Jack Yan on Vox

Kiwi troops greet First Lady Laura Bush; race debate emerges on YouTube

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 20:13:07 +1200

Finally, one of the Bushes meets some New Zealanders—the First Lady is greeted by New Zealand soldiers and police officers in Afghanistan. The haka is a customary greeting, borne from Māori culture.
   I was going to go in to a bit more depth on this video about how nice it was for Mrs Bush to have some contact with our country. However, I am embarrassed by some 19-year-old New Zealander on YouTube who has entered several racist, anti-Māori comments at this video’s page.
   If any Kiwis want to comment on JZZ’s anti-Māori rhetoric, which I think embarrasses our country as it is hardly representative of what most New Zealanders think, please head on over to that page.
   Normally I would just consider him a teenage troublemaker and troll, but there’s another part of me that says if we keep turning a blind eye to our young people’s misbehaviour, then are we telling them that it is acceptable?
   Slamming a single race is hardly productive.
   I assume for the purposes of this discussion that the teenager is Caucasian, statistically speaking. I realize he could be another race.
   In one comment, while calling Māori unkind, a ‘wishy-washy race are full of fakes, liars and cheats,’ he also mentions that no Māori has over 50 per cent blood. Anyone see the easy target there? Using JZZ’s logic: the Māori were, after all, living in relative harmony before the arrival of the English—ergo dilution of their blood by pakeha has introduced criminal genes.
   In another comment, Māori are branded uncivilized because they only had a written language since the 1800s. I guess using that logic, that must make my own race superior since the Chinese have had a written language a few thousand years before Christ.
   And a teenager who posts videos of a Toyota Soarer is hardly, as he describes himself, a ‘car connoisseur’. The Soarer can only trace its automotive lineage to 1981, 96 years after the internal combustion engine automobile was first devised.
   Of course these are all silly arguments. By taking JZZ’s logic we get nowhere.
   This is not a politically correct demand for all New Zealanders to “just get along”. But we are obviously creating a generation of some New Zealanders who by their racism will impede national progress.
   The root causes of, say, there being a large Māori–Polynesian prison population stem from colonization and a failure to integrate cultures.
   We cannot turn back the clock but we can become steadily more open-minded to our own solutions that are distinct from the monocultural Westminster system.
   And as a community that once enforced its own standards, perhaps it is time we extended that same thinking to the online world.
   YouTube isn’t a forum to educate in any depth with its limited space. However, it is a place where we may signal disapproval of behaviour with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and perhaps the odd pithy comment pointing out the faults of racist thinking.

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Ooh, You Are Awful: Mandy on ﬁlm

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:30:37 +1200

Ooh! You are awful! Dick Emery as Mandy!

I wasn’t a huge fan of Dick Emery but I have £9 left over from an Amazon UK coupon and have been considering buying his 1972 film, Ooh, You Are Awful (a.k.a. Get Charlie Tully). It is a trivial, film-buff interest: the movie formed the basis of the Hong Kong movie series, 最佳拍檔 (Aces Go Places), and even some of the gags are repeated. The above one, where Dick is in his Mandy character, isn’t in the Chinese film, though others are (almost line for line, in some cases)—and the overall storyline (the location of loot is tattooed on a series of female posteriors) comes straight from here.
Unless I can find some Alarm für Cobra 11 DVDs through the UK service (the coupon can’t be used at other Amazons), the credit may go on Emery—especially as it expires on June 11. Suggestions on how to waste £9 are welcome (remember, shipping will be £3 to New Zealand).

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Mr Lee gets off a speeding ticket

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:08:59 +1200

This has been, apparently, doing the rounds for a while, but I have missed it. It finally came on PDF today from a colleague. Normally I don’t have a lot of sympathy for law-breakers, but this gets extra marks for imagination.
A Mr Justin Lee was booked for speeding, doing 116 km/h in a 100 km/h zone. This was issued by a police officer:

Justin Lee 1

Mr Lee wrote a letter, concerned about the above:

Justin Lee 2

Justin Lee 3

Very clever—and cheeky. I should note that American English is not normal here, but Mr Lee probably had the wrong language installed on his computer; plus ‘grand theft auto’ is not used as a colloquial term, unless one is referring to a computer game.
The police responded, unhumorously:

Justin Lee 4

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Capt Kirk gets off a speeding ticket

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Sun, 11 May 2008 12:14:58 +1200

Just as I finished writing about Philip Glenister getting his driver off a ticket by acting as Gene Hunt, I surfed over to an article about Canadian actor William Shatner linked from the Daily Mail page I cited earlier:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=565380&in_page_id=1879

In the 1960s, Shatner wore his Capt Kirk uniform rushing to work and was also stopped. He writes:

I got out of my car, dressed in my uniform. The police officer looked me up and down, frowned and asked: “So where are you going so fast at this time in the morning?”
I told him the truth: “To my spaceship.”
He sighed. “OK, go ahead,” he said, before adding the Vulcan blessing: “Live long and prosper.”

Nothing new under the sun.
The story is quite good, told in the first person. Shatner recounts his lows and the death of his third wife (after what seems to be the final paragraph talking about the price of his autobiography).

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Gene Hunt is a law unto himself—even in real life

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Sun, 11 May 2008 11:50:18 +1200

The first time I read about Philip Glenister getting his driver off for speeding (35 mph in a 30 mph zone) I chuckled, as he adopted his Gene Hunt persona. The cop saw the actor and said, according to Glenister, ‘I’m terribly sorry about this sir, I’ll let you off this time if you don’t mind.’
Glenister had apparently said to him prior, ‘Yes, I’m the one on the booze, not him. Go and catch some proper criminals.’
Then I found the earliest article on the incident in the Daily Mail tabloid which contrasted this with others in the UK:

Earlier this week it emerged that Sydney Duffy was fined for doing 35mph in a 30mph area when he tried to leave the road quickly as his wife had an epileptic fit. The 63-year-old has appealed against the fine from Cumbria police and will appear in court.
And Stephanie Cornwall was issued with a £60 fine after rushing to hospital when her six year-old son Alfie was mauled by a dog. The mother, 40, from Leicestershire, was travelling at 37mph in a 30mph zone.

   One law for celebrities?
   The Met should have more sense than to fine people like Mr Duffy and Ms Cornwall.
   At least here the traffic cops allow for some speedometer error and that humans cannot be expected to constantly monitor their speed when traffic safety is at issue. If you kept staring at your speedo, you might get involved in an accident!
   It is worse here in New Zealand than it was 30 years ago but by and large, 5 mph is not something for the cops to get that upset about.
   I know there are exceptions but I am talking in a general sense. As we work in metric, 5 mph is roughly 8 km/h.
   The second incident probably would have been frowned on more today, less so 30 years ago: 7 mph goes past that 10 km/h leeway that some cops have as a rule of thumb.
   I tend to drive at the legal limit but realize that due to speedometer error I can be anywhere between 5 km/h over or under.
   The ‘Your speed is’ digital signs around some parts of New Zealand are helpful as a means of calibrating my own speedometer—so why do so many of them have their displays closed?
   They tend to show that my car’s 50 km/h is actually 47 km/h so I tend to go closer to 55 km/h on my speedo.
   The problem is that speeding here is governed by legislation that brings strict liability, which basically means “no excuses”.
   But I would think a Kiwi copper would have been able to judge in both cases somewhat better than his or her British counterpart.
   I am not sure if we would distinguish between celebrities and everyday folk. Any stories? I know of one incident told to me by an eyewitness (the passenger) where a rich driver was let off because of the car he drove, and the officers wound up going into macho mode to discuss the vehicle and neglected to issue a fine for excessive speeding. I cannot reveal more since I am not permitted to, and I would hope it is exceptional rather than commonplace.
   If a flash car could get me off a fine, I would have really opened up the Astons and Porsche 911 I have driven, but I prefer my clean licence (knock on wood) and was much more careful.

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Psycho Missouri cops

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:25:38 +1200

This is from a friend of mine living in the US. This is disgusting behaviour, and comes on the same day I find out that one in four prisoners on this planet are in the US.

Today, **** went to the **** Missouri police department to ask them if the knife he made is legal.
   He asked the receptionist and she said she would ask an officer to come and tell him. Well, he sat down, and waited and waited.
   Finally, he just got up to leave. About the time he got to his car, two policemen asked him if he was the one asking if his knife was legal.
   He said yes. They told him to bring it over to them. He took one step towards them and they pulled their guns, aimed them at him and yelled, "Drop that fucking knife!!" **** was startled and of course and dropped it.
   They set him up! And they never told him if it was legal or not. They ran his tags and all and let him go but I am just so upset that it happened. It is like someone hit me in the gut.

   Not really the by-the-books policemen we see on Cops. This gives all American cops a bad name.
   Hey, Missouri police—pick on someone your own size and solve some real crimes, OK? Imagine how much of the taxpayers’ money they wasted.
   And I thought there was a War on Terror on.

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Britney Spears’s motorcade: $25k

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 19:02:09 +1300

I wouldn’t be happy being an American taxpayer right now.
   The Los Angeles Times says Britney Spears’ hospital motorcade, probably smaller than the one Dick Cheney has for his annual heart attack, cost the LAPD $25,000.
   There were motorbikes, cruisers and even at least one helicopter escorting the ambulance carrying the singer.
   The last time I saw a motorcade-with-ambulance that huge was in the fictional film Dave, where the President of the United States was driven to hospital.
   In fact, satirical site The Spoof wrote, ‘White House Press Secretary Britney Spears was rushed to a hospital early Thursday morning while riding with President Bush in his presidential motorcade, a White House spokesman said.’
   I can understand, for her public safety, having some police presence but considering that a few cops on duty at the courthouse were enough the last time she had to embarrass herself in the public eye, this is excessive.
   She only went in for a psych. evaluation, for goodness’ sake.
   This woman managed to get more cops escorting her than, say, a fallen US soldier who paid the ultimate price serving her or his country.
   I still vote for leaving Spears alone, and let her get her treatment in peace. She might actually get better if we treated her as a normal person and that means keeping her out of the headlines.
   I’d rather hear about someone making a difference to our world. I mean a real difference. Marrying a dude with the same name as the guy who played George Costanza does not count.
   And, if I may follow the order of the news here: ‘in other news,’ Microsoft has offered to buy Yahoo! for $44·6 billion.

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Red China gets whatever it wants from Labour

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 23:30:10 +1200

[Cross-posted] The press release says it all, really. No one voted in the Communist Chinese as the government of New Zealand, even if a lot of us voted Labour. Pity that some of our senior government ﬁgures and cops decided to take their orders from Beijing, or are too scared to confront the Politburo when given the chance.

Publisher outraged at barring of Nick Wang from Parliamentary event

Jack Yan reminds Red Chinese that their sovereignty ends at Embassy doors

Wellington, March 27 (JY&A Media) Jack Yan, publisher of Lucire, says he is ‘outraged’ by the barring of journalist Nick Wang from a Parliamentary event last night, and says it is among a ‘pattern’ of suppression that the New Zealand Government is either ignoring, or endorsing.
Earlier reports indicate that Red Chinese Embassy ofﬁcials had pressured Marie McNicholas, the head of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, to bar Mr Wang from reporting on the visit of Zeng Peiyan (Tsang Pui Yam, 曾培炎), an ofﬁcial from Beijing. Mrs McNicholas refused, and told Radio New Zealand that ofﬁcials may have approached members of the New Zealand police force.
‘We generally have some of the best police ofﬁcers in the world,’ says Mr Yan. ‘The Red Chinese government needs to understand that they do not have the right to give orders to our cops, especially not the right to suppress a New Zealand-based journalist in the course of his job.
‘This is New Zealand territory, and diplomatic missions are here by convention, not by right.
‘Red Chinese sovereignty ends at their Embassy’s doors. They do not extend on to New Zealand soil,’ he says. ‘Why certain MPs like Peter Dunne and I have to remind Beijing of this, constantly, is beyond me.’
Both the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister are saying the incident is a misunderstanding which has been blown out of proportion.
‘A free press and New Zealand sovereignty deserve to be protected, and if the Government believes either can be so readily dismissed, then they are ignoring, or endorsing, a pattern of Politburo pressure,’ says Mr Yan.
‘Red China’s actions, once again, make me question their understanding of other nations’ rights, and why we should even pursue a free-trade deal with a régime that does not respect New Zealanders or New Zealand jobs.’
Mr Yan says that he has found Mr Wang to be a fair and balanced journalist, who has never been staunchly anti-Beijing in his reports in the Capital Chinese News.
Mr Yan adds that he was disappointed that the Leader of the Opposition, John Key, did not raise the matter with Mr Zeng in his meeting earlier today, and questions why no other MP with Chinese ethnicity has publicly stood by Mr Wang.

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Darth needs a Mentos (the freshmaker)

nobody@vox.com(Jack Yan) — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 17:15:52 +1200

The home of achingly uncomfortable reality shows where people humiliate themselves badly is not the Netherlands. No, the Dutch don’t have a patch on the Japanese, usually known as civilized and formal. That means that Japanese humour can be both subtle (they sell you a Camry and laugh as you drive away) and unsubtle, as French Voxer CBT77 posted.

Darth Vader vs. Japanese Police

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