Paul Buchanan writes at Kiwipolitico:

Some Left media types jumped at the opportunity to work for Kim Dotcom’s Internet Party … 

Material and personal motivations rather than ideological affinity apparently pushed these people to violate rudimentary conflict of interest and ethical standards.

That is symptomatic of the fact that the political (as opposed to cultural) Left is well and truly dead in New Zealand. The association (supplication?) of these “progressives” with a cowboy capitalist who has zero Marxist inclinations is a travesty if not treason to any working class cause. In one case the class betrayal had a specific dollar amount and a proposed political candidacy attached to it.

Buchanan continues:

Winston First is a personality cult wrapped in nationalist populist rhetoric and Mana is a personality cult posing as an indigenous socialist movement. The Alliance is dead. Social Credit is no more.

What passes for an armed Left is no more than a bunch of bumbling fantasists who make Kyle Chapman look like a strategic genius.

Harsh, but true.

I use them to make the point that the NZ political Left is increasingly the province of self-interested opportunists and vainglorious charlatans, some with sociopathic tendencies and others divorced from the practicalities involved in confronting a capitalist-dominated political system that has overwhelming popular support. …

For a start, it might be wise to put distance on the delusional sociopaths and self-interested opportunists and charlatans that give the political Left its bad name. Having done that, the legitimate Left can begin to craft an agenda for change that is more than just the piecemeal undoing of the market-oriented policies in place since 1985.

Looks like the revolution has been postponed.

Sarah Putt of IITP blogs the top 10 NZ tech stories for 2013:

1. The NSA revelations
2. The Chorus and copper issue
3. The Patents Bill
4. The IRD transformation project
5. Novopay
6. Launch of the Cloud Computing Code of Practice
7. The Sky TV investigation
8. Tech IPOs on the NZX
9. Launch of 4G Networks
10. The launch of Network for Learning

From Andrew Sullivan quoting Francesca Gino:

In recent research, my Harvard Business School colleagues Silvia Bellezza and Anat Keinan and I found that under certain conditions, nonconforming behaviors, such as not following the expected dress code or the appropriate professional conduct in a given context, can signal higher status. In our research, for example, shop assistants working in boutiques selling luxury brands in Milan assigned greater status to the woman wearing gym clothes and a jean jacket rather than to the woman properly dressed. In another study, students assigned higher status to a 45-year-old professor working at a top-tier university when he was described as wearing a t-shirt and had a beard than to a clean-shaven one wearing a tie. When the deviant behavior appears to be deliberate, it can lead to higher status inferences rather than lower ones.

Why is this the case? Nonconformity often has a social cost, so people assume people breaking the rules enjoy a powerful enough position that they are not concerned about the costs.

I’ve found this to be true. At two international political conferences I’ve attended, almost everyone is in suits. At each conference there was  one exception – old guys in jeans and casual shirts, looking almost scruffy.

In both cases they had a net worth of over $1 billion. When you’re that rich, you can dress how you like!

If the party aims to get 5%, I’m looking forward to reading their policies on:

• The living wage
• The Treaty of Waitangi
• Housing affordability
• Top tax rate
• Immigration laws
• Reducing crime

A party with just one policy (don’t extradite me and I’ll give you some free stuff) is unlikely to go far.

I blogged in October on this strange billboard which appeared in Wellington, with no identified sponsor or publisher.

It seems an advocacy advertisement is required to identify the advertiser, so the Advertising Standards Authority found it is breach of their rules.

What is also interesting is that neither the advertiser nor the billboard company responded to the complaint. It does make you wonder who the advertiser is. Most people are happy to stand by their opinions.

Bradford Wilcox at The Atlantic writes:

But for all the new attention devoted to the 1 percent, a new dataset from the Equality of Opportunity Project at Harvard and Berkeley suggests that, if we care about upward mobility overall, we’re vastly exaggerating the dangers of the rich-poor gap. Inequality itself is not a particularly potent predictor of economic mobility, as sociologist Scott Winship noted in a recent article with his colleague Donald Schneider based on their analysis of this data.

You will always have inequality. A 45 year old with 30 years experience will almost always have a much higher income than an unskilled 18 year old.

What is more important is indeed mobility, can you be born poor, but rise out of it.

So what factors, at the community level, do predict if poor children will move up the economic ladder as adults? …

Harvard economist Raj Chetty, a principal investigator at the Equality of Opportunity Project, has pointed to economic and racial segregation, community density, the size of a community’s middle class, the quality of schools, community religiosity, and family structure, which he calls the “single strongest correlate of upward mobility.” Chetty finds that communities like Salt Like City, with high levels of two-parent families and religiosity, are much more likely to see poor children get ahead than communities like Atlanta, with high levels of racial and economic segregation.

Very interesting. And the three big ones are:

1. Per-capita income growth

2. Prevalence of single mothers (where correlation is strong, but negative)

3. Per-capita local government spending

In other words, communities with high levels of per-capita income growth, high percentages of two-parent families, and high local government spending—which may be a proxy for good schools—are the most likely to help poor children relive the Horatio Alger story. 

So grow incomes for all, invest in schools and have more two parent families.

But many measures directly related to income inequality—such as the size of the middle class in a community, or the gap between the richest and poorest middle-class households in communities—seem far less important than local growth, two-parent households, and local spending.

Good data, but a warning.

Still, we don’t know which way causation runs. High economic mobility might lead to more marriages, creating dual-earner households that would, in turn, facilitate more mobility. Periods of economic growth might make local governments richer, which would lead to more local spending on schools, which better prepare low-income students for college. These are knotty and interlocking variables. 

Would be great to get data for New Zealand.

A very good campaign video by Beat Bowel Cancer Aotearoa.

Bowel cancer is one of the cancers we don’t like to talk about, as anything around that area can be a bit yucky. But it is the number two cancer killer in New Zealand. Almost as many people die from bowel cancer as from breast and prostrate cancer combined. Around 1,200 NZers a year die from it and 3,000 get diagnosed. This is one of the highest rates in the world.

Your lifetime risk of bowel cancer is 1 in 18 for men and 1 in 23 for women and can affect people of any age (but more common over 50). The good news is the 75% of bowel cancer cases are treatable if caught early enough.

So what are the symptoms of bowel cancer. They include:

• Bleeding from the bottom or seeing blood in the toilet after a bowel motion
• Change of bowel motions over several weeks without returning to normal
• Persistent or periodic severe pain the abdomen
• A lump or mass in the abdomen
• Tiredness and loss of weight for no particular reason
• Anaemia

More info on symptoms and screening is on the Beat Bowel Cancer website.

In England the five year survival rate for those diagnosed early is 93%. For those diagnosed at Stage D (late) it is only 7%.

Standing Guard, Bethells Beach (Te Henga)

I love heading out to the mighty west coast beaches (from Auckland) and am always amazed by the ruggedness and beauty of this coastline just within a stones throw of the city.

The possibilities are endless but on this occasion I decided to compose the photograph with the surf-club watch tower in a dominant front-and-centre position. The small figures on either side of the tower are people in the distance enjoying what was a magical sunset.

Click on the image for a larger view of this photograph.

Free Wallpaper – Desktop or iPad

I hope you enjoy this photograph – you can download it as a free Desktop Wallpaper HERE and please share with your friends.

Cheers

Richard [richardhume.com]

The PPTA goes to battle a lot against the Government on educational issues. However they have done a blog post highlighting five good things the Government did in education in 2013. They are:

1. Continued investment in and support for the Positive Behaviour for Learning Action Plan. Started in 2009, many schools involved are reporting fewer behaviour problems.
2. The response to the report on twenty-first century learning and the Network for Learning. They praise the minister’s reference group as dynamic and credible and say the Network for Learning has huge promise.
3. The Ministry of Education’s new approach to consultation. Peter Hughes is making a difference.
4. The Aranui cluster and the secondary sector in Christchurch. They say there has been massive improvement in communication over Canterbury schools, and genuine consultation.
5. The property announcements in response to the Beca review. They praise the option for schools to be able to hand back property management to the ministry.

Good on the PPTA for highlighting the areas where they are agreeing with the Government, while continuing to oppose in the areas where they do not agree. Politics is about being able to work constructively in some areas, while disagreeing in other.s

The Herald reports:

Questions have been raised about the level of security surrounding Auckland Mayor Len Brown during his first public appearance of the year.

Auckland Councillor Cameron Brewer said ratepayers should be concerned at seeing a “bevy of heavies” shadowing the Mayor at the opening of the new $17 million Panmure Transport Interchange on Saturday. …

Protester Dick Cuthbert, who has been to many demonstrations over the years and had come to voice his disapproval of Mr Brown’s leadership, said he was surprised by the level of security.

“I was amazed by the heavies at what was not a controversial event – it was a much-awaited bus-train station. It’s unprecedented.

“I put this down as a mayor terrified of the real public and how they will respond to his carrying on.”

Mr Brewer said the protesters did not justify security being there.

“I don’t believe ratepayers should be funding security guards to surround the Mayor on such occasions. A few hecklers and peaceful demonstrators exercising their democratic right is no justification,” he said.

“It’s an unprecedented sight to have a New Zealand mayor surrounded by publicly-funded heavies to open a suburban railway station.”

I can’t recall a precedent in terms of local body politicians.

Stuff reports:

A US federal appeals court ruled has that bloggers and the public have the same First Amendment protections as journalists when sued for defamation: If the issue is of public concern, plaintiffs have to prove negligence to win damages.

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a new trial in a defamation lawsuit brought by an Oregon bankruptcy trustee against a Montana blogger who wrote online that the court-appointed trustee criminally mishandled a bankruptcy case.

The appeals court ruled that the trustee was not a public figure, which could have invoked an even higher standard of showing the writer acted with malice, but the issue was of public concern, so the negligence standard applied.

Gregg Leslie of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press said the ruling affirms what many have long argued: Standards set by a 1974 US Supreme Court ruling, Gertz v Robert Welch Inc, apply to everyone, not just journalists.

“It’s not a special right to the news media,” he said. “So it’s a good thing for bloggers and citizen journalists and others.”

I expect we will see this case cited in the appeal over whether Cameron Slater has to disclose sources in the defamation case brought by Matthew Blomfield against him.

The appeals court upheld rulings by the District Court that other posts by Cox were constitutionally protected opinion.

Though Cox acted as her own attorney, UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, who had written an article on the issue, learned of her case and offered to represent her in an appeal. Volokh said such cases usually end up settled without trial, and it was rare for one to reach the federal appeals court level.

 

“It makes clear that bloggers have the same First Amendment rights as professional journalists,” he said. “There had been similar precedents before concerning advocacy groups, other writers and book authors. This follows a fairly well established chain of precedents. I believe it is the first federal appeals court level ruling that applies to bloggers.”

A welcome precedent.

The Atlantic reports:

Forget mindfulness meditation, computerized working-memory training, and learning a musical instrument; all methods recently shown by scientists to increase intelligence. There could be an easier answer. It turns out that sex might actually make you smarter.

Researchers in Maryland and South Korea recently found that sexual activity in mice and rats improves mental performance and increases neurogenesis (the production of new neurons) in the hippocampus, where long-term memories are formed.

Wonder if they’ll do human experiments to test the hypothesis?

Last week Grant Robertson said:

The failure of the Government’s digital archive programme is putting at risk a cornerstone project that is part of centenary commemorations of New Zealand’s involvement in World War One, Labour’s Associate Arts, Culture and Heritage Spokesperson Grant Robertson says.

“In December it was revealed the Government’s flagship $12 million digital archive programme had failed and was to be canned.

“One of the results of this is that a project to make the diaries, personnel and other records of New Zealand World War One veterans searchable online by the time the commemorations start is in jeopardy.

Are they? Archives NZ responded:

The acting Chief Archivist, John Roberts says people should be confident in the progress being made in making World War l records available on-line:

“The on-line plan was announced by the Minister in August 2013. No date for completion was stated, but we have been working towards having the information available by the anniversary of the start of the war.

“So far, 73,674 are on-line for public viewing. This is almost half (46%) of the total 160,740 records. A further 65,438 have been digitised, and are ready to go on-line. We are confident this will happen before the August anniversary of the beginning of World War l.  21,628 or 13% of the records are still to be digitised. These records are to be digitised and go on-line before the anniversary.

I’d take a bet that they’ll get them all done by August.

The Economist says:

INNOVATION, the elixir of progress, has always cost people their jobs. In the Industrial Revolution artisan weavers were swept aside by the mechanical loom. Over the past 30 years the digital revolution has displaced many of the mid-skill jobs that underpinned 20th-century middle-class life. Typists, ticket agents, bank tellers and many production-line jobs have been dispensed with, just as the weavers were.

For those, including this newspaper, who believe that technological progress has made the world a better place, such churn is a natural part of rising prosperity. Although innovation kills some jobs, it creates new and better ones, as a more productive society becomes richer and its wealthier inhabitants demand more goods and services. A hundred years ago one in three American workers was employed on a farm. Today less than 2% of them produce far more food. 

That’s an astonishing figure.

… it seems likely that this wave of technological disruption to the job market has only just started. From driverless cars to clever household gadgets (see article), innovations that already exist could destroy swathes of jobs that have hitherto been untouched. The public sector is one obvious target: it has proved singularly resistant to tech-driven reinvention. But the step change in what computers can do will have a powerful effect on middle-class jobs in the private sector too.

Until now the jobs most vulnerable to machines were those that involved routine, repetitive tasks. But thanks to the exponential rise in processing power and the ubiquity of digitised information (“big data”), computers are increasingly able to perform complicated tasks more cheaply and effectively than people. Clever industrial robots can quickly “learn” a set of human actions. Services may be even more vulnerable. Computers can already detect intruders in a closed-circuit camera picture more reliably than a human can. By comparing reams of financial or biometric data, they can often diagnose fraud or illness more accurately than any number of accountants or doctors. One recent study by academics at Oxford University suggests that 47% of today’s jobs could be automated in the next two decades.

This got em thinking. Could cleaners be an endangered species? You already had automated vacuum cleaners that you can leave unattended. Could you end up with an automated toilet bowl cleaner? automated floor polisher? The higher the costs of manual cleaning go, the more likely it is that it will become cost effective to invest in automated cleaning.

At the same time, the digital revolution is transforming the process of innovation itself, as ourspecial report explains. Thanks to off-the-shelf code from the internet and platforms that host services (such as Amazon’s cloud computing), provide distribution (Apple’s app store) and offer marketing (Facebook), the number of digital startups has exploded. Just as computer-games designers invented a product that humanity never knew it needed but now cannot do without, so these firms will no doubt dream up new goods and services to employ millions. But for now they are singularly light on workers. When Instagram, a popular photo-sharing site, was sold to Facebook for about $1 billion in 2012, it had 30m customers and employed 13 people. Kodak, which filed for bankruptcy a few months earlier, employed 145,000 people in its heyday.

30 million customers and 13 staff. Incredible.

Anger about rising inequality is bound to grow, but politicians will find it hard to address the problem. Shunning progress would be as futile now as the Luddites’ protests against mechanised looms were in the 1810s, because any country that tried to stop would be left behind by competitors eager to embrace new technology. The freedom to raise taxes on the rich to punitive levels will be similarly constrained by the mobility of capital and highly skilled labour.

The main way in which governments can help their people through this dislocation is through education systems.

Absolutely.

Yet however well people are taught, their abilities will remain unequal, and in a world which is increasingly polarised economically, many will find their job prospects dimmed and wages squeezed. The best way of helping them is not, as many on the left seem to think, to push up minimum wages. Jacking up the floor too far would accelerate the shift from human workers to computers. Better to top up low wages with public money so that anyone who works has a reasonable income, through a bold expansion of the tax credits that countries such as America and Britain use.

It is a fair point. The more you push up the minimum wage, the more you may speed up the decline of entire industries such as cleaning.

The BBC reports:

A nun who gave birth to a baby boy in the central Italian city of Rieti, said she had no idea she was pregnant, local media report.

The 31-year-old was rushed to hospital with abdominal pains, which she thought were stomach cramps.

The young mother, who is originally from El Salvador, reportedly named her newborn Francis after the current Pope.

The mayor of Rieti, Simone Petrangeli has appealed to the public and media to respect the woman’s privacy.

The news has drawn international attention to the small city of 47,700 inhabitants.

The nun called the ambulance on Wednesday morning. A few hours later she gave birth to a healthy baby boy.

“I did not know I was pregnant. I only felt a stomach pain,” she was quoted as saying by the Ansa news agency.

I can’t wait to see who is listed as the father on the birth certificate!

The Australian reports:

TASMANIAN Labor has ended the nation’s first experiment of Greens in cabinet, conceding power-sharing with the minor party alienates its core supporters, suffocates its messages and must never be repeated. …

She said caucus had resolved that it would never again have Greens “in cabinet” and would not make “power-sharing deals”.

Yet the only possible route to power for NZ Labour is through the Greens.

Senior national Labor figures have urged the party to end its dalliances with the Greens. Union leader Paul Howes last week called for the Tasmanian agreement to be the last anywhere in the country.

Once bitten, twice shy.

To give you some idea of how unpopular the Labor-Green Government is, Labor were at just 18% in the latest poll in Tasmania (Nov 13). That is under half of what they got in 2010.

An interesting profile on and interview of Jamie Whyte in the SST. Some extracts:

But you want some plain speaking? Here’s what he thinks of his putative future colleagues, the good members of the Parliament of New Zealand.

For some, he says, “shamefully, it’s just that it’s the best job they are capable of getting . . . they have no particular talents, somehow they have managed to get in with their party and get elevated and they are as happy as a pig in shit. Otherwise, they would be working in the food industry [think McDonald’s] or cleaning.”

Still others, he says scornfully, are the ideology-free, poorly-read “Tory boy” types who think they are the “shepherds of society”.

Cheerful, convivial, entertaining company, clearly very intelligent, prone to the odd curse, Whyte is a youthful-looking 48-year-old father of two with a shaven head and tailored shirt.

He’s an unlikely pollie and of course, considers himself in neither of the categories described above. “I’m not a careerist politician. I am not doing this because I am desperate to be an MP.”

Whyte’s much purer motivation is ideas.

Which we need more of.

Actually, he’s an ACT natural, would never have fitted in National. He talks about how the state should be smaller, offer more freedoms. He hates the Greens (“watermelons, green on the outside, red on the inside”), disdains Cunliffe, likes John Key but is frustrated at what he sees as National’s tendency to accept Labour reforms when they take power.

For example, he’s “appalled” by Labour’s extension of welfare “deep into the middle classes”, saying it is a hugely inefficient way of recirculating people’s own money, and can’t understand why it hasn’t been rolled back.

Why, he wonders, are there more laws every year and not fewer: surely after 200 years of effective parliamentary democracy there shouldn’t be many stones left unturned? So we get intrusive, inconsistent legislation that leaves room for discretion. Such as? “If you take smacking . . .” A pause; frantic backpedalling. “No, I am not going there.”

Emphatically, he says, an ACT party led by Whyte would not go to war on Treaty issues. “I’ve got no interest in Maori-bashing as a political game.”

Good.

The HoS reports:

Turned down a McDonald’s thickshake this summer because you’ve heard it contains pig fat? Given up drinking diet cola because of cancer fears? Swapped margarine for butter because you’ve heard table spreads are just one molecule away from plastic?

These are three of the most common myths about food – and food experts say misinformation about food is worryingly widespread.

Had not heard that third one.

Consumer NZ food writer Belinda Allan said there were myths and misinformation about almost all kinds of food. “There have even been myths about broccoli being bad for you.”

Some of the most pervasive are that organic foods are better for you, oysters improve your sex life, Diet Coke causes cancer and – one of the most common – canola oil was used to make mustard gas and should not be eaten by humans.

A few rave about oysters, but it is really a placebo effect.

The HoS reports:

An emotional Judith Collins has revealed her personal pain at the loss of a cousin, murdered when her husband breached a protection order.

The Justice Minister spoke to the Herald on Sunday yesterday, after announcing plans to use GPS monitors to track violent men and stop them going near women they had threatened or attacked.

The GPS monitor plan sounds a good initiative. Ideally it could be done so an the person being protected is also notified if (for example) they get within 500 metres of their house, so they can take action (as well as automatiically notify authorities).

Sadly the reality is that for many people, a protection order has little impact. Over 2,000 a year are broken. I was debating with friends yesterday whether one should have automatic jail sentence for breaches – even say seven days. So there is absolute certainty if you breach one, you will go to jail.

The problem with that is sometimes (not often) protection orders are granted on false evidence, as we saw with Helen Milner who got her son arrested for breaching such an order, after Milner forged text messages from him.

The Herald reports:

Police are investigating former Whanganui mayor Michael Laws after an allegation of child assault was made against him.

Laws, a former RadioLive talkback host and current Whanganui District Health Board member, was reported to police after allegedly smacking one of his children.

The incident allegedly happened at Whanganui Hospital last year. Laws, 56, was there with his three youngest children – Lucy, 9, Zoe, 7, and Theo, 5 – to visit their mother, Laws’ former partner Leonie Brookhammer, who suffered a stroke in August.

The Herald on Sunday understands the alleged smack was witnessed by a nurse in the assessment, treatment and rehabilitation ward. She reported it to the DHB and complained to police.

The Herald on Sunday asked police whether Laws was under investigation for allegedly hitting a child.

A spokesman replied by email saying: “Police can confirm they are investigating a child assault complaint made against a 56-year-old Whanganui man.

I blogged a link yesterday to a summary of some of the reviews of the sugarless gummy bears. But last night I went to the original sources of the comments on Amazon.

The summary had me laughing out loud. The actual original comments caused actual tears and physical pain. I read at least half of the 45 pages of them.

My favourite was the date with the German girl:

I’m pretty sure Andrea (I’ll call her) agreed to have dinner at my apartment only because I always spoke to her using nothing but my two-years-of-high-school German. Her English was perfect. Probably better than mine. But the fact that I could only ask her directions to the Autobahn or inquire about the health of her non-existent Tante Amelia, seemed to make me appealing to her in a sweet and non-threatening way.
My intentions, however, were considerably less child-like. Which is why the shopping that night was done at one of those upscale groceries with an international flair. Moules Marinieres is as much of a panty-peeler as anything I can cook, and isn’t that hard to pull off. But still, I was busy tracking the recipe in my head when I found myself in the sweets aisle. And that, to my great chagrin, is why I didn’t immediately notice the difference between Haribo Normal Gummi Bears (which are designed for human enjoyment) and Haribo Sugarless Gummi Bears (which are designed for use in maximum security prisons as a way to punish uncooperative inmates).
I shan’t make that mistake again. (notice you can’t spell SHAN’T without SHAT.)
Prior to Andrea’s arrival, I sat in my living room, creating a playlist of make-out music and nervously binging on the Gummi Bears I had placed in a decorative bowl because I am fancy.
The doorbell rang, and within minutes we were standing in the kitchen, drinking beers and both of us probably worrying that we were about to exhaust my ability to communicate in her native tongue. But soon that would be the least of my worries. In the middle of trying to ask Andrea if she likes to dance to young people’s music, I felt a flutter in my midsection, accompanied by a guttural pronouncement so loud it threatened to drown out my own voice.
Maybe it was because I was mentally refreshing my language lessons, but it suddenly struck me how much pre-diarrheal grumblings sound like German words.
“ENTSCHULDIGUNG!” was the next thing uttered by my rapidly clenching stomach. Appropriately, Andrea looked up in response.
“Sind Sie Kaffee machen?” she asked.
Am I making coffee?
I thought I must have mistranslated her at first, then finally I realized that yes, the loud, ominous gurgling coming from my gut could easily be mistaken for the percolating of some bachelor’s crappy coffeemaker.
It’s remarkable how quickly one knows that one is about to have a traumatic pottymaking experience. Maybe that’s the body’s way of buying you the precious seconds you need. I was already calculating the number of steps to the bathroom, speculating on whether I would have time to lift the lid to the toilet, when my own voice cried out loudly in my head.
She’s going to hear EVERYTHING!
Thanks to an acoustical idiosyncrasy in my building, the hallway outside the bathroom works as an amplifier pointed straight at my living room-slash-kitchen. So that somehow even the gentlest tinkle sounds like I’m pouring lemonade out of a bucket.
With only half an idea of what I was doing, I grabbed Andrea’s hand and pulled her roughly down onto my sofa. I must have looked like a madman as I booted up my iTunes playlist, plugged in the gigantic new headphones I had just bought to keep me looking young and hip, and clamped them down over her ears. (the sweat forming on my brow and upper lip couldn’t have helped.) In response to her nervous expression, I kept shouting “You’ll love this! You’ll love this!”
I spun her around so that she was looking out the window. My “plan” was that she’d be so distracted by the modest 4th floor view, that it would allow me to pull my pants off while I sprinted down the hall, silently singing the praises of the noise-reducing quality of my new headphones. (this story will be reprinted in its entirety as a 5 star review on the Sony Beats Audio Amazon page.)
As I slammed the bathroom door shut, already half naked, it occurred to me that I had not been shouting “You’ll love this!” at Andrea. I don’t even know how to say that in German. In my desperation I had been saying “Ich Leibe Dich!” Repeatedly professing my love for her in a shaky and frantic voice. But maybe that was a good thing, because as I threw myself at the toilet, I figured the best I could hope for is that she would be so creeped-out that she would sneak out of the apartment, blissfully unaware of the carnage taking place in the next room.
What can I say about the ensuing white-knuckle bowel movement that hasn’t been expressed in other reviews on this page? I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen the adjective “Kafkaesque” used anywhere else.
By the end of Act One of this private little torture-porn movie, I was confessing to every unsolved crime in history. Praying I would stumble upon the one that would satisfy my invisible captors.
Quickly I realized that I had more than Andrea’s sense of sound to worry about. Were she to get even the faintest whiff of the weapons-grade sluice that my anus was angrily shouting into the porcelain, I would have to change my name and move to another city.
And so I flushed. And flushed. And flushed and flushed.
And then I flushed and nothing happened.
I have never looked down into a broken toilet with more horror in my entire life. And I once stopped up George Clooney’s crapper! (a true story for another time.)
I reached for the plunger, but my hand froze and my heart seized when I saw it on the floor, broken in two and covered in what looked like teeth marks. Apparently I had used the wooden handle to keep from biting my tongue off and had chewed clean through it. When did that happen? It seems my mind had already started the process of repressing this entire event.
Amid the feverish, fruitless dance I did across my tiny bathroom floor, it dawned on me that it had been more than a minute since my last soul-wrenching anal tantrum. Dear Lord, is it over? I asked, quite possibly aloud.
I may have been light-headed and delusional, but I began to imagine a non-ignominious resolution to this ordeal. I just needed to get her the hell out of here. If Andrea hadn’t fled the building, vomiting in terror, then I supposed I could pull up my trousers and make a cavalier exit. As long as I could get her off premises and as far away from this post-apocalyptic commode as humanly possible. Assuming that the Diarrhistas had retreated to the hills temporarily, maybe I could even whisk Andrea away to a candlelight dinner at Bernardo’s. How impulsive!
My first few steps back toward the living room were tentative. And not just because my sphincter felt raw and tattered. It was a slow approach to the Moment of Truth, especially when I saw her figure still planted on my sofa. I knew any look on Andrea’s face other than her mouth agape would constitute a miraculous victory. And when she smiled at me, the wash of relief that engulfed me was more glorious than any throes of ecstasy I might have wished for at the beginning of the night.
And then I saw it.
The decorative bowl sitting in her lap. Down to just the last few sugarless Gummi bears.
“Du hast Haribo!” she said to me. Accompanied by a satisfied smile. A big, beaming Hansel and Gretel smile, that slightly turned down in one corner at the sound we both suddenly heard. A low rumble from deep within her GI tract that sounded like Gefahrrrrr.
The German word for Danger.
Her eyes shot past mine and refocused on the bathroom door just down the hall behind me.

Just re-reading this and my eyes are wet again. Some others:

“Does she have a GI bleed? A necrotic bowel?” he asked.

As soon as we hit the ER doors I was off like a Kenyan on methamphetamine for the bathroom. I tried to use a hallway bathroom, but it was occupied. My only other option was the bathroom right outside the nurses station. I mean, it was RIGHT outside the nurses station. The door was a mere five feet from their desks. All those pretty, young, nurses. With no other option, I ran back, trying to keep my cheeks clinched. Little staccato bursts of sulfuric farts punctuated each yard as I raced for the finish line hoping that I could keep my chocolate starfish clenched tight enough to stem the tide.

I ripped the door open and somehow managed to drop my pants without undoing my belt. What erupted sounded like a steamroller driving through a bubble wrap factory. I knew it was audible from the nurses station and I had nearly knocked a pretty blonde out of her chair during my mad dash. As the sense of relief from the pressure washed over me, so did the smell. It smelled like someone took a bag of dirty diapers, filled it with rotting body parts, and let it sit in the sun for two weeks.

I sat there, petrified, but also doubled over with the sort of cramps that make one pray for death.

“Tonya? What is that SMELL?!” came a voice from outside the door. I knew there was no escaping with my dignity intact. I sent a text to my partner from the bathroom telling her I was sick and to let me know when she was ready to leave. When she replied I dashed from the bathroom back to the ambulance.

That was from a female ambulance officer.

Next time I am scheduled for a colonoscopy, I plan to eat sugar free gummi bears instead of drinking that nasty magnesium citrate. The bears are delicious and the cleansing effect is the same!

Heh.

He shuffled his way to my office shouting my name (probably to get the code) but I had hidden myself under my desk. “Unbelievable!” was the only thing he could say when I heard what sounded like a live cat being dropped in a bubbling stew pot while shooting a tommy gun. I looked under my desk to see soiled trousers drop on the floor of my office, as he defiled my shredder bin.

I started to feel bad for him and stood up, but was immediately knocked back down by a putrefied stench of an exploding blue whale that had laid in the sun for weeks. My gag reflex was vaporized and I spun yarn like Linda Blair and Pazuzu’s love child. Most of it covered my boss’s pants and legs, as he bore down like a power squatter moments before prolapsing. His eyes were open, but he couldn’t see anything but pain.

The quality of the writing is superb.

I begin to punch in the four digit code to open the gate… “4, 7″….. suddenly my stomach makes a noise that could only be described as an elephant with a trumpet playing into a megaphone….. then a shift of my insides that hit harder then anything I’d ever felt even during the two times I had GIVEN BIRTH…. WHEN SOMETHING WAS LITERALLY SHIFTING INSIDE OF ME!
I did not punch in the last two digits. All I could do…. all that my instincts and training had taught me to do…. I threw on my lights and sirens and put my car in reverse as I was already beginning to accelerate with my foot. I swear I nearly exceeded 30mph in reverse just to make it to the main road immediately. I had 2.7miles to make it to the nearest public restroom. Lights and sirens on I traveled at 80mph as I heaved through traffic and pulled into that ENMARK Station nearby. When I went running from my car and into the station I took no notice of the fully packed pumping area or the 15 or so people inside. I was too busy trying to squeeze my butt cheeks together and still maintain running.
Fast forward through what I will call the S***-POCALYPSE and a good 40minutes of my life I will never forget, I am faced with walking through the crowd of people that had collected due to my very fast and dramatic entrance. Apparently the assumption was there was a criminal type in the bathroom who I was arresting.

That was a police officer.

I bought a bag because I’m trying to cut down on sugar. It seems Haribo has replaced the sucrose in a typical batch of Gummy Bears with colon-shredding rage. Just a couple of handfuls left me crying for my mommy on the bathroom floor (I am 43 years old).

The cute little tricksters look just like their benign counterparts, with the same cuddly ears, stubby arms and not-too-squishy, not-too-firm texture. The taste is the same too, and that’s how the little demons invade your innards. I ate a dozen or so and then went about my day, oblivious to the angry, brown fire hose that they were constructing in my colon.

The cramping started about an hour later, and soon enough I was as bloated as a balloon in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. When the rumbling started I sprinted down the hallway and made it to the bathroom just in time for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to stampede from my backside, laying waste to my home’s septic system AND my will to live. After three hours of pelvis-shaking misery, I was spongy, weak, and amazed that I had any bones left. I cursed Haribo with the little strength I could muster.

I’m amazed the FDA hasn’t banned them.

What is occurring in my body right now may only be explained with the final 20 minutes of the movie Independence Day. The sweet gummy bears that I thought I had chewed and swallowed have now resurrected inside my bowels with a vengeance. The only thing that I can imagine they are doing is s***ting inside my digestive tract. Decomposed zombie gummy bear s***. This can’t be all my s***. There’s no way. That’s not my s***. That’s s*** from a supernatural entity living inside me. Literally nothing I’ve eaten in a dozen years could possibly turn my ass into a to-scale model of Mt. St. Helens, violently spewing what smells like a public bus filled with homeless people with fresh perms, in Mexico City at such a cyclic rate, that I’m worried the war veteran below me thinks he’s storming Normandy again.
Shame on everyone who handled these bears before they made it to me. Shame on Amazon for making theses available for purchase. Shame on the guy in the warehouse who packaged this for shipment. Shame on the UPS guy for bringing this to my door. You all knew. I know you knew, and you knew I’d know. And you still let me do this to myself. Shame on you!
My last hope now is that the force of gas propelling from my anus may be strong enough to disturb Satan himself in hell. And that he is so angered by this that he sends an entire fleet of brave minions to come up through the toilet and put me out of my misery.

Is it wrong that these reviews made me want to try some? In fact some of the reviews are from exactly that – people who thought they couldn’t be that bad, and had to find out.

Seriously give up now whatever you are doing, and spend the rest of the day reading the 47 pages of reviews. It will cheer you up no end.

The Press editorial:

With the announcement this week of the appointment of a press secretary for Mayor Lianne Dalziel, along with a number of other appointments, the make-up of the mayor’s office is now complete. The mayor had earlier announced the appointment of a chief of staff to run the office. The mayor will have nine people working directly for her, more than twice the four that the former mayor, Bob Parker, had.

It would be interesting to compare the size of the various Mayoral offices to the sizes of their Councils.

In addition to a chief of staff and a press secretary, the mayor now has a senior adviser, a community adviser, a visits and ceremonials co-ordinator, two information officers and two executive assistants (one of them shared with the chief of staff). It must be hoped this staff will be committed to ensuring robust performance from the mayor’s office. It must also be hoped they will be committed to the greatest possible transparency and openness about the mayor’s work.

The mayor’s community adviser is Nicola Shirlaw, who was Dalziel’s campaign manager for the council election. That political connection is of no great significance by itself but the mayor must take care not to allow her office to become highly politicised or excessively inward-looking.

Of course it will be politicised. The job of the Mayor’s office is to get the Mayor re-elected. There’s nothing wrong with that per se. A Mayor who is doing a good job is more likely to be re-elected, so part of what the Mayoral office does is help the Mayor perform well. But they also of course promote the Mayor and try and get favourable coverage.

The office must also not become a barrier between the mayor and the media and public. Parker was commendably available to the media – replying with remarkable diligence and promptness to emails, texts and phone calls, even at the height of his political travails when there was little benefit to him from doing so. Dalziel is proving to be less accessible.

I didn’t know that about Parker. Good on him.