Oh my dear sweet lord. There is a Tim Gunn bobblehead. 'Make it work!'

Lawrence made me a 'top 40 of the 90s' CD compilation. This idea grew from an incensed conversation he had with a friend after C4 did a 'top 40 of the 90s' countdown show (which was, apparently, quite crap). I have been listening to these CDs over the past few days, and have discovered a few things:

 

a) the 90s ruled

b) I apparently didn't hear half of the great music being released during that decade

c) my 90s top 40 would be almost completely different from Lawrence's, and yet it would still kick ass

 

So yay!

So the distribution workers get a national collective agreement in all but name, and pay parity between the three worksites. It was nice of the NDU to let Progressive spin this as though they won because there is no national collective agreement, when in real terms the bullying Progressive lost their battle to divide and conquer.

 

This industrial dispute has given me a tiny smidgen of hope that old-school union movements didn't completely die in the 1990s. For some time I've been worried that I'm some kind of nostalgic throwback, mentally chanting my 'power to the people' stuff while everyone else joined a libertarian party or something. I suppose it helped that Progressive is Australian-owned - there's nothing like a bit of 'we are the underdog!' nationalism to bring a community together. But I'm pleased that our country, recently labelled as one of the most business-friendly in the world by the OECD, still has some of that egalitarian worker-supporting spirit to share around. I think the workers support campaign raised over $200,000 in four weeks, in a country of four million people. That's pretty cool.

Today is the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. I learned this morning that it killed more New Zealanders than Gallipoli did - one in every seven men. The other day my mother told me a story I'd never heard about my great-grandfather George, who was at Gallipoli. He was a medic, and one of his jobs was to collect the ID tags from the corpses lying around. When he came home to Invercargill, a pretty small town, he saw a regular classified advertisement in the newspaper from some local parents, asking returned soldiers for any information about their son, who was missing. George remembered that the son they were looking for was (of course) one of the corpses from which he had collected ID tags.

 

That's sad and horrible, but the kicker to the story is that George could never screw up the courage to tell those parents that their son was dead. He kept thinking he should get around to it, and he never did, and finally one day they stopped advertising in the paper, so they probably never found out for sure. And my great-grandfather felt guilty about his inaction for years and years, until he died in 1995 at the age of 101.

There are some cool photos of of the picket lines and empty supermarket shelves at aucklandsburning. And the dispute already has its own Wikipedia entry.

I don't care what you all think: Rick Springfield's 'Jessie's Girl' is a bitchin' song.

Russell Brown linked to this - the Daily Show's first segment after the September 11 attacks. It's funny, because I don't have a particularly good memory for things, particularly during stressful periods, but I remember this Stewart monologue vividly. Some of the stuff about liberty seems sort of hollow and ironic now - and perhaps it should have then, too. But I remember being comforted by it. In fact, I know Brent and I were waiting for the Daily Show to come on to give us some perspective or something: it was a very confusing and scary time to live in the US (although perhaps not as confusing and scary as it is now!).

 

I feel like this monologue lifted Stewart from a satirist to... I don't know what. Someone great. I do truly admire and like him, which is a bizarre thing to say about a TV host on a news parody show on Comedy Central. Here's to you, Jon.

Aha - it all becomes clear. Woolworths Australia, who own Progressive, have a management exchange programme with Wal-Mart. That damn company really *is* the root of all evil!

Here's to the locked out members of the NDU. Two weeks and counting without any pay. Progressive Enterprises: you are a bunch of aggressive wannabe 19th-century industrialist arseholes and I hope that billion dollar profit chokes you. Solidarity! I am donating my last ten dollars this pay period to the cause.

 

(Selfishly, I really hope Progressive sees the light soon and gives their workers a fair deal, because they're the only supermarket chain that does delivery. Am I going to have to boycott them and go back to getting my own groceries every week? The horror!)

I can't get over this. Last night, I watched an episode of a television series I love. In one key scene, although it was never spelled out explicitly, two of the characters were clearly high on ecstasy. OK, sure, you say, no big deal, it's been done before... but on *Coronation Street*? That near-fifty-year bastion of TV1? The most popular show with retired folk apart from the nightly news?

 

Look, the last time anyone took E on Coronation Street, it was Tracy Barlow in 1994, and she had renal failure and had to have a kidney transplanted from her very young stepdad (who later died tragically as the result of a kidney-affecting racist beating, I believe). Message: E is a bad, scary drug destroying our yoof!

 

Now the message appears to be 'we are very happy for you to get loved-up on telly, but don't confess to your boyfriend that you kissed his boss while high, because it's never as good an idea as it seems, even if you think it's all going to work out well because your judgement is impaired by MDMA'.

 

Hee.