Thursday, March 2009: Front page fury

1) Is it uninteresting or obvious or just too easy for me to get angry a) at the fact that the Herald has to have a human interest story + photo on every front page or b) the actual human interest story + photo that the Herald has on a particular day? Today, a couple won tickets to the Rugby World Cup final in 2011. Of course, statistics suggest they'll probably be divorced by then, but never mind. In a lot of ways it's no different to your typical human interest story, and thus no more rageworthy than any other - except when it turns into an ad for Heineken:

"The tickets, a prize in a Heineken-sponsored competition, were presented to the pair at Wellington's Westpac Stadium yesterday. Heineken New Zealand managing director Brian Blake said the company was keen to get New Zealanders into the stadium for the final, and would provide more opportunities to score tickets in the remaining 905 days before the final."

Well I'm glad they're thinking of us. Just an unexpected side effect that they got themselves on the front page of the paper, then.


2) Check out this headline: "Workers growing older than their years - study". Intriguing. In tomorrow's news: "Workers growing taller than their height - study". So that's one stupid thing. I can't really be bothered going into the article - I have bigger fish to fry in today's paper (figuratively) - but basically, it says that people are unhealthy. Why they have to put it in terms of being older than your age and talk about "penalty years" I don't know. I suppose that if they didn't come out with something like that, and instead announced findings that most people were just fat and lazy, Southern Cross Healthcare wouldn't have paid tns Conversa tens of thousands of dollars.


3) Not on the front page, but I thought I would mention it: "George W. Bush said he would not criticise President Barack Obama because he 'deserves my silence'". Well that's nice. He goes on to say that "he planned to write a book about the 12 toughest decisions he made in office". Now, like with most George Bush comments, there are numerous rich veins of satire one might choose to exploit. I'm going to go with this: did anyone else read that sentence and imagine a twelve page, cardboard picture book with big numbers on each page and a pictures of a monkey, you know, hunting for WMDs?

I also had ideas about pretzels, Segways and Karl Rove.