A change of clowns

New Zealand’s 3-ring circus government had a major change today when the leader of the hard-rightwing Act Party, David Seymour, became Deputy Prime Minister (aka “DPM”), replacing Winston Peters, leader of the rightwing populist New Zealand First Party (Peters will remain Foreign Minister). On the surface, its not a big deal at all, but it may prove to be one for entirely partisan political reasons.

The job-share Deputy Prime Minister position (a description of the job that both Seymour and Peters loathe, which is ironic since they both say disparaging things about opponents that are far, far worse) was part of the two parties’ coalition agreement with the right-of-centre National Party, headed by current Prime Minister Chris Luxon. The role of Deputy Prime Minster exists so that someone is “in charge” when the Prime Minister is out of the country, at which time the DPM becomes acting prime minister. Because there were times over the past 18 months when both Luxon and Peters were out of the country, Seymour has been the acting PM a couple before. And that’s where the unimportance ends.

By taking the first half of the job-share role, Winston is free to start campaining for next year’s General Election. He has never won re-election after serving in Government, but he clearly hopes that this will give him the distance to run against the very governmnt he was part of. Insteresting ploy from the wily Winston, but it’s by no means certain it’ll work. The election of change” was 2023, and 2026 will be largely a reaction to the past three years of this Government.

I wrote about this circus arrangement back in 2023, and in that post I quoted TVNZ journalist John Campbell making the same point about Winston’s motivation for being DPM first. Today, 1News published a new piece about his interviews with Winston and Peters about the job-share change, and Winston confirmed the reason he went first. So… not so secret then. Clearly.

Seymour, on the other hand, apparently wanted to be the sole DPM because his party won more seats in Parliament than Winston’s did. Those of us who oppose this rightwing government have dreaded this job-share change because, of the two, Seymour is way more reprehensible. His “Treaty Priniciples Bill” was the most divisive—and racist—bill in decades, or even longer. It resulted in the largest-ever protest march on Parliament and an astounding 300,000 submissions to Parliament the VAST majority of which opposed the bill. The parliamentary select committee recommended that the bill be rejected, and Parliament did: It only got 11 votes, all from the Act Party’s own MPs—ALL other parties voted against it and former politicians from all over the spectrum denounced the bill.

Among other neoliberal things, Seymour is a proponent of “charter schools”, as he was in the past, and many of his opponents, including me, see it as his way of privatising education by stealth. He and his party are not friends of working people, though in a sort of backhanded compliment, they’ve also never pretended to be. Their policies promote the sort of far-right, neoliberal agenda that could never get through democratically (kind of like the current occupant of the USA’s White House’s “Project 2025” fascist agenda).

Seymour is openly hostile to the news media—often aggressively so (though one suspects it may be mainly performative…) but always in a dickheadish way. John Campbell talks about that, too. Seymour has ties to a far-right a foreign neoliberal network that worked behind the scenes to affect public policy in multiple countries. He dismisses concerns about his past, and denies any connection, even though his policy objectives align with the neoliberals’ priorities. The extent of his involvement in the far-right group and its influence on him, AND his prickly relationship with journalists, can be seen in an RNZ documentary in its “Mata Reports” series, titled “ACT: The Foreign Influences That Have Shaped David Seymour's Political Agenda” presented by veteran journalist Mihingarangi Forbes.

Seymour has a habit of making outrageous and confrontational statements that openly and strongly contradict official government policy, often to claim “credit” for his party. While some of that is purely performative, mainly for the benefit of the minority of New Zealanders who agree with him, he’s always nevertheless consistently promoting an unpopular hard-right political agenda, and he does so with a weird blend of attempted humour and aggressive bullying. It’s never pleasant to watch him perform for the cameras—but, to be clear, he really is very, very good at performing and has a productive social media team, which is why the very journalists he attacks always cover him and his antics.

The bottom line in all this is that for the majority of New Zealanders, Winston was (and is) bad, but Seymour is far worse. To be abundantly clear, I have never voted for Winston or Seymour’s parties, and I can’t conceive of any scenario whatsoever in which I would consider it for even a nanosecond. This is a truly “duh!” statement: As I’ve made abundantly clear over the past 18+ years of this blog, I am absolutely not a “conservative”, much less a hard-rightwinger. It is, in fact, my centre-left politics and values that make me reject both Winston and Seymour. It’s not personal, it’s political.

As difficult as the past 18 months have often been, the coming 18 months may be even worse. If they are, it’ll help ensure this current government is turfed out at the next election. That gives Seymour an incentive to behave himself in his job-share role. Can he do it? Dunno. But I doubt it.

Food storage teaches me

Life habits are a lot like Rome: They’re not built in a day. They’re also not changed in a day, either. Carrots showed me a way that such things can change.

Changing decades of habits isn’t easy, even when it comes to food. For much of our life together, I did the cooking for Nigel and me, and for our last fifteen years or so I did nearly all of it. That meant I built habits to make that easier, and to ensure we didn’t run out of things.

Running out of things—hooboy! Nigel’s breakfasts nearly ruined us. He might get grumpy with me if we ran out of margarine to put on his morning toast (he could use butter…), but if we ran out of peanut butter, I might need to plan on moving out. I’m exaggerating, obviously, but for many, many years he had the same breakfast nearly every morning on work days (and sometimes on weekends): Toast with margarine, peanut butter, and strawberry jam. Sometimes I made it for him, but he often made it for himself—and he let me know his displeasure if we ran out of one of the ingredients.

So, I started having not merely one margarine container in reserve, I often had two. Similarly, I always had at least one unopened peanut butter jar on hand in addition to the open one, and when I noticed the open one was getting low, I’d buy a new jar so that there’d still be one in reserve. I learned and improved—from Nigel’s perspective, anyway. Jam tended to last longer, but we usually had one unopened jar in reserve.

Everything changed when Nigel died—everything except my buying habits. I kept making sure I had two tubs of margarine in the fridge, and at first it was because I was on autopilot, but as post-Covid prices soared, I started buying a new reserve one when they were on special—but that sometimes means I have two in reserve, which even I know is stupid. Peanut butter is different: I only ever have one in reserve, and I’ve even run out a time a two, but that’s also how I ended up with extra peanut butter when Nigel died: I had two in reserve and the opened one. I think that underscores how quickly my life unravelled, and may it even point to why it took me so long to change my ways to meet my new reality.

And that brings me to carrots.

I had a years-long habbit of buying bags of fresh carrots (1.5kg) because, back then, it was cheaper than buying a few at a time, and because we went through them reasonably quickly. I kept buying those bags, and I kept doing that once I was alone. However, the carrots would frequently start to rot or become mummified before I could use them all. This was not good, and I knew it: The media and my local council often tried get us to reduce food waste, but there I was, a poster child for wasting food. This shame could not remain unaddressed.

My first thing attempt at self-improvement was to switch to buying a few carrots at a time, since the unit price (the price per kilogram or gram) was similar to the larger bags. However, I kept running out of carrots, and if I bought more, the old problems returned. There simply had to be another and better way!

So, I did what any self-respecting Digital Immigrant would do: I googled “best way to store carrots”, or similar, and may even have added “NZ”, though I don’t remember for sure. At any rate, I ended up on a New Zealand site, “Love the Food, Hate the Waste”. There, I read that globally, one-third of all food is lost or wasted,” which is pretty abyssmal, and I bet it’s much higher in at least some developed countries. The site adds that food waste “has a profound environmental impact and is the third-largest contributor to global carbon emissions.” Yikes.

Fortunately, their site also had information on how to store carrots (summarised in the graphic below). I took it to heart immediately, and pulled out a small airtight container, and I bought a few fresh carrots to put in it, and they were perfect to the very last one.

Next, I bought a 1.5kg bag of Woolworth’s “The Odd Bunch” carrots, which are called that because they’re considered “imperfect” because they’re too small, too big, too misshapen. I buy a lot of “Odd Bunch” produce primarily because it keeps them out of landfill, but they’re also a bit cheaper: 1.5kg bag of “The Odd Bunch: carrots is currently $3.10 ($2.07/kg) while the “normal” bags of the same size are $4.29 ($2.86 per kg). The middle price would be for loose carrots, which are currently $2.59/kg. So, buying “The Odd Bunch” bag is cheapest, but, more importantly, it may help reduce food waste, too.

I then bought a larger NZ-made plastic container (at left in the photo above), which was able to store a 1.5kg bag of carrots, though I bet sometimes that may be harder than other times (the carrots I buy aren’t uniform in size or shape, after all). However, I could get away with keeping a few carrots stored less ideally for a short time, so Im not worried about this potential problem actually being a problem.

I’ve been using the new system for several weeks now with no complaints—in fact, I no longer have rotting or mummified carrots. That’s good news in itself, but it reminds me, yet again, that there’s always a solution to challenges if I look for them. Sometimes I just need to realise I need to look for a solution. Carrots showed me a way that can change.

AmeriNZ Podcast episode 419 is now available

AmeriNZ Podcast episode 419, “My bumpy ride”, is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast episode, along with any other episode. The site doesn't currently use “https”, so you may need to tell your browser to let you through, anyway.

The five most recent episodes of the podcast are listed on the sidebar on the right side of this blog.

Weekend Diversion: 1985, Part 7

After only one week since the previous post in this series, we have a new post in this series. On May 18, 1985, “Don't You (Forget About Me)” (video up top) by by the Scottish rock band Simple Minds reached Number One on the USA’s Billboard “Hot 100”. Like last week’s song, this one was also on a movie soundtrack, this one for the 1985 movie The Breakfast Club—this time, it's a movie I actually saw and liked. This song was released on February 20, 1985, shortly after the movie opened. The song would be the band’s biggest hit, and their only Number One, in the USA.

I remember both the movie and the song from 1985, though I may have seen the movie on cable. At that same time, I was watching a lot of MTV, and that’s where I saw the music video (which was directed by Daniel Kleinman). I liked both at the time, but the song has been more enduring for me: I’m not sure when I last saw the movie—or even if I ever watched it again—but I’ve heard the song a lot over the past 40 years. That’s not unusual, of course, and pop music usually has been a more enduring part of my life than pop movies have been.

The only Simple Minds album I bought was their 1985 album Once Upon a Time, which featured the single “Alive And Kicking”, which I quite liked. It was their next single after “Don't You (Forget About Me)”. While their first US hit wasn’t on the original Once Upon a Time album, it was included in a deluxe version in 2015. I left that 1985 album behind when I moved to New Zealand, but I actually don’t remember listening to the album all that much as time went on. However, I still sometimes hear “Don't You (Forget About Me)” on the radio.

“Don't You (Forget About Me)” ultimately reached Number 6 in Australia, Number One and Canada (Platinum), Number 3 in New Zealand (4x Platinum), Number 7 in the UK (Silver), and Number One on the USA’s Billboard “Hot 100” and on their “Mainstream Rock” chart, and also reached Number One on the USA’s Cash Box “Top 100 Singles” chart. The song was not certified in the USA.

Complete chart information for the soundtrack album for The Breakfast Club wasn’t included in the Wikipedia article, however, it does mention that it hit Number 17 on the “Billboard 200” chart.

This series will return next week—wait, what? Three weeks in a row?!! Yes. The series continues on May 25 with the next Number One from 1985.

Previously in the “Weekend Diversion – 1985” series:

Weekend Diversion: 1985, Part 1 – February 2, 2025
Weekend Diversion: 1985, Part 2 – February 16, 2025
Weekend Diversion: 1985, Part 3 – March 12, 2025
Weekend Diversion: 1985, Part 4 – March 30, 2025
Weekend Diversion: 1985, Part 5 – April 13, 2025
Weekend Diversion: 1985, Part 6 – May 11, 2025

Weekend Diversion: 1985, Part 6

Another month, and new a new Number One. On May 11, 1985, “Crazy for You” (video up top) by American singer Madonna reached Number One on the USA’s Billboard “Hot 100”. The song was from the soundtrack of the 1985 movie Vision Quest—a movie I never saw and had absolutely no memory of until I read the linked Wikipedia article. The song, which I definitely remember, was released on March 2, 1985. It was written by John Bettis and Jon Lind, and produced by John "Jellybean" Benitez. I was already very familiar with Bettis because he worked with Richard Carpenter on many songs for the Carpenters.

It’s hard to remember forty years later, but at teh time Madonna recorded this song she was better known for uptempo songs and her label was reluctant to release this song as a single. The relented, and the song became a hit.

I liked many of Madonna’s songs in those days—and lots of her songs since—and this song is one I also liked. While I don’t remember the movie tie-in at all, I certainly heard the song on the radio at the time. As the 1980s continued, I heard her on the radio a lot, and I liked a lot of them. And yet, I never bought a Madonna album or ordinary single, though I did buy the 12-inch single of “Like A Prayer”—at least I think I did, because if I really did, I no longer have it. When I moved to New Zealand, Nigel had the CD version of The Immaculate Collection, Madonna’s 1990 greatest hits collection. I still have that CD, but haven’t bought anything in the years since. This is sort of thing is actually quite common for me.

“Crazy for You” reached Number One in Australia and Canada, Number 2 in New Zealand, Number 2 in the UK (Gold), and Number One on the USA’s Billboard “Hot 100”, as well as Number 2 on their “Adult Contemporary”, and reached Number 2 on the Cash Box “Top 100” chart, and Number One on the USA’s Radio & Records “CHR & Pop Charts”. The song was certified Gold in the USA.

The soundtrack album for Vision Quest reached Number 46 in Australia, Number 42 in Canada, in New Zealand (Platinum), and Number 11 on the “Billboard 200” (3x Platinum), as well as Number 30 on the Cash Box “Top 100 Albums”. It was certified Platinum in the USA. The album didn’t chart in New Zealand or the UK.

This series will return next week, on May 18 with the next Number One from 1985. Is that another song I liked?

Previously in the “Weekend Diversion – 1985” series:

Weekend Diversion: 1985, Part 1 – February 2, 2025
Weekend Diversion: 1985, Part 2 – February 16, 2025
Weekend Diversion: 1985, Part 3 – March 12, 2025
Weekend Diversion: 1985, Part 4 – March 30, 2025
Weekend Diversion: 1985, Part 5 – April 13, 2025

More peanut butter trials

There are two ongoing food sagas in my life: The search for decent pizza, and for peanut butter I like (not together…). I still have no real solution to the pizza issue, apart from maybe experimenting making them myself—maybe. It turns out, thought, that peanut butter keeps presenting challenges for me, even if they’re sometimes self-selected. It happens.

This time, my peanut butter search was about trying a different variety of the brand I use, but it was an experiment, nevertheless. Maybe not a wise one?

First, though, a recap. Back in 2018, I talked about my search for a peanut butter, and, at the time sodium content was a major consideration, so I eventually settled on “Pic’s No Salt Added Peanut Butter” (I purchased all brands mentioned in this post myself at normal retail prices; this post is not sponsored). After Nigel died, I decided I liked the brand he liked, “Woolworth’s Select American Style Peanut Butter”, which I also mentioned in that 2018 post. This was not to last.

It turned out that Countdown (now called Woolworths) discontinued the peanut butter Nigel liked, and in 2023 I wrote about searching for a replacement. I briefly tried an American brand I used to eat when I was a kid groing up in the USA, but 30-odd years later, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the weird additives in it. So, I ended up adopting the regular version of Pic’s peanut butter (which has salt added).

A few months later, in April 2024, I tried the large size of the Pic’s peanut butter so it would last longer, but that, too, was problematic. As I said in an Update Post at the very end of last year:

The jar lasted much longer than the ordinary (small) jar I’d been buying, but it lasted a bit too long—months, I think. The problem was that by the end, the peanut butter at the bottom of the jar was too hard to spread, probably because I didn’t properly stir it when I opened it. At any rate, that wasn’t what I wanted, so I’ve gone back to the small jar I’d been using.

And now this saga is up tp date. So: I was in the supermarket recently, and I noticed the squeeze bottle of Pic’s (photo above), and I was intrigued. I thought that maybe I could shake the bottle to re-mix the oil into it, meaning I could keep it at room temperature, which would make it easier to spread. The first time I opened the bottle and removed the seal, I immediately noticed that there was a peanut butter plug at the bottle mouth—because it had separated. So, the first thing I had to do was manually stir the contents, just like always, before squirting some out.

The oil separates at room temperature.

Since then, I’ve tried shaking the bottle and it seems to work as I expected, but it’s a little odd to have squiggles of peanut butter on my bread, Still, I just spread that with a knife and it was like “normal”. So, maybe its a good choice? Yeah, well…

I was hesitant to buy it because the bottle may be recycled (I’m sceptical about that, a subject in itself), but the red top to the bottle absolutely is not. The jar I normally buy is clear glass (and desirable for recycling), and the lid is metal (which may not be recycled—part of that subject in itself again…). However, the jars are also useful for reuse, and I quite like the black star on the red lid), so I’ve re-purposed several into small storage jars, as I have with so many others (hmmm, that, too, is a subject in itself—why am I making more work for myself?!).

This experiment had mixed result. The bottle seems to work as expected, and since I spread the peanut butter, anyway, the squiggle business isn’t bad. Actually, the fact it’s easy to spread is a very good thing. It’s the waste—specifically the fact the top isn’t recyclable—that bothers me.

I guess it’ll come down to whether, all things considered, I think it’s good value for money. At the moment, the ordinary price per 100g is the same for both options, and the squeezy bottle holds a bit more. However, I only buy peanut butter when it’s on special because Pic’s is probably a “premium” brand, and so, more expensive per 100g than mass-produced brands. I don’t know if the squeezy bottle will be on special as the jar version often is.

I have a few more servings to go before I get through the bottle, so my final decision is some while away yet, but if I was to bet, it would be that I’ll go back the glass jar. I guess I’ll have ot make more work for myself: Another Update post.

Trendsetting declarations?

This is becoming a trend: Voters in countries in the Commonwealth are rejecting the USA’s titular president and his hard-right authoritarian politics. Will this spread? We can certainly hope so.

This past Saturday, Australians went to the polls in parliamentary elections, and the delivered a resounding defeat to the countries MAGA-aligned conservatives. Just as Canada recently did, the Australian conservative leader also lost his own seat in Parliament. Well done, Australia, well done.

Australia’s re-elected government is under the Australian Labor Party (ALP) headed by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (his surname is pronounced “all-ban-EE-zee”). The leader of The Coalition was Peter Dutton who tried to use the US Republicans' culture war antics, along with a bizarre focus on expanding nuclear energy (critics suggested it was to promote uranium mining in Australia, and also to distract from conservatives’ fixation on coal, which is also mined in Australia).

The Albanese government wasn’t overwhelmingly popular late last year, then in January everything changed as the US regime bedded in. In the last couple weeks before the election, it looked like the ALP would be re-elected, but the polls were quite close, and it looked like maybe the best Albanese could hope for was to form a minority government (this happens when no party has an absolute majority in Parliament and is able to form government with the support of minor parties). In the end, the ALP increased its majority.

The conservative Liberal Party (which is in coalition with the largely rural National Party, and together they’re usually called “The Coalition”) was the target because of their rhetoric aping the US regime’s leader, leading to the ALP branding him “DOGE-y Dutton”. He wasn’t the only MAGA-aligned Australian, of course. The AP News article linked to above noted:

Trumpet of Patriots, a minor party inspired by Trump policies with an advertising budget funded by mining magnate Clive Palmer that eclipsed the major parties, attracted only 2% of the vote.

Once again, mining rears its head (many of Australia’s ultra rich are connected to mining). At any rate, it’s always pleasing to see oligarchs waste some of their obscene wealth in a failed campaign to buy an election, much as Elon failed to buy a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat. Seeing the oligarchs fail utterly is always satisfying to the those of us who love and embrace democracy.1

New Zealand’s next general election is next year, and we have two very different minor parties aligned with the US Republican regime: One is led by an octogenarian who apes the Republican leader’s culture war bullshit. His party is introducing a bill to declare there are only two genders, after campaigning in the election to require restaurants, bars, etc., to verify that the gender of patrons using matched the toilets the toilets they planned to use. How, precisely, business were to do that was never stated, leading to mockery about them requiring genital inspections.

The other hard-rightwing minor party is led by a much younger man who wants to implement the same far-right fascistic agenda being advocated by those working behind the scenes of the USA’s current regime, in part because that particular minor party leader was part of an international organisation promoting neoliberal (sometimes call neoconservative) policies, such as, promoting the interests of corporations and the ultra rich, against poor and working people, and in favour of using the power of the state to control behaviour they don’t approve of (though in this case, not religiously based). They also want to privatise pretty much all government functions, in much the same way the USA’s “Doge” is trying to give core US government functions to corporations. That guy is about to become Deputy Prime Minister under the coalition agreement the three parties entered into to form government,

It’s around a year and a half-ish until New Zealand's next General Election, and there’s no way to know what shape politics here or in the US will be in. Will New Zealand join its fellow Commonwealth nations and reject the divisive and negative politics of the USA? No idea at this point, but you can be sure I’ll be talking about it—next year. Right now, I am proud to celebrate with both Australia and Canada.

Behind my ‘Weekend Diversion’ posts

It’s Sunday, and that often means a “Weekend Diversion” post about pop music, though the next one isn’t until next week. However, one of the important resources for those posts had a significant anniversary this week, and that’s definitely worth noting.

This past Friday, May 2, the official New Zealand music chart turned 50. The very first song to be listed at Number One was “Yesterday was Just the Beginning of My Life” by Mark Williams (it’s available to watch on NZ On Screen, however, that may not be viewable in all countries, at least not without using a VPN). I never heard the song until I came to New Zealand, and even then it was kind of by accident: 20 years after it went to Number One, it wasn’t exactly cool anymore. It didn’t chart in any other country.

Because the official chart is so (relatively) young, it charts, so to speak, a LOT of New Zealand pop culture history as it happened. For example, it documents the first single entirely in Te reo Māori, “Poi E”, which I talked about way back in 2010. The Aotearoa Music Charts site has published a a “50 Iconic Chart Moments” infographic, which provides insight into part of NZ’s pop culture history over the past 50 years—even without being eve vaguely familiar with the songs.

The official NZ music chart provides the local context for my “Weekend Diversion” music posts, and that’s incredibly valuable to me—and interesting, too. Like all bloggers, I have many, many resources to refer to when writing my posts, but this one has been very important. And acknowledging its 50th birthday on the day of the week on which I often celebrate pop music seems to me to be utterly appropriate. Happy Birthday, NZ Music Chart! And happy NZ Music Month, too.

Another month and beginning

So, it’s a new month, huh? It is, and it’s a good opportunity to reset. In fact, that’s somthing I’ve always done, but I haven’t really talked about it. Until now.

A lot of people look at New Year’s Day as a time to reset, but the focus on one day means that if goals aren’t met or plans don’t happen it’s easy to give up or forget about whatever changes we wanted to make. I’ve talked about how I looked at New Year as a good opportunity for a reset, and I’ve also talked about how I looked at my birthday as another opportunity—sort of my personal New Year. However, there’s far more to it: I’ve always looked at the first of every month as another chance for a reset.

This requires some more explanation: I see New Year (or my birthday…) as a chance for an annual reset, a chance to set goals and make plans for the year. The reset on the first of every other month is actually a chance to refine rather than starting again. On the first of the month, I look at my annual goals/plans and adjust as needed to better accomplish what I want to do—or not. I’m not (obviously?) obsessed with progressing every goal or achieving every plan; I just want to keep moving forward, as I perceive that.

This brings me to this First of May 2025: What’s the reset here? Well, everything, to be honest. Or, nothing. It’s complicated.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been looking at my drafts folder and also things I posted to my personal Facebook that I never shared here. Next, I also looked at my list of blog topics for the year. Together, these provide a whole bunch of things to talk about, some of which I already have scheduled, or else things I want to talk about, including something from last year. On top of that is completely new stuff that I’d like to talk about here, or things I know will probably come up (like New Zealand’s local government elections later this year).

The thing is, while the first of the month gives me an opportunity to reset and start again, there are no guarantees any of the things I mentioned will actually get published, except for most of the posts I’ve got on my 2025 schedule—probably, because none of those posts are actually written yet.

Even so, a new month means new opportunities, both to do new things and to do old things better. I have no idea how this story will turn out, of course, but worst case scenario, June 1 is yet another opportunity. Onward!