Blow up dolls and Auckland traffic

What do North Shore residents do with inflatable dolls?
Reuters is sending a story around the world, claiming New Zealand drivers are using blow-up dolls to beat traffic rules.It comes, believe it or not, from a North Shore city media release.
Apparently, to get into the express lanes on the North Shore, people are packing their cars with imaginary friends, all different kinds of them. And some of them are inflatable.

TV3

I can confirm that this unlikely story is in fact true.

The Onewa Rd transit lane can be used by motorcycles, buses and any vehicle with three or more occupants. Travelling down it can shorten you journey by as much as half an hour.

My secretary favours insisting that the kids come along for the ride if we have to go down this road between 6:30am and 9am on a weekday morning. He who earns money favours leaving home early enough to avoid the start of the restrictions or by having co-workers in the car.

Carpooling isn't just about subsidising the cost of the petrol in this neck of the woods.

Methods others have tried without success include the use of the blow up dolls as mentioned above, Pink Panthers, shop mannequins and even dressed up large dogs.

I have see some of these with my own eyes from the safety of my cat carrier. (We will not mention the VET word or the incident that caused that journey).

The most successful method was a pair of teenaged boys who hired themselves out as passengers from the bus stop outside Zion Hill church and got out of the car at Lake Rd last year during the holidays. They could manage 3 or 4 trips at $5 each every morning depending on the number of drivers with money and how fast they could run back up the hill.

Of course blow up dolls etc are not the only strange things to been seen travelling down this frequently grid locked road. It is a favoured spot for aspiring mayoral candidate during local elections to wave placards while wearing wedding dresses..........here

Sometimes I really have to wonder about the wisdom of living on the 'Shore.

Fueling Stagflation

No, you are not seeing things. The fuel prices on that sign have been updated through the creative use of yellow electrical tape.

The ANZ/National Bank and the AA have been making noises along the lines that the government should be looking at removing the tax from petrol to give the local economy some respite from the continual rises in oil prices. watch video here

That was this morning.

I sent my secretary down to take the above photo - too late. The price had already jumped by 6 cents by the time she got down there.

Which illustrates why the government doesn't seem to be seriously considering reducing the petrol tax. Removing the petrol tax would give drivers a respite but for how long? 2 or 3 months? By then we will not only be no better off but have no funding for roads or to top up the consolidated fund (which is where the petrol tax money goes by the way).

That would mean no tax cuts. An election loser if ever I saw one.

Stagflation - an economic term meaning a state of inflation without corresponding increase in demand and employment.

Welcome back to the 70s.

Food and Fuel Crisis

Now I know that food is becoming more expensive.
That tinned stuff in my cat dish has gone back to being Rival Beef and Gravy rather than the much nicer Chef Oceanfish Platter.
My taste buds are protesting!
Still there is always dog tucker over at the neighbours if I ask very nicely.

There has been an alarming drop in the amount of meat scraps landing in my dish.
One of the kids is grumping about the number of stews suddenly on the menu, short on meat big on gravy. I wouldn't mind if the leftovers were landing in my dish but alas they are not.
Somebody else is using them for sandwich filling.
At this rate I am going to have to take up mousing.

Then there is the car. Warming my cold feet and bottom on the bonnet was one of my evening pleasures after it rolled down the drive late afternoon but suddenly it isn't doing that. It sits on the parking bay without moving once 4 or 5 days a week, bonnet as cold as fog (we haven't had a frost yet).

Still the fire is going most nights and there is enough room under the clothes horse for my basket with sheepskin so it can't be that bad.

There has been a sudden increase in gardening round here. Nobody has seen fit to plant a catfood tree but I figure with the number of inept gardeners and the number of people about to discover that they don't like all that silver beet and cabbage the birds are going to have plenty to eat. Which means more of them to discuss lunch with.

My lunch of course.

Budget Bribery

After months of speculation we now know the size of the carrot Labour wishes to bribe us with but in typical Cullen style we are going to have to wait for it. The money won't be in our paws for another 6 months and we will have to wait until 2011 for the last bit of the carrot.

Still it isn't a pack of chewing gum sized tax cut this time but a full block of cheese sized cut for most of us. The fact if we got it last year it would have bought nearly 2 blocks of cheese is purely coincidental and nothing to do with government policy we are told.

Insert your favourite conspiracy theory or Tui ad here.

The timing of the first of the loot is spacious enough. Even most wombles have figured out that the election happens just 1 month after that.

It's enough to make the oldies look nostalgically back to the dates when Muldoon's Budgets had them sitting on the edge of their seats watching the TV with the car keys clamped in their sweaty hands, ready to race down to the nearest petrol station and fill up the car if the petrol tax was to be increased at 8pm that night. The annual budget night ques at the local garage had to be seen to believed I am told. The speed at which they vanished the moment the clock struck 8pm bore a striking resemblance to the more resent phenomenon of a flash mob.

Speaking of petrol, it is now offical, petrol now cost $2+ a litre whatever the octane or place of puchase. Somebody has to be making a lot of money out of this.

For now we will have to tighten our belts further and wait of the October windfall and hope like hell that it all won't have to walk directly into the nearest bank by way of interest rate increase or staight to the petrol pump or supermarket for that matter.

I pity any poor sods whose fixed rate mortgage rolls over just then.

'Puter Problems

The anti-virus is soon to be unsupported.
The operating system old.
And as for the motherboard,
the processor is nearly overwhelmed.
The amount of ram is laughable,
MSN messenger updates won't load.
And as for the doddering C drive,
I'm sure there is dodgy sector in there.

So I need a new C drive,
And a shit load of new ram,
Operating system and mother board,
I just hope it all fits in the existing can.
A new anti-virus program and firewall would be nice,
a powerful video card would be grand.
Together with a new liquid crystal monitor.
Now doesn't that sound like a plan?

All that is going to cost a couple of k,
more than I have just now.
It will have to wait 'till a change in interest rates,
or she who budgets will have a cow.

So I guess I'll keep creating back ups,
Like a newly converted fanatic.
To insure against the blue screen of death,
and registry errors....
Which are all becoming a bit pedantic.

Petrol Powered Economic Sky Rocket

In early 2003 my secretary was wincing over the price of petrol. There would be no trips to pay to enter attraction while on holiday because the money set aside for that had to be used for the petrol to get there. It was $1.079/litre.

In 2006 my secretary again announced that this would be possibly be the last holiday involving long day trips using the van due to the price of petrol. It was $1.439/litre and rose to $1.48.9/litre during the week away. The $1.50/litre "barrier" was breached shortly afterwards.

Looking at those figures now her concern seems a little laughable.

Yes the "magic" $2/litre is now in sight or will be next week or next month in the main centres the way things are going. The drivers of Coromandel, National Park, Stewart Island and a few other more remote spots have already had to shell out that much.

Today in my neck of the woods 98 octane is up to $1.949 but who the heck runs their car on that? 91 octane is at $1.829. You can check it out here.

OK so at some point if you haven't already you are going to start having to use your car less.

Many are touting public transport as the way of the future and are quick to point out how using public transport instead of a car will save you money and thus makes sense or should that be cents? I have my doubts.

First of all no bus driver is going to let me, a small admittedly loud mouthed white cat on for a ride ticket or no ticket. So a car is going to be needed for trips to the vet and a few other places as well that I can think of . Nobody is going to get me on a bicycle with or without a cat carrier.

So I can reasonable assume that selling the car out right is not an option right now.
That means that some of the costs of owning a car, like warrant of fitness, registration, insurance, and some maintenance are going to remain regardless.

If you just compare the price of a bus ticket with the cost of petrol to run a small car the car wins. If you have to pay for parking that changes so the the real incentive to use the bus/train or ferry to get to work are the parking charges not the price of fuel.

I have watched this sort of discussion going on in earnest at home between she who spends money and he who earns it. She who spends pointed out the cost of hiring the parking space for he who earns was more than the price of the bus fare so he should catch the bus. He who earns came up with another solution. He started picking up a workmate who given that a weeks worth of petrol cost just over half what his bus ticket did was more than happy to pay for a tank of petrol once a fortnight. An occasion second passenger has cut the cost of the hiring the parking space as well.

The cost of using the bus just doesn't stack up against the economies of putting a passenger or two in a car which is why bus travel isn't a family friendly option for now. Trains are cheaper than buses if you live and work near a rail line with a service. Ferries are dearer still but that maybe due to a lack of subsidies.

As for bicycles - I will seriously consider that when the death and injury rate drops and a fat lady can pedal one up a hill laden with shopping. Riding a bicycle still needs fuel in the form of food, shoes, raincoats as does Shank's pony.

Of course all this may change when petrol reaches $3/litre (which at this rate will be sometime next year) or more but then so will the price of just about everything else as a result. Hello inflation!

Ultimately paying less for fuel will come down to just using less.

Promises - political enlightenment or just more toxic honey?

For the last fortnight I have be watching the flow of election promises coming from both Labour and National.
For awhile there it looked like we had only one political party the promises were so alike. Even the big news of a budget deficit didn't slow the flow of promised tax cuts which makes me wonder if our politicians were either ignoring the bad news or had spotted the Inland Revenues $600million error (in which case why wasn't it spotted earlier?).

Then at last some light relief in the shape of National promising that every person convicted by a court would have to pay a tax of $50 to fund victim costs. Did the significance of the 31 March press release escape the National Party spin doctors or did they thing that Joe Bloggs would miss the possibility that this was a hoax when this was reported in the daily papers a day later, on April Fools Day?

We really must thank that inept Coromandel bee keeper and his honey from Tutu honey dew for inadvertently providing the idea for a new metaphor to describe questionable promises coming from the Beehive.

Toxic honey indeed.

The fun part is going to be trying to detect the safe honey from the poison before voting the new bees into the Beehive.