Some amusing incidents

Four amusing incidents this week, I thought I would share.

The first (and second) were at the Electoral Legislation Select Committee. There was a discussion over whether MPs who pass rumours onto bloggers could be considered the “publisher” and a Labour MP referred to a particular rumour about her, which she alleged came from a National MP. She said that it didn’t appear on my blog, but on “that other blog”.

I was very amused by the reluctance to name “that other blog”, so suggested that she was referring to “The blog that shall not be named”, in the fashion of not naming Lord Voldermort. This caused a fair bit of merriment, and the Dom Post even covered that little snippet.

At the same hearing, there was also a discussion on the appropriateness of parliamentary surveys (the ones posted out) asking questions on how people vote. I responded with an absolutely correct answer that one legitimate use of asking such a question is that allows you to do a cross-tabular analysis of responses to the issues and policy questions,  which can help MPs better understand how different communities regard different issues, and that understanding the diversity of viewpoints is a legitimate parliamentary activity.

Without co-ordination, both Lianne Dalziel and Darren Hughes burst into howls of laughter, with Darren expressing admiration for how I managed to give that entire answer with a straight face.  At that point my straight face somewhat ceased, and I did concede there may be a variety of motivations for the asking of such a question (which incidentally all parties do). It was very amusing.

Later that day I had a meeting with two Labour MPs over copyright issues, held over in one of their offices. The meeting went on later than expected and at 5.40 pm I was due to go on air with Larry Williams and Deborah Coddington to talk about issues of the day. So I excused myself from the meeting and stepped out into the corridor to do the radio interview, sitting down on the couches there.

Around halfway through a Labour Executive Secretary came out of her office into the corridor, and the look on her face seeing me by myself in the secure Labour corridor, sitting on the couch conducting a radio interview was priceless.I was lucky not to have security guards descend on me!

The fourth amusing incident was at a dinner last night, to mark my retirement from the board of .nz Registry Services. I’m the last of the inaugural directors to retire, after eight years there. Anyway the Board Chair started the dinner by saying it was to acknowledge everything I had done to NZRS. As it was hastily corrected to be everything I had done for NZRS, it was very amusing to everyone there. Set the scene nicely for a very enjoyable night.