Filed under: deep breath | Tags: alcohol in new zealand, law commission, paul quigley
Wellington has a bright, newish A and E, which I’ve visited a couple of times. Once was because I developed stomach pains a couple of weeks after the birth of my first child. I had to wait out in the reception in pain for twenty minutes and then stayed for hours in a cubicle. Beside the memory of being both in pain and bored for hours, I can recall the kindness, common sense and energy of the medical staff there.
Wellington emergency medical specialist Paul Quigley talked on Radio NZ this morning about what it’s like to work there on a weekend when 70% of the admissions are drink related. It’s not new to most people that New Zealanders are crap drinkers; the ugliness of our booze culture makes A and E a bad place to be. I’ve heard Paul before – as well as talking with the complete authority of someone who deals with drunks every day and night, he has also carefully compiled statistics on the causes of admissions to the Wellington A and E. (more…)
Filed under: deep breath | Tags: clayton weatherston, greg king, judith ablett-kerr
According to the NZ Herald, Judith Ablett-Kerr QC is being inundated with hate mail and worse because she defended Clayton Weatherston.
This is the kind of story that feeds into one of our latest public debate memes – that New Zealanders are haters. Too many of us stew in our juices in our cold, damp houses, get a shot of battery acid from listening to talkback and then put pen to paper.
I doubt that really we are any more hateful than other nations – I’m not sure there’s a league table that covers it, but I would just say that I’d probably rather deal with a daily mail box of badly spelled “fuck off, you uglie trol” letters than suffer the fate of so many woman in the Congo or Liberia.
Having said that though, for fuck’s sake angry people, the weather is gorgeous right now. Go outside and read a novel, run up a hill, take the kids to the market.
Just switch off the talkback, because honestly the only thing I have ever learnt from listening to an hour or two is that a lot of New Zealanders can’t deal with the complexity of most issues or even string a coherent sentence together. Many callers seem drunk or a little insane even. I can’t listen to it any more, because why would you let such ugly, unintelligent people take up house in your mind? (more…)
Being a sad dork big fan of Ashes to Ashes, I was a little perturbed to check out Alex Drake’s new series hair-cut. WTF BBC?
So to recap, Alex had an amazing, improbable perm in series 1
Unfortunately, by series 2 Alex has transmetamorphosensationalised into a soccer mom
BBC has had a look under the couch and come up with the spare change to make series 3 of A2A. Please just buy Alex the best perm wig money can buy. I will donate my kid’s hair … anything but the wing tips again.
I don’t watch a whole bunch of TV so I was unaware that TV3 had brought back Telethon until this week when I stupidly switched my radio from RNZ to RadioLive. World-record ranter Michael Laws was hating on the KidsCan Trust, which is the charity being supported by Telethon this year.
Basically he was arguing that there are far too many charities in New Zealand, that every new charity looking for its market segment means more charity funds go into administration and infrastructure costs, and that many of these orgs are far from transparent about how much of their donated funds actually go to the causes.
As much as I loathe Laws and the ugly, spiteful, pathetic people who call into his show, he’s got a point on this one. It’s not that I agree with him that we shouldn’t donate to charities that try to make up for the shittiness of so many New Zealand parents because yeah, we are talking about little children who never asked to be born into loser families. But seriously, there’s a charity devoted solely to providing underprivileged NZ kids with raincoats, shoes and school lunches? (more…)
Filed under: angry rants, kids | Tags: anti-immunisation, Dr Nikki Turner, immunisation, measles
Expect more measles outbreak cases in New Zealand as apparently a quarter of school-children in this country have no immunity.
This is an issue that anybody who knows me fears being brought up because I can rant about it for hours until your eyes bleed. I mean, seriously, a whole bunch of New Zealand parents are either too effing lazy socio-economically deprived to go to the doctor for free jabs, or are convinced they know better than the medical establishment in New Zealand because they spent a night googling immunisation and autism.
I listen to anti-immunisation people spread their organic pixie dust over the media, like this super-mom who was on RadioNZ this afternoon (about three minutes in). Aside from her side attempt to re-litigate the heavily disproven link between the MMR vaccine and autism, her basic point was that she preferred to pump her kids full of vegetables and let them get measles. And that was her choice. (I’d love to know whether or not she immunised her kids against whooping cough when they were babies; in my opinion, if you made that “informed choice” not to and you turn up with a baby struggling to breathe at A and E, you are pond scum). (more…)
I blogged before that I didn’t want the fashion styling industry getting their caked-on makeup hands on lovely Susan Boyle, but okay I admit was wrong. She looks sooooo gorgeous in Harper’s Bazaar, but more importantly she still looks like herself.
polka dots are everything that’s good in life. Ignore the story – go straight to the dots.
Everything in ONJ’s bedroom is white … except her teddy.
I can’t decipher this video. It’s like a video production company gave her a menu of items and she ticked a combo of doves, bad dreams, shit-house “special effects” and scary moppet.
At one point, she looks at a dove that’s kept in a bamboo cage prepared earlier – then *gasp* she’s in the bamboo cage (hey skinny bitch, you can fit through the bars).
Still, it’s only a matter of time before the “Let’s get Physical” Olivia Neutron Bomb (tee hee) hair cut comes back. Find me some curtain tie rope – I’m weaving myself a head-band.
Filed under: eyeroll, kids | Tags: education in New Zealand, Karen Bock, Rathkeale College, voluntary school donations
The issue of schools pursuing parents, and their kids in some cases, over “voluntary” fees crops up again and again because the issue is so damn juicy, and so mired in vagaries and obfuscations.
Today, it’s Masterton solo mother Karen Bock who sends her son to Rathkeale College, an integrated Anglican secondary school for boys. Apparently, integrated means that Rathkeale used to be private, but now receives the same funding from the Ministry of Education as State schools. State schools also request donations, but not in the order of $1000 a term plus a compulsory $2000 a year.
Karen put up the hand a while back so she owes Rathkeale $13k. She ain’t gonna pay … unless it’s for a geography trip to Australia, in which case her folks apparently stumped up a cool $3,200. I actually had a little sympathy for this battling struggler from striver street until I read that bit. (Seriously, my parents would still be laughing today about me asking them to spring for a $3k trip anywhere back in the day. They’d be “can your fat arse work after school and on weekends? Yes? Problem solved.”) (more…)
