Random quotes and facts from The World Almanac and Book of Facts 2007:

"In the 17C, when French explorers arrived, Algonquian, Sauk, Fox and Illinois and Souian Osage, Missouri, Iowa and Kansa peoples were living in the region; few remained by the 1830s."

Alaska is more than twice as large as Texas.

In 1925, 689 people died in a tornado that ripped through Missouri, Illinois and Indiana.

The 2nd and 3rd stanzas of The Star-Spangled Banner are commonly omitted as a courtesy to the British. One line: "Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution."

US atmospheric CO2 concentration ppm in 1744: 277; CO2 concentration ppm 2005; 377.

Best-selling US magazine: AARP The Magazine, circ: 23m (it's for 50+).

US Army personnel on active duty, 1940: 267, 767; in 1945: 8,266, 373.

One of the best bands I’ve ever seen playing live is currently doing casino dates in the US. Twelve May to June dates have been added to the ‘Heavy Rollers’ tour, from New Orleans to Niagara Falls, NY. The Dan’s website has always been slick, funny and useful, and now, having signed up for the e-newsletter, I also get the customer service I’d expect from a slick corporation but which is sadly not only absent from those but also otherwise unheard of in what has been described as the music industry. Pity most of us won’t get to see any of the shows. This, from the ‘Concert info and advice’ section of newsletter #30:

Rumor Control
Here’s something that your cousin at the venue
or your brother-in-law at the promoters
or even your “high-level contact with the band”
apparently doesn’t know:
Shows can be routed,
dates can be held,
schedules can be circulated,
...all before a gig is confirmed.
Please don't schedule your vacation around a rumor!
And please do not assume a show is confirmed
until and unless it is announced on steelydan.com

Eat Well, Stay Fit, Die Anyway: collected bits and bobs from the very rude Holy Moly. Available here.

Al Gore’s Nashville mansion consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, it says here. All up, his power and gas bill comes to $US30,000 a year.

Which may explain this report in the Daily Mail:

The self-styled green crusader was invited to address tomorrow’s special meeting in London of the Norwich-based Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.
But organisers were informed that Gore would require a hefty fee to share his ecological principles.
Says one: ‘We got a letter saying that Mr Gore would be happy to come if we paid him £85,000. And he wanted three first-class return air fares from the U.S. as well. We simply couldn’t afford him.’

Chris reckons with shows such as Life On Mars juxtaposed on Kiwi TVs alongside reruns of The Sweeney, Minder and The Professionals, seventies man (complete with big moustache, booze, fags and sexist remarks) is back onscreen in a big way. John Harris of the Guardian asks what makes him so appealing to 21st Century film and TV audiences.

TV’s repulsive "Poo Lady", so-called Doctor Gillian McKeith, has been using her bogus title to get on the telly, but now Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority has stepped in — and not before time, says Ben Goldacre, who reckons she's a menace to science.

Germaine Greer interviews Frank Zappa's wife Gail and eldest son Dweezil, along with some of the composer's former cohorts, including 'stunt guitarist', Steve Vai, and reveals they’ll be playing FZ’s G-Spot Tornado at her funeral (it’s one of Chris's postmortem picks, too).

"Maestro of the weird", film director David Lynch talks about meditating, bottled uteruses and why nobody should have a kitchen. As usual strangeness lurks, like a dust bunny under the radiator.

Stephen finds Paper, Scissors, Rock's views on male pattern stupidity worthy. He likes Farrar on blogging too and on new protest tactics. He also recommends the bizarre Monkey Fluids.

Nowt from me. I don't get out much - or rather I get out too much.

Ciao.

A most irregular column

The new Metro is good, isn’t it. “Barney’s rubble” is a great cover line for the Pavement story, and it’s a great story by Simon Farrell-Green.

Graeme Hunt has an excellent map of Waiheke Island showing where the rich people live. Frances – not Fran – Walsh has a good story taking a different tack from North & South's on Wither Hills and the wine competitions, with a sidebar in which Simon Wilson explains what a good editor of Cuisine he was but the publisher just didn’t understand. He may well be right. But usually publishers are – they pay for the Piper-Heidsieck, so they call the tune.

And it’s nice – but sad – to see an obituary for Georg Kohlap. I didn’t know him well but adored him. Plus, he got Warwick Roger and William Chen to do his bidding. Not many people can say that.

The Listener has been good recently – I can’t understand the 11% drop in circulation. Can you? – but this week’s issue has a dreadful cover, possibly the worst ever. The typography is all to hell, and look at this:

Will the war
on climate
change kill
our trade
& tourism?

Wrong in so many ways, but here’s two: you want the phrase “climate change” to be readable, and “change kill” is just daft. Designed by a designer and proof-read by nobody. Or so one hopes.

But wait, there’s more. On pages 12-13 there’s an interview with Paolo Rotondo, who’s such a nice bloke that they shouldn't have let him say in print that “Maori and Italians have both got a disrespect for authority because of colonisation.” When was the last time the Italians got colonised? The Greeks did them over about a couple of millennia ago and Napoleon had a crack later. But in between there was a little thing called the Roman Empire, and much later there was Abyssinia. A bit more out-colonising than in-colonising there. What’s the Maori for “bollocks”?

Which brings us to Philip Matthews. He’s a terrific writer but he does like to let us know that he’s, you know, politically okay. In the TV Films section, he starts on The Hollow Man with “Not the long-awaited Don Brash biopic…” Yee-es.

Next, his review of the 2004 remake of Around the World in 80 Days opens, “The standard version of this Jules Verne fantasy contraption might still be the 1956 version in which David Niven played Phileas Fogg; certainly, it seemed an easier film to make in the fading days of empire (wasn’t 1956 also the year of the Suez crisis?) than now.”

I won’t quibble about that semi-colon, though others might. And I won’t quibble about 1956 being the year of the Suez crisis. But this is an American film, released in 1956 hence almost certainly shot in 1955 at the latest ie before the Suez crisis – which America stopped by making England, France and Israel back off. So what is the point of mentioning it? Something to do with Iraq, I suppose, ie nothing to do with the fucking film.

Stuff reports:

GNS said both quakes would have been felt in the Auckland region. An unconfirmed report said a roof had collapsed in Avondale but police said they not received any reports of damage to date. Police also added they were looking to websites for further information.

Is it just me or is the police checking the internet for information the most frightening thing about Wednesday’s earthquakes in Auckland?

The editorial in this week’s Independent (not online) begins:

“Helen Clark should listen closely whenever she flies over the central North Island’s forests. She is likely to hear the sound of chainsaws tearing through the moral high ground she is trying to construct around greenhouse policy.”

1. She’s unlikely to hear anything at ground-level from inside an aeroplane.

2. Unless you are having a nasty accident, chainsaws tear through trees, not the ground.

3. You can’t construct high ground, moral or otherwise, around a policy.

There are no sub-editors listed on the Indy’s masthead. Perhaps they should hire one.

She's been a tough road supporting the Black Caps, especially in the era Bracewell, but every so often they play like champs and yesterday was one of those days. Even better, I was there - courtesy of the good folk at Renaissance.

And even though they were chasing a formidable total, there wasn't a moment when you gave up. They were there or thereabouts the whole time. Magnifique.

Anyway, here's the latest ICC international one-day rankings to savour.

Whose moronic idea was to fence off one of the few green areas adjacent to Queen St, dig it up and plant sunflowers?

Oh I see.

Does the Auckland City Council intend to remove the iron fence and return the area to grass for people to sit on once the flowers fade into autumn?

Does it realise that cities overseas are voraciously gobbling up residential and commercial plots that become vacant for green patches to patchwork the taupe and beige? People need a place to eat their sushi away from the fumes and disease-ridden air conditioning.

Were the citizens asked if they wanted a display above a respite?

What a beautiful conservation job the council has done in the old post office - the tiles are magnificent, comforting memories of the past on the way to the glasshouse and the trains.

They just need to think of the real needs of the people. All the time.

The current vehicle safety campaign encouraging people to "be patient" and "waitfora gap" at intersections is barking up the wrong off-ramp.

Trouble is, New Zealanders still drive as if they live in a small town. They speed, they jump red lights, they close up gaps. If drivers were to wait for a gap in traffic in Auckland, for example, they'd run out of petrol.

What needs to be encouraged is for drivers to create gaps - to travel a safer distance from the car in front, to stop when the traffic is crawling along for cars to come in from side streets, to slow when a light is turning orange.

For that to happen, though, drivers need to pay more attention to lights and mirrors and speedometers. Yeah, right.

Nice to see that Lily Allen is doing so well in America. She’s great – but maybe a bit confused: she tells Uncut, a Brit pop magazine, that “vanity about the way you look, that’s right up there with global warming and capitalism in terms of the evils of the modern world”. Lily Allen records for EMI, which according to Wikipedia is one of the Big Four record labels, and the largest music publisher in the world. Quite possibly an evil capitalist organisation, then. Should somebody tell her?

She also says that “I prefer chubby blokes with glasses and bald heads.” That’s good news for Toby Young (interviewed here by the excellent David Cohen and here by the DG), who writes in the new, improved Spectator on how so not independent the indie movies are at the Sundance festival.

Jim Morrison predicts climate change.

What's next? Jimi Hendrix thinking a big sexual virus with a little acronym is going to hit party people any day now? That's Henry VIII was concerned for de facto property laws to be as equitable as possible? That Oscar Wilde was frantic about the role of independent film at Sundance?