Week in review, quiz style
1. In a Stuff poll for leader of the National Party LOL who got by far the biggest vote?
a. Chris I’m sorted mate Luxon
b. Chris The sausage roll doesn’t fall far from the plate Bishop
c. Prominent New Zealander
d. Anybody else
2. Simeon Brown learned about drawing ethical lines from whom?
a. Florence Nightingale
b. Hawkeye Pierce
c. House M.D.
d. Wile E Coyote
3. Which of these propositions about health spending are incontestably true?
a. Doctors and nurses deserve good pay
b. You can pretend that privatising health care will get you more for your money, but the US experience shows us that’s a complete delusion
c. If the main reason you don’t have enough money for health is that you’ve made a fetish of tax cuts, you’re doing it all wrong
d. Simeon’s party has made a fetish of tax cuts
e. Bloody all of them
4. A Swiss company has found a way use sunlight to melt what?
a. Cheese fondue
b. Trump’s makeup
c. Steel
d. AI data centres
5. Who has offered money to help Sean Plunket?
a. The ghost of Bob Jones
b. Winston Peters’ dog
c. Troy Bowker
d. Helen of Troy
6. Which of these powers does the Broadcasting Standards Authority hold?
a. Can revoke broadcast licenses
b. Can impose criminal penalties
c. Can award punitive damages beyond compensation for actual harm
d. None of the above
7. Who was it that broke into the home of Winston Peters and his partner?
a. Some bloody activist
b. Some bloody protestor
c. Some bloody greenie who hates New Zealand
d. None of the above, it was a regular Auckland burglar
8. How many cars are there in the world?
a. 10 million
b. 100 million
c. 500 million
d. More than a billion
9. Who sang Sunday Bloody Sunday?
a. Yoko
b. Poco
c. Lobo
d. Paul Hewson
10. True or false? This quizmaster wrote speeches for Jim Bolger
a. Come on mate, as if
b. True bro
Answers
1. In a Stuff poll for leader of the National Party LOL who got by far the biggest vote?
d. Anybody else
2. Simeon Brown learned about drawing ethical lines from whom?
d. Wile E Coyote. When Rogernomics began, Simeon Brown was not yet born. On the day of 9/11 he was ten years old. Maybe it’s not his fault he’s so certain about everything and wrong about all of it. Maybe the world he’s grown up in has given him completely the wrong idea about everything.
3. Which of these propositions about health spending are incontestably true?
e. Bloody all of them
4. A Swiss company has found a way use sunlight to melt what?
c. Steel
In a pioneering move towards sustainable manufacturing, Swiss company Panatere has launched the world’s first solar-powered furnaces to recycle luxury steel, leveraging concentrated solar energy to melt and repurpose industrial steel waste.
5. Who has offered money to help Sean Plunket?
c. Troy Bowker. He doesn’t think the broadcasting standards authority should be sticking their noses into other new forms of broadcasting. The only people who should be sticking their noses into other stuff are people who have made a pile of money and are therefore obviously an expert on everything else in the world.
6. Which of these powers does the Broadcasting Standards Authority hold?
d. None of the above. The authority’s powers are primarily focused on remedying specific breaches and deterring future violations through public accountability. Scary eh? Stasi-like, even. Eh Winston?
7. Who was it that broke into the home of Winston Peters and his partner?
d. None of the above, it was a regular Auckland burglar. The noise of people walking back their immediate febrile assumptions and denunciations has not been particularly deafening, eh.
8. How many cars are there in the world?
d. More than a billion
9. Who sang Sunday Bloody Sunday?
d. Paul Hewson
10. True or false? This quizmaster wrote speeches for Jim Bolger
b. True, but we never met. This is something that really should happen when you’re writing speeches for someone, but oh well.
It came about because Richard Griffin hired me to do some of his work for him. I enjoyed doing it enough. And I admired the way he came to see the rightness of reparations and reconciliation, and championed it.
I did also like what reader Trevor Nicholls wrote: A poor Prime Minister but a very good ex-Prime Minister.
In the end what I liked most was an anecdote he offered about how important we can imagine we are. His Irish Grandmother told it to him:
You see that glass of water there? Put your finger in it. Now take it out. Where’s the hole?
