Is David Benson-Pope about to become the latest victim of political correctness? If so it is interesting to note those lined up against him.

Some, who are known to rail about "political correctness gone mad", appear to have already convicted him. What of I'm still not sure. National's Judith Collins, who has been most vocal in attacking Benson-Pope, likes to bandy that "PC" phrase around a bit too.

I must say the whole affair reminds me of Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain, in which a university lecturer, Coleman Silk, is drummed out of his position for using the word "spooks" in class. He meant ghosts, but it was wrongly interpreted as a racist remark. There are other similarities to Roth's novel. If Benson-Pope goes, it will likely be for misleading Parliament, not because of any of the substantive allegations being proven. It's very similar to the situation Bill Clinton found himself in, and which forms the background to the novel.

So here we have someone who once had the courage to take on a really tough job, teaching, now being crucified in public over what look to me to be relatively insignificant incidents. Teachers throwing chalk and dusters around and applying the strap and the ruler were the norm when I went to school. There was always a bit of rough and tumble between male teachers and male students. I hope there still is.

Girls arguably were much harder to manage. Some of them found out they had a kind of power over their teachers that male students did not have and were not afraid to use it. A lot has changed in education, but I don't think the dynamics of the classroom have.

Teachers have to think on their feet and probably make mistakes every day. In this case we are putting those mistakes under the microscope, years later, to be used in evidence.

Good on Helen Clark for backing her man and standing up to the PC mob. But how long can she hold out?

A tip from experience for anyone planning to complete their census form online: they don’t tell you to keep your initial browser window open while you’re completing the brown Dwelling Form, which opens in a new browser window. So, should you have a short attention span, get bored with answering personal questions and decide to take a look at NZBC before you’ve finished, do so by opening a new browser window. Otherwise, if you click away from the initial Statistics New Zealand page and close that window, when you’ve completed the Dwelling Form and want to fill in the blue Individual Form, it tells you that a session with that Internet ID is already active, forcing you to log-on all over again… and again, until the session times-out. That minor hiccup notwithstanding, it’s still quicker than paper — although you need to have the PIN from the sealed envelope and the Internet ID that come with your hardcopy forms before you start. Completing the forms took me less than ten minutes, and at the end of it you’re issued with receipt numbers to prove you’ve “already given”.

A brief update to an earlier post: my book Liquidambar (the Pierrot from Edward Hopper’s Soir Bleu, shown here, is one of the novel’s nastier antagonists), is at last searchable via the Amazon UK website, thanks to its ‘Search Inside’ service. This provides a view of the book’s pages (including both front and back cover) in a similar way to Google’s Book Search, but with the added advantage for authors and publishers that it provides — alongside reviews — an instant option to purchase the book. Meanwhile, Liquidambar’s Amazon UK sales rank has dropped from 232,593 to 251,744; hardly Harry Potter territory, but considerably better than its pre-Google Book Search ranking of 912,577 on 16 January. And the publisher PABD says that, “after much prodding”, it can now provide me with a date by which the book should also be available on Amazon.com: a little over three weeks from now. Shipping will then be displayed as “within 24 hours”, rather than the current four to six weeks. However, PABD claims still to be looking at the numbers of books sold through the trade, saying it would get back to me by Thursday of last week. I’m still waiting. Watch this space.

God New Zealand is a great place. I remember when they were closing down logging on the West Coast in the 1970s or 80s the locals were up in arms about the place being turned into one big national park.

Later, during the dot com years, there was a lot of stuff said about how we had to get with it or become the world's biggest theme park. Well, guess what, we got with it and became the world's biggest theme park. And a lot of people are doing very well out of it.

Everywhere I go I see signs of prosperity that were missing when I went offshore in 2000. The coast is doing good again. Greymouth and Hokitika are booming. Southland and Otago are doing great too. Dunedin has been totally transformed and is vibrant and cool in ways that Auckland can only dream about.

All the righty hysteria over Christmas about hard landings is looking increasingly ridiculous.

After cruising up to my old home town of Waitati, along the Pigroot, staying in The Highwayman Hotel in Dunback, dropping into the Vulcan in St Bathans and my other old home town of Lauder, I'm now in Oamaru. It's all been a total treat and I'm glad to report David Slack hasn't romanticised it one little bit. (Though I must make a minor correction, our muse was elected unanimously at one of our many AGMs.)

The sun's been shining all the way. I've seen Mt Tasman and Mt Cook reflected in Lake Matheson, slept the night in the car in Haast, had beers with the locals all over Otago and even condescended to speak to a backpacker or two. Canterbury and Kaikoura, here I come.

I hope the parts needed to fix my car, which is now in Blenheim apparently, prove very, very hard to come by.

Google Book Search, and in particular the way in which it’s helping me promote my “difficult first novel” Liquidambar to a potentially global readership, gives me an excuse for some shameless self-promotion. By registering with Google and supplying them with PDFs of selected pages of your book (assuming you’re the copyright owner), you authorise Google to publish “snippets” of it online. Google also offers writers and publishers a web search of reviews for their book(s), along with links to various online book stores that may or may not stock it... (if you think you detect a note of bitterness there, you’d be correct). There are other caveats, and as long as the programme is in beta it’s bound to be less than perfect. But publishers take note: Google Book Search and Amazon’s Search Inside will revolutionise the way people search for books — not to mention the reasons why they buy them. More…

In late-breaking monkey news, the most-downloaded podcast in the world (according to the Guinness Book of World Records), featuring Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington, will move to a paid format as from next week, following on from its successful first-season run of 12 episodes. The groundbreaking first series — which became the world’s number one podcast within just a handful of half-hour episodes — was freely hosted by the Guardian and was arguably funnier than The Office or anything else in history (although the final episodes were marred by some inane, unfunny ads for Channel Four UK Friday night comedy).

In the just-released 12th episode, Gervais says of the new series, which will start on Tuesday 28 February: “We may have to charge a small fee for it because it will cost us money and Karl is unemployed.”

Karl Pilkington, the podcast’s round-headed star, has become an unlikely internet icon; thanks to astonishing excerpts from his diary, assorted bootleg merchandise and his curious fact-free renderings of nature and the world around him. The normally hard-of-thinking Pilkington had urged his co-presenters to charge £1-per-download from the outset, so was understandably miffed when the podcast quickly hit five million downloads.

A link to the new pay-per-Pilkington series can be found at the Ricky Gervais website, with further information here. The new series will cost $6.95 (presumably US dollars) for “at least” four new, weekly, full-length episodes (and possibly more). From Tuesday 7 March you’ll be able to access episodes from the original podcast series via the Gervais website, in case you missed any.

All I’m saying is, you read about it first at some blog you went to and that.

The glorious mental image of our Director-General, stranded in Picton outside a mouldering garage, singing After The Goldrush to himself in a risible falsetto (“Flying mother nature’s silver seed to a new home…”), provides me with a brief distraction from which to post this picture of our radiant muse and to distribute a few new lollies.

Stephen says he’s all lollied-out, but London NZBC reader Richard Cooper has sent in this old-fashioned tale (it made our TV news and papers, but you may still have missed it) about a copy of The Punch Library of Humour, a library book that was 61 years overdue. Laugh? I was about to offer to pay the $9000 fine, but it was waived by the Rotorua library manager.

In my lighthearted mood, I’ve also had cause to revisit McSweeney’s Lists to marvel at the sheer minimalism of the site and reprise Rejected Bond Girls, If Poets Named Breakfast Cereals and “Things I Thought About Telling My Husband I Was Thinking About When He Asked What I Was Thinking About While I Was Actually Thinking About Having Babies”.

Speaking as one who spends far too many working days tapping away at a computer but who has recently come over all retro and returned to pencil and paper, I enjoyed Stuart Jeffries at the Guardian bemoaning the death of handwriting.

The New Republic (registration required) reminds us that Johnny and Jane B. American still love their middle initial; featuring as it does an online debate between Richard A. Posner and Philip B. Heymann on the legal and ethical ramifications of Bush's wiretapping program; and legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein’s analysis of the recent Supreme Court hearings. And, on a completely unrelated note, Ms Hilton has realised that you can’t be doin’ wit no fat dog when you’se a skinny bitch.

Mark draws our attention to this New Yorker article about the social and economic consequences of twenty-five hundred hard-core homeless in New York City; and also to some apparent double-standards in Oprah’s dealings with literary lies and ancestral assertions.

That’s all, folks! (Watch out for those silver space ships, Rob — the loading has begun. Apparently.)

Hmm. Whispers are that No 2 has not had the opening its people were hoping for.

Local fillums don't always attract the audiences they deserve, and in the past those just deserts might have been zero so heinous were some. But Toa Fraser's No 2 should have cinema tills overflowing.

In a paid-for review, I could only say a few words of praise, but I suspect it's far better than worthy nonsense like North Country , the well-meant but doomed River Queen, obvious-from-the-trailer pap like Fun with Dick and Jane, and overproduced junk like Memoirs of a Geisha. It's funny, and warm, and kind of real.

Given more space, I would of course have had to mention the dull as well as the shiny. I could have said that it's occasionally overwritten, some of the acting has that slightly mistimed Shortland Street quality, and that montage sequences at times looked like an insurance commercial. But overall it's terrific.

Now box-office it's absolutely no way to judge a film, but it's what production companies live or die on. So when I heard that the opening numbers for No 2 might not be as flash as expected - and they were right to expect good returns - I had a horrible thought. What if people weren't going to see it because it's a 'Polynesian' film?

Now I'm one of the keenest to climb into a pic if it's a closed box of deep and meaningful cultural artefacts, inaccessible to all but the finest, most aware minds. But right throughout No 2, it never occurred to me that this was anything but a Kiwi – horrible term – family, recognisably us, if a little browner and larger than some.

See it. And not something else.

The hot news in Greymouth today, leading the venerable Evening Express, is how residents of Kumara (a town, not a root crop) are up in arms at losing their mobile phone coverage.

Apparently Telecom brought in a phone site for the local race meet and the Coast to Coast. One farmer promptly went out and got himself a prepay phone, thinking it might come in useful. The only problem was Telecom packed up their coverage after the Coast to Coast and went home. The farmer (quoting from memory here) said:

"Now I have to go right down the back paddock to send a text message. I'm feeling a bit ripped off."

Ah, the joys of international travel.

I have also discovered that Picton is a great place to get off a ferry, but after four days with your car stuck in a garage, well, it begins to pall. I don't now how many Interislanders I saw come and go, come and go, come and go...

The West Coast has changed a lot since I was last here, circa 1978, but the backpackers haven't. They're still young and smelly and cheap. I've even seen a few hippy-mobiles around. You know the thing, campervans made out of wood.

Anyway, I'm off to buy a Neil Young tape.

Even though you can't buy music from iTunes - unless you have a credit-card billing address in the US, UK or Oz - you can still use the sites to listen to music that one day you may be able to acquire legitimately. As all responsible NZBC readers would wish to - Limewire and BitTorrent are not for us. Oh no.

So you too can listen to the "Celebrity Playlist" of Richard Hawley, whose Coles Corner was one of the albums of 2005, at least for men of a certain age.

His playlist is a, frankly, shit-hot collection of mostly rootsy music ranging from Sam Cooke and Etta James to Echo and the Bunnymen via Pink Floyd and Scott Walker. And he saves the best till last - Sanford Clark's "The Fool", which I'd never heard of but was produced by Lee Hazlewood so is of course brilliant.

There's a lively discussion at Leaf Salon about the shortlist for the NZ Post children's book awards. Some contributors feel that Elizabeth Knox's young adult novel Dreamhunter should have made the list. The first post is by Fergus, who writes, "This will probably sound like sour grapes, but..."

Knox's husband and publisher is the estimable Fergus Barrowman. I wonder if by any chance they could be related?

If you want some time out from all the cartoon hullabaloo, my bloggies have sent their usual selection of weekend treats. First Mark goes cruising with Lee Tamahori. How did they get that up so fast? He also points to this for all the ginges out there, The International Ginger Kids Foundation.

Chris notes comedian Rowan Atkinson is urging the British government to back down over its religious hatred bill, particularly with regards to the right to criticise religion.

“Oh, how I feel for Mark Vender, an unpublished writer who decided to take his first novel to January’s Hay Festival in Cartagena, Colombia,” says Chris. “Vender concludes: ‘a successful writer’s qualities must extend well beyond the written page’.” How true.

We haven’t linked to Clive James’s site before, but we should have done. It’s everything literature should be. Here’s his interview with Martin Amis. Chris also recommends Emily Bell on Julie Burchill’s writing, and more on the Penguin podcasts we wrote about here. Jeremy Ettinghausen at the Penguin Group in the UK writes to say that the artist we liked is called Chris Hutchings.

Stephen offers, from Popbitch, the dinner party guide to Orthodox Jewish pop music. The top three are: 1. David Lazzar - the Hassidic Jewish Fred Durst, who “blends heavy metal with Old Testament themes”; 2. Jew Da Maccabi - the best orthodox Jewish hip-hop artist; and 3. YLove - the top black Hassidic Jewish rapper.

And that’s a rap.

I've been away on a road trip, as regular readers may have gathered. Me, my gut, my body odour and my dandruff. Oh, and the Girlie too. The Girlie and her bad attitude.

After going down the west coast, we stopped off for a couple of days in Wellington and came back up the east. Our final day was a mammoth drive from Napier to Auckland - via Gisborne and Opotiki.

The road between these two has to be one of New Zealand's hidden treasures. I'd never even heard of it before. The last time I was down that way it was to go around East Cape, as I imagine most people do.

But Gisborne to Opotiki includes the marvellous Waioeka Gorge, about half an hours drive alongside a clear river deep in the heart of some pristine forest. The weather came down a bit just as we were having a beer at the Matawai pub. I think that made the gorge even better. Here's a pic.

I’m going out on a limb here, but I’d put good money on my hunch that you’ve never even heard of John Grundy, let alone seen Grundy’s Wonders. The show screens here on a Sunday evening, on the Living Channel at 22:30. Tyne Tees Television in the UK has made five series of this programme. Grundy is glibly written off by The Living Channel as “an architectural historian and writer. He casts a comical and critical eye over buildings in England’s fair land. He comes up with interesting snippets on things you never knew about”. He calls himself “a sort of pretendy Geordie”, has a northeastern accent and a way of emphasising his arguments that might fool Kiwis, who confuse passion with bellyaching, into believing he’s whingeing. But New Zealand could use a few more men like Grundy — especially among its town and city planners. More…

It's Sunday. Time for a relaxed morning coffee, a bit of toast, bacon. Actually being unemployed that's pretty much every day for me right now, but Sunday is special in featuring just about the only real newspaper war worth watching in New Zealand: The Sunday Star Times versus the Herald on Sunday.

HoS editor Shayne Currie is a former Star Times man, which adds nice frisson to the clash.

Having just finished Piers Morgan's terrific memoir The Insider, I can't help casting this face-off in that light, especially today in the different blow-by-blow treatments the papers give the Lee Tamahori (pictured) story.

The HoS goes large with it (not online, oddly), speaking to just about anyone who ever met the guy, while the SST makes it Page 3 lead with a puff on the front. Page 3 is generally considered the second most important in any paper, so that's still pretty prominent. However, neither paper manages to speak to Tamahori himself, so the big question now is who will land the exclusive, the HoS, SST or someone else?

The SST leads instead with a real broadsheet story about botched births and the supervision of midwives and a second lead about the Mohammed cartoons. But perhaps most tantalising of all is the prospect of Rodney Hide, taking time out from floating Brash coup rumours, to make an appearance on Dancing with the Stars. We can't wait. The HoS save serious for its second lead, a good story about more 111 system failures.

I understand Fairfax NZ management were pretty sure they had seen the HoS threat off. They haven't, and that could be a serious mistake. As an old boss of mine once said: "What do you do when your competition is drowning? ... Shove a hose down their throat."

It isn’t yellow, it isn’t on A4 paper, but it is in the spirit of the Slickman A4 Quotation Event (the SA4QE), so buy Russell Hoban’s books and join The Kraken, while I 4Qate:

“I went down the stairs and out into the winter sky (very high and open, with gold-tinted clouds) and the last part of the day. Brightly lit newsagents and snack shops led me out of the station into lights and traffic and crossings and railings and the Finchley Road. After the cramped closeness of Soho it all seemed very wide and spread out and strange to me. Elijah’s Lucky Dragon was only a short walk from the station, between Leverton and Sons Ltd, Independent Funeral Directors since 1789, and The Gate Lodge pub. I wouldn’t have minded dropping in for a quick one but The Gate Lodge sounded like designer beers and careful drinkers and the pub front was red with hanging plants and yellow outlines on the panels and windows, all very charming. I don’t like charming and I don’t like careful drinkers. I like pubs plain and dark and old-fashioned with names like The Hand of Glory, The Spade and Coffin and The Jolly Sandboys. With serious drinkers. There was a bus stop nearby with dark huddles of people and buses coming and going. In this cold northern twilight the buses looked larger and redder than the ones in my part of town.” Russell Hoban, Linger Awhile, Chapter 26, page 101-102 (published by Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006)

Happy 81st birthday, Russell Hoban, from the NZBC.

THE MANLY by Chris Bell

Another in NZBC’s series of summer fiction, this is what has become known as a ‘short short’: a story of 500 words or less, short enough to read in one sitting.

Disclosure: Three NZBC bloggers, Director-General Rob O’Neill, Mark Broatch and Chris Bell, had their short-shorts published last year in Random House (NZ)’s anthology Home, which was co-edited by another NZBC blogger Stephen Stratford (cue: Theme from The Twilight Zone). The collection is available from New Zealand bookshops, ISBN: 1869417410.

This short short, THE MANLY, is previously unpublished and was inspired by the vintage advertisement shown — a product which, as far as we know, is sadly no longer available. Read on…

Phil Parker, NZBC's occasional wine columnist, is with the masses when it comes to food and wine matching - he doesn't give a toss.

Our director-general is on a road trip, covering the North Island, mostly with dandruff and sweet wrappings, in his new Japanese sporty number – one careful owner, going overseas, probably. His fellow board members, tired of waiting for him to return for a much-delayed Special General Meeting involving Jacob’s Creek white and Ready Salted potato chips, took to thinking up titles of a road movie with him as the star:

Hello Pork Pie

Lord of the Burger Rings

Middle Age Spread

Puku

King Pong

Smashed Palace

Meet the Feeble

Heart of the Stag Party

and, naturally:

Mr Wrong.

Any further suggestions?

All great art leaves you wanting more, and is thus ultimately unfulfilling. The perfect pop song is the most poignant example of this: Three minutes of unfulfilled potential. You want to hear the best bits over and over. But they’re the best bits only because they don’t occur often. The classic example of this (in fact, it’s the only example I can think of) is the jubilant guitar chord riff that opens New Order’s Regret from ‘Republic’, and which forms the song’s real hook. It wouldn’t be a perfect pop song if it consisted only of that hook over and over again… And yet, you want to hear it over and over again. So greatness is tinged with sadness. We deceive ourselves into believing it can be erased by putting the needle back on the start of the song, or pressing ‘replay’, or hitting the ‘back’ button and playing the song again. But repetition will dull our senses; like colours exposed to sunlight, the wonder will fade and the perfect pop song will seem ordinary for a while. Only, perhaps, when we hear the song years later will we be transported back in time, and it will again encapsulate our feelings; it will seem it was composed exclusively to fulfil this purpose, and for us alone.

Let us know your picks for the perfect pop song — or magic moments you wish were repeated — and post your comment here.