Well, the outcome of the election obviously wasn’t what I was hoping for, but at least I made some money from it.

On iPredict.co.nz, I made money from the following positions:

• Short sold the Maori party vote (at 4%)
• Short sold National gaining an outright majority
• Short sold Winston Peters returning to parliament
• Bought National Prime Minister

I’m a swing voter.  I’ve voted Labour in the past, but there are a few things they’ve done that leave me dissatisfied.  National has promised not to do anything really bad during it’s first term in office, so I am truly undecided about which party I’d like leading the government.

But today, I came across this quote from John Key in NBR which really annoys me:

“I’ve had nine years of being told what lightbulb I can screw into the house, what shower I can take, what food I can eat, what things I can do, what thoughts I am allowed to have.“

None of this is true.  Not one bit.

• Lightbulbs.  There is no law about what lightbulbs John Key could use for the past nine years.  There have always been consumer regulations about energy efficiency for all sorts of things - the stars on fridges for example.  All that’s happened is there is a plan to raise the standard on lightbulbs.
• Showers.  For the past nine years there have been no laws governing what showers John Key can take.  Unless you count that he probably wouldn’t be allowed to walk into a ladies shower block, but I doubt that’s what he means.  I assume he’s referring to the Greens’ plan to have low-flow showerheads installed in newly built houses.  How is this a problem?  The Consumers’ Institute has been recommending people switch to them for years as it saves a lot of money with no noticable impact on shower quality.
• Food.  If anyone has ben telling John Key what food he can eat for the past nine years, it wasn’t Helen Clark.  The government does have food safety regulations, which most people generally consider to be a good thing.  It means for instance that he can’t choose to eat milk powder with melamine or spinach with E. coli.   As far as I know, National has not been arguing that food safety regulations are a bad thing, nor do they have any policies to repeal our food safety laws.
• Things.  Yes, there are certain things that John Key can’t do.  He can’t murder people, steal, beat people up and various other things that are against the law in this country.  The only thing I can think of that he can’t do now that he perhaps could nine years ago is smack his kids.  But National voted for that law also and has no plans to repeal it.  Rather than being fewer things he can do, John Key can now do more things than he could nine years ago.  He can now sell his sexual services, and he can now enter a Civil union with a man.  Or not - it’s an option, not a requirement. 
• Thoughts.  This is just blatent ridiculous scaremongering.

Now, I don’t know whether John Key actually believes this.  If he truly thinks that the Labour government for the past nine years have been telling him what lightbulbs to use, shower pressure to have, what to eat, do and think then he doesn’t have a very firm grasp on reality.  If on the other hand he doesn’t really believe this then he is just lying in order to gain votes by stoking fear.  Playing on and inflating people’s fears is the most vile form of dishonesty.    Either way, I don’t want to vote for him.

The Large Hadron Collider might be out of action for up to two months after a cooling failure caused a quench. Scientists are still fine tuning and testing everything before the collision experiments were due to start next month. It was out of action for a week already when a transformer failed, but the damage from a magnet quench is potentially more serious and takes longer to fix.
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I’m sure most of you are less sad than me and have seen the Apollo 13 movie. And if not, then maybe you’re enough of a science geek to know the details anyway. I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t really need to explain what Apollo 13 is and what happened to it, do I? I just need to explain why I’m writing about its towing bill.
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Some people make friends easily and have lots and lots of friends. They could probably spend every day with a different friend and not have to start recycling people for months. I’m not one of those people.
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Yes, I know it has been a long long time since I posted. I’m a bad bad blogger.

I was kicked out of my apartment. My landlords sold at auction, losing very close to $100,000 in the process. I’ve currently packed up all my stuff and stashed it at my brother’s place, and I’ve moved back in with my family on Waiheke to save some money.

Since I hate moving so much, I’d really like to buy a place this time. Also, I’ve had such good luck with landlords in the past that I can’t realistically expect it to continue. Even though I earn (I think) a fairly decent salary, I’m almost completely priced out of the housing market in Auckland. There are a few places I can afford but I really don’t want to live in them (Manurewa, Clendon) or that are just too far away to be feasible (Papakura, Pukekohe).

I’ve been looking at units in the Mt Wellington/Panmure/Ellerslie area (I can’t afford an actual house in this area), but most of them are not really places I’d want to live. For instance, I’d quite like to have a deck/garden where I can have a BBQ, but many of these places have just a shared lawn that doubles as extra carparking for everyone. I’m also not a big fan of having a carport miles away from the unit, or a situation where everyone coming and going from the other units has to drive or walk past mine to get to theirs.

My second choice is to look for a place out west - Massey, Royal Heights, West Harbour. At the very bottom of the market there are some actual houses that I could possibly just afford. They aren’t flash - basically kitset type houses with flimsy fibro-cement cladding, but they are sufficiently old that they are unlikely to leak. They’re usually three bedroom and most places have a garage and at least room for a deck or patio. I’ll probably end up having to rent out one or two rooms for a while to try and get the mortgage paid off.

I’m still busy saving up a deposit so I won’t really be able to buy anything until the end of the year, but I’m starting to tentatively look for places now.

I regularly get emails sent around with sexist jokes like those in Part 1 & Part 2. I’m pretty sure a few years ago we used to have a whole lot of them hung on the walls of our postgrad labs. I know I found them funny then, but I don’t anymore.

I know they’re just jokes, but I think that our tacit acceptance of the stereotypes underlying the jokes is no laughing matter.
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Q. Why did the black man cross the road?
A. Who cares? What the hell was he doing out of the cotton fields?

Q. What do get when you cross a mexican and a chinese?
A. A car thief who can’t drive.

Q. What’s the difference between good black kids and bad black kids?
A. Good black kids are in medium security prisons.
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Equal opportunities:

Q. Why did the woman cross the road?
A. Who cares? What the hell was she doing out of the kitchen?

Q. How many men does it take to open a beer?
A. None. It should be opened when she brings it.

Q. Why do women have smaller feet than men?
A. It’s one of those “evolutionary things” that allows them to stand closer to the kitchen sink.
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Every now and then, I get emails like this in my inbox:

Q. Why did the man cross the road?
A. He heard the chicken was a slut.

Q. When would you want a man’s company?
A. When he owns it.

Q. Why are blonde jokes so short?
A. So men can remember them.
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