Well, not so much bad as automated... ( under the cut for those who may be at a less liberal workplace than mine )

For those who don't want to click, well it's not often you see live boobs and diagrams of weeners so close in the news.

I know I haven't posted much recently, I've been busy doing other things.

The laptop pics made the Sunday Star-Times today, you might have noticed (extra pics that weren't in the paper version or in my previous post, for your viewing pleasure/amusement). I began telling my mother and sister about the whole ordeal, when she basically finished the story for me - I was thinking, what, how does she know, so she showed us the article online. Much LOLZ. (Click pic for larger version, about 230k or so.)

It's Saturday morning, 7am and I'm up. Damn. I suppose my body is all 'you've had eight hours sleep, more than you usually get, now, out of bed!' The past couple of weeks on early shifts has given me a good idea, at least at this part of the year, what happens at what time. When I awoke, I knew it was 6.30am, got up to check, and sure enough, it was. I know 'cause at 4am it's dark and quiet, and 4.25am when I leave the house it's dark and quiet (unless my iPod decides to play Master of Puppets), when I get to work at 5am it's dark and quiet, when I sometimes pop out at 6am to get a V from the bakery across the road, it's dark and quiet. So to wake up to dark and birds chirping, I figured it was 6.30am, and no later, cause at 7am it's dark but with hungry cats meiowing.

Our friend Ice McGunface broke the terms of his bail - he was under 24-hour curfew at his place, and he wasn't there when the police checked - and they apparently don't think he is going to turn up to his hearing on Wednesday.So combine that with the deleting of his Facebook, and I guess he's trying to disappear or something.

It would suck, for him, if someone who worked in the newsroom of a television station happened to get a hold of any incriminating photographs...

There's nothing on TV at this hour of Saturday morning. TV One's Best of Breakfast is pretty lame, and as often happens in times of crap TV, I've landed on Fox News. It's amusing to hear the presenters twist everything to suit their station's views, sometimes blatantly, but sometimes more subtly and awkwardly. Like the guy on now, struggling and hesitating to describe global warming as, at the very least, 'partly' man's fault.

Being up this early on a Saturday sucks.

First off, in order to win the war on pollution its waging before the Olympics, Beijing has declared war on the sky. Yes, in order to clear the thick smog that blankets the city, they are going to make it rain by firing chemically-coated artillery shells into the clouds. This ticks so many 'evil genius/axis of evil' boxes - chemical weapons, weather control, misguided science to name but a few.

Viceland.com sent me a message asking if they could link to and do an entry on Ice McGunface, and I told them no. Firstly, Vice, the magazine sucks. I hate Vice. Secondly, I'd imagine their website to be only worse, and there's no telling what crap people might post. Besides, since when did blogs ask people for permission to link to stuff?

Last weekend we had the Star Wars ultramarathon - it's kind of shameful it's taken this long for me write about it! Rob, Jennah and Simon came over during the early parts of The Phantom Menace, which showed commitment, and yeah. Even Tariqa passed on heading out into what was the coldest day of the year and made it to the end! We passed on watching Family Guy's Blue Harvest immediately afterward though, haha.

My sleeping has gotten better, I think the virus I had at the time must've been a lot harsher than I thought - I didn't even know I had one till the doctor said, and now it's gone I'm not so tired yet awake. I'm getting by on six or seven hours a night, which isn't bad.

I had so much I was going to write about, and now I can't remember any of it. If my phone had a camera I could show you the smashed up bus stop on the way to work which used to have a life-size portrait of Ali Williams on it, and now doesn't, but it doesn't have a camera.

Tariqa's written about the neighbours' big fight with the smashed windows and all that last week, but she made it friends only so I suppose I'll have to say something! They were having a domestic long after I'd meant to have gone to sleep. I heard some pretty heavy banging, so called the police - then while I'm on the phone to the operator, there are three loud smashes, none of which sound like bottles.

Come to think of it, sounds of smashing bottles might've signalled even worse trouble to come!

But anyway, I fell asleep once they quietened down (except the baby, which cried long and hard), which must've been when the cops arrived. Today the windows were suddenly all fixed, large boxes on the lawn their kids ended up playing in (before relocating to our lawn, hence my previous post!). I doubt they called the landlord - I was considering doing that myself to be honest, but never got to it. It seems loud guy (who I'm sure I've complained about before) has moved out now though, so maybe things will be fine from here on in.

Damn, it seems Ice McGunface has raped the battery on this laptop. I've been here half of Viva La Vida and it's already down to 50%.

I'm sure I'll remember everything I was going to write about once the battery hits 5% and the computer shuts itself down...

Here's a whole bunch of pulled-from-the-ass made up "statistics" reported as fact. And this is why little Timmy can't have that operation: cause some rich fuck wants the money instead.

I can't wait till I'm dictator of NZ. I'm sure 99% of the population can, but I can't!

(I'm going to go back to working on music stuff now)

The Govt's plans to restrict liquor outlets in local shopping areas is going to have the opposite effect of what i assume is their goal - to get people to drink less. How so? Well, instead of buying a bottle of vodka at small 'mum and dad' wine store for $35, people will just drive that extra minute to the large discount franchise store and buy it for $25 instead, perhaps picking up a six-pack as well. Do they really think that by eliminating the little guys who pepper the suburbs and leaving liquor sales in the hands of the larger, cheaper stores is going to stop people buying alcohol? It's only going to drive them to the cheaper warehouses and monopolistic supermarkets. Way to go, retards.

Another assumption that's being played out is that the concentration of liquor stores is causing any percieved problems, which is an outright fallacy. It's a basic tenet of capitalism that supply follows demand, not the reverse. There are loads of liquor stores in some areas because there is high demand for liquor, not the other way around. When I go to buy some cold ones, if there are two liquor stores on the block, I don't buy twice as much - that's retarded. But if I'm forced to go to a discount liquor warehouse because there are no local stores, chances are I'll buy more - for one, it's cheaper, and secondly, it's harder to get to so I'll buy more incase I don't get back again anytime soon.

A strange, non-argument some people have tried to make is that liquor stores are sometimes right next to dairies... and? There is no second half to this argument. Where are they meant to go? No one seems to have asked that question.

If it is the concentration of liquor outlets causing the 'problem', then why aren't areas with far higher concentrations having the same issues/being singled out?

Because it isn't a problem - it's a scapegoat.

PS. Why is it every time I tag an entry 'politics' or 'journalism', the 'idiots' tag nearly always follows?

The Herald hasn't given up on its retard stock photo story, but at least the vast majority of their readers, who can't usually be trusted for good judgment, have told them just how stupid they're acting. As probably the day's biggest politics story, somehow, we had to cover it but at least I tried to be a bit more neutral in my headline.

Yeah, our new site looks pretty, doesn't it? There were a few teething problems, completely normal I suppose but then again, not every website has to deal with a John Campbell on-air-plug sending thousands to it all at once!

Check this out. It's pretty much the coolest, oddest but most creative remix, ever.


Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Takes a while to get started, but pretty awesome.

I installed a cleaning/housework regime on the weekend, but have been terrible in sticking to it myself this week... must... do... dishes...

This has to be perhaps the weakest, most idiotic breaking news, ever. I use stock photos all day at work, and I bet the Herald does too. What lame, one-eyed and fucking retarded editor decided to run that as a lead?

Today's Herald editorial is a stunning rebuke to the 85% of their readers who, for some bizarre reason or another, refuse to understand the 'anti-smacking' bill. It's come a bit from left-field, but is quite refreshing to read. As it points out, and not many noticed, Family First's survey shows that far less children are being smacked now than before, and still there has not been the flood of parents being criminalised, nor any increase in youth crime, as predicted.

Even if the bill, for now, doesn't stop the extreme likes of the Kahui case, in the long term as attitudes change, it will. Call it social engineering if you want, I'm not against calling a spade a spade, but sometimes society does need to be led. That's why we call them leaders. If we wanted politicians to follow the exact will of the majority, we wouldn't need politicians, only referenda.

But the Herald's idiotic comments about the cost of Housing NZ's little trip are shameless. They even drag out a tenant and say the cost of the trip would pay her rent for seven years. They forget to point out under a National government charging market rents, it would pay for much less than half that.

That's it. I'm gonna go play some Battlefront II.

I saw a comment on the NZ Herald's website that said something along the lines of, "we all get drug tested when we start a new job and regularly while on the job and if we fail we lose our jobs, so why don't people on the benefit/dole have to undergo drug tests?"

Firstly, I've never been drug tested at any workplace of mine, and I don't think I know anyone else who has either, so that's the first part of that argument shot down. Secondly, people on the dole generally aren't required to be doing anything all that important, so if their judgement is impaired, more often than not it's not going to matter as much as if say, an air traffic controller or a forklift driver was out of his mind. Thirdly, what are you going to do if someone unemployed fails a drug test? Let them resort to crime in order to stay alive, lock them up and cost the taxpayer four or five times more than what it would to leave them on the dole? Think, people, think. Fourthly, maybe some people on the dole drink and do drugs BECAUSE they're on the dole, not the other way around as is often assumed. It can be pretty boring and depressing for many, not being able to find work.

Grrr.

Next thing: we get a lot of emails from high school students complaining about schools enforcing dress codes strictly - a few a day, minimum, from all across the country. All of them read as if they're written by 13-year-olds, at the oldest, but anyway, none of them describe anything my school didn't pull on us back in the mid-90s... yet we never thought of asking the news media to investigate! Then again, it was so much harder to write a letter back then... in my day...

Next next thing: the new Weezer video is awesome, perhaps the nerdiest three minutes in music history.

Next next next thing: perhaps the last Kittyhawk practise for me is tonight, for our last gig (I think) this weekend.

The Herald: "$70,000 is a modest income these days."

The reality: Only 11% of NZers earn $70,000 or more.

National Party: (paraphrased) We've been waiting for nine years for tax cuts.

The reality: Labour was voted in on a platform of raising tax rates, not lowering them.

This article is hilarious for so many reasons, perhaps none of which the Herald intentioned, but the all-time best part is:

TVNZ spokeswoman Megan Richards said the broadcaster had a policy of trying to match sound between ads and programmes - but said it was difficult to test sound compression with the network's current equipment.

Okay, so apparently TVNZ does not have a computer capable of downloading a program that weighs in at a massive 2.13 megabytes that will run fine on Windows 98... I mean, with all the tax cuts and shit going on, it must be hard measuring the dynamic range of a 30 second piece of music. BUT...to be fair, it takes me, an independent, amateur musician a whole minute or so to work out the average RMS decibel value of a song, so how can we expect a government-owned commercial media enterprise to be able to work this out in time for a statement for a newspaper that only comes out once a week!?

Spokespeople should check their information before making stupid announcements about not being able to tell whether the ads are louder than the shows they interrupt, when it's been a problem I've been fighting since I was a kid, even if then I'd no idea why they were so loud, they just were.

I took loads of photos of Tariqa today, only about 200 or so, I think she looked hot in about 100 of them, but it's not up to me which ones she likes.

What kind of idiots do we have for neighbours here? I was awoken at some ridiculous hour of the night (after going to bed around 1am, after work) by a couple of guys shouting at each other to be quiet as people were trying to sleep. I don't know what was so noisy to begin with, but it can't have been very loud - I'm a pretty light sleeper - so the irony was pretty thick.

Then a couple of hours or so later, someone shouted, "wake up you faggot!", then about 8am, "get up you wanker!". So much for sleeping.

In other news, I heard an advert on C4 announcing the return of 'New Zealand's shittest TV show', Back of the Y, which is totally awesome.

And in other other news, looks like the Herald's continuing its campaign serving National-voting 'middle' NZ, with or without the Electoral Finance Act. The lead story is about how wrong it is the Government stands to make billions of dollars from carbon emissions plans - because saving the environment and having more funds to put into education, health and research is a bad thing, remember. There's a story suggesting the recent (albeit not all that large) spike in unemployment is a good thing, because it means property owners' interest rates will drop. There's also more industry threats about the carbon emissions scheme. But it's not all doom and gloom, as the Herald reassures its core audience their investment properties are still going to appreciate in the long-run - the unspoken assumption being perhaps that despite overseeing the most dramatic property value appreciation in history, Labour will soon be gone and National will be back to let everyone make lots of money again.


Meanwhile, Stuff has an article about RickRolling (not a RickRoll, I promise), and an article on how violent video games don't create killers. I think Stuff wins today.

Ryan Adams has dyed his hair blonde.

Anyway, I've completed my first week at TV3 - how fast did the week go, goddamn!? I suppose that's what you get when you get a job you actually like and isn't the same thing over and over and over, and you know you're at pretty much the bottom and can only go up.

I got a small kick today to see a headline I wrote appear as the lead in news.google.co.nz's Sci/Tech section. I wasn't expecting it, and only wrote it an hour earlier, so to stumble across it randomly was pretty cool.

I have a huge list of things to do tomorrow - get a bike pump, fix bike, remove bike from Vulcan Lane, buy a jacket and a man bag, get receipts /quotes for stolen gear, drop off store key to Saturday staff, buy some blank CDs (optional), check mail, return library books, and maybe get a haircut. I'm not going to do things in that order, though cause that'd be inefficient.

I came across this article through Fark, and thought it'd make a good 'meme' of sorts. It's supposedly a list of 'obsolete' skills - how many do you still use?

I want to respond to all the morons crying "nanny state!" about a school banning birthday cakes on the Herald's website, and say something along the lines of, "This is your chance to exercise your freedom of choice and let the market take care of itself by shifting your kid to a different school," but every time I try to log in, it tells me: "403 Forbidden. Cross Site Request Forgery detected. Request aborted."

I think this is either the Herald's way of telling me the don't need my sarcastic commentary, or the universe's way of telling me I have better things to do. The realist in me is inclined to think it's the latter, the fighter in me the former, while the geek in me just thinks they should fix their freakin' website, lest it be overrun with nerds who know what they are doing.

Actually, that doesn't sound too bad. While they're at it, they should totally Rickroll the entire Your Views section.

The NZ Herald gave us this shining example of fine journalism this morning:

Headline: Labour booklet runs gauntlet in Parliament
Article: National produced the 12-page booklet, titled We're Making a Difference for Everyone, in Parliament yesterday and said it was distributed at Waikato University last week - in the regulated period.

Anyway... I haven't written in a while, I don't really know what to say... been working and demo-ing songs for a potential new band I might be forming with a guy at work, Raid Over Moscow. That would be the band's name, not his name.

WINZ are so incompetent they've driven me off the dole and back into the slave wages of retail, haha. It's less hassle working every day for peanuts than it is having to deal with those retards. Helps that we're severely understaffed at the mo, so there are plenty of hours available. I had my second interview at TV3 earlier in the week, and it was really casual, and I've got a good feeling about it... fingers crossed, since the job title include pretty much the three words I was hoping for in any job I managed to get - online, news and editor - so if I don't like it, then who knows what I'm meant to do with my non-rocksstar life, haha.

Had our first couple of gigs with fill-in drummer Matt, at Fordes and Dogs Bollix (last night). Went good. We need some new material though, damnit. I'm sick of playing the same damn songs in the same order. There's one new one in the set, Realistic Computers, which is breaking it up a bit.

Mark showed me two of the funniest things I've seen on Youtube in recent times: Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Kimmel's (don't go, hear me out) pseudo break-up/fued involving one Matt Damon. Part One and Part Two. First one is good, but the second... is truly awesome. But you have to watch the first to make sense of the second, so don't go skimping on the bandwidth.

Alright, I'm off to work out the chords to these songs I've demo-ed.


TOP ALBUMS OF THE LAST FORTNIGHT!

1. Sia - Some People Have Real Problems
2. Replacements - Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out The Trash
3. Midlake - Trials of Van Occupanther
4. Liam Finn - I'll Be Lightning
5. Kinky (Reina)
6. Vampire Weekend  - S/T

Turns out the 'bomb scare' near Aotea Square recently was nothing to do with bombs or part of a 'computer game', as the media reported. Fark posters debunk it here...

It's basically a giant, massive game ad hide-and-seek, not too dissimilar to the Monty Python sketch of Olympic hide-and-seek.

I've also decided to wage a crusade against every single news story about 'social networking' having to bring up the fact there are some bad apples out there who'll try to fuck you over. Why? Because in ALL walks of life, there are a few bad apples if not trying, then at least accidentally fucking you over. 2 or 3 people out of every 100 drivers are going to fuck someone over eventually, so why doesn't every motoring story end with something like, "3% of all drivers are out to fuck you up, or will do so from a combination or drugs and ill-will", like they do every story about Facebook? The same goes for employers, workmates, teammates, classmates, teachers, bandmates, everything. Any time you get a random sample of anyone, there is going to be a few who don't quite play by the 'rules' - why do networking sites have to be singled out, every single time?

I feel much safer logging into Facebook and even the notoriously loose MySpace than I do driving down the motorway to the city.

Jim Anderton busts the Herald's myths and nonsense. I suppose there's a certain irony in linking to his speech as hosted by the Herald Online...

Fucking stupid Herald. We studied their treatment of certain news stories in class all year, and they were always biased a bit, but their coverage of the EFB has been atrocious, one-eyed and an embarrassment to journalism.

What the headline/first couple of paragraphs argue: smoking is on the increase among young people, reversing a 30-year trend.

The truth, revealed over the course of the article: the percentage of people who've smoked at least once in the past year among those aged 15-45 is static when compared with previous data, bar a lower-than-usual result in 2001, though to be a statistical anomaly (and if they surveyed about a thousand, as they usually do, well within the standard deviation, if this particular year's results are above it).

By this study's reasoning, even I am a "young" smoker.

And this is today's lead story! (are those stupid snap.com previews gone?


PS. When I start my lessons, I'm so going to fail the T-Rex too.

Just as every intelligent person could see coming from a mile away, the BZP party-pill ban has forced unsafe crazy shiat onto the market, to replace the old pills that perhaps indirectly led to the death of only a single person the whole time they were on sale.

The Iraqi chemical engineer whose evidence suggested Saddam Hussein was building biological weapons, and was used by Dubya & Co to justify invading Iraq... turned out to be a fraud, and nothing more than a theif.

Laughing is an innate response to tickling.

You have to be extremely wealthy to even be considered as the Republican Party's presidential candidate.

And some people will type anything into the internet if there's a chance they'll see boobies.