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Archive for October, 2010

Labour Day in New Zealand

October 25, 2010

Today was Labour Day in New Zealand. Time to par-tay.

It’s true. I was down at the supermarket this afternoon for my usual corn flakes and Ajax. The place was crawling with folk stocking up on par-tay balloons and trail mix. Whoop-whoop.

I just hope everyone par-tayed responsi-blay.

So did the New Zealand Herald. They ran a campaign against drink-driving. Its aim was to reduce the legal blood alcohol content limit from .08 mg of alcohol per 100 ml of blood to .05 mg.

I agree with this. It makes total sense on paper. But practically speaking, come on? Who can tell the difference between a drunk Kiwi driver and a sober one?

New Zealand’s traffic rules don’t make it easy. One rule says cars making a right-hand turn have the right-of-way over those making left-hand turns. This rule is responsible for 2,500 car crashes––and two or three fatalities––every year, according to the Department of Transportation.

Under current rules, the blue car will go first, then the orange, then the green, if we're lucky.

This is what actually happens.

See what following the rules gets you? Two or three deaths every year. That’s pretty bad. I can’t imagine how much worse it would be if there was any place interesting to drive to in New Zealand.

But Labour Day isn’t just another opportunity to complain about the hideous New Zealand drivers (sober or no). It’s also a time to celebrate the Kiwi worker (sober or no).

It all started in 1840 when Samuel Parnell––a carpenter resembling a contented goat––told his prospective employer that he only worked eight hours a day. The other 16 hours were divided evenly between sleep and chewing holes in the neighbors’ laundry.

Thanks in part to such chronic malingering, Parnell gets a lot of credit for the eight-hour working days that were established in different regions over the next 40 to 50 years.

Relevant Websites are fairly ambiguous about when the first legislation was passed establishing a national eight-hour work day. But the holiday being celebrated today was legally started in 1899, by which time there was already a de facto eight-hour working day for many trades and industries.

So to celebrate Labour Day in my own special manner, I’ve reached back in the history of management-labour relations to Captain James Cook’s three voyages to the South Pacific from the late 1760s to the late 1770s.

Capt. Cook visited New Zealand on all three voyages.

The first was sponsored and financed mainly by the Royal Society (of which Benjamin Franklin was a member at the time, if I recall correctly). The Society and the British Navy were dispatching scores of vessels around the world to observe the solar transit of Venus in order to precisely calculate the distance of the Earth to the Sun. One of Cook’s missions, then, was to make such observations from Tahiti.

But his primary goal was to seek out the southern continent that was supposed to exist if simply to offset the preponderance of land mass in the northern hemisphere.

Cook set sail from England in August, 1768 and the hilarity ensued. The comedy continued throughout all three of his voyages, right up to the hilarious moment when he was killed by Hawaiians after overstaying his welcome in February, 1779.

The list below comes from a thorough record of Cook’s ship-board discipline as published in Anne Salmond’s 2003 book The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas.

Happy Labour Day everybody!

Tags:Anne Salmond, Eight Hour Workday, New Zealand Labour Day, Right-Turn Rule, Samuel Parnell, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog
Posted in Culture, Now Zealand | 5 Comments »

The Perils of Workplace Onanism

October 18, 2010

Here’s a fun comic everyone can relate to. Unfortunately, I can’t fit this into the blog at a legible scale (same problem as the last time I tried this.)

The only way to read the comic seems to be to click on it. It should open in a new window at full size.

But the important thing is to have a good time.

So without further ado, here’s Sunny and Boba in “Curiosity Kill” (Written by me and Jacquie. With special thanks to Jimbo’s brand pet food).

Tags:Bethells Beach, Boba Fett, Jimbo's, Onanism
Posted in Sunny | 3 Comments »

Notice of Abandoned Property

October 13, 2010

This Thursday marks the first anniversary of my visit to the beautiful city of Linden, New Jersey.

You need to spend some time there if you’ve never been. It’s so much fun. Whether passing through at 80 mph on the New Jersey Turnpike or browsing the aisles of adult toys and pornography at Love Boutique, Linden offers something for the whole family.

Just thinking about Linden inspires the creative part of a person’s brain, provided the creative part of a person’s brain isn’t much bigger than the part of the brain that tells you when to urinate. To wit:

I do hope the mayor of Linden appreciates my sketch of the perfect Linden postcard. I don’t want to sound boastful, but I believe it reflects the feelings most people hold for Linden, NJ.

Linden was where I had to deliver the stuff we wanted to take with us to New Zealand. Jacquie and I had spent weeks prioritizing. We could only afford to ship our most-valued Earthly possessions: 36 boxes of Jacquie’s shoes.

We hired two guys with a panel truck to drive the shoes to our freight consolidator.

Jacquie's shoes began their journey to New Zealand here on Huron Street in Brooklyn, NY, roughly 26 miles northeast of Linden. The Ailanthus altissima was just a weed when we left. Now its offspring cover most of North America's blighted urban centers, especially Linden. (Photo by Matthew Everett, taken some time late summer, 2010)

Ha ha. See that traffic cone? I put that there in, like, December, 2006 when I thought I was getting a ten-speed bicycle for Christmas. Jacquie got me a curling iron instead. But my traffic cone remains and people still won't park in my bicycle space because of it. Suckers. (Photo by Matthew Everett) (Late Summer, 2010)

It was 9:30 a.m. when we arrived at their warehouse.

A man in a forklift saw me coming. He immediately shut down his machine and climbed out. “Break time,” he said.

“How long?” I said.

“Hour, two hours.”

“My guys are on the clock here.”

There was a man at a desk in the middle of the warehouse floor. He waved me over. He was short and wore a shiny Jheri curl wig. He said his name was Alan. He seemed really sympathetic.

“Where’s your stuff headed, buddy?” he said. “You got your booking number?”

“I sure do, Alan,” I said.

I handed Alan my documents. He inspected them, nodded, dropped them on his desk, sat down and opened a drawer out of which he took out a large salad. The salad was one of those pre-made things you buy at the supermarket and it was filled with the more pointless vegetables, like iceberg lettuce. “Break time,” Alan said.

He enjoyed his salad.

“What about my boxes?” I said.

“How do you like that, Alan?” said the forklift guy. “It’s your break, but it’s his boxes. Can you believe he’s making you work on your break?”

“No, I cannot believe it,” Alan said. “I myself have trouble believing this.”

Alan wore glasses and had shiny green skin and his Jheri curl wig did not move in concert with his terrible head. ”Fine,” he said. “Have your guys unload your truck. How many pallets will you need?”

“Do I need pallets?” I said.

“It’s for your own protection,” he said. “You want your things to get there in one piece, is all I’m saying.”

Did I mention that Linden is the world capital of spontaneous, small-time extortion?

“How much is a pallet?” I said.

“Let’s say I make it $25 each,” he said.

I find it hard to believe, but this abandoned property notice has been in that window since last November and indicates, much to my surprise, that we must have left some of Jacquie's shoes behind, for which reason I hope to return to Huron Street one day. (Again. Matt Everett.)

Nobody home for a year and we still get junk-mail and flyers. I guess nothing drums up business faster than leafletting an abandoned building. (Photo: M. Everett)

So I paid for three pallets and that was that.

And later I went to East Rutherford to pay for the freight and I had a very disappointing slice of pizza near the railroad station.

It's sad to think how many people in Brooklyn have never been to Linden, NJ, despite the fact that it's only 26 miles away. A crowd outside the old local bookstore, Word. (Yep.)

You can take the boy out of Greenpoint, but you can't take the heavy metals and volatile organic compounds out of the boy.

Tags:Greenpoint, Jheri curl, Linden NJ, Love Boutique
Posted in Migration, Non-Zealand | 6 Comments »

Spring in the South Pacific

October 5, 2010

Poetry. Nobody understands it. Even fewer bother to try. Its purpose appears to be to make the dull moments of our lives seem exciting by comparison.

People who write poetry (or “poets”) often turn their thoughts to springtime. About once a year, I’d guess.

I can’t recall any examples of spring-themed poems right now. But I’m sure there’s a poem that makes reference to at least one of the seasons.

Come to think of it, there’s a famous sonnet in which Shakespeare writes, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

If a poet said that to me, I’d be like, “What’s the catch?”

Even if Sonnet 18 doesn’t mention spring exactly, it does refer to summer quite openly. To which I say, “Close enough.”

Because––and forgive me for waxing poetic––spring is the appetizer of summer.

The cenotaph outside the Auckland War Memorial Museum is a replica of the one in London memorializing the English killed in World War I. According to the Museum's Website, the design was copied using cinema newsreels because the blueprints were too expensive. "Poet" Rudyard Kipling provided the epitaph.

Except, I really don’t like the word appetizer, especially on a menu. Isn’t the very fact of going to a restaurant proof that one already wants to eat and therefore is in no need of having their appetite stimulated? Wouldn’t it make more business-sense to offer appetizers at the end, thus enticing customers to start all over again despite having just eaten a full meal?

Here’s a multiple-choice exercise to illustrate what I’m talking about:

It’s late one Friday afternoon and you say to your significant other, ”I have absolutely no desire to eat.” Your significant other replies:

That’s fine as long as it doesn’t interfere with my drinking.
But without food, how are we supposed to plug-up your pie-hole?
Let’s go to a restaurant. We might have to make a reservation; you know how a lot of people don’t feel like eating on a Friday night.

If you chose number 3, chances are you own a restaurant that serves appetizers at the start of a meal, and you don’t live in New Zealand. Because the restaurants in New Zealand don’t have appetizers. They only have “entrées” followed by “mains” followed by “severe cramps and diarrhea.”

So despite the effects of destructive snow storms in mid-September, we can finally welcome spring, the entrée of summer, the time of year when the beauty and innocence of nature arouses the poets in us…