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Rosemary says...

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« on: September 17, 2011, 02:39:32 pm »


ROSEMARY McLEOD: If you knew Muldoon like I knew him

The Dominion Post | 2:00PM - Thursday, 01 September 2011

Rosemary McLeod

BE GLAD not to be important or interesting enough to become someone's biography project. There's compelling proof in no afterlife when we admit that no biographer has yet been savagely struck down by the infuriated spirit of their long-dead subject. Rather, biographers go on to be covered in glory simply because they wrote about somebody glorious.

Such will never be the fate of any biographer of Sir Robert Muldoon, the former prime minister of this country who invented Think Big, a best- forgotten big adventure with taxpayers' money. Sir Robert was small of stature, which explains everything. But to call him "New Zealand's most evil prime minister" is surely going a bit far.

That unattributed quote was linked this week to a new production at Wellington's Bats Theatre, described as an "expressionist biography" of Muldoon. I hope this does not mean it involves the special artistic hell known as expressive dance, but I fear it could.

The thing is, I remember Muldoon, an astounding fact that may now seem a bit like remembering Napoleon, who shared his diminutive stature and pugilistic nature. I neither liked nor admired him, and deplored his bullying behaviour; I thought he was a damned fool for enabling the notorious Springbok rugby tour of 1981; his constant references to "Rob's Mob" — his imaginary millions of adoring admirers — incensed me; but to call him evil is to go too far. He was just a snappy little bloke whom we made prime minister. Bad call.

You can't explain the past to younger people. They can't imagine the effect returned servicemen like Muldoon had on politics and policy here because they didn't grow up in the shadow of World War II. And if you brought Muldoon back to life by some dire feat of black magic, he would not believe what we've done with this country.


PIGGY MULDOON

Maddening as he was, vile as he could be, Muldoon would not have imagined you could get away with selling off the state's assets and depriving people of jobs in the belief that somehow the market would solve the social problems that followed. Compared with some in the ACT party I'd call him a softie.

We've had a fair few prime ministers in our short history, about whom I bet we know almost nothing. But if we're going to talk about evil, I'd call Richard John Seddon, whose statue graces Parliament's front lawn, a contender. Well may the pigeons poo on the effigy of the man, pointing toward heaven as if to hector God. He was a rabid racist, who made sure the odds were stacked against would-be Chinese immigrants, and who likened Chinese people to monkeys. He also opposed votes for women, and on both of those counts his nickname, King Dick, was well earned. That said, it was under his watch that the first move towards social welfare began. Few people are entirely nasty.

On a more serious note, I am deeply worried about New Zealand Fashion Week. Its founder, Pieter Stewart, this week warned that its days could be numbered unless the Government stumps up some cash. Plainly this is a desperate situation. I wonder how I can help.

Perhaps I should put myself down for an ensemble from the Starfish autumn/winter 2012 collection, featuring jewellery made of resin and recycled plastic collected on beaches.

Having driven to Auckland and back in the past few days, I can appreciate this unusual concept. State Highway 1 is littered from one end to the other with plastic drink bottles, tin cans and food wrappers, one long necklace of detritus proclaiming our true feelings for the environment. Surely it could all be threaded together and draped around the neck of the Seddon statue, a fitting fashion statement from a posterity that has neither heard of him, nor grasped the point of rubbish bins.


http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/columnists/rosemary-mcleod/5545174/If-you-knew-Muldoon-like-I-knew-him
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« Reply #1 on: September 17, 2011, 02:46:05 pm »


ROSEMARY McLEOD: The elephant in the room that speaks

The Dominion Post | 11:07AM - Thursday, 15 September 2011

Rosemary McLeod

WHAT WITH the herd of elephants in the living room, it's a wonder we can talk about anything that matters.

Try these: Who pushed for changes in building standards that have left so many owners of leaky homes out of pocket and in misery? Who — taking into account the long and tragic history of mining — decided to leave mine safety up to private enterprise? How did the knowledge that there'd been earthquakes in Christchurch before, and that there was a danger of liquefaction, vanish? Anyone want to discuss the number of gay people prominent in the Labour Party? How about the lowering of the drinking age, and what about the fascinating Asian bride phenomenon?

Then there's racism, by far the biggest elephant. Discussing that is a minefield: only the most suave of public servants have the bland finesse required. And then there are Maori. It's a brave Maori who tells us in plain English about their feelings on, say, immigration policy. But a leaked Labour Department report tells us Maori are more opposed to immigration — and believe there are negative effects from it — than any other group.

Auckland University academic Margaret Mutu was reacting to that report when she said we should cut back on white immigration, in part on the grounds — she suggests — that those who come here from South Africa bring white supremacist attitudes with them. So this is a surprise?

You'd have to be pretty dumb if you thought Maori happily accept the flood of immigrants from all over the world who threaten their numerical status and possibly their influence in the future direction of this country. If the statistics were reversed, and we were taking in brown-skinned immigrants from all over the Pacific in equal numbers, Pakeha here would soon speak their mind. Or would they? Would they be cowed into silence? That seems to be the intention of complaints the Race Relations office has received about Professor Mutu's comments.

Auckland University, where Professor Mutu heads the Maori Studies department, backs her right to free speech, as it is bound to do. But in the wider community it seems we'd rather see dissent squashed — for complex reasons, among them a petty, self-righteous desire for revenge over what's seen as special privileges for Maori.

Where's the harm in what she said? Isn't a head of Maori Studies, and chair of her runanga, entitled to speak as an expert on Maori attitudes? Do we seriously want academics to shut up on demand? Have we forgotten that universities are supposed to foster inquiring minds? Or have we mutely accepted that they're rightly just degree factories for whatever dull trade is currently in vogue?

Meanwhile, the aftermath of the bizarre 2007 terrorism raids in Tuhoe country is slowly being played out, with the majority of charges against those who were arrested now dropped. Still among the final four people facing charges is Tame Iti, the apparently terrifying diminutive figure with full facial moko who in someone's mind was considered to be our version of Osama bin Laden. I await the evidence against him with interest. Iti is a great one for the theatrics of protest; we're familiar with the sight of his bare buttocks and, as he pointed out after an unattractive spitting and nose-clearing session at Parliament, "We were not there as a haka party performing for tourists".

But how we wish they would be just that, tame brown folk to wheel out on special occasions, when we could get sentimental about them for a few hours, then send them home again. We love our Maori heritage when it suits us. Where would the opening to the Rugby World Cup have been without their creative input? What we don't want to be reminded of is the little things like the 19th-century land confiscations that simmer in the background of all our dealings with Maori, and will wind up future Tame Itis for generations to come. Get used to it.


http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/columnists/rosemary-mcleod/5627874/The-elephant-in-the-room-that-speaks
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« Reply #2 on: September 29, 2011, 11:38:31 am »


Rosemary McLeod

ROSEMARY McLEOD: All you need is love, Don

Give dope a chance, it delivers bread, man!

The Dominion Post and The Press | 5:00AM - Thursday, 29 September 2011



NEVER underestimate The Donald. With one bound he has taken the ACT party into the late 60s to tune in, turn on and drop out. Hey, all you need is love.

There'll be a lecture tour, provisionally entitled "One Love: Act's Vision", or possibly "Brash for the Hash" or "Don for the Bong". We're doing audience research on that.

What timing. As the world money markets crash again, whole national economies stagger, and capitalism reels, The Donald, with his track record at the Reserve Bank, has had the vision.

He has seen where legalising cannabis would be more to the point than tinkering with education, paying more police, or twiddling with the health sector. The country would grow.




It would be a money-saver. People would be happy and stop their griping about food prices and the cost of dentistry, and with no hope of jobs for the under-educated, the law change would guarantee their eternal devotion to the party. Fusion with cannabis lobby groups seems inevitable, to make up for the ACT stalwarts quitting the party, and there are heaps of votes in that.

True, there is John Banks to consider in passing. He'd be no fan of cannabis law reform, or of those particular lobby groups, but we won't miss him. The Donald can do the party thing solo. He has the charisma.

For too long, we've seen him depicted as an old man in overalls squeezing into a pedal car. There's been the comb-over to get your head around too. But think older man with creds: think Timothy Leary, William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, Keith Richards.

Heck, Hunter S. Thompson was only three years older than The Donald is now when his ashes left this world on the ultimate trip, and Keith is only three years younger. The similarities will undoubtedly strike you.

They all share, or shared, the love of freedom, the ad-hoc, the what-the-heck, the let's-run-it-up-the-flagpole-and-salute-it approach to life. Like, why not?




In legalising cannabis The Donald would be widening his fan base, and going for an international vision. He has seen the huge illegal profits in the trade, and ever the thinking pragmatist, has assessed the potential tax take, along with the benefits that could be accrued from making this country a cannabis-promoting tourist destination.

While Indonesia has its mean-spirited attitude to drugs of leisure, jailing so many innocents caught with the drug in their backpacks, we could lure their tourist bucks down here, where we're cool dudes.

Our climate could be an issue, but with the profits the rich would make from dope, they could easily afford to blow hot air through the streets and sell fake tan at cut rates so the punters would think they'd had a proper holiday.

Add to that our prostitution industry, which can only boom in hard times, and what an enticing vision we'd offer travellers.

We would organise cannabis production along proper industrial lines, naturally, and list licensed growers on the stock exchange. Quality would be monitored by a government agency created for this purpose from our supporters, who'd be experts at grading the crop.

We'd send trade emissaries to countries where the need is equally great but the governments are cowards, and develop ways of shipping the crop there. Unlike dairying, you barely even need irrigation for a cannabis crop it grows like a weed and you sure don't need topdressing. That's a win for the environment too.

The Donald assures us he's never smoked cannabis, and hopes nobody in his family will ever enjoy this possibly-should-be-legal drug. We have our advisers, though, and they're excited by last weekend's brainwave.

If this is what he is like when he is straight, they are saying, just imagine what he would come up with if he did get stoned.


http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/columnists/rosemary-mcleod/5700279/All-you-need-is-love-Don

http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/opinion/columnists/rosemary-mcleod/5701947/Give-dope-a-chance-it-delivers-bread-man
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« Reply #3 on: September 29, 2011, 01:18:00 pm »


Suffering from haka fatigue
ROSEMARY MCLEOD
Last updated 08:30 22/09/2011           


OPINION: I can't blame Springbok coach Peter de Villiers for his comments on the omnipresent haka. I'm also starting to suffer from haka fatigue.

It's right that Maori retain, and we respect, their cultural practices, but surely we can be forgiven a wan smirk when we see on TV news, as we did the other night, a mob of pakeha striplings performing a haka about the reopening of their Christchurch school.

Just who were they challenging on that occasion? The NCEA? Their headmaster? The god of earthquakes? None of those likely targets would have trembled in their boots. And what about the growing practice of performing haka at funerals? What is the aggression aimed at then? God? Doctors? The dead person? And is this really a way of expressing grief? When you see a haka performed in the context of the death of a small child it just seems disturbing, and not in a good way.

There are times when a haka truly speaks to us - and movingly - about who and where we are, but there are also times when it just makes you fidgety, and overseas visitors must resent being repeatedly forced to face down a mob of ferocious performers before they get down to some well- earned tea and biscuits. We don't want the haka to become a cultural cliche, surely. We've got enough of those already.

And here I'd like to offer Dan Carter's cute little face and muscular, spray-tanned, alarmingly hairless body as an exhausted cliche, the poster boy of sport who I can't even escape from during TV commercials. Carter is a nice lad I'm sure, but I prefer to know a chap better than this before seeing him regularly in his underpants.

I much preferred the misty past when an All Black typically spoke in sentences of three words max, and got back to dagging and crutching as soon as possible. In those days - quite rightly - you weren't expecting to get a whiff of chemicals when you poked your snout into a man's armpit, and you did expect to find hair there.

Haka - and Carter - may be most in danger of over-exposure, but there is also that cultural cliche, the universal political dignitary, and his excruciating verbal drone. How we dread the requisite wet joke; the tribute to the better half; the quote from Shakespeare - or Oscar Wilde; the platitudinous observations about the locality's attractions, real or fictitious. The marginal advantage of this over a haka is that you're more likely to fall asleep than feel nervous.

Goodness knows culinary cultural cliches also abound, especially that awful bore pumpkin soup, which I prefer to call pumpkin slop. I don't believe there's a cafe or restaurant in the country that isn't serving up a version of it. There's nothing wrong with pumpkin itself. It's mostly pleasing to look at, whether grey, green, orange, smooth, stippled or striped, dwarf or giant, but the uses to which it's put can be actionable.

It's too easy to make pumpkin slop, that's the trouble. All it takes is pumpkin, onion, butter, water or stock, salt and pepper, and a food processor to whiz them in when they're cooked. There are variations - curry powder, celery, tomato, coconut milk, and fresh ginger are some - but the outcome is much the same, baby food you have to eat with a spoon, its colour, aptly enough, Karitane yellow.

I recall, as a tot, envying a bowl of similarly yellow mush streaked with silver beet that my grandmother was feeding to a toddler foster child she looked after, but that was long ago. I've grown teeth in the interim, and I hereby give fair warning that the next time I see pumpkin slop on a menu I'm likely to perform a personal haka for the benefit of the unimaginative, lamentable bore of a cook who put it there.

- The Dominion Post

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/columnists/rosemary-mcleod/5665283/Suffering-from-haka-fatigue

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« Reply #4 on: April 20, 2012, 04:49:12 pm »


ROSEMARY McLEOD: Old flames can burn your fingers

The Dominion Post | 5:00AM - Thursday, 19 April 2012

WEDDING PICTURE: Posted by Paula Bennett on Facebook.
WEDDING PICTURE: Posted by Paula Bennett on Facebook.

I'M HAPPY to see a couple of old flames once every five years, but the idea of picking up an old romance with them again, like some dropped stitch in a piece of knitting, holds no appeal.

Besides, there must have been a good reason why you split up the first time; some suppressed memory of rage or humiliation that would suddenly surface, and blow the whole edifice of rekindled ardour to bits. of the case, please. We need to check out the file and call in her case worker to explain this burst of middle-aged romance. Did she advise us of this on the correct form, and does it involve a change of address?

My mother always said: "Marry in haste, repent at leisure."

She knew the truth of that from personal experience.

I feel the need, then, armed with her belated wisdom, to be the bad fairy at the social development minister's nuptials. I do this on behalf of everyone who has rekindled a long-dead romance with a blast from the past and knows that: It. Seldom. Works.

Paula Bennett was all smiles and bare feet in the sand at her wedding last weekend to an old boyfriend. She looked thrilled to bits. But back home (his) in Australia, his until-recently lover is most upset, and wants us to know.

"Within 24 hours of him meeting her again he told me basically he and I were over and he was going to go back to New Zealand with her," she said.

Until then she'd thought he was The One For Her. Now she's left with nothing but his dog, she reports, and no doubt the fading scent of his toothpaste on her pillow, and a sock (his) with a hole in it wedged under her clothes drier. To become the solo mother of a dog is a sad thing. Feeding a mutt costs a fortune, and who's going to foot the bill? And there's nothing more poignant than an old sock, so I wish her better things.

You hear these late-flowering romance stories all the time, especially now that the internet makes infinite human connections possible.

I know one woman, about 80, who abandoned her husband of a lifetime to rush overseas to the brand new love of her life. It lasted, oh, weeks.

I know another, whose rekindled ardour wore out in months (she was younger). A friend rekindled a past romance with a louse, only to prove he was still a louse, as they tend to be.

We all know these people, otherwise sane, but desperate for the rush of lust you feel when you're young and unwary, and which you inevitably live to regret. It's better left to occasional daydreaming, surely.

Think of Roger Kerr's embarrassing carry-on with former ACT MP Deborah Coddington.

Think of Don Brash's public romantic problems, and those of so many middle-aged men desperate to produce sprogs again with women their daughters' age.

They rush at it like lemmings, and what happens next? They're snoozing in front of the television news, worn out, a delicate trail of dribble welling up at the corner of their mouth, while some harassed young career woman (the new wife) cleans up after the toddlers and rues the day she bought the whole creaky package.

I'm happy to see a couple of old flames once every five years, but the idea of picking up an old romance with them again, like some dropped stitch in a piece of knitting, holds no appeal.

Besides, there must have been a good reason why you split up the first time; some suppressed memory of rage or humiliation that would suddenly surface, and blow the whole edifice of rekindled ardour to bits.

I trust this won't be the case for the minister; that she won't be another high-flying woman formerly on a benefit - Christine Rankin springs to mind - who believes she can have it all: true love, a demanding job, and a joyous blended family.

But I'm not in the business of waving magic wands, and a lifetime's cynicism is a habit hard to break. Her new husband may be a good bloke and all - Ms Bennett believes him to be, for all I know - and they may be happy ever after.

Either way, to paraphrase Janis Joplin, they might as well get it while they can. Why not?


http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/columnists/rosemary-mcleod/6767951/Old-flames-can-burn-your-fingers
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« Reply #5 on: April 20, 2012, 05:22:02 pm »

Great Scott!  Shocked
That looks like the north end of a south-bound bus!
Surely she could post a more flattering photo than that!
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« Reply #6 on: July 19, 2012, 03:57:16 pm »


ROSEMARY McLEOD: A savage world of meaty feasts

The Dominion Post | 5:00AM - Thursday, 19 July 2012

Rosemary McLeod

IT'S A curious sport, the one when young people, mostly males, dress up as seals in shiny black wetsuits, then ride surfboards in sharks' killing grounds.

In pursuit of this, a 24-year-old surfer has been snatched by a great white shark off a beach north of Perth, where it had reportedly been seen cruising for several days, and was even nicknamed Brutus by fellow surfers.

They had not reported its sighting. Perhaps they feared they'd have to stay away from that stretch of water if they did.

The sea off Western Australia is a known magnet for these predators, with surfers ignoring the fact that there have now been five fatal shark attacks along its coast in 10 months, and that great white sharks have a massive size advantage over people: they can grow to six metres — this one was reportedly 4.5m long — and weigh up to 3000 kilograms.

Sharks hunt seals, sea lions, dolphins, elephant seals, sea otters, turtles and sea birds — so from their point of view, why not add humans to the list?

Anything that moves is a snack.

Western Australian officials swiftly set out on a hunt for the villain, to kill it and avenge the death.

But unlike humans, the great white shark is a protected species, vulnerable to extinction.

Better, maybe, to suggest wearing pastel-coloured wetsuits.

Brutes come in many forms and I'm sad to add a jack russell terrier to the list.
 
One of these raffish little dogs — I like the way they boldly dash about — has savaged two of an Auckland journalist's precious chooks to death.

"The dog looked like it was having fun; it looked like it was a game," the journalist's daughter has reported indignantly.

She said the dog's owner bolted, adding insult to injury.

From her holiday offshore the journalist has declared she will hunt the man down on her return.

I hear a muted drum roll at this point. What will she do when she finds him?

I hesitate to compare a jack russell to a great white shark, but nature will out.

Dogs are hunters too, unless we breed that out of them, as are cats, which Wellington's Zealandia, the native bird sanctuary, would like people to give up having as pets.

I flinched at the description of chook feathers flying, since my own cats have done their share of evil deeds, and one of them regularly attacks newspapers, shredding them viciously as if they're some kind of prey — or possibly as an indignant comment on press ethics in Britain.

If revenge is a dish best served cold, I'd hate to be that dog's owner, slinking around with his hat down and collar up, in dark glasses like the-ghost-who-walks (the Phantom) when he's travelling incognito.

Hopefully, he's dyed the terrier's coat purple and smuggled it out of the country.

But why not keep your precious chooks — and I adore chooks — safe in a fenced-in run, where a dog can't get at them? And why not walk the dog on a lead the way everyone else does?

For that matter, why not drive cautiously when you're in a strange country, and why not just pull over when police catch you speeding?

The appalling road deaths of the past few weeks suggest too many people don't believe the roads are a wilderness where you have to keep your wits about you.

Incidentally, I wonder if the Duchess of Cambridge is another person who's on the warpath over pictures the latest Woman's Day has published of her and Prince William on their honeymoon.

Rival editor Sarah Stuart, of the NZ Woman's Weekly, has called this a betrayal, a "breach of trust on William and Kate's honeymoon that was, I believe, a truly modern kind of treason".

A woman convicted of treason could be burned at the stake in Britain until 1790, and Britain's ruler could ask for a guilty subject to be beheaded until 1973.

Hard to choose, really, between such human savagery and the habits of the great white shark, which is at least hungry.

But then so are magazines, for circulation.


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« Reply #7 on: July 20, 2012, 01:40:51 pm »

It's rather funny that the rest of the world media have chosen to follow the Woman's Day.  I don't know what Woman's Day's circulation is but surely if the rest of the media had chosen to ignore the story/photos of Kate and Wills it would have died a natural death. However, media being what it is everyone had to jump on the bandwagon.
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« Reply #8 on: September 06, 2012, 11:36:10 am »


ROSEMARY McLEOD: The day I lost faith in Eastwood

The Dominion Post | 5:00am - Thursday, 06 September 2012

Rosemary McLeod

CLINT EASTWOOD movies have been my thumb-sucking comfort in a cruel world. You know where you stand with Clint; right's right, wrong's wrong, and a well-placed bullet will solve everything. It's just like fairytales, and he's the good fairy — in a manner of speaking.

I have been loyal to the squint. I loved him in the poncho, when he was The Man With No Name. I loved him still, though less, as Dirty Harry, avenger of everyone ever been done wrong by a creep, and I loved Mystic River.

There are films like Paint Your Wagon and Every Which Way But Loose that I've never watched because I've suspected they'd shatter my fragile trust in his manliness. When the world seems to be a dismal and confusing place, what comfort there has been in Clint's dark power to realign the universe.

And then there was the Republican Convention.

Actors, as we all know, need someone to keep an eye on them and stop them making dicks of themselves. If you've watched Breaking Bad you'll know the episode where the two main characters improvise the entire, excruciating time, like a pair of lunatics in a method-acting workshop. No doubt they were egged on by a devoted production crew keen to make Art; no doubt they thought they were cute; but it was terrible. As was Clint, interviewing that chair.

What was he thinking? I don't want to think about that myself, because I've always relished the lack of profound thinking or subtlety that goes into his work: revenge is all the motivation and storyline you need. I've admired him for being so one-dimensional, so clear about everything, so Clint, even now that he's crinkly. So it's tough to have to face the fact that he's been thinking all along, and taken the whole deal seriously. Even in a poncho.

An idol has fallen. No, two idols have fallen for me in the past few days. The other is Oliver Sacks.

If Clint was the guy with a gun you could turn to in a bad neighbourhood, Sacks is the guy you always hoped would be looking down on you if a bad thing happened inside your brain.

He has been in my pantheon of good guys for years. Only 10 days ago I bought another of his books, looking for the dependable experience of reading an intelligent and compassionate man writing about something I only half understand (the science) but wholly applaud (the empathy). In a world where medical experiences can be grim, and void of empathy, it has been a comfort to think of him. And yet.

There's no coming back, for me, from Sacks' just-made revelations about his years of recreational drug-taking, his "research" into the effects they have on the brain, back in the 60s. From now on his name will be linked, in my still-hanging-in-there mind, with that arch bore, the acid freak Timothy Leary, whose shadow fell over the 60s like some sort of Batman cape.

There are things we just don't need to know. Only our nearest and dearest can be expected to listen patiently to our dreams, and even they shouldn't have to listen to tales of druggie hallucinations and the amazing experience of being, like, out of it.

Sacks talked to a spider, he reveals, and the spider talked back. He cooked breakfast for guests who were never there. He had insights. And, as with all bores, there is an undercurrent of bragging. He's so interesting that he had interesting hallucinations, and he thinks they made him a better human being; was so clever that drugs couldn't harm him.

I'd like to say the same for the people whose brains get fried by such adventures. They don't wake up and become famous pop psychologists; they go somewhere strange in their heads, and never get back.

It's that hint of boastfulness that annoys me, and the gnawing suspicion that what looked like true compassion all this time was maybe just a fellow druggie's curiosity about someone 's trip.


http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/columnists/rosemary-mcleod/7619915/The-day-I-lost-faith-in-Eastwood
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« Reply #9 on: September 17, 2012, 11:38:51 am »


ROSEMARY McLEOD: Doing right by criminals' children

The Dominion Post | 5:00AM - Thursday, 13 September 2012

Rosemary McLeod

IT'S A PITY we can't choose our parents, or we'd all pick multi-millionaires who were also good-looking and borderline geniuses. I'd have liked a life of ease once Sister Sullivan, queen of the maternity ward, had greeted me with a whack on the backside.

But since we can't choose, we will look roughly like our parents, and do roughly as well or badly in life, which in my case is a bit of a bummer because mine both lived and died skint. They had good qualities, but you can't buy breakfast with those.

And so it is with the children of feckless, foolish, irresponsible, criminal, drug-and-alcohol addicted parents who offer little more than a urine-soaked mattress and the dregs of a soft drink bottle on which to grow up. Their kids start life with one hand behind their backs, metaphorically speaking; gang kids in particular.

I'm targeting them because we're told gang members make up 10 per cent of the prison population, a statistic out of all proportion to gang numbers.

Here is a mystery that is never explained: How gangs of uneducated men run huge drug businesses, which have to be ludicrously profitable, while they and their partners and kids invariably live on welfare, in the bad back streets of towns that have seen better days, and will soon see worse.

Where do the millions we're told all those drugs are worth — and the profits are untaxed — end up?

They're not spent on their children as far as anyone can tell, or on the children's hapless mothers.

You don't see gang people ordering fine wines in fashionable restaurants, or swaggering through design stores buying Alessi trinkets to decorate their kitchens; and you won't find them in toy shops, buying Lego to thrill the nippers.

It's rotten luck, then, to be a gang child. If their parents were white collar they'd have them in private schools and pony clubs while they smoothly ripped off the system.

But as things stand, gang kids are more likely to have glue ear, go hungry, witness violence regularly and have nobody who cares whether they can read, write or do arithmetic until the glorious day dawns when they're big enough to become gang prospects.

Here is another mystery: Gang members are typically ill-educated, yet they manage to run — we're told – drug empires. This is manufacturing and distribution business like any other, calling for the same skills as respectable people have, all done without university degrees.

There are workers to attract and hierarchies of management to organise; wages to be paid and markets to expand into; entrepreneurial schemes to evaluate; and profits to be shared and reinvested – all of this while eluding police.

If this is what gangs are capable of, they are by no means as dumb as we like to think and could be gainfully employed quite legally. So how do they contrive to stay on welfare?

Against these realities, Labour now proposes that the children of feckless parents like these get free breakfasts at school, so they can concentrate enough to learn.

National says it's the parents' fault the kids go hungry, while Labour, keen to do something useful, says it's everybody's problem.

I'm with Labour on that one: The parents will never be sorted out, and actually, their children are all of our children; we'll likely be paying for them from the cradle to the grave either way.

But I think the free breakfasts would have to be available to every kid. The truly needy shouldn't be exposed to ridicule from their smugly well-heeled classmates.

I am intrigued, against this school situation, by the plight of Burger King, which has been allowed to import nearly 600 overseas workers, claiming it couldn't find New Zealanders fit to train as managers.

So have I got this right: We have thousands of able-bodied New Zealanders running lucrative businesses while living on welfare, yet we've imported workers from the Philippines to sling burgers efficiently.

For goodness sake, won't somebody join the dots.


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« Reply #10 on: September 20, 2012, 12:31:05 pm »


Kate has every right to flash us

Rosemary McLeod on Kate baring her booty

The Press | 9:08AM - Thursday, 20 September 2012

Rosemary McLeod

IF I had 'em I'd flash 'em too. The Duchess of Cambridge was quite within her rights to do so, even if she knew paparazzi were on the prowl.

There's much envy in the world's reaction to pics of Kate baring her booty. She still has a decent figure is why, and hasn't had any sprogs, so she's had no gravitational pull, unlike some of us who are well along the alphabet in cup size. Any day now we'll be doubled over in special harnesses, so great is our burden. But I digress.

It's a professional thing. Kate has to wear posh evening frocks with low decolletage, and you need an all-over tan to peep through the shoestring straps and lace squiggles. And just think; the poor thing is domiciled in England, where it's always drizzling. She only gets a glimpse of sunlight when she's abroad.

It's nonsense, all this talk of media violation. Aristocrats are brought up being gawked at, and bring up their children the same way, sending them to boarding school at a tender age so they get habituated to a total lack of privacy.

How could there be social pages if there weren't aristocrats with triple-hyphenated names to photograph reeling blearily, glass in hand, hilarious hats at rakish angles? Both men and women, I mean.

Kate may have been born a commoner, but let's not forget it was a see-through outfit she wore in a university fashion parade that made Wills suddenly see she was hot. No shame in that, either. Everyone else flaunts it, especially royalty, as she should know by now.


OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD: The Duchess of Cambridge on a visit to Malaysia. She often has to wear posh evening frocks with low decolletage and needs an all-over tan to peep through the shoestring straps. — Photo: Getty Images.
OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD: The Duchess of
Cambridge on a visit to Malaysia. She often
has to wear posh evening frocks with low
decolletage and needs an all-over tan to
peep through the shoestring straps.
 — Photo: Getty Images.


There is much precedent, but we could start with the Monaco girls. Princess Stephanie is well documented bare-breasted, and in a variety of cup sizes. The most recent set, implants that seem to be bowling balls she's commandeered from a pensioner, were in thrusting evidence at her brother's wedding. They looked set to fall out of her dress and must have upstaged the bride.

Her more elegant sister, Princess Caroline, features naked from many angles on the internet, which her husband, a fellow aristocrat and rational man, would appreciate. He'd like that sort of thing because he reportedly had a fling with Miss Nude Belgium a while back. Wills needs to be more urbane.

Then there's his great-aunt, Princess Margaret, who was snapped by the paps years ago at her holiday shack with her much younger lover. I doubt she kicked up a fuss, though from memory the snaps were unflattering. An older woman will always be grateful to be seen to have pulling power.

For more recent precedent, Fergie, Duchess of York, was snapped having her toes sucked by a man who was definitely not the duke. That was also in France, where the better class of person gaily sheds inhibitions as Kate has done, quite likely under the influence of champagne - or in some cases a snort of something more expensive.

Naked paparazzi pics of former president Jaques Chirac were taken there but never published, and we should be glad of that. Paunches are never going to cut it.

As for royalty flashing, there's no finer example than the duchess's brother-in-law, Prince Harry, a mere couple of weeks ago. We can look him up, too, on the internet, where he apparently bounces about in mating tackle, but I've seen too much of that sort of thing in my time to bother.

There is a comprehension problem with the world's media over incidents like these, which are quite understood by anyone who has ever mixed with former boarding school boys of the better class. They like nothing better than ripping their gear off, especially while drunk, and chundering on the upholstery.

I used to idly wonder at the homoeroticism of it all, but we shouldn't read too much into innocent fun. And that should be Kate's position. She's got the rest of her life to put up with it, so why spit the dummy now?


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« Reply #11 on: October 04, 2012, 10:07:09 pm »


ROSEMARY McLEOD: Dotcom ought to be a sitcom

The Dominion Post | 9:41AM - Thursday, 04 October 2012

Rosemary McLeod

BREASTFEEDING MOTHERS will have gasped at the report of police holding a teenage mother in their cells for 36 hours, separated from her baby.

The Upper Hutt 16-year-old mother will not forget, and it wouldn't have happened if two police probationers involved had normal human feelings.

If last week's reports are true, the teenager and a 14-year-old girl were photographed in public, strip searched — which means a woman had to be involved — and kept in police cells until they appeared in court, when the judge threw out the charges against them.

Expect lawyers to have a field day on their behalf, as they should.

It's basic: what kind of people would separate a breastfeeding mother from a 4-month-old baby? What kind of woman — one had to be involved in the strip search — would show no concern for her plight? Were no senior officers on duty? Did they not notice what the probationers were up to?

And why would nobody let either girl call her parents or a lawyer? Any TV cop show will tell you people have rights: you'd think probationer cops might have watched a few. But we should know better than to expect common decency on a lot of fronts.

Imagine being the sensitive claimants in the ACC breach of privacy that flung their personal files to the four winds, and imagine being offered $250 in compensation for the shock of what you'd been through, and the intransigent indifference of the corporation until it was absolutely forced to face reality. How hugely unimpressive and how costly that will prove when ACC is sued, as will undoubtedly happen.

Watching the lunacy of the Kim Dotcom affair is equally astonishing.

It really ought to be pitched as a sitcom.

John Key has apologised to everyone over the risible mishandling of his case, and as a result all the Government Communications Security Bureau's spying for the past three years is to be reviewed. That should be entertaining.

But first — Dotcom is in a strong position to sue over the abrogation of his rights. It would take a big man in both senses of the word not to.

Our spies don't have an impressive public record.

In their one and only major spy case, brought against economist and distinguished public servant William Ball Sutch, the high point in my memory is the discovery that rather than holding secret files to pass to a Russian contact, Dr Sutch had half an opened bottle of milk in his briefcase, being weirdly old-fashioned and thrifty.

A jury found him not guilty.

At that time university students were always detecting supposed Security Intelligence Service agents on campus.

Usually this was on the basis they had super-short hair, wore sports jackets and navy blue trousers, when everyone else was in beads and jeans, and were never seen to laugh, when everyone else was cackling under the influence of marijuana. We were probably right.

It takes all sorts, even the spy whose briefcase, containing his lunch, a copy of The Listener and a diary was found on a Wellington journalist's fence years back.

But isn't the work supposed to be deadly serious?

The latest fiasco has made a surprising martyr out of Dotcom.

Like some opposition politicians, I link Dotcom's situation to the illegal surveillance activities in the Ureweras five years ago, a Tintin escapade that culminated in fresh insults to Tuhoe.

After much trumpeting about breaches of the Terrorism Suppression Act and the Arms Act, after 300 police carried out dramatic armed raids on the Ruatoki community, just four supposedly dangerous dissidents ended up on firearms charges this year, and were found guilty of some of them.

I doubt anyone quivers in bed at night for fear of what they might have done.

The cost to the good faith of the community is one thing; the financial cost is another.

A hundred of us could pay taxes all our lives and hardly compensate the Upper Hutt girls, the ACC claimants and Dotcom.

Throw David Bain into the mix and we'll all be bankrupt.


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« Reply #12 on: October 05, 2012, 09:47:45 am »

Rosemary says "Dotcom ought to be a sitcom" 

News4U, Rosie: Dotcom ALREADY IS a sitcom.
 
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« Reply #13 on: October 11, 2012, 12:36:58 pm »


ROSEMARY McLEOD: What ever happened to strawberries?

The Dominion Post | 5:00AM - Thursday, 11 October 2012

Rosemary McLeod

LET ME just mention strawberries — so exciting each year when they first appear. There was a plant in the garden of my last house that produced them in ones and threes, never more, in spring and into summer.

You were lucky if the birds didn't get them first, so you ate them slowly, first inhaling their smell with gratitude.

You may remember such a thing.

The plant grew where nothing with half a brain would dream of it, in rocky soil, on a hillside. It was neglected, and seldom watered, until the first flush of pink on the first berry.

Those berries had a perfume, actually, not a smell, quite unlike the artificial strawberry stuff they put in ice cream and milkshakes, whipped up in laboratories.

Scientists never get the point about sensual things — think white-coated Masters and Johnson on the mechanics of sex.

In any case, when was anything artificial ever as good as the real thing?

The smell of a ripe, real strawberry picked a second ago on a fine day is so good that you wish you could wear it: fulsome, aromatic, delicious and delicate.

The berry seems too good to put in your mouth, but too enticing not to.

Only raspberries can compete — later, in summer. They're worth staining your fingers and clothing for, and getting scratched, but it's strawberries that are the harbingers of our chilly spring.


USED TO BE COOL: Strawberries seem to have lost their flavour.
USED TO BE COOL: Strawberries seem to have lost their flavour.

I left that plant behind when I moved house. It seemed mean not to. I think it was pretty old — the house itself was well over 100 years old — and certainly looked quite different from the strawberries I bought this week.

My old strawberries were round, with delicate skin and soft flesh. The juice burst into your mouth, sweet yet sharp, and the aroma was divine, but that was then.

This week, I bought a packet of red things in a punnet, under plastic.

They were a mixture of red, white and green, which is understandable early in the season, but not pretty.

They were as hard as radishes, although with a coarser texture. Perhaps they should be grated. They smelled like nothing much.

The only way I like to eat them now is sliced up in a raspberry coulis, made from frozen berries, where they give more texture than taste, so why bother?

This is what we now call strawberries, and if you can buy another kind, I would like to know where and when I can lay my hands on them.

The ones we get now are, I guess, a miracle of chemistry and botany, impervious to rain, hail, combine harvesters, meat cleavers, long journeys in trucks, the heavy footprints of gardeners; able to linger for however long on supermarket shelves and quite possibly useful for playing table tennis.

They taste, a little, of plastic.

I would pay four times as much for a punnet of real ones.

As for my old plant, they wrecked whatever garden I had after they bought the house and it went to the tip, along with the old roses I had thought it would be mean to take with me, and the Victorian terracotta planters I foolishly thought they would appreciate.

The usual box and iceberg roses moved in.

I doubt that it's possible to like the people who buy your house, whoever they are, and it's certainly a mistake to ever return.

They rip down the wrong walls, paint rooms the wrong colour, make horrible kitchens, and with a sure instinct destroy whatever you liked about the place, especially the garden.

I remember the truck that came, when the new people moved in, and the men flinging plants into it.

I wonder what the crabapple, the pink hawthorn, the sweet-scented old roses and that tenacious strawberry had done to offend them.

And I never buy strawberries these days without remembering what they ought to be, what they used to be and knowing what they are not now.


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« Reply #14 on: June 13, 2013, 10:37:03 pm »


Rosemary McLeod

ROSEMARY McLEOD: To view tragedy at a distance

The Dominion Post | 5:00AM - Thursday, 06 June 2013

BREAKFAST CLUB: Al Nisbet's cartoon caused controversy for its portrayal of ethnic minorities.
BREAKFAST CLUB: Al Nisbet's cartoon caused controversy for its portrayal of ethnic minorities.

THERE USED to be a newspaper column bylined "Hori", the supposed ruminations of a blubbery-lipped, chubby brown character who said "pi kori" a lot.

The character was Maori, of course, though the writer wasn't, and my mother and many others of her generation (it ran till 1964) found it hilarious.

This strikes me as weirder in retrospect than it did then, because my mother was much fonder of people from other cultures than she was of her own, and showed genuine kindness and/or romantic interest in many.

But Maori were an exception. She never had a Maori boyfriend. And I have never heard a Maori person say "pi kori" for what that's worth.

I'm reminded of the now-infamous column, and my mother's unconscious racism, because of the current cartoon controversy.

Al Nisbet's cartoons stereotyped Maori in much the same way — and I think for much the same reason — as Hori (real name Wingate Norman McCallum) once did.

Decades have passed, but some people still defend the right to stereotype a minority racial group for the purpose of ridicule and call it freedom of speech. That it may be, but is it a good use of it?

I wouldn't ban expression of any point of view myself, but when something is racist we can say so, and justify the accusation. That this example delighted so many says a lot about how far we haven't come in race relations since people chortled over Hori, and Nisbet's cartoons are a reminder that you can be racist without necessarily having sinister intent.

Like fellow cartoonist Tom Scott, I guess I could be described by Nisbet as a "comfortable, bleeding-heart white liberal", a knee-jerk stereotype like his racial one that I trust he tossed about in jest.

Scott criticised the cartoons for attacking underdogs. I do for the same reason, and also because they endorse a stereotype that denigrates both poor people and people of different ethnicity without making a wider point. It's not funny that people are poor, lacking in parenting skills, or fat, or lazy, or gamblers and drinkers. If comedy is tragedy viewed at a distance, where's the joke?

Perhaps the problem is that it's unclear who exactly Nisbet intends to mock: The poor and brown, or the people who denigrate them.

I also have a problem with the skin colour issue, because all his cartoon characters look brown-skinned to me.

Jokes about brown-skinned people really work most happily when brown-skinned people make them about themselves, as in bro'Town, or Billy T James' material. My question ultimately is: What's the perceived unfairness in the majority providing free food for a minority of kids when measured against the unfairness of their parents failing in education, being jobless and devoid of hope?

A useful comparison, for satirical purposes, might be the Lombard Finance directors who stood in a row in court last week while their sentences were appealed. All four are Pakeha, middle-aged to elderly and male. All wore suits, white shirts and ties. Between them they lost $111 million invested by 3600 unlucky punters. They look like stereotypical middle-class white offenders to me, the kind we may be wise to steer clear of when we have a nest egg looking for a home.

But we mock such privileged characters at our peril, because we know they'll sue. The poor won't.

The four will doubtless serve their sentences in the gilded cages of their own homes, fussing over whether a hollandaise sauce has curdled, perhaps. No chance that they'll riot like the Killer Beez did last weekend, causing a few million dollars' damage to a jail that, if it's true to form, will be filled with more brown-skinned men like them, whom we vilify — for good reason — for hurting people and selling drugs.

But in the long run, white collar crime surely does as much damage as mindless crimes pivoted on a lack of education, lack of work, social alienation, covert racism and plain poverty. Draw that, Nisbet.


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« Reply #15 on: June 13, 2013, 10:37:18 pm »


Rosemary McLeod

ROSEMARY McLEOD: Keep your flash and trash — the capital's just fine

The Dominion Post | 12:03AM - Thursday, 13 June 2013

ROSEMARY MCLEOD: No Botox here.
ROSEMARY MCLEOD: No Botox here.

WE DO NOT, en masse, Botox. Wellington women have lips that look like mouths, not bee-stung baboons' bottoms.

There is a compelling reason for living in Wellington that has not occurred to the prime minister, who says we're dying, or most of the Government: It is not Auckland.

Hence we do not, en masse, Botox. Wellington women have lips that look like mouths, not bee-stung baboons' bottoms, and eyes that crinkle when we smile, not stretched skin that makes people wonder, but hesitate to timidly inquire, whether perhaps the old dear has had skin grafts after serious burns.

Older women here don't have eyes that seem to be propped open with invisible matchsticks, they can actually use their faces to smile, and they don't do mahogany suntans upon which to dangle sparkly baubles with the conspicuous brand name of the week.

We might wear clothes more than once too.

We do not have Paritai Drive, that exercise in breathtaking ugliness, obscene obsolescence, venal vulgarity, all-round tastelessness and precious pretentiousness. Even our most expensive streets are a mixture of cheaper and costlier housing, which makes them more interesting and more human to live in.

We quietly ignore the irritating nouveau riche here who occasionally build costly houses in imitation Roman villas, guarded by concrete urn-clutchers clad in concrete togas in a manner best described as low camp. We avert our gaze from such, whereas in Auckland crowds gather to clap.

We do not have a City of Sails, all white and glittery blocks of flats and motionless yachts, for the poor to gaze at and hope one day to clean the lavatories of if they are very, very good.

We have a harbour that's lovely enough on its own, especially with the snow-topped Rimutakas and Tararuas as a backdrop — and they are, as yet, not for sale to foreign investors.

We have rich people who tend not to flash their fortunes in front of everyone, preferring to flash at each other instead, in the privacy of their own homes.

Here, we live in our homes because the weather is not disgustingly sultry. Aucklanders mostly photograph theirs for the property pages, and their favourite pastime is comparing real estate values, which makes for dull conversation.

We are not BMW-ed and Merc-ed out, like Auckland, despite having embassies in the city that like to cling to emblems of the bigger world they come from.

Surely, we say, they are more often the calling card of the parvenu, but we have our share of four-wheel-drive vehicles, so necessary for taking kids to school in the morning, driving to bridge clubs and taking kids to tennis lessons, and possibly giving the spoodle a ride in.

As for the outdoors, there is no beach in Auckland quite as glamorous as Oriental Bay on a fine day, fine days being appreciated all the more here because they come so seldom. Any more often and they'd be irritating.

We don't, as yet, have miles of honeycombed apartment blocks in which to trap unwary Asians who are, as Aucklanders believe, keen on living the way they formerly did in cities of millions where families have to live in shoe boxes. We have some of these unlovable buildings, admittedly. Even paradise makes mistakes.

Our mayor rides a bicycle through traffic that is not permanently gridlocked, which is quaint. We have the Chow brothers too, who are quaint in a different way. They've taught us a thing or two about brothel-keeping, and are expanding their kingdom into Auckland.

This will delight Aucklanders who, lacking a city's heart of any kind, are about to build a vast gambling setup and convention centre to go with it, which they hope will do the trick. The Chows are to build a 15-storey hotel and brothel over the road — and there you have it. Auckland. You can keep it.


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« Reply #16 on: June 20, 2013, 01:11:38 pm »


Rosemary McLeod

ROSEMARY McLEOD: Nigella's trouble no ‘playful tiff’

The Dominion Post | 5:00AM - Thursday, 20 June 2013



"A PLAYFUL TIFF"? Give us a break, Charles Saatchi.

The hand around the throat, the pinching of a nose — in public view in a big city — you can't help wondering what Mr Saatchi's last wife meant when she divorced him for "unreasonable behaviour".

As painful as it must be for Nigella Lawson to have the whole world know about her predicament, it's important that we do, not in some cheap women's magazine tell-all expose, but in the adult world of real life.

We now have proof that when a woman is beautiful, clever, famous and independently wealthy, it's no protection against domestic violence, because that's what an observer photographed on June 6th.

Here is all the evidence you need that it doesn't just happen among the under-classes of the world, the people who are not like us.

The sequence is so familiar that an estimated one in four women knows about it first hand.

There is seduction, of course, the apparent meeting of minds, the talk of respect and protestations of love.

There is a shoulder to cry on, good advice given, humour appreciated, the life of the mind and of culture savoured together. Men at every level of society can manifest such things to women who believe a man is necessary to feel whole. Then, slowly, it changes.

This man shouts, Ms Lawson is on record as saying, and then she goes quiet and resentful, she says, as women do, because they don't want a man's anger to escalate.

Where do we learn to be this craven? I call this — the shouting — violence already, because it's about domination and control of another person through fear. Possibly some women behave like this and they are no better, but this week it's about a celebrity woman cook and a famous male art lover.

It may seem strange that a man will love art so much, implying an enlightened sensibility, yet behave so inappropriately in his private life, but it isn't strange at all. People with tempers, people who lay hands on other people to force them into submission, are able to mentally cut off the side of them that is outwardly competent, and the competent side will be all that the world sees. We know that families endure the dark side of these outward achievers, because the story is so familiar.

Nobody interfered in the exchange between Ms Lawson and her husband, reinforcing the idea that we shouldn't interfere in the dynamic of a marriage, however sick it may appear to be.

Where did this idea come from? From the belief that women are men's chattels and in marrying men they become slaves to their emotional dramas, which is more than shocking — it's sick.

But there are reasons why we don't get involved and they're complicated. We try to respect other people's privacy, even when it's probably damaging for them that we do, and we know that women go back to loutish men time and again because they hear the apologies and promises of reform, see the tears and they are tired, sad and have lost hope.

There's a bigger reason: shame. Public acts like Mr Saatchi's shame a woman who is universally liked, whose recipes are a standby for millions, possibly as many millions as Mr Saatchi has dollars. Nobody wants to see her put up with it.

It's significant that the couple were in the only restaurant where they can dine out together, because he can smoke there.

Her first husband died of throat cancer. What must she feel about that?

Mr Saatchi claims not to enjoy her cooking: "I'm sure it's fantastic, but it's a bit wasted on me. I like toast with Dairylea, followed by Weetabix for supper."

Is something about that denial of her talent supposed to be funny? It sounds competitive and undermining to me.

But analysis is just a game. Ms Lawson has to leave this prat and make it snappy.


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« Reply #17 on: May 06, 2014, 03:23:28 pm »


Free Whittaker's chocolates at Wellington Railway Station today.

They're handing them out to all & sundry while a commercial for Whittaker's featuring Nigella Lawson is being filmed.

I filled my pockets with chocolates before departing for Wairarapa. I see they will be filming until late this evening (according to the schedule of events at the station put out by Tranz Metro), so hopefully I'll be able to grab some more free chocolate when I get back there on my second return trip to Wellington today.


Lawson filming at Wellington station
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« Reply #18 on: May 06, 2014, 05:26:51 pm »

Milk or Dark chocolate?
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« Reply #19 on: May 06, 2014, 06:10:55 pm »

Milk or Dark chocolate?

Both.

I've just filled my pockets up again.

Gotta dash now and drive the train back to Masterton again.
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« Reply #20 on: May 08, 2015, 11:03:45 am »


from The Dominion Post....

Princesses, perfection and real-life parenting

By ROSEMARY McLEOD | 5:00AM - Thursday, 07 May 2015

I WORRY for the Duchess of Cambridge that she's too perfect.

A child of each sex now, the girl younger than the boy, is the so-perfect combination after the so-perfect marriage that no good can possibly come of it.

Zeus will send down a thunderbolt one of these days and give her varicose veins, or make her lustrous locks fall out. Perfect can't last. It's too weird.

While we adore Catherine-who-can-do-no-wrong, another mother with an entirely different situation is suffering a backlash after slapping her teenage son and dragging him home from the Baltimore riots. Oh, and she swore at him too.

Tory Graham is a single mother with no handsome prince in the offing, and she and her son are black.

The statistics for them compared with — say — the baby Cambridge princess are grim. They are likely to suffer more health problems, earn less, and experience the legal system more often than white Americans.

As we now know, 16-year-old Michael Graham is also more likely to be shot dead by a police officer for no good reason.

The Duchess will be home this week with at least one nanny to tend to her small child and newborn, but two are planned.

Her parents and husband will be looking after her and the children too.

There will be tuberoses and orchids by the ton landing at their door from the costliest florists in the world; excellent compost; and gifts for the baby will pile up in truckloads.

Catherine will slide between linen sheets with a thread count like a telephone number every night, and need never worry about paying the power bill.

Should she need entertainment she can gaze at her jewellery, including the stonking sapphire engagement ring once worn by Princess Diana. I would find that a dubious omen, but I am not so perfectly well adjusted.

Female reporters on CNN could hardly contain themselves last Saturday night when the birth — after a miraculously short labour, naturally — was announced.

One of them gasped that the commercial value of the baby had already been estimated at a billion dollars.

Just think of the spin-off for manufacturers every time the baby wears one of their sunbonnets or dandles one of their dolls.

There is a downside. For the royal family life is one long Truman Show, locked into an idyll with all their needs met, but scant privacy.

And while the guy in the Truman Show could finally rip through the paper backdrop that kept him imprisoned, they can never do that. Being a princess is a job from day one.

She will never be walloped, and never join rioters in the street. Why would she riot?

She will never pose for an online photograph smoking drugs and holding a pistol, as Michael has been, because why would she need to?

Her life will be restricted, but it won't lack any opportunity money can buy. The only thing she mustn't do is run wild.

Her grandfather once ordered a cherry brandy when he was under age, and never heard the end of it.

When Michael was born he would already have been in debt, as opposed to being worth a billion dollars.

Many Americans would object that his parents were not married, and would complain that he and his mother would likely go on to live on welfare.

You've heard Elvis singing In The Ghetto. Was he wrong?

Aristocrats and middle-class people can afford the luxury of reasoning with their teenage children, and condition them like laboratory rats to press the right buttons to get a reward.

There is no such luxury in the ghetto, where your child can be lured into using drugs or selling them, or selling their body, and carry guns they mean to use.

I don't know if the Graham family live in a ghetto, but the pull of dissident black youth culture is strong.

Armchair critics have slagged Graham for walloping her son, and it didn't look pretty.

How purse-lipped we are, though?

I guess she should have calmly reasoned with him while his mates ripped the street apart, but she lives in the real world, a world her critics only see on the TV news.

Let them walk a mile in her shoes. I say good for her.


http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/columnists/68297243/princesses-perfection-and-reallife-parenting
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« Reply #21 on: March 29, 2016, 02:47:27 pm »

remove this imediatly. I am one of the girls in this photo and I certainly never gave you permission to use my photo or to use my name For your article.
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« Reply #22 on: September 08, 2016, 06:56:36 pm »


from The Dominion Post....

Men don't have a right to see women in public
in advanced states of undress


OPINION: The row in France over the wearing of the burkini makes
women everywhere think about what we mean by freedom.


By ROSEMARY McLEOD | 5:00AM - Thursday, 01 September 2016

A Muslim woman wears a burkini, a swimsuit that leaves only the face, hands and feet exposed, on a beach in Marseille, France. — Photograph: Reuters.
A Muslim woman wears a burkini, a swimsuit that leaves only the face, hands and feet
exposed, on a beach in Marseille, France. — Photograph: Reuters.


THE BURKINI — where was it all my adult life? I could have enjoyed going to the beach, or the swimming baths. I might even have learned to swim.

Well, swimming I can do without actually. But I would not have had an adult lifetime's self-consciousness if I could just have trotted around in a hijab and slipped into a burkini to muck about in salt water in the blistering heat of summer. I would have been — well — liberated.

But hang on, French politician Alain Juppe, getting into that country's row about Islamic women and the burkini, says, “I strongly disapprove of outfits that are aimed at hiding women's bodies. Let no one claim this is about women's liberation. It's the imprisonment of women and we have to fight against that.”

It took a man to say that, just as it took armed male police to struggle with a burkini-clad woman on a French beach, apparently to make her show more flesh. How terrifying, whether farce or sexual assault. It asked women everywhere to think about what we mean by freedom, and what constitutes oppression.

Men actually don't have a right to see us in public in advanced states of undress, as they would surely admit if they were not dealing with fear of Islamic terrorists. They don't own us, or our bodies, and have no claim to them. The irony is that extremists could well use that footage to illustrate disrespect for women in the Western World, and they'd have a point.

How interesting that the rift between Western and Islamic values should reduce, in this case, to how naked women ought to be in public. To make stripping off at the beach compulsory — as the armed police implied — is not about freedom, but the opposite. Modesty is not a sign of subjugation but of choice, without which there is no such thing as freedom, as the French courts understood when they ruled that the current French beach resort ban on burkinis breaches basic civil rights.

I have the right to walk around in a bright pink pup tent if I choose. I am entitled to cut a hole in the middle of a chunk of carpet, stick my head through it and wear it trailing behind me like a fibre mountain. I can wear large dark glasses to hide my eyes without offending anyone much, and if I like, I can wear a headscarf to cover my hair, as some Christian sects who live among us do.

I could add gloves if I felt like it, and in the end I would be eccentric but not offensive. But such is my contrary nature that if a man, or a religion, told me to do it it would be the last thing on earth that would appeal to me.

We can't all be blessed with my bolshie-ness, and I see no harm in Islamic women covering up. I draw the line at hiding the face, which in its range of expressions is an important means of communication in itself, but for the rest I am not threatened, and in some ways I'm envious.

In my world women are starving themselves into anorexia or vomiting up what they eat in an effort to conform to an ideal standard of the female body that naturally occurs in one woman in a thousand, aged under 20. They are miserable because they have stomachs and backsides, thighs and breasts, and are willing to pay surgeons to slice them away. Is this out of choice, or a response to images of women that push the idea that it is almost sinful not to?

In my world we are equally obsessed with the sin of fatness, which we call obesity regardless of how many kilos are involved. Body image is everything.

To have blemishes — blobby bits, varicose veins, surgical scars, wrinkles — is such a big deal that many women, after bearing children or just being the “wrong” shape, will never strip off at the beach, or swim with their kids at public baths. I admire those imperfect women who do, but would never do it myself. I'm too well indoctrinated.

I last owned swimming togs — a bikini — before God was born. My problem then was — is — fair skin in a time when a suntan is compulsory. Would I be attacked on a French beach for being fully clothed, then, and would a burkini make it worse?

It's my own business what I do. Here, in France, or anywhere for that matter, we need to take a deep breath and leave it at that.


__________________________________________________________________________

Read more on this topic:

 • France's top court suspends ‘illegal’ burkini ban that ‘breaches fundamental freedoms’

 • Nadine Chalmers-Ross: Finding liberation in a burkini


http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/columnists/83744824
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