Island Life by David Slack

There is a memorable moment early in the Blackadder series.

"Is there someone in there with you?" asks the Queen, and after a pause:
"It’s not a sheep is it?"

From within the four-poster bed, a hidden Richard III offers up a fair simulation of a bleat.

"Oh Edmund," sighs his mother, "It's the lying I find so hurtful."

When the pain of being lied to is more than you can bear, you turn to your friends. You turn to the Internet. Lesama12 turns to Yahoo Answers to put a question which seems more like a general howl of anguish.

How do you get over your ex husband lying over and over, am I looking for closure?

Offer advice at your peril; Lesama12 has been flying through rough air.

I have been through him attempting suicide when I left (as a punishment to me) and then he got out of the Pavilion and told every one at church I had an affair and that's why I left him. (many believed him as I kept my mouth shut)

Result number two in a Google search for the phrase “He lied to us all” yields some tortured Bush doggerel, The Night Before Baghdad. “

He lied to us all
About terror and pain
When all that he's after
Is monetary gain

The whole of the first results page is in fact heavy on complaints about the presidency of the Idiot Son.

Lower down, the passion of the football emerges. A Tottenham Hotspurs fan is venting: The betrayal I felt was personal, had he lied to us all along?

On a MySpace forum, some young man is being discredited for dishonouring his friends, his family, and his flag. Mark didnt go out of this country or this state he is not in the army or anything of that sort he is living in peoria with some girl and he lied to us all .

In Idaho, it is time for Tom Luna to face the music. “Tom Luna Must Directly Answer Allegations or Face Consequences,” writes Joe Vandal, who is ticked off, and ticking off a list.

I am not upset about what Tom Luna may have smoked in his youth, I’m upset that (A) he lied to us all in the last few months and (B

Joe continues in that vein at considerable length. It’s a long litany, but the upshot is plain: Our political representatives should damn well be straight with us.

Oh, Winston! Could it be your memory failing you, and not your lustrous principles?

How can we go on believing you?

It’s not a sheep is it?

Sports ingenue that I am, I had no idea of the origins of the madison. What a story it is.

It begins in London in 1878. Mr David Stanton bet that he could ride a bicycle 1,000 miles in six successive days, riding 18 hours a day.

Were there any takers? There were. A man named Davis put up £100. In those days you could trust the Main Stream Media. He handed over the hundred quid to the Sporting Life newspaper.

And that was the last he saw of it, because the intrepid Stanton cycled the 1000 miles in just 73 hours, riding on a high-wheeled machine at an average speed of 13½mph.

In those simpler times, you took your entertainment where you found it. If you put on a six day walking race in a hall, 20,000 people would turn out to watch. An impresario whose name is no longer known to history - or at least to Wikipedia - saw the popular appeal of the walking races and the success of the 1000 mile cycling wager and hit on the idea of combining the two.

“A bicycle contest was commenced at the Agricultural Hall, on Monday last, for which £150 is offered in prizes for a six days' competition,” reported the Islington Gazette.

You rode for as long you could, you rested, you resumed your ride. Bill Cann, of Sheffield, led from the start and finished after 1,060 miles.

So popular was the idea, it crossed the Atlantic and arrived at Madison Square Garden.

Calling all riders. We shoot no horses.

Around and around they went. They got on their bikes, they rode as as many laps as possible over a six-day period. They rested, they rode. Before long, the rest intervals dwindled to nothing. Many of the riders employed seconds, as in boxing, to keep them going. It was brutal. You rode until you dropped. You suffered delusions, hallucinations.

But the money’s so good. Just get a grip of your bike.

Promoters in New York paid Teddy Hale $5,000 when he won in 1896 and he won:

like a ghost, his face as white as a corpse, his eyes no longer visible because they'd retreated into his skull

All the way through the sorry history of our species: the bread, the circuses, the human suffering. The more grotesque the spectacle, the bigger the crowd. See for yourself on Queen Street today.

The New York Times said in 1897:

An athletic contest in which participants 'go queer' in their heads, and strain their powers until their faces become hideous with the tortures that wrack them, is not sport. It is brutality. Days and weeks of recuperation will be needed to put the Garden racers in condition, and it is likely that some of them will never recover from the strain.

Last night’s madison at the Olympics seemed, as does so much of our modern life, an antiseptic shell of its forerunner.

A few blocks up from Madison Square Garden, you come to Times Square. That was one seedy place two decades ago, but then Mayor Guiliani sent in the Disney people and they prettied it up for the tourists and it just wasn’t the same.

I confess I preferred it in its earlier state; which is just downright selfish, and unreasonable of me.

The respectable face I put on this is to say that I prefer Upper Cuba Street to Lambton Quay, the old fisheries buildings and Turners and Growers to the Viaduct, the old Devonport ferry building to the new one, because I prefer character to blandness.

But I am pretending I do not see a less noble impulse.

You’re fascinated by the spectacle of human misery and degradation, you know you should applaud its elimination; but its anodyne replacement is so much less fascinating.

When these dark thoughts cross my mind I reprove myself. By any measure that was an impressive athletic spectacle last night. It even had the frisson of mortal danger with Hayden Roulston pumping away at the pedals while his delicate heart muscle pounded away inside his chest.

It’s time for me to take my gear and my iPod to the gym and give myself some punishment.

Ingrate that I am, I don’t give nearly enough thanks to the God of private enterprise that I no longer work in a cubicle. I should. Those things are death traps.

HowStuffWorks catalogues the harm they do: high blood pressure, heart attack, chronic fatigue, musculoskeletal disorders, diabetes, depression, substance abuse.

No way? Way. That place is killing you, man.

You think those walls are keeping the world out, but in truth they keep you chained to the pole, the better for all that passing office life to torture you with its inane conversations, its tuneless singing, its asinine ringtones, its malodorous microwave food.

You steel yourself to concentrate on your work, but your body trembles under the strain.

Your pulse quickens, you breathe faster, your muscles tense. The stress takes you to bad places: your doctor’s surgery, the ambulance, an early grave.

You should have opted for a career in neurogenesis: a crisp lab coat, intelligent co-workers, a quiet laboratory. You could have studied marmosets.

Some lucky person who gets to wear a white coat and works in a quiet lab put some marmosets into a stressful environment and documented the consequences.

Their brain cells retreated. They no longer produced new ones.

A second group was placed in nice surroundings. Unlike the mistreated marmosets, these ones had enriched brains to match their enriched environment. They grew more, denser, brain cells. Clever little monkeys.

You may be reading this in a cubicle, feeling your brain cells withering. You may be thinking nice for some. I say: take your cue from the marmosets. Get out while you can. Or at the very least, rise up in defence of your own best interests.

Say to your Team Leader or Chief Operating Officer: Tear Down This Wall! Please.

You may imagine that an open plan office would be a retrograde step; an affront to your sense of status; a surrender of your privacy.

Put this out of your mind. The privacy is illusory. There is no status that matters in the modern workplace, save for the significance of your accomplishments.

Tell your boss: I read about it on How Stuff Works.

There has been a study. People working in open-office environments, without partitioned walls, were more satisfied with the noise levels and their own privacy of speech than cubicle dwellers.

It may be that removing cubicle walls destroys the illusion of privacy that some must feel they have when they yap away for hours to their dog sitter. When workers can see that those around them are concentrating, they may be less likely to engage in disruptive behaviors.

If I were your boss, I’d be persuaded. If your boss is less of a soft touch than me, try these additional arguments:

1. Instead of popping your head into a cube to see if it's a good time to talk, you'd know when your co-worker might have a minute to chat, so conversations could be better timed.

2. Because tasks often rely upon the talents of an entire team, having this ability to share information quickly and efficiently could improve productivity.

3.Open plan offices are highly effective for team building. Think of all the money you've been shelling out for expensive hotels with white water rafting.

4. Simple things such as eating lunch away from your cubicle and with your co-workers can do a lot to sluice away the toxic stress of the place. Get into the lifeboat! Get to know one another!

There’s no need to thank me. Just knowing I may have brought an end to your suffering is reward enough.

Thank you, anonymous reader.

In this instalment of The Longest Job Interview Ever, candidate Key tries to get Tax Cuts and debt to square up on his spreadsheet.

Via: 08wire.org

It took no more than an hour for our family to become disenchanted with the Olympics coverage last night.

Despite your initial ambivalence, you discover that you’re quite interested in the women's road race. You feel your own lungs grow cold as that brave solitary Russian rider strikes out on her own up that improbably steep hill in the pouring rain.

She has a minute on the Peloton! They might be reeling her back in! Or they might not! The road is treacherous; they may hit the deck if their spinning wheels catch the paint as they descend at speed on the wet greasy surface. Will she hold on out in front and seize the gold?

Who knows? We’re crossing to the soccer.

Bastards.

I picked up my book. Karren flicked over to RabbitProof Fence on Maori TV, checking back in at the commercial breaks. Nada. An hour or so on, I fetched the laptop. Four streaming TVNZ channels and none of them offering the cycling. I tried NBC and BBC with my anonymiser, but no video for me.

Thanks to the relatively low-tech medium of words on an LCD page, we were at least able to learn the outcome, if not watch it. We empathised with the plucky little Russian who had evidently been reeled back in.

But what’s this on Triangle TV? Miles of Olympics coverage, with no commercial breaks, no sponsors and athletes looking remarkably unaffected; guileless even. And look! The black singlet is moving forward! He’s at the lead! He’s racing away from them! Gold in the 1500 metres! They hoist the New Zealand ensign to the tune of God Save the King, and look, in the stands! Spectators' arms outstretched. Heil Hitler!

That was then, this is now. Should an inexplicable Olympics programming decision arouse your ire, don't let your spirit curdle. The games are for the fostering of peace and love. They also present a physical training opportunity.

What better or more appropriate time to hone your martial arts skills?

Look at this.

That’s Bruce Lee doing the One Inch Punch.

The One inch punch is a skill which uses fa jing (translated as explosive power) to generate tremendous amounts of impact force at extremely close distances.

You stand with your fist very close to your target, say up to six inches or so. Then in one explosive burst, your legs root, your waist turns, your ribs expand and your arm extends through the target. Your entire body has to move in unison. That’s crucial. If it doesn't, there will be no power.

It is all an elegant piece of Yin to the Yang of the supine marathon you embark upon when you join this Olympic extravaganza.

Your waist expands.

You’re stuck where you are, because your legs are rooted.

If you could extend your arm, you’d toss the remote at the set, but you can’t.

The TV and the Olympics people are taking you for a sap.

There is no power.