You can break out your electric blankets, guys and girls. Scoop reports the danger of power cuts diminishing fast as water literally floods into the South Island's hydro lakes. As for the economy, there could be signs of an upswing there too, with an unexpected trade surplus for March, but oil remains a wild card. How that affects GDP for the March quarter (and whether we are in a technical recession or not) is anyone's guess.

Be that as it may there is one stock that appears to have fallen sharply. Our eternal muse only managed third place in an FHM poll on the world's sexiest women. Keira Knightly won with Keeley Hazel (who?) second. "What about Toni Marsh?" Stephen asks.

Chris contributes some funny and erudite letters sent by Frank Zappa in connection with the PMRC "Parental Music Resource Centre" (a mid-80s music censorship lobby run by Washington Wives), around the time of the 1985 hearings on music and censorship. Note in particular his superbly barbed letter to Ronald Reagan.

He also likes this: everything you'll ever need to know about knife-sharpening (via BoingBoing). Chris also reckons the participants in Stephen's Robert Fisk debate should read this — and possibly so should Mr Fisk (via Arts & Letters).

Mark reckons this research could be the key to ending my single status (heaven forbid!). I could go bungeeing while eating chocolate and listening to the Eagles on my iPod. Yeah!

From me? Well there's Chirac's project for a French rival to Google, which is very, err, French. Or you could pop over to the Gaurniad's Culture Vulture blog to listen to a podcast of Will Self reading one of his best stories. I keep urging people to go to Slate and check out their Magnum photos display. And, while you are there have a read about big oil trying to downplay their massive windfall profits.

Ciao-arama.

Update: how could I be so forgetful. This humorous piece in the Listener from a certain Mr Broatch is also well worth a read.

We've finally got around to doing up a black version of our famous and extraordinarily popular retro NZBC shirts. It's a snip at $24.99. Well it would be if it weren't $US24.99.

Now available at the NZBC Shop.

In a guide to movies coming up this year, The Guardian mentioned that The Da Vinci Code, the film of the groaner of a book about the Magdelene sisters or somesuch, might also be known as I Know What You Did Last Supper.

We thought, there's another idea to avoid doing paid work!

Ride 'Em Cowboy (Brokeback Mountain)

Along that line of thinking - not that there's anything wrong with it - came the obvious Blazing Saddles and the, er, less obvious I'll Have a Twist (geddit? Jack Twist is one of the sheeppokes). And so, Twist and Shout, Twist of Fate, Round the Twist, etc.

Grace Under Fire (Rear Window), or maybe Will and Grace.

Throw Momma from the Chair (Psycho), or Torn Curtain or Curtain Call or Truly Deeply Madly.

Ice, Slice and Four Smoking Funnels (Titanic).

The Eiffel Truth (The Lavender Hill Mob).

Koha welcome.

As I've said before, she's a hard road being a New Zealand cricket supporter. A week or so ago, just before the first test, I was contemplating a post questioning Stephen Fleming's recent contributions to the team.

Of late he seems to score large against weak opposition, but when the crunch comes against the Aussies, English or South Africans his results have been much less impressive. His average, at under 40, was not exactly stellar for a player of his stature and ability, even taking into account a string of rather unlucky dismissals.

I'm glad I never made that post. In one magnificent innings of 262 he has lifted his average to 40.06, and done it against a really good attack featuring one of the best bowlers around, Makhaya Ntini. Great boy's-own stuff.

A post on Tim Blair’s blog gives this summary of Robert Fisk’s position on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, as set out in an interview yesterday with the ABC’s Tony Jones:

“Zarqawi is just a figurehead whom we just are encouraged to loathe, who, at the end of the day, is not a person whom we need to worry about. Although he is a problem for all of us (Fisk, too). The West bestializes Zarqawi, although he is genuinely a bad guy (no doubt about it). It is wrong for us to paint the Middle East as a fight between good and evil, although Bin Laden and Zarqawi are monstrous. We created Zarqawi, although he created himself, and we helped, although he used to exist as a fantasy figure created by American propaganda. The media perpetuates these myths every time it blames Zarqawi, although he is to blame, and it would be absolutely wrong for reporters to ignore the things he is to blame for. Zarqawi’s existence supports American propaganda, but his continued existence is also a severe blow to American credibility.”

Don’t believe it? The full transcript is here.

David Parker has been exonerated of any wrongdoing and is likely to be reinstated to cabinet in short order. Now some are asking whether Investigate failed to investigate the case properly. The best discussion of this is over at David Farrar's, largely because Ian Wishart responds to the question in detail - and makes some interesting, if technical, points.

It's okay to surf the net at work, US employment judge says:

It should be observed that the Internet has become the modern equivalent of a telephone or a daily newspaper, providing a combination of communication and information that most employees use as frequently in their personal lives as for their work.

Thank God, or Allah or whoever, for employment law and regulated workplaces! There are more than a few Aussies praying they had theirs back right now.

One guy was told he'd be sacked if he attended the birth of his child. Another was sacked for requesting light duties after a workplace accident. Two apprentices were sacked the day the new laws came into force. And, inevitably, one guy for refusing to work on Anzac day.

The Franz Kafka masterpiece known as Metamorphosis in English isn’t about a cockroach. Gregor Samsa’s transformation (Verwandlung without the masculine article was its original title) was from man into “Ungeziefer”, which can be translated only to “vermin” — as Richard Stokes explains in the flawed but lovely Hesperus Press edition. In Kafka’s story, a cleaning woman calls the metamorphosed Gregor “alter Mistkäfer” — “old dung beetle” — but Kafka didn’t mean that he had changed into a dung beetle, either; it’s a term of affection in German. How far-sighted of Kafka (a Jew himself, whose three sisters were murdered by the Nazis) to predate the use of “Ungeziefer” to denigrate Jewry during the Third Reich. The generic term “vermin” didn’t work in translating Metamorphosis into English, so most people think of Kafka’s story as “the one about the man who turns into a cockroach”. I’ve written about roaches before and enjoyed it, so I wondered what would happen if I wrote a short story that turned Metamorphosis on its head. Read on…

We're having a heatwave, at least in Auckland. The Girlie reckons it's, like, soooo global warming.

"It never used to be like this," she said as we walked up the shops yesterday. Not in April.

Anyway, before they melt, here's your lollies. First from Mark, on one writer who had to shut down her blog after five years because:

"...somewhere between the bedsheets and 6 a.m., I realized something: Blogging wasn't helping me write; it was keeping me from it."

Stephen likes this Economist piece on Tom Wolfe's encounters with "hog-stomping reality".

Chris says we now know why that third-rate science fiction hack did it: "L. Ron Hoover of the First Church of Appliantology" (as Frank Zappa once dubbed Hubbard), once addressed an authors' convention saying writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. "If a man really wants to make a million dollars he should start his own religion." (via Arts & Letters Daily).

He also recommends the KCRW Bookworm site especially Michael Silverblatt's interview with the "god-like Kurt Vonnegut", and his interview with Elliot Perlman, author of The Reasons I Won't Be Coming, which he says is one of the most extraordinary interviews he's ever heard. Silverblatt starts by reprimanding Perlman for being modest (he asks him to be as articulate and impressive as his work), and Perlman has an 'epiphany' at the end that makes you realise how stunning the silver-tongued Silverblatt is at summarising writers' work. Priceless.

A blogger called Heather warns of the dangers of not knowing what to do with your breasts, providing a blasphemous photo of our Muse to, er, support her case. "Breasts deserve better," says Heather.

Finally, from Chris anyway, German scholar Matthias Kuntzel has written "a dramatic-and frightening" cover story about Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for the New Republic (free registration).

And analysis of Iraq casualty figures over at Sir Humphreys appears to reach the conclusion that the data may or may not be cyclical and may or may not be important depending on what you are trying to measure - which no one can agree on. But no matter what, my analysis is wrong.

Ciao.

An Australian has been accidentally shot and killed in Baghdad. With the four Fijian security guards killed last week it brings things kinda close to home. Very sad.

Meanwhile, the US government is rooting out leakers, sacking an unnamed CIA agent.

Yesterday the NZ Herald reported on the widening gap between male and female academic achievement in New Zealand schools. Interestingly, US network PBS (sorry can't find link) reported on a similar trend in the US but the statistics painted a different kind of picture.

Class and race appear to have a greater impact on male academic achievement than just gender, PBS reported. The rate of university enrolments among middle class whites, for instance, was 49% for males and 51% for females - hardly a cause for concern.

However, among low income groups and ethnic minorities the gap is huge. Clearly boys brought up in these environments or communities are not overcoming barriers to achievement at the same rate as girls. There is even affirmative action for boys taking place.

None of this undoes what Paul Baker had to say in the Herald yesterday, especially as most low-income children rely on state co-ed education. However, I would like to see the New Zealand statistics broken down by other factors than just gender. It is a complex problem, and we need to look at all the angles.

I’d been wondering how Ricky Gervais managed to top the podcast charts so quickly after launching his free podcasts last December. I wonder no more: there’s simply no competition. I have so far failed to find anything worthy of comparison in the podcast market. It’s not that there are no comedy casts to choose from — there are thousands of purportedly humorous shows in the iTunes podcast directory alone — it’s just that most of them aren’t even remotely funny. So here is NZBC’s reasonably random roundup of the podcasts that top the charts but which aren’t necessarily fit for purpose. Read on…

Some interesting winners, including a Kiwi, in the US Pulitzer Prizes just announced. The Washington Post won one for its Abramoff corruption scandal investigation and another for its report on US secret "black site" prisons. The New York Times won for its scoop about domestic spying, which no doubt will be solace to the paper's reporters and editors when they are sent to jail for treason, as some bloggers fantasize.

Kiwi snapper Melanie Burford, was among the Dallas Morning News photo crew that took an award.

March by Geraldine Brooks won the fiction prize and interestingly there was no award for drama. The late great jazzman Thelonious Monk (pictured on piano) was given a special citation.

What have we got? What have we got?

Well, let's start with Mr Bell who is pleased by Pandora, which is designed to create musical “conversations”. If that sounds a bit pretentious, Chris says, check it out anyway. Choose your artist and see what Pandora lets out of the box. Israeli Miklos Olesh reckons “it's the best thing that's happened to the internet”.

The New Republic's art critic Jed Perl defends Dada, the subject of a exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington (registration required). The image of Sylvia Plath and Kurt Cobain "prowling around together" is one Chris likes for rather obvious reasons. This article, however, explores the possibility that Cobain died because he misread a poem by 1920s poet Elinor Wylie.

Mark contributes this, from The Observer, on John Howard's appearance before an enquiry into bribes paid to Saddam, and this on, err, anal sex:

Nor wonder how I lost my wits;
Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia shits!

Beautiful! You've gotta love those eighteenth century guys!

From me? Well, Slate does it every time. Here we have Hitchens on Joe Wilson and the Niger yellowcake, John Dickerson looks forward to the Libby trial, and Slate's Explainer talks about generals.

Ciao.

God don't the MSM bang on about blogging. Deborah Hill Cone, who can spell really well, was the latest with an effort in the SST's Sunday magazine (not online). Deborah, this post is for you.

First off, let's not pretend, as some like to, that coalition casualties are dropping. They go up and down but the overall trend since the start of the insurgency remains up. At the time of posting, just over half way through the month, April's tally was 49 dead at one of the highest monthly rates yet seen. And now it looks as if the US has to reconquer Baghdad.

Meanwhile, incidents like this, this and this are not helping. As for reconstruction, the oil ain't flowing to pay for it and then the contractors have to bilk their cut ...

Other interesting stories here, here, here and here.

Update: Chefen at Sir Humphrey's has done a lot of very good work on reanalysing the deaths data presented above. The weakness of the simple linear trend line I used is that it is very poor in registering recent trends (put simply, it isn't very responsive and takes a long time to change from positive to negative). He's presented a range of different analysis worthy of thoughtful consideration.

FILM REVIEW: The Matador

Most of Pierce Brosnan's acting career has been devoted, lucratively, to shiny, handsome heroes with loveable flaws. For a couple of well-padded decades he's been little more than a Brioni mannequin with a well-ironed RP accent, a line of quips crafted by the best scripters average sort of money can buy, and a mat of chest hair that could carpet a small Chelsea apartment. In The Matador he lustily grabs the chance to slip on the smelly pelt of a completely new animal.

Actually it's worse. Our Herald describes Malcolm Kendall-Smith, just sentenced to eight months jail over refusing to serve in Iraq, as a "New Zealand-born Royal Air Force doctor". Across the ditch he's an "Australian born RAF doctor". Something's gotta give and I suspect our Herald has got it wrong.

Another interesting item from the SMH today is this on our currency's unexpected and spectacular bounce against the $A yesterday

I’m a huge fan of TV3 News but tonight they blew it, big time. First item up was the re-opening of the police investigation into the 1980 murder of Auckland photographer Simon Buis. It closed with a description of the clothes he was wearing: shirt, jacket, brown corduroy trouser and “brown – not blue – suede shoes”.

What the hell was that “not blue” doing there? Only to make a joke about blue suede shoes. This was a man who was beaten to death. Whoever wrote that line, and whoever let it go to air, should be ashamed of themselves.

Hitchens Watch, out of Auckland, has been going for a while but I've never seen it mentioned locally and it seems it's not much linked locally either. It gets a link from Hitchens' Wikipedia entry and even a mention on Salon.

Other Watch sites? LGF Watch, Mark Steyn Watch, Bolton Watch, Michelle Malkin Watch, Horowitz Watch, and PR Watch. There's a lot of watching going on. Chauncey Gardiner would be pleased.

Meanwhile NZBC has passed a milestone (and God how it hurt). We set out to displace the New Zealand Building Code at the top of any Google search of "NZBC". And we've done it! We knocked the bastard off!

A few days ago Mark Steyn was singing the praises of his favourite foreign minister, Australia's Alexander Downer. Downer, along with PM Howard and Treasurer Costello are straight-talkers, prepared to say what other world leaders are not, particularly about Islam, says Steyn.

Yesterday, Steyn's favourite foreign minister appeared before an enquiry to explain what he knew or did not know about the payment of $A290 million in bribes to Saddam Hussein. The news of the rort first reached Downer's office in June 2003 but he didn't pay any attention to it because "this was information provided by a captain in the US Army, a junior officer in the US Army."

On the basis of yesterday's performance, one columnist asks and answers the obvious question:

So how is it that the Foreign Affairs Minister, who was responsible for the regulations that gave force to the UN trade sanctions on Iraq, could preside over such breathtaking negligence yet still expect to keep his job?

To lose his job, Downer cannot be merely negligent. We know that under the Howard doctrine of ministerial responsibility, the most extraordinary negligence will be tolerated.

A systematic, $290 million, four-year scam carried on by a company that, at the outset, was a government instrumentality, could only have occurred in the presence of great negligence. That is self-evident.

So Downer's "pithy" turn of phrase that Steyn likes so much will be around for a bit longer.

The Sydney Morning Herald has as good as given the Italian election to the centre left but Reuters reports it is swinging back to Berlusconi. She's a cliff-hanger.

In Peru it will likely be a straight left/right runoff in May with Ollanta Humala, a kind of Peruvian Hugo Chavez, likely to face conservative Lourdes Flores to find out if Peru too will go the way of Bolivia and Venezuela.

And France has scrapped its controversial youth job law, putting much-needed labour reform on the back burner.

Update: It really is a cliffhanger. On a tiny margin, Prodi claims victory, Berlusconi disputes the claim.

CBS interviews Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer, the man who killed an Iraqi general under interrogation. Apparently until the Abu Ghraib story broke he was up for promotion for his efforts. Welshofer says he was told to "take the gloves off" and, like any good thug, he did. That was two days after the general was given a good beating by a shadowy group of five or six interrogators with rubber hoses.

Welshofer was tried for murder and found guilty of "negligent homicide". Somehow I think the general would have been praying for a bit of neglect. Welshofer's sentence? 60 days confinement to barracks.

Okay, before we get into it this week, a plea for help. We at the NZBC want to introduce a third column on the front page on the left hand side of the main column. We figure there is probably more to this than sticking a new valve in the old radiogram, so if anyone can provide some advice, either by email in the Director General's link to the right or in comments below, it would be appreciated.

Mark sends 15 things no man wants to hear from a woman and a very bitter rant indeed from a writer about some hapless sub-editing (registration required). Our resident mediaphile also hails the New York Times' redesign, "Boy does it look good," he says. And it does.

Stephen has been Steyning out again. Steyn has lots of praise for Australia's leaders and lays into Charlie Sheen for his theory that the World Trade Centre was a controlled explosion:

The "Hot Shots! Part Deux" star is apparently an expert in that field, and he'd never seen commercial property break up that quickly since Heidi Fleiss' hooker ring.

He also notes trenchant advice from The Economist to the French.

Christopher John Bell emerged from technology hell with a story about the nutty producer Phil Spector who will soon stand trial for murder. For those of you unfamiliar with Spector here's a potted biography: Invented the Wall of Sound, shot Marvin Gaye's Dad. Or something ...

Chris says the makers of Head and Shoulders shampoo were reprimanded this week, so it's timely to remember some of advertising's spurious claims of yore. And, with the 'smoko' about to disappear in a cloud of stale smoke in Aussie, he recommends the Step-by Step Guide to Smoking Twenty Cigarettes a Day - and Loads More in the Evening.

Right, allegations US Marines went on the rampage and massacred 15 civilians in Haditha are still being investigated, however, MarineCorp Times reports three officers, two from the battalion and unit allegedly involved have been stood down “due to lack of confidence in their leadership abilities stemming from their performance during a recent deployment to Iraq.” The story was originally investigated and reported by Time magazine.

Oh and this post from Stephen and its comments are well worth a read.

Ciaoarama.

Congratulations to the Public Address crew for last night's win at the NetGuide Awards, and to David Kiwiblog Farrar and Idolblog, the other finalists. Farrar is gracious, but some of his commenters less so, asking whether Public Address is really a blog as it has no comments.

According to Wikipedia, while blogs now typically include comments, they were developed before the systems that support comments. Perhaps, therefore, we should consider Public Address the kiwi blog equivalent of an historic place?

Anyway, PA does have comments, provided in a spirit of bloggerly love by the boys at Sir Humphrey's.

Metro’s good under new editor Lauren Quaintance, isn’t it. For Aucklanders, anyway, it’s got stuff you want to read, from Russell Brown™ on the Big House in St George’s Bay Road which all of us have been to at some time (my band performed at a party there, ooh, 15 years ago), to whether my fellow Skeptic, weather forecaster Ken Ring, is completely mad, to lovely Jill Rawnsley of the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival. And then there’s the entirely credible (but Auckland only) Restaurant of the Year award .

Which got me and Mark and Phil thinking – over a bottle, as is the NZBC tradition – about New Zealand food-related book, song and film titles that should have been:

Silence of the Lamingtons
Scone with the Wind
Pavlova the Moon
Winnie the Puha
Whitebait, White Heat
Sally Lunn Can’t Dance
Pipi Longstocking
Trevally of the Dolls
Taniwha from the Madding Crowd
Brokeback Mutton
Yellow Submerino
To Kill a Muttonbird
The Woman in Whitebait
Blindman’s Bluff Oysters

A man is escorted from a UK flight for singing along to The Clash...

The only question remaining is, will we read this in the NZ Herald tomorrow?

Apple will allow users of its new Intel-based computers to install and use Windows, in a move designed to help people considering a switch away from the PC platform. Another move of pure genius from a company that has barely made a misstep since the return of founder and Podfather Steve Jobs.

I'm one of those people considering a switch, and the news certainly got my attention. A month or so ago my Sony laptop arrived in luggage from Sydney. After eighteen months of idiosyncratic operation, it had finally died, the motherboard burnt out due to the overheating it seemed to suffer from. Luckily my Dad was upgrading so I gave him $300 for his old PC as an interim measure.

I've really enjoyed having a desktop computer again having become increasingly disillusioned with laptops due to my own and my friends' experiences. For me the choice isn't about the switch to Apple, but about switching back to Apple. A Windows option would allow me much greater choice of small business accounting packages with all the graphics bells and whistles of an Apple there as well. It's very compelling.

Well, it looks as if the economic benefits of the falling dollar are already starting to arrive. Yesterday 42 Below reported its loss would be markedly lower than forecast in September last year.

Even though commodity prices are falling, the ANZ New Zealand Commodity Price Index rose 4.5 per cent in March, so that should pay for microchipping your dogs, farmers. And to cap it off, it looks as if the government's film incentives are doing the trick, with the long movie-making boom set to continue.

The NZX 50 is at an all-time high. NZSE stocks are generally heading north including, as the dollar falls, exporting companies such as the Fisher & Paykels. However, there are warnings stocks may already be overvalued and that some of the gains are driven by takeover speculation.

Any recession, if it happens, will be short and shallow.

Lollies on a Monday? So it seems.

Scarlett!
Stephen is obviously keeping a close watch on our muse. He sends this link to celebrity gossip site Defamer having a bit of trouble with Brit tabloid lingo. At issue? Jonathan Rhys-Meyers' reaction when confronted with Ms Johansson's "lady-bazzers" aka her "sauce shelf" while appearing in Woody Allen's new film. At least Jonathan resisted the temptation to cop a feel.

Oh Canada!
When not watching developments on the Scarlett front, or indeed on Scarlett's front, Stephen seems to spend his time scouring the Canadian media ...

He forwards this review by Mark Steyn of Glenn (Instapundit) Reynold's new book, which should be inspirational to dot commers, or dot conzers, everywhere.

He also forwards this reaction from Canada's Western Standard to being sued for publishing the Mohammed cartooons.

Matters arising
Slate's Michael Kinsley, talks a lot of sense here about journalistic objectivity and the emergence of a "post-objective" press:

May a reporter take as a given that two plus two is four? Should a newspaper strive to be open-minded about Osama Bin Laden? To reveal—to have!—no preference between the United States and Iran? Is it permissible for a news story to take as a given that the Holocaust not only happened, but was a bad thing—or is that an expression of opinion that belongs on the op-ed page?

And speaking of matters media, am I alone in thinking that in Paul Sheehan and Michael Gawenda the Sydney Morning Herald boasts two of the world's most unreadable columnists?

Finally, we noticed just two local April Fools posts, our own, and David Farrar's. Despite the giveaway first line ("I am always ready to praise Labour when they do something right"), I have to confess to Googling the Cullen quote just in case it was real. No such luck.

This funny post, just up on Public Address, could easily have stood being posted a couple of days earlier. If there were any other worthy pranks, please point to them in comments.

Ciao.

We write a lot about matters cultural here on NZBC, but not a lot about theatre. I guess that's because there really isn't much theatre around. Since I've been back I've walked past what used to be the Mercury Theatre, off K Road, and it's turned into some sort of odd Christian educational place ...

Anyway, it's good to see something really ambitious happening in the theatre area. Word is Creative New Zealand is about to approve a grant for a major new new production being promoted by a consortium out of Dunedin. Waitangi!, the musical will, they say, be the theatre equivalent of Lord of the Rings. Let's hope so. New Zealand theatre really needs it.

In thespian circles the buzz is all about who will take the key roles. Busby is apparently already locked in. Marton Csokas, most famous for fighting Matt Damon to the death in The Bourne Supremacy, will step up to play the author of the treaty. The producers don't want some old crusty playing the Rev Henry Williams either. Rumour is they have opted for Martin Henderson in that role. A good choice, I think. He has ethnic cred.

The real mystery is who will play the firebrand Hone Heke. A few names are being touted about, but one comes up more often than most - and he's a terrific choice, I think, way out of left field: Scribe. With 14 original songs in the production, having a real singer in the cast, and a rebellious singer at that, has to be a winner. And it will bring in the kids. Scribe, if indeed it is he that fills the role, will get to sing the number the entire show revolves around, one that is reprised several times during the production, "Chop Chop".

The production does not adhere strictly to historical accuracy, and why should it? Danielle Cormack's name crops up in the gossip as the love interest in some yet-unknown subplot, perhaps involving Heke. That's all right and proper in this all-singing, all-dancing show. It has to be time we moved on from thinking of Waitangi as an historical event and document to seeing it as a cultural artefact. Don't you think?

Anyway, it's all good for New Zealand theatre and New Zealand musical theatre in particular. Tickets will be available some time midyear for a season starting July. It should be good. Get out and support it.