Island Life by David Slack

Cameron Brewer appears to cleave to that hoary old PR creed: don't worry what the media might write about you, just make sure they spell your name right. On that basis, he should be happy enough with the results of his efforts this week on behalf of the Newmarket Business Association.

Sideswipe took some pleasure in telling Herald readers that he had generously supplied the paper - for its 'exclusive' use - "unsolicited pap quotes to insert into our coverage of Bill Clinton's visit, just in case the former President buys some socks in Newmarket".

Of course they were too good not to share:

1. "America has a special place in Newmarket's heart and unlike Winston Peters we would love the opportunity to show Bill Clinton our appreciation for his country's role in the Pacific," said Cameron Brewer, head of the Newmarket Business Association.

2. "We would love to get the stars and stripes back out on Broadway. Newmarket is the spiritual ground for any visiting American."

Some may sneer, or scoff, or chuckle, but I think this is admirable work. Don't the economists keep telling us we need to improve our productivity?

Just tell me this, Mr or Ms News Editor: isn't it a lot more efficient to have little quotes all filed away and ready to go at a moment's notice?

Newsrooms must strike a man of such tidy thought as Cameron Brewer as great sprawling empires of inefficiency. The only thing they write in advance are obituaries, and even those they tremble about because of the risk that the thing will inadvertently get run while the subject is still up and active and on the golf course, and tributes have not even begun to trickle, let alone flow. (Where, incidentally, do these tributes flow, precisely? Can a mourner gather with other admirers along a street or outside wrought iron gates in Princess Diana fashion and sob together as the tributes flow past?)

But back to productivity.

Our public figures are pretty predictable in their public utterances. Our Prime Minister's response to any scandal has two templates: I can't comment on that while the investigation is in progress and: the matter has been thoroughly investigated and I've moved on. Name a public figure, pick an issue and you can predict their script without very much difficulty.

So I offer this notion to an enterprising reporter fresh out of the 14 dozen or so tertiary institutions now preparing young New Zealanders for a fabulous career in journalism, or more precisely, the faint glimmer of hope of one day getting to wear one of Kate Hawkesby's frocks and read the late night news.

What I have to offer is guaranteed to make you stand out from the pack. First, you need to make a list of the all the likely big events of the next year or so: Bird Flu Mutates, US Invades Iraq, Democrats Win Midterms- Bush Impeachment Underway, Oil $125 A Barrel, that kind of thing.

Then all you have to do is work up a portfolio of predictable quotes by all the usual figures, and tuck them away ready to use the moment the story breaks.

Let's try an example. Let's say we want quotes from all the usual suspects on the second coming of Christ. You just need a couple of lines each.

Helen Clark: We will make Mr Christ very welcome on his visit to New Zealand, and if he is able to join me on a tour of our film and TV locations I am sure he will soon be telling the rest of the world: "Morningside forever!"

Don Brash: It is of course a not inconsiderable matter of pride that a celestial eminence as notable as Jesus Christ should be coming to New Zealand. But it would be quite wrong of me not to point out that he will be spending twice as long in Australia. What future can we possibly hope to offer our grandchildren when the gulf between our two countries continues to widen?

John Banks: That's not him.

Tim Shadbolt: I told you we'd get him to Invercargill. Do you want another picture of us shoveling the builders mix?

Phil O'Reilly: I simply remind people that if we had lower taxes he might actually feel like staying here.

Wendyl Nissen: Do you notice how he keeps changing the subject when you ask him about his mother?

Ian Johnstone: What a great shame we couldn't have seen him on Gallery. Brian Edwards would have asked him much better questions than Susan Wood did.

And so on. It couldn't be easier. Close your eyes, think of what they'd say, then write it. In just an hour or so, you'll have all the material you'll need. In conservative and unenlightened circles, this is otherwise known as making shit up. And the odd journalist has lately got himself in trouble for doing it. But the mistake those reporters made was in trying too hard. They made the quotes too colourful.

You need to follow the work of a master, and Cameron Brewer has shown you the way. If you make the phrases as bland and predictable and anodyne as possible, no-one will spot the difference. It will read as though it has been through the proper blood-draining channel of spin and polish, and you will be welcomed as a go-getter who can pull the quotes before anyone else has even hit the speed dial.

Must stop now. I'm late for an interview with Rupert Murdoch. Later, I'll be having lunch with Kerry Packer.

Business New Zealand waded into the Broadband debate yesterday. Quoting from the release:

Business NZ has called for a more factually based argument over broadband access.
Chief Executive Phil O'Reilly says given the conflicting claims over broadband volume and price, Business NZ had decided to commission the same company* responsible for the Ministry of Economic Development's broadband reports to find out the current competitive situation on how well New Zealand consumers are being served.
He says the research shows that since Telecom's recent price changes, its broadband offerings are now among the best priced in the world.

Coverage, so far, of their contribution has been a little short on an actual comparison of the oranges, apples and lemons in question, which of course is what you want in a more factually based argument, so I asked Business NZ for a copy of the data. You can see the gory facts, details, apples and oranges in these three PDF tables.

Table One

Table Two

Table Three

A few observations:

The tables can tell you what you'll pay for a given speed, but they can't tell you whether you'll actually get the speed you're being sold. That's the point Russell was making yesterday about contention rates. You might think you're signing up for the superhighway, but you may well find that Telecom is letting so many cars onto the motorway in your area, that you're still going at a crawl.

Secondly, the tables make it pretty obvious that this is one of the few places where you have a monthly limit on how many miles you can do on the highway.

Run through the various tables and see how many of the entries end with the alluring letters "UL". I'm assuming it doesn't stand for "Usually Lousy". Unless I'm completely misinterpreting the context, it means "Unlimited", and dammit, at a speed of 250, you'd think Telecom could spring for more than a lousy 0.2 GB in the entry level deal described in Table 1.

What is clear is that the prices for these particular packages do indeed look competitive as far as the price goes. In the case of the Pro Ultra deal in Table 3, it's clearly a vast improvement on the various crap deals I put up with when I was a JetStream customer. 40 gig is a lot of monthly traffic, and at $142, not terribly onerous for your average business. But what guarantee do you have that you'll get the promised performance? My own experience with JetStream was that it could slow to a crawl. Given their recurring theme of squeezing the most from the least, it would surprise me to see Telecom really doing right by the long-suffering customer.

And working back down the scale from the Pro Ultra, the rest of it still looks a bit shabby. Phil O'Reilly is correct, up to a point: their prices are in the right place in the table. But compare the speeds and the cap limits in Tables 1 and 2 especially, and you find that the customer gets not a lot for their dollar.

Feedback:

Paul Brislen points out that these numbers only compare incumbents with incumbents.

In other un-spun words: amongst a group of not very competitive incumbent telcos, Telecom doesn't come off too badly ...

More:

Juha Saarinen has much more detail here. In brief:

- Outdated or inaccurate information in 21 of the 30 countries listed;
- 15 of the 30 countries now offer uncapped services;
- 512kbit/s plans are the typical minimum;
- Report only looks at incumbent telcos' plans, not new offerings;
- Report doesn't include ADSL 2+ plans, only first generation ADSL

There are very few things I've written here that have generated as energetic a response from the readers as a post that featured Uma Thurman, Scarlett Johannnsen and assorted other beauties. I like to flatter myself that it was the humour of the thing, but the excited tone of the replies told me it had more to do with purdy pictures of scantily-clad and attractive young women.

So it was no great surprise a month or two later to see a sharp trend-watcher like Rob O'Neill spotting the potential and choosing the smouldering Scarlett as the NZBC muse.They were already offering a banquet of magnificent diversions; once they added Scarlett, they had the perfect ice sculpture. I return to the table each Friday with anticipation.

My envy is not limited to ice sculptures. I also fancy working to the unscripted plot Rob has been following since the beginning of the year, nosing the bonnet of his small but perfectly formed sports car out onto the road every morning and driving wherever the mood and a full tank of 91 will take him. His last report had him in Picton, listening to a Neil Young cassette. Not to everyone's taste, to be sure, but I could enjoy great helpings of it.

Seeing he's so good at taking the germ of an idea and nurturing it to its full flowering, I offer him this: the rhythm of driving the length of State Highway One is occasionally punctuated by a set of traffic lights. I like to think it says something about the unevenness of the nature of life in New Zealand:

Welcome to our biggest highway! Wind down the windows, feel the breeze, open up the engine and enjoy the ride; oh, by the way: occasionally your exhilarating ride will come to a dead stop if the lights turn red.

It's quite startling. Just as you've comfortably settled into miles of momentum, you come to an entirely arbitrary halt. You feel surprisingly dislocated as the rhythm of an hour or more of fast open road-driving closes down in the blink of an eye to nothing.

You strike it in Huntly.

The last time I went though Waikanae and Paraparaumu it was still happening.

I would guess there are a few dozen other spots where the same thing happens. Perhaps there are more. I imagine Transit New Zealand have it all methodically collated, but all the same, I can see an entertaining diversion here for a man in a sports car tooling around the country without a deadline.

Why not get a photo of every set of traffic lights on State Highway One from top to bottom? Awanui to Bluff. Or Riverton. Or wherever SH1 runs out.

You could throw in a shot of the nearest tearooms and pub, if you want to broaden the cultural dimension. Perhaps Doddery Old Fart has a few pictures already.

It's your blog, Rob, but can I humbly suggest that in between the pictures of Scarlett, an evolving series of traffic light shots could offer just as exotic an allure to the nation's deskbound blog readers?

On a day like this I get especially wistful about the whole idea. This was the time of year - when we were students - when my brother and I would be out on our motorbikes finding an empty open road somewhere in the North Island and opening up the throttle. Leaning into the corners on the Napier-Taupo road in the late afternoon summer sun.

An office can't compete with that; all it has to offer is the call of the mild.

While you're settling into a 10.00am meeting in some air-conditioned boardroom, Rob may well be pulling into a West Coast town and deciding which pub he'll pick for lunch. As you clear away the dishes, he may be tucking into whitebait fritters on a remote beach, watching the sun set on the Tasman.

As you crawl home in the early evening Auckland traffic and fret, for all you know he may be coming down the red carpet aisle of a movie premiere in Invercargill. Scarlett will doubtless be on his arm.

In response to your as-yet-not-emailed question: no everything's fine here at my place. We have just had a lovely evening at Narrow Neck beach and I'm contentedly rubbing against my book deadline.

I just fancy the notion of doing what Rob's doing. It's the sheer sense of liberation of not having to be anywhere or do anything in the middle of a glorious summer that sounds enormously appealing. And I have a sneaking suspicion I'll never get around to photographing those traffic lights.

If you read Boing Boing, you'll know the story already, but if you've missed it, you should absolutely go see this.

Let's say you lose your camera. Let’s say someone else finds it. Let's say the two of you make contact. Let’s say that in the interim, the finder’s nine year old child forms a strong attachment to the camera and does not feel able to give it back. What would you say happens next?

Truly astounding.

And now, because it's a very nice summer afternoon, I'm going back outside. I might even take the camera.

Some nice suggestions for the Howlybag Awards have been coming in. Please feel very welcome to add a contribution.

If you ask Google to look for "howlybag", you get only an entry or two:

Technology Talk
Hmm, heres what Elephant, AKA Tony(the)Frew posted before his big howlybag tantram

Ask it for "howleybag" and you get:

Who Are The 5 Worst Band/solo Artists Ever?
These are in order for me- 1. Mariah Carey-I can't stand that howleybag.

If smart people like Llew can be frank about gaps in their knowledge, then so can I.

"Howlybag" was a word unknown to me until I read about it in an article about the New Zealand Oxford School Thesaurus.

Dr Dianne Bardsley, who sounds justifiably proud of her work, tells us that informal and slang words posed particular challenges.

"Wimp and wuss get a look in, but I decided that howlybag was too much of a 60s term to be included."

Well, there's proof that if you can remember the 60s you weren't actually there.

We called people spastic, we called them huckery molls (and because you never committed it to paper, you were never sure of the spelling). We called them pills, we called them drips, and if you were cruel you called them whatever it took to make them blub. But if they were the blubbing kind, I never saw them labelled a howlybag.

I wish I had. What a great handle! How did I miss it? Was I not paying attention at play and lunchtimes, or is Dr Bardsley a little out on her era?

If Gordon King were still blogging, it's precisely the kind of epithet I would expect to see him hurling about with gay abandon. We are, on the progressive left, whinging cry-babies to a man. Howlybags.

That's just his opinion. Or to be completely fair, it's my impression of his opinion of us. But that's the kind of word howlybag is: utterly subjective, and a great big, bright, shiny axe of a weapon. See the judgmental and the scornful wield it with glee!

I'm game. Who's the biggest howlybag around here? I invite readers' suggestions. I even have categories to suggest:

- Most howlybag blogger.
- Most howlybag celebrity.
- Most howlybag media personality.
- Most howlybag politician.
- Most howlybag person you've ever met.

No prizes. This is just for the fun of it. And if you think that's unfair: tough. You're old enough and ugly enough by now to know that life's not fair. Howlybag.