There were any number of wineries giving away measurable quantities of product - a number more if you forked out three dollars for a glass. There was also Belgian beer (I'm told that if you didn't make eye contact and took a turn around the stadium in between you could get more than one helping). And coffee, though I wish to note the Caffee L'affare had the check to charge full price. But, between reminding me what all those grape varieties taste like and what the difference between oaked and unoaked chardonnay is, my highlights were actually foods.

Pastrami, for instance - supermarkets would have you believe that you make pastrami by fixing it so the edge of the slice has that coating on it. Proper pastrami has to be properly cured - cured of not tasting fantastic.

Am I the only one that didn't know that olive oil mellows with age?

And somebody was importing (from Spain, I think) saffron-infused vinegar. I haven't actually had much direct experience of saffron, and I tried it because I wanted to test something I'd read in a book (which was mostly about pigments rather than food, but recommended infusing it in hot water). Saffron makes you laugh. It turned the vinegar yellow, gave it a pleasant earthy taste, and when I tried a little on a scrap of bread it sent a big warm belly-chuckle into the world.

Now, saffron filaments have to be picked out of their tiny little flowers by hand, so they're not likely to be less expensive than your drug of choice. But the experience was, and this is the word I'm after, nice.

This is what happens when you take sports seriously

And I happen to think that once somebody served their sentence we should stop punishing them. If not, where do you stop? It's not much incentive to reform if you're never going to be allowed to do anything with your life anyway.

For God's sake, let the man go to Greece and get beaten up.

National: The Bomb

I got this in the email shortly after my last post:

Hi Lyndon - The Krugman book was published 9/03. How do you calculate this to be "early in the wave of pre-election anti-Bush publications"? Also, while he is a Princeton professor, this doesn't make him "nobody's flake". Any dispassionate reading of his NYT columns reveal him to be little more than a partisan hack. His predictions of economic doom following the Bush tax cuts have not come to pass - in fact, quite the opposite has occurred. To finish, where did you get the "their behaviour is of a character with the way they got elected, by doctoring the rolls in Florida to a huge extent" line? I can see why you admire Krugman - you are both inclined to make stuff up! Later - Sean.

Ah, yes: sometimes I wonder whether there is such a thing as constructive political debate.

When I asked to quote him, Sean said that he mostly enjoyed the blog, which is good. Otherwise I would have to recommend that he avoid it lest the hate poison his soul (I once had this problem until I stopped reading Frank Haden's opinion pieces). I sure don't expect to be writing anything positive about the Bush administration anytime soon.

And as for the Florida election, well, I'm glad you asked, but we're running out of space. Tune in next time!

He's, like, a celebrity for actors

I attended a question-and-answer session on Monday morning. I was fascinated and inspired, but I won't go into too much detail, partly because all I wanted to do was publicly associate myself with Keith Johnstone. Patrick was there too, so he is also cool.

You should go see the show ('The Sercet Origin of Improv') with him and the people he's workshopping with this week, who include a unique gathering of creamy improv talent from all over NZ. Sunday (June 27) 7pm at the Illiot Theatre.

Else you're just ungrateful.

I'm not talking about the generalised presumption that they meant to govern in the interests of the American people at large, or the belief that cutting taxes and increasing spending in a recession is a good idea, or even that oath Dubya had to make about preserving the constitution. I'm talking specific, shameless and sometimes blatant, lies. I'm quite convinced that George W. Bush is a charming person, but if he told me it was a nice day I would be running to the nearest window to check.

Krugman generally sticks to his field. The story starts with misleading campaign claims (to an economist, obviously misleading) in favour of privatising social security. Later, there is a triumph as they convince almost everybody that Bush's tax cut package was mostly for the middle classes (Democrats who bought that one, and there were plenty, are having trouble renouncing their votes to this day). See also Bushes public outrage over dodgy corporate schemes structurally identical to ones that he had been involved in. It goes on.

Krugman, in his introduction, ascribes this behaviour to the attitude of a "revolutionary power". The phrase was used by, of all people, Henry Kissinger in an early academic work to describe governments like revolutionary France or Nazi Germany, and their dealings with the rest of Europe. Powers that do not accept the legitimacy of the system - either the way their country was or the way the world is - and consequently will happily lie to achieve their ends. And if they are caught out, they can lie again, or intimidate, or just ignore it.

Previous statements by Bush advisors have demonstrated their contempt for the world order and the constitution. And even a whiff of something like Cheney's ongoing links to Halliburton would have been enough to cause a resignation or at least some action - if, that is, they shared any kind of moral compass with the rest of us.

Generally speaking their behaviour is of a character with the way they got "elected", by doctoring the rolls in Florida to a huge extent (and that almost wasn't enough). My faith in politicians' honesty is probably as low as everyone else's, but Krugman confirms that these guys are in a class of their own.

A question of transcription

Anyone who's ever tried to transcribe natural speech knows that it's crammed full of these "conversational noises" - ums, ers, y'knows, repetitions, false starts... When transcribing for public consumption, one normally leaves them out. It may be that there is less of this random verbiage in the pre-prepared speeches of Parliament. In fact, one of the things that is intimidating about Helen Clark is the way that, particularly for a woman, she uses very few of them (which has, it seems, led to her being taunted when she does). To generalise: women tend to use them as part of the emotional-connection side of conversation. Men tend to read them as sign of weakness.

To me, who knows all this, Brash is displaying a kind of malicious pedantry. Normally I'm not one to complain about politicians being cruel to each other, but that seems an unusually childish way of going about it.

It's often difficult to tell how significant an issue is from another country is (my sister, who used to live in the US, likes to remind us that those freaky American law suits you hear about are generally either lost or overturned by a higher court). But this seems to have politicians in government and opposition rushing to scold the ABC. On Monday Channel 9's Today show interviewed opposition leader Mark Latham about Peter Garrett's candidacy, Iraq, environmental policy, and Play School. Someone has since drawn attention to another sequence which featured a child visiting the father then going to see her mother and her mother's new boyfriend.

The main issue seems to be that it's raised questions for children that a lot of parents don't particularly want to answer. Oh, and having the "homosexual agenda" forced down our children's throats (as it were). But my impression is that it's gotten so much coverage because same-sex marriage and adoption are live issues for the government (as something to be prevented). Not that these children are going to be voting anytime soon.

Now to my mind (warning: postmodernism), supporting the dominant paradigm is just as political as subverting it. It's just that people notice the latter. And if you were constantly wondering what effect your every action had on the formation of impressionable young minds, I imagine you would turn into an activist pretty quickly.

I want to leave aside discussion of whether they should be encouraged to make television only for the children with one mummy and one daddy. Also whether parliament has any business interfering in the content of a state-owned TV channel. I just want to say that people who think that Play School is a natural haven of conservative social values are wrong.

New Zealand Play School, like the other local kids shows from my childhood, was made in Dunedin. Hanging out with the theatre crowd, one hears stories. For example, I'm told that to relieve the tension caused by being relentlessly cheerful and safe the presenters would often make the dolls perform unspeakable acts on each other between takes. Then someone had the idea of giving little kids tours through the studio, which meant presenters had to be on their best behaviour the whole time. I don't recall if it came to the threat of industrial action, but the tour thing got dropped pretty quickly.

Another bit of information, more relevant to the present discussion, is to do with the programme having an agenda. They had an agenda and they were proud! The example cited was that, whenever there was any heavy lifting work to be done, the girl dolls would do it, while Humpty and the Teds (Major and Minor) would sit around and watch. Which seems to me an elegant combination of 'girls can do anything' activism (which was big around then) and telling it like it is, and I was assured that it was utterly deliberate.

On the other hand, as a male, I feel I should wonder whether such things may have damaged the development of my own sense of self-worth. But I can't bring myself to get too worked up about it. If I was bullied at school, I don't think it was because my generation lacked positive inanimate role models.

In closing, the least relevant Play School story: A friend of mine told me about a radio interview with a onetime presenter (I think it was Tim Bartlett) who explained the downside of being a celebrity with the under-five set. He would often be placed in an awkward situation when a child, seeing him outside of a TV set, would point at this man their parents didn't recognise and burst into tears. That's another one for all the postmodernists.