Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

So I could blame my recent blog slowdown on that convenient old wives’ catch-all “preggy brain,” but that would be... um, true. Even Busyboy has noticed. The other day he boasted “My daddy has a SSSSSHUGE brain, and I have a great big four-year-old brain.” I waited for the rest. He patted me on the shoulder and said “And you have a medium-sized brain.”

In my quicker-witted days I might have clipped him round the ear for that, but under the circumstances it felt like a massive compliment. Really? Medium-sized? Awesome! That’ll get me through till Christmas.

He's making it really easy on me too, with a new mania for giving extensive and very explicit clues and hints as to what he's thinking about. A recent sample: "Do you know what season it is right now, Mummy? I'll give you a clue. It starts with 'wint' and it ends with 'uh' -- can you guess what it is?"

Even with such generous help, I confess I still sometimes end with 'uh.'

Is pregnancy-related dopiness a real biological phenomenon? I don’t know -- even with the help of the all-powerful Google, both hands, and a flashlight, I can’t track down any reliable scientific studies on the subject. Not just because I’m a bit medium-sized in the cranium department, either: “preggy brain” “scientific basis” returned NO RESULTS.

Now that I think about it, though, I doubt it only applies to bio-mums, or indeed only to mums in general – it stands to reason that anyone anticipating an impending child of any kind would be a bit, as it were, preoccupied.

Actually that’s a useful image, with its toilet cubicle overtones. Maybe I need a T-shirt that says “Vacant” on one side and “Preoccupied” on the other. Except I probably don’t, because I finally have a tummy that signals that for me... and with only seven weeks to go. Something to show for it, at last!

It is rather handy to be what the old lady next door called “a tidy carrier,” squeezing into my most forgiving pair of stretch jeans until a month ago, and able to clip my own toe-nails and shovel snow as of yesterday. But on the other hand, I miss out on the reflexive chivalry that comes to those whose tummies precede them majestically into a room by a good few minutes.

I remember last time, when I was about eleven million months pregnant, a fellow shopper in a New York deli with an armful of groceries dropped their topmost packet of Rice-a-Roni, and asked “Pick that up for me, wouldya doll?” And I cheerfully did, although it took me a good five minutes to return to the upright position. Impatience, and then a second look, led to a flustered apology from my queue-mate. No probs -- squats are good for you when you’re pregnant. Even if I nearly did go into labour on the spot.

So what keeps the expecting brain so very very busy in such a foggy, misty way? I would love to say it’s all the long lingering wordless conversations with the burgeoning miracle within, but mostly I stick to the Alcatraz model. Couple of taps on the plumbing a couple of times a day means you’re still alive in there. When it turns into more complex volleys of Morse Code, I’ll know the escape plan is underway, but for now it’s one kick for yes, two for yes all right I heard you the first time, now lay off my kidney.

I did read a nice book about Your Amazing Fetus and Its Thrilling Intra-Uterine Life, which suggested I might like to try transmitting some warm, affirming dreams to my unborn lovechild. Maybe not such a great idea, considering I don’t tend to go in for lavender-scented dreamscapes, but rather obsess about whatever I just read. I spent all night last night, for example, tossing and turning about Ian Frazier’s kookily brilliant piece in the New Yorker on wild hogs (not online alas, but absolutely worth hunting down in print). Can see how well that would go down in wombland dreamtime. Oink! It's your mother here. Vote Democrat! Oink!

That, and the other freaky side-effect of preggy brain -- or is it just me? -- which is the worst case of ear worms in your life: random songs that stick in your brain for days, and nights, and days, and nights, and weeks and months at a time. Aaaargh. Make it stop! Make it STOP!! Or the baby will emerge singing “Right Said Fred” word-perfect from start to finish.

But one very eye-opening claim in the amazing fetus book was that not only do babies like to play with the umbilical cord – which makes sense, as it’s to hand, and sturdy, and you could practice sailors’ knots and such – but allegedly they sometimes like to deliberately squeeze it and let go, to give themselves a rush.

That stopped me cold. You mean, I might have a regular little Michael Hutchence in there, dangling off the wardrobe door to while away the lonely evenings? Oh dear.

I mean, really?? How on earth would you know this was going on? Do they all do it? Do some do it more than others? Could you get advance warning of whether you’re incubating a teeny tiny auto-erotic thrillseeker, or just a regular old person who will one day stand idly in a queue at the bank, running their hand up and down that looped lane-divider thing and musing at a totally preconscious level about the good old days when the only toy was an umbilical cord, nothing more, nothing less.

God. See where your medium-sized preggy brain will take you, if you’re not too worried about the deadlines for your loftier prose projects?

One of the other things you think about a lot, when you’re pre-occupied, is of course names. You think about all the baby name books, and how they’re premised on a lie, because what you’re trying to name is not really a baby, per se, but a human being with a lifespan of three score or more, and those are two very different things.

The right name should work under all circumstances: from blowing raspberries on a fat six-month-old tummy, all the way up to the Presidential swearing-in ceremony. Ah, but that’s me being conservative. The right kid, of course, will make any name seem right in any place, regardless – ask Tokyo Sexwale, or our own Che Tibby. And goodness knows I’m in no position to cast stones at whimsical names that you have to spell over the phone. Although if you do like to slow down as you pass traffic accidents, you might want to peruse these lists of imponderable naming choices.

Of course, anyone who’s named a child lately knows that your perfect, secret, and totally unique name will also be the one chosen by your cousin, your next-door neighbour, and the postie’s daughter. If you’re canny, you scope out the name lists and see what’s popular so you can rule those ones out. But the zeitgeist moves in completely mysterious ways, and never more so than when you’re trying to elude it. For Busyboy, we picked a nice old standard, not too popular but by no means obscure, halfway up and down the US top forty. And of course it turned out to be the most popular name in New Zealand that year, blah blah cousin, blah blah neighbour, blah blah postie’s daughter. He has made it his own, though, and so far hasn’t shared a class or a playground with a namesake, so we’re all right.

If duplication really keeps you up at nights, I suppose you could start at the other end of the list and deliberately pick a highly unpopular name. The Social Security Administration keeps track of American baby names for the last century, and here’s a handy variation that groups the 2004 names by spelling variations to give an even more accurate picture (what is up with all the –aydens? Aidan, Hayden, Jayden, Kayden, Brayden? Note that Fayden and Gayden are still up for grabs... also Spreydon, if you’re looking to reprazent the Garden City).

Taking it up a notch, Baby Name Wizard's Namevoyager is an extraordinary resource that animates the raw data to let you track the meteoric rise of Connor and Caitlin, and the inexplicable decline of Dorcas and Elmer. The accompanying blog has some fascinating analysis of where the name trends come from: hint, it’s all about the vowels and consonants, and the celebrity babies.

Name trends tend to skip a generation, too, so the current crop of baby-bearers are more or less duty-bound to use what their parents think of as rest-home names, ones that smack of kindly moustachioed aunties in faded pinnies and nice old soldier uncles with beer breath and a chest full of medals.

I’ve noticed an expat trend as well: using names that speak eloquently of the home country. I know of several Baxters and Seddons and Kowhais out there, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of a Mansfield or two (but again, Savage and King Dick and Hamilton Jet are mysteriously still up for grabs). And in the Aussie contingent, keep an eye out for Matilda (Heath Ledger's new baby), and Adelaide and Banjo (courtesy of Rachel Griffiths).

But this can get you coming or going, depending on whether the children will flap godwit-like for the homeland, or spend their lives abroad. For a while, Tui was at the top of my list, for a boy or a girl. Gorgeous name (Niki Caro agrees!), gotta love the birdie. But American friends thought it sounded a bit too Wookie, and New Zealand friends all managed to chortle some version of “Yeah, right.” You can’t win.

The sibling preference is definitely worth taking into account, to a degree. I really wanted to call my little sister Bernina, and I could still sing you the jingle that inspired me, but I won't because Gemma doesn’t like being referred to as “so easy and so versatile.” Whether or not you plan to take advice from juniors, it is useful to run your test-names past a small pair of ears, as they are that much closer to the ground and can certainly fill you in on any playground resonances you may have missed yourself. Busyboy, for example, says that Finn reminds him scarily of sharks, and vetoed the venerable Piers by noting that to a child’s ear it is just one consonant off a male body part. Oops.

He also suggested Rosebush for a girl, but I’m damned if any child of mine is going to share a syllable with the guy who was responsible for the Titanic disaster. And he optimistically has a bid in for some version of his own name, although that’s taking the Bob the Builder recycling thing a bit far. To be fair, he also came up with a rather excellent moniker that we may yet use as a middle name. And in the end -- as the poet who spelt his name any old way reminds us -- a Rosebush by any other name will surely smell as sweet.

They say the fourth birthday is when you actually become conscious of birthdays, of past ones and future ones, and your corresponding position on the ever-ascending escalator of life. From what I’ve observed over the last couple of weeks, this is entirely true.

Yes, it’s time for a Busyboy birthday special, now we are four.

The day was celebrated with a small party and an airplane cake, which by late afternoon had been whittled away to a wrecked tail-piece marooned on a field of desiccated coconut, spookily reminiscent of Flight 901 for those of us who were alive in 1979. Favourite presents included an alarmingly complete toy doctor’s kit (they still use saws?!), which was immediately renamed “my midwife kit.” Pretty much everyone at the party had their blood pressure checked and their umbilical cord deftly snipped with the plastic scissors.

He had witnessed a couple of strategic purchases back in August, so the parental presents weren’t a total surprise. Nonetheless, he played along. “Oh, a battery-powered cable-car kit just exactly like the one Russell Brown’s kid has! My wishes came true!” he piped, like something out of Enid Blyton or E. Nesbit. He really does talk like this, I’m afraid – is it too many books, or just the inherent theatricality of the four year old?

One of the things that intrigues me about this business of child-rearing is how much, at any given moment, a child is their age as much as their essential self, as helpfully theorized by Louise Bates Ames and her colleagues at the Yale Child Study Center just up the road.

In other words, how much of what I see is Busyboy the unique, individual soul -- and how much is simply the universal spirit of Fourness? Are the traits I admire on Monday or deplore on Tuesday simply the calling cards of a cohort of October 2001 babies across the globe? (And is this true of life as a whole? Can it be said of someone that they are having a particularly Forty-Two day, or making decisions like a Twenty-Three Year Old?)

Another thing I wonder: how much credit for the mysterious amalgam of a person can really be claimed by a parent? I’m agnostic on this point, although gardening analogies suggest themselves. The seed contains the plant, yes; but you’d best treat it right if you want it to bloom as beautifully as it can.

So, a daffodil bulb will guarantee daffodils, but only as long as you plant it the right way up at the appropriate depth to begin with, and shovel some decent fertilizer in with it. A birch tree will never give you flowers in a vase, but will always shimmer fetchingly, and even more so if you pop it in a boggy, shady corner of the garden and leave it to its own devices. Possible rule of thumb for parenting, then: don’t put your daffs in the shade, or your birch in the sunniest spot, but between them you might just get the cottage garden of your dreams.

In any case, here is how Four looks around our house, these days. Bear in mind we’re only a couple of weeks into it, although very self-consciously so, in view of the imminent promotion to big brotherhood. The boy is not just four, he is FOUR! A BIG BOY! In his own eyes, practically a teenager. And he is also:

1. Obsessed with disasters As a family, we don’t watch much television -- a couple of hours a week of ploddingly genial Bob the Builder, and reassuring-friend-of-autistic-kids-everywhere Thomas the Tank Engine is about it. (Before you ask, the vile Barney is absolutely banned, although this awesome bootleg almost had me reconsidering -- NB not safe for work or kids).

The most dramatic televisual entertainment lately has been some deliciously reassuring hippie birth videos, in which babies float gently to the surface of birthing pools into the arms of their beautiful mothers and handsome, ringletted fathers. Sometimes siblings hop in the pool too, much to Busyboy’s delight, although I think I will draw the line at him bringing his beloved “mask-and-snorple.” (Home birth is a family event, but last time I looked, not a spectator sport.)

But we do wake up to the radio, and Hurricane Katrina and the Kashmir earthquake have been getting a lot of grim airtime.

Which has led to some creative new approaches to cleaning up toys; it used to be enough to dismantle the train layout, but now it must be swept away in a tide of toxic soup or uprooted by tectonic upheaval. Then there are the explosioning volcanoes, and the black holes, and the power cuts, and the train crashes and so on and so on.

The good news is that these don’t seem to be scary propositions at all, but Baden-Powell-like challenges to his capacity to be mentally prepared. There is always a magical solution to the disaster at hand involving jet planes and dinosaurs, or some real world cunning hack suggested by the estimable Bob (battery-powered lanterns and candles! Who knew?).

If the worst happens in our neighbourhood, I know who to ask for help.

2. Compassionate The upside of all the disaster news is a powerful new philanthropic urge. Just before Halloween, a local shop was giving away small cardboard boxes so kids could collect money for Unicef rather than candy for Mum and Dad to, er, discreetly dispose of. Busyboy grabbed three boxes - one for each of us - and as soon as we got home, he emptied his piggy bank to fill his own box. I found him scrabbling around in the cupboard for a stamp so that he could send money “straight to the kids in the earthquake so they can buy blankets for tonight.” He puts the rest of us to shame, he really does.

3. Politically aware The hurricane was a more troubling issue – a natural disaster, yes, but with significant human input. Somehow he picked up the notion that President Bush “didn’t care about the people,” and instantly became very censorious on the subject. “Oh, I hate that President Bush,” he would say, seditiously, “he’s just terrible at his job.” Not wanting to completely brainwash him, or, you know, get deported, I let the matter drop.

Then last week, we were in a bookshop, reading a kids’ book about the ill-fated Titanic. (His choice, not mine – an older friend has a copy of the same book, and it really is a riveting story, especially if you are into ocean liners in general). When we got to the part about how there weren’t enough lifeboats, I wondered aloud who was in charge of counting the passengers and making sure there were enough lifeboats for them all, because clearly they hadn’t done a very good job of it.

“Oh, probably President Bush,” was the instant reply, “and we should totally put him in jail.” Reckon the statute of limitations has run out on that one though, eh?

4. My favourite: Magical realist, to the max Channeling Borges and Garcia Marquez - with a dash of L. Ron Hubbard and Erich von Daniken - Busyboy tells endlessly entertaining tales of a place called South America. It is an extraordinary realm where anything is possible.

In South America, boy chickens lay eggs and nobody ever dies. Whenever you step on a crack in South America, a trapdoor opens up underneath you, which is both exciting and scary. You need to know that the land is largely frozen, and patrolled by transparent glowing robot police hippos, who travel on ice skates.

His Nonna and Poppa tried showing him photos of their own travels to a place they were pretty sure was South America, to no avail. “I know all about South America, and that’s not it.” Nope, it takes about fourteen days to get there on a plane, and when you do there is nowhere to stay because there are no people and no hotels (and the transparent glowing robot police hippos don’t run B & Bs, more’s the pity).

This South America has a rich and astonishing history. Brandishing a Lego construction that has five wheels and an indeterminate number of projecting bumps, he informs me: “This is a jet-jet. It was one of the first South American planes that was ever built. A hundred and fifty thousand years ago, when there was nuffing, even dinosaurs, or people, or cats, or dogs, or trees, or spiders, or anything else. That’s when this plane was built, when there was no anything, just nuffing. Just that plane. And robots. Actually, the plane was built by robots. Then the robots died out and the people came, and the dinosaurs. And that’s its real name, jet-jet. I didn’t make it up. That’s what they call it, in South America.” See, not a lot of people know that.

But the best part about this treasury of stories: there is an inexhaustible supply. “There’s lots more about South America,” he says, patting me on the arm. “When you’re a grandma, I’ll tell you the rest.” I’ll try to remember to hold him to that.

Hmmm. Just as Niki Caro’s first big-budget movie opens to very respectable reviews in the United States, the Weekend Herald runs a short piece based on selections from an interview Caro did with Slate.com.

Now, is it just me, or does the Herald’s re-write -- under the headline "Too Many Talented Kiwis Get Little Respect at Home" -- have a rancid whiff of negativity to it?

Reading the original interview over at Slate last week, I quite literally sat up straight with pride. Damn, I thought, we’re so professional when we need to be! Caro's answers are uniformly gracious, direct, and honest, whether she’s fending off the suggestion that talking about sexual harassment is so last century, or whether she’s telling the truth about how it's not necessarily always a hundred percent easy to be a film-maker, in New Zealand or elsewhere.

And the whole article is accompanied by a very hot pic. Caro is totally gorgeous. What’s not to like?

Which is why I choked on my toast when I read the Herald’s version of the same exchange. At first I couldn’t reconcile the entirely opposite vibes of the two different articles, but on reflection it seems the Herald’s trick is two-fold: first, select at most 200 words from a 1350 word piece, and then launch your negative spin in the very first sentence with a particularly charged verb:

Whale Rider director Niki Caro claims a colonial mentality is forcing many talented New Zealanders to fight for recognition.

Oho, she claims, does she? Amazing what you can do with a single word, isn’t it? One might have written that Caro “opines” or “says” or “believes” or “feels,” but no, she “claims” -- and we’re immediately in the realm of tendentiousness, ostentation, falsifiability, bluster.

In newspaperland, only really naughty people “claim” things, and of course they’re usually wrong. It’s no accident that the word invokes disputes, tribunals, and uppity demanding types who set themselves apart from the so-called rest of us with their noisy clamour and their sense of entitlement. Land, paternity, compensation for self-inflicted woes; defendant claims he was only doing 50, your honour. All mere baseless "claims." Y’know?

And spot the other journalese verbs at play here: “fight” and “force.” Are ya ready for a spot of cultural fisticuffs yet? Yeah? Think you can take on a disgruntled talented New Zealander? Huh? Huh? C'mon!

But read on. The snark is also there in the tsk-tsk way the Herald has framed its highly selective quotations. All else is carved away in order to get to grips with third-hand allegations of a “colonial mentality.” So we might reasonably expect a spot of critical analysis. Et voilà, Gray Bartlett is randomly wheeled on to agree -- in somewhat non-sequiturish fashion -- that the arts may well be under-loved compared to, say, rugby.

Ooh, scoop! Hold the front page!

And that’s it. But not before we wrap up with the money quote: Caro’s wistful declaration that she “never had a mentor, but would have liked one.” In the Herald piece, this comes out of nowhere, which gives it the feel of an adolescent argument-ending accusation, along the lines of “And one more thing! You never loved me!”

But in the original article it’s just a "Yeah, I wish!" answer to a direct and very sensible question from Slate’s Pamela Paul: "Have you had a mentor?" Given the vastly disproportionate number of ace New Zealand film-makers with world-class names -- a shortlist would number in the dozens -- it’s a reasonable ask. And a reasonable answer. Who hasn't wished for a fairy godmother or godfather, especially in such a demanding industry? I find it all the more impressive that Caro has achieved what she has without a benevolent hovering spirit. She's a latter-day Colin McKenzie.

What’s truly annoying is that there are real debates buried under this cheap “Our Niki hits big time, slams us, boo hoo” palaver. Like, do we do the mentor thing in New Zealand anyway? If not, should we? And why are we always encouraged to play sports and arts off against each other, as if they’re natural opposites (Black Grace, anyone? Haka? Foreskin’s Lament?) and as if it’s a zero-sum game in the first place? Also, how come we like our heroes world-beating, rather than just locally superb, and then suddenly we don’t like them any more?

Could we maybe talk about some of this? Or shall we just reflexively cut and paste from interviews by inquisitive foreigners? Which, if you think about it, is the real colonial mentality at work in this story.

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Nor is this the first time the Herald has pulled this particular move: remember the way they sandbagged Bic Runga last year? Russell blogged it at the time, with a direct link to the original story which has since been safely sealed off behind the Herald's pay-per-view "premium content" wall...

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... as, oddly, was the In the women’s mags gossip round-up when I idly clicked on it last Saturday. This is a definition of “premium” of which I was not previously aware. It must have just been a temporary glitch, as you can now read all about Ginger Spice’s sperm donor without cutting an annual cheque for ninety-nine bucks. Oh hooray.

But that freaky link got me thinking: damn, I miss Tapu Misa. Could some clever hacker unlock her from behind the subscription wall and just swap her for the pointless gossip column? A swifty guerilla Checkpoint Charlie manoeuvre that would make it a pleasure to read the Herald again?

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Back to the underloved arts: if you’re hanging round the Wellington train station next month and see a bunch of World War II soldiers, US Marines, spunky dames in seamed stockings, and oddly familiar faces behind the camera, be sure to say a warm, arts-lovin’ hello to the crew from Quarter Acre Pictures: Paolo Rotondo, Fraser Brown, and the lovely Gemma Gracewood. With the generous support of the New Zealand Film Commission (love ya!), a couple of dozen marvellous sponsors (you’re so beautiful!), an army of gifted professionals (mwah!), and a vast pool of willing extras (cheers!), they’ll be making a short film called Dead Letters.

It’s based on a short story by a little-known New Zealand writer who is currently working in New Haven, Connecticut. She doesn’t have a mentor, either; just lots of very sweet and helpful artsy friends with boundless energy and a messianic devotion to their respective fields, which is the next best thing. Maybe better.

And she claims it will be the best short film you'll see next year.

And this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature goes to... someone I’ve actually read! According to reports, when he received the early morning phone-call, Harold Pinter was at a bit of a loss for words. Well, yes, of course. That would be what we call Pinteresque in the extreme:

NOBEL COMMITTEE CHAIR: Hello? Mr Pinter?

Silence.

I mean, Sir Harold? Is that Sir Harold Pinter?

Pause.

HAROLD PINTER: Who wants to know?

CHAIR: Well, we have some news for him.

HAROLD: Who?

CHAIR: Pinter. Sir. Harold.

Pause.

If he’s home.

HAROLD: Let’s say... Let’s say he is.

CHAIR: Is he?

Pause.

HAROLD: Yes.

CHAIR: You’ve won the Nobel Prize for Literature!

Long, considering silence.

HAROLD: Fuck me.

CHAIR: Ah yes, you’d like that, wouldn’t you, you filthy old world-class playwright. Is that what the weasel is for?

HAROLD: What?

CHAIR: The weasel.

HAROLD: What weasel?

CHAIR: The one under the cocktail cabinet.

Long, uncomfortable silence, broken only by a squeaking sound.

You disgust me, Mr Sir Harold Pinter, Sir. (There is a spitting sound).

HAROLD: Sorry.

Silence

CHAIR: Well, anyway, congratulations and all that. So would you like the million dollars in cash, or cheque?

HAROLD: Er, cash sounds all right. And thank you...

Pause.

... I think.

CHAIR: You do. Too much if you ask me. Doesn’t he, Eddie?

HAROLD: Eddie? I don’t know any Eddie?

Pause.

Do I?

EDDIE: Hello, Harold. Long time.

HP: (He gasps).

Etc.

If you can't take the man as a writer, check out instead his compelling, not to say chilling performance as Sir Thomas Bertram in Patricia Rozema's film adaptation of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. Top notch.

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Speaking of disturbing locked-room dramas where you have no idea what the hell anyone is doing: how about Bush’s new nominee for the Supreme Court? I have no doubt that Harriet Miers is a smart woman, but she’s a jolly hard one to figure out. On the one hand, Bush’s radically conservative base is frothing at the mouth about her liberal tendencies (she gave $1000 to the Al Gore campaign! has ventured that gays and lesbians ought to have equal civil rights! a friend notes that she is personally pro-life but would also be able to uphold Roe v. Wade!). Others, like Andrew Sullivan, and former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully, kinda like her.

On the other hand, she has been quoted as saying that George W. Bush is the “most brilliant man” she has ever met. NB not “cunningest,” or “wackiest”or “dabbest hand with a chainsaw if you need some brush cleared,” but “most brilliant.” Unless this is some Mae West style covert slur on every member of the male gender, you’ve got to ask: what was she smoking?

And let's not forget the girlish mash notes Miers sent to Bush when he was still Governor of Texas. The best! U rock! I [heart] you George! My favourite is the one on an Anne Geddes card depicting chunky babies dressed in flowerpots to look like magic mushrooms. Harriet enthuses that she can't wait to "try some of the recipes." Uh-huh.

By the way, check out her awesome blog.

But seriously, the one conclusion that can definitively be drawn from the scraps of public information about Ms Miers is an important lesson for us all: trending to the right, politically, is just really, really, really bad for your hair. And she used to be so pretty! No disrespect, but girlfriend needs a makeunder, and fast. Even if big hair is some sort of secret Texan handshake.

Oh look, she got one.

Thing is, fashion critique aside, you want top legal minds on the Supreme Court (that's why they call it Supreme, not Middling). I’m not convinced she’d be a total disaster on the court, even if she wasn’t anywhere on the top ten lists, or even the top hundred. If she truly has a first-class analytical brain, strong non-ideological ethics, and a genuine passion for the field of law, she can pick the rest up on the job. Sometimes it’s smart to hire for raw talent and train for skills. And I say that fervently on behalf of unemployed arts graduates everywhere.

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Speaking of powerful women and desperate arts grads, I’m warming to the newest twist on The Apprentice, in which a monochromatic dozen or so neat-freaks and design buffs compete to be Martha Stewart’s newest employee.

Martha herself, looking none-the-worse for her recent bout of striped sunlight, is the same old gal; crushingly literal, mammothly pedantic, monumentally humourless despite a newfound ability to chuckle girlishly on cue. This domestic powerhouse has more in common with Henry Ford than, say, Plath or Picasso. She has about as “artistic” a persona as Gort, that stainless steel space robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

And truly, the first couple of episodes did stand pretty still. The teams split up, not along gender lines but according to professional background: Business Heads vs Creative Types. With silly names to match. The market-savvy team went with the faux-Latin “Primarius,” which has to be better than the frankly confusing “Matchstick” chosen by the other team. Apparently meant to symbolize the creative spark, it conveys instead a twiggy, disposable brittleness and reminds me of the old joke about the quality control department in the Irish match factory. “Zzzzzzip? Yep, that one works. Zzzzzip. So does that one. Zzzzzip…”

Strrrrike one for the creatives.

The tasks rely on equal parts creativity (or lack thereof) and salesmanship. First up was a job that looked a million times easier than it was: rewriting a classic fairy tale to appeal to kids. Tip: don’t frighten the littlies, nor suggest that small Manhattanites might like to wander the city unaccompanied: it’s parents who buy the books, and kids who ask them to. Duh.

The second week involved selling flowers. Not to give it away, but the winning strategy: if you’re aiming to sell something to stupid rich people, half of a big number looks like better value than a very very small number. Strange but true. And the next week was all about the wedding cakes, featuring one shaped like a cross between a boot and a cruise-ship. Because nothing says “I do” like a boot-shaped cruise ship.

As became almost immediately obvious, the team split was a huge mistake, one that only compounds with each task. If you’re looking to win a business-based competition, chumming up with a bunch of fellow highly-strung artistes is kind of a dumb idea. It’s like watching one of those hoop-jumping, child-rescuing superdog contests, only with a cohort of lean, mean former police dogs competing against a team composed entirely of well-fed purebred cats. It’s ugly, ugly television, let me tell you, and so much illicit fun to watch.

Here comes autumn. One minute we're enjoying the last blazing days of a Connecticut summer, and the next, Busyboy and I are filling our pockets with fallen chestnuts on the leisurely walk to daycare. We're doing voluntary carless days, at the suggestion of the youngest member of the household, so we “don’t have to buy too much petrol and we can save our money for bunk beds.”

I have to say we were both pretty disgruntled to see the President claiming this brainwave as his own and solemnly urging the populace not to take “unnecessary car trips.” Mmmm, you mean like this one, George?

So, did you notice how hard I’ve been working to prove Tze-Ming’s calculus about the appalling blog rate of women with jobs and children, versus the fancy-free rest of the world? Thought so. I blinked, and there went half of August, all of September, and a small chunk of October.

What happened? Well, after a fun six-week stint of pretty much 24/7 parenting, incorporating a trip back to New Zealand and the resulting jetlag, came the luxurious return to regular daycare and some quality time with the brand-new computer. Plus, I’m incubating Busytot: The Sequel, which can be a full-time job in itself, especially once you hit the nap-heavy second trimester.

The other thing that took me off the air was Hurricane Katrina. Only in a metaphorical sense; we’re nowhere near the Gulf Coast. But something about September disasters, especially when I’m pregnant and sensitive, really wobbles me. This one unfolded like a bad dream, and frankly, it did my head in.

You know that thought experiment where you design a society on the assumption that you have no control over where you ended up in it? In the last weeks, the veil of ignorance was definitively ripped aside, and the face of American poverty was revealed, for anyone who couldn't already see it: largely black, elderly and very young. The day before the hurricane landed (and two days before the levees broke) I listened to a New Orleans teacher on the radio, talking about lending fifty dollars here and there to his students’ families so that they could afford a tank of gas. And they were the lucky ones who had access to cars.

We all saw the ones who couldn’t get out (and part of what was so distressing was that the average person watching TV in New Zealand or the US knew more, sooner, than the federal government). People who only ever had the clothes on their backs anyway. Bewildered old folk in wheelchairs. Mothers of increasingly inconsolable children, or worse, children that were increasingly difficult to rouse. My heart broke for the mothers of the very young babies -- bottle or breast, either way you need good clean water to make milk. It was a barbaric sight.

The complex, deeply rooted, ongoing legacy of racism was abundantly on display, of course, and has been remarked upon and anatomized by too many others to link here. I was especially intrigued by two articles in the New Yorker: David Remnick on conspiracy theories, and Jon Lee Anderson's fascinating profile of Lionel Petrie and his Ninth Ward neighbourhood, via an account of Petrie's rescue eight days after the flooding.

The irresistible urge to compare yielded some telling similarities and some stark differences. It was like 9/11, except it wasn’t, because the hurricane was forecast in advance, so people could prepare as best as possible, whereas the 9/11 attacks… well, they certainly came as a surprise to those of us who hadn’t got any of the memos. Plus, the city of New Orleans had been there before and knew it might happen again, whereas New York... hmmm. Same buildings, even. Anyway, in New Orleans it only took Bush a couple of days to show up and rally the folks, whereas in New York... yes, well.

There are important differences, of course. Katrina was a natural disaster, as opposed to a deliberate act of aggression. Bin Laden’s hijackers destroyed a workplace, but apart from those who lived in downtown Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, most people had homes to escape to, whereas whole neighbourhoods in Louisiana and Mississippi have been obliterated. In the days after Rudy Giuliani averred that the casualty numbers were uncertain but would be “more than we can bear,” the estimates steadily dropped from five figures to four. Whereas down South, they climbed slowly higher and higher before dropping back to “several thousand,” with the official death toll now at around one thousand -- which is not, it should be pointed out, a small number of people. Most of the bodies are still unidentified nearly six weeks after the fact.

Most of the comparisons also dwelt on the speed or slowness of rescue efforts, and even the massive tsunami of last Christmas revealed a more efficient response. Oddly, the week of the hurricane I was reading about the Tarawera eruption, some hundred and twenty years ago. A proud village and a fun-time tourist attraction destroyed in a flash, followed by weeks of digging survivors out of the rubble and identifying the dead. Except even there, the timeline was not flattering to FEMA: the postmaster at Rotorua sent Morse Code messages to the capital and a rescue effort was launched that same day.

For my money, there were also striking similarities between Katrina and the Kobe earthquake of 1995, especially the mismanaged official response, and the radical inequity of the earthquake's impact.

Some days after the Kobe earthquake, then Prime Minister Murayama visited some survivors camped out in a school gymnasium to offer his condolences. He asked them to hang in there a little longer – “gaman” was the word he used, appealing to the Japanese preference for keeping a stiff upper lip under adversity.

Boy was he surprised when one feisty obaa-san, who like him had lived through the war and seen worse, drew herself up to her full four and a half feet and bellowed that in her opinion they had all persevered quite long enough and would gaman no longer, thank you very much.

Murayama was a genial fellow with spectacular eyebrows, an old-time socialist who had lucked in to the big job as part of a coalition deal. In the weeks after the earthquake, as anger grew over how the rescue effort had been bungled, his political career quickly eroded. The subway sarin attacks, two months later, were the last straw; natural disaster and terrorism combined to topple a government.

Hurricane Katrina is Bush’s Kobe, only instead of one stroppy granny telling him off in front of television cameras, we saw hundreds of sick, tired, sad, and helpless old people in wheelchairs, suffering in the heat. The mainstream media -- which, in the single most encouraging outcome of the whole disaster, finally got its balls back -- stepped up to tell him off. Bush's approval ratings have subsequently reached an all-time low. But will the displaced Louisianans still be living in tent cities four years from now?

We might also think of Iraq, of course; what with by the images of unclaimed bodies, and of children, the elderly, women holding families together, vast ranks of unemployed men trying to scrape by in debilitated neighbourhoods. If it takes two traumas to make a trauma, as Freud suggested -- you don’t truly register the first thud until the second shoe has dropped -- then the resounding boom of Katrina might have finally re-awakened the slumbering public to the ongoing debacle somewhat to the east of here. The (American) body count is similar in both cases. As is the price for reconstruction.

Of course there are differences here, too. Bush promised to rebuild the city of New Orleans just the way it was, only better (him and whose army, and whose several hundred billion dollars?). You could picture tentative hands being raised all over Baghdad, Basra, Falllujah, wondering if it might be at all possible to have the steaming crater on the corner turned back into the little coffee shop that used to be there? Fat chance, guys; I doubt that’s as high on Halliburton’s to-do list as making sure there’s still a Mardi Gras for the tourists to come back to.

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Meanwhile, back home it looks like Labour, despite the last minute bad news on the cost of the student loan interest write-off, and despite punting on the long-overdue chance to rejigger the tax thresholds, has scraped in again. Talk about a close shave. How did the wavering voters make their decision, in the end, after a couple of weeks tossing up what they might do with National’s tempting tax cut (new bathroom? Club Med? school fees?)... Maybe they took another look at the rest of the slate -- crypto-racism, global warming denial, cosying up to freaky fundamentalists and all -- and then a long, careful look at what was happening in the US, and asked the old Dr Phil rhetorical question: “So, how’s that workin’ for ya?”

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In other news, nice to see a New Zealander on this year's list of Ig Nobel Prize recipients (the prizes awarded to scientific research that "cannot, or should not, be reproduced"). James Watson of Massey University, won the Agricultural History Prize for his scholarly article, "The Significance of Mr Richard Buckley's Exploding Trousers."

And the prize for Literature? It went to:

The internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for using email to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters, each of whom requires just a small amount of money so as to obtain access to the great wealth they will share with you.

At last, the literature prize goes to someone whose work I've actually read!