Island Life by David Slack

More readers' farewells today, this time to the MPs whose fate was sealed on Saturday morning.

Nandor Tanczos: if goodwill means anything, there's clearly a substantial constituency for your return at the next election.

I'm just a little puzzled that the Greens don't seem to be contemplating creating some sort of function for their almost-seventh List MP. I appreciate that this is not a movement awash in cash, and that their parliamentary funding is not nearly enough to enable them to take on the research staff they need, but it would be a terrible shame if he really did have to follow Grant Tyrell's admonition to get a haircut and a real job.

Which brings me to two more Poetry Corner contributions, this time from Alison Green - one in the approved form, and the other slightly bending it to say something nice to Nandor. Well fair enough.

So. Farewell
Then
Katrina Shanks.

We barely
knew
you.

You began by
filling in forms
and going to
caucus lunches.

But you were gone by
Saturday lunchtime.

I had to
look up your name
online.

-------------------

So. Farewell
Then
Nandor.

I'll miss your
dreadlocks
and your
hemp-green
suit.

They say you rocked
in select committees.
And that
you really
knew your stuff.

Others may
remember you
for dope and Rastafari.

But you made me proud
to be a Kiwi -
where my vote can elect
a man such as you.

And moving to a different form of verse altogether, Hilary Stace sent me this marvellous little contribution from her mother Jeanette.

Thanks to the people's party
I got my start
Now I've made my pile
Our ways must part

One of the joys of reading Annie Proulx's novel Postcards comes in the laconic little messages at the opening of the chapters scrawled on the back of a postcard from the story's tragic hero, Loyal Blood. None of his messages convey even a fraction of the anguish, ordeal and grim fatalism that attend his tale, and that's the whole point. I defy you to read it without shedding a manly tear at its poignant end.

I was reminded of this by visiting a site which Nic Wise recommended. PostSecret is "an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard."

Typically, people print out a line or two and paste it onto the back of a suitable post card, ransom note style. They're concise, but they can pack a sizeable punch.

One has pasted onto a dollar bill:

I gave up my true love for a guy with lots of money.
It makes feel kind of dead inside.

And then at the foot of the bill in red letters:

But I would do it again.

Later in this post, photos of hard-drinking press gallery journalists, but first, something from the world of light entertainment. Tonight's four remaining aspirant NZ Idols will not include Teresa, to our six-year old's disappointment. Perhaps I should show her the very nice piece of verse Ms Robyn Gallagher composed in response to my suggestion last week that she might write something to mark the imminent departure of Steve.

So. Farewell
Then Teresa
from Wellington.

You sang a few songs
on the telly
and were
quite good.

I thought Steve
would go before
you.

But he had shiny,
pretty blonde hair;
and you,
a floppy fringe.

The farewell to Steve will have to wait, Robyn, writes, "but hopefully for not more than a week."

**********************

In other news, the Auckland Half Marathon is just four weeks away, and I find to my pleasant surprise that a hamstring injury is wearing off just as I need to be stretching out for the longer training distances.

This makes me a good bet for a little sponsorship money in aid of the Heart Foundation. As I write this, my current total of pledges is zero, so really, if you have some parking meter money taking up space in your pocket, do by all means feel welcome to click here and get the warm glow of selflessness that comes with noble acts of charitable giving.

I have absolutely no idea whether this is worth mentioning but you automatically get rigged up for this when you sign up for the marathon and, well, this is a cause I can identify with.

**********************

Now: pictures of pissed hacks.

We had old friends visiting yesterday, and we pulled out the photo albums to give the various assembled kids some examples of our lives Before Children. If you want, I can show you pictures of exotic and enchanted journeys, but let's be honest, they're not likely to be as interesting as a picture of Her Majesty's loyal press gallery journalists drinking in the line of duty, so a here's an example from the 1989 CHOGM in Malaysia.

Karren was there in her capacity as the Prime Minister's Press Secretary. You can read elsewhere about other entertaining aspects of that adventure, as documented by Joanne Black, but today's story concerns that debonaire eminence gris, and currently TVNZ's man-of-influence about the corridors of power, Richard Griffin.

You may have read a profile In the Herald by Michele Hewitson a few weeks ago in which she captured two essential facets of his character. One, he's a bugger for the bottle and the other is that he cares very much about the welfare of animals. I had no idea, and I'm glad that I never brought up any of my farming experiences when we were drinking.

But I would have been aware, had Karren related the story to me sooner about a crab that was saved from a cruel and untimely end at a hawker stall in a humid alleyway of Kuala Lumpur by Radio New Zealand's political editor. As we were looking through the photos yesterday, we came upon this.

What was it? We asked. And Karren told the story of how the gallery journalists were out for a night of drinking and eating, and someone had come towards the table bearing a selection of live crabs. The group was, of course, asked to choose the one they most fancied eating.

Dick would have none of it. He became animated, agitated even. Mollification ensued, and long story short, they ended up with a liberated crab back at their hotel, given refuge in a 5 star hotel hand basin.

Order restored, Dick went back to his drinking, and the picture captures the result nicely.

That's a youthful looking Barry "until then my lips are sealed" Soper to his right, of course. In drinking terms, they go together as naturally as Winston Peters and the Green Parrot. And sometimes you can collect the whole set.

There's just something about the picture that captures the essence of that particular meeting of the minds, and I thought it was too good not to share.

Lest you think I'm bagging him, I'm not. He's a splendid fellow to drink with. It's just that when you consider that this is the same man who was often mistaken for the Prime Minister of our nation when he accompanied Jim Bolger on overseas visits, it reminds you how very well he does scrub up in the morning.

A long time ago, longer ago, even, than the day New Zealand's first FM radio station got to air, I had a job in a bottle store. Every day was a party. We had low, low prices. People would drive across five suburbs for our special on a half gallon bottle of gin. Whenever we ran our Jim Beam special, you could stack them high and watch them fly. Only God knows just how many households in the Aro Valley would tote home the bourbon and coke and load Free Bird or Bad to the Bone onto the turntable.

Our store was something of a rebel in the liquor business. It was a highly regulated industry. If you had a liquor licence, you were in quite a cosy position. It would be overstating things, but not by very much, to say that there was something of a cartel in effect. Prices were more or less ordained by the Hotel Association, and a member who priced their product below the prescribed prices could expect a bit of grief.

Deregulating the industry, which happened towards the end of the eighties, was intended to give anyone the opportunity to compete in the business. The various vested interests were all aghast, but in practice, it wasn't DB or Lion or any of the big liquor distributors who took the biggest hit. It was your humble pub which found itself competing with a wide and varied choice of bars, cafes and clubs. And as if that wasn't hard enough to swallow, they also saw their bottle store trade slowly drift away to the new off licenses and then, a few years further down the track, to the supermarkets.

Did this change unleash a wave of drunken debauchery? No. You might even argue that a proliferation of smaller bars has diminished some of the anonymity of drinking in booze barns that enabled antisocial behaviour.

As for the greater access to alcohol - all-on, any hour or day of the week, does that mean we're drinking more? Certainly not beer - that's levelled out, and the breweries have compensated by switching us to brands that cost more and come in bottles that contain less. Wine, though is a different story. We're drinking more of that. And that alcopop crap has made one or two New Zealanders remarkably wealthy. If there was one aspect of the business that you might be especially inclined to worry about, I'd say it was that one. The kids love it, and they pile into it, with some unfortunate consequences.

And that's just the market segment that seems a natural fit for the Warehouse, should it choose to expand into the liquor market as it seems poised to do. Cheap, low quality, but fulfilling a need. That describes your typical alcopop and your bourbon and coke and can segment pretty neatly, and of course it describes vast aisles worth of the stuff you can buy at the Warehouse.

I may have been born just plain white trash but Fancy was my name.

Last night's news took us on a tour of the new Warehouse premises in Te Rapa and even gave us a look at their new TV ad. They're making themselves over and moving ever-so-slightly up-market. I don't know, in Kevin Roberts' terminology, if the Warehouse is a Lovemark so much as a stretch mark, but it does seem to have fulfilled his prescription for becoming a brand to which people are so attached that it can earn itself a fairly softball news report on its marketing strategy.

There's nothing unusual about marketing that gives a slightly rosier tinge to its product than it possesses in real life, and to be fair to the Warehouse, this makeover seems to be pretty carefully contrived to make only small style improvements. What you see and what you get will still be largely in step, by the look of things.

For a truly egregious example of the advertising diverging from reality, those Sky City ads would be hard to beat. Somehow the happy, photogenic family tableau of a fun night out at the casino just fails to capture the grim joylessness of the place and the quiet desperation that lies behind the resigned and sullen faces of the rows upon rows of Aucklanders sitting at their pokie machines.

Jus' be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy, and they'll be nice to you.

I'm not especially troubled by the notion of the Warehouse having beer and wine a few aisles along from the plastic toys. I suppose I'd be troubled if they were doing the country's best price on alcopops and other teen liquor bait. But the line I would draw would come at the next step: pokies. That might well complete the circle, but at what cost? Put in the pokies at the Warehouse and what would those still-surviving old pubs have left?

In a moment, a few political farewells, but first a quick rant or two to set the tone for Monday morning.

There are a great many right wing bloggers who love to declare whenever they come upon an example of government behaviour or language that smacks of authoritarianism or thought-control that "Orwell would have been proud".

No he bloody would not have been, you nimrods. He might have been outraged, he might have been scathing, he might have shrugged his tired shoulders with weary resignation or a knowing wry smile, but he absolutely, without any question whatsoever, would not have been proud. Okay?

Rant the second: when you're looking for a fresh way to describe the kind of apartment that is so small you have to squeeze past the developer's margin to get into the kitchen, you might be tempted to use the words "not enough room to swing a kitten" as a nice twist on the more famous expression.

This would be a logical enough development if you took the view that the original expression described some kind of horrifying domestic habit favoured by - who knows - right wing bloggers?

Perhaps that horrifying scene in 1900 in which Donald Sutherland inflicts the most cruel of deaths on a child has left some people with the vague idea that there lurk amongst us people who would do something comparable to cats.

Mercifully the expression "not enough room to swing a cat" has nothing to do with anything quite so sociopathic. Or to put it another way, it derives from the behaviour of another group of sociopaths, namely those sailors who used to wield the whip known as the cat-o-nine tails.

I think we can say with confidence that any of the aforementioned behaviour is both prohibited by law and probably not physically feasible within the confines of your average Auckland inner city apartment.

So. Nice weekend?

There have been some entertaining responses to last week's Poetry Corner invitation.

To recap: Private Eye's Poetry Corner presents a touching little verse offering good wishes and a fond farewell to someone retired, deceased, fired, incarcerated or otherwise passing by one of life's great milestones. I'm offering a prize or two for some farewell in that form to this election's recent casualties (imagined or real). Early favourites have been Mr Dunne and Mr Tamihere.

Mr D Farrar of Wellington, for example, offers this nice farewell to JT.

So. Farewell
Then
John

We forgave you
Front bums
And
Holocaust boredom

But in the end
Not even
A kidnapping

Could stop
The Westies
From giving you
Another golden handshake

Jonathan Ganley also bids him goodbye.

So. Farewell then
"J.T."
The bell tolls for you.

Sharples was more
Than a match.

An electorate weary
Of men's locker room talk
Did not baulk
At your despatch.

All the Front Bottoms
Now behind you.
Tariana too,
Can go with the Nats.

Indeed, 'Think Again'

You've lots of time now
To be nice
To your cats.

The always-dependable Andrew Llewellyn produced this little gem:

So.Farewell
Then
Common sense

Are we Dunne yet?

The worm returns.

Bugger.

And a coy reader from Albany offered this very fine effort:

Farewell
Then
Peter Dunne
United was
Your future.

But now
You are un-Dunne
Your power
Has been neutered.

With common sense
And Christians
You rode a worm
To glory

To be thwarted
At the polls
By evil Greens
And Horis.

More to come, and more submissions warmly invited. If your surname is Gallagher, for example, I have no doubt you could do something sublime. Perhaps a farewell for Steve.

A couple of weeks ago, we learned that Donna Awatere-Huata was "likely to be housed in a chalet equipped with her own television and La-Z-Boy armchair". No word, though, on who might have been assigned the task of peeling her grapes.

Then a few days later, we learned that a supervisor in charge of the 111 calls for Wellington Free Ambulance had fallen asleep on the job, sitting in…her La-Z-Boy.

Talk about furniture of notoriety. I don't know when I last saw an advertisement for a La-Z-Boy, and I wonder if they even need to run any. So successful has their marketing been that La-Z-Boy is evidently a byword for all that is pampered and luxurious. You've got yourself a La-Z-Boy, you're ass-deep in the good life.

Ah yes, the good life. Another expression that rolls off the autocue whenever a 60 Minutes reporter goes hunting down some shyster or ratbag like the late unlamented Christopher Skase.

But while his victims begin the long and painful process of piecing their shattered lives back together, Llewellyn is half a world away in Sardinia, living the good life.

Not that you'll see many La-Z-Boy recliner rockers in the home of your average high-net-worth-individual. There was a bit of royalty porn on Prime the other night that took you on a tour of Windsor Castle. We must have seen at least a thousand chairs, and not a La-Z-Boy among them.

So what is it that's imagined to make the La-Z-Boy such an object of envy? I think it's all to do with putting the feet up. This is a right that's earned by the most noble of toilers. At the Auckland Cup each year, they have one sitting there on the podium as a prize for the jockey. The winner gets the cash and the cup, the jockey gets to take a load off. But you have to ride a horse two miles, faster than anyone else, to earn the privilege.

One of the reasons I so enjoy being my own employer is that I quite like putting my feet up at my desk. Especially when I'm on the phone. It was my experience in my younger life as someone else's employee that bosses really don't like that spectacle.

For all that, though, I don't possess a La-Z-Boy and neither do I covet one. I can think of few more homely pieces of furniture. So kudos and mad props and all that to the makers of these things for working their product so deeply into the consumer consciousness.

It is surely a mark of marketing prowess whenever your brand name is deployed in preference to the generic, and it's often instructive to see the media making that preference.

For example, in the news reports you arrive at court in your "BMW", otherwise you arrive at court in your "car." You never arrive in your "Hyundai".

All manner of news stories get these little tangential status labels dropped into them, and it's not only a matter of brands.

If you're an attractive young woman who falls victim to a crime, that fact is scrupulously mentioned in every report. The appearance of other victims doesn't seem to rate the same pertinence. And then there's the matter of the victim's vocation. Model, prostitute, or anything else with sexual overtone, you'll hear about it. If they're a claims administrator, well…what's that got to do with it?

I've been thinking about all this since I read a couple of days ago that our venerable advertising man of letters Kevin Roberts has been mentioned in War on Terror dispatches this week.

According to the marketing magazine Brandweek he was invited by the United States Department of Defence to address various "US defence intelligence agencies" at a conference in New York earlier this year.

In his speech, "Loyal Beyond Reason", he reportedly recommended that the war on terror might be more productively styled "the Fight for a Better World".

His theme, which was apparently derived from his book, Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands was that America had to change the way potential terrorists feel emotionally about the US, and that the current way American officials describe the war is hurting, not helping, matters. "The War on Terror doesn't have a lot of positive equity going for it," he told them.

Well, yes. Where would we be without positive equity? Kevin, the fact that Donald Rumsfeld subsequently deployed the phrase, "the global struggle against violent extremism", to wide ridicule should not discourage you. He didn't use the exact phrase and that's what made all the difference.

Mark Twain was right on the money:

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

Stick to your guns, Kev, I say. Brand power is strong, and clearly strong enough to corrode the clear thinking of reporters. If Rummy would only use the words the way you suggested them, we could begin the journey towards the sunlit uplands of peace and harmony.

Just say the words, Mr Secretary and the Fight for a Better World will join its rightful place in the pantheon alongside BMW, La-Z-Boy and prostitute.