Everyone’s Dying!

Vale Steve Iriwn, and the madness of New Zealand

Dying seems to be the in thing for Australians this week. First Don Chipp, founder of the Australian Democrats, then yesterday author of Storm Boy Colin Thiele and of course the (in the words of Tripod) “mighty skivvy wearing hunter man” Steve Irwin.

It’s weird about Steve Irwin. I was never much of a fan of his work – which to me seemed mostly to consist of poking dangerous animals with sticks while giving Americans a completely inaccurate idea of Australia and Australians – but now he’s gone things just don’t seem right. He was such an instantly recognisable character that it seems impossible that he’s not around any more. It’s as if there’s suddenly a gaping Crocodile-Hunter-shaped hole in the world – a hole that is never going to be filled because he’s the only one who could fill it. Other zany wildlife enthusiasts may come and may go, but there’ll never be another Steve Irwin, and although I couldn’t stand his shows and mocked the guy mercilessly, the world is a little bit poorer at his passing.

On a somewhat cheerier note I received a bizare email to my work address yesterday from someone in New Zealand. First up it’s huge. And when I say huge I mean over 11,000 lines long. I haven’t read all of it (obviously) but it seems to be a highly paranoid rant about some of the following points…

  1. There’s no central heating in New Zealand, despite it being a cold country
  2. The author knows this because a Canadian told her so
  3. All the space heaters she buys die when turned up on full
  4. On investigation, all space heaters in New Zealand turn out to be produced by companies that are front companies for companies in Canada
  5. The American National Football League harassed her so much that she had to leave the United States and move to New Zealand
  6. The State of Texas also harassed her
  7. The NFL routinely murder men, women and children
  8. The State of Texas is in league with the NFL
  9. She heard that there was a shooting in a McDonalds in Texas – but McDonalds wouldn’t provide her with any information about it
  10. Obviously McDonalds are in league with the NFL and the State of Texas
  11. Any and all Asian restaurants are also involved
  12. All this has something to do with September 11

I have no idea if this is some kind of joke, some kind of conceptual art project, a cleverly encrypted message from some security or terrorist organisation, or if a paranoid maniac (with much better spelling and grammar than the average paranoid maniac) has got access to an email program. It certainly boggles the mind in any case. I’ll paste in a bit of it so you can make your own judgement…

Soon after reaching that state, listening to a TV news broadcast revealed that another football player had again been arrested for killing a woman. This time the player was still active, and played for the Carolina Panthers, a team whose head coach was George Seifert, who’d previously coached the San Francisco Forty Niners, the team that O.J. Simpson had once played for, in his home town of San Francisco. However, I do not know if George Seifert, who is said to have spent many of his working years in San Francisco ever coached O. J. Simpson directly. Simpson, who shares the same last name as a former Physics teacher of mine at Kenya High School, later left the Forty Niners to play in the city of Buffalo for the Buffalo Bills who are located near the border with Canada. As for the player from the Carolina Panthers, the woman he was accused of having killed was apparently a partner or former partner. By that time, my own tribulations with the National Football League were so intense, I did not have the resources to follow up on that case, and as a result, do not know if the player was ever tried and/or convicted. While coaching the San Francisco Forty Niners, George Seifert had coached Steve Young, one of the antagonists mentioned to me by Texans in Fort Worth and Dallas. The other was Troy Aikman who played for a team known as the Dallas Cowboys in Texas. During my own high school years in in the seventiesKenya, the study of politics was very important, even though we were very young. One of a guest speakers was Dr. Anyang’ Nyong’o, the elder brother of a classmate of mine called Risper Nyagoy Nyong’o. The Nyong’o’s had just returned from Chicago in the state of Illinois in the United States of America, where recently, another Kenyan born politician named Barrack Obama has recently campaigned for political office. Mr. Obama has thesame last name as another former schoolmate of mine, Rita Obama, with whom I studied first at Kilimani Primary School, and later at Kenya High School where our headmistress was a native of New Zealand named Miss Barnes, and where one of our English teachers was also from New Zealand. Her name was Mrs. Barns, and the differences in the title and spelling were often emphasized, so that we could fully understand that they were different teachers. (Yet a third teacher was called Mrs. Barnes, with a different title from the headmistress but the same spelling. Mrs. Barnes was from Britain, and although she was English, taught French. The other Frenchteachers were a Canadian nun named Sister (or Soeur) Lise Rousson who was from the French Canadian Province of Quebec, and another English woman who never taught me personally and whose name I do not remember). Dr. Anyang’ Nyong’o is now an Assistant Minister in the current Kenyan Government. He was nominated by thecurrent president, Mr. Mwai Kibaki. When he returned to Kenya in the mid-seventies, the United States’ Congress had just impeached President Milhouse Nixon, and President Gerald Ford had been appointed to complete that elective term. During that decade, the government of that country had another controversial politician, Mr. Henry Kissinger, who’d been born in Germany, but had migrated with his family to the United States of America at a very young age. (While I was in Texas, the United States of America repeated that pattern when President Bill Clinton was impeached by the Congress. He retained his office and appointed an European born Secretary of State called Madeleine Albright, to whom I’ve written regarding the events of Texas. I’ve alsowritten to former President Clinton and to former Vice President Al Gore). According to his biography in the internet, when Henry Kissinger left Germany, he’d just left behind the massacre of Jews accross Europe. Later in his adulthood, he’d participated in the war in Cambodia in South-East Asia. Former Vice President Al Gore was also mentioned as having fought in South East Asia, in the Viet Nam War. He is from the state of Tennessee. Here in Auckland, where many of the food establishments and supermarkets are operated by South East Asians, I have met a Cambodian woman who operated a bakery in Orewa on the North Shore in Rodney District. My firstemployer her in New Zealand was a Canadian company known as Apotex New Zealand Limited, where I worked from June 2002 until December 2004. The managing director of Apotex New Zealand Ltd. was named Colin James Robertson, a New Zealander who’d been trained at the Canadian head office…

And it goes on like that for 11,000 lines!!!!!

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