Sideswiped: The A-Z of 2025...

So far.

Jan 17, 2025

Winners and Losers: “Winners are busy swimming in vaults full of gold, having a nice dinner and drinks, and going to bed with bevies of cute people. lLosers have time and grudges and writing is cheap.” Anon.

A

Anti-everything: As Lara Greaves (politics associate professor, University of Auckland) describes it in The Spinoff:

“A continuation of the rolling feast of anti-expert, anti-technocrat stories: government announces something, experts denounce it, there are media stories, nothing changes.”

B

Biofuels: At last year’s Climate Change and Business conference a rep for Air New Zealand, warned that in just six years most of the airports the company flies will require it to fly home with sustainable fuel.

“Unless the Government moves to support biofuels, the airline will be excluded from many global destinations. The impact on tourism and New Zealand’s ability to trade would be immense,” writes Dame Anne Salmond. (Read More)

C

Wikipedia list of colours include Bisque, Languid lavender, Macaroni and Cheese, Raw umber, Shandy and Willpower orange. A rabbit hole awaits.

D

Decorative Statistics (Ray Fisman, Andrew Gelman, and Matthew C. Stephenson, “The Statistics That Come Out of Nowhere,” The Atlantic, March 2023)

Their purpose is not to convey an actual amount of money but to sound big and impressive. That doesn’t keep them from being added, subtracted, divided, or multiplied to yield other decorative statistics.

E

A new Enid Blyton book at last…

F

Food: Husband balked at the fact Noodle Canteen has upped its prices to $25 (which means $100 for a dinner for four). Not so long ago he would feed him and his two ravenous teens for $30. But according to Stats NZ food prices up 1.5% this year on top of a rise of 1.3% last year. But you already know this if you are the household supermarket shopper. Blame butter (up 50%) and olive oil (up 45%). The good news is that Kūmara prices are around 60 percent lower than they were a year ago. Rejoice.

G

Google Search has a credibility issue: According to Futurism users can no longer count on finding a useful link buried under ten promoted ones; now it's all just AI slop. A search for the phrase "does corn get digested" returns a Google image results page loaded down with strange, nonsensical AI graphics claiming to depict corn kernels' sluggish journey through the human digestive tract. Four out of the top six results are AI slop.

H

I

What gives me the ICK: Grey meatballs in David Seymour’s cheap n unnutritious school lunches.

J

January is grim: And it’s a really bad time to get sick in New Zealand. We shunt Christmas & New Year, School Holidays and Summer Holidays together creating a 8 week hot, sweaty ball of domestic stress and a plague of annual leave and burdening skeleton staff with our still heaving demand. And January our news is awful too. With the politicians doing their Great Walks, at the bach in Omaha or courtside at the tennis, the MSM only have domestic homicides, drownings, and road fatalities to report on. Oh, and scaremongering with scrub fires.

L

Love is… This song.

M

Massiveness. Mind Blown: All the “Technostuff” built in the last 100 years now outweighs all the living matter on Earth and humans use 100 times their own mass in plastic.

I need to sit down and process that.

To find out this fascination stuff Biocubes created a visualization comparing the mass of the living world (biomass) to the mass that’s been generated by humans (technomass).

For more read this NYT gift story.

N

Garron Noone is indeed delicious. Why irish people say sorry.

@garron_music @garron_music ♬ original sound - Garron Noone

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O

Measuring Obesity with BMI is outdated: A group of global researchers want it gone and replaced with something less blunt. BMI calculates the ratio of weight to height: Between 18.5 and 24.9 is considered healthy, while more than 30 is obese. But y that measure the front row of the All Black would all be obese, Researchers want to include other measures, like waist-height ratios or medical tests, to assess fat, not just weight. A better definition will help target those who really need the help.

P

What Horrible Things Did We Do To Our Penises Last Year? Descritions from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s database of emergency room visits:

PUTTING UP A TOWEL BAR AT HOME AND THE DRILL HE WAS USING HIT HIS PENIS
LACERATION TO PENIS AFTER WALKING INTO FAN.
IN HIS CLOSET NAKED, CLOSED THE CLOSET DOOR WHICH WAS A BIFOLD DOOR AND CAUGHT HIS PENIS

More here.

Q

Quiz: TV themed, for Gen X.

The full name of The Fonz’s girlfriend pictured here is...
Who are these dancers?
What famous character did this actor play?
What hit series followed Little House on the Prairie for Michael Landon?
What show did this moose appear in the opening credits for?
Patrick Duffy was famous for Dallas, but what other 80s show?

Answers at the end

R

Rice. It’s time to get it right: “We never boil and drain our rice,” says Ms Emily Lucas, Producer at MR PORTER, who grew up in Tokyo. The Japanese way to do it? “Always start by soaking it first (to rinse off the starch), then add it to your rice cooker or pot. You can cook it in a regular pot, but for extra points invest in a donabe, or Japanese clay pot. I use the knuckle method to measure the ratio between rice to water. Cook for 15 mins, then leave to rest for 20 – you’re left with perfect fluffy rice. Not wet or soggy rice that you get if you just boil and drain.” ( Via 33 Ways To Improve Your Life, Japanese Style)

S

Surreal Skates: Torvill and Dean would be turning in their graves if they were dead (they’re not - they are judges on the British TV show Dancing on Ice) but I mean get a load THIS. It’s no Boléro.

T

Gen Zers are tearfully bidding farewell to their "personal Chinese spy” and claiming to soon be a #TikTokrefugee. There are already 29.3K posts on TikTok using the hashtag, and Google searches for the phrase have spiked, according to After School by Casey Lewis. And there is oversenstivity too.

“However tasteless you might find the phrase, it undeniably reflects Gen Z’s sense of humor — dark, absurdist, macabre. They’re not trivializing the experience of actual refugees; they’re leaning into the absurdity of their situation and making fun of themselves.”

V

Vertical Farms: Grow lettuce in buildings using robots, hydroponics, and LED lights. A ‘vertical farming’ startup, Bowery raised over $700 million but went bust a few months later.

Bowery claimed that vertical farms were “100 times more productive” per square foot than traditional farms, since racks of plants could be stacked 40 feet high. In reality, the company’s lettuce was more expensive, and when a stubborn plant infection spread through its East Coast facilities, Bowery were fucked.

W

Wise guys: The Three Wise Monkeys, by DK Ratana at The Hundertwasser, Whangarei.

X

Extreme close up: popcorn popping is some satisfying ASMR shit for pimple popping fetishists.

Y

Why? Why not: It’s free.

Z

Ze answers to ze quiz: 1. Carol "Pinky" Tuscadero 2. Soild Gold Dancers 3. Gopher, The Love Boat 4. Highway to Heavan 5. Northan Exposure 6. Man from Atlantis.