Mulholland Heft Meer Mmmmmmmm...

"She's So Hot, She's Making Me Racist"

Shaved heads huh.  Nice body, pity 'bout the attitude...

Strange Internet Gigolo Advertisements

Ladies, for $50k, this could be all yours.

*vomits*

Mulholland Drive Official Correspondence

28th February 2008

Hu Jintao
General Secretary
Communist Party of China
The Imperial Palace
Tiannamen Square
Beijing, People's Republic of China

Dear Filthy Fascist-Socialist Scumbag,

I write to request the immediate acquisition of New Zealand by China as a Special Administrative Region.

The reason for this, in light of the tax cuts granted to one of your other SARs, should be obvious.  Basically, our democratically elected Filthy Fascist-Socialist Scumbags have been remiss in providing anything similar, and I suspect the odds of us getting a decent tax cut might be much higher under your patronage.

Should you wish to take up this offer, I might also have some excellent suggestions as to whom you could entrust the role of Chief Executive.

I thank you for your consideration of this proposal, and eagerly await the invading hordes of your People's Liberation Army.

Yours sincerely,
Blair Mulholland
NZSAR Chief Executive-in-Waiting

It's Enough to Make You Depressed

I've never read such bullshit in all my life.

The anti-pill brigade infuriate me.  It's one reason why Scientologists piss me off as well.  There's this whole movement in modern society to be "natural" and "organic" and to avoid "chemicals" that is based on primitive animism more than reason and good science.  Better living through chemistry is exactly right.  Science has prolonged our lives and life expectancy.  Don't be scared, folks.  Run with it.

Methinks this study has more to do with drawing the conclusion that "pills are bad m'kay" first and then building a study to support that.  Which of course it is easy to do.  The whole deal with antidepressants is that you can't just take them and change nothing about your life or attitude to it, and expect them to help you.  The point of them is that they saw off the peaks of your emotions and allow you to sit back and rationalise stuff better instead of simply reacting instinctively to stuff that happens and letting your emotions spiral out of control.  If you're not rational in the first place, or not determined to fix the attitudes you have, they ain't going to help you.  And if you have a strictly controlled study of this nature where your subjects change nothing else about themselves, the result is going to reflect that.

To me it just seems obvious that the pills have an effect.  I have been on Citalopram for a year now - currently at 20mg/day, and they have been fantastic for me.  The bouts of anxiety, depression, mood swings and outbursts of anger that I used to frequently experience are now rare (and reserved for dickheads like the people conducting this study).  And it's not a placebo effect, because believe me the pills physically alter things, and do have side effects.  I have to take them at the exact same time every day or they act like sleeping pills.  Placebo?  I don't think so!  You try a dose of these suckers and when you wake up fifteen hours later you can see how you like it.

Another point about antidepressant pills, which seems to have been bourne out by the comments here, is that you have to take them for quite a while before they really kick in.  Like six weeks minimum.  These twats who have commented that they started taking them and freaked out and came off them and the comedown was terrible... all I can say is that either their doctor has not been informative enough, or they've ignored his/her advice.  The pills do make things worse before they make them better.  And if you change the dose, that messes things up for a while too.

Taking antidepressant pills is a bit of a crapshoot - some don't work as well as others and different pills work different ways for different people.  Depression also has different sources - some clinical and some not.  These idiots who claim that they were on pills for three years and it "didn't work" are probably right - it didn't work because your depression is bound up in your attitude.  And telling me I'm a fool for taking them when they clearly and blatantly work for me is bollocks.

Reassuring ACTs

I don't know how much of this is just a kiss-and-make-up along the lines of Clark and Moore, or whether it is genuine.  I'm prepared to believe the latter.  I also think that, if it was initiated by Rodney, it shows he may be serious about getting more ACT MPs as opposed to just keeping his seat.

I'm not entirely opposed to Douglas, former official titleholder of The World's Finest '80s Moustache, being on the list - 70 is still young in world terms as far as legislators go.  Hell, Ruth Richardson is still only 58 and she still has much to contribute (she should challenge Brownlee in Ilam!).  But ACT needs to be careful not to be seen as the party of yesterday - and there is a danger in that.  To put the old farts on the list, you'd have to have plenty of new farts on there too.

Either way, it is great to see these two working together instead of their followers tearing the party to bits and costing it representation.  Could ACT finally be getting its shit together?

"Waaaaaaahhh! Granny's Being Meeeeaaan!!!!"

Oh boo hoo hoo.  Poor Helen.

This is a newspaper which crucified Shipley, bashed Bill into submission, damaged the Don into quitting, and now it's your turn you don't like it.  A paper that has supported you for two terms in government and half of one in opposition, and now, after it rightly lambasts you for a dire third and some appalling lapses in political judgement, you smear it as a "Tory paper"?!

The Herald, Miss Clark, has helped you become the longest serving Labour Party Leader in New Zealand history.  If it wasn't for them and TVNZ's Linda Clark, you would have been back to lecturing Politics at Auckland University for the last nine years.  It nearly saw off National in Auckland in 2002, where they polled 19% of the vote and gained their worst result since the first election they contested in 1938.  Audrey Young and Vernon Small were your biggest cheerleaders for the longest time.  Now Audrey has turned on you, perhaps you should take heed of what she is saying instead of painting her blue?

So, to be frank, and to not put too fine a point on it, STFU.  And that goes for all the Labour Bloggers out there who are prepared to ignore history and accuse Granny of bias when things suddenly aren't going their way.

Oh, and PS, Gordon Minhinnick - WTF?!  He's been dead for 16 years!  And he stopped cartooning five years before you even entered parliament.  Come on Helen, when are you going to come down that Beehive corridor tipsy on chardonnay and put us out of our misery with a Snappie?

Languages in Schools

In an increasingly globalised world, it's madness that New Zealand schools place such little value on foreign languages.  In most of Europe, English is compulsory study for students, and the trade benefits to those nations are vast, both through interaction with native English speakers, and through its use as an intermediary language between nationalities with foreign tongues.

Surely our public primary and secondary schools should be offering foreign languages as an integral part of the curriculum, with priority being given to Mandarin Chinese?  Imagine a generation of New Zealanders fluent in Chinese!  Imagine how wealthy this country could become in fifteen years time when those kids enter the workforce and start to do international business!

Clouding it further is the politically correct insistence that, if languages are to be given priority, the language so honoured should be Maori - a tongue only useful in isolated rural communities.  It's a shame Sir Apirana Ngata isn't alive today to denounce this for the bollocks that it is.  Learning Maori is great for scoring some weed in downtown Ruatoria, but it ain't going to make you money unless you're a Wellington bureaucrat on the take.

NZ kids desperately need foreign languages to survive in the modern world.  But they won't get them.  Sadly it comes down to our shitty, socialist, centrally-run, state-planned education system that won't let parents run their own schools, inflates housing prices beyond all reason around school zones, and, most importantly, doesn't allow better payrates for valuable staff, like say, oh I don't know... Mandarin teachers!  In Soviet Helengrad, school runs you.

Strange Internet Dating Profiles for Jesus

This one isn't quite as funny as the Christian woman who posed in a thong, but it's up there.  Is this woman for real?  "Needlework"?  "Please be prepared to be police checked before you meet [my daughter]"?!  "Larger than normal family"?!!

God bless internet dating.  Check it out:

"...If It Wasn't for Those Meddling Bloggers..."

Check out Scooby-Doo at No Minister!

To my mind this seems the obvious reason why Glenn donated so much money to Labour.  Though he may not be so popular with them now...

Horsesh*t!

Labour:  Playing the public for fools since 1917.

Let me point out the obvious for Colin Espiner:  Mike Williams is the President of the Labour Party.  When you're the President, you're in charge.  You're not accountable to anyone, least of all the Parliamentary Leader.

Helen Clark can't reject the Labour Party President's resignation because she has no authority over him.  It's the other way around.  The only entity Mike can tender his resignation to is the Labour Council, of which she is but one member.

Don't give us this smokescreen bollocks, Mike.  Man up to the Council and see what they say before you leak this nonsense.