The alternative Kiwipedia
Aren’t I lucky, I got a chunky bit.
The phrase “clean, green New Zealand” does not, as is often mistakenly suggested, refer to our high standard of environmentalism. Far from it, in fact. Nor does it refer to the colour of our deepening national envy for Australia.
It refers, rather, to the state of our healthy, if oddly coloured, collective colon.
Doer-Uppers Dream..?
New Zealand has a great many beautifully preserved character buildings and colonial villas. Ideal locations, in other words, in which to turn a fast profit by demolishing, sub-dividing and replacing them with brown, ‘Nouveau-Tuscan’, leaky townhouses and windowless shoebox apartment blocks.
Nothing too fancy, thanks, mate.
Most countries in the world like coffee. But only New Zealand actually wants to marry it.
Formerly a nation of PG Tips and Nescafe drinkers, around the late 1980s to early 90s, Kiwis embraced coffee hard. The real-coffee revolution started with young, urbane women and gentlemen considered ‘light of foot‘, but it wasn’t until the invention of the Flat White – half way between a Cafe Latte and a Cappuccino, only minus the effete European name (a coffee, in other words, that no-nonsense Kiwi men could at last order in public without fear of sounding ‘like a bloody shirt-lifter’) - that our national obsession really took off.
Really?
Georgie Pie – New Zealand’s own answer to McDonalds, featuring meat pies instead of burgers – began life in the 70s. But in the early 1990s, a ‘perfect storm’ of events significantly boosted the fortunes of the company, triggering a rapid over-expansion of franchises which, like all great empires, eventually caused the company to implode.
And even though Georgie Pie is also the single biggest contributing factor to an alarming rise in teenage bowel cancer during the same period1, Kiwis, particularly late 20s and thirty somethings, still get all misty eyed at it’s memory, and fall over themselves in support of any to bring it back. So why is this?
Other People’s Shit