Keeping warm
Diary of the last 9 hours
6.45 am
This morning we are a bubble of three, plus cat. The beloved daughter has been home for the night to enjoy a meal and lavishly appointed bathroom.
Morning Report is on, the soundtrack she grew up with, a morning memory of mixed feelings.
She would also have Mikey Havoc and Newsboy as we drove to daycare, and you bet it was formative and this Friday she does her final Wire on bFM and the years just keep rolling and rolling.
7.10 am
Our cat is like every other in the world; wants whatever it is that she does not have right now, outside the bedroom door wailing and wailing and wailing and pawing for Mary-Margaret to get up and let her in.
7.25 am
The door has opened and the wailing and wailing and wailing and pawing at the door has ceased, so we can now hear Judith Collins do the same thing.
8.45am
If you’re ever after a swift forensic examination of political shitbaggery, proceed directly to Mr PublicAddress, and Clint Smith.
In brief: they took the answers given by the minister of health to Dr Shane Reti a month ago and contorted them into a misleading piece of ‘breaking news’ bullshit. The Border Fiasco News, brought to you by an outdoor billboard company, leapt on board for the ride.
You can find the whole sorry thing in Russell’s thread but maybe we won’t dwell too long on something that looks suspiciously like an emulation of the communications strategy made infamous in the 1990s by Theresa Gattung namely: using confusion as a marketing tool.
Except…see if you can spot the difference between the answer provided by the minister and the telling of the story by the National Party.
Marvel, as they truncate the statement of the Minister of Health and affix a full stop.
I’m sure it was not their intention to mislead, not like the sort of person who might have once been employed to practice dark arts in an office along the corridor from John Key, as recounted by fabulist Nicky Hager who most annoyingly seems to keep turning out to be correct in every respect while still being a complete fabulist.
9.05 am
Taking a break from copy editing to do some copy editing of the popup leader of the opposition.
Let's try out this exciting new editing format where you rip out all the boring shit and put in a full stop. Let’s see if we can give her some MeMeMe energy and, you know, make her go virus.
How does she rate the contribution of Sir Isaac Hooton?
Bloggers have been calling your party’s policy lurches wilder than a day at Rainbows End. What’s your take on that?
Who would you say you're letting down with this sort of carry-on?
Anything to say about that digger thing, you know, with the aviation fuel?
10.40am
What's exercising the people on the radio who get paid to make mewling noises to bigoted reactionaries is the phrase team of 5 million. They're sick of hearing it.
Paradoxically, the only time I seem to hear it these days is when one of them is using it as a lazy derisive reference point, airtime hours to fill and not much ever in the way of their own original imaginative phrase.
I last noticed the PM using it, once, at the latest lockdown announcement, when she made reference in terms of some being on the field and some not, but outside of that she seemed to park it more or less after we came out of the first lockdown.
Do by all means correct me if I'm mistaken.
10.51am
Ashley Campbell writes on Twitter:
I was originally against lowering the voting age. But the argument about young people getting involved in voting while at school, with all their peers, so normalising it and creating the habit is kinda swaying me.
In year 12 Mary-Margaret and friends got a group going for Amnesty International. Their mission was to recruit, they did okay. They learned about the techniques of campaigning, they learned what works and what doesn’t work so well.
Her somewhat impassioned friend took the lead at one assembly to make the pitch, delivering ten minutes of anguish about political prisoners and human rights abuses and reaching her crescendo with hands literally wringing: can you all for just once in your entitled lives think about someone other than yourself?
1975 I was in the 5th Form, had a glossy copy of the Values Party manifesto, a school library copy of Rise and Fall of a Young Turk, followed the whole Muldoon campaign, all the party political broadcasts, all the Colenso ads, and what a thing it all was.
Election day, I hassled the parents to do the right thing all the way out the door and into the car and I didn’t chase them down the drive waving the glossy manifesto as they disappeared in a cloud of dust, but if you picture that you're getting the right vibe.
I was probably never better informed about the contents of the party manifestos than I was that year.
Young people have time and energy. Young people might find themselves motivated to make a lifelong habit of engagement if they’re able to turn that energy into action.
There’s some very good commentary on this at The Conversation.
2.28pm
Many replies about Beverly Hillbillies thank you. Yes, this readership remembers it all, saw it all, in a black and white and all the way into the nineties it was still playing on afternoon TV. It turns out Donna Douglas died five years ago aged 82, and so long Ellie May, and the years just keep rolling and rolling.
3.00pm
Michele A'Court has a huge heart and enormous comic talent and when she writes about vulnerability it can be just beautiful and always so kind. This is a book in three pages, and it's meat loaf and music and goodness and finding a way to care for yourself and find the joy in any day and any time in all of the uncertainty and worry. It’s warmth.
Oh! Thank you for the boost, Mr Slack! Plus noting that we must have had the same copy of the Values Party manifesto when we were at high school. I invited the local candidate to our house for a chat which both appalled and tickled my mother who was, at that point, baking cakes for a National Party fundraiser. Kids, eh?
Tick..