Confessions of a complete leftard moron hypocrite

Diary of the last ten hours

9.20am

Philip Matthews on Twitter sets the mood of the morning for me.

It's getting to the point where I can't hear or read another story about Covid-19, the borders and testing, and I doubt that's an uncommon reaction.

Good call, Philip. Might tune out for a while.  I’ll stop it here with the reassuring words of Sir Brian Roche ringing in my ears from the radio earlier on. 

I had the privilege of being in an office with him back when he was just Brian no Sir in the PM’s department, on secondment from one of the big accounting firms. If you had a difficult question about anything, anything at all really,  the best and smartest thing you could do was go downstairs and ask Brian.

This morning on the radio he said:

We are the envy of the world. We seem to want to beat ourselves up for every infringement, and as a citizen I find that surprising.

The best and smartest thing for us to do is print that out and pop that on the fridge door.

9.25am

Can’t help myself. I’m back to thinking about it.

Lew on Twitter says of the border policy:

Seriously. It's not a magic solution to border transmission but it's not a bad idea either. Every security layer is worth consideration. You are allowed to like things even when your nemesis likes them. I give you permission.

Am conscious that in excoriating the policy yesterday I may have been, what's the word, a complete hypocrite you leftard dickhead moron.

Let’s ask Twitter to search out my reckons from two months ago.

What  do I have to say for myself? I feel I was wrong, is what I feel I was. 

The defence I submit is only that it was a reflex response to learning that the virus might be hitchhiking into the city from the Ellerslie roundabout and I wasn't too thrilled  about it.

Helpfully, because we also have experts who don't just ask themselves what the reflex reckon is, we can end up with better-conceived responses.

In that particular thread, actual doctor @vincristine told me:

No guarantee of anything. 3 days after isolation much better

I replied: Not looking for guarantees, looking for further layers of protection.

This is what we’re also hearing from defenders of the policy: that it would be just one more helpful layer of protection. That sounds helpful, but would it be helpful enough to warrant the weight of the imposition it could put on the people trying to get home, in terms of cost and time and availability? And how much might it count for if it only tell you the condition of the travellers at some time prior to boarding? In other words, would the game really be worth the candle? And if not, would that make it more a branding exercise than a meaningful additional precaution?

11.10am

People say what’s the point of all this time you spend on Twitter, and that’s not easy to answer. But I think I finally have one. It makes a marvellous journal. 

You go searching for the smoking water pistol you misfired two months ago and you end up retracing a whole lot of other steps from years now gone that you'd entirely forgotten. Type in “PLANE” and you find yourself doing things like this on some now-forgotten Queen Birthday weekend.

Queenz Birthday Poem

When a New Zealander travels 

to see their Queen

they first must disembark the plane 

and stand 

in the Aliens line

And, further back in years, wondering where in the world the 777 might be:

Still no sign of the plane, but a better idea of how that measles outbreak got here.

Amazing how completely something you do can vanish from your memory. But for the printed evidence, you might doubt you were ever there. Yesterday I found a Metro living obituary I’d so entirely forgotten that if you'd said his name I’d have had no idea who you were on about. His obituary will appear on this site in about six hours from now.

1.00pm

The PM is laying out the reasoning for the steps they're taking but first she wants to give a shout out to the people who have gone that extra mile, and that's people in Auckland especially the ones who got a test, and hey that’s me!  Oh look you're welcome. Really, if I can see just a few more people enjoying fresh baked cheese puffs, it’s been worth it tbh.

Hot take number one: AT Hop Card appears in rare AT-Hop-Card-not-shit story! Watch it retrace the steps of everyone who was on the bus to St Lukes! See it proving its worth! Loyal readers will recall that the much-loved daughter got herself a test the other day and this was because she had been working at St Lukes and travelled there by bus. Result: negative. Happy.

Anyone who was on the actual bus in question carrying the infected person, though, the Hop Card tells the story. This is cheering news, assuming all the users are registered, of course. Is that still optional? I hope not. 

Anyway, yay Hop Card. The little Covid card that could.

Hot take number two: Never mind hot takes, what does an expert think? I challenge you to nominate one Morning Report in the last month when the most useful stuff you heard was from from anyone other than Shaun Hendy or Siouxsie Wiles or Michael Baker.

Oh look, here’s Professor Baker in my inbox with a media release about matters covered in today's press conference. Copy, paste, here you go. 

It would be premature to lower the Alert Level in the Auckland region before next week at the earliest. The Auckland COVID-19 cluster is continuing to generate a steady number of cases each day, including nine new cases announced today. By now we will be starting to see the impact of the Alert Level 3 measures, which should have dampening down transmission of cases over the past week.

The Alert Level system itself needs to be reviewed after nearly six months use. It has served us well as a means for conveying physical distancing requirements and travel restrictions in a cohesive and understandable way. However, it needs to be fine-tuned for a number of reasons. It is now being used in a regional way, which is a useful advance. It also needs to have mask using rules integrated into it in a logical and consistent manner.

Hot take number three. Yay for being able to figure out who’s been on a bus, and regarding that last thing Professor Baker said: can we maybe agree that it is a really very good idea for everyone to wear a mask on public transport?

3.15pm 

Old mate Rick writes from Wellington to say he enjoyed yesterday's drug yarn.

I have to say I was unsettled by MM’s stories about Police conduct. I genuinely thought that we were past that and, by extension, there was no need for law reform… more fool me. And tolerance isn’t the same as legality, particularly when it’s subject to the whims of Policeman Plod.

I shall henceforth apply myself diligently to the task of furthering my knowledge of the upcoming (but now delayed) referendum!

Cottage meetings for the win, then. This is affirmed by the NZ Drug Foundation with this  very helpful information and material.

4.05pm

Getting some grief from inside our bubble about the legibility of my handwriting. Guesses invited as to the nature of item 4 please. Correct answer may possibly score a chocolate fish or one of whatever item 4 is.

5.05pm

Living Obituary, Metro, May 2016

John Webb, Wicked Campers founder and CEO, fun-loving capitalist, free speech advocate

John Webb made stacks of money being obnoxious. His flash of genius was to buy rooted old vans, spray offensive slogans all over them, and rent them out cheap.

He started with 15 clapped-out vans. Very quickly he had thousands of them, trundling all over Australia and New Zealand. Very quickly he and his slogans were all over the news.

He wasn't worried. Anyone who grizzled about the slogans was a hand wringer, or a pearl clutcher, or a wowser.  The media could take a hike, and maybe find themselves a sense of humour.

Even in Australia this was pushing things a bit, but it made more sense if you knew his story.

He was raised by dingoes. They snatched little baby John away from a tent site one summer evening, and dragged him to the den they’d made under the floorboards of a Kalgoorlie brothel.

There, amidst the growling and the pissing and the scrapping over raw meat, little John listened to the conversations in the rooms above, and learned the ways of humans.

He learned about women. He learned what goes through the mind of a Kalgoorlie miner with sixteen beers on board and a strain in his trousers. He learned how to shake the last dollar out of a punter’s pocket.

The miners were always leaving things behind: shirts, belts, singlets, trousers. By the time he had grown to manhood he had enough of a wardrobe to dress himself for the city. He crawled out from under the brothel, slouched towards the main road and put his thumb out.

He spoke perfect miner, and there wasn't a bar where he couldn't get every bastard laughing at his hilarious jokes. Everyone told him he was a real hard case.

When he started Wicked Campers he kept right on going. Every slogan was a crackup. “Your daughter is on my list of things to do tonight.” “Women are like banks. Once you withdraw you lose interest.” 

Complaints, though there were many, went nowhere. He promised in a press statement to vet the slogans using a team of “highly-intelligent, socially-conscious super monkeys” that would scream loudly when offended.

It might all have gone on for ever if it hadn't been for a Justin Bieber concert. He was dragged along on a dare, expecting to joke his way through the whole bloody thing. But the moment he saw “that beautiful boy’s face”, his universe tilted. “I felt pure love. The kind you think you can only have for a meatlovers pizza.”

He trailed Bieber across continents, every show, every media appearance. He swamped him with Twitter messages of love. For fifteen years Bieber tried to ignore the lovestruck fan, but when that didn't work the entourage went to work on him.

He came out of his coma, and his lover’s fugue, to discover everything was gone. No-one in the pub thought he was a hard case any more. Donald Trump had invested in Wicked Campers. The business had collapsed inside a year.

The city had chewed him up and spat him out. It was time to go back to Kalgoorlie.

John was at peace once more. Or at least he was until this week when exterminators lifted the floorboards in the brothel and found him in an act of excitement with two young dingoes. “We shot first, cos that’s what you do with dingoes. We had no idea we were shooting a 94 year old bloke. You should have seen him going at it but! Hard case!”