He wades through the buildings towards the centre of town

The initial proposal for a Hilton hotel on the Wellington Harbour waterfront was thrown out in an appeal to the Environment Court. The town planners and architects redesigned the hotels and presented new scale models, but this time the public response was even more negative.

I can see why the horse is in such a bad mood, what with all the snakes biting its haunches and even crawling up its bum. Probably it should have stayed at home.

UPDATE: People were wondering about the tyre sculpture in the left-hand background of the picture, so here's a close-up.

Typical

You work with stone, chocolate, hot elements, van der Graaff generators and any amount of other stuff, but does Wikipedia mention any of that? No, you're typecast as "a Canadian artist best known for her works constructed from meat."

Then the art critics blather on about "issues of the carnivory implicit in societal attitudes to women". The truth is that she originally tried to make a skirt out of tofu, but it kept sliding off.

You'd think she would be better-known for her controversial 2002 piece, Undersized Zorb.

A new project

for an animated sequence.

Imagination Dead Imagine

People really have no idea how much work goes into each new edition of Bernouli's Encyclopedia of Imaginary Diseases. There is no time for the editors to sit around on their laurels -- probably a good thing because laurels are NOT COMFORTABLE and the aphids get up the bum -- what with all the competition from rival imaginary-disease compendia like the Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases and the DSM-IV-TR.

This afternoon we were down at the Old Entomologist, all wearing masks to conceal our true identities and to minimise the undue influence from the various disease lobbies, and argy-bargying whether or not to include phthiriasis as a separate entry. Things got so heated that I had to call out to the barman for "A brace of cocktails!" to chill everyone out.

True, 1870 was the last time a case was reported of someone's flesh being devoured from within by a morbid, spontaneously-generated proliferation of lice and mites. But perhaps this means it is due for a revival, and before we know it, all the cool people will have 8-legged anthropods wriggling out of every body pore, as a sign that they are sufficiently important to deserve a divine retribution. That will liven up the lifestyle magazines.

Then Editor 'X' was all "Phthiriasis is really just a form of Morgellons" -- where 'Morgellons' are mysterious threads or strands exuding from skin lesions, as if the patient is developing spinnerets. The Morgellons lobby is particularly powerful and I suspect that they got to Editor 'X' somehow.

Then the barman turned up with a couple of martini glasses wrapped in sandpaper which no-one could remember ordering, and in the ensuing argument we forgot what we'd been talking about.

This guy has an infestation of leeches generating within his flesh and crawling out through his skin, but you don't see him complaining, do you? To make the most of it, he has trained them to perform simple tricks, and on Friday evenings you can see him busking on Courtenay Place.

UPDATE: Animated moustaches! Go wild!

Stop sniggering back there!

When last we visited with Nile Gardiner he was warning us about... a very dangerous... thing.. with...stuff.
Anyway, his Conservative batteries have been refreshed!! He went to CPAC, people!!! He makes such claims as

An avowedly left-wing president worshipped with almost messianic zeal across much of the world, from Paris to Nairobi,

which puts them Frenchies in the right context, they are the same as people from Nairobia.

And how about the wonders of the food trough:

They have come from all corners of the country, a large percentage of them under the age of 30, to listen to veteran politicians such as Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney, as well as rising stars such as newly elected Senator Scott Brown and Marco Rubio, the youthful son of Cuban immigrants, now campaigning for a Senate seat in Florida. At a CPAC dinner I attended as a guest last night, emceed by the wonderfully charismatic Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, there was an extremely buoyant, almost festival-like atmosphere across the 1,000-strong crowd, enough to send shivers down the spine of Rahm Emmanuel.

See? people are 'veteran' and 'youthful' and 'wonderfully charismatic'. No one is a creeparse yokel with  homocidal tendencies. And Nile was a guest, like asked, no sneaking in under the tent flaps for him!!!

But, of course, the true nugget awaits at the bottom of the drool jar, where Nile tells us, might I say, breathlessly,

The American Left can only dream of putting together this kind of impeccably managed and intellectually vibrant three-day event,

See, Spendy Liberals (S.McGravitas 2009) you are too hopeless to put on a good freak show with the Birchers and the racism and the Glenn Beck mind unravelling thing. I bet no one calls you "wonderfully charismatic".

Zorbital velocity

The Zorb is another invention that people credit to New Zealanders. In fact it was first designed by Leonardo da Vinci, though the Vatican don't want you to know that.


UPDATE: Zorbs need orbs.



BONUS UPDATE:
Every day, more and more people are reporting a variant of the "Zorb Dream". Psychologists are baffled by this trend. Another Kiwi was unavailable for comment.

Tears before bedtime- as I said there would be

 

So things in the Riddled office have been a little slow what with Global Warming turning out to be caused by emails (Smut said) so we turned them all off. So then he says "What we need is some exercise" I said what about a game of "Chase the blind beggar through the street?" 

And the blind beggar said "Sod that " and went home. This was unsporting and he will not get any porridge down the trousers tomorrow. So we had a lottery to be The Blind Beggar and the youngest member of the team Young Little Tim was lucky enough to draw the shortest rat tail.

The game went well although as can be seen above Smut kept making up rules and trying to pin the hat on the Blind Beggar which looked like it hurt. There are some nice rocks in the scene which we had thrown earlier.

Eventually the game was declared a draw and Young Little Tim was given Rabid Dog Treatment and will one day have a good job with Mrs Miggins's Falling Off Roofs show.

People might say "Bugger!"

As any fule know the anti global warming crowd is a wholly owned subsidiary of "Fuck the World.org" but this is rarely allowed to sneak to the surface of the discourse about "The environazis making us all wear skins and live in huts and they wrote emails to each other-gate"
Now it has bubbled up a ways as seen here where it seems that a person who has posited the religiosity of thinking that maybe we shouldn't boil the Earth, just yet, was involved in draughting questions to ask the evil scientists intent on writing emails to each other.

In an article in the newsletter of the IOP south central branch in April 2008, which attempted to downplay the role carbon dioxide plays in global warming, Gill wrote: "If you don't 'believe' in anthropogenic climate change, you risk at best ridicule, but more likely vitriolic comments or even character assassination. Unfortunately, for many people the subject has become a religion, so facts and analysis have become largely irrelevant."

AND IT IS SO UNFAIR BECAUSE:

The submission, from the Institute of Physics (IOP), suggested that scientists at the University of East Anglia had cherry-picked data to support conclusions and that key reconstructions of past temperature could not be relied upon.

Which is so totally not character assassination.

The throes of creation. Perhaps just a single throe.

Overseas perceptions of the New Zealand national character seem to lay special stress on the 'inventive' trait. Case in point: Following a long-established hoverwing design, a Nelson mechanic builds himself a wingèd hovercraft that uses the ground effect to travel 1.5 m above the water -- which is cool as fuck, especially since he has improvised a lot of the parts. I WANT. Then he puts it up for sale on an internet auction site. The story 'goes prokaryote' as the kids apparently like to say, and in the course of telling and re-telling it is reconformed to fit collective expectations about New Zealanders, losing or gaining details to ensure a more comfortable fit. At the end of the process, Rudy Heeman is a Genius Inventor comparable only to Ilmarinen the Smith -- a Thinker Outside the Box and all-round Renaissance Man, a Denizen of the Workshed who fucks sheep. Probably his name helps the meme.

Case in point #2: This guy claims to have assembled his own cruise missile for $5000 (or about €47.06 in real money) from off-the shelf components. Apparently The Authoriteez are trying to suppress his invention, which is why the completed missile is currently unavailable though 'in safe hands'. "A detailed level of documentation will be provided to those who qualify and are willing to pay a small subscription for full access to the project diary."

Coming from any other country, this story would arouse the same mixture of skepticism and derision normally reserved for e-mails from Nigeria about dead relatives and their sequestered wealth. But hey, he's from New Zealand, where they invent things all the time, so it's plausible! And you can buy his book! So the DIY cruise-missile yarn still enjoys a certain amount of currency.*

Now admittedly the national psyche does include a certain low rat cunning. And we have earned a reputation for improvising repairs and spare parts to keep things running in the absence of money from the powers-that-be (though these days, the spokesmen for our corporate masters economists and pundits are wont to deprecate this #8-fencing-wire mode of creativity, since it results in no marketable products and goes against the "craving stuff you don't need" mentality vital for the modern economy). But if anything, rather than inventiveness, we excel in leaping onto FAILwagons adopting stupid ideas just when more reality-based countries are abandoning them [scholarly footnotes here about the student loan scheme and the 1990s vogue for privatisation]. I blame the gold-rush tradition.

No doubt my own account of how to construct a Project Pluto nuclear-ramjet-powered long-range hypersonic bomber using smoke-alarm alpha emitters and ceramic cores from old one-bar heaters (controlled by a fluidic-circuitry computer) will receive the same uncritical reception. If there are critics, I expect them to provide their exact GPS coordinates.

* To be fair, I first read about it in the context of a Libertarian wet-dream about escaping from the shackles of national laws by taking to the sea in ships -- it relies on DIY cruise missiles to defend the floating freedom cities from pirates -- and libertarians are by definition poorly endowed in the critical-faculty department.

Teleost family values

This fish is trying to withdraw his children from the secular education system so he can home-school them. He does not want them to be indoctrinated with the Godless "theory of evolution".

Fire of Unknown Origin

Lieutenant Lucius Martius, notorious for cheating at golf, realised that his poor sportsmanship had cost him the respect of his troops when someone swapped his hair pomade for self-igniting napalm. He was not well-pleased.

Rather than own up or dob in the prankster, the halbardiers merely tittered, and made signifiying fingers in the direction of the extra balls concealed within his plus-fours.

Violence

Fortunately this diabolical plan was thwarted and the violence remained uncontrolled.
Government listening devices were much larger in those days.

Is it about a cyclamen?

Here in this far-off land of wonder and enchantment the vegetation includes the tree nettle, Urtica ferox, which is basically a stinging nettle that's evolved into a small tree and kills people, and tree daisies like Olearia spp. which are indeed daisies that have evolved into small trees and get in the way when you're tramping. And then there are tree orchids which HA HA FOOLED YOU are epiphytes. Though they are not obligate branch-dwellers, and seem to thrive on the forest floor if they end up there when a branch breaks off or a tree falls over or they are brought down by the invidious workings of the "tall orchid syndrome" or "great Kiwi clobbering machine".*

Of the various species of tree orchid, Earina autumnalis is the one in flower at the moment. And very nice it is too. The flowers have a strong aroma rather like toilet freshener, and rather like someone has dropped a whole bottle of vanilla essence; or to put it in terms you'll understand, like a combination of GD gas (Soman), CA gas (Camite) and CN gas (CAP).

Also spotted a pygmy tree orchid (Ichthyostomum pygmaeum) today. This makes me proud enough and I will not get up in the morning for any sergeant, for it is an inconspicuous wee plant with leaves up to 1 cm long growing out of little pseudobulbs like wrinkled dried peas but smaller.

Also of note in the NZ flora is the dirigible cyclamen. In the picture the breeze is blowing one across a bay. The people below in the castle gate are looking rather concerned at the prospect of its roots lodging in the castle walls, for they can widen cracks and do no end of damage to the stonework.

Here's a painting of a dirigible cyclamen by Brent Wong, but I have to say that he's made a bit of a dog's breakfast of it, and it doesn't look very convincing to me.

* Not to be confused with ZRM's "Wingnut processing machine".

Just saying, it's no wonder they came here as refugees

The Greys next door are very proud of their youngest son's progress with his trumpet lessons, and last night they were insistent that I should stay still and listen to his rendition of Pokarekare Ana.

It's nice that they're making such an effort to assimilate to New Zealand ways, but sometimes I miss the nasal implants and the anal probes. At least back then you knew what to expect.

Our two weapons are discretion and how we apply the law... and ruthless efficiency

Since localised bans on drinking alcohol in public have proved unworkable, or led to worse displays of public pissantry, or both, the Wellington City Council responds by proposing to extend the ban across the entire city. The proposed ban will not cover beer, wine, etc. consumed at bars, or at the tables that spill out from them across the footpath. Yet it would be churlish to regard it as merely a form of rent-farming; a tool to enforce patronage at the very bars that promote inner-city Wellington as a place for getting hammered (evil alcohol peddlers, boo hiss). Suffice to say that

Wellington's Hospitality Association branch president Adam Cunningham said the ban was appropriate and would not affect hospitality businesses.

If brothel owners had the same clout on the Council as is wielded by the hoteliers and publicans, then any public-lewdness problems arising from turning prostitution into the main activity of the inner city would be addressed by a bylaw that criminalised sex (except in brothels).
It turns out that the bylaw's chief proponents are the police. No-one could possibly have expected them to be so enthusiastic about a ban that would criminalise large sectors of the population and leave the decisions like "who deserves punishment" up to their partiality and selective enforcement rather than in the hands of the court system.

[Inspector Perry] accepted that even people drinking responsibly in public places, such as at picnics in parks, on beaches and in the green belt, would now be acting unlawfully.
"The police's biggest power is one of discretion and how we apply the law."

His insouciant acceptance of arbitrary powers might sound chilling and Orwellian to those of us who are easily chilled or Orwelled but fear not, Perry has promised that white middle-class rate-payers will be safe:*

"I don't think we will see [those sorts of offenders] appearing in Wellington District Court."

In other news, the constabulary are butt-hurt about the growing number of violent assaults against police officers. It is almost as if people no longer accept them as a source of safety but instead resent them as a kind of army of occupation.

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* Worth noting that the same people were delivering the same sanguine promise of commonsense inconsistency 18 months ago, when the first, circumscribed liquor ban was introduced. Three months later,

People who breach the public liquor ban in the designated city areas can expect to be arrested, says Inspector Kevin Riordan, acting Wellington Area Commander.
"We've been using our discretion until now so that people could get used to the idea that the 24/7 liquor ban exists. There's plenty of signage about the ban so we don't want any more excuses."