FZ: ‘Don’t they pay you good, for the stuff that you do?’
Devil: ‘Well, I can’t complain when the cheques come through.’
- Frank Zappa in conversation with the Devil, ‘Titties ’N’ Beer’
I have a nice job that pays me adequately and doesn’t trouble me between the hours of 5pm and 9am weekdays, or even in the long dark hours of Sunday evening precluding Mondayitis. This means when I drive to work I have spare capacity in my think box which might have otherwise been taken up with fretting about the Day To Come. And with that spare capacity I wonder things. Things I wonder include:
- What sort of person buys personalised plates for a Hyundai Elantra?
- Are they the same sort of person who rolls 18” rims on a white Toyota Camry GL?
- Has the guy in the Cleaning Co van ever watched This Is Spinal Tap?
- What unutterly miserable and destitute station in life must you have sunk to in order to consider reasonable the fitting of number plate holders emblazoned with ‘MUM’S TAXI SERVICE’, or ‘HELP! DAD FARTED AND WE’RE TRAPPED!’
- Related: can we retrospectively withdraw your right to breed?
- If you were driving a bus with grinning National Party smugwits smeared across its enormous backside, surely you'd choose to deliberately drive like a weapons-grade cunt?
I fucking hate election advertising. Even when it’s my side of politics. Sometimes I’m not even sure I have a side of politics, but then I remember I live in NZ, where Labour isn’t as irrevocably fucking compromised as its Australian counterpart. You can still have hope for NZ Labour. At least because they can actually fucking spell.
The run-in to the Sept 20 election has taken a turn with evidence presented in a new book by NZ investigative journalist and inveterate shitstirrer Nicky Hager that the Dirty Nats have been engaging in Dirty Politics, secretly collaborating with right-wing shitcunt attack bloggers like WhaleOil (cos calling yourself that isn’t a flat-out giveaway ref Your Guarantee Of Shitcuntery) to crush NZ Labour in the newspolls and reduce them to irrelevance. Which is disgraceful and unfair. NZ Labour are perfectly capable of doing that themselves. Anyone lining up to hear leadership advice from Ball Sharten is not in a comfortable space ref. concept and clue.
Still, the red side of politics will probably run the blue side closer than two-party-preferred polling might indicate - partially because, regardless of the wet-dream fantasies of MSM political hacks, NZ doesn’t run a two-party system. None of the major parties have governed in their own right - with an absolute majority - since the introduction of MMP in the late 90s. To paraphrase Don Chipp, the Bastards are Kept Honest. The Greens are polling well and backing themselves to win 20 seats - the swingeing majority of which will be Party seats not Electorate seats, but they all count for the same. Which isn’t entirely unequivocally fantastic news for NZ science, a priori; we’re not that many years removed from their demonstrable Corngate-era Luddism on genetic engineering (Also, ironically enough, instigated by a Hager book).
Which was why I was interested to read in one of their flyers they’ll be pushing to plough resources into research and innovation, with a focus on massively upskilling NZ in STEM - science, technology, engineering and maths. This sounds bloody tremendous, particularly given their history with SCIENTS. They plan to fund an additional thousand uni places in physics, maths, engineering, computer sci…
Wait, no biology?
Ahhh. No we can’t have that. Cos biology has genetic engineering in it. MAKE THE BAD SCIENTS GO AWAY.
Dammit NZ Greens, you were so close.
The Doctor is OUT.
