Category Archives: Observatory

Every day is Big Wednesday

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So, the jackpot for the Big Wednesday lottery is up to $35 million tonight. Whatever that means.

I’ve never bought a Big Wednesday ticket, but (googlegooglegoogle) it costs $5 minimum, and one of the things you have to decide is a heads or tails option for a cyber coin toss.

And then if you win (because you are special and deserve to win), then you get a car and a boat and a beach house and a whole buttload of cash ‘n’ shit. Because you’re special. You deserve to to win. You’ve worked hard.

But the chances of winning Big Wednesday are really really really slim.

From NewstalkZB:

Victoria University anthropologist Peter Howland says people are more likely to die in an plane crash than win Big Wednesday tonight. He says the odds of hitting the jackpot tonight are a dismal one in 38 million, making it a near certainty that if you buy a ticket, you will lose.

“Those odds are so astronomical they’re outside of everybody’s everyday experience … outside of everybody’s ability to comprehend.”

So why do people buy tickets? Well, it helps that there’s a big ad campaign attached to Big Wednesday, as well as extensive media coverage of the big jackpots.

And that’s my general objection to Big Wednesday. It’s not the gambling aspect (there are much worse forms of gambling) or the dumbness of buying a ticket because the chances of winning are so incredibly low. It’s the dumbness of getting sucked in to all the hype surrounding it.

I’m tired of seeing my friends – smart, cool people – standing in line to buy Big Wednesday tickets. It implies that their excellent lives are somehow lacking something. That all the cool things in their lives – their families, the things they create – somehow lack something that only $35 million can replace. $35,000 isn’t enough. Nor is $350,000. No, only $35 million can fill that empty empty hole.

Yeah, you’ve worked hard. You’ve made sacrifices, like not going out tonight because you have kids now and you need to spend time with them while they’re young (How many people do that, eh?) And while you’ve never specifically wanted a boat, if you won Big Wednesday and they gave you a boat, well, you wouldn’t say no to that. You invite your friends over and go for a cruise on the harbour and have a barbecue on the boat and drink pinot gris and Monteiths Radler and other stuff that people do on boats. I mean, it wouldn’t be like that “I’m on a Boat” video (that’s just silly) but it would be quite nice. Yeah.

And surely – because the universe is just and fair and, well, you are are special – surely you’re going to win Big Wednesday and not have one of the five million tickets that won’t win.

Well, if I were you, I’d take that $5 and go down to your local video shop and rent the 1978 coming-of-age flick “Big Wednesday“. Set in the 1960s and ’70s, it’s about three surfer friends (Jan-Michael Vincent! William Katt! Gary Busey!) who go through the turmoil of the late ’60s, Vietnam, love, war, heartbreak and pain.

It’s about how sometimes life is kind of lousy, and how you don’t always get everything you want. But when you look at your life in any closeness, you realise that you actually already have everything you could possibly want.

Notes on Zombies

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Hallowe’en; I was having dinner with my brother in a Malaysian restaurant on Cuba Street. As the evening went on, various people dressed in Halloween costumes walked along Cuba Street. But then I realised something: virtually all of them were dressed as zombies.

Some of the zombies banged on the front window of the restaurant, attempting to frighten the diners, but when you’ve already seen a dozen zombies walk past, the sight of another one isn’t going to distract you from your beef rendang.

I started wondering why being a zombie was such a popular choice of Halloween costume. Then I realised: it’s a really easy costume to pull together. If you’re going for the classic Dawn of the Dead zombie, you’re essentially just wearing street clothes with some ghoulish make-up. So you can still be quite a styley hipster or sexy mama while dressing in a Halloween theme.

But as I sat there nibbling at some roti, I got a creepy feeling. The mass of zombies started to take on a weird conformist tone. Like, everyone was out there dressed as a zombie because they wanted to fit in and not deviate from the norm. Muuuust…. confooooorm!

This probably fits in with some sort of cinematic subtext, but in real life it’s all far more creepy than a bit of fake blood ever could be.

Put down the semi-colon and let the participle dangle

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When I started my old job working in the production of closed captions for the telly, I was fairly confident of my knowledge of the English language. I knew the difference between it’s and its, who’s and whose, and other sorts of things that Lynn Truss wailed about in “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”.

And I knew that my job would involve getting all my work edited and corrected, and that I’d receive a list of all the mistakes I’d made with explanations of what I did wrong. I figured I’d maybe make one or two mistakes per episode, and that would be it.

But then I got back the edit notes to the very first episode of Shortie I’d captioned and… it was three pages long. I felt dumb and illiterate. I was sure someone would soon drag me into their office and tell me it had been a terrible mistake and it was back to the dole for me.

However, that didn’t happen. Instead I got better and better. I learned about comma splices and attributive hyphens and the difference between “my pimp Carlos” and “my pimp, Carlos”. But I still got things wrong; I still made mistakes.

What I came to realise is that English is hard. It’s a bastard mongrel of a language. It has all these bits and pieces from all over the place, so while there are lots of rules that children quickly pick up really quickly, there are all these annoying exceptions that you have to memorise – like that the plural of child is children, not childs.

But then there’s the curious thing about English – you can mess with it and it still makes sense. Having excellent grammar and spelling is just a bit of oil to lubricate the works and make the message flow out clearly. But if you don’t oil it, the message is sill there and it still makes sense… eventually.

As much fun as it is to laugh at the poorly constructed ‘about me’ statements on NZDating.com, if I read that HuGGGy1 says he “enjoy sports like dinner concerts im reliable watching videos”, it might take me a while to work out what he’s trying (oh, he’s trying) to say, but eventually I can get the message.

To be really good at English, you have to be a total nerd. You have to practise, practise and practise and train your brain to do things in a certain way. You know how really good musicians have got that way because they’ve spent hours and hours practising? It’s the same thing with English.

And I’ve come out the other side of it realising that it’s more fun being the guy in a punk band who can’t really play his guitar but is having heaps of fun bashing out some tunes with his friends, rather than the lone guitarist spending hours in his room practising a lightning-fast guitar solo but missing out on life.

After I left captioning and returned to a world where I wasn’t surrounded by professional word nerds, I had to tame myself. I was back in a reality where people don’t always like having their spelling or grammar corrected. I’m sure they fear it makes them seem stupid or illiterate, so I want to say, “No! It’s not you! We’re all like this! Perfect English is really hard!”

Free your semi-colon and your arse will follow.

OMG, it’s a massive bag!

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People get a bit excited and/or freaked out when they see someone walking around with a large bag from a shop.

A few months ago I bought a couple of new duvets. They were pretty bulky and the lady at Farmers put them in one big bag each. I got the bus home and it took a bit of manoeuvring to get me and my duvets on to the bus. One man commented, “Been on a bit of a shopping spree, have ya?” which I thought was a bit weird because, uh, I only bought two duvets. Then, later on, a lady spied my bags and said, “Oh, been shopping! Good on you!”

I’m pretty sure it was obvious that my bags contained duvets or some sort of large pillowy objects. I don’t get how that translates into me having been on a massive shopping spree.

OMG, a giant bag!Then on Monday I bought four magazine storage boxes from Whitcoulls and the guy put them into one massive bag. And throughout the day I kept getting comments from people, like “You’ve been shopping!” Yes, indeed I did go to a shop and buy some things.

The funny thing was that the four boxes were worth a mere $20 in total. If I’d bought a book and a DVD from Whitcoulls it would have been worth more, but they would have all gone into a little bag that wouldn’t even have been noticed let alone commented on.

Or I could have bought some extravagant piece of jewellery and stashed it away in my handbag and then no one could have seen the fruit of my shopstravaganza.

What is it about large bags that get people so excited? Well, it seems that the symbol of a woman with large shopping bags has come to represent a shopping spree. Check out the shopping-themed photos this photo agency has.

So it’s funny to think that while I was struggling to get the giant plastic bag filled with two-for-$10 magazine boxes on to the Link bus, my fellow passengers were probably thinking I’d been on a mad shopping spree.

Nostalgia for the future

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I’m a fan of the future. No, not the one beyond the present. I mean the future as seen from the 1950s – 1980s. When the year 2000 was going to be all flying cars and food pills. Whatever happened to that future?

One of my favourite relics of The Future is The Usborne Book of the Future, published in 1979. I had it as a child and I was excited to discover that it had been scanned and put online.

When I was little, I enjoyed reading of the authors’ vision of the future. Was it to be a brown, smoggy dying world, or would we get our act together and live in a green, thriving utopia with robots to clean the toilet?

But the one thing that really confused me was an illustration of a hologram conference call – where some businesspeople see their boss across the table, only he’s a hologram.

It wasn’t the technology that confused me. It was the fact that is was daylight for the staff and night-time for the boss. I didn’t understand how the two states could exist simultaneously. My mum tried explaining about the shape of the earth and time zones, but it did not compute.

Now, maybe the idea of cyborgs with ESP or colonising Venus is still pretty far-fetched, but the Computers in the Home section didn’t do too badly with his predictions – A giant flat-screen TV! A home video camera! Ordering goods off a computer! A video disk player! Electronic mail! A robot butler!

All of those innovations are now part of my everyday life (Except the robot butler – I threw my RoboButler2000 off a cliff after he gained sentience and started pilfering my Jack Daniel’s. What a hassle that was.) Though, unlike the future suburbanites in the book, I don’t lounge about in a jumpsuit.

But is is worth considering that the idea of email as we know it was too far out to be considered – email back then involved writing out a letter by hand, scanning it, sending it, and then printing out at the other end. OMG -fax!

And unlike the 1950s’ sexist vision of The Future, were women did housework in their space homes, bringing their husband his space pipe and space slippers, this 1979 vision of The Future appears to have gone one step future and has no women in it at all. Or – and I think this theory has weight – perhaps by the year 2000 the human race has evolved into one sex – everyone is totally gay for everyone else! (This doesn’t explain the abundance of jumpsuits, though.)

But I’m not going to be nostalgic for the future too much. I’ll just take comfort that while it’s the cybertronic year 2008, even though the lush, green solar-powered utopian future hasn’t happened, at least the dirty brown nightmare future hasn’t happened either.

Perhaps it’s most revealing that both visions of the future include brutalist architecture.

Overheard

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I have this notebook that I always keep in my bag and I write stuff in it. It’s a black Moleskine, so it kind of looks like a sekrit diary, but it’s more likely that I’ll write down bus times (like, I can never remember if the 006 leaves hourly on the hour or the half-hour) than any personal revelations (that’s what my actual diary is for, of course).

I got to the end of the notebook I’ve been using for the last couple of years and so I went through and copied all the more interesting bits from it. I suppose my original idea was that I’d be doing something with the the stuff I write down not long after I write it down, but, uh, I can be lazy.

Anyway, here’s the first selection from my notebook. It’s other people’s words – various snippets (or sometimes chunks) of conversation I’ve overheard over the last two years.

The difference between New Zealand and somewhere else

Totally different lifestyle to New Zealand – different culture, different people, different religion and that kinda shit.

A teenage girl on Hobson Street

My name’s Devious!

The narrating guy at Whitcoulls.

Two pens. [Scans barcodes on pens] Right, those two pens – $11.98. From $20, that’s $8 change. $20. Just double-checking your change. That’s five, two and one is 20.

The express lane at a Napier supermarket.

Checkout Girl: Hello, sir. Did you have a fun day at work today?
Man 1: Huh, that’s an understatement.
Checkout Girl: Um, well, what would be a correct statement?
Man 1: It would be correct to state that today was not fun.
Checkout Girl: Oh! That’s not good to hear. Well, I hope the rest of your day is fun. Goodnight! What about you, sir. Did you have a fun day at work?
Man 2: No.
Checkout Girl: Oh, that’s not good to hear. Why is that?
Man 2: I’d rather be out fishing.
Checkout Girl: Well, I think you should go out and get a job that is fun. Work is supposed to be fun. What good is it having a job if it’s not fun?
Man 2: I’m quite happy with my job, thanks.
Checkout Girl: Oh, well, goodnight. I think I scared him!

A university lecturer

People who disagree with you are not always stupid or evil.

A guy on the bus

I had the grossest dream last night. I had an eyeball here and I could see out of it. I never have cool dreams.

A disgruntled guy in a cafe

Wow, they really know how to make a lukewarm hot chocolate.

A guy in a stripy shirt on Hobson Street, to another

You know, if I went to Vegas, I’d probably budget 100 bucks US a night – minimum.

The mother and the small boy

Son: That car’s been through the mud!
Mum: Which car?
Son: [Pointing] That one.
Mum: The shiny red one?
Son: It’s a Holden.

The mum at the mall

They don’t have it in Keanu’s size and they say they can’t get it ordered in before Christmas.

One tourist to another at the bus stop

Only push card in to the machine. No need to talk to the driver. He will understand.

The youth pastor in the cafe in Nelson

Do you want my honest opinion? I know more about youth than John does. Last week, 43 – 43! – youth turned up to the youth service. Can John come up with a programme that will involve them all? No. It’s too hard. It’s not just about, “Do you know what’s happening?”, it’s about, “Do you support what’s happening.” And I do.

The guy in Brazil cafe talking about the future of dance music

Who the hell pops an E and sits in their lounge listening to dance music?

The two young teenage boys on the bus

Boy 1: We should have gone to Ice.
Boy 2: It’s gay.
Boy 1: Cos we would have met girls there.
Boy 2: Andrew says it’s gay. It’s all 13-year-olds.
Boy 1: That’s cos he’s older than us.
Boy 2: He’s 17. He makes up so many lies.

American mom, explaining pedestrian lights to her kids in Wellington

The little red man is up there, so we can’t cross. It’s far superior to having a white man.

The tyranny of eyeglass fashion

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It’s been about a year and a half since I experienced the special combination of razors and lasers and sedatives and painkillers that made up the Lasik experience, and it’s really good not having to wear glasses any more.

It’s not a hugely life-changing thing, but rather its benefits are made up of lots of little things – not getting fogged up in humid weather, not having raindrops obscure my vision, being able to lie on my side on the couch and watch DVDs, and not being pressured by the ever-changing world of eyeglass fashions.

Cos spectacles seem to have a faster fashion half-life than clothing does. I’m guessing it’s because that while clothing tends to wear out and is cheaper to replace, spectacles last longer and cost more, so get replaced less often.

But even though a pair of glasses bought 10 years ago might work just as well as they did back then, it doesn’t mean they will be any less fashionable than some late ’90s-style clothing ensemble involving cargo pants, a backpack handbag and a pashmina.

I know of a guy who wore the same pair of glasses for about 10 years, all of which were lean student years. Over that period he gradually became known as “the guy with the big glasses”. He finally upgraded to a pair of fashionably slim frames, but I wonder if in 10 years he’ll have become “the guy with the narrow glasses”.

Another example is “Goldstein“, the New York banker star of the ASB Bank ads. He’s been in the ads since 2000, and is usually dressed in a business suit and sports a pair of those big round glasses that were only fashionable in the ’90s.

Here’s his look, as seen in the window of the Mt Eden ASB:

Goldstein's old glasses

He’s probably being kept in the same tired old specs from 2000 because updating his look would cause a ruckus amongst the telly-viewing public and detract from the promotion of ASB’s banking services.

But in the real world, Goldstein would have visited his optometrist at some point in the past seven years, had his vision tested, and decided that as well as getting new lenses, he ought to get some new frames as well – probably something with narrow black rectangular frames.

And when I look at the pair of glasses, which served me from 2000 to 2005, they now look gigantic. When I bought them, I remember how tiny they seemed. They were Gucci and they cost over $300 and I did not want to give them up until I absolutely had to.

But it appears that the interweb may have a solution for people financially caught in an optical timewarp. Websites like 39 Dollar Glasses.com let you buy prescription glasses online for cheap. You need to get your prescription details from your optometrist, but once you have that you can get some relatively cheap cool frames, to finally drag your facial fashion look into the new millennium. The Glassy Eyes blog has lots of good consumer information and reviews for buying prescription glasses online.

Or you can keep wearing your old specs until they come back into fashion again.