lindsey out loud

It was a ball at the Peter Pan

2012-01-19T12:10:00.000-08:00

We’ve got a new gizmo at our place – something that converts old 35mm slides and negatives to digital format.
Genius! For years I’ve kept looking at dusty boxes of slides lurking in wardrobes and told myself to throw them out. Keeping them was pointless because who has a clunky slide projector any more?
But we never did chuck them.
I’m glad now because I’ve been having such fun finding treasure. Sure, 80% of the shots do need to be dumped – all those many nameless lakes and mountains and party scenes full of people you can barely remember. Out they go.
But there are delicious images as well. I’ve found ancient holiday snaps that bring back so many memories. And shots of my now grown-up daughters that remind me of their baby years.
And pictures of me, too, that reveal an utterly different time. Take this one. I’m the girl in the middle, looking a bit tipsy in my black lace. I’m 18 or 19. I’ve gone mad for scarlet lipstick. The black eye-liner was the sort that went on shiny and could be peeled off in a tissue-thin strip. My hair: roller-set and sprayed stiff with lacquer.
I marvel now that I was once so good at sewing I could whip up this tricky ball gown with ease. It’s backless, as I recall, and has a long, white, bell-shaped skirt of something silky, possibly a fabric called sharkskin.
I may have gone shopping in the ground-floor fabric department at Smith and Caughey’s. It had everything from chunky tweeds to fine satins and there was a long wooden bench where you could perch on stools to graze the pattern books from Vogue, Butterick, Simplicity and McCall’s. I once had boxes full of paper patterns.
We’re at the Peter Pan Cabaret at the top of Queen Street, Auckland. It has a big dance floor. There’s a live band, with blokes in tuxedos playing saxophones.
I have a small glass of something sweet. Gin and lemonade? Can’t remember. Possibly Pimm’s. Light shines on the neck of a tall brown beer bottle in the foreground. Booze packaging is pretty basic in the early 1960s.
That’s my friend Sue. Note her long kid gloves, unbuttoned at the wrists, the fingers tucked away to expose her hands. That’s how girls do it, all the better to hold your cigarette. Almost everyone smokes.
Sue and I are junior reporters at the Auckland Star, the city’s daily afternoon newspaper. Handsome Bill (nice guy, but we’re just friends) works in sales for BOAC – short for British Overseas Airways Corporation.
The Peter Pan, the Star and BOAC are long gone from Auckland’s business scene, though the airline lives on as British Airways.
Do you have old slides? Rescue the fun ones. Digitise them. Print them. And, most importantly, caption them.
As future mementos they’ll only work if people know the context – and get to understand there was a long-ago time when young women wore gloves almost to their armpits, thought that smoking did no harm, and could make just about everything in their wardrobes.

* Lindsey hosts Let’s Talk on Triangle TV in Auckland, airing 7pm Fridays. This year’s season kicks off on Jan 27 and focuses on books, media and arts - all about what's hot on paper and on screen.

Take up your oars

2012-01-02T18:59:00.000-08:00

As we settle into the first week of 2012 I’m thinking about rowboats.

Tidying up some old stuff I came across notes I made at a ‘Business and Consciousness’ conference in Mexico. It was a long time ago – 1999, I think, the year in which we were all worried about how Y2K might shred our lives, just as now there’s a heap of fretting about the arrival of the fabled 2012.

Not that we should worry overmuch – I can still remember people being nervous of 1984 because of George Orwell’s bleak novel of that name. It's interesting how we've always stayed afloat despite all the angst.

I heard lots of high-impact speakers in my 1999 week in Acapulco, and one guy (whose name I can’t remember) did a whole session on that folk song we all know so well and probably sang in rounds at school or around campfires: Row, row your boat, gently down the stream…

He made me think of it in a whole new way, pointing out that every line is worth considering in terms of being good advice for living life well.

Here’s the guts of what he said:

Row, row, row your boat – Do what you’re good at. And keep doing it until you reach your desired destinations, whatever they may be.

Gently down the stream – Go with the flow. Do not flail, panic or mess about. Seek out smooth water. Avoid getting sidetracked by exploring minor side streams. Don’t get caught up in overhanging trees or submerged obstacles. Be wary of whirlpools and scary rapids. All can impede your progress.

Merrily, merrily, merrily – keep a sense of humour at all times. Laughter makes everything better and eases all your dealings with other people.

Life is but a dream – don’t take everything so seriously. Much of the stuff we think is important, such as ambition and success, is just an illusion.

It’s hard to argue with any of that. Basic rowboat philosophy works.

I looked into a rowboat often in 2011. Twin grandsons arrived and for a few weeks, while they were still small enough, they slept together in a beautiful cradle boat hand-made by my husband. Sailing ship carpenters used to make little boats like this for times when an infant arrived during long sea voyages. The boat would be slung from ceiling rafters to rock the baby with the movement of the ship.

Our grandbabies are pictured here at two weeks old, frowning and sleepy. Nine months later, they have of course graduated to individual cots. The cradle boat is empty again, waiting for a next small body to be soothed to sleep inside it.

Then, as the year turned over, I was nudged by yet another rowboat reminder. Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estes (author of a long-ago much admired book, Women Who Run With the Wolves) is a prolific Facebook updater who has 25,000 followers, including me.

She wrote a lovely New Year’s Eve piece about what she calls ‘the little red rowboat of the heart’ and of how important it is to choose what to row toward, and to do so diligently and daily.

She went on: “I love that the word 'diligently' has the word 'gently' in it. For though sometimes the rowing must be fierce to pierce the riptides or to row up the downside of the escarpment of a huge green wave, even then, often the gentle insistence of the heart 'to keep going' is what allows us to continue in any weathers.”

Dr Estes writes so well. Let’s hope all our rowboats carry us serenely and strongly through whatever 2012 will bring. Propelled, of course, by our own strong arms and a keener than ever sense of direction.

Snow White - armed and dangerous

2011-11-21T13:04:00.000-08:00

How many little girls must have grown up on those old Disney cartoons starring pretty ladies in danger – Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. Well it’s time to forget all that sweetness, for new movies are demolishing the dreamy myths.
Epic action-adventure story Snow white and the Huntsman is due out next year. About all that remains from the old story is that Snow White is far too beautiful and the evil queen is out to destroy her. But what the queen, played with blonde menace by Charlize Theron, does not know is that the pretty one has been getting martial-arts training from the very man who’s supposed to be killing her.
So forget Disney’s heroine in puffy sleeves with the perky red bow in her bobbed black hair. Here’s the new Snow White, all grimly armoured up with sharp sword like some latter-day Joan of Arc, ready to hack her enemies to pieces. The archetypal sweet and helpless girl has gone, swept up in the new admiration for Kill Bill-style heroines. You could say, of course, that it was time those dippy Disney heroines toughened up a bit, but I'm kind of uneasy about easily we've got used to girls adept at shooting, stabbing and kung fu kicking.
There is still a prince in the new Snow White movie, though now that the girl herself is so lethal it’s hard to know what purpose he'll serve. Small men are in the cast too, but undoubtedly they won't have cozy names like Happy, Sleepy and Dopy.
The movie's bound to be technically brilliant but the trailer looks oh so dark and certainly not anything you’ll want your five-year-old to see. But given that the movie stars Kristen Stewart from the Twilight series, it's clear the movie's made for teenagers.
What's next, I wonder – a version of Cinderella where she’s water-boarded by the stepsisters, or a Sleeping Beauty being raped by aliens? Tell you what, audiences would probably lap it up. Especially if the heroine gets to wreak bloody vengeance in the end. And meanwhile we keep on wondering why schoolgirls are so ready today to start fights and punch people.

Eleven eleven eleven

2011-11-09T13:35:00.000-08:00

Friday! Here it comes - 11-11-11. It's a date some people are slightly nervous about, and even ecstatic about if they're seeing it as a pivotal moment in the evolution of mankind, as is the case for lots of Mayan Calendar watchers.
Numerologists are excited about it too - check out this article by Christine deLorey for instance. She says, "we are at an important moment in time and there is more to it than meets the eye."
11:11 of course famously marked a huge moment in 1918. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month was when the Armistice was signed, thus ending the terrible Great War.
Why does a gaggle of elevens have the power to grab us? Maybe it's a hangover from the past. The number eleven was apparently regarded with some dread in medieval times, when numbers were often held to have mystical significance. There's even a new horror movie called 11-11-11, based on a widely reported 11:11 phenomenon, which is all about people constantly noticing that time on digital clocks.
Behavioural scientists say that rather than feeling something special is going on we should put our 11:11 alertness down to something called apophenia, which is the brain’s tendency to look for meaningful patterns in the world around us. Example: When women are dying to get pregnant they notice other women pushing baby buggies in the street and think they're everywhere, when in fact there are no more than there ever were. Or, anyone thinking about buying a red Honda will be noticing them all over the place too.
There are positive aspects for the date. Because some people really like the idea of 11-11-11 there are lots of weddings planned for the big day (almost 4000 scheduled in Las Vegas). And in New York they've poured extra effort into organizing Friday's Corduroy Appreciation Day, that being of course the date that most resembles the parallel lines in corduroy fabric. At one big party the required dress code is anything in corduroy... and course there's an 11-piece band.
Once Friday's over we can, hopefully, relax for another hundred years until 11-11-11 comes round again. That’s assuming of course we get through 2012.

Flying in 1950s style

2011-11-06T11:22:00.000-08:00

I wrote about Pan Am (the airline) in a recent blog, which prompted my brother to send me some great pics of old planes that he found on the website of Motat, Auckland's Museum of Transport and Technology. I love this one, showing the dining set-up in a Solent flying boat. The aircraft - currently under restoration at Motat and the only surviving Mark IV Solent in the world - represented "the pinnacle of luxury flying boat airliners".
We all aspire to fly business Class today but back in the 1950s when the Solent took tourists over the Tasman to Australia and on the Coral Route to Tahiti, the whole plane was business class.
Check out the decor in soft lemon and dove grey, the tables spread with white linen, fine china and glassware. Look closely and you can see the TEAL logo on the glasses (TEAL being the forerunner of Air New Zealand - short for Tasman Empire Airways Ltd).
Elaborate meals were apparently cooked on board and it all looks like the 45 passengers enjoyed an elegance that's hard to find today.
Mind you, you'd have needed something to pass the time. There was, after all, no inflight entertainment, so if you forgot to take a good book there was nothing to do but wait to get there. They weren't quick, cruising at around 400kmh; the Auckland-Sydney flight took five and a half hours. And the planes could go no higher than 17,000 feet which must have meant they had to batter their way through some hefty weather systems. There must, at times, have been a whole lotta rattling of that china going on.
When I was a kid I lived at the foot of Upland Road in Remuera, quite a long way from Auckland harbour but still close enough to be able to hear the flying boats on their lumbering take-off runs, those four 2000 horsepower engines roaring like fury as the pilots pushed them to maximum power to lift the plane off the water. I can still hear them now.

Why world class?

2011-10-18T12:57:00.000-07:00

You might have noticed, if you’ve read anything recently about plans for Auckland’s future, that our leaders yearn for us to be a world-class city. Over and over we hear about our world-class art gallery, world-class food, world-class coffee, world-class design, world-class just about anything you can think of. It’s the highest accolade we have. Who started this world-class talk? They need a good smack. World class sounds like a category of aircraft seating. It also makes us sound like a bunch of wanna-be’s. No-one in a major city like Hong Kong, Paris, Berlin or San Francisco, would ever use a tag like that because they already know who they are. They know they are indeed somewhere in the world. Do we think we are somehow not of the world? It reveals in us such a lack of self confidence. It’s like the old bragging we used to hear in New Zealand about things here being the biggest in the Southern Hemisphere. It smacks of small-country cringe. Enough already! Time to stop being so try-hard. “World-class” needs to be banned.

A woman's heart explained

2011-10-03T13:25:00.000-07:00

I have to thank Maria Popova, curator of the wonderfully curious site, brainpickings.org, for this lovely Victorian illustration. Popova scours the web constantly looking for interesting things. This "Map of the Open Country of a Woman's Heart" is the work of one DW Kellogg and was drawn some time around the 1830s. You can find more beautiful maps here.

But this map - how intriguing it is to me, especially after spending so much time lately in old newspaper archives as I researched social life in my home town, Auckland, in the 1880s. It was so much a man's world then. At least by the 1880s activism was starting to show its face. By then a few lady doctors were touring the world giving lectures on health to female audiences who were probably completely ignorant of the workings of their own bodies. Some women were beginning to call for the abolition of smoking. There was even an Anti Plumage League, whose members were outraged at the killing of birds so their feathers could be used as hat adornments.
But 40 years earlier, a woman's heart - at least according to this fanciful map - was a morass of sentiment and vanity. The largest font sizes are reserved for her vanities - love of dress, love of display and love of admiration. There are lands labelled Coquetry, Selfishness, Sentimentality, Affectation and Fickleness.
The lower right quadrant goes give the woman's heart a little praise. It contains (if in small letters) Hope, Enthusiasm, Good Sense, Discrimination and Prudence, close to the border of the Country of Solid Worth. It does tend to balance up the opposing border marking the Land of Oblivion. Too much laudanum, perhaps?

When flying was fun

2011-09-25T23:40:00.000-07:00

Out of America’s TV factory comes the latest hot show, Pan Am, inspired by that long-ago time in aviation when flying was glamorous and people dressed up to get on a plane. Pan Am, just launched in the US, is a drama series set in the 1960s about aircrew members’ lives.
Retro themes are big right now and viewers are loving stories set in more confident times when Kennedy was in the Oval Office, America ruled the world and the future looked assured. Even if they were clueless about ending the Vietnam war.
Pan American Airlines was all over the globe back in the ‘60s, and flying deep down to the South Pacific even earlier than that. Here’s a New Zealand newspaper ad from the 1950s.
The words give you a taste of flying in the piston-engine age. The Boeing 707 was still a far-off, jet-fuelled dream when the Strato Clipper was the queen of the air – its “four giant engines” boasting a range of 4000 miles, “more than double the average non-stop flight”.
But even so its power wasn’t beefy enough to get you to Hawaii in one leap, so if you flew Pan Am across the Pacific and the United States to London, you had to island-hop with Fiji as the first stop. Crossing the world took at least five days and cost a lot of money; in that era long-distant travel usually meant going by sea.
Perks available in business class today were standard back then – “superb meals” with complimentary champagne, and “a choice of individual sleeping accommodation to the USA at no extra charge”. The Clipper even foreshadowed the 747 in having two decks connected by a spiral staircase.
The ‘stewardesses’ wore pale blue suits, white gloves and polite smiles. Captains were veterans of World War II. Passport control was casual. Security was a breeze.
No-one was x-raying your suitcase, taking your fingerprints or demanding you carry lip balm and eye drops in a plastic bag. It seems like a sweet dream to us now.
How impossible it would have been for Pan Am staffers of those days to imagine the day in 1988 when a jet in that familiar blue livery would lie smashed to pieces in a village called Lockerbie, brought down by a terrorist bomb.
Dear old Pan Am, founded in 1927, was an icon of the 20th century but, bankrupt and struggling, it was forced to close its doors in 1991.
Makes you realise it’s smart to enjoy life’s good things while they last.

HOT HISTORY COMING UP

2011-09-11T20:16:00.000-07:00

ONE WEEK TO GO before my Auckland talks on what a humming town this was in the 1880s. Your ancestors flirted and laughed and gossiped when they weren’t being outraged and appalled. Some things were just too “utterly utter”, as they used to say back then.
You can hear more about this from me during the upcoming Auckland Heritage Festival.
I’m giving two fun presentations (see dates below) at the Auckland City and Takapuna Libraries about the era when women could be jailed for wearing trousers, men could be called cute, opium dens and brothels thrived and cosmetic surgery was the talk of the town. Yes, truly. Way back in Victorian times a few people were already using surgery to improve their looks
We often have the wrong idea about our ancestors. We look at their stiff old portraits and think they look so grim, but there was plenty going on in Auckland’s early days. In the 1880s the town was barely 40 years old and brimming with ambition, big dreams and large egos.
And Aucklanders were already looking for weekend getaway places like the big hotel at Waiwera, which an editor of the era called “awfully jolly”.
I love how the past is just a mirror of today. We’ve got satellite feeds and social media now, but back then people adored their newspapers. Murders, robberies and romance – it was all in the weekly rag. And Auckland had a beauty – an acerbic little journal called the Observer. I’ve unearthed lots of old Auckland secrets from its pages – and the sweet illustration you see here is also from there.
Researching this has taught me that in many ways our issues aren’t so different from the way they were 130 years ago. Of course, technology has changed radically but human nature hasn’t. We still laugh and cry over the same things.”

* I’m speaking at Auckland City Library, 5.30pm Sept 19, and at Takapuna Library, 6pm Sep 21. Tickets $5. That includes a welcoming glass of wine and lovely live opening music from clarinetist Yvette Audain and two talented friends. To book: Ph 307 7764 for the Auckland event or 486 8469 for Takapuna. .

* The Auckland Heritage Festival runs from Sep 17 to Oct 2 and offers more than 200 events all over Auckland.

Hot time in the city

2011-08-08T15:02:00.000-07:00

Coming soon once more - Cirque de Soleil. Its latest incarnation, Saltimbanco, is bound to be flashy, bright and wonderful.
But it’s nothing new. Imagine the excitement in Auckland 126 years ago as Woodyear’s Electric Circus unloaded piles of crates onto the wharf downtown and got ready to stage its latest spectacular.
“Now, larger and better than ever – returning after an absence of 13 months of unabated success,” shouted the newspaper ads. The circus had 30 “lady and gentleman artists” from five continents, “a marvellous troupe of Japanese and a superb stud of trained horses and fairy trick ponies”.
Eyes must have goggled at the “monster marquee”, big enough to seat 5000 people, and – wonder of wonders – “brilliantly illuminated”.
Even Queen Street had no electric light in 1885 (it was still two years away), so this was some treat.
You can hear about exciting Auckland life in the 1880s next month when I give a couple of talks, A Hot Time in the Old Town, at the Auckland Library and Takapuna Library. It’s my way of contributing to the Auckland Heritage Festival.
Passion, intrigue, flirtation, murder, gossip – it sure was a lively place back then.
Come along and I’ll reveal the mischief your ancient rellies got up to, and you can ponder how similar or different your scruples are today.
It’s yours for only $5 to cover light refreshments. Auckland City Library, Sep 19, 5.30pm to 7pm (book at 307 7764), or Takapuna Library, Sep 21, 6pm to 7.30pm. Book at 486 8469 or by emailing Helen.woodhouse@aucklandcouncil.govt.nz
PS The lovely illustration is from an 1885 issue of The Auckland Star, accessed through that great digitised resource, paperspast.natlib.govt.nz

The air over there

2011-07-11T01:48:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you hear news items that are so unbelievable you think you’re hearing things. For instance, last week’s newsbite that the United States is spending $20 billion a year on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, 20 billion with a ‘b’. Apparently it’s more than NASA's entire annual budget. Of course there are untold tents and buildings over there that need to be heated in winter and cooled in summer, many of them no doubt containing temperamental computers that need a stable, dust-free environment in which to work. It’s easy to scoff over this. The troops who sweated through desert warfare in World War II got by without air con, after all. But we’re all getting soft when it comes to climate control. Once you’ve had a car with air con you never want to go back. Shopping malls are popular right now not for what’s on sale but because they’re warm and dry. But $20 billion for air? No wonder America’s giving all the appearance of going broke.

Starry, starry sites

2011-06-24T01:42:00.000-07:00

It’s a rare newspaper or women’s magazine that doesn’t include horoscopes in its mix of content. Sceptics will keep on calling astrology a load of old tosh, but most readers probably give their ‘sign’ at least a quick scan.
Astrology is a bit like the romance genre – people love it but will rarely admit to it. So it’s not surprising the internet is teeming with star-sign pundits.
Astrology.com, a lively American site, has of course long been established and aspiring newcomers must find it almost impossible to find a domain name not already taken, which is why clunky monikers like Astrogrrl, StarIQ and AstroPro are everywhere.
There’s a world of difference, though, between sucking up quick star-sign tips or celebrity snippets and ordering up a full personal chart. Professional astrologers take their art seriously.
www.astro.com As one of the earliest online astrology sites it was thus able to score the plum ‘astro’ domain name. Its content comes in considerable depth. Set up in 1996 by Swiss company Astrodienst, and founded by a physicist with training in astrology, it’s set up in seven languages and scores 6 million visitors a month. Browsers can access free short reports on current conditions in their lives by submitting their time, date and place of birth. But pay around $US50 and you can order a range of highly detailed documents. It’s also for professional astrologers seeking tools and software for different types of chart calculation.
www.astrologyzone.com New Yorker Susan Miller's site is mega-popular. She writes copious, free monthly forecasts pointing out the aspects and alignments that may light up or darken your life, somehow fitting her flood of entertaining words in between penning annual books and calendars and making public appearances.
www.jessicaadams.com This Australian writes for the Sunday Star Times, and Cosmopolitan, and has one of the prettier sites around. Heaps of freebies here, too with weekly, monthly and annual forecasts on tap – plus podcasts as well. Want more depth and detail and you can pay for extra info, such as a 30-minute MP3 audio report for $A5.99.
www.donmurray.co.nz For fearless predictions, look no further than the site of New Zealand astrologer Don Murray. Murray pulls no punches and writes site updates every few days (click on ‘news’ on his home page). He says there’s “definitely no cup in October” for All Black captain Richie McCaw, and John Key is also up against it later this year battling “Pluto-Venus negativity’.
There’s bad news for Obama too. Murray reckons that in 28 years of study he can’t remember a more demanding six months than the US president has in front of him for the first half of 2012. As for Kate and Wills…they’re okay for a few years, apparently, but then it’s not looking so rosy after all. Damn. Just when we thought there was something to smile about…

How deeply should one bow before him?

2011-05-29T19:14:00.000-07:00

I’ve been intrigued lately to hear radio advertising for the forthcoming visit to Australia and New Zealand of former British prime minister Tony Blair, who is of course these days hardly the most popular bloke in the UK. They’re calling his Auckland-only gig, ‘an audience with Tony Blair’. Ooh-er. An audience! Isn’t that what you get if you go see the Queen, or the Pope?
My understanding is that a meeting with the luminaries above usually comes free of charge. No such luck with the man who was once so fresh-faced and bright-eyed that they used to call him Bambi. If you care to trot along to Eden Park to join him for dinner (which is of course described as a 'banquet') and listen to him speak on leadership, negotiation and innovation, your basic ticket price is a thousand dollars. Chuck in a further $500 and you can meet him over a cocktail and have your picture taken with him. Smarming, groveling and forelock tugging optional, one assumes.

Needling the environment

2011-05-22T16:16:00.000-07:00

There’s absolutely no knowing what new trend is about to pop up in the world. Take yarn bombing, for instance . If. Like me, you’ve never heard of it before, it’s a subversive new form of knitting. I thought hand-knitting was well over as a creative pursuit, but in European and American cities, knitters are taking it to the streets.
Just like graffiti artists armed with spray cans, they’re out of make their mark on the landscape – but they’re doing it with yarn. Stitch’n’bitch groups are getting together to knit lengths of stuff to wrap around anything they deem ugly or boring. Hand-rails, parking meters, bicycle racks, … you name it , they’ll be layering it with lime green or dayglo orange wool. They’re putting crocheted hats on statues of long-dead city leaders, and artful woolen bows on orange road cones. Trees are being yarn-bombed as well, sometimes wrapped with 'tree cosies'.
Just look at the covered pole in California, done by a knitter called Streetcolor. See www.yarnbombing for more pictures.
Who’d have thought p1, k1, k2 tog could become street language? Of course it’s a gentler kind of protest than tagging with paint as it’s so easy to snip off. And some cities like it so much that they’re actually commissioning yarn-bombers to prettify buildings, fences and even whole parks full of trees.
I hear there’s been a bit of it in Wellington already, so it must be time for Auckland knitters to get out in force. Forget making sweaters for the kids. There’s got to be a statue or two around Auckland that could do with a pink and orange striped balaclava. General Freyberg, presiding over that space on High Street? He could really do with a lacy scarf, I reckon.
What's more (and I'm sure you didn't know this) it's International Yarn Bombing Day on June 11, so you still have time to create something funky. What amazes me, though, is how people find the time. Whenever I've knitted anything it's taken months to complete. So I'm damned if I'd want to spend time prettifying some traffic bollard, only to have it cut off and slung in the trash.

'Bye-bye, typewriters

2011-05-09T15:31:00.000-07:00

A milestone moment slipped by the other day. The last typewriter factory closed down. It was in India and was apparently the last one left on the planet, all other manufacturers in the west having closed their production lines years ago. About the only place you’ll spot a typewriter now is in museums or in antique shops – displayed there simply because they’re quaint and look good, joining hand-operated coffee grinders and even corkscrews as things that were once indispensible but are now no good for anything.
What’s astonishing is the speed at which items now arise and die. The typewriter idea lasted for well over a century. I still have wistful thoughts about my first portable, an Olivetti Lettera with a turquoise case. It was so cute! But everything hits the trash heap in time. Take the Flip camera. I’ve had one for a whole 12 months – it was the hottest little thing around back then and was great because you could shoot a movie and plug it straight into your computer's USB port for editing. But just one year later, the Flip has been flicked into obscurity. All because the iPhone, and other smart phones, can do the same job better.
Makes you wonder what’s next for the chop… Personally I hope it's my Dualit toaster. Cost a fortune. Looks all very glam and retro. Worst browner of bread I've ever owned.

The 'flourish over 50' workshop

2011-05-01T14:26:00.000-07:00

A woman's middle years are often quite daunting. Why? Because, at around 50, it begins to dawn on her that she's not so valued any more. And until now, she has been. She's been valued overall for her youth - and maybe her beauty too, if she lucked out on that score. But maintenance becomes difficult and costly at midlife. The result: She fears she's sinking into invisibility.
She'll often have been valued at work, too, but realises at 50-ish that a horde of keen and well-skilled younger women is coming up behind her. Her good are her promotion prospects now? It becomes harder to know. That's scary.
She may have been valued as a mother too - but around now her children are in their teens or leaving home. Even they don't need her so much any more.
Does she have a partner? If so, how's that relationship going? If not, does she still have time to find another one?
So what's a woman to do at this crossroads in her life? What dreams does she have now? What's her plan for the next decade?
My friend Janis Grummitt, who's highly skilled at coaxing people in the business of making the most of themselves and their brainpower, is hosting a great day at the end of this month for women looking for self-development at the time of life when they really need it. I'm going to be there too, to present my own take over lunch on flourishing over 50.
Janis calls it 'You Developing You', and says the day's about discovering the secrets of wise women - learning the way we learn best: together. An expert in mind development, she points out (did you know this?) that wisdom potential begins in our brains at around 45 and you can fully flourish in your life after 50. Now that's good news!
It's happening on May 29 at the very pleasant Waves beachfront motel, Orewa, an easy drive north of Auckland. Earlybird price, up to May 21, $125 plus GST. A great day - with lunch included.
For more info contact Janis at janis@workplacewisdom.co.nz or call her in New Zealand on 09 427 4511.
You can see all the info and register online too at this link.

Hating our jobs

2011-04-04T15:25:00.000-07:00

Did you see that recent survey about work that revealed more than 60% of us either hate our jobs or couldn’t care less?
You’d think that maybe bosses and managers might be a keener, but even they weren’t bubbling over with enthusiasm. Nearly 20% of them said they hated their jobs, 48% were neutral and only 28% said they loved what they did.
What sort of way is that to live our lives? Bored, dissatisfied, resentful – whatever mood we’re in, it ain’t no way to be passing the best years of our lives.
What’s gone wrong in the work world? Do we fail to get an education that gives us good choices, or do we just stumble into positions that give us no joy at all and then get stuck there because the bills need paying.
If things are going to get better in the world, wouldn’t it help for us to actually love what we do? Imagine how things would whizz along if more of us couldn’t wait to get out of bed in the morning.
This idea that work is generally miserable is what has led to the tedious cliché about our need for better work/life balance.
What does that even mean – that because life is good then its opposite, work, represents death? The survey is saying that trudging to work does represent a sort of death for most people. What a sad thing that is. Of course work is about money - the stuff we need to get on in life - but it should also feed our talents and satisfy the soul. Work should be a good part of life. Evidently, it’s not.
And the work/life balance idea has to change. Instead, let’s call for better work/leisure balance. Now that’s an idea I can believe in.

Who will the media pick on next?

2011-03-31T01:45:00.000-07:00

What a relief it is that this week we’re not all talking about Ken Ring and his earthquake forecasts. Probably nobody’s more pleased about that than Ken. I know him slightly - he seems a nice guy. And I did buy one of his weather almanacs once. I didn't find it hugely accurate, but you can say the same thing about traditional forecasting – whether it’s about weather or finances.
For instance, just as New York’s huge money crisis was looming a few years ago, a TV host called Larry Kudlow (above right) kept on crowing to his audience, "there is no recession out there!' He was completely wrong. Guess what. He’s still one of the top news guys on Wall Street and still has his highly paid job.
What the controversy Ken Ring was really all about was potent combination of public fear, which was understandable, wound up by media hysteria and deepened by our own scientific ignorance. Really, it was the media that flogged the story to a frenzy. Hardly a day went by when they weren’t raving about things Ken had written many months before. They all loved to hate the 'Moon Man' – as they decided to label him.
It’s all one more sign that the news business is becoming ever more feverish and tabloid... like the front page headline in a recent Herald On Sunday that said ‘Wills and Kate Torn Apart – surely it won’t end this way’.
What? Was the world’s most famous couple splitting up?
Nah… the paper was talking about some perforated postage stamps from Nuie featuring him on one side – her on the other. Total tosh.
So…with Ken Ring comprehensively done over by the media, who’s next? Better be careful out there, people. These days, anyone, and anything, is fair game.

Teetering on high heels

2011-03-14T23:55:00.000-07:00

Have you noticed how people are re-evaluating things lately? One of my favorite bloggers is Moata Tamaira, a Christchurch librarian who writes really amusing articles for stuff.co.nz
Well, they were amusing back in the times when things were normal, and even now, when things feel not at all normal, she still manages to put a funny spin on life.
Last week, she was on about the changes in her wardrobe – how she’s chucked away her favorite high heels because they’re not just useless on uneven ground but actually feel unsafe. She also talks about how she now walks alongside walls in a state of constant calculation…as in, how sound is that wall? How far would she have to run if it began to topple?
I even find myself doing it here in non-quaky Auckland. I went to a play in the old Mercury Theatre last week, and as I walked up the street I took a long look at its huge rear wall of century-old bricks. I wonder how well that would do in an earthquake, I was thinking.
And then, after Japan, I stood on a hill above a beach and watched the sea do strange things, surging up a creek and pouring back out in a cascade of foam to form a big spiral in the bay - nothing like the huge whirlpool we saw on our TV screens after the big quake and tsunami, but echoing its shape. Nearly 9000 kilometres from Japan, we are, but there was the evidence of trouble far away.
2011 is turning out to be a very weird year, but it’s also making us think about what’s really important…which is people, of course. Always has been. But we seem to need a few shocks every now and again to remind us of that.

We're all heart

2011-03-04T20:35:00.000-08:00

Haven’t we come up shining as a community since the earthquake on Feb 22? I saw an interview with Phil Keoghan, the host of top-rating show The Amazing Race, who said the way Kiwis are responding was nothing short of amazing.
All over the country people are desperate to find a way to help. If we can’t be there on the ground, at least we can raise cash – and it’s been happening at schools and shopping centres and in offices and clubs. The money has been pouring in - so much so that you have to feel a bit sorry for anyone who's trying to raise funds for anything else.
Someone from the Red Cross knocked on our door the other night. She was, just coincidentally, taking part in their annual collection. "We have given already," I said, as my husband went to find more cash for her. I felt I needed to explain why I wasn't stuffing wads of bills into her official plastic bag.
"People are so wonderful," she told us. "I'm hearing that at every house I go to, but they'e still giving more when I say it's all going to Christchurch."
Something else I'm noticing: Have you noticed the big surge of the ‘kia kaha’ expression? Everyone’s saying it, from former PM Helen Clark to thousands of wellwishers on Facebook and Twitter.
Most of us know it means ‘stand strong’, but a friend of mine, Makuini Ruth Tai, specialises in deep analysis of the Maori language and she says it really means ‘be strengthened by lighting the breath’.
I like that. In the sports context we all know that you must have deep, explosive breath to sprint, or lift or achieve something mighty. And women know you need breath to give birth, too. So, all the more reason for us to keep saying it… kia kaha!

Heartsick for the south

2011-02-24T12:41:00.000-08:00

Each week on my TV show, Let's Talk, I have a minute or two to voice an opinion piece. I write it on Tuesday, record it on Wednesday and it gets aired on Friday. I can't even remember now what I was sitting down to write when I first heard the news about Christchurch. Something, I think, about how the media had so comprehensively ignored Auckland's lovely Chinese Lantern Festival.
The earthquake wiped all normal preoccupations from my mind. From everyone's minds. Those of us who don’t live in Canterbury could only gaze in shock at the TV, listen to the radio, and be so, so grateful that we were not ourselves involved.
The whole country came to a standstill as everyone struggled to absorb the scale of the destruction and injury and death that had struck so suddenly on an otherwise so- average Tuesday afternoon.
The human casualties were the worst but the symbolic toppling of the cathedral spire must have been like a knife in the heart for those who love that city.
But then something else happened. For good things do come out of times like this. Love rises. Compassion swells. Ordinary people discover what extraordinary strengths they possess. And everybody, just everybody, wants to help.
As New Zealanders we sometimes feel that we live in a little country where not much happens. Something really big happened last Tuesday. Lots of terrible things are happening on Planet Earth right now, but we don’t have time to pay much attention to anything else. For this is our country’s pain. Our country’s challenge. Our country’s current mountain of trouble.
When all we can hear are the voices of pain and loss, no one wants to hear about lessons learnt, but I guess there’s just one small one – the pictures we're seeing might at least prompt some more of us to finally take serious and sober notice of those television civil defence ads in case, sometime, it’s our turn.

Ignore the oval ball

2011-02-21T11:49:00.000-08:00

I’ve recently met people who were planning big events towards the end of this year but are thinking they’ll pull the plug. Because, hurtling down the track is the all-consuming Rugby World Cup.
I know some of you can hardly wait. But me, come September, I’d rather be outta here. I know I’m not alone. Even Martin Snedden, the RWC chief executive, thinks about 40% of us are either indifferent to rugby or actively dislike it. But you’ll never know that in September when it will be severely unpatriotic to refuse to haul on an AB shirt and paint your face black.
I was therefore overjoyed to discover a Melbourne group that detests all the feverish hype surrounding Aussie Rules - run by the AFL, short for Australian Football League.
To poke fun at footy hysteria these rebels formed a different AFL, the Anti Football League.
It’s 41 years old and has 1000 members, 60% female.
I’ve been having a giggle reading their website.
It declares members are united by the common understanding that there is more to life than the ability to kick a pigskin between two white posts. They also hand out an annual medal to 'the person who does the least for football in a given year'.
It’s all done in good humour. They periodically destroy a football – by explosion, for instance, by fire or by burial at sea. They meet away from TV sets to enjoy alternative amusements on cup final days.
Members can even buy a badge, Madge, in the shape of a square, unkickable football. Stickers are available too – that’s how it looks (above). And, bless ‘em, they raise lots of funds for charity (despite which they get lots of hate mail).
Great idea, I reckon. We could sure do with an alternative world cup event. Not easy, though, to dream up a suitable name with the initials RWC. I’m working on it, but given the power of rugby I’ll probably find the boys have already slapped copyright on it.

Hungry for a good blog

2011-02-14T01:16:00.000-08:00

How obsessed with food we’ve become. The telly is full of it. Nigella, Jamie, Rick, Annabel and Gordon (see, you don’t even need their surnames to know who they are) and all the reality-show wannabe chefs are everywhere. So it’s no wonder the web is also brimming with edibles.
In my mum’s day, neighbours used to swap recipes over the fence. Now the food universe is both enormous and local, all at the same time. Keen cooks are launching blogs, taking their own photos of their lovely dishes, and sharing their creations with the world. I love it.
Emma Galloway’s blog is a delight. It’s about “my family, food and recipes, my vege garden and how we cope living with food allergies”. Based in Raglan, but soon moving to Perth, Emma is a vegetarian (except for fish) and trained chef. She has a wide range of yummy-looking recipes that include lots of sweet treats, such as chocolate afghans free of dairy and gluten. And I can’t wait to try her grapefruit curd.
Emma’s work is included at Foodgawker, a San Francisco-online gallery jammed with thousands of treats cooked up and photographed by ardent foodies.
That’s one of Emma’s photos above – a platter of grilled courgette with parsley, olives & garlic crumbs Anyone can submit dishes; if you’re keen, look up the rules and have a go.
Of course, a big international site like Foodgawker doesn’t take account of topsy-turvy seasons and regional preferences – for that you need to look closer to home.
Example: Plum-kitchen, created by Auckland accountant Kristina Douglas. She loves it when people try her recipes and comment on them. “How cool is that,” she says.
UK-trained chef Allison Pirrie Mawer of Muriwai, where she runs the Gourmet Gannet cooking school, also has a beguiling blog. At her site, I found a link to Nigel Olsen’s blog.
He’s even made gorse useful by concocting a pale yellow gorseflower cocktail, made from equal parts vodka, dry vermouth and gorseflower cordial. That is derived from boiling handfuls of flowers in water, caster sugar, lemon juice and orange rind. How does it taste? Apparently, like "mangoes", "cut grass", "spring" and with "herby notes".
If tackling gorse sounds too hard, you may just need someone to point you to great places to shop. If so, MrsCake is a good port of call. Rosa Wakefield lives in Wellington but loves reporting on culinary explorations all over the place. Her Twitter account (also under the MrsCake name) says she is “working to explore the world one meal at a time”. Aren’t we all.

Unfurl something new

2011-02-10T10:22:00.000-08:00

Here's my rant for my TV show this week - Let's Talk, Stratos TV...
Listener magazine editorial writer waved the flag this week for a new flag. A flag for us in New Zealand, not one with Britain’s flag still stuck in the corner. A flag that says something about us as an independent Pacific nation. One that means you’d no longer have to pause and think, now is that ours with the four stars on the blue or is it the Australian one?
Of course this sort of talk instantly gets people shouting and grumbling. Half of us cry, "Don’t change it’, soldiers have died for it, it’s our history, how can you even think of ditching it!"
Me, I’m in the "yes, let’s change it' camp. I reckon Britain stopped loving us long ago, but still we cling to this tiny little remnant of the time when world maps were scattered with the pink landa of the dear old British Empire.
Canada woke up, dropped the ensign and opted for its bright maple leaf flag more than 45 years ago. Not without pain, mind, because diehards there scrapped like pitbulls to retain the old design.
You probably don’t know what it used to look like. It was kind of like ours, though red rather than blue. That's it at top right...boring, huh, when you compare it with the current blazing maple-leaf design.
There was a Union Jack in the corner, and a shield with a mish-mash of symbols in the middle. Completely blah. A few million maple leaves later, the queen is still the Queen of Canada. I don’t think she’ll have conniptions if we run something new up our flag poles. We just need to do what the Canadians did – appoint a design-savvy team and get on with it. And just imagine how much fun it would be to get in ahead of the Aussies.

Egypt's neverending cycle

2011-01-30T20:45:00.000-08:00

I am riveted to TV's news channels as the Egyptian revolution unfolds. It's too soon to tell how it will go, but my mind is full of Egyptian memories from nearly 10 years ago. It was 2002, just after 9/11, and it was a good time to visit as Americans were too scared to visit - wary of anywhere Islamic - and many of the great sites were virtually empty of other tourists. I loved it. The wonderful temples in the south, the fabulous statuary, art and sculpture, the stupendous skills of its pyramid builders, and the profound myths and legends.
Here's a papyrus painting I bought then, of Nut (pronounced Noot), the sky goddess.
The Egyptians were fond of painting ceilings inside temples a deep rich blue, sprinkled with stars - a design theme copied much later by medieval church builders in Europe. Nut was in charge, giving birth to the sun each morning and swallowing it each night in an endless round of light and darkness. The idea was that her great body arched protectively over the earth and all its inhabitants. So here she is carrying out her neverending duties with the starry sky above, and the busy earth below.
If Nut was still worshipped she'd sure be busy now, struggling to protect the land below as her country stumbles towards a new, uncertain future.
Even in '02 the poverty was plain to see, the infrastructure crumbling. Even then it was a bit dodgy. Fully armed tourist police accompanied us everywhere. The authorities were desperate to maintain tourism as a foreign exchange earner.
That cash flow must already have plummeted. Jobs will be disappearing. Food supplies must be running low. Cairo, always a tough city, will be an ever harder place in which to survive. Cairo is huge. Nearly 8 million are crowded in there, most of them scrabbling a life together on tiny incomes.
Even 10 years ago, people we met were derisive of their leader, Mubarak, but he had an iron grip. But it seems his time has finally come. He's just not admitting it yet...probably too busy with his hairstylist, ensuring that at 83 his hair is still black as kohl. It's as if he pretends, like the ancient mummy makers, that he can stay youthful for ever.
But one of these mornings, as Nut gives birth to the Sun yet again, the old man's reign will end. Even the pharoahs lost their power in the end.

Door knocks after midnight

2011-01-28T20:01:00.000-08:00

I have a new TV show up and running,Let's Talk", running weekly on Stratos TV, 5pm Mondays. Haven't had time yet to put a clip from it up on YouTube but here's a chunk of script I used in the show. It's something I really wanted to say...

After yet another horrendous car crash last weekend, killing two teenage boys, maiming two more and also killing a man who had the terrible luck to be in the way, all of us must be asking ourselves if there isn’t more we can do to stop this happening so often.

It was, as usual, all about booze, speed and bad driving and the kids who died were just 16 and 17. The man in the other car, who was 45, was on his way home after work to his wife and three kids.

Once again we’ve seen the ripped up cars at the roadside, so totalled they look like a monster has torn them apart.

We’ve seen pictures of shocked relatives clinging to each other. We’ve heard again how it looked like a war zone.

And a police sergeant told a reporter how he’d had to knock on the doors of four separate sets of parents and the wife of a dead man in the middle of the night, to deliver the bad news.

A friend of mine who was a police officer once told me how that feels – to stand at a door with your fist up, knuckles ready to go, hearing calm and happy sounds or peaceful silence inside and knowing that in just a moment you will blow these people’s lives apart.

We still don’t have it right, it seems, when it comes to tragedies like this. The license age is still too low, the drinking age is still too low, driving skills aren’t good, and of course you can never underestimate the desire in teenagers for the sheer thrill of speed, no matter how often parents say ‘drive carefully’.

Apparently there was a beer box and alcopop cans littering the scene of the last disaster… and that’s something we can at least try to get right. In California they have a simple rule about alcohol and vehicles. Having any drink inside the car at all, whether opened or unopened, is forbidden. If you’re carrying booze it has be out of reach, locked in the rear compartment.

We can’t tell what happened in that car at Waihi but over and over again we hear of accidents where booze was being knocked back even as drivers and passengers rode to oblivion. We can’t stop people drinking either before they get behind the wheel.

But at least we could do more to discourage anyone from drinking while the car’s in motion, and thus cut down the yahooing and the egging on. It’s such a simple idea. And wouldn’t it be worth if it at least it prevents just one more family from hearing that knock on the door after midnight?

Join the chorus

2010-12-14T20:31:00.000-08:00

I've been writing a piece on Twitter for people who aren't on Twitter. Here it is...

When I hear this summer’s tuis going squawk, rasp and whistle, it seems like Twitter has somehow taken over my garden. But when the mini-blog site was invented back in 2006 its name was merely “twttr” – a five-letter code partly inspired by the picture-sharing website, Flickr.
An American called Jack Dorsey and some friends were messing about with the idea of being able to contact small groups of friends via SMS messaging. It was only when they spotted the global potential of their idea that Twitter, the brand, came to life complete with its little bird logo.
Five years on the avian chorus is deafening, with tweets breaking out all across the virtual arena that some call the Twitterverse.
Twitter is smaller than Facebook and YouTube but is still enormous at around 100 million users. Million, schmillion… it’s just one slice of the vast social-media pie, but more and more of us are taking flight there.
Many will start out like me. You open a free account (my name there is @lindseyoutloud) at www.twitter.com, do one cautious tweet, find a few people to ‘follow’, then just sit back and watch. Once the world starts streaming in you begin to ‘get it’. Soon you too will be itching to tweet – using no more than 140 characters at a time, please. It’s interesting how inventive you can become.
Unbelievers will tell you that reading celebrity prattle is a big yawn. But tick the right ‘follow’ boxes and you’ll be well entertained. By following Vanity Fair, for instance, I can get early alerts to top story links on that magazine’s website so I can read tasty pieces way before the actual issue gets here.
I follow comedians, writers, politicians, monks, big thinkers, artists and activists – and a bunch of friends old and new. It’s great for new thoughts and ideas and video links and, as with Facebook, you can direct-message your contacts as well.
Aucklander Linda Coles, of Blue Banana Ltd, is making her living training business people in how to build relationships online. “All that stuff about what people are having for breakfast is just boring,” she says. “It’s really about letting people you want to do business with know you exist. “ Linking Twitter with business site LinkedIn, she’s constantly interacting with existing customers and new prospects and sees it as an essential business tool.
For the rest of us, it offers fleeting fun as often as you want. And here’s an unexpected upside – if you become a tweeter you’ll find yourself mostly amongst grownups – teenagers don’t like it much. One recent survey found only four percent of Twitter users are under 18. Average age: a nicely mellow 31. n
* This article appears in the Jan issue of Next magazine.

Office affairs - oh, the angst!

2010-12-01T13:21:00.001-08:00

Lucy Kellaway is a Financial Times columnist. I first got to know her via her voice in the witty little pieces about business life that she records for the BBC.
Turns out she's a good novelist as well. I just read her In Office Hours and can highly recommend it for a holiday read. Or a curled-up-on-the- couch read. You might label it 'chick lit' if it wasn't Lucy at the helm, but she overcomes what could be a standard office-affairs theme by being really dry, witty and droll...in her inimitable manner. In Office Hours is office politics writ large, set against the backdrop of London City machinations, the GFC, and corporate and banking greed. Ironically - for she must have written it before the Gulf oil spill and the tarnishing of BP's reputation - it is set within the head office of a rapacious oil company that she tags Atlantic Energy.
She has two main characters who are (slightly annoyingly) called Stella and Bella, but you quickly get to grips with their linked but separate dramas.
Stella is the senior exec appalled to find herself having it off with a junior, many-years-younger male assistant; Bella is the struggling junior office assistant and solo mum feeling the tug of illicit excitement with her male, much-older married boss. Kellaway niftily exposes the different tensions and attitudes evoked by these unequal relationships.
It's agonising and funny, all at the same time, and accompanied by the churning of feverish emails and texts. Which is of course the modern, and often hazardous way.
It also points out how damn annoying Microsoft can be. There's Stella, struggling to write an emotionally laden email that's ripping her heart out, when up pops a smarmy on-screen message from the 'assistant' - "it looks like you're trying to write a letter. Would you like help?"

Stick it to us

2010-11-18T13:01:00.000-08:00

The Post-it note is 30 years old this year. Can we imagine life without them? Ten years ago someone visited my office and laughed because I had yellow reminder notes to myself stuck around the edge of my monitor. "Post-it notes?" she jeered. "Use the Stickies tool on your Mac!" I do, but I still like scribbling and sticking. Newsweek magazine has a vivid collection of the crazy and vivid and political and sentimental things people have done with Post-it notes over the years.

http://www.newsweek.com/photo/2010/11/16/how-post-it-notes-have-stuck-to-our-history-and-culture.html

As a for instance, I love this Korean bridal car - a mass of flapping yellow. Apparently they started out yellow because when 3M scientists were messing about with a new adhesive they happened to have some yellow scrap paper in the office. The idea languished for a while until one of the guys, who sang in his church choir, realised a tag of the sticky paper they'd been playing with would be a great way to keep his place in the hymn book. Small idea. Big business.

The online world of pretty

2010-11-17T17:37:00.000-08:00

The web started out as a realm for geeks. The content was all about business, computer science, numbers and graphs. But something more beguiling flooded in when artists and dreamers began to play. While hard-sell merchants are screaming their names elsewhere on the web, the appeal of pretty sites is partly due to the fact that nobody’s shouting at you.
Lovers of all things beautiful tend to hope you’re not so much interested in them as the style they espouse. Sometimes you can’t even find their real names.
Take, for instance, the mysteriously labelled Gypsy Purple, who loves all things French and can be found at http://gypsypurple.blogspot.com Her opulent blog is a bit of a gypsy tea-room, overflowing with romantic, retro and nostalgic art of all kinds. The elegant white Swedish dining room above is from her blog.
If it’s the colour grey (or ‘gray’ if you’re American) that spins your wheels, see www.aperfectgray.com, a blog full to the brim with lovely charcoal, dove and pearl-toned goodies. Its creator rhapsodises that life has “four phenomenal goodnesses; décor, art, antiques and style – and this girl’s search for that one perfect gray wall colour.”
Needlework fans should cruise http://karenruane.blogspot.com, where there are oodles of embroidery pieces to admire, mostly in white on frosty white. Karen’s gorgeously detailed pieces come with lots of helpful chat about how to be an expert with needle and thread.
No such colour blindness is exhibited by an English architect who rolls out an almost daily post of all things bright and beautiful. Blogging at http://ijeomabyijeoma.blogspot.com, she recently displayed the interiors of Kim Kardashian’s plush home (remarkably restrained for a Kardashian) and the site is always full of international interiors to die for.
At http://adiaryoflovely.blogspot.com you can find Helena, who has about 1000 “lovely people” instead of “fans”. Her blog is awash with cool clothes and design.
Some style bloggers love to pair up words to make cute, double-barrelled names for their sites. Already taken – just in case you’ve been musing on such a move – are Lilac and Grey, Velvet and Linen, Linen and Lavender, and Chi Chi and Luxe, all of them bursting with sweetness and colour.
But there are no fluffy words at www.cleverbastards.co.nz, where you can browse and buy arty stuff made right here. On show is the work of huge talents from all over New Zealand. The idea in setting up the site (say the six people who run it) was to give you a place to purchase something from a creative Kiwi and also “get an idea how it was made and what the hell made them do it in the first place”. Clever.
* This piece appears in my Webmistress column, Next magazine, Dec 2010.

A different look at going back to the future

2010-11-15T13:32:00.000-08:00

Was just browsing around in Slideshare and came across this beguiling piece of work - setting romantic visionary images against the reality of today's world. This sort of thing is why I love the internet.

Yesterday’s future

View more presentations from Nicolás Svistoonoff.

I'd love to know more about these images, but the person who posted is from Ecuador, and being horribly monolingual I can't ask him. But the pictures speak for themselves.

Skimming the shallows

2010-11-06T19:47:00.001-07:00

Have you noticed lately that your ability to concentrate has dropped off? I have, especially when it comes to reading. And I'm an old-school, hard-core kind of reader, so it's a bit weird. I'm finding that when I bring my customary stack of three or four books home from the library, I'm then reading only one or two of them. I have little patience for books that don't grab me instantly, or magazine stories that go on too long.

I've worked on newspapers and used to be a cover-to-cover kind of reader. These days I flip, scanning headlines, and only stop if a story looks sufficiently enticing. Trouble is, of course, most newspaper stories are already at least 12 or 24 hours old and we know the news already from a thousand other sources. Which is why, of course, newspapers are having such a hard time of it.

But according to author Nicholas Carr, there's more to it than stale news. He reckons that the internet, and all the other fast-moving media we're saturated with, is forcing us into too much multi-tasking, making us distracted and turning our brains to mush. Well, he's too cautious to put it quite like that, but it's the general thrust of his book, The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember. Carr gathers lots of scholarly evidence to show that even as we're enjoying the many excellent things the web has to offer, it is rewiring our brains, flattening our brilliance, reducing our capacity for deep, meditative thought - and suppressing human empathy and compassion.

He writes, "There is no Sleepy Hollow on the Internet, no peaceful spot where contemplativeness can work its resorative magic. There is only the endless, mesmerizing buzz of the urban street."

Oops. Just as well I've taken a quiet walk by the sea today. But then I did come home to get back to my keyboard and write this blog, send three emails and post videos on two websites, all time thinking of my next media projects as well. And it's Sunday, supposedly the day of rest. Perhaps Mr Carr is right. Sigh. Time to switch off the laptop and firmly close the office door.

write your life story - the video

2010-10-18T14:34:00.000-07:00

I'm having such fun with a cool tool called Animoto. All you do is gather some pictures and brief video clips, add some text, choose a background theme, pick some music, arrange it all in the order you want, and send it to Animoto.
In a few minutes they email you that your video is ready to view and you can do whatever you want with it - remix or edit to your heart's content, send to friends, put on your website, embed in blogs. You can make 60-second videos for free, or sign up for not much money at all to make videos up to 10 minutes long. Check out this one (just click on the yellow words below) that I just made about my upcoming 'Story of My Life" workshop, on November 21, at Eden Garden in Epsom.

write your life story

Of course, these videos would be terrific for invitations or celebrations, or post-holiday wrap-ups. I continue to be amazed by how clever internet services are becoming. I use a Mac and have made a few little iMovie videos but this is even easier than iMovie. Swoon.

Easy as falling off a blog

2010-10-12T17:48:00.000-07:00

Amazingly, I still sometimes meet people who, with furrowed brow, say, "what is a blog anyway?" The blogosphere is the hot place to be, of course. So who’s running it? Nobody. Which is its blessing and its curse.
Obviously (because you're reading it here) you already know that blog means ‘web log’. It started when web-savvy writers began to pour out words in a journal sort of format that could be updated at will.
Now there are around 133 million (and counting) blogs out there. ‘Real’ journalists can be a bit sniffy about bloggers, dissing them as mere scribblers. But to sneer would be missing the point. Many blog writers are top names.
The world’s biggest blog, at www.huffingtonpost.com, prints the views of major commentators and now rivals venerable newspapers in terms of influence.
For the most part bloggers write for free but if they’re clever enough they can turn a buck or two. For instance, fashion ‘curator’ and professional speaker Gala Darling sells her writings as monthly chapters of an ongoing book called Love & Sequins.
“It’s my handbook on being a love letter to the universe,” coos Gala, who grew up in Wellington and moved to New York in pursuit of a more glamorous life. Like all big web personalities she is prolific – blogging madly at www.galadarling.com and other sites, and is all over Facebook and Twitter.
That’s the gorgeous Gala in the picture, which I nicked from her blog.
There is, of course, much serious blogging happening too. At www.stuff.co.nz a range of familiar names pops up – such as political reporter Colin Espiner and investment expert Bruce Sheppard.
Also included there is Christchurch librarian Moata Tamaira. Her self-described “unholy mash-up of whimsy, cynicism and wry observation” won her the best blog prize at last year’s Qantas Media Awards. She’s just written a hilarious piece about being detained overnight by Customs at Madrid Airport when she lost her passport on the inbound flight.
There are a dozen or so good writers at www.publicaddress.net. Try also www.kiwiblog.co.nz which has been “fomenting happy mischief since 2003”. It contains some 400 blogs. Some are moribund but there are heaps to get stuck into, including the prickly Cactus Kate. She’s a Hong Kong-based lawyer (and admirer of Rodney Hide) whose tagline is, “Saving the world from sanctimonious bearded men, one whisker removed at a time”.
If you’re looking for local and stylish browse www.lovelyblogs.co.nz - which collects appealing blogs from around the country. So give it a go. Set yours up right here at blogspot.com or wordpress.com or tumblr.com – all are free and simple to use.
* This article is adapted from my Webmistress column in the Nov issue of Next magazine. I’m also currently running its Facebook page – find it at Next Magazine NZ and tick the ‘Like’ box to see what’s happening there.

Women all over the web

2010-09-19T13:20:00.000-07:00

There are some corners of the web inhabited just by women and that’s just as it should be. We did always did like gathering at the well for a chat and the web is just one big well.
One of the first off the mark was www.handbag.com, launched back in 1999 to provide a “glossy, stylish take on matters that women love, like fashion, beauty, celebrity, gossip, going out and staying in”. Then it was a pioneer. Now it’s just part of the Hearst magazine empire. Big, busy and booming, it scores 22 million “unique page views” per month.
The world’s number one women’s site is www.ivillage.com , launched in 1995 and now NBC-owned. On the day I last looked it was offering advice on how to manage sex when on “vaycay” (vacation) with the kids; and what your ice-cream preference says about your personality. A yen for vanilla, it seems, means you’re more of a risk- taker than those who like chocolate or strawberry. Oh sure.
Big sites like that can be so take-it-or-leave-it. So is there something more local, more ‘niche’, more relevant?
You bet. Try www.wisanow.co.nz, set up by Aucklanders Geraldine Meo and Raewyn Hamilton (pictured). They’re both in real estate but Wisanow is their outside-of-work baby, set up because they believe strongly that baby-boomer women can have a struggle as they enter what some call “second adulthood”. Once the mid-life stage opens up, many are searching for fresh fields, renewed purpose and meaningful goals. Meo and Hamilton are aiming for a “warm, honest and empathetic forum”.
Packed full of food, travel, health, shopping and culture pages (around 1000 at last count), it’s receiving as much interest from overseas as at home. “They tell us they like that our discussion forums are real and not just about botox and celebrities,” says Hamilton. “And we’re finding that the topics women care about here are the same all over the world.”
Another useful local site: www.womenz.co.nz, founded by Katrina Winn as a bid to “add value to women’s lives”. It also contains good, relevant material.
But it’s not easy maintaining such sites. They come and go. But check out www.heartless-bitches.com, which has been up since 1996 and is thus positively venerable. I think it’s US-based but on the web it’s hard to tell. Not quite as hard-arse as it sounds, it’s leavened with considerable humour. And “bitch” stands for Being In Total Control, Honey. As a life goal that’s hard to argue with.
*This piece is part of my Webmistress page in Next magazine, Oct issue. The mag's not online but you can 'like' it on Facebook page. Look for Next Magazine NZ

The return of the Jed

2010-09-08T19:36:00.001-07:00

How very weird it is that one overwrought and half-baked pastor from a Florida church that has 50 in its congregation (down by half from where it was a few days ago) can nab headlines around the world with his intention to burn copies of the Koran as his very own ridiculous and inflammatory way to mark 9/11. Outraged protests from a host of world leaders is not enough to stay the hand of Pastor Jones, who is presumably revelling in the attention. Ah well, what can you expect from someone who is the spitting image of The Beverly Hillbillies' Jed Clampett? All he needs is the hat. And probably the gun.
If you're too young to remember Jed be advised that the scriptwriters of this classic '60s comedy gave him some very good lines, including this put-down of his dim-witted son, Jethro: "If brains was lard, that boy wouldn't have enough to grease a skillet." Seems like a good retort for Mr Jones.

The power of stories told by dads

2010-09-01T19:19:00.000-07:00

As Father’s Day has rolled round this year I’ve thought not so much of my own father but of my father-in–law, Richie, because I’ve also been thinking lots about the importance of family stories.
Richie told us a story the night after his wife Hilda’s funeral. It’s interesting how funerals bring out tales of days gone by. A key gets turned in our hearts at such times, and the door opens and out flow words that need saying.
He talked about the hard times in his early life and of a morning when he was just a small boy, living on the family dairy farm on the slopes of Mt Ngongotaha. It was a dark, freezing morning, early 1920s. Richie’s dad was out with the cows, as usual, when his mother came into the room he shared with his brother. They were still in bed.
“She looked so odd,” Richie remembered when he was himself an old man. “She came in and said, ‘I’ve just come to say goodbye, boys’. And then she turned and walked out of the house.’
Little Richie knew something was very wrong. He got up and raced out to the milking shed. ‘Dad, Dad!’ he cried. ‘Mum’s gone.’
A lifetime later, he could still remember the stricken expression on his father’s face as he ran out of the shed and down the frosty hill after his wife and brought her home again.
When I heard that story I felt for her. I wondered if, desperate to escape the hard-scrabble farming life, she just had to get away. But then, where would she have gone? Was she really going to leave her boys behind? How would she have made it on her own? Divorce was a great scandal then and social welfare non-existent.
Did she simply go back with a leaden heart and get on with things, because there was just no other option? Whatever, she stayed, and between them they raised a fine family.
You start to feel the impact of stories like that in midlife, because it’s only then that we’ve been through enough of our own dramas to know that life rarely turns out as we expect it to.
Of course even though we think we’re just ordinary, all our lives are rich with drama. But most of us cover up our hot-point moments because we think they’re too private, too painful or maybe too embarrassing to share. And yet it’s so vital for us to reveal them, not just because they can help other people cope with trouble, but because unloading our old hurts can be good for us too, leaving us feeling lighter and stronger.
“I used to think I’d be able to change the world,” one friend told me with rueful smile. “Then I realised I couldn’t do that. Then I thought you could change yourself, and came to see that wasn’t possible either. The good thing about getting older is that you finally begin to figure who you are in the big picture of things. I think now that what life’s all about is just being the hero or heroine of your own story – and sharing it with other people.’
Richie’s gone now too, but thanks, Poppa, for sharing. And thanks to all dads everywhere who’ve sat down with their families sometime and told them a true-life story, straight from the heart. Not enough blokes do that. And they’re stories we need to hear.

Seeking "letters to Lindsey"

2010-08-26T15:08:00.000-07:00

I’ve done lots of media jobs in my life but never hosted a TV show. But now I am. I figure I’m the oldest trout on the telly! Well, in this country anyway, as opposed to the United States where it seems possible to carry on forever if you’re Barbara Walters, who is 80. So at 65 I’m a mere chicken. And an increasingly wise one! It's what happens when you've been around a few years.

Anyhow, the show is Letters to Lindsey. Think of it as an agony aunt show with ‘uncles’ as well as ‘aunties’, who sit around our table and answer problems sent in by viewers. Our panellists aren’t just there because they’re good talkers but because they’re experts in their field. The weekly show is on Triangle TV in Auckland, 7pm Fridays, and on Stratos (channel 89 on Sky and 22 on Freeview) across the country, 8pm Saturdays.

Here’s a brief video promo.

We’d welcome emails about any problem that’s getting you down. We’ve been running for only a few weeks but have already canvassed a wide range of dilemmas – from drug addiction probs through teen pregnancy woes and employment and migrant issues. This weekend the programme’s all about sex and intimacy. Next week: where are the new heroes and role models for kids to look up?

The world's full of problems, of course, so if you’d care to share a burning issue (treated anonymously, of course!) my producer Deb Faith would love to hear from you. You can either send it to me or directly to her at info@tritv.co.nz

Speaking of letters (of the alphabet) is language misuse driving you nuts? Me too, sometimes. So you might enjoy www.loginisnotaverb.com, the work of a man who cannot abide how we’re messing with new words like login, carryout, lockdown, signout and checkout, not to mention that ubiquitous little verb, text, which of course used to be a mere noun.

Then there are the adjectives which have become nouns, like creative and corporate. Sigh. One's pedantic nit-picking can go on.

Nutting out great story lines

2010-08-21T17:20:00.000-07:00

I just went to a terrific one-day seminar - Christopher Vogler's 'The Writer's Journey' Workshop. It's so great when someone is able to make things fall into place for you.
I've known for years about the work of the late Joseph Campbell, the much admired scholar/historian who wrote The Hero With a Thousand Faces. It's been sitting on my bookshelf for years and I kept looking at it thinking "I must get into that" but never did. After a few half-hearted attempts to penetrate his academic prose I put it back on the shelf. Which was fine except that I found myself, for the second time, with a novel at the 30,000 word mark and stuck on how to proceed.
Vogler, who has heaps of Hollywood script-writing and doctoring experience, demystifies Campbell with his own work. He's written a series of books which outline the essentials for every great story, whether on paper or screen. I raced home from his workshop dived into a novel with Vogler's notes in hand, analysing it at every step to see how well it conformed to Campbell's formula (which he worked out from studying ancient plays and myths going back thousands of years). Twelve hours later I was thoroughly convinced. And was intrigued to realise that in writing my first two published novels I had instinctively followed the magic pattern.
You don't need to attend a whole workshop as Vogler, bless him, has put the basics online as a free download.
It contains the text of a career-changing memo about story that he wrote to his Hollywood bosses way back in 1985. Mr Vogler is a nice guy. As we talked during a break I told him how much I enjoyed hearing his opening address. He talked about how reading Campbell's work was a huge revelation for him - so big that it was as if he felt an arrow of purpose shooting through him from 20 or 30 generations back - and that in that moment he knew exactly what he was here on Earth to do. Lucky guy - lots of us spend a whole lifetime trying to figure that out!
His breakthrough moment has been extra important to him, he said, because he's had no children, and the fact that his books are out there helping others with the secrets of good storytelling is hugely important to him in the sense of legacy. So... back I go to my manuscript...
Thanks to the great gals at the Romance Writers Association of New Zealand for bringing him to New Zealand!
See him here too

Go the girls in graphics!

2010-08-15T02:42:00.000-07:00

With the internet so full of moving pictures it’s good that the web also hosts an older form of visual entertainment – comics and cartoons. They may be dominated by boy power (zap! kablooey! aaargh!) but cool trends are arising that are just as much for girls as for guys.
Back when Superman ruled there were female figures too, such as Wonder Woman — “beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, stronger than Hercules, and swifter than Mercury”. So far, so Grecian.
We’ve moved on. Check out http://sarahzero.com for an online graphic novel that is updated every few days. Its creator works “without elves, fairies or wizards, without pirates, ninjas or zombies, without monkeys, penguins or dinosaurs, without sad girls, cat girls or robot girls”.
A Toronto designer simply named Stef draws Sarah Zero, who is a feisty redhead “struggling to find love and validation on the internet”.
Graphic novels and comics both tell stories via sequential art, but paper comics are shorter, usually less than 30 pages, while graphic novels can go on for 600 pages – or be online for years. At www.girlgenius.org there’s a story staring another feisty heroine, Agatha Clay, that’s been running since 2002.
Its creators, Phil and Kaja Foglio, recommend it for teens and up, pointing out that it contains “lots of running around in Victorian underwear, occasional innuendo, a certain amount of violence and the occasional ‘damn!’"
Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton has a brilliant little site at www.harkavagrant.com, chock full of comic strips that poke subversive fun at figures as famous as Jane Austen, the Wright Brothers and the Kennedys.
At www.lillicarre.com artist Lilli Carré has a quirky page full of sparse black-pen drawings that shift and vibrate, along with pages from her books to browse and enjoy.
If all of this makes you think that here’s a field in which you, too, can play, here’s a really useful blog, http://dw-wp.com, where the ‘dw-wp’ is short for Drawing Words and Writing Pictures. It’s been set up by cartoonist Jessica Abel to help others learn cartooning skills and get published. Don’t think you have to be a great artist. Some of these sites reveal that it is the possession of a sharp wit, not ace drawing ability, that makes for the most engaging comics and cartoons.
* This text is from my 'Webmistress' column in Next magazine, September issue, published Aug 16. Check out the mag's Facebook page too, at Next Magazine NZ.< .

Pudding, glorious puddings

2010-07-19T20:53:00.000-07:00

You know how it is when the friendly waitperson offers the dessert menu – and everyone hesitates? No-one wants to be first to mutter, “Oh, go on then”, even if you are secretly hanging out for crème brulée or chocolate mud cake.
Or pudding.
Yay, pudding! Winter is the right, the only time of year to eat puddings in all their creamy, stodgy, comforting glory.
Naturally, the web is laden with them. It amazes me that cookbooks still sell in their thousands when all you have to do is Google “pudding” and a million recipes fill your screen.
Ah, but can you trust them? That’s the question. Which is why we do still want books and magazines full of recipes by our favourite cooks. And why we’ll never discard the yellowing, grease-spotted pages of our mothers’ recipe books.
My Mum’s Lemon Delicious Pudding is still my favourite, preferably scoffed with melting vanilla ice-cream. Others swoon at the thought of rice pudding, and bread-and-butter pudding. All sweet, soft and golden.
But puddings weren’t always like that. If you live in Labrador you might sometimes have a traditional ‘Jiggs Dinner’, a roast-meat Sunday feast that also includes salted beef, boiled veges and pease pudding. I had no idea what pease is and found it's hummus-like stuff made of split yellow peas, cooked with water, salt and spices and, sometimes, a bacon or ham joint.
It’s also known as Pease Pottage and there’s a Pease Pottage Village in Sussex - so-called because the locals used to feed pease pottage to convicts being transported from London to the South Coast.
Then there’s Scotland’s Red Pudding – which shows how keen the Scots are to exclude anything remotely green from their diet. You can get Red Pudding, a true artery clogger, only at chip shops. It’s a sausage-shaped lump of various ground meats, suet, spices, fat and colouring, dipped in thick batter and deed fried.
You can’t ignore Black Pudding or Blood Pudding, a sausage made from cooked blood and eaten all over the planet. And White Pudding, which is similar but contains no blood, though it may have brain matter instead. All of which is a vegetarian’s nightmare.
Turn then to a true sweet-pudding lover’s paradise – a British hotel devoted to after-dinner delights.
The Three Ways House Hotel in the Cotswolds hosts a weekly pudding club where members are expected to eat a full main course and then sample and vote on the delights of seven puddings. You can browse the club's “pudcasts”, contribute your own puddings to their “Wikipudia of Recipes”. You can even stay in one of their luxury pudding-themed rooms. The Spotted Dick and Custard Room, anyone? I'm not kidding. That's it at the top of this blog, complete with spotted bed cover.
The most famous pudding of all is the one trotted out at Christmas. If you’re keen to do a Christmas pud in the most traditional way, you can find Mrs Beeton’s recipe here at Jane Austen's World.
Actually, with all its suet and shredded carrot, it doesn’t sound too appetizing at all. I’m off to get lemons. Now, where did I put Mum’s recipe book?
This article also appears in the August issue of Next magazine, on the Webmistress page. Become a Next fan on Facebook, too. Look for Next Magazine NZ

Online evolutionaries

2010-06-15T14:47:00.000-07:00

With great hair, perfect makeup and huge CVs, they’re the world’s new powerful females. But forget tired old feminist notions. This lot still want to change things, but differently – via conscious evolution. Not heard of it before? You will.
The movers and shakers are mostly American – hence the big hair. But they have big minds too and have been chipping away at this idea for years.
At evolve.org you can meet the maven of the movement, Barbara Marx Hubbard. “Conscious Evolution is a new worldview that is now emerging rapidly,’ she says. “It acknowledges that humankind has attained unprecedented powers to affect, control and change the evolution of life on Earth. In simple terms, it means that we must improve our ability to use our powers ethically and effectively to achieve a positive future.”
In other words it’s about working with others to do good, rather like your local Lions Club.
But the visionary Barbara and friends are thinking big, driven by the conviction that the whole planet is royally stuffed and right now is our last chance to rescue it.
The web is quaking with sites devoted the cause. Marilyn Nyborg is pushing Women Waking The World. Kathy Eldon is heading the Creative Visions Foundation. Dr Elizabeth Debold teaches Evolutionary Enlightenment, which is about discovering the “explosive emergence of a new women's spiritual liberation”.
The Feminine Power Global Community – tinyurl.com/2cdabuq – is keen to tell us all about "the three power bases of the co-creative feminine”. The push is to reach for “the power to change your life, the power to realize your destiny and the power to transform the world.”
Whoo, heady stuff. Aspirin, anyone? There’s a tide of similarly urgent prose out there.
Jean Houston at tinyurl.com/25ve8jp says it’s about “all of us together co-creating the human and social changes needed to make a better world.”
I feel like shouting back, “Jean! Love your work, but co-creation? I can barely co-create a coffee date. The world is a tall order!”
Having been to a few of her events I know she’d come back at me sternly with her favourite saying by Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
For more, check out the gals at Women on the Edge of Evolution. At tinyurl.com/2dhr535 they offer hours of info for free.
And for one of my favourite takes on changing your world go to a wise bloke, influential author Peter Russell. He works with lovely images and calming words. Enjoy at tinyurl.com/2exkq99

This story (and more) is from Lindsey's Webmistress column, in the July issue of Next magazine, out now.

Arrowing contempt

2010-06-10T20:38:00.000-07:00

I love that TV can still teach me things. I learnt (on History or Discovery or one of the more worthy channels) the origin of that universal gesture, giving people "the fingers". In the time of Henry V, hordes of men used to engage in bows-and-arrows warfare. Good archers were the secret to winning battles and each man needed two strong fingers to pull back the string of the bow. The French vowed to hack off the fingers of any archer they captured so they couldn't fight again. When the English won a battle, they would jubilantly jab up their fingers in the air so their French opponents could see they were still intact. It's the defiant "nyah-nyah, can't-beat-me" gesture still so often used today. Ain't history wonderful?

How many days have you had then?

2010-05-23T21:46:00.000-07:00

I was a tad disconcerted recently to come across a website - www.peterrussell.com/age.php - that could calculate for me in a millisecond how many days I’ve been alive. For me, it’s more than 23 thousand days.

Terrifying thought! Of course, not all of those thousands of days have been in any way special. Life just progressed. Chores were done. I turned up at work. I cooked, showered, slept, talked, walked, shopped and drove around. All pretty darned ordinary, really, except for the miracle of being alive at all. We take that for granted usually, unless we’ve survived something that should have or could have killed us. Then life itself becomes stunningly interesting.

Russell (pictured right) has a hugely expansive worldview and is the author of some pretty profound books. I loved his "The Global Brain Awakens". He prefers of think of his life in days rather than years. “I can hold a day’s experience in mind quite easily,” he writes on his site. It’s much harder, he says, to go back and take stock of a whole year. Many incidents and discoveries are inevitably forgotten.

He also finds it more meaningful to think he’s lived through more than 20,000 days, rather than 50-plus years. “And it reframes the future. I have, probably, thousands of days still to come. Thousands new days to discover, enjoy and learn from.”

I don’t quite agree with him. I think we can go back and take stock of events many years after they’ve occurred. But I do agree that life is all about discovering, enjoying, and learning about your existence. Your life, everyone’s life, is unique. It deserves to be noticed and celebrated.

I heard Peter speak at a conference once and was amused by his pointing out of the totally obvious. He was trying to get us to think fresh, think real. He did it by getting us to consider sunset. Humans have been saying sunset (and sunrise) for gazillions of year. After all, the sun does seem to us earthbound citizens to set and rise. But it's a very long time since we've known that actually the sun doesn't go anywhere - it's just that the earth keeps on rotating. But we don't care and just keep on mis-labelling the appearance and disappearance of that bright old light in the sky. Does us good to think about things differently, I reckon.

iPhones and Passings

2010-04-14T16:59:00.000-07:00

My friend writer Helen Brown lost her iPhone. Quel bereavement! Because she was on holiday at Byron Bay and was just about to pack up and leave, there was no chance of it turning up under a cushion as might have happened at home.
“No doubt it's jiggling about inside the shorts pocket of a virile surfie,” she wrote in her blog. http://browngentry.livejournal
But then she added, “Living without it is surprisingly liberating. Not being available every second of the day is the definition of 21st century freedom.”
How wedded we’ve become to our gadgets. I’ve just switched over from PC to Mac because everyone I know who owns a Mac just loves it. Adapting is currently doing my head in but I’m beginning to see glimmerings of how good it will be once I’m sorted. And how I will hate to ever lose the thing.
I remember once, in the midst of writing a book, how I refused to leave my laptop in my car at a secluded beach to go for a walk. I had a thousand projected-related emails in that computer and couldn’t bear to think of losing the lot to a smash-and-grab thief. “I’ve got my life on that thing,” I said to my thwarted hiking buddy. She rolled her eyes, obviously thinking how pathetic I was.
This week I was reminded that the important things in life sometimes have nothing to do with technical wizardry.
I was in a hospital emergency room, waiting for a friend to have a health problem seen to.
We chatted with a staff nurse as she set and supervised an IV drip. My friend is also a health professional, so the chat was more open than would normally be the case.
The nurse talked about a dreadful day she’d just had as one of a team working on a young patient who was dying of a sudden and massive internal bleed.
She said how hard the emergency team had worked to save the patient, and how gut-wrenching it had been to lose the life of that stranger.
“Then,” she said casually, “We blessed the room.”
I was amazed. How do you do that, I wanted to know. And how often? Oh, all the time. Do you call in a chaplain? ‘Sometimes,” she said, “if there’s one around. But often we do it ourselves .”
Quietly, without fuss, someone will sprinkle water and maybe say a small prayer to send on the soul and make the space fresh for the next sick or injured body to occupy.
Emergency care is, of course, also a matter of employing high-tech skills and gadgets. But sometimes even the best skills and gadgets can’t work miracles.
How good it is to know that at least some of those highly trained and overstretched workers will spare a moment to do what human beings have always done. That they’ll pause, pay respect and carry out a small, unseen ritual to honour the passing of a life.
We may be wedded to our gizmos in the 21st century, but our humanity still runs deep.
Sitting there, in one of the country’s busiest emergency departments, I was immensely moved.
* I’m running a ‘Story of My Life’ one-day workshop in Auckland on May 9. Your life, with all its drama, deserves to be written about. Remember, no life is ever ordinary. For more info check out www.storyofmylife.co.nz

Orcas in the pen

2010-03-02T15:01:00.000-08:00

I saw a Shamu show in 1977. Now that’s a long way back. The place was Sea World San Diego. It was a terrific show, featuring astonishingly large animals in very small pools. The trainers were all very fit, loud and smiley and yelled things like “yee-hah!” a lot. It was like a blue-water rodeo. Our little daughters were thrilled and wanted to take home a stuffed toy Shamu as well. We enjoyed the whole sloshing, glossy, superific experience.
It makes me feel a bit squirmy now. Maybe I’ve just grown up, finally, but now you couldn’t pay me to go to such a show. Last week another Shamu (how many of them have there been, I wonder?) was in disgrace after hauling trainer Dawn Brancheau into the pool, killing her.
Since then we’ve seen people weeping at poolside as the show went on – with the trainers now safely out of reach of those big jaws. If Dawn had been a friend of mine I’ve have shed tears for her too, because it seemed she loved big, bad Shamu and all his other Shamu mates. But it’s the orcas I’m feeling most sorry for.
The UK Independent’s Michael McCarthy wrote an excellent piece (re-run by the NZ Herald) about about why orcas (which are actually big dolphins) should be left alone to run around in their huge natural playground, the world’s oceans. He wrote , “Ending up in Sea World is the orca equivalent of you and me being imprisoned by a lunatic in a cupboard under the stairs.” Right on, Michael.
But of course the sad fact is that humans make a pile of money from locking them up and making them do silly tricks. There are currently 42 in captivity around the world. I guess their presence helps experts get to know them better, so some might justify their capture on ‘scientific research’ grounds. But isn’t that what we deride the Japanese for when they kill Antarctic whales?
Orcas’ survival time, once they’re penned in, is only about four years. In the wild, they can live up to 50 or 60 years. So is it surprising if they get tetchy, stressed and bored? And the trouble is, freeing them all would be enormously expensive. It cost millions for the ‘Free Willy’ campaign, and poor Willy only lasted 18 months when finally let loose, despite lots of care and attention during the transition from pool to ocean.
But we’re all a bit strange, we humans, when it comes to being entertained by other creatures, even other humans. Once, on holiday in Peru, I was ashamed when some of my travel mates insisted that the tour bus stop so they could take pictures of peasants and their donkey ploughing a field. The Peruvians showed enormous grace in obligingly smiling for the cameras. They were given nothing for their time. Then we left them to their subsistence drudgery and rode on in comfort to our next nice lunch.
Not long after that some residents in a swanky Auckland street expressed outrage at the fact that busloads of Asian tourists were slowly cruising past their homes (how dare they!) to take photos of householders trimming roses.
If orcas can talk to each other – and I have no doubt they do, even if we can’t fathom the language – I wonder what they say about us beastly humans?

Gagging for caffeine

2010-02-16T18:21:00.000-08:00

I had a grim week this summer. I stopped drinking coffee.
It’s the second time in my life that I’ve gone cold turkey – both times on the advice of naturopaths who told me that coffee is not my friend.
So I knew how tough it was going to be. And this time around was no different from my previous experience. I felt shivery, headachy, utterly out of sorts and yes, there were those sharp leg pains back again.
The emotional tug was worse. I had to look the other way each time I passed my favourite cafes, lest I got lured inside to worship at the espresso machine.
Before, I couldn’t start the day without a plunger of stiff black stuff with breakfast. There also had to be the mid-morning flat white and maybe an afternoon one as well if I was meeting friends. Each time a cup was placed before me I would admire its heady aroma, the richness of the crema and the dinky little pattern on top created by a caring barista.
There was the whole ceremonial ritual of playing with the spoon, stirring, skimming off a little foam, slipping it between your lips. I can't like Starbucks because of the spoon shortage there. A wooden or plastic stick is no substitute. But overall, even Starbucks will do if there's no alternative. A good coffee (or so I believed) makes everything better.
When I stopped and become an outcast, I began to realise how intensely our world is engaged in a coffee culture that did not exist a few short years ago. There’s a cafe on every corner to feed our habit. Mobile vans are on patrol for office and factory workers who can’t cope without double-shot lattes. Portable machines take centre stage at farmers’ markets. Every second person on the street is carrying a cardboard cup with plastic cap. Forests are being felled to make those cups.
We’ve gone as ga-ga over coffee as we have over bottled water.
Petrol outlets are probably making more money from caffeine (and water) than they are from fuel. The weatherbeaten guys who used to check your oil and tyres - ah, in the good old days - are now hunched over steaming machines in the BP shop, looking embarrassed about having to faff around with chocolate powder and sugar tubes.
We are so hooked.
I decided that stopping coffee was like stopping smoking. Smokers convince themselves that having a cigarette calms their nerves, when really all it calms is the desire to have another cigarette. We have to have a coffee to perk us up, when really we just need to have one to make us feel like the last time we had one. We’re addicted.
At least lattes don’t give you cancer. At least not as far as we know. But surely when it hurts to give something up, it can’t be doing you much good.
So at breakfast now, I drink green tea. But being healthy can’t last for long. I’m back onto flat whites. Just once a day. Damn, it’s good.

A new decade flies in

2009-12-14T14:31:00.000-08:00

It seems like such a short time ago that we were all hyped up over the end of the 90s. The new millennium was coming! A brave new age! That is, if we could get over the spectre of Y2K and all the world’s computers crashing and dying. How quaint it all was.
So where were you on that fateful New Year’s Eve? I stood on the balcony of a little apartment we then had in Auckland, trying to spot the fireworks display through the murk. It rained and rained and rained.
Then I went to Okahu Bay to watch a fleet of Maori canoes welcome in the dawn. Had to park miles away. Sat on the beach with friends. The day dawned a bit pallid and dull. We were all exhausted by then. Trudged back to the car, went home, slept, got up – and the world went on.
A lot has happened since those celebrations around the globe, much of it nasty and bewildering. TIME magazine recently declared it a ‘toxic decade’. And suddenly this first decade of the 21st century has almost gone. We’re all ten years older. We’ve either leapt or been dragged into the digital world, which continues to spin ever faster.
Time itself seems to spin faster – and not just because we’re getting older. There’s so much going on that your brain hurts.
I recall, a decade ago, having conversations about what we would call this decade, for the ‘zero’ years did not make for easy contractions like seventies, eighties and nineties.
Some reckoned we’d label them the noughties, but that hasn’t really happened yet. Instead, we just talk about, for instance, 05 or 06. And soon we’ll be referring to 2-10 and 2-11, booting the middle zero out of the way. Or maybe we’ll say twenty-ten or twenty-11. Whatever, the next lot of numbers is roaring down the freeway at us.
In the last decade, TVs grew skinny while people grew large; we talked less and texted more; financial bubbles grew and burst; the web went more viral; gossip grew more global; and mankind kept on chopping down rain forests and firing guns at each other.
So what’s likely to happen next? Who knows. But here are ten little expectations from me. I reckon we’ll see:
1 MORE DRAMA over climate change, and also more talk about limiting the number of people on the planet. Expect to hear from groups pushing a ‘Stop At Two’ agenda.
2. MORE ANGST about geopolitics. So what’s new!? Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan (which is now apparently being tagged ‘Afpak’ in strategic-thinking circles), Israel, Palestine: all such a mess.
3. MORE RUSH and excitement about bright sparks inventing clever new things to improve our lives. Today’s young people, who’ve grown up with computers, will produce marvels the world has never seen before.
4. MORE APPRECIATION of old-fashioned values like friendship, caring, community spirit. With so much going on in the digital world, human interaction will be all the more valued and yearned for.
5. MORE SOCIAL NETWORKING and digital media to both delight us and baffle us until we get the hang of it. Plaxo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Flickr; Ning, Bing and Jing – they may sound like Santa’s reindeer but there are hundreds of sites and tools to discover and use.
6. MORE NEED (as a consequence of the point above) to pay attention to body maintenance – with better eating, exercise and de-stressing activities to balance up this stressful world.
7. MORE ADDICTION to the things we use to get away from it all – such as iTunes and You Tube and mountains of pills and liquids, including those endless cups of coffee – the stimulating drug that so many of us simply can’t do without.
8. MORE ADMIRATION of truth, honesty, compassion and moral magnificence.
9. MORE MAGNIFICENCE in performing and visual arts. We don’t want everything brought to us on-screen. It’s glorious to see real live people producing sights and sounds that makes the heart sing.
10. MORE YEARNING for simplicity. Life is now so very complex that it’s the small things we’ll love even more: summer sand beneath our feet; the sound of birds, waves and rippling streams; hugs from loved ones; artless prattle from small children; smiles from strangers; and beautiful, useful things made by hand.
Happy Christmas, all.

Night Horrors

2009-11-16T01:27:00.000-08:00

Are we witnessing the decline and fall of our civilization? Sometimes, when I look at TV, I think so.
Slowly, subtly – and not so subtly – the box has become a very scary place to spend time with. Oddly, most of the truly awful stuff comes from England. It’s an strange state of affairs considering that for years we idolised the UK’s quality dramas. They’re still there. I hear, for instance, that the recently screened Bleak House was great.
But most British fare is now pretty yucky. I couldn’t believe my eyes a week or two ago when I stumbled over something on Prime called Three Fat Brides and One Thin Dress. The idea of this ‘reality’ show is for three chubby women to diet furiously in the hope of squeezing themselves into a strapless, bejewelled slip of a gown fit for a princess. This show is really just another version of Cinderella, only there’s no need now for Cinders to be sweet or brave or long-suffering, but merely to be skinny.
We’ve seen lots of dieting on the telly, but this was the first time I’d seen the judge demand that participants bring along a fecal sample for discussion. The judge is, naturally, blonde and skinny and issues her orders like a trainer calling sheep dogs to heel.
‘Whose poo is this?’ she shrieked, picking up a plastic lidded box with a dark turd inside. A chart on the wall behind her indicated the look and shape of the perfect poo. Smooth and snake-like is how they’re supposed to be, apparently.
One of the brides-to-be confessed shamefacedly that in fact the lumpy offering had been produced by her fiancé, Gareth. Judge Lady thought as much. With an expression of disgust she lifted the lid and snapped it shut again. ‘It stinks!’ she shrilled, outraged that the bride-to-be had been too shy to produce a sample which might somehow have been more fragrant.
I could barely believe that this was going on in my living room. But still, I shouldn’t have been surprised as evening TV is now largely a swamp of nightly murder, mayhem and gooey forensics as floods of crime shows swallow up prime time.
Some nights I switch instead to the History Channel (uh-oh, soldiers being machine-gunned); Animal Planet (crikey dick, another animal-cruelty show); E! (how many Botoxed starlets can there be in the world?); the Documentary Channel (oops, it’s Fat Doctor with surgeons up to their elbows inside the torsos of the super-obese); and Fox News, where all the gals look like ex-Miss Americas and most of the men seem to hate Democrats.
And yet, every now and again, something wonderful shimmers on the screen. Just today I caught a brief documentary on Al Jazeera about South Africa’s Miagi Youth Orchestra, a classical-music ensemble of young and hugely talented players from right across the race and income spectrum. I watched a slender black boy lost in the magic of wringing music from his viola, his whole body trembling with the sound and passion of it, his face glowing with the pleasure and power of creating beauty. Aah, sometimes, even now, it’s really worth sitting down in front of the telly.

Green shoots you can believe in

2009-09-18T22:41:00.000-07:00

We keep on reading about ‘green shoots’ of recovery as the world struggles out of recession. Some of them seem a bit illusory, but seeing real green shoots does your heart good.

I was in Melbourne last month, catching up with my old friend Mary, who took me, appropriately enough, to Marysville. The name sounds familiar? It should, because it was one of the country towns almost wiped out in Victoria’s terrible black Saturday fires last February. Thirty-three of its citizens died.

The disaster scene is still a surreal sight. You drive the winding road through miles and miles of blackened trees, along that stretch where, in the midst of hot panic, some people perished in their cars as they fled, blinded by the smoke, overwhelmed by the speed of the flames.

Now you can stop along that road, get out and listen...to total silence. All these months later, the stink of burning still drifts through the darkened forest. If you touch the black charcoal that coats a roadside trunk, it feels as fragile and brittle as the top of a burnt pavlova cake.

The town is a sad sight. There are just a few remaining shops and a grid of empty streets with blank spaces laid bare where bulldozers have been in and scraped ruined houses away. Oddly, there are some undamaged wooden signs still hanging between posts where front fences or hedges must have been, advertising the rates for cosy weekend accommodation in cottages that no longer exist.

But there are signs of new life. A big marquee fills the space where a hotel once stood, with two temporary cafes inside offering food and coffee. Workers in orange vests are busy as re-building gets under way around the village.

And the marvellous thing is that all the tall black tree trunks in the forest are just beginning now to shed charcoal-coated bark to reveal bright, fresh, healthy timber. Springing from the vertical trunks are clumps of beautiful, bright green tiny leaves, like explosions of green feather dusters. Some of the trees, from a distance, look to be sporting a coat of green down, like new feathers on the skin of a baby bird. Tree ferns too, have somehow survived and are sprouting elegant new fronds.

And as spring arrives in Marysville, daffodils are blooming – dots of sunny yellow in otherwise empty gardens. Of course, when the fires roared over and scorched the land any bulbs still tucked underground from previous years slept safely on, untouched by the heat, ready to do their thing next time Nature sent out whatever subtle signal it is that motivates a daffodil to stand up and sing. So there they are, blooming like crazy, semaphoring hope.

Rain of terror

2009-08-26T22:40:00.000-07:00

Oh, such care people are taking not to offend. So fragile have we become. How thin our skins are. How easy it is to wound with a careless word or two. It must be so, or we wouldn’t be scolded for using what seem to be essentially harmless terms. A friend who runs seminars for a living tells me she was berated recently for asking the attendees to do some brain-storming. A fine phrase, I’d have thought, full of the electricity and imagery that suggests the zipping and zapping of lively debate. But... no.
Brainstorming is no longer allowed less it be deemed to refer to the electrical disturbances that are a part of epilepsy. The approved phrase to use now to describe a hectic exchange of ideas is ‘thought shower’. How pallid. How wet that sounds. Let’s not get excited, folks. Let’s just sit and hear the drip, drip, drip of opinions wafting down from above.
Not long after hearing that, I noticed a couple of terms that are supposed to be now out of bounds in business circles, lest women be outraged. Surely, I thought, surely, after something like 40 years of feminism, there can’t be any ways left to get it wrong? But yes.
Be advised that it’s possibly offensive today refer to anyone as your ‘right-hand man’ (even, or maybe especially, if she’s a girl). And that something personally affirmed by two parties should not now be called a ‘gentleman’s agreement’.
Of course, because we get so much news in mere sound bites and headlines, clever manipulation of words is now mandatory in politics and business. Some people make a good living out of telling people how to do it. Thus we hear about oil companies benignly ‘exploring for energy’, not wantonly ‘drilling for oil’. Some expressions have become famous in themselves – and not in a good way. When we hear, for instance, of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ the phrase is no more appealing than ‘torture’ ever was.
I just read an article by one of America’s most influential word wranglers, Frank Luntz, author of a book called Words that Work: It’s Not What You Say, it’s What People Hear.
Frank says that if you’re a leader of a country or a business, there are five words you should be using. They are: consequences (because people think there should be consequences); impact (because we want to know what’s really happening); reliability (because we’re sick of things not working); mission (because we want to know our leaders care); and commitment (because we care that leaders are personally committed to things, and are not just making empty promises).
Being on a mission, says Frank, is different from dreaming up some cold corporate mission statement. I remember those from my corporate years. What a crock they all were.
There are a few more words I’d add to the good-words-for-leaders list that. Like truth, authenticity, and honesty. Though if someone in charge says they’re giving us the ‘honest truth’ it’s just the sort of statement to make me imagine every shade of dishonesty possible. It’s got to the point where I hardly believe anything I hear on the news.
These days, I’m more interested in real, everyday people and their rich, juicy, tender, amazing stories of real life.
• Give yourself time out to write about your life. Do it for you and your family – for memories not kept are memories forgotten. I'm running workshops in Orewa and Auckland in October and November. All you need for an intriguing and uplifting day is a pen and your personal storehouse of experience. For info go to www.storyofmylife.co.nz

All shopped out

2009-08-19T01:58:00.000-07:00

I think that in future we’ll look back at the designer carrier bag as a symbol of the era just past. Think of every TV ad you ever see that reflects city lifestyle or tries to promote the joys of destination shopping. Every one features at least a few seconds of some babe sashaying along with bags swinging from each hand.
There’s an ad on New Zealand TV right now (for Tower Insurance) where two guys are standing talking outside a house while, in the background, a woman is unpacking a shiny SUV. She lifts up the rear door to reveal a sea of bags like the one I’ve drawn here.
Her man looks on glumly as she carries them into the house. They are rectangular, sharp edged and prettified with logos – because, of course, that’s the whole point of these bags. They’re not just for putting stuff in. As you carry them along, they also turn you into a walking, free advertisement for the store or designer to whom you’ve just handed cash or card.
Thus encumbered, you are proclaiming, ‘I shop. I consume with a capital C. I am playing my part by buying stuff that others make, therefore ensuring enduring employment for everyone involved in the manufacture, packaging and transport of these consumables. Not only that, but I’m smart and I’m loaded and can afford the latest gear and am therefore to be admired.’ There’s a whole lotta snobby yada-yada embodied in every paper carry bag.
There’s been a feeling abroad for a long time that not only must you tote shopping bags to keep the economy spinning, you should also see shopping as leisure because everyone knows (don’t they?) that shopping is fun, fun, fun. Tell that to someone who’d love to buy lovely things that nestle in bags like that, but can’t afford them. For them it’s yearn, yearn, yearn.
We forget about the newness of shopping culture for the masses. Time was when those with the money to enjoy top-ending shopping would never have consented to carrying their own purchases. Things were delivered. At the tradesmen’s entrance – if you had such a thing.
More recently, stores would let trusted customers take things home ‘on appro’ so you could try on clothes in the privacy of your own home, or check if those cushions really did match the drapes. There was no deposit, no taking of credit card details. The merchant would know the customer would return them in good order if they were not wanted. The customer would know that if they failed to do that, or failed to pay on time, their name would be mud. The system worked on trust.
But now we have little trust. Now it’s, ‘Show me the money’. Or at least, ‘Show me your gold card’. Only then can you walk out with that thousand-dollar suit wrapped in tissue in a loopy-handled, ego-booster bag. Which you’ll chuck away as soon as you get home.
As the world struggles to climb out of recession, economists everywhere are desperate for us to go back to the mall with the same old devil-may-care ease. But I think the mindless-shopping era is over. We may not be going back to brown paper parcels, wrapped up in string. But all of that just-put-it-on-the-card, got-to-have-it attitude? It’s feeling very 20th century.

THE CHARMED OR UNCHARMED LIFE

2009-07-07T16:09:00.000-07:00

I’m having trouble thinking about blogging and all things digital right now because my head is back in the 19th century. I’m writing a new novel set around 1880 and the more I read letters from that era that end in flourishing signatures, preceded by phrases like “I am, your affectionate brother" or "yours very truly”, the harder it is to wrench myself back into today.
Look at this signature by my great-grandfather, Joe Buddle, laid down by him in Tauranga in 1879. It’s so elegant and practised that it would seem it was obligatory then to develop a ‘hand’ that said something about you - assuming you could actually read and write.
We don’t care now. Who’s writing letters with a pen? People aren’t even bothering to say “Hi Joe” at the start of emails, let alone “Dear Joe”. We just launch right into the message. Our sign-offs are just “cheers”, or “regards” if we’re being extra polite. Affection doesn't get a look in. And business emails don’t even carry a name as a sign-off because the automatic signature does it for you. Texting requires no goodbyes at all, except perhaps a CU.
Perhaps it’s all this impersonal communicating that is making big events seem much more profound now. Half the planet must have stopped to watch Michael Jackson’s memorial service, with all of its tributes. When Michael’s brother Germaine sang Smile, and his daughter Paris showed us her breaking heart, they revealed how important it is in this crazy world for us to stop, listen and feel.
We’ve come in 130 years from a world where it was important to write 'very truly’ to one where we care mostly about speed and instant fame.
Michael’s life may have been all too speedy and a bit manic, especially in his later years, but in his going he’s somehow touched a lot of lives.
His whole career was all about exposure and visibility (and the opposite as well - made up of secrecy and shadows). In a way, he was a human example of the power of advertising, that peculiarly 20th century art form.
The entire world knew his music and his moves and his face. Whether admired or despised, he was a massive global brand.
But I’ve found that advertising’s power began to get a hold on us much earlier than the 20th century. In reading old issues of the Bay of Plenty Times I’ve come across an 1880 ditty that was already shouting to the world that if you wanted to be KNOWN, if you wanted to SUCCEED, then you had to advertise, you had to be SEEN. Here’s how it goes – read and ponder:

THE CHARM OF LIFE
Tell me not that advertising
Is at best an empty dream,
For its charm is more surprising
That its base traducers deem.

And whichever way thou turnest
Thou wilt find upon the whole,
Those who advertise in earnest
Soonest reach the wished for goal.

Wouldst thou save regret and sorrow
For good prospects thrown away?
Never wait, then, till tomorrow;
Always advertise today.

Advertise then! Time is fleeting!
All the wealth this side the grave
That is ever worth the meeting
It will bring if thou be brave.

Try the charm of advertising,
And avert a meaner fate;
Be ye ever enterprising,
Learn to advertise and wait.
(Author unknown)

Feeling a touch of grumpy coming on

2009-06-07T20:13:00.000-07:00

I guess the time may come for all of us to get to the grumpy old woman (or man) stage. Women have menopause to contend with, of course. And Dr Frances Pitsilis told Paul Henry on TV1’s Breakfast show that male menopause really can happen. It’s all because a bloke’s testosterone levels drop throughout life.
At 70, your average guy apparently has only half as much of the t-hormone as he had at 20. And as it wanes, from middle age onwards, men can lose their potency and enjoyment of life – not just in the sexual sense but also in terms of general perkiness, curiosity and liveliness of thought, possibly leading to glumness, depression and even a shorter life span.
Not to worry though, she said. Once your GP has ascertained your testosterone status through blood tests (and you might need more than one as the results aren’t always exact), he or she can prescribe hormone boosters. One such little helper comes in the form of a cream.
“Where do you apply it?” asked Henry innocently as he picked up a jar of the wonder ointment. ‘Behind your testicles,” said the good doctor, thus perhaps becoming the only person to ever utter the word on Breakfast. Henry dropped the jar so fast it was as if she’d told him he was holding a scorpion.
It was just about the best chuckly moment of the morning. But as a grumpy old woman in the making, I’d already had my share of droll moments. One was hearing a Newstalk ZB newsreader inform me that the recent loss of an Air France jet may have been partly caused by a “fierce equilateral storm”.
“Equatorial, you fool!” I said into the early morning darkness, feeling guilty that I could find any humour at all in anything to do with such a ghastly event. Perhaps it was that very earliness that addled the brain of the journalist who wrote the sentence for her to read.
And perhaps it was the same only-half-awake person who put a piece of paper in front of Kate Hawkesby recently, requiring her to read in another bulletin that the Pope had beatified someone (thus proclaiming that the person was blessed and worthy of veneration). Only the word that came out of Hawkesby’s mouth was “beautified”.
But even the grand and the famous can have foot-in-mouth moments. British PM Gordon Brown dropped a lovely clanger in a speech about D-Day when he referred not to Omaha Beach, but Obama Beach. Just one more reason for the beleaguered PM to feel like a total grumpy old man right now.

The instant book machine

2009-05-12T15:52:00.000-07:00

I'm intrigued by this video, showing the workings of a newish gizmo called the Espresso Book Machine. It's not exactly mass production, but in book shops you can use it to order up out-of-print or hard-to-find books, if you can find what you want in the retailer's database. I am not sure how this will work in terms of author's copyright. This is becoming a very complicated world.
However, self-publishers are intrigued by this idea (print your family history,with pictures, for instance), though if you want a thousand copies of something, getting it bulk-printed is still far cheaper. It is of course a great way to make instant books look good, no matter how tedious or unreadable the content may be.(Yay! The world still needs editors, designers and proof readers.)
This video shows the machine in action with book retailer Blackwell's UK, and Angus & Robertson are also doing it in Australia, with eventual plans to put 50 of these machines in shops across Oz and New Zealand.
It's funny, though, that while it's undoubtedly clever, there's something about this machine's whirring noises and moving parts that make it seem kind of steam age - a throw-back rather than a step forward, and more akin to Gutenberg than Digital Age. It takes 15 minutes to print an average book, and costs the same as buying one ready-made.

Check it out

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIq0VqF0MnA

The clack of the keys

2009-05-01T19:37:00.000-07:00

The newspaper paragraph that slayed me lately was the one in which writer and satirist P J O’Rourke admitted to not being able to “work a computer”.
Best-selling author (14 books), top-rated speaker, mocker of presidents and governments, and former foreign desk chief at Rolling Stone , the guy’s been an ace communicator for 30-something years. Now 61, he comes to New Zealand for a full-on round of speechmaking and interviews and tells the Herald’s Karyn Scherer that he’s computer-illiterate.
I am astonished.
He told her, “I can't imagine how I would manage with email. It's just such a massive distraction with email, and BlackBerries, and Twitter, and so on. I have somebody input the stuff and off it goes.”
He excuses himself by saying that if he had a computer he would play with it. He might find himself looking up “exactly what was Rwanda's GDP in 1954, and other such distractions”. He does enough of that already, he says, “just with the books that are sitting around”. And he is nervous that that sort of activity would “soon devolve into playing Battleships with someone, or whatever”.
He has a cell phone but declares that its number is known only to his family, so he and his wife can co-ordinate childminding schedules. Scherer wasn’t brazen enough to ask him if he knows how to text.
He has no interest in blogging. “The only thing that makes writing worth anything is that people put some time and thought into it, and you just can't do that on a blog,” says O’Rourke. (Tell that to some of the best bloggers around.)
He sees the computer not as a useful tool but a distraction, and prefers his outmoded typewriter because all he wants to do is have time to think about something, and not be “constantly distracted and interrupted”. He seems not to consider that cell phones can be switched off, doors can be closed, and email can be checked as often or as rarely as you like.
He sounds like a man who is very easily distracted.
Typewriters. Ye gods. The miles my fingers must have done. I once prized my turquoise Olivetti Lettera portable like I now treasure my laptop. I’ve battered keys on Imperials, Royals, Underwoods and Smith Coronas. I’ve clacked away for hours, furiously typing xxxxx over errors when I couldn’t be bothered using that special eraser (a round, hard, thin rubber disc) or wielding a Wite-Out brush. I’ve faffed around with sheets of carbon paper and once possessed a now long-lost office vocab. Hands up who can remember what a platen is.
O’Rourke apparently uses an IBM Selectric, invented in 1961 and gradually improved over the years until IBM ditched the whole idea when everyone shifted to computers around 1990. Everyone, that is, but O’Rourke. Amazingly, for all his wit and intelligence, he has become an old fogey. Still, whoever it is who “inputs the stuff” must be pleased. At least the job will be there for as long as PJ keeps writing.

Stress in the kitchen

2009-04-28T03:52:00.000-07:00

Everyone wants to cook well, but we forget how CRUCIAL a good home-baked cake was in great-grandma's times for women's self esteem. At least, that's what advertisers tried to tell them.
This word-packed ad, from 1922, tells a tale headed "From Failure to Success: The Story of a Young Wife Who Thought She Couldn't Cook."
Its chapters describe the terrible food served up by a new bride to her long-suffering husband. How shocking this was then. Working women were expected to leave their jobs when they wed. Housewifery was far more important.
The story coyly begins, "When the friends of Miss Office heard that she was to become Mrs Cook, they began to crack the age-old jokes about newly-wed wives. 'Jack will have indigestion for the first month,' they said."
And so it goes. Her first cake is "very heavy", followed by a doughy Madeira, leaden scones and pastry that is "simply waste of good butter".
Then, oh joy, she discovers "sure to rise" Edmonds Baking Powder. "Oh!" she exclaims. "I've not been using Edmonds! No wonder my cooking was a failure!"
Brimming with exclamation marks and proud smiles, she is shown in her pinny at the ad's end as simpering Jack assures her that her cooking is "just as good as Mother's - and better."
Tradition like this is what makes for enduring brands. This is how old slogans make for mindsets that do not change for years and years and years. This is why, when Edmonds was attacked this month by professional cooks for the inadequacy of its Hot Cross Bun recipe, the brand's owners would not admit to any problems at all.
Just like Jack's wife, they had a "sure to rise" reputation to uphold, even when the buns weren't rising.
But they should beware of wives in pinnies. Put-upon women have a habit of flinging aprons off, going back to work and buying store-bought cakes instead. Or not eating cake at all for health reasons. Or coaxing Jack to do some baking instead.

Tick tock bye-bye watch

2009-04-22T18:50:00.000-07:00

Preparing to make a speech to staff at a media company, I trawled through some old magazines I’d once edited and came across a full-page ad from 20 years ago starring the coolest new accessory from those times, the Swatch watch. The guy in the ad was delirious with glee over the prospect of having on his wrist something so sexy, so slender, so very ‘now’.
I’d forgotten about the Swatch. Did a Google. Discovered the brand is very alive and kicking. But it got me thinking about the wristwatch. Years ago in a British museum I was delighted to spot, in a glass case, an example of an early watch from the late 1800s. A fat, clunky thing it was, with a leather strap rendered fragile by use and age.
They became so ubiquitous that a good watch became the gift of choice in the 20th century – the pretty one for a girl’s 21st birthday, the ideal anniversary gift (with a few dinky diamonds), the gold-plated one on retirement. That was a weird idea, actually, given that it’s the very time when clock-watching loses importance.
The Swiss originally cornered the market for watches, along with cuckoo clocks and anything else that ticked. But then something bad happened, at least from the Swiss point of view. The Japanese got inventive. Once they’d got over just copying Swiss cleverness, they began to make watches that were just as good, and cheaper, than timepieces put together in Europe.
Yikes, said the Swiss. What to do? And so they invented the Swatch. Cheap, thin, bright, smart and colourful, they were an instant success in a brand-hungry world.
But now something else bad is happening. People are going off them altogether. Timepiece sales have dropped off every year since 2001. I asked my audience yesterday how many of them go watch-less. Close to half the room raised their hands.
Instead, they rely on cell phones, PDAs, in-car digital displays, the computers they sit in front of all day and the clocks that still adorn public buildings around town. It’s the cell phone that’s really done the damage of course. Everyone has one available at all times.
And yet what a funny turnaround that is. Apparently the first flush of enthusiasm for wrist watches came in the women’s fashion accessory market. A hundred years ago men carried pocket watches. Ladies’ gowns didn’t have handy pockets, so a dainty wristwatch was a boon for them.
World War 1 changed that. Blokes about to let loose the artillery or urge the troops out of the trench didn’t have time to be digging into pockets to find out if the moment had come. A flicking glance at the wrist was so much easier.
And now here we, hurtling into the digital future and, at the same time, returning to the past and fumbling in pockets and bags to find a time display not attached to our persons. These must be worrying times at Rolex. And at Swatch.

Recession's alphabet soup

2009-04-07T17:03:00.000-07:00

Once it was acronyms that drove us nuts. Well, they still do. I’m forever stumbling over clumps of letters that mean nothing to me.

Now we’re also being faced with the challenge of understanding itty-bitty letters. The first time I heard economists debating the likely look of the end of the recession, I thought, ‘what the?!’ They spoke of U-curves, and V-shapes and (ohmigod) the worst shape of all... the dreaded L.
It seems that, historically, recessions have followed certain patterns – giving us those Us, Vs and Ls. It seems we all love Vs, because it means a swift descent into the depths, followed by an equally rapid upsurge – something like the woe that hits fox-trotters’ faces when criticised by judges on Dancing with the Stars , quickly followed by grins when they score the next dollop of praise.
U curves are pretty good too. We slide down, swoop around the bend and then quickly ascend once more. But the L? Bad news. It indicates a vertical drop followed by a flat line, with damn-all uptick in sight.
I keep hearing commentators rattling on about ‘green shoots’, signs of life, and evidence of better results. But it all depends on who’s talking. It seems Kiwi business people aren’t expecting a U any time soon, given that the latest survey out today (April 8) says confidence hasn’t been this low since 1974. But given that stockmarkets have done a little up-climb lately, followed by a down-slip, I’m betting it won’t be long before someone invents a W mode, with a pesky up/down jiggly bit in the middle. Maybe even a series of them.
My metaphorical soup was made even murkier last week when I heard someone use “hockey-stick” talk to describe the typical uptake pattern for new technology. I took that to mean there’s a brief, u-shaped hesitation at the bottom of any new way of doing things, followed by a swoop up the vertical handle of the stick, as more and more people come on board.
But no.
Googling revealed that the term – coined by someone debating climate records – is based on the shape of a North American ice hockey stick. It describes numbers running along from left to right on a flat line (as represented by a stick lying on its back) followed by an acutely angled upturn, like the blade of that sort of stick. Sharp angle, not U-curve.
At least acronyms do have meanings you can easily get to grips with, unlike two types of hockey sticks. Why, only today I’ve been reading about a NASA project called THEMIS, which stands, as I’m sure you know, for Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms. Yes, well. It is interesting. Really.
NB As there’s nothing we can do about economics or outer space, the best thing to do is work on our own wellbeing. Which means getting out, having fun and being creative. Here are four ways of doing that (all Auckland events). I’ve done courses with all the women mentioned below and know they can give you a good, powerful and even life-changing time.

You can:

FEEL EMPOWERED at Sally Mabelle’s uplifting range of classes covering singing, speaking, relating, and creating. http://sallymabelle.com/events

FIND THE COURAGE TO BE YOURSELF by attending six evening sessions with visionary trainer Amanda Fleming, beginning mid June. Here's the info on this, and her other courses. www.amandafleming.co.nz/courses

DANCE FOR JOY at an afternoon event, April 19, with the inspiring Lizzie Haylock and unwind out of your rushing, time-stressed life. NB No dancing talent needed! As Lizzie says, however you want to move is perfect, no matter your age or shape. A creative, time-out, sensory space for women. For info email: lhaylock@xtra.co.nz

And you can also WRITE SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL, at my own weekend course on May 16-17, Call Out Your Inner Writer. It’s just as much about developing your creative confidence as your scribbling skills. www.lindseydawson.com

Silver bullets flying everywhere

2009-03-19T15:51:00.000-07:00

Have we ever heard so much about silver bullets as in recent times? Not that anyone is being over-optimistic about the power of the famed SB. But every time someone announces the pouring of gazillions of dollars, euros or pounds into some floundering bank or other, a sombre guy in a dark suit pops up to say, “this may not be the silver bullet”.
Okay, okay, we get the picture. No matter how much cash gets shovelled into achingly deep holes, there is no guarantee it’ll do the trick of reviving the global economy.
It got me wondering where the silver bullet concept comes from. Thanks to Wikipedia, I now have a clue or two. Appropriately enough for these scary times, it goes back to the days when werewolves, vampires, monsters and other boogeymen made small children whimper and brought bad dreams in the night.
Seems that if you were going out into the dark to slay such beasts with your trusty musket, only silver ammo would do. Why silver? It’s all to do with ancient associations of silver with the moon and the human soul. With its clean, bright sheen, silver was thought to be the only metal brilliant enough to vanquish evil.
The Brothers Grimm dreamt up silver buttons for a gun used in their fairytale,‘The Two Brothers’, to do away with a bullet-proof witch.
In the 20th century a Eugene O’Neill play, ‘the Emperor Jones’, had silver bullets at the core of the story. Investors in 21st century schemes run by modern vampire Bernie Madoff might have been wishing for a silver slug or two lately, too.
But the irony of it all is that apparently they’re not actually that useful. Because silver is less dense than lead, it’s a bit sluggish when fired from a gun. P’raps it’s time for the leaders of nations and fixers of problems to dream up a different metaphor.

R.I.P. the daily paper

2009-03-18T20:43:00.000-07:00

Newspapers are dying. It’s like watching a part of civilization sputtering and going dark. Mostly it’s happening in America. The latest was the 146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer (which will survive in a different form, online. At least, that’s the plan.) Before that, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News shut its doors.
In San Francisco they’re close to losing the Chronicle. On the east coast the New York Times was recently saved from bankruptcy by a Mexican billionaire. What a bitter pill it must have been for proud New Yorkers to be rescued by a super-wealthy man called Carlos from south of the border!
The thing that’s killing all these papers (and the many more also in deep doo-doo) is the internet. Everything’s going there... both readers and advertising dollars. Young people aren’t reading newspapers now. The Classifieds are shrinking. Every happens online and for free and at such great speed that by the time you read a morning paper almost everything in it is no longer news. Even if you’ve not seen it online, you’ll have sucked it up via TV or radio.
Print’s just not in the game any more.
Newspapers are ‘declining and transitioning’ according to a guy whose company recently shored up another sick-puppy newspaper, San Diego’s Union Tribune. In other words, we’re in a time of great change and no-one knows quite where thing s will end up.
Of course, papers have died here too. I often go past an empty Auckland City lot. It’s long been a car park but once contained the building that housed the Auckland Star, my first workplace. Its smoke-filled newsroom... gone. The clattering linotype machines... gone. The great presses whose thunder used to shake the Fort Street pavement and fill the air with pungent ink fumes...gone.
And yet we shouldn’t be surprised. There was something very old about many of these dead papers. It was in the way they announced themselves to the world. Their top-of-front-page titles were in heavy gothic script. Gutenberg, who invented movable type and paved the way for commercial printing, used this script in the 1400s. Even then it was old – apeing the painstaking calligraphy used by monks and nuns to hand-copy old religious texts.
A hundred years ago, newspaper proprietors took pride in that look because it stood for authority, power and heritage. Today it just looks, well, quaint.
And though it’s still used on the masthead of the newspaper I read every day (more out of habit than enthusiasm), I look at that antique font and see it not as a sign of power, but as a signal that these once-great institutions are running close to their use-by date. Sob. I don’t want papers to die. They’ve been part of my life. But then (and here’s the real killer) my local takeaway shop doesn’t even deign to wrap up fish’n’chips in dirty newsprint.

High Altitude Harbingers of Change

2009-02-16T13:27:00.000-08:00

I last wore shoes like this when I was about 17. I remember red ones with a bow on the front, just like this sketch of mine. (Only there were no imps playing inside.) And I had some super-glam gold lamé ones. That is ‘lamé’ with an accent on the e to denote glittery fabric, which is now so out of fashion that you may not have heard of it. Without the accent you’ll think I’m writing ‘lame’ which is a whole different word. Although if you wear shoes like this for long enough you get quite lame quite fast.

I’m careful about confusion these days because I was interviewed by a journalist for Sunday magazine before Christmas for a story on optimism, and gave her a list of qualities which I thought were good to have if you wanted to live a cheerful life. I gave her words like gratitude, calm, playfulness etc and included civility in there. She wrote that down as servility. Just a little bit off the mark!

Anyhow, back to shoes. I note that in the fashion-show world, heels have never been thinner or higher than they are now. You too will have seen leggy models falling off the things on slippery runways. (Who knows why they’re called runways, because models lope, stride or teeter or but are rarely seen running. Shoes like this would, anyway, make that impossible.)

But given that it was the 1960s when heels were last like this, I begin to wonder whether women’s shoes and times of great change are not somehow connected. The last time girls wore stilettos was a pretty crazy period when old ways were crumbling and everything was shifting from post-war to new-era. And now, here they are again, just as everything seems new and challenging all over again. It’s as if the more uncertain the times, the higher the heel. I await the next few years with interest. Watch for women’s heels to go shorter and wider next year as the world strives for more balance and stability. Like the impish fellow on the slide, we are in for a ride.

Cheerleading for cellulite

2009-02-13T16:33:00.000-08:00

It's raining here today - the first cool, grey day for a long time in a summer when we've equalled the highest Auckland temp ever recorded, back in 1872 or therabouts. Who knew there was anyone recording temperatures on this colonial shore that long ago? When it's over 32 deg C and humid as well, it feels like Singapore.
So today (when I've even had to put on socks for warmth!) there's no-one on the beach, not even any dogged dog walkers. And certainly no skinny gals in teensie bikinis. Welcome then to the kind of girl I'm happy to see on the beach any old time. She's my cheerleader for cellulite.
Someone this big is usually called obese. But let's hear it for women who are not those angular glowering colts who canter the runways at the world's fashion shows. Let us praise women who are full-bodied, rounded, laughing exemplars of beauty.
I've long despised the mantra, invented by the beauty industry, that insists women must do all in their power to get rid of cellulite or 'orange peel' thighs.
It seems we've forgotten that every society in history has admired young women who are slim of waist AND broad of hip - sure indicators (as they thought in ancient times) of a woman's ability to bear children.
Today's girls are filled with woe if they fail to possess lean and boyish thighs that, preferably, don't touch at the top. Once 'feminine' meant curvy. Now it means that most nebulous of terms, toned. Today's female body is now required to be thin, hard and sculpted. How bullied we are by the arbiters of style. Nothing wrong, I say, with flesh that's allowed to jiggle. Not a lot. But a little. Cellulite and all.

OBAMA'S BUBBLE CAR

2009-02-02T20:58:00.000-08:00

It was a mighty fine day when Obama got inaugurated. Wahoo, we all went! Of course, the size of his task is already growing and growing - along with the dimensions of the new presidential limo. What a horrible vehicle, so very indicative of the grim and bloated condition that its maker, GM, is in. The media quickly dubbed it The Beast.
Apparently able to withstand attacks of the most grievous kind, The Beast shuts Obama off from the world so well that he might as well be in a submarine.
In olden times, emperors rode in open coaches or chariots so that their adoring people could see them. Of course, the downside of that, even in fairly modern times, has been that it's made even well-loved people horribly vulnerable to assassins. Viz Archduke Whatsit of Sarajevo and President Kennedy.
And now, Prez Obama lives in such a perilous world that he must be enclosed as often as possible inside bullet-proof glass. It is so thick, that glass, that during the great presidential parade it all but obscured the First Family. I think I spotted one of the girls, her profile so murky that it was like seeing her through green swamp water.
Apparently the president chafes at the bubble in which he must now live, and so has persuaded his minions that yes he can carry his Blackberry so he can communicate with real people and not just the government.
It all reminds me of Eisenhower. After he left the White House (back in the 50s)he picked up a telephone to make a call and wanted to know what the funny noise was. Because aides had always made his calls he'd never heard a dial tone before.
You get the feeling Obama will resist such isolation and insulation. But oh, that car. Inside The Beast he must feel like an old-time deep-sea diver in heavy helmet and thick face visor, speaking through a tube to the space out there where the sun shines and breezes flow.

A pilot's lament for the way things used to be

2008-12-14T01:09:00.000-08:00

Such a strange year’s end we’re living through. There’s lots of bad news out there and, conversely, lots of hopeful talk as well. You hear many ‘experts’ saying things will get worse, and just as many saying things will get better. Who knows which way it’ll go in ‘09.
You also hear lots of grumbling about how everything’s falling apart in the 21st century, and much yearning for the way things were back in the 20th.
For instance, read the following lament by an ageing pilot about the glory days of aviation. An un-named flyer who once commanded Boeing 707s - presumably in the US, given the American references - he vents a heap of rage about a time when pilots were kings, check-in queues were short, security barely mattered and flying was a whole lot more fun.
You might find some of his views dated (even offensive!) but there you go... that’s another of the differences between then and now.
Thanks to local former aviator Len Mills for passing on this anguished piece. It’ll ring bells for you not only on air travel, but also on political correctness, gender relations and social attitudes that have all changed radically in the last decade or three.
That's John Travolta's own 707 in the picture, painted up in old Qantas livery. I reckon that secretly, most men want to be like him. and the guy who wrote the following piece, probably once was like him.
“Those were the good ole days. Pilots back then were men that didn't want to be women or girlymen. Pilots drank coffee and whiskey, smoked cigars and didn't wear digital watches.
“They carried their own suitcases and brain bags like the real men that they were. Pilots didn't bend over into the crash position multiple times each day in front of the passengers at security so that some government agent could probe for tweezers or fingernail clippers or too much toothpaste.
“Pilots did not go through the terminal impersonating a caddy pulling a bunch of golf clubs, computers, guitars, and feed bags full of tofu and granola on a sissy-trailer with no hat and granny glasses hanging on a pink string around their pencil neck while talking to their personal trainer on their cell phone.
“Being an airline captain was as good as being the King in a Mel Brooks movie. All the stewardesses (a.k.a. flight attendants) were young, attractive, single women who were proud to be combatants in the sexual revolution.
“They didn't have to turn sideways, grease up and suck it in to get through the cockpit door. They would blush and say thank you when told that they looked good, instead of filing a sexual harassment claim.
“Passengers wore nice clothes and were polite, they could speak AND understand English. They didn't speak gibberish or listen to loud 'gangsta rap' on their iPods. They bathed and didn't smell like a rotting pile of garbage in a jogging suit and flip-flops. Children didn't travel alone, commuting between trailer parks. There were no mongol hordes asking for a "mu-fuggin" seatbelt extension or a Scotch and grapefruit juice cocktail with a twist.
“If the captain wanted to throw some offensive, ranting jerk off the airplane, it was done without any worries of a lawsuit or getting fired.
“Axial flow engines crackled with the sound of freedom and left an impressive black smoke trail like a locomotive burning soft coal. Jet fuel was cheap and once the throttles were pushed up they were left there. After all , it was the jet age and the idea was to go fast (run like a lizard on a hardwood floor).
“Economy cruise was something in the performance book, but no one knew why or where it was. When the clacker [a flight-deck warning sound] went off no one got all tight and scared because Boeing built it out of iron, nothing was going to fall off and that sound had the same effect on real pilots then as Viagra does now for those new age guys.
“There was very little plastic and no composites in the airplanes or the stewardesses' pectoral regions. Airplanes and women had eye-pleasing symmetrical curves, not a bunch of ugly vortex generators, ventral fins, winglets, flow diverters, tattoos, rings in their nose, tongues and eyebrows. “Airlines were run by real men like Juan Trippe [the founder of Pan Am] who had built their companies virtually from scratch, knew many of their employees by name and were lifetime airline employees themselves...not these pseudo financiers and bean counters who now flit from one occupation to another for a few extra bucks, a better golden parachute, or a fancier title, while fervently believing that they are a better class of beings unto themselves.
“And so it was back then....and sadly, will never be again.”

GM splutters and gold glows brighter

2008-10-13T21:17:00.000-07:00

On October 10, General Motors shares in America fell to the same price as they were at in 1950. The company once produced the mighty Oldsmobile, such as the hulking 1958
sedan seen here. But now ‒ bogged down its by huge factories, enormous workforce and crippling pension payments to past employees ‒ it is said to be chewing through $1 billion a month and simply not selling enough SUVs to make even a small dent in that river of cash. And they have only $14 or so billion left in the kitty. Which means (unless they, too, get a bailout from Uncle Sam’s resentful taxpayers) it won’t be long before they’re broke.
What, then, would happen to the GM and Holden brands in this part of the world? Interesting thought. Of course, things are little better at Ford - which will lay off 1500 Australian workers just before Christmas.
Out of the Northern Hemisphere we hear cries of ‘carnage’, ‘chaos’ and ‘catastrophe’. Iceland is virtually bankrupt. Governments are throwing hundreds of billions of dollars and euros at the market-collapse problem and still there’s little economic confidence out there. Yet here, if you turned on talkback radio last week, the only concern being expressed was over the government’s plan to reduce the water flow in our showerheads. And the lead story on Thursday's TV1 news was about the retirement of two Olympic-champ rowers. If that was the biggest thing going on in the world, either we're exceptionally calm and resilient in the face of our own recession, or exceptionally passive and thick.
The next day I was in a shop next door to Michael Hill Jewellers, who had a staff member out front with a bullhorn, shouting at customers to come buy glittering stuff. ‘That must be driving you nuts’, I said to the woman who was serving me. ‘Sure is,’ she replied. ‘And you know what? There were people queueing up outside the door at 7am yesterday to get in there for some bling.”
Meanwhile, in the States, women are taking their old gold jewellery to suburban precious-metal parties, having it evaluated and weighed and swapped for cash. The word in these new troubled times is that, once again, gold will be king.
I’m old enough to remember the same eagerness for gold in the late 80s, the last time we fell into a financial crevasse, when an Aucklander called Ray Smith set up the Goldcorp bullion company and lured in thousands of fretful investors who bought his gold certificates. Only trouble was, when they wanted to clap eyes on the actual shiny stuff it turned out that he had no gold bars at all – or nowhere near enough to cover the cash he’d taken in. He’d just sucked up the money instead and had a high old time before fleeing the country with the loot. He was brought back to face the music, did jail time, and put a whole generation off investing in gold for ever.
But now that few remember his name, a new gold rush can’t be far away. Checking your jewellery box, anyone?

Double-edged swords

2008-10-02T16:33:00.000-07:00

The world today seems full of swords that can fall both ways (which can even apply to flying pigs). We have, for instance, the impending bail-out vote in Washington that, we're told, is the only way to avoid impending financial catastrophe/armageddon/Pearl Harbour (you name it - some expert has said it). And yet the other side of that sharp blade is the undoubted enormous risk that the bail-out will chew away at the value of the US dollar, thus eroding the economy that everyone is so desperate to save.
My local newspaper reminds me today of fund manager Peter Schiff and how he's been predicting this state of affairs for a very long time. Back in 2006 he appeared on the Fox News Bulls and Bears show and was jeered at by other panellists when he said that America's economy was heading for collapse. You can find that clip at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoB4BS7CGAw
That two-year-old show reveals the sword-aspect of Youtube as well. Every foolish word every politican/celebrity/expert ever says will be there online for decades to come. While Youtube can bestow fame, it can open you to endless ridicule as well.
Or endless kudos, as it turns out, in the Schiff case.
Even harmless imagery can carry potential for differing interpretation these days.
Look at the pig pictures above. The fat and smiling pig (think piggy banks and childish happiness at the jingle of coins therein) is the current 'face' of the Bank of New Zealand - happily smiling beneath buoyant balloons of
prosperity. The other pink pig is a very different beast. He cowers on the cover of Peter Shiff's book, with only a frail umbrella sheltering him from the lightning storm overhead. The book's jolly title is Crash Proof: How to Profit from the Coming Economic Collapse.
It was published a year ago.
Clever Mr Schiff.

Tracing your distant past

2008-09-30T21:10:00.000-07:00

Do you ever wonder where you’ve come from? I mean, really wonder? This isn't about musing on who your great-grandparents were. It's not recent genealogy going back to the 1800s. I’m talking big-picture stuff.
I’ve become so intrigued with this question that I decided to take part in the National Geographic society’s Genographic Project. This is an enormous piece of genetic research that aims to figure out where we all came from.
It’s becoming obvious that actually, we’re all Africans. Sure we may be fair or olive-skinned and have red or blonde hair and count Scots, Irish, French, Persian, Fijian, Chinese (or whatever!) people in the ancestry we know about, but gene studies are proving that the whole world’s very first ancestors grew out of African soil.
So I sent off for a kit (it costs $US100) to find out about my own far-distant rellies. You do a couple of inside-cheek swabs with a special brush, pop the resulting DNA samples into little vials that they supply, and send the envelope off to the US. In a few weeks I’ll be able to go to the website, type in my password and get the results – which will tell me the region where my most ancient female ancestor lived and what path her descendants took, maybe 50,000 years ago, to work their nomadic way up into Europe. This is expressed in map form, with dotted lines showing your family’s ancient trail.
As a woman you can only select your female ancestors. Their X chromosomes (we don’t have a Y chromosome) have come in a long, shimmering line down to the person that is you. Men can choose to track either their male (Y) or female (X) side.
My interest in this was sparked by seeing the Lascaux Caves in the south of France – where you can see fabulous paintings of horses, bison, reindeer and all manner of mythical beasties painted on the cave walls some 18,000 years ago. Eighteen thousand years! (That's a bit of Lascaux pictured above.)
The paintings are gorgeous, full of life and vitality. They’re all the more wonderful when you consider they were daubed with basic pigments in the guttering light of primitive lamps. The paintings were hidden there for millennia until some boys stumbled on a cave entrance in 1940, went in, looked up and said “wow” (or whatever French schoolboys would have said back then).
Just before my Lascaux trip I heard about a DNA testing programme in Britain which had discovered that nearly all British people are descended from a small group of people who were bailed up in the south of France and northern Spain by the chill of the last Ice Age. I’m guessing it was some of them who filled those caves with art as they sat out the long, cold centuries.
As the climate warmed and the ice retreated, they gradually migrated further north and crossed the Channel to begin populating what we now think of as UK. Anyhow, modern-day Brits who’d thought about their roots at all had assumed they’d have some familiar label, like Anglo Saxon, Celtic, Norman or Viking. Some were a bit shocked to discover traces of African, Arab and even Mongolian genes in their blood. (That Genghis Khan guy went everywhere!)
Because I'm from basically British stock, it seemed reasonable to assume that a far-distant ancestor of mine might have been one of the artists.
I love this big-picture stuff. In a world where we keep on emphasising our differences, this research surely has to prove that in the end we are all one enormous family. And now that there are so many of us ‒ surging to nine billion by the middle of this century ‒ it’s even more important that we learn to get along together without hitting each other over the head with clubs, not to mention nuclear bombs.
To find out more, go to www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic

2008-09-09T18:40:00.000-07:00

SUPERMAN THE DREAMER?
It's interesting how it can take just one picture to make you see things in a new light - it's part of the old story about a picture being worth a thousand words. One can debate that now, of course, in this era when you can't trust photos at all, what with Photoshop being so available to everybody.
But recently I was browsing around looking for material for a workshop on authorship that I was running. I wanted to touch on how graphic novels are becoming hot again. If 'graphic novel' means nothing to you, then think 'comic'. Yes, you loved them when you were a kid and they're big again - very clever and sharp. They're also being printed on substantial paper, not at all like the flimsy, throw-away comics of old.
I stumbled across a TIME magazine list of the top 10 graphic novels for last year, and here was this picture of the number three title, by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. It's Superman, but not as I remember him.
I haven't seen the book, and so don't know how these two have re-engineered the big guy overall, but this image seems to say it all. Who is this guy? He looks like Sensitive New Age Superman, adrift on fluffy clouds, gazing out over Gotham City and waiting for the next runaway train to stop in its tracks. He looks like he's been groomed by the keen guys on Queer Eye team.
He could be Supermetrosexual, or Superpoet, just pondering and dreaming. Sure he's still got the well-toned bod and rippling muscles, but it's like he's, well, gone soft! He even looks a bit drippy.
The cape that should be streaming in his wake as he scorches through the sky is tucked demurely beneath his bum, as if to cushion that super posterior (the clouds not being fluffy enough). The glance he gives us is languid. Should the sirens shriek it's going to take this guy a while to wake up, flex the muscles and go to battle. It doesn't look like he'll be biffing baddies with a 'zap!' or a 'pow!' any time soon.
"Got a problem down there?" he might call out. "Yeah, okay. I'll be there in a bit. Just taking a nana-nap right now."
This picture reminds of America itself. Not seeing what trouble it's in. Not as sharp and shiny as it used to be. Distanced from the rest of the world by being up there in the clouds.
According to recent polls Americans aren't too sure who to vote for. The Republicans might even make it. Especially now that Lois Lane is bustling about and taking all the attention in her high heels and power suit. At the same time the BBC has polled people in 22 countries about who they'd like to see in the White House, and the resulting was an overwhelming vote for Barack Obama. Instead, there's a chance the world is heading for John McCain. Wake up, Superman. You may needed. Soon.

Undone by love

2008-05-23T21:52:00.000-07:00

It’s so interesting how time forges and mellows our characters. For evidence look no further than May 17’s Herald on Sunday and the next day’s Sunday Star Times. Paul Holmes writes for the first newspaper; Michael Laws for the other.
Both are radio stars in their Monday-to-Friday lives. Both have long histories as cocky roosters, leaders in their fields, never short of a barbed comment or lofty opinion delivered from on high. They’ve been newsmakers for years – Holmes in television and Laws in politics – both of them adept at batting away criticism and apparently rarely troubled by self-doubt.
But on that May weekend we saw these two men undone by love. Both wrote columns remarkable for the lack of cynicism in guys who’ve been hard men from way back. Of course, the worlds they live in have a habit of breeding cynicism. Politics and broadcasting are not fields in which the “love” word gets bandied around. Love is too cosy, too heart-driven – way too sentimental by far.

Politicians and broadcasters want the facts. Theirs is a world in which analysis matters most. When they talk about truth they’re speaking with an eye on what’s in the news today – about business trends or legal matters or policy detail. Sure, it’s fine to have a sense of humour, to have a laugh, be impish, share a joke. But heart? Oh, let’s not go there. Hearts are too soft and gooey to refer to when you work with people who think it’s normal to scoff at caring politicians (the much-despised “wets”) and for whom the term “do gooder” is one of derision.

At least, that’s the norm when such people are flying high. But none of us can fly high for ever. Life comes along and slaps us in the kisser. For “life” read family. It’s the family woes that really rip into us. Work crises can be irritating and enraging but rarely have the power to undermine us the way personal problems can.

For Holmes, the softening has come in waves that have included the ending of his TV career (even if he’s still tops in radio), plane crashes, a cancer battle and, worst of all, seeing his daughter fall under the spell of the cursed drug, P. He made a magnificent speech in court some weeks ago, vowing to support her through her recovery. And judging from his Sunday column, it sounds like he made another good one in Wellington when he talked to teens about leadership. It seems that most of his speech centred on how important love is.

He told the kids (so he wrote): “Leaders love. You have to love and stay open to love because people are all we have. In the end, it’s about people. If you cease to love your heart, your mind and your world will shrivel. No one will follow a shrivelled spirit. Cease to love and you will not be open to opportunity.”

Over at the Sunday Star Times, Laws was writing most movingly, as he’s been doing for weeks now, about his small daughter Lucy’s fight for life in the face of leukaemia as well as a dire infection. Though Lucy has improved, the struggle goes on, and Michael is overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers. More than that, the mayor best known for his feistiness is hugely grateful for people’s prayers and comforted by knowing that people he’s never met have been praying for her. He is not “particularly religious”, he writes – and the rest of us sure can’t recall him ever expressing any glimmer of interest in spirituality. But now, he says, “till my last days, I’ll affirm that those prayers made the difference.”
We don’t much like growing older, but there can be small compensations in the troubles that time may force us to confront. They bend us towards more empathy and compassion. Our caring side waxes as our toughness wanes. We realise the vanity of ambition and the pointlessness of “success”, if all that means is money and fame. We finally know what’s important. Ah, how our hearts soften when we’re battered by love.

The decade's almost over

2008-04-18T20:52:00.000-07:00

Here’s something surprising to think about. It’s not much more than 18 months before we’ll be farewelling this decade. This 10-year block that some call the noughties (not much of a label, but what else is there to call it?) is fast disappearing down history’s plughole.
All too soon it will join the nineties, the eighties, the seventies and all those other 20th century time zones in the library of what used to be.
When you’re old enough for your memory to span a few decades, the past tends to blur. Now, when was that singer a star? What era does that movie come from? And how did we get to here?
Even going back to the dearly departed nineties is an exercise in realising that even if we think not much has changed since 2000, it certainly has. I’ve recently been ploughing through early Next magazines in the course of doing some research. I was Next’s launch editor in 1991. And, oh wow, talk about nostalgia. If you were a grown-up in the early nineties, you too may remember life when:
* magazines still had knitting patterns because everyone knew how to knit
* maternity clothes were big and baggy; showing off your baby bump just wasn’t done
* Johnny Depp was just that strange young dude in Edward Scissorhands.
* we were ripping out leg hair with the fiendishly painful Epilady
* no-one had yet had a Brazilian
* Suzy Aitken was pushing her fitness videos
* Olivio and Olivani began to give butter a fright
* we were suddenly delighted to eat sushi
* Anne Geddes was just beginning her rush to fame by photographing babies in clay pots
* Sitcoms still reigned and we’d not even heard of reality TV
* every woman worried about toxic shock syndrome
* we were endlessly debating how possible it was to “have it all”
* beauty companies first told us that “cellulite” existed, and that it had to be banished
* we lusted after clothes by Barbara Lee, Annie Bonza, Marilyn Sainty and Thornton Hall
* everyone’s kitchens were painted yellow and blue
* home renovation involved heaps of rag-rolling, stencilling, sponging, dragging and stippling
* the Filofax was everyone’s must-have business tool
* cell phone price tags sank to around $200, down from $2000 in the eighties
* Call Waiting first became available for home phone lines and drove us mad as we struggled with the new phone etiquette rules
* 50% of people had a home computer but 20% couldn’t programme their VCR
* The first personal trainers started working in gyms
* Women actually wanted to make their own pot pourri
* Lionel’s Muffins (recipes from Shortland Street) was a mega-best seller
* waterbeds were finally ejected from the nation’s bedrooms
* we were fixated on millennial predictions based on the sayings of Nostradamus
And right at the end of the decade some group of bureaucrats called the Y2K Commission warned us to stock up with three days of food, a stash of fresh water and batteries for our torches. After all, there was a chance that the world, as we knew it, might stutter to an end as every computer died. Pictured above is a fridge magnet I still possess, sent by the government to every New Zealander, telling us what to do.
Looking back, it all seems so naive. But somehow we got through the nineties, just as we'll survive this decade too. Even if things do look decidedly dodgy on a whole lot of fronts right now!

The First Wives' Club from Hell

2008-03-16T15:58:00.000-07:00

New Zealand TV channels don’t do overseas news until about 25 minutes into the news hour because they’re so stuck on the idea that viewers like local news best. The only time that changes is when the world is falling apart.
Around half an hour into the news bulletins of the last day or two we’ve been witnessing the sad sight a woman whose world is falling apart. Poor Mrs Spitzer. Skewered by the glare of lights and cameras, she was either forced or felt it necessary to stand alongside her husband, the granite-jawed Eliot, now former Governor of New York, as he confessed to using the services of prostitutes even while he was going after other people for doing the very same thing.
He blah-blahed all the usual things that American politicians have said over the years as they ’fessed up to wrongdoing. There’s been a long line of them, including Bill Clinton’s own excruciating moments. Every time, their wives (including Hillary) stood shoulder to shoulder with their errant spouses, grim-faced but upright, willing to be seen as the good woman staying strong through thick and thin.
It seems, in America, to be required of them. And even a woman like Silda Spitzer, a top Harvard graduate who once had a big career in finance, felt the call to fall into line and stand gamely before the avid cameras as her husband intoned his “sorry” speech.
What a face she showed us. Eyes like stones, grey complexion, compressed mouth, face wiped blank with... what?... rage, humiliation, grief, anger, shame. No need for the latter, of course. He’s the bad boy. But she’s probably feeling stunned with the shame of it all, knowing that her position as Number One society wife of America’s greatest city, with all the parties, the honour and glory, the designer gowns and flowers, the best seats in restaurants and shows and operas, the invitations engraved on fine paper, the chauffeurs opening doors, and doormen saluting and lunches with powerful ladies... all of it is now in the compost. Along with whatever life she used to have with the father of their three teenage daughters.
What, by the way, do you tell three teenage daughters about the trouble their daddy is in over his habit of having expensive sex with young women not much older than them? How did Silda hold it all together in public like that, when what she must have really wanted to do was howl and sock him in the chops?
But this, it would appear, is how life is for the spouses of famous men. Just look at the great political parade going on in the US elections. Each candidate must be accompanied by their other half. Whenever John McCain appears, there alongside him is his wife of 28 years, the smiling and silent Cindy, groomed to the max, pin-thin in her bright silk suits and with ultra-sleek blonde hair, looking like a very mature Barbie doll.
Michelle Obama, wife of Barack, looks like she can barely contain herself as a talker, but must resist blurting for now. When she did speak recently she made the mistake of saying she was “proud of America” for the first time in her adult life. Big oops! Patriotism must not be questioned. Since then, not a murmur.
Then there’s Bill – so verbally effusive in recent weeks that he came close to and pushing Hill’s campaign off course. The former Prez has had to go quiet, too. It must be killing him.
It’s a weird thing. All these middle-aged couples but must chat and argue and fight and debate and chew the fat far into the night – but on the election trail there can be no hint of that. Instead the partners must just stand there, visible but mute, as useful as a stuffed sausage but still somehow necessary to the process. For it seems no single candidate could ever be elected to the White House. Hard enough to be black or female. But single? Not a chance.
Here, it’s all so different. Our own First Husband, Peter Davis, pops up only when absolutely necessary. And because here, too, it’s election year, PR requirements will mean we’re bound to see him pottering amiably in the next few months, keeping the home fires burning while Helen does her thing. Mrs Key? I don’t even know her first name. I could bump into her at the supermarket and be none the wiser. And I have no idea if there’s a Mrs Hide, or a Mrs Peters, or a Mr Turia. What a good thing. How lucky we are.

See the whales dive

2008-02-15T19:01:00.000-08:00

Have you too been watching housing for the last half-decade, marvelling at how those values have gone up and up and up? It’s been optimism all around. Those who’ve bought houses since the turn of the century have been on to a very, very good thing. It’s all been so fabulous that few imagined a time could come when the value of our dwellings might not only plateau but slide, just like a whale arcing up out of the sea and then slipping back down again, propelled by its own great weight.

At least three years ago I chatted with a young (well, 30-ish) friend about real estate’s great cycles. She and her man were buying property after property, leveraging each one on the back of the one before, starry-eyed about the future and confident that their returns would always cover their outgoings and that values would keep rising for ever.

I told her about a place we tried to sell in 1998. We’d paid close to $320,000 for it just a few years earlier, and it was in a prime location. The best offer we got was little more than $290,000. We sighed and accepted it. We were buying again on the same market and so could move on to something similar for about the same money. But the point I was trying to make to my friend was that prices had tanked then – that they can and do go down sometimes. She listened politely but was convinced that long-term they’d be fine. Which is probably right but there's still the short-term to get through.

The drive to make a killing has kept on building, fuelled by all the TV property programmes showing the thrill of doing up houses, flicking them on and looking for the next one. It’s a strategy that’s worked beautifully, with people making delicious (and untaxed) capital gains. I mean, why wouldn’t you? Lots of us have done it, or cheered as our kids did it. And yet. And yet.

I watched a local show a few weeks ago about a young couple who are dreaming of establishing a property portfolio of 20 houses. Their idea is that when they finally retire, a few decades hence, all that rent income will fund an ongoing good lifestyle.

But six houses later, the combined rent was failing to keep up with their mortgage payments and they were having to top them up out of the husband’s reportedly average salary. The wife had no salary, being a stay-at- home mum. Some people might have sold a house or two to get back on even keel. But no. Their solution was to buy two more places because the rents from these two new places were going to be (applause, applause) around $900 a week.

Aided by a smiling broker, the couple borrowed still more, blithely increasing their indebtedness to $1.8 million. One. Point. Eight. Mill.

I sighed again a month ago when I read a New Zealand Herald story by Simon Collins about how 10-15% of all new mortgages are now going to people borrowing 100% of the cost of their homes. He interviewed a hard-working couple who looked like really good citizens, both working fulltime to raise their two lovely kids and repay $1500 per fortnight back to the bank.

They’d just paid nearly $400,000 for what was described as a “modest house”. Judging from the latest stats, the value of their Birkdale house may already have dropped. The Real Estate Institute reports that the median North Shore price sagged from $516,000 in December 07 to $495,000 in January 08.

Not so much, you might say. Just a few thousand. But they, and many other hundred per centers, must be hoping like hell that this is as far as it goes. And that they don’t lose their jobs. Or get sick. Or have an accident. Or get divorced. Or encounter any obstacle to the continuance of happy life in their pleasant home, with their careers secure and their expenses stable. Fingers crossed, everyone

Big Butts

2007-12-22T19:56:00.000-08:00

Having posted a poem about Christmas last week, I might as well add another download of personal doggerel that may be useful to contemplate after Christmas, subsequent to the consumption of too much rich food. It is dedicated to all of us who find ourselves fatter in the next week or two. Ah well, best advice is to keep smiling, just like the adipose angel seen here...

BIG BUTTS

We all sing the chorus,
‘Does my butt look big in this?’
Say no and you bestow upon us
Such a shot of bliss.

We can never see what’s right
Or even what looks wrong.
Are our pants best uber-short
or ankle-scratching long?

If we go for wide-set pockets
will our hips look too capacious?
Or might a larger size contrive
to make us merely spacious?

Higher waist or low-rise?
Sloppy fit or snug?
What’s the way to stop us
seeing ourselves and saying, “ugh!”?

The trouble is those changing rooms,
designed to make us weep.
The cruel lights and those mirrors
are enough to make us leap

into the next damn diet –
all celery and greens,
with no sweet cakes or macaroons
or chocolate ice creams.

So stop now! Aim to love your butt
and quit being so damn grumpy,
for were it not so soft and plump
would sitting be so comfy?

2007-12-17T20:11:00.000-08:00

SANTA’S BIG FAT CARBON FOOTPRINT PROBLEM

Santa had a headache, a mean and nasty one,
for fulfilling all the orders was no longer any fun.
Every year his problems were enough to make him scream
and now the elves were telling him he had to go more green.

They said they couldn’t keep up with the factories of Shanghai.
Their working hours were lousy and they pestered him with why
they had to make these bleeping, flashing, noisy, garish toys at all!
“We’re not here,” they whined, “to fill those shelves up at the mall.”

Out back in the workshop, his helpers had the snitch
because the fur they used for teddy bears was promulgating itch.
They hated all the packaging they had to wrap round toys,
and were sick of whining letters from greedy girls and boys.

“It’s got too much,” the reindeer cried. “The hype’s become unreal.”
So they sat the old guy down and told him, “Santa, here’s the deal.
We’re not freighting presents unless you start recycling,
and a low-emission, hybrid sleigh would be more to our liking.”

“Bah!” yelled Santa, “Don’t you know that all our days are numbered?
Have you seen the costs with which this business has been lumbered?
I need new GPS’s. The sleigh’s become outdated.
The hay you eat now costs so much it’s like it’s silver-plated.

“Your farting is so hearty that the methane fills the skies.
Our carbon footprint’s got so big I can’t believe my eyes.
I’m trying to recycle but you elves waste so much wood
that even firing half of you won’t do us any good.

“And then no doubt you’d drag me to the great Employment Court
and claim unfair dismissal – oh, yes, a sneaky elvish rort!
You’ll be wanting compensation and a lump of next year’s pay.
I’m damned if I’ll put up with that, no matter what you say.”

So there was little for it but for Santa to comply.
His workers got a pay rise big enough to make him cry.
The presents turned all eco, guaranteed organic,
(and kiddies used to plastic were thrown into a panic).

And now when Rudolph leads the team out on their annual trip
The sleigh’s a half-tonne lighter, which makes the flight a snip.
The elves feel really happy ‘cos they’re making Christmas greener
and Santa tries to smile - but his life is feeling leaner.

The trouble is he’s finding that he misses all the glitter,
the bling, the booze, the bad-taste gifts, the eating and the litter.
However, when he’s lauded for the changing of his ways
he’s not averse to preening in the light of so much praise.

But just quietly, if you ask him for some tips on his success,
he’ll tell you he’s still partial to some OTT excess.
“Save the planet? Sure,” he’ll say. “Go for it, my friend.
But loving life is what makes life worth living, in the end.”

Merry Christmas!

Watching birds

2007-11-30T14:16:00.000-08:00

I’ve been to see my dad again. He is 98. My mother died at 58. How odd it is, this distance that can separate people. Is it in our genes, when we’re born, the clock that cuts one person off short and gives someone else decades more?
This is not a question that troubles my father. He was married to my mother for 34 years but can’t now remember her name. Or that of his second wife, with whom he had another 15 years or so before being widowed once again. Or that of his third wife to whom he’s still wed after another 15 years, not that he knows it. He doesn’t know me either.
He married his third bride in his early 80s. ‘Why?’ we asked, pleased he’d happily found late love, but mystified by why he was making yet another walk to the altar. ‘At our age we like to do things properly,’ he said.
Now, he’s in a nursing home, which of course is a cause of guilt on my part. Good daughters aren’t supposed to let that happen.
But when his dementia sent him wandering, there was nothing for it but for him to be kept somewhere safe. He was in a Catholic-run retirement village then. One night they found him naked in the chapel in the wee small hours. Who knows what the Virgin Mary thought. Another time he fetched up in the billiard room, wrapped up in the blanket off the tabletop, unable to find his way back to his bed. Another time he wandered into a gas station a kilometre from home, asking for his Uncle Basil, who died sometime in the middle of the 20th century.
Dad’s too wobbly now for wandering. Mostly, he sleeps. When he’s awake he sits at his habitual place at a table in Cairns, North Queensland, slowly turning the pages of books he doesn’t comprehend. He has to wear a bib over his shirt, for his dribble.
This week I pointed to pictures in the bird book in front of him. ‘Look,’ I said, in the high, clear voice you use for small children. ‘Here’s a woodpecker. Look at its lovely red head.’
Dad took no notice and turned the page to look at ducks, muttering something I couldn’t understand.
And I suddenly realised this moment was an echo of my earliest memory. I’m very small in this fragment of recollection, standing up in a cot holding onto its bars, looking out the window on a misty morning, excited by the morning chatter of birds. I’m pointing out the window. My father is smiling down at me, sharing the moment. Me, him and the birds.
And here I am again, so many years later, life gone full circle. No mist now. We’re in the tropics. Flame trees blaze outside. New Zealand’s meek thrushes have given way to brash Aussie parrots. But otherwise it’s the same, except that my father is the infant now.
Me and my dad. I feel the years, and my aching heart, flip-flop as we sit together, looking at birds.

Natural solutions

2007-10-31T13:45:00.000-07:00

I’ve had nature on my mind this year. That’s hardly surprising, as I’ve just published a book about it, along with my good friend Trish Whillans, who took the rose photo you see here. Our book is called The Answer: How Nature Can Help You When Life Seems Too Hard (for more pop over to my website, www.lindseydawson.com).
The Answer is not about global warming, or climate change, or carbon footprints, or compost, or recycling. Instead it’s a little book with a simple storyline that imagines a conversation between ourselves and the natural world. It’s based on the notion that getting in amongst the green, slushy, gritty, tangled stuff that makes up the wild world can do us good - because nature can tell us things.
It took a Malaysian conservationist called Osman to remind me of that last year. I was staying at the Andaman Hotel on Langkawi Island. It offers an early morning nature walk. Always a sucker for such delights, I turned up the next morning and off we went into the humid dawn.
Osman was a quiet, still sort of guy. Never raised his voice above a murmur. But his eyes were sharp and alert. To everything. “You might like to step back,” he suggested at one point, indicating our feet.
A broad, seething ribbon of large ants was surging close to our toes on the jungle path, fast and urgent as a black river swollen after rain. “They have a very painful bite,” Osman mildly observed.
As we strolled with him, he pointed out amazing birds, like the racquet-tailed drongo, and all manner of plants, both healing and toxic. Many had steely barbs.
“But nature always has a solution,” he pointed out. “If there’s a plant that can hurt or give you a rash, you can guarantee that there’ll be another plant growing nearby that can fix the hurt. Problem? Solution. Problem? Solution. That’s how nature works.”
I liked that. It set me wondering whether there was a message in there for me too. As in, does nature in more temperature climates, like where I live, have solutions for different sorts of problems – such as fixing emotional woes? And decided that of course it does. I know all too well that if I’m feeling itchy with frustration or mad as a snake, a walk on a forest track always sorts me out.
As Trish kept on taking her photos and we were putting the book together, I had my ears open for ways in which others were seeing (or not seeing) the nature of nature all around them.
I did a wonderful waka tour down the Whanganui River in April and listened to our guide, Niko Tangaroa, as he talked about leaving his structured life as an engineer in Australia to return home and set up a business where he could share the river’s delights with others. With a big grin, he said, “Every morning when I get out on the river, I look up at the sky and say, “Thank you, Ranginui [sky father], for my new workshop!”’
By contrast, in July I had a short, startling encounter next to a rose bush in a French garden with a young American woman. She was so unaware of nature that her only connection with its smells was via the cosmetic industry. I pointed out a pink bloom to her because it had the most beautiful fragrance. “Mmm,” she sighed. That’s so beautiful! It’s just like rose oil. So this is a rose, huh?”.
Then in Fiji, in September, I saw such a warping of nature that it chilled my heart. I was in a bus with friends as we drove through a valley filled with emerald jungle. But the tree profiles were strangely lumpy. The leaves were a densely packed, uniform, brilliant green. We came to realise we were looking not at the rich variety of specimens that should have been there, but at a vast leafy blanket that was smothering miles of native forest under a thick duvet of curling vines . “What is that?” we asked. “Killer vine!” spat a local man. “The Americans brought it here during the war to use as camouflage. Now it is everywhere.” It can overcome the tallest trees and nothing can stop its spread.
Like most pest introductions, the kudzu invation started innocently enough. Japanese gardeners brought it to a Philadelphia garden expo in 1876. Americans loved it. They wanted it for their gardens, too. And now it’s strangling huge areas of the south-eastern United States, too. No wonder they knew it would be good for concealing soldiers in the tropics. Kudzu is very polite in Japan as winter frosts knock it back every year. But deprived of cold it becomes a maniac, growing by as much as a foot per day.
It’s a problem. Out of control. Just like so much of the stuff going on in our lives. But I remember wise Osman and his quiet observation : Problem. Solution. Problem. Solution.
Our little book can’t stop kudzu, but in its small way it might untie a few other knots in modern life.

Gas-guzzling blues

2007-10-21T19:32:00.000-07:00

I’ve been trying to remember the words of an old advertising jingle.
Forever rattling out of the radio when I was a kid, it was a
petrol-pushing song for a company called Europa, then “the only
New Zealand oil company”.

After much Googling I finally found it:
“Clean burning Europa,
The petrol with pep.
Keeps your engine sweeter,
Makes your engine step.
All along the way,
Wise motorists say,
‘It’s clean-burning Europa for me’!”

It was sung by a very jolly, English-sounding men’s chorus, with a warbling trumpet at beginning and end.

I was puzzled by the engine-step reference in line four, but my brother (full of knowledge of the art and history of advertising) reminds me that in those days, everyone loved “stepping on it” as drivers strove to get more speed. And we loved cars that looked huge and sassy, like the Chevvy here.

Now that we can go plenty fast enough, we’re more interested in economy. And yet we’re still not thinking straight about oil and how much we need it.

It seems nobody (in New Zealand) is talking about the impending “peak oil” crisis. For a global view, mosey on over to http://www.theoildrum.com/, which recently featured a prediction by top Texas oil man T. Boone Pickens that oil, currently bobbing around at $US85 or so per barrel, will certainly rise to $100 sometime soon. If not this year, then certainly in 2008.
But blithely we go on as if everything’s fine, because we can’t think what else to do. We’ve created the business world the way it is, and only know how to make it hum by keeping on growing. Auckland airport, for instance, is busily investing millions in a new runway. And yet people with foresight, all over the planet, are saying that expensive plans for new airports and motorways and the developments of far-flung towns and suburbs requiring long commutes are pretty much doomed in the long term.

Why? Because oil, already at record highs, is never going to be cheap again. The world’s major oil fields are beginning to suck dry right at the time when consumption is going up and up and up. We, in the west’s developed nations, became completely oil-dependent in the 20th century, to the point where our lives are unthinkable without the stuff. And now China and India, the world’s new power economies, understandably want their turn.

Energy experts are saying we’re in for rough times as we adjust to this new reality. Australians are beginning to think about it. Just last month a headline in the Brisbane Courier Mail screamed: “It’s not Doomsday yet, but if we don’t act now it soon will be.”

The bottom line, wrote journalist Paul Syret is that “that the world’s oil production is close to peaking, with demand for the product soon to outstrip supply.”

The Queensland government has just produced a report following on from research by US energy analyst Robert Hirsch. He concluded two years ago that "as peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented".

Some pessimists reckon we’ll be in crisis very soon: optimists think the peak won’t hit hard until about 2025. But they all think it will hit.

Syret points out, “It will mean a dramatic change of life as we know it, as cheap fuel becomes a distant memory and supply of what is available is hotly contested.”

Some Griffith University wonks recently looked at which Queensland areas would be hardest hit by rising oil prices and flagged outlying urban areas and growth corridors such as Caboolture and Ipswich on Brisbane’s edge.

I live in a growth corridor, too. Our house is about 50km from most of my work activities and social life. I drive back and forth several times a week. My fuel bill is climbing and climbing. Maybe, at some stage, we’ll decide it would be smart to move closer to town. But by then, our house’s location might be a real liability in resale terms. Mmm. How will we know to pick the right time?

One of the Queensland report’s authors described the looming problem as a “double whammy, with higher fuel prices pushing up not just transport, but food prices and everything else as well. He argues that the government must “stop making things worse” with car-dependent suburbs, and start embarking on a “massive investment in outer suburban public transport services”.

There’s scant evidence that anyone in Wellington is thinking this way, even though New Zealand, so very far away from the world’s refineries, is even more vulnerable than Australia.
But a different future is so unimaginable that we all carry on, business as usual, as if cheapish oil will be here for ever.

The irony is that while arguments rage about global warming and the need to reduce carbon emissions, oil is getting scarcer all the time. Maybe that’s how the problem will get fixed – for waning oil flows, surely, will produce lower emissions. But if the supply problem does get really serious, our carbon footprints will pale into insignificance compared with the challenge of feeding and housing ourselves.

Just really cheer you up, the peak-oil people also point out that mass tourism is unlikely to last. When air fares rocket, all those nifty travel packages will be but a memory. So if you’re thinking about taking yourself off on (maybe your last) cheap world trip, right now could be a damn good time.

Blasts from the past

2007-10-12T20:47:00.000-07:00

BACK IN THE DAY

I'm doing a presentation in a few weeks to a group of car retailers and financiers. Because I've written a book about the trials and the terrific bits of being middle-aged, and edit a magazine for that same group of consumers, I quite often get asked to talk about us quaint old geezers. Businesses know that the 50-plus crowd is one that they should be marketing to, because the baby boomers is roaring along in fine style, some just starting to retire and with more money and time than most other people. But for the young, they're still old fogies.

I've had fun today browsing through some magazines from my archives, looking for ancient ads that I used to enjoy putting in the pages of Next magazine. The idea was to show people how much things have changed over years. My god, have they ever.

The ad here dates from the 1950s (when the baby boomers were babies), when only very very rich people flew anywhere, and when Pan Am still existed, and Lockerbie hadn't happened (let alone 9/11) and it took days to fly to Europe and maybe jet-lag hadn't even been invented, let alone economy class syndrome. It took so long to get anywhere that the plane would land and the crew and the passeners would all fall asleep, an event no doubt preceded by a darn good dinner and a martini or two, and then they'd all set forth again, fresh and rested, the next morning.

Back then (though for some reason or other, people are starting to say 'back in the day' now - why is that?) the dear old blunt-nosed Strato Clipper could fly 4000 miles at a stretch, which probably sounded a lot to people who'd only ever chugged along on ships before then. But they did do it in style. The fine print says the de luxe flights ("President service", if you please) featured "superb hot meals, complimentary champagne and choice of individual sleeping accommodation". Mmm. Were it not for the roar of all those propellors, it might have been a nice way to go.