Intelligent Design ( & Art Direction)

The more things change, the more they apparently stay the same, as someone said at some stage, somewhere. I think it may have been Devo, actually.

According to Steve Braunias in the big Sunday paper today, Charles Darwin visited New Zealand in 1835 on a masters rugby tour and he thought it "sucked shit bigtime". (For such a serious scientist, he sure had a potty mouth.) Anyway, Chuck Darwin visited Russell back in the day to do the Fullers trip through the hole in the rock and found the settlers were the "very refuse of society" and the beach was strewn with broken booze bottles. (Back then of course, the legal drinking age was 6 months, but kids as young as 2 months were crawling into bottle stores and buying earthenware flagons (early RTDs) using false IDs. Sometimes they got an older brother to buy it for them. We digress). Nothing much has changed. Darwo, at the time, apparently suggested to Governor Hobson or whatever his name was that a liquor ban on beaches and public spaces would probably reduce crime and other burning colonial teething problems. He quite rightly pointed out that we were a fledgling nation of absolute pissheads. "Shouldn't you raise the drinking age to 20?", suggested Charlie at the time. Did the colonial government listen? Did they fuck. It took another 160 years before the current Labour ubersturmbahnfuhrer's Thought Police started to realise maybe 18 is too young to have kids getting pissed and driving their hot-hatches at high speed into trees, and by that time I'm afraid Darwin was history."Told you so",he would have said.

Interestingly,if Darwin had visited New Zealand today, he would probably have done what Mike O, Nick Worthington, Catmur and all those other big-thinking Brits have done. Get a big job, have big ideas, make big things happen, buy a big place on the beach, and spend lots of time catching big fish in a little country at the bottom of the world. Catmur or Mike O would have taken him out on their boat, and Chazza would have had the time of his life - possibly even caught a 20 pound Kawhai on a salt fly.

Of course, if Dars had liked NZ and wangled himself a job with Colenso ( originally formed to bring the first printing press to nz or something - Hylton Mackley was running the whole show back in the 1830s, he'll be able to fill you in on the full story) then the world wouldn't have been blessed with Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Or would it? In fact, The Origin of the Species probably would have been bigger, more original and backed up with a smart ambient campaign, a few busbacks, adshels, a truly interactive read/write website. And the Darwinster would have had a blog, not just a log. JPGS instead of drawings. Maybe even streaming video and a link to GoogleEarth, which would have been quite useful back then. hell, even Google Maps would have saved everyone a lot of trouble. George Bush would never have risen from the Texas swamp to rule America... hey, we might never have needed to have the Darwin Awards.

Have a look at the UK viral mentioned in the post below. And thank your lucky stars you live and work in little new Auckland and not dirty old fuckn' London.

Brainias' feature is probably at www.stuff.co.nz . It's a good Sunday read. Much better than this one.

Apologies to Unauthorised History of NZ who were the first to uncover Russell's seedy past and present it to a disbelieving and thoroughly shocked nation. Let's hope that series gets a re-run soon... it was over way too quickly.