The Dilbert management theory of John Banks and Kim Dotcom

* Allegedly, *allegedly, *allegedly, *allegedly, *allegedly, **illegibly, ***in my opinion, *allegedly, *allegedly, *allegedly. **** I reckon.

That’s the best way to talk about this Banks / Dotcom palaver: if you get the legal tip-toeing out of the way first, it’s just asterisks, not lawyers, that break your flow as you try to explain it. It’s hard to work out what’s going on if you’re worrying about getting sued.

Anyway, let’s see what we’ve got. Deep breath…

… okay so the slim majority of our government is at risk of collapse because the PM – who struck a deal with a casino* to change the law in exchange for a convention centre – depends on support from an ex-Mayor who has been soliciting corporate donations* and calling them anonymous*, including money from said casino plus an absurdly wealthy internet pirate* who split his donations into more easily concealed parts at the ex-Mayor’s request* by signing** a couple of $25,000 cheques. But the pirate is now angry*** because, apart from buying the ex-Mayor’s (failed) efforts to influence the law and help him purchase a mansion*, his money was wasted when the ex-mayor didn’t go to $50,000-worth of effort* to block his extradition on trumped-up charges out of the US* which itself has purchased New Zealand’s legal co-operation in order to protect its entertainment sector ****.

…Phew. What an unsavoury mess. It’s as if the galaxy of stars required to even explain this situation are casting a wan and wobbly light of their own – one that picks out worry lines on John Key’s brow and glints from the sweat beads on Banskie’s too-tight skin. It’s an unattractive scene. Continue reading…

Sailing south

A wedding, a pregnant wife, and a busy evening job at the Herald has meant my blog’s gone unloved for months – which is a shame because I’ve had some great adventures. A while back I abandoned my seriously morning-sick lady for two weeks and sailed to the Auckland Island and Campbell Island groups in the subantarctic – several hundred kilometres south of mainland New Zealand – with Air New Zealand.

It was a project dreamed up by their Green Team, which is an internal staff group that raises environmental awareness within the company – they asked me along because they wanted a journalist to document the trip and spread the word.

Unfortunately, the word for the first two days was “yaaarrgghhhh!” as my first experience of open-ocean sailing on the 15m Tiama resulted in 48hrs of exhausting, constant vomiting. But pretty quickly my landlubber’s belly settled down and the trip turned out to be one of those never-to-be-forgotten experiences. Continue reading…

Buy my novel on Amazon!

Hooray! Today my novel became available on Amazon.com.

It’s called Effra: a love story, and it’s a cracking read.

Click here to go through.

A fast-moving gothic fairytale, the story brings together a modern-day Fagan, a young man lost in London – and something bigger and nastier than both of them – all unified by loss and a hunger for greater things.

The action plays out above the lost rivers of London, buried waterways which have loaned their names to the city’s streets. Rivers such as the Fleet, the Wandle, and the titular Effra map the currents of the narrative, drawing the characters into a deeper discovery of old and ever-new London.

And you can buy it for US2.99 – that’s a serious bargain (I think).

Download it and read it on a Kindle if you have one, or on the Kindle app on iPad, iPhone, Mac computers, PCs, Android devices and lots of other readers.

As many people know this has been a big project for me, and I’ve put a lot into it – including quitting a job and working part time to get it done. And the good news is I’m stoked with the result. So go on – click here to flick through some sample pages on Amazon.

A present for the Flight of the Conchords

The other day I heard that Flight of the Conchords were going to write a movie – and the next morning I woke up with the complete plot in my head. So hey, Bret and Jemaine? If you ever happened to read this, it’s all yours – obligation free…

The plot

Jemaine’s crazy cousin, played by Taika Waiti, arrives in New York. He is the direct descendant of famed warlord and haka-writer Te Rauparaha.

Bret and Jemaine have landed a gig recording advertising jingles for a beer company, and cousin Taika tags along. Taika is annoying Jemaine, so to keep him happy, the evil ad executives agree to take him out and show him New York.

They treat him to an American football game.

The home team is losing – and the distraught evil ad executives are fans. But Taika knows what to do. To the team’s astonishment he leaps on to the pitch and performs his great-great-great grandfather’s haka…

…cut to after the game, where the evil ad executives are amazed at how the home team went on to pull off an amazing last-minute win.

They eagerly steer Taika to a nearby bar, where they ply him with drink to discover his secret. Dazzled and inebriated he signs over the intellectual property rights to Te Rauparaha’s powerful haka.

The evil ad executives decide to relaunch the beer as “haka lite”. They discover that Jemaine is also ‘a Maori’ and want him to write a haka jingle. He’s torn between ambition and selling out.

Non-Maori Bret is kicked out of the deal. He returns to New Zealand to attend a ‘wudding’.

* In New Zealand, Bret gets drunk at the wedding and ends up in a spa-pool with an enormous bridesmaid – and after, she tells him she’s pregnant. He wants to escape back to New York, but his fatherly obligations mean he must stay.

* In New York an incredibly cute girl is pursuing Jemaine. She has been hired by the evil ad executives as a honey-trap to convince him to put the power of the haka into the jingle.

* Elsewhere in New York, Taika is being hunted by the shadowy Man from Uncles, a hitman hired by his relatives, who have heard he signed away the intellectual property rights to their treasure. Continue reading…

Southern adventure

So once again I find myself woefully unprepared for a trip just a few days from leaving. On Monday I’m flying to Invercargill, then driving to Bluff before sailing to the Campbell Islands on what should be an amazing expedition.

Unfortunately, instead of collecting lots of snug, professional gear suited to a trip to New Zealand’s DoC-controlled sub-antarctic islands, I’ve spent mornings trying to deal with painters and builders – and evenings at my newspaper job trying very hard to resist headlining stories about Hamilton Council holding a special session to discuss whether they want Steve Crowe’s latest sex expo to come to town, with: “Council urges mass debate on sex event”. Continue reading…

Skeksis in the walls

As Rebecca and I renovate our old wooden house we’re turning up some interesting, disgusting, objects. Most impressive is this beautifully mummified creature which was preserved in the gap between the building’s inner and outer walls, and looks a lot like one of Jim Henson’s Skeksi creatures from the Dark Crystal movie.

Continue reading…

Oops! The IRB lets slip its World Cup predictions

You’d think it was unsporting if the IRB predicted the outcome to every Rugby World Cup pool match, wouldn’t you? But that’s exactly what they’ve done.

Check it out.

I was looking up match fixtures on the official www.rugbyworldcup.com site today and noticed something funny. Do you see how some teams are listed just on the left, some are on the right, and some are scattered between left and right? It doesn’t quite seem arbitrary. But what could the logic be?

Think it might have something to do with who’s expected to win and lose?

Too right it does! Basically what’s happened is someone has thought it would be neatest to have the higher, winning, score from each match in the left-hand column – and has laid out the tables according to the likely outcomes. Sheesh. Everyone knows the World Cup pool matches are predictable, but there’s got to be a point in actually playing, right?

Have a look at the match-ups. In Pool A, New Zealand are on the left for all their games, being backed by the IRB to beat Tonga, Japan, France and Canada. The “brave blossoms” from Japan are expected to lose all their matches, while Tonga were expected to lose to France and New Zealand, but beat Japan and Canada – even though they actually lost narrowly to Canada in the first “upset” of the tournament. How untidy of Canada to win! Continue reading…

The rugger

Rugby rugby rugby. Cup cup cup. How many times have you heard the phrase? I’ve been working as a sub-editor lately and can confirm that every newspaper story written in New Zealand for the last two months has included a World Cup angle. Rugby rugby rugby.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying the tournament immensely, it’s just I’ve heard the phrase Rugby World Cup fifteen hundred thousand times. Remember when you were at school and you got lines for being naughty? Imagine writing RWC out for every time you’ve heard the phrase. You’d go insane.

It’s not as if it rolls off the tongue nicely. In headlines we’re writing Cup, with the C up – C up for Cup – to stand for the whole thing. There’s a word for that – when one thing comes to stand for something larger (much larger: the hopes and dreams and clichés of a whole nation) which is ‘synecdoche’. Sin neck D’Key is how you say it. Doesn’t it roll off the tongue well? I’m not going anywhere with this, I was just saying…

Anyway. Rugger rugger rugger. Kup kup kup. Here are my thoughts so far.

The opening ceremony.

Was shit. I don’t mean the one at Eden Park – I hear that was excellent. I mean the made-for-TV cringe-fest down at the waterfront.

I was so embarrassed. There were pirouetting forklifts and a gospel choir on top of a building. Behind the choir was the giant neon sign for Tower Insurance with the T out of shot, so that all you saw was “ower”, like some kind of piss-take on the way we say “our”. Ower opening ceremony sucks, it seemed to say – and I didn’t disagree. The whole thing seemed designed to showcase our functioning port and wharf area, plus associated heavy industries, and reminded me of nothing more than the phoney Kazakhstan national anthem that Borat sings in his movie. “Kazakhstan number one exporter of potassium / All other country have inferior potassium…”. I was so ashamed I curled up on a giant velvet couch and tried to hide – until I realised I was on Jonah Lomu’s suit.

Continue reading…

What to do with Christchurch Cathedral?

On February 22 a 6.3 magnitude earthquake demolished most of Christchurch, which is my hometown, and turned the spire of its iconic cathedral into a pile of dark-stoned rubble. I went back to Christchurch recently, for the first time since the quake, and it’s funny. You walk down a street and you’re sure you remember something – did you go to a party here? Did someone get married? But the visual cues to memory are gone and all you see are empty spaces where buildings were; whole streets like punched-out teeth.

It’s hard to feel sad about what you can’t see.

What you can see however – though just in photos at the moment, as the central city is still closed to the public – is the massive damage to the cathedral.

Now, I was a Catholic boy and our school church was the Catholic cathedral on Barbados Street (which is, like, toast) but the Anglican cathedral stood right in the centre of the city and it was a kind of symbol of Christchurch. I think when most people saw it lying in ruins it brought home the damage that had been done to the city as a whole. It became a focal point for shock and amazement.

Which is why the question of what’s to be done with the building feels important.

These are my ideas.

The photos above are of my favourite church in the world, St Dunstan in the East. It was first built in 1100AD – about 200 years before Maori set foot on this country – got extended in 1391, then burned to a crisp in the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Continue reading…

The definitive “Even if you want to, and you’re going to – don’t use it” list of plot devices

Well here I am again, sequestered in a rumpety beach house for a winter month with nothing on the agenda but thinking about and writing fiction – a happy state which has inspired me to compile the following short list:

Plot devices so hackneyed they must never be used again

Do post a comment if you come up with additions of your own. Now, let’s see… where to begin?

1. Ah yes. Amnesia. New rule: you can only use amnesia in a story if you personally know someone, or have heard recently about a person who has suffered from this disorder. Come to think of it I’ve never heard of a real case of amnesia. Was it made up just so it could be used in Matt Damon movies and soap operas?

2. Ditto with aspergers and autism. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was excellent, as was the touching autobiography Born on a Blue Day, so let’s just take it that this angle has been done as well as it can be, and give it up. Actually while we’re at it, can we throw tourettes syndrome in here too? You bet your sweet titties we can (see? Cheap laughs from a real disorder). Continue reading…