James Elliott hands out red cards to runners in the reckons relay as he does his best not to put his hand into a power saw
The sensation you get when you see that Mike Hosking is trending on Twitter is a lot like the feeling some people get when they see a power saw in action, there’s an irrational urge to slide your hand towards the whirring blade. And if you give in to that urge and click on the whirring blade of Hosking punditry the results are entirely predictable - immediate trauma injury (metaphorically speaking), extreme blood loss (metaphorically speaking) and waves of nausea (there’s nothing metaphorical about these waves).
Mike Hosking was trending on Twitter this week for the same reason he was trending on Twitter last week, and all the weeks before that - his reckons were facing a reckoning of their own with reality. In the spirit of the Olympics, medals should go to those who take the time to point out that Mike’s reckons of yesterweek, yesterday and occasionally yesterhour are often red-carded by reality. The reckon that Tokyo wouldn’t see a Covid surge during the Olympics - red-carded by reality. If you want to know what exponentially steep looks like, check out the daily Covid cases for Tokyo over the last week or so - 1387 new cases on July 20 and 3865 new cases yesterday.
I don’t listen to Newstalk ZB for the same reason that I don’t walk barefoot across a lego-strewn lounge floor in the dark.
The reckon from May praising NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian for not going into lockdown: “This is why Gladys shines. She’s aspirational, she doesn’t panic, New South Wales doesn’t lock down at the drop of a hat or a single case” - red-carded by reality and not so shiny anymore. It’s widely accepted that NSW didn’t go into lockdown soon enough and is now in a midst of an uncontrollable Covid outbreak and lockdown without a foreseeable end date.
Does any of this matter? Not really. We live in the age of goldfish punditry, where the record of reckons is wiped clean with every circuit of the goldfish bowl, and we’re good to go with whatever reckons work for today. And if you don’t like today’s reckons come back tomorrow and we’ll have some brand new ones.
I regret to advise I won’t be one of the ones coming back tomorrow. I don’t listen to Newstalk ZB for the same reason that I don’t walk barefoot across a lego-strewn lounge floor in the dark. I don’t have to do it to know what it’s going to feel like.
On Newstalk ZB the daily reckons appear to be run like a team relay. Kate Hawkesby runs the first leg and then passes the baton on to Mike who may or may not pass it on to Kerre McIvor, and later in the day Heather du Plessis-Allan is supposed to cross the finish line either with the original baton or one of her own. And not only is it supposed to be a relay, it’s supposed to be a medley, each leg has to be done in a different style if you want to keep the spectators engaged. So this week I side-stepped my rule of not reading opinions beginning with “so” and tried to tip toe across the lounge floor to see whether this relay team is a medal prospect. And they’re not, principally because they’re in the wrong event. However, they are a shoo-in for the gold in synchronised snarking.
Kate Hawkesby runs the first leg and then passes the baton on to Mike who may or may not pass it on to Kerre McIvor, and later in the day Heather du Plessis-Allan is supposed to cross the finish line either with the original baton or one of her own.
It was just one two-word phrase that caught my attention, like a small lego block wedged between two toes - “hermit kingdom” - a term coined in the 1880s to describe the Joseon dynasty in Korea. A hermit kingdom is one that deliberately separates itself physically and metaphorically from the rest of the world. In 2021 North Korea is so synonymous with the term that it is widely regarded as the one and only hermit kingdom in the world today.
So it came somewhat as a surprise to learn from the Newstalk ZB opiners that North Korea is not the only hermit kingdom in the world today. And it was like a particularly pointy lego block to the tender arch of the foot to learn that New Zealand is also a hermit kingdom. In fact we’re definitive and capitalised, we’re the Hermit Kingdom. This is the snark label for New Zealand under our border protection policy, synchronised in its use by Kate, Mike and Heather. I don’t know who coined it first, my feet were too tender to scroll back that far but I’m giving the podium to Mike who seems to have used it the most. He’s also paired the Hermit Kingdom with “our great saviour and leader Jacinda Ardern” in case you weren’t getting the North Korea analogy clearly enough.
Then there’s our apparent “smugness of shutting the border”, and our leaders speaking from “the pulpit of truth”, that’s when they’re not “asleep at the wheel”. I forget who said what, at a certain point it’s all just a blur and you just have to retrace your steps without standing on Heather’s “What’s the incentive to get the jab?”
Have a peaceful weekend?
