Happy Birthday Henry

The toddler as a crawler

Have a good time with your friends and with Nana and Granddad and Uncle Chris.

The toddler as a crawler

More Schadenfreude

In addition to giving us Zeitgeisten, the German media also delivered the wonderfully untranslatable concept of Schadenfreude, a perverse, irony-fuelled delight in the downfalls and disasters of those who most deserve it but who are usually in a position of power.

This is how I feel when I read that for the second time in as many weeks the McDonalds fastfood chain, or a franchise of it in Auckland, may be guilty of serving up more than just Big Mcs and French fries. Locusts may be delicacies in some parts of Asian, but today a bloke found a huge cicada in his combo. “I looked down and there was a ginormous deep-fried cicada in my chips,” he told The Sunday Star Times. And that, old chums, is just not cricket.

As they did last time this happened, McDonalds disdained comment because the consumer had not returned the meal. He’s probably auctioning it on Ebay and will probably give the proceeds to Auckland’s Starship Hospital, which of course is sponsored by Ronald McDonald.

See and delight: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10558065

Kentucky Flied Chicken

News is in that as the world heads towards deeper recession they head to the fast food shops more believing them better value for time and money. You can get a ‘full meal’ for less than a tenner. This mentality is mililtating throughout Asia, where thousands of Asian Colonel Sanderses are in training for the onslaught of the Asian chicken invasion. They all look alike, don’t they?

More Stand-Up Comedy from New Zealand

Missing the security of his plastercast, John Key wears his new furry, grey mittens to parliament

God Bless the Queen

Welcome to the Twenty-first century!

This image of the Queen-in-Green (we learned from Helen Mirren that her nickname was Cabbage) delivering an Al Gore-style powerpoint presentation on nine screens and unveiling her new website, complete with links to YouTube, tickled my funny bone, although it really wasn’t meant to.

Her site includes a video archive of Christmas Messages plus voyeuristic panoramic tours of all of her castles, for those of us who love reality real estate shows.

Her newly revamped royal.gov.uk site includes a job vacancies tab. If you look, you can see that there are currently openings for trainee butlers, so bring on the pink gins. Their duties include delivering “tea and coffee trays, breakfast trays and newspapers … in an efficient and discreet manner.”

Reunited Triplets

As news breaks of octuplets born by IVF to a woman with 6 children of her own already in the USA, we stumble upon a lost story of triplets reunited. It deserves a news break, don’t you think?

The Flapping Hand

When I read the descriptions of meatworker Bryan Speers’s near-severed “flapping” hand at Crusader Meats in Benneydale, NZ, I nearly choked. This is my idea of a nightmare. “And then I saw my hand flapping around,” he said in a prepared statement. “I just grabbed my hand and walked down to the office swearing my head off … I really thought I was going to die.”

No jokes about giving the poor guy a hand are permitted as the operation that gave him back his hand has been a wonderful success. He is a keen hunter, rugby player and fisherman, so his hand is central to his way of life. The operation’s remarkable success is another step towards Frankensteinian medical genius.

Apparently, this is not the first but the seond time he has nearly severed his hand. The surgeon added, “He had nearly cut off the same arm before about five centimetres up his arm. The scarring made it difficult to know what was what.” I choked again.

But I want to emerge from this not with a nighmare but a sense of wonder.

Source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10556112

Keyed Up

New Zealand’s most famous stand up comedian, John Key, went from Waitangi to the Big Gay Out in Point Chevalier, Auckland.

He can rub shoulders with many potential constituents and voters, and he can exploit photo opportunities. He is all-inclusive and he mucks in like a good Kiwi sport.

Here he is mucking in during one of his stand up comedy routines, mucking in with some whose Civil Unions bill he had not supported several years before. The body language says it all. After selling his arm’s plaster case on auction website Trademe, he had to be careful his arm did not flap too much.

The Dame Edna Look

In my family, there is an in-joke about the Dame Edna Everage face. It denotes an exaggerated expression of yukkiness. It looks like this. Does it look like anyone you know?

Hello Yukky Possums.

Location X3

We sold our house in hard times (September, Two thousand and Eight= 08) (Blogger-only in-joke: “Oh Eight” is the Microsoft year of the smile, apparently, since recessions are good for them) after nearly a decade in the lovely house.

Selling without an agent was hard in the market that soon became a recession. The Greendoor agitators did not stand a chance. No amount of leaflet dropping, TradeMe-blogging or Herald-baiting would work. This needed access to mobilised market brute force. This is probably the nicest way I’ve ever described Real Estate Agents, although  a dear friend used to be one and has since fully reformed.

It will all be on TVOne NZ soon, one Sunday night soon at 7pm.

We thought we were getting a raw exploitative deal and were unable constitutionally to trust anything we were told by the agent. The glint in their eye declared a big fat fee and another Louis Vuitton handbag. Their fees weren’t going to be affected by recession. They weren’t going down with the sinking ship. But it turns out many of them did, and are, both in NZ and Australia and especially in the dear old USA.

In retrospect we did better than the others. The market in NZ died in October and now has rigor mortis, if the following is to be believe, and it contains statistics, so it should be. Read this: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10555632 (Sorry, I can’t do blue HTML links yet, use your browser as you used to in 2004. They should be automatic anyway like they are in Microhard Word). Where can the market possibly go from here?