Let's do a bit of Face Time

 

 

Resting Bitch Face A.K.A. RBF is a recognised and researched condition. It is a facial expression conveying that the person who has it is (take your pick) angry, annoyed, arrogant, contemptuous, superior to you or at the very least removed from the current conversation. The condition is genuine and is covered in extensive detail in populist portals such as Wikipedia and Urban Dictionary.  Celebrities known for it, or accused of it, include Victoria Beckham, Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza and among the relatively few men with it, Kayne West.

 

I have it. And I can tell you that in my experience, it is not a case of what you see is what you get. If I look at you with an expressionless face, I am not holding you in contempt, I am not angry with you, and I certainly don’t think I am superior to you. It is just that smiling (for example) takes a physical toll on me. I want to smile more to make you feel better, but I prefer to have a spontaneous, shared, and warranted smile. I could make a smile a permanent fixture on my face, but that would be both physically exhausting and somewhat hypocritical. Just—please—be assured that unless you hear something to the contrary (from me), I like you and am interested in you even if my face doesn’t show it.

 

I like faces, particularly eyes. It is said that eyes are windows to the soul. They are certainly the most expressive of our facial features. As evidence of that, consider the greatest actors of our time—particularly in the time of close-ups. They act with their eyes. They tell a story with their eyes. Their eyes suggest they have set aside their souls in favour of that of their character. The best modern-day exponent, in my view, is Anthony Hopkins. He did it early with Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs (if you believe Lector had a soul) and again as Burt Munro in The World’s Fastest Indian. The best single example of the eyes at work is that of the great British actor Tom Hardy in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. In the film, Hardy plays Farrier, a Spitfire pilot. He spends almost the entire movie wearing an oxygen mask. Yet, Hardy manages to convey all his emotions of his character—fear, anger, triumph, and despair—through his only exposed facial feature, his eyes. It is a work of art which in these Covid-masked days we can but envy and perhaps aspire to.

 

So that brings me to the dude above. But, before I reveal who he is, allow me to ask you two questions:

1. What year was the photograph taken?
2. Which films has he appeared in?

 

Take your time; I’ll wait

……

The answer to the first question is 1910.

The answer to the second question is none. Despite Brad Pitt good looks (to whom he has been likened), he is not an actor. Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who lived from 1884 to 1922. His most significant and possibly only claim to fame is as the creator of the once exalted ink blob test as a means of identifying a person’s personality traits. That test has since been discredited. 

 

Yet I can but wonder whether there would have been a better outcome for Rorschach had he followed a similar path in our time? And that is perhaps an indictment on the media today. We see it in New Zealand; we see it on CNN and Fox. In these days of style over substance, presentation over professionalism, visuals are our default position.

In Rorschach’s case, with those film star good looks and medical qualifications, he surely would be the media’s go-to guy for all things medical. He may have to eschew that inkblot stuff, but why not be our latest covid-modeller? He might not be any better at the job than the current lot. But let’s face it, if we can no longer expect credibility, we could at least improve the eye candy.

 

https://frydaysblog.blogspot.com/

 

 

Whetu Calls: The epidemiologist

 

I have known Whetu for a long time. Longer than anticipated and, on reflection, longer than desired. In the time I have known him I have moved house three times and on none of these have I given him my home address. Yet he crops up. He finds me. It is uncanny. The only times he has granted me a hiatus is when he is in prison, which are, admittedly, frequent. His crimes are petty, mostly involving the theft of cars, a couple of burglaries and shoplifting. As far as I know, he has never been convicted of a major crime involving violence or being a member of the Labour Party. I personally have nothing against Whetu. In fact, I admire him for being the entrepreneur he is. And the ruses he adopts and adapts to extort money from me are genuinely creative; but he is an intrusion, an unwelcome visitor, and a penetrator of my comfort zone—I do not like being penetrated. So, it was with some displeasure today that I opened my door to find Whetu on my doorstep. The exchange went like this:

HE: Kia Ora, Bro.

ME: Whetu.

HE: You gots new home?

ME: Yes.

HE: You didn’t tell me.

ME: It slipped my mind.

HE: But I found you.

ME: Obviously. Look, Whetu, what is it this time? And how much?

HE: How much?

ME: How much money do you want? Or, to put it more accurately, how much money are you NOT going to get from me?

HE: I don’t want no money from you.

ME: Really?

HE: I got plenty of money. I gotta new job.

ME: Really? With who…whom?

HE: Pacifica University.

ME: Never heard of it.

HE: It’s new. I am their epdi…epid…epri…bug doctor.

ME: Bug doctor.

HE: I tells them how much covid cases to expect. I models for them.

ME: And what does modelling mean?

HE: Standing around and looking good.

ME: What on earth do you know about Covid?

HE: Nothing.

ME: Nothing.

HE: I makes it up. Television comes to me because I am at university, asks me how much covid cases there are going to be next week, and I tells them.

ME: And how do you know?

HE: I looks it up.

ME: Looks…Look it up, where?

HE: First three numbers of last week’s Lotto draw.

ME: That’s not very scientific.

HE: Well, if you want to get scie…scia…

ME: Scientific.

HE: Yeah, that. I sometimes gives them the first four numbers—scares the shits out of them.

ME: So, what have you come to see me for?

HE: Next week there are going to be 8,433 covid cases.

ME: So?

HE: Want to buy a mask?

 

Vaccines and Vehemence

 

 

vehemence

/ˈviːɪm(ə)ns/

noun

noun: vehemence; plural noun: vehemences

Great forcefulness or intensity of feeling or expression. "the vehemence of his reaction".

 

Last year, the rupture of what I had considered a resilient friendship deeply upset me. There are three reasons for that:

 

1. The rupture was predicated on a misunderstanding that could have been “sorted”.
2. I had the, and I now think naïve, view that a friendship, particularly the length of this one, should be able to withstand misunderstandings, at least to the point of agreeing to disagree.
3. The rupture was so abrupt and complete that I questioned my judgement in forming the foundation of a friendship with this person.

 

I have calmed down now and moved on. But it got me thinking. Was that event symptomatic of a wider malaise infecting our society? 

Are we so stressed out even a minor and previously thought insignificant issue attains wider ramifications and consequences—without the possibility of atonement?

I hope that is not the case. I fervently do. But it appears to me that New Zealand is becoming increasingly polarised on a far broader range of issues and that polarisation is now exhibited with far greater exactitude and vehemence.

 

And nowhere in my world is that more obvious than the pro-vaccine v. anti-vaccine debate. 

Fryday won’t contribute to the debate; this post is not about vaccines. It is about the vehemence in which the argument is being waged and what it says of whom we may have become.

 

My starting point is that I have the elective right to make my own decisions, provided I am not breaking the law or intentionally harming someone. You—and I mean a collective you— have the right to arrive at your own decisions under the same adjuncts. You also have the right to persuade me to your opinion if you have a view contrary to mine.

 

No problem.

 

However, there is a problem in that some in this debate ignore the aspect of not intentionally harming someone.

I can cite three examples from my neighbourhood:

 

1. An elderly lady allegedly approached children in our town, telling them they would die if “Mommy and Daddy” forced them to have a jab. That lady has been reported to the police. I believe I know who she is.
2. People waiting in their cars at vaccination centres have been accosted by placard-wielding anti-vaxers so aggressively that they intimidated the occupants and frightened the children. Again, the matter has been referred to the police.
3. One woman in the small, gated community my wife and I live in sent a message to us claiming DHB staff and the military were going door-to-door asking residents whether they were vaccinated—and should we (the community) lock our gate to keep them out.

 

That last one, more naïve than harmful, recognises a factor present in all three examples. People are so intense about this issue that they cannot allow people to have an opinion opposing theirs. Why is that? Why the evangelical zeal? Why has one side in this argument turned into a Latter-Day Saints visit? And why, in extreme examples, is it necessary to target kids?

 

I have no answers to those questions. But the questions themselves worry me. I have never seen the likes of this venom in New Zealand—at least not on this scale. I am uncomfortable with it; I don’t like it and, whilst there is room for passion and zeal, there is no room for this crap.[1]

 

To use a well-worn phrase: this is not who we are or, for most of us, want to be.

 

PostScript:

I was naïve last year in thinking a friendship could withstand a disagreement, particularly one based on a misunderstanding; I am perhaps being equally naïve this year in hoping we can all pull back and show a little common sense—and courtesy.

 

 

[1] It can be argued that the 1981 Springbok tour forged the same intensity and did divide the country. But that was for the most part attacking an issue (apartheid)—not targeting individuals and certainly not children.

 

 

 

Doing No.2s

 

The best print advertisement headline I wrote while working in advertising owed its appeal to logic rather than imagination or creativity, so its subsequent success in winning an award was largely undeserved.

It was for Budget Car Rentals who were at the time having trouble with one of its competitors, and the No.1 in the market, Hertz allegedly spreading misinformation about Budget’s vehicle availability in Australia.

The headline I wrote for my ad. was:

The Truth, Hertz.

As I said, not particularly imaginative, but it captured the public’s attention, made Hertz angry (I believe) and garnered me an advertising award.

It wasn’t the best headline written for the car rental industry. That accolade goes to the famous slogan created for Avis by DDB in the 1960s:

When you’re only No.2, you try harder.

So successful was that headline, that Avis’s market share and profits quickly grew to the point that there was a very real risk of it becoming No.1!

There is merit in being No.2; it leaves something for you to aspire to and the motivation to achieve it. I would be quite happy if anything I achieved thus far got me to the position.

But for me, it comes down to something else. Two is my lucky number and 2022 is replete with them (only 2222 is better, and I am unlikely to see that in) so I am looking forward to 2022 with optimism.

I hope you can do the same.

To that end, Fryday wishes you, your family, those you love and all those you simply want the best for, a year in which you attain your dreams, and which leaves you happier moments experiences and memories.

After all, we’ve all worked bloody hard for that over the last two years.

We deserve it.

 

Le Grice without Grace

 

Is this a joke?

Ridiculing the NZ Police is very close to being the fashionable norm these days.

Those who do it point to, among other things, the perceived lack of action against the illegal gathering of gangs during covid, support for the iwi roadblocks in Northland, and their failure to arrest an escalating rise in all forms of crime.

None of which is the fault of frontline police officers, and I can imagine they are just as frustrated as we are, and perhaps even embarrassed, over the diffidence of those in power who seemingly won’t—at this woke time— allow them to do the job they signed up for.

Personally, I have nothing but respect for those frontline officers. They have a difficult and sometimes dangerous job. Let’s show a bit of appreciation.

And I mean you, Dr Jade Sophia Le Grice.

Here is the story:

On Tuesday, police arrested two young offenders at the Britomart train station. Those offenders were among a group of 12 who allegedly assaulted a security officer outside the station. The two arrested were charged on suspicion of fighting in one case and suspicion of obstruction and assaulting a police officer in the other.

The arrests weren’t made without difficulty, and of course, as is the case these days, they were filmed by a bystander and uploaded to social media.

This brought out the predictable claims of police brutality.

But as predictable as those claims are, Dr Le Grice’s tilt for 15 minutes of fame has left me wondering where academics such as her come from and whether they have the realistic expectation that I will treat them as anything but a joke.

Dr Jade Le Grice, a senior lecturer at Auckland University, tweeted, saying the arrest video showed “vectors of colonial racism [and sexism] ... again brought to bear”.

Really? “Colonial Racism”? Sexism”?

Sorry, but those are, to me, trite terms trotted out when somebody feels the need to be provocative and claim undeserved importance.

They are also dreadfully old-fashioned. And, by the way, at least one of those arrested appears to be pakeha.

And who is Dr Jade Sophia Le Grice? Well, she is a deep thinker. Either that or she makes it up as she goes along. I think the latter. But I’ll leave the following for you to judge for yourself. This is what she says about herself on her University of Auckland page.

 

“My research approach situates mātauranga Māori, the diversity of Māori culture and identity, and the lived experiences of Māori people as legitimate within our local psychology context. It also involves interfacing with key stakeholders and agents of change to maximise opportunities for praxis, social and institutional change.

“One branch of my research programme applies this approach to the context of reproductive decision making, reproductive justice and inter-related domains of abortion, sexuality education, contraception, reproductive health, and maternity. Through this work I have also explored the importance of developing feminism that is historically congruent, and locally derived, to produce decolonizing psychological knowledge.

“A second branch attends to the social and cultural conditions within which rangatahi Māori develop identities, navigate a colonial context, and create agentic pathways. This extends to decolonising sociocultural contexts of meaning making, understanding supportive relational contexts of whanaungatanga, attending to the development of Māori gendered sexual subjectivities, and Māori identities in the context of state care.”

Greetings from the Red Zone.

 

This morning the Stuff website published what is to me is an extraordinary article regarding the rationale for not imposing checkpoints at Auckland’s southern border.

It quoted stark modelling by the New Zealand Transport Agency forecasting that if checkpoints were imposed during the holiday period, traffic queues could stretch 25 kilometres back into the city and the time waiting in traffic may be as much as 9.5 hours.

Those figures are horrific, and I commend the agency for stating that they create “significant” concerns for the welfare and safety of people and pets stuck in a hot car for anything over two hours.

The agency also said [the delays] would lead to irrational behaviour because of frustration.

Rightly, in my view, the agency recommended against checkpoints.

But that is not why I think the article is extraordinary. On the contrary, I believe the views of the agency and the reporting of them by Stuff is logical, responsible, and mercifully free of the politicisation that governs so much of our lives these days.

So, it is not what the article says; it is what the article doesn’t say—the checkpoints at the northern border.

Surely the same arguments apply to the north. What are the differences? The Stuff article doesn’t supply an answer. There is no mention of the northern checkpoints other than a short statement from an unnamed source that the northern checkpoints are not stopping every car.

Really. So, what are they doing? Why are they there?  If every car is not being checked, why not simply have the random checks administered by police (and only by police) that are now in place to the south of Auckland?

Again, what is the difference?

The defenders of the checkpoints point to Northland’s low vaccination rate and the need to protect a “vulnerable” population.

That, of course, is just obfuscation. If that was the only reason, I could make the argument that Aucklanders need protection from us. There are, I submit, other reasons, to some unpalatable and therefore not to be mentioned, why there are checkpoints in the north and not in the south. I alluded to some of them back in May last year—and I’ll leave it at that.

But getting back to the article. Good on Stuff for publishing it. Stuff and the Transport Agency present compelling reasons against the continued use of checkpoints. Public safety is paramount amongst them.

Why is no such concern expressed for those, my family included, travelling north?

The Last Word in Last Words

 

Last words.

Most of them litter History’s floor often bruised and buried beneath boots of victors. 

That is perhaps God’s gift to the soon to be departed. I imagine that when in the throes of dying, you do not do your best work. God understands that and spares you embarrassment.

Other last words are lost in the myriad of commonalities of surrounding words, particularly during war or natural disasters. For example, I am reminded of Napoleon’s Old Guard, his elite soldiers, when toward the end of the Battle of Waterloo and led by an ancestor of mine, they refused to surrender despite being the target of countless cannon surrounding them.  I can imagine the last words of those brave men as the canon ripped them apart: Oh merde!                       

 I don’t know what my last words will be. I want to think they will be something like “What are we doing tomorrow?” which would suggest that my death comes quickly and unheralded, in the company of someone I love, rather than suffering the slow degradation I deserve.

Some of the famous last words may or may not have been uttered by those to whom they are attributed. For example, who said “Et tu Brute”? Caesar or William Shakespeare?  

We can only imagine the last words of some others. It’s pure conjecture, but could they not have been for George Armstrong Custer at Little Big Horn: “Bloody hell! Where did they come from?”

My favourite actor is Jimmy Cagney. I don’t know what he said on his deathbed, but given the exasperation he had experienced during his life about what he did and didn’t say, he could be forgiven for saying, “Okay. For Fucksake!: You dirty rat. Satisfied?” You dirty rat was never said in any film in his lifetime.

We know the (almost) last words Oscar Wilde said on his deathbed in the Hôtel d'Alsace in Paris. Looking toward the grotesque wallpaper in his room, he turned to a companion and said, “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death - one or the other of us has to go.”  It was Oscar who went, dying a few hours later; the wallpaper is still there.^⁠1

There are great last words everywhere. Let’s look at a few:

“Hey, fellas! How about this for a headline for tomorrow’s paper? ‘French fries.'”— James French, convicted murderer (before his execution on an electric chair).

Similarly: “Bring me a bullet-proof vest.”— James W. Rodgers, convicted murderer (when asked if he had a last request before dying by firing squad).

“I’ve had 18 straight whiskeys… I think that’s the record.”— Dylan Thomas, poet.

“I should have never switched from scotch to martinis.”— Humphrey Bogart, actor.

“Gun’s not loaded… see?”— Johnny Ace, singer (while playing with a gun backstage during a concert).

“I’m bored with it all.”— Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister.

“This is no way to live.”— Groucho Marx, comedian.

“Turn me over — I’m done on this side.”— Lawrence of Rome, deacon (while being burned alive as punishment).

“Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something important.”— Pancho Villa, a Mexican revolutionary.

 “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”— General John Sedgwick during the American Civil War just before he was shot dead by a Confederate sniper:

Though not “last words” as such, it is typical of Spike Milligan that the epitaph written on his headstone is, “I told you I was ill.”

And the last word in last words for me was that of Joseph Henry Green: A surgeon, Green was checking his own pulse as he lay dying. His last word? 

“Stopped.”

¹ Incidentally, Oscar Wilde is buried within 500 metres of my aforementioned Waterloo ancestor, Marshal Ney. Ney’s final words were “Soldiers, when I give the command to fire, fire straight at my heart. Wait for the order. It will be my last to you.” He was then ripped apart by a firing squad. Technically, therefore, his last word was “Fire!”

 

 

The Deep Dark Mire of the National Party

 

I remember sitting in Jack Elder’s West Auckland home on the 14^thof June 1984, watching Rob Muldoon announce live on television that there would be a general election the following month. Muldoon was visibly drunk and his judgement severely impaired, but everybody from Elder’s campaign team in Elder’s house that night was initially stunned by the announcement and then openly ecstatic. There was no way Muldoon, then in his third term as prime minister and up against the eloquent and popular David Lange, would win a general election.

Nor did he. He and the National Party lost in a landslide. The fourth Labour Government was ushed in. David Lange became Prime Minister, and Jack Elder was appointed Minister of Police.

That night, June 14, Muldoon committed political suicide. Did he know then? I think he did. I have watched footage of the announcement. There is resignation in his eyes and exhaustion about his demeanour that suggests he wanted out, and Marilyn Waring was a convenient scapegoat and diversion. 

Of course, the comparison with last Wednesday is obvious. Did Judith Collins know what she was doing? Or know the likely (some will say inevitable) ramifications of demoting her chief rival over an innocuous issue that occurred five years ago? I think she did. She is too astute and too experienced not to. And unlike Muldoon, she was not, as far as I know, drunk.

So, why did she do it?

I don’t think we will ever know that. Collins’ appalling lack of judgement (if that indeed was what it was) defies logic. And any proffered explanation by others is, to this point, speculation. We may get an answer from the inevitable autobiography, but that I think will be tarnished by varnish. I don’t think Collins then as now will be in any mood to share the true or whole motivation for what she did. Why should she? She owes us nothing.

Why she did what she did will remain a mystery, like so much within the deep dark mire of the current National Party.

Political leaders come and go, but the National Party is haemorrhaging them—five of them since the 2017 election if we count Bill English and Shane Reti.

Why is that?

Because the party lacks vision and back-room leadership.

The National Party has long considered itself the rightful party of power, and that any loss of power is both temporary and an aberration. On the rare occasions they have been out of power, they always assumed there was a way back, and it was just a matter of time and patience.

The party would pull through.

But none of that exists now. And hasn’t since the party lost for a second time and in a landslide in 2020.

Lacking imagination and leadership, the best they have managed to come up with is cycling through a group of parliamentary leaders in the vain hope that one of them will capture the public’s imagination and combat the charismatic Jacinda Ardern. 

None has, despite in my view Ardern leading the most incompetent government in New Zealand history.

Now the party has run out of time and options. Looking at the group of potential front-runners for the leadership, none stands out, and there are two who, in my view, would be worse than Collins (deputy leader is a different story, there are a couple of women there who would be magic but not yet ready to take the helm).

So, how did the party get to this parlous state?

If changing leaders doesn’t work and the party is directionless, we are left only to consider the common elements that have prevailed through this decay in the party’s persona and progress.

Peter Goodfellow.

Peter Goodfellow is the President of the National Party and hugely influential in its management and machinations.

I know him. I have had lunch with him. He seems to be a—well—a good fellow.

But in my view, he is a disaster for the party. He had his day in the sun when he was basking in the supernova of John Key. But since then he has presided over the sharpest decline in the party’s history.

And it is not only him. Much of the management team he leads have struck me, and I have met many of them, as arrogant, authoritarian and deeply out of touch with the electorate and even the party membership.

It is a mystery to me why they have lasted as long as they have.

I have heard that Goodfellow’s saving graces are he is a good fundraiser and well connected in Remuera. But given where the party he leads is now, are those “graces” enough? And as for the rest of them—their time has come and well and truly gone.

They oversee a time when the party nearly destroyed itself and may still do.

The National Party can change all the leaders it wants (at its peril), but nothing will change until it changes its failed back-room.

The country needs that to happen.