My latest rant

Sometimes a news story brings out both the best and worst in Kiwis, and the sad news of the death of Paddles did just that, with kind words from many and an epic and ill-timed rant from Gareth “I Hate Cats” Morgan.

As a pet-owner/slave, my heart goes out to our PM Jacinda Ardern on the loss of her wee furry friend Paddles, who died after being hit by a car. I had a scary moment less than a fortnight ago where I faced the possibility of losing my own wee ginger ninja when Seymour the Wonder Cat had a rather costly vet experience, so as the old saying goes: there but for the grace of God … and all that. But holy crap, there are a couple of things about the story (that apparently warranted a news alert from Newshub and was the lead on Stuff, no less) that really pissed me off.

First of all, I wish the media would stop telling us that Paddles had opposable thumbs. She didn’t have opposable thumbs, no cat does. Sure, she was cute, fluffy, adept at typing (she had her own Twitter account) and a great advertisement for the SPCA. But if a cat suddenly turned up with opposable thumbs, we’d probably have a gaggle of scientists having a total meltdown over having to rewrite the textbooks. Cats don’t even have thumbs, let alone the opposable variety.

However, they can be polydactyl, which is what Paddles was. That means she have a few extra toes on her paws, which sat at the side, slightly separate from her other toes. They stuck out a little more, almost looking like a small thumb, but clearly weren’t opposable, nor were they actually thumbs.

I’m peeved that that little item of misreporting because unfortunately, even though the PM probably initially said Paddles had opposable thumbs as a wee bit of a light-hearted comment when introducing her little moggy to the world, there are plenty of muppets out there who will believe that as a fact and suddenly we’ll have a generation believing that somehow cats evolved to have thumbs. And opposable ones at that. The Andrew Wakefield debacle is proof of just how dangerous the reporting of bullshit is.

And that other thing that got my blood boiling on reading about Paddles: Gareth fecking Morgan. What the fuck is wrong with that man? Did he have a bad experience with a cat as a child, or is he just terminally self-absorbed and insensitive?

No sooner had news of the passing of Paddles been reported, and he was spouting off about it all on Twitter: he started by accusing Ardern of having a “callous disregard” for New Zealand’s native wildlife, before asking the PM if Paddles had been out wandering when she was run over, saying “if so does this reflect the value the PM puts on NZ wildlife?”

There seems to be a bit of a trend for pussy-obsessed rich old men to try to muscle their way into politics. Luckily for us, our particular self-confessed pussy-hater failed in his bid, unlike the tangerine-hued self-confessed pussy-grabber on the other side of the world.

Every time Morgan opens his mouth – or flexes his fingers on Twitter (much like that aforementioned orange dude in the States) – I lose a little more respect for him. His petulant behaviour on election night, having a verbal tanty at the voters of New Zealand for not backing him and his divisive policies, pretty much wiped out the last scrap of respect, and this little tirade over the demise of poor Paddles has shown he is capable of plummeting to new depths.

His beliefs about the benefits of wiping out cats aren’t even backed up by all experts in the conservation field, many of whom say that cats play a role in keeping down the numbers of predators that target some of our native birds.

Sure, some cats are hunters, but so are humans, so his claim that cats are the only critters to kill for fun isn’t true: humans are the most damaging creature on this planet, and humans hunt for “sport”.

I can get behind a plan to eradicate feral cats and strays, but not pets. Sure, it is believed that cats have been responsible for the extinction of several bird breeds around the world, but that most likely been down to feral cats.

I have one cat who is a hunter, one who isn’t. Norman catches starlings and blackbirds (neither of which is native nor endangered … in fact they breed like bunnies from all accounts). She eats most of them and leaves the feet as a wee trophy for me in my wardrobe. Noice.

Oh, and I get that there’s a decent amount of interest in the loss of Paddles, so fully understand the various news outlets giving it a good run. But it was sitting above a story about the death of a mother and daughter in Auckland and while I’m a cat-lover, I do think the death of two humans is probably a little more newsworthy.

 

And let’s be honest, I reckon Stuff gave more coverage to the death of Ardern’s cat Paddles than when her grandmother died during the election campaign!

 

 

It seems that the are of receiving a gift has been lost in recent years, as we hear more and more often about people making crazy and often unreasonable demands for gift expectations.

There was a time, when a gift was something awesome, and often a surprise. As all good gifts should be. Note: To qualify as a good gift, it should also be good surprise. I was once surprised by a Christmas gift from my other half that was surprisingly … well, bad. A toaster. Er, sorry, household appliances don’t fit the “good surprise category”. Might as well give someone a toilet brush and a bottle of bleach.

But I digress. 

Everyone getting hitched these days seems to ask for cash rather that a well-thought-out gift (a bit tacky, but whatever floats your boat I guess). To be honest, I reckon if you really need to ask your “guests” to stump up some cash to cover the cost of your nuptials, perhaps it’s time to think a little less flashy.

Anyhoo, the latest gifting drama-rama involves a two-year-old and an out-of-control mother. A user on Mumsnet (where else!) says she was presented with a gift list for her niece’s birthday, along with strict instructions on minimum required spending for said niece.

She said her brother even told her not to “bother” buying his daughter a present if it wasn’t among those already picked out and on the approved list.

Seriously, get over yourselves people. We are talking about a two-year-old. She didn’t make the list or set the spending limit, her idiot parents did. Sadly, it’s self-entitled adults turning their youngsters into self-entitled kids. The kid would probably be just as happy with a bag of jelly beans and some crayons.

As a born-and-bred Southlander and a proud Invercargillite, I’m not sure if I’m most pissed off at the whinging couple from Hamilton who didn’t like their Air New Zealand Mystery Break, or at the idiotic, pandering media for giving them their five minutes of fame.

If you’ve been living under a rock, or perhaps hanging out at a Hamilton STI clinic (more on that later), you might have missed today’s “breaking news” on both Stuff and the NZ Herald about a Hamilton couple having a mighty whinge after ending up in Invercargill for their Mystery Break.

And I’m not kidding about the breaking news thing: according to friends who use the Stuff app, it showed up as a breaking news headline, and the Herald ran it at the top of their site in the big “holy shit it’s on a red bar so it must be important” panel.

On the front of Stuff it was a “Mystery break farce”, because of course coming to Invercargill must be a farce. No one would want to come here, surely? Well, apart from all the people who were in town over the weekend for the 50^th anniversary of Burt Munro’s awesome record-breaking ride. There were plenty of people who turned out for the parade, and cafes and shops were busy all weekend. Unless they were all figments of my imagination. Perhaps inhaling all that fresh air during the seven-minute drive from suburbs to inner city on a lovely Saturday afternoon addled my brain.

But wait, it gets worse: later, in the “Travel headlines” panel in the travel section, it was labelled “Air NZ’s mystery break horror”.

Horror? Really … horror? Really Stuff, is that how little you think of your southern-most readers?

The Hamiltonians (hereinafter known as Mr Penis and The Bit of Fluff, or TBOF) had been expecting a luxurious three-night mystery break, but (the story tells us in dramatic fashion): “they ended up in an Invercargill serviced apartment they found so substandard they fled to Queenstown”.

They fled to Queenstown? Holy crap, how bad was it? Were they chased out of the building by torch-wielding cockroaches?

TBOF made it clear that she wasn’t happy about being exiled to Invercargill from the get-go, saying “The disappointment set in as soon as they checked in at Hamilton Airport and realised they were going to Invercargill … She tried to keep an open mind but couldn’t contain her dismay when they touched down in the country’s southernmost city. “

Really? Wow, way to keep an open mind TBOF. “We landed and I was like ‘oh, dear god’.”

When they got to their accommodation, poor ol’ TBOF really lost it, having a bit of a blub to the staff at the hotel after telling the seemingly obedient Mr P to ring Air NZ because she wasn’t staying there. Those torch-wielding cockroaches must have made her feel really unwelcome.

Mr P and TBOF had booked and paid for a deluxe break, which offers 4 to 5-star accommodation, and TBOF reckons the hotel manager told her they couldn’t provide 4 to 5-star rooms because his hotel has a 3 to 4-star rating. No one in the media seems to have contacted the hotel concerned but if it is indeed the Quest (looks like it is), then the rooms there are rated as 4-star and the majority of reviews on Trip Advisor are quite complimentary. Besides, 4-star is in the 4 to 5-star range.

The view? Well, yes, it certainly wasn’t the greatest. But I’ve stayed in hotels in Dunedin, Christchurch, Wellington, Auckland, Brisbane and Sydney that were in inner-city locations and had similar views. I’m generally more concerned with being close to the action.

Here’s the deal: when you book a Mystery Break, you have the option of naming where you don’t want to go. They obviously didn’t do that. If they had such a bias against Invercargill, they should have selected that as the “don’t send us there” option.

I’m not always the biggest advocate for Air New Zealand, having had a whinge or two myself about them and last-minute flight changes in the past. But in this case, our national carrier did nothing wrong. Mr P and TBOF bought and paid for a deluxe Mystery Break, that means they can end up anywhere in New Zealand. They go what they paid for.

Why the hell did their online whinging deserve to make the headlines? They weren’t “ripped off” as they claimed in the story, they were simply too fucking lazy to actually book their own holiday, left it up to the lucky dip system, and weren’t happy. Whoop-de-do.

Let’s see, I bought some rice milk a while ago to try in my coffee in an attempt to cut back on the lactose levels I was getting from standard cow juice. I opened it, gave it a sniff and a bit of a shake and casually mentioned to my well-insured other half that it smelled a bit like arse. But, I said, I’ll give it a go.

Turns out it also tasted a bit like arse. Or maybe I was just put off by the initial smell and weird, watered-down look it had straight from the carton. Perhaps, much like Mr P and TBOF, I formed an opinion before I even tried it.

Should I have gone to the media? “I bought rice milk expecting it to be nasty, and it was. Even though the supermarket gave me exactly what I paid for, they’ve ripped me off. Whine, whine, whine, please write a story about what a victim/dickhead I am.”

I’m pretty sure that the response would have been something along the lines of “sod off”. And rightly so.

Southland Times opinion writer, the lovely young Michael Fallow wrote a nice wee story to tell Mr P and TBOF why they should have given the city a go, and even the Invercargill City Council got involved, offering up a list of attractions and the few businesses they always promote (read the link if you want their names, they get enough publicity). But there’s also Invercargill Brewery, some great independent cafes and restaurants, a pretty bloody good locally owned department store in H & J Smiths and a whole bunch of smaller, boutique businesses that will entice you to break out your credit card.

We might not have the sexually-transmitted infection claim-to-fame that Hamilton does (although, it would seem the online reputation of being the chlamydia capital New Zealand isn’t fully deserved, so that attraction needs to be crossed off the list), but for those feeling like a spot of exercise that doesn’t involve getting fungus on your dangly bits, we do have some nice parks, walking tracks, and beaches. And the stumpery at Queens Park is worth a look.

But it would seem that those poor displaced Hamiltonians were far too traumatised by actually having to land in Invercargill to look at any of that. They fled to Queenstown and stayed there instead.

And now, according to the Herald, Air NZ has refunded their money and apologised for the Mystery Break not meeting their expectations. Air NZ had nothing to apologise for. Mr P and TBOF had nothing to claim a refund for.

But still they whinge: the NZ Herald story says “(the artist formerly known as TBOF) says she has no intention to ever return to Invercargill ever again.”

She goes on to say “We’re never going back there, especially with the amount of hate locals have been giving us online – apparently we’re just a pack of Jaffas.”

Allow me to apologise to TBOF: I’m sorry you’re a whinging, entitled brat. Get over yourself.

Oh, and thank you for saying you’ll never venture back to our fair city. I’m sure we’re all relieved. Especially the cockroaches.

Fuck you very much, enjoy your day. But really NZ media: WTF were you guys thinking? This isn’t a story, it’s just some tosser having a fucking whinge.

PS: I have no problem with Jafas (yes Herald, since it’s an acronym for Just Another Fucking Aucklander, it has just one F). And I think you’ll find many of us Southlanders probably use the term in a friendly way, the same as we do with Pom, Yank or Ocker.

Besides, I actually really like Auckland.