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Home / New Zealand

<i>Greg Dixon:</i> For whom the wind blows

By Greg Dixon
NZ Herald·
5 Oct, 2008 02:59 PM4 mins to read

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Opinion by

KEY POINTS:

Finally, my own blog. Thank heavens that other fellow seems to have had some sort of breakdown. "On strike" he's calling it, though how one goes about going on strike over the apparent passing of a small, booger-green bonbon is beyond me.

Actually I don't believe him
for a minute when he says he is holding his breath and stamping his feet until they bring back Snifters. In fact, I have developed a persuasive alternative theory about King James and his Jacobite-sized revolt. His surname is Griffin. This is a compelling clue.

As a trained observer, I can see that there is a clear correlation between the surname Griffin and the company named Griffin's. Might James be an heir to a biscuit fortune? Is he a confidant of the Cookie Bear? Might he, in fact, have more than a little to gain from doing down Snifters' makers Cadbury, a rival of Griffin's in the ongoing struggle to part small children from their pocket money on their way home from school?

I leave it to you, as a member of the Court of Public Amnesia, to decide on what might motivate a man who so recently put himself forward to be a weather god and who has, if the rumours are true, made an outrageous fortune on the back of the misfortune of some poor sods from out West.

Still, another man losing his Jaffas is this man's opportunity to join the deer velvet industry of the early 21st century: internet blogging. Never have so many rushed head-long, like so many demented lemmings, to leap over the cliff of self-absorption only to die horribly on the rocks of their own craptitude.

I, too, wish to throw myself off the bluff of narcissism and strained analogy. I, too, wish to be sucked under by the exciting eddy of having five people leave a comment. It used to be that the only way one was able to inflict one's thoughts on the great unwashed was to be elected to public office, to become a man of the cloth or to sweat out your working years inside the grim factory of journalism before retiring into grumpiness, dry alcoholism and column writing. But thanks to the mobocracy of the internet, any idiot - and I am such an idiot - can join the herd like never before.

Indeed contrary to what you might have heard, the word "blog" is not derived from the term "web log" but is in fact a contraction of "mob logic", something I have been specialising in for years. On almost any given subject I can tell which way the wind is blowing, whether it's the cold wind of public contempt, whether it's a hot wind of outrage, whether it is a gale force wind of donation controversy blowing a government out to sea, or whether it is a zephyr, gently wafting us in to the harbour of understanding and conciliation.

All of which means I can tell you exactly how the country is feeling just a month or so out from a general election. It's feeling like me: tired of being buffeted by all this damn wind.

Of course I should have a blog - I should have had one for years - and I have spent much of the last week researching other blogs to discover what it is that appeals to the mob. It seems that underlining parts of sentences is popular, apparently for emphasis - one should never overestimated the herd's capacity to get your point.

Other than that it appears one should feel free to put the world to rights using one tedious anecdote at a time. I have thought of a name for this blog: Not Known At This Address. And I have also extended invitations to a wide variety of people you have never heard of to join me. We will be settling old scores, insulting people whose politics we don't like and scorning the tired old print media, a medium struggling to compete with the internet's ability to deliver bag loads of worthless opinion.

Anyway enough introduction, what I really want to say in my first foray into online opinion is that it's vitally important that you don't vote for that swine... Oh. I seem to have run out of space. Bloody internet.

* James Griffin is on strike until Snifters are saved.

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