I’m looking forward to Sex and the City III, where the Revolution comes and our heroines are sent off to a re-education camp. Many men would pay money to watch them scratch lice from the seams of their overalls with broken DKNY lenses and fight over stale bread. Blood is only thicker than fresh water: marine fishes leach water to the sea, but river fishes are constantly being diluted. My most entertaining haircut was in Berlin. I contemplated the result solemnly, said “Fantastische”, and all the hairdressers cracked up. Pitting a kilo of cherries is surprisingly gruesome. Spatters, stains, a bowl of glistening entrails. Cleanup felt like Dexter. This morning’s baking has been sorted into Eccles Cakes and Unsucceccles Cakes. An owl’s eye is as big as a human’s, an ostrich’s much bigger. Some bird eyes are so big they nearly touch, behind the scenes. Your eyeball is about an inch in diameter. This is perhaps the least-useful rule-of-thumb measure I know. Science isn’t everything, but we know the universe is 13.75 billion years old and 930 yottametres wide no thanks to astrology. A thesis is Death By Chocolate: eaten slowly in one go, by an unlucky few, who usually feel a bit ill afterwards. We were going to call our band The Boston Molasses Disaster, but were pre-empted by a band actually from Boston. Swans: avian hydrangeas. Discuss. In the midst of chaos and destruction, there’s no reason a gentleman can’t keep his beard neatly trimmed. @adzebill

Maui’s dolphin | © WWF & Will Rayment

Everyone wants to save the Maui’s dolphin. It’s either the world’s smallest dolphin or smallest marine mammal (depending who you read), and supposedly the most endangered: there are only about 55 left. A petition is doing the rounds to save the “most critically endangered marine species in the world” from extinction, partly by stopping iron ore mining on the seabed.

There’s one big problem, though. Maui’s dolphins don’t really exist, not in the same way that takahe or kakapo or short-tailed bats do. They’re not a distinct species, just a subspecies of Hector’s dolphins—in fact, it would be perfectly accurate to call them “North Island Hector’s dolphins”. And this has implications for their conservation.

Part of the problem is that people who should know better use technical terms like subspecies and species as if they were the the same thing, but there’s a world of difference. A subspecies is a population of animals or plants that looks a bit different from its relatives nearby. Critically, members of the subspecies are still perfectly-well able to breed with other members of their species. If a subspecies is isolated for long enough and become so different they it can’t interbreed any more, we call it, by definition, a different species. A species is a real thing, reproductively isolated and distinct from its nearest relative; a subspecies is just a formally-named variety, and what counts as a subspecies can be a matter of personal taste, reflecting how picky a biologist is. Some biologists refuse to even countenance subspecies and say, with some justification, that they’re not real.

Because biologists, like everyone else, are fond of large charismatic animals, it’s mostly mammals and birds that get fussily sorted into subspecies. This whole debate would be a non-issue if we were talking about an insect, or reptile, or fungus. The problem is if you split something into multiple subspecies you are almost guaranteed to create at least one rare, localised population, which then becomes in urgent need of conservation, and it’s problematic if ever-decreasing conservation funds have to be allocated to saving something that doesn’t really exist.

So what sort of thing is a Maui’s dolphin, then? Alan Baker and two colleagues measured bones of a dozen or so Hector’s dolphins from the North Island and few dozen from the South, and also compared their genetics. North Island Hector’s dolphins are a bit bigger, have a longer snout, and show some differences in their DNA—the sort of differences you would see if they’d been evolving separately from the southern dolphins for a few thousand years. (Thousands of years sounds like a lot, but it’s really nothing in evolutionary time.) Baker et al. (2002) named the northern population Cephalorhynchus hectori maui, and decided it would henceforth be called Maui’s dolphin, with the South Island population, confusingly, remaining Hector’s dolphin (Cephalorhynchus hectori hectori). Notice the triple-barrelled Latin names, which indicate both forms are just subspecies of Cephalorhynchus hectori.

(Maui’s dolphin is actually a pretty terrible name, as Maui didn’t identify, know about, or even see them, being, as he was, mythical. Baker et al. were naming them after the North Island, Maui’s fish—Te Ika a Maui—as that’s where they live, but the South Island is Maui’s canoe, and they live there too; it would be more appropriate, but a bad idea, to call them fish dolphins, or ika dolphins. Personally I think we should go back to cumbersome-but-accurate North Island and South Island Hector’s dolphins.)

Does all this pickiness about the difference between species and subspecies matter? Yes. Cephalorhynchus hectori are distinctive, unique beasts, not very much like other dolphins, and they’re only found here in New Zealand. Losing them would be a tragedy, because there’s no way to get them back. Maui’s dolphins are just those slightly-bigger Hector’s dolphins that live in the North Island, and if they died out the species would be be a little less varied, but, critically, it would still be here. It’s awful to lose a subspecies, but it doesn’t even compare to an actual species extinction; we’ve had plenty of those in New Zealand, and will be hard-pressed to prevent more.

It’s also important to look at these subspecies on a longer, evolutionary, timescale. The north/south split is, as you would guess, caused by Cook Strait; it isn’t a complete barrier, but Hector’s dolphins are coastal animals that prefer water less than 100 m deep, and most of the Strait is deeper. They can and do cross it, though, as the 2010 DoC survey found some South Island dolphins along the North Island coast. This species prefers cool water, so Maui’s dolphins are currently living close to the edge of their comfortable range, and population numbers might never have been very high.

But the North Island/South Island split is quite recent, and only temporary. Over the last couple of million years, New Zealand has been through about 20 ice ages, in which the world sea level dropped dramatically and our three main islands were joined into a single land mass. Back then, Hector’s dolphins would have lived as one continuous population in the cool waters around the entire coastline of that big island. Twenty times there has been a comparatively short warm period, called an interglacial (we’re in one right now), when the waters have risen, the islands have separated, and the North Island dolphins have been isolated from their kin and begun to evolve slightly differently. Twenty times they’ve been reabsorbed back into the fold. Maui’s dolphins have appeared and disappeared repeatedly for millions of years.

The species Cephalorhynchus hectori is in trouble: it’s been classified as Endangered since 2000 (IUCN 2011), and the population has dropped by 75% in the last 40 years, down to about 7000, largely from accidental bycatch in fishing nets. The response has been to ban commercial gillnetting in much of the dolphin’s habitat—coastal waters less than 100 m deep—though numbers continue to drop. I think it’s more important to stabilise the dolphin population than worry about whether or not they persist in the North Island. Most whales and dolphins, as their numbers recover, can recolonise their former range without assistance, and the fact that South Island Hector’s dolphins are still crossing Cook Strait suggests that would happen here too. Rather than worrying about seabed mining near Raglan, which is surely a comparatively minor threat, we should be fighting for Liz Slooten’s proposal: a gillnet and trawling ban across Cook Strait shallow waters so dolphins can get to the North Island unhindered.

Hector’s dolphin in Akaroa Harbour | Harald Selke / Tewahipounamu

Hector’s dolphins do need protection, but conservation organisations, journalists, and even the Department of Conservation are treating the North Island dolphins as if they were a distinct species about to go extinct, even comparing them to the moa. That’s irresponsible, and plays fast and loose with the facts at a time when we need to have those facts on our side.

References

Baker, Alan N., Smith, Adam N. H., and Pichler, Franz B. 2002. Geographical variation in Hector’s dolphin: recognition of new subspecies of Cephalorhynchus hectori. Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand 32(4): 713–727

IUCN. 2011. Cephalorhynchus hectori. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Accessed 20 March 2012.

The Science Media Centre provides a good overview of recent stories on Maui’s dolphin, and the WWF has a series of fact sheets that are informative although they don’t agree with my argument above.

And for journalists who claim Cephalorhynchus hectori is the “smallest” or “rarest”:

• Smallest marine mammal: the sea otter (Enhydra lutris), up to 45 kg.
• Smallest cetacean: probably the vaquita (Phocoena sinus), from the Gulf of California, 40–55 kg.
• Rarest cetacean species: the vaquita again (100–300 left).
• Rarest other marine mammals: the Hawaiian monk seal (Monachus schauinslandi), 1100 remaining, and the Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus), less than 600.

Books Acquired

• The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating | Elisabeth Bailey
• The Mouse and His Child | Russell Hoban
• Tales from Moominvalley | Tove Jansson
• Moominvalley in November | Tove Jansson
• Moominpappa at Sea | Tove Jansson
• The Ukulele Entertainer | Ralph Shaw
• Wulf | Hamish Clayton
• The Birthday Boys | Beryl Bainbridge
• Great Expectations | Charles Dickens
• The Flower Beneath the Foot | Ronald Firbank
• Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women | Ricky Jay
• Ravens in Winter | Bernd Heinrich
• Far From the Madding Crowd | Thomas Hardy
• The Mayor of Casterbridge | Thomas Hardy
• Yesterdays in Maoriland | Andreas Reischek
• The Voyage of the Narwhal | Andrea Barrett
• Oryx and Crake | Margaret Atwood
• The Penguin Modern Poets: Mersey Sound | Adrian Henri, Roger McGough, Brian Patten

Books Read

• The Sense of an Ending | Julian Barnes
• The Sisters Brothers | Patrick de Witt
• The Mouse and His Child | Russell Hoban
• Tales From Moominvalley | Tove Jansson
• The Third Policeman | Flann O’Brien
• The Road | Cormac McCarthy

Every time I go into town I accidentally buy two or three books.
—Philip Pullman, “Unpacking My Library”

Well. I’m obviously buying far more than I’m reading and I think we all know who’s to blame. The bookstores. Principal offenders this month were Hard To Find Books in Onehunga, where I picked up the long-sought Ricky Jay volume, and Time Out in Mt Eden, my favourite bookshop in Auckland and indeed all of New Zealand. From Smiths to Scorpio, all the fine bookstores of Christchurch were trashed in the earthquake, but they’ve sprouted again in shipping containers, or in the suburbs. Even amidst the devastation of Lyttelton, its used-book shop popped up again in a back room, and I found a nice clean 1950s edition of Reischeck’s 19th century wanderings around New Zealand. Prominently displayed in Time Out was The Sisters Brothers, frontrunner in the Best Cover Design of 2012 for me. The voice of the shlumpy psychopath Eli Sisters carried me through this parade of memorable vignettes and eccentric characters, and I could almost see how the Coen brothers would shoot some of the scenes.

Revisiting favourite childhood books is always a risk. I suspect the Willard Price zoo-collector stories that enthralled me in my youth would not bear up well today. The teenage protagonists were ignorant of CITES and animal ethics guidelines, and the fawning devotion of their various brown-skinned native guides would be a bit sickening. Plus having been a teenage boy at one point I would not trust one to organise a DVD rental, let alone an animal-collecting expedition to New Guinea.

So it was a relief to find The Mouse and His Child has lost none of its charm. I remember having it read to 10-year-old me, sitting on the mat in Burwood Primary School—now in the Red Zone and doomed, I think—but I couldn’t remember how it ended; a perfect reason to read it again, 33 years later, spurred by Russell Hoban’s death last December (which also prompted me to add Riddley Walker to the reading list). Surprisingly sophisticated and moving, with metaphorical depth lost on me the first time around, along with the Samuel Beckett parody. Hoban was adventurous and had no qualms about including, in what was supposedly a children’s book, words like chthonic, demiurge, capstan, and mansard.

I also grabbed re-issues of the last three Tove Jansson moomin books, and realised I’d never actually read Tales From Moominvalley, which was like finding $20 in my coat pocket. Gorgeous stories for kids that have deep resonance for adults—I’m working my way up to the darkest one, Moominpappa At Sea, which freaked me out as a child.

Michael Dirda’s review collection Classics for Pleasure inspired me to track down some authors I’d only vaguely heard of: Firbank was one, and Flann O’Brien another. I eventually figured out The Third Policemen was in the same vein as “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and The Man Who Was Thursday, but the ending was even neater than I anticipated. A fabulous piece of absurdism, both funny and unsettling, told in a dry and elliptical tone in a distinctly roundabout Irish way.

The latest Julian Barnes was read almost entirely in one sitting on the Cook Strait ferry. Barnes likes to make you gradually re-examine both the narrator’s motives and the theme of the whole book. He did it in Flaubert’s Parrot and A History of the World, and tries it again here. It wasn’t completely successful for me, but the biting observations of the unreliable narrator are fun, and it’s a beautifully-crafted examination of the nature of history (explicitly so) and memory.

I’ll save The Road until I can compare it with Riddley Walker, next in the queue. This grand reading scheme seems to be working, in one sense: I’m making time in the evenings to open a book, not just aimlessly cruise the Internet. The next step will be to throttle back the acquisitions. Which might be harder.

World Sweet World magazine suggested wrapping paper is unsustainable and we should all give each other biscotti for Xmas. They gave a sample biscotti recipe. Every ingredient is imported, except for four eggs. And the flour they forgot to include. The best idea I heard today: arrange the entire score of The Sound of Music for a costumed ukulele ensemble. Bearded uking nuns = sublime. I hope @justinethinks’s Sound of Ukulele Music plan doesn’t include dancing, because crossdressing ukulele nuns DANCING is just silly. Wouldn’t The Sound of Music be better without all those Nazis? They don’t even get any songs. Alternative staging: keep the Nazis, add chorus of Austrian jews gradually led offstage through show. “So long, farewell…” What the world needs is a mashup of The Sound of Music and its contemporary, West Side Story, pivoting on Maria. With those classic songs “I’ve Just Met a Problem Like Maria”, “Climb Evr’y Mountain Tonight”, and “Gee, Gauleiter Krupke”. It’s a shame “Ich liebe leben in Österreich” isn’t grammatical, because it scans better than the English. If you think science removes our “sense of wonder”, compare the Tuwharetoa account of Taupo’s origin (guy threw a tree) with the real one. Namely, a gigantic explosion heard round the world, and the skies turning blood red over China and Rome. “Eat Pray Love” listed as someone’s favourite book raises a red flag; “Eat Love Pray” raises a whole fluttering regiment. If you want me to open your spammy attachment, my good sir, you’ll need to choose a more trustworthy name than Mr Milosevic. @adzebill

(Appeared in a modified form in the NZ Herald Online)

“Have you signed the Pledge?”, people kept asking me in the months after February. The Pledge was a register of people who were committed to staying in Christchurch; copies were made available for signing in public places, and the whole thing was to be bound and presented to the mayor. Curiously, all the people badgering me seemed not to be in a position to leave: trapped by dependents, job, unresolved insurance, or an unsellable house. One should only pledge to stay if one is free to go; I was, and didn’t pledge, because I don’t like loyalty oaths. This was before the June 13 quakes. And the December 23. And the thousands in between. You don’t hear much about the Pledge any more.

After the first quake shock had worn off, there was an unexpected elation in the air. People were itching to reclaim the rubble and turn destruction into a fresh start. The Gap Filler project screened outdoor movies in an empty lot, and made a book exchange out of an old fridge; Greening The Rubble built parks where there used to be buildings. The urge to help – to do something – filled community meetings and swamped the City Council with suggestions for the rebuild, giving rise to that utopian document the Central City Plan, which painted a picture of tree-lined cycleways, green markets, and inner-city apartments. Not only would the quake damage be fixed, so would decades of urban sprawl and central city neglect. Ponies for everybody. Ponies with free wireless.

Afire with the spirit of the Revolution, I approached the owner of the neighbouring empty lot. It was going to be sitting unused for a year or two; could we turn it into a community garden? The Cashel St Victory Garden began with a working bee, adults and kids sowing seeds and planting a bed of lettuces edged with recycled bricks. The quake had uncapped an artesian well, so we had a pond and a trench for growing watercress; our digging unearthed fragments of Victorian crockery. There were grand plans: creating garden beds for all the neighbours, seeking sponsorship, even building a team to help create more gardens around the city.

Three days later it had been paved and turned into a Wilson Parking lot.

Apart from a fortnight when I was barred from my apartment by a police cordon, I’ve been living in the central city since the February quake, watching earthquake tourists circle the Red Zone on sunny weekends, and seeing buildings gradually disappear week by week. I’ve watched the crack in my wall get slowly wider, and energy and optimism leak away, replaced by frustration, cynicism, and a dawning realisation that bringing a heart and life back to the city will take a decade or longer. And that the only people who can speed that up are politicians and insurance companies, not citizens.

We’ve said our piece, and now we wait.

The favoured dismissal for those leaving was “doing a runner”. Cowards fled; they probably never loved Christchurch anyway, or so said people who seemed to be trying to convince themselves to stay. An All Black recently claimed we’re scared and should harden up instead of running. Nobody’s had the guts to tell me that to my face. Those praising us for our supposed “resilience”, or accusing us of cowardice, seem to be projecting their own fears and needs onto ordinary people who aren’t exemplars of anything.

The funny part is, I was planning on quitting Christchurch two years ago, and suspect I’ve only stuck around through bloody-mindedness. I’ve watched my friends and neighbours leave in ones and twos, to Wellington and Auckland, and finally decided I was going too. Who wants to live for a decade in a wasteland, where we’re told we should be excited about shopping malls? The signs on the back of the buses implore us, with a big red heart, to love Christchurch—love it or leave it, I guess. But this is a city without a heart, and I no longer have it in me to stay.

For a while now I’ve been buying more books than I read. Reading is slow, but buying books is so quick sometimes the sensible bits of your brain cannot intervene fast enough. Having all my books in LibraryThing for a while, though, makes the mathematics of the problem clear. Acquiring 50–100 books a year and reading one only every week or two means, through the application of pitiless Malthusian logic, that I’ll die with over 1000 unread books in an enormous teetering pile beside my bed. This is a good argument for investing in ample shelving, or moving to a remote island and reading for three years, or perhaps even for frittering away less time on the Internet. Something had to be done.

To exert some control over the problem, and I am admitting it’s a problem, I decided to monitor my incomings and outgoings over this year (humiliatingly like a Weight Watchers food diary) and to come up with a plan: a reading list I could consciously work my way through. Like a shopping list for someone who only hits the supermarket when they’re hungry. Compiling such a list, picked by the Listener Best Books of 2011 and suggestions from my well-read partner D, was the easy part.

• Atwood, Margaret | Cat’s Eye
• Atwood, Margaret | Oryx and Crake
• Bailey, Elisabeth | The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
• Bakewell, Sarah | How to Live: a Life of Montaigne
• Barnes, Julian | The Sense of an Ending
• Burke, James Lee | Feast Day of Fools
• Clayton, Hamish | Wulf
• DeWitt, Patrick | The Sisters Brothers
• Dickens, Charles | Great Expectations
• Druett, Joan | Tupaia
• Duncan, Glen | The Last Werewolf
• Dyer, Geoff | Otherwise Known as the Human Condition
• Egan, Jennifer | A Visit from the Goon Squad
• Eugenides, Jeffrey | Middlesex
• Eugenides, Jeffrey | The Marriage Plot
• Farrell, Fiona | The Broken Book
• Firbank, Ronald | The Flower Beneath the Foot
• Grimshaw, Charlotte | Opportunity
• Hardy, Thomas | The Mayor of Casterbridge
• Hitchens, Christopher | Arguably
• Hoban, Russell | Riddley Walker
• Hollinghurst, Alan | The Stranger’s Child
• Kelly, Kevin | What Technology Wants
• Lanier, Jaron | You Are Not a Gadget
• McCarthy, Cormac | All the Pretty Horses
• McCarthy, Cormac | The Road
• Mukherjee, Siddhartha | The Emperor of All Maladies
• O’Brien, Flann | The Third Policeman
• Phillips, Arthur | The Tragedy of Arthur
• Quigley, Sarah | The Conductor
• Redniss, Laura | Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie—a Tale of Love and Fallout
• Ross, Alex | Listen to This
• Ross, Alex | The Rest is Noise
• Shirky, Clay | Cognitive Surplus
• Smiley, Jane | A Thousand Acres
• Smith, Jennie Erin | Stolen World: a Tale of Reptiles, Smugglers, and Skullduggery
• St Aubyn, Edward | At Last
• Stephenson, Neal | Anathem
• Stewart, Rory | The Places In Between
• Tremain, Rose | Music and Silence
• Trevor-Roper, Hugh | The Last Days of Hitler
• Unsworth, Barry | Sacred Hunger
• Unsworth, Barry | The Quality of Mercy
• Vann, David | Caribou Island
• Wallace, Alfred Russell | The Malay Archipelago
• Wells, Peter | The Hungry Heart
• Wilson, Tim | The Desolation Angel

Though this looks a little like one of those Great Books One Must Read lists, it’s anything but. I’ll still be compulsively reading randomly, but this should cut down on the impulse purchases. And having a deliberate goal will surely help me set aside more reading time—something that I’ve noticed has been declining every year, with the competition from Twitter, Facebook, ukulele practice, movies, DVDs from Fatso that must be watched, and all the other demands on my free time. In part, this is an experiment to see if reading can be as important as I remember it being in my youth, or even in graduate school.

So the question then occurred to me: how long should it take to read this list? Am I being unrealistic? Once again, LibraryThing to the rescue (seriously, if you love your books I can’t recommend this site enough). The list adds up to just over 16,000 pages. That’s 307 pages a week, or 44 pages a day. I tested my reading speed with The Road, and seem to cruise along at 20 pages every 15 minutes. So if I can read half an hour a day, perhaps an hour a day on weekends, I should get through them all. He said blithely. Let’s see.

Orange: the only juice for which manufacturers can claim, “No no, we meant the COLOUR.” Bemused by people who can afford a computer and broadband but email me because they’ve run out of prepay minutes on their phone. If Beck and Palin had announced their 2012 Presidential candidacy on 9/11, then the terrorists would have won. Also, the Mayans. On the cover of Handwriting Analysis for Dummies, the title is set in Comic Sans. What is the author trying to hide? An online review of Decline and Fall describes Evelyn Waugh as “not my favorite post-modern author.” God bless user-created content. Imagined UC Library suggestion box: “Could the ‘Library is being munted by an earthquake’ announcements be in English and Māori, please.” My friend’s new kitchen has so much cupboard space it could inconspicuously house a small nocturnal child. It’s all fun and games until the pale-skinned sunbather realises the swan thinks he is a lady swan. Even if a student has an amusing name, I really shouldn’t make up nursery rhymes about them. Force de frappe. Does anyone have a wussier name for its nuclear arsenal than France? Scary as a wet slap. Why are those folks most clueless about the internet—even self-described technophobes—the ones convinced they can make money off it? Ignorance is seen as a barrier to getting rich from medicine, property investment, or racehorse breeding. But the Web’s fair game, it seems. My mum, looking for an easy-to-remember phone number, was chuffed to find that one ending in “666” was strangely not taken. Now every time I call her I shall think, “Hail Satan, Mum.” @adzebill

Natural disasters create a surge of helplessness in those not directly affected. Many people want to do something concrete, something more than a quick donation or a Like on Facebook. Nowadays this desire to help can be harnessed by social media, but it’s easy to waste the time and goodwill of volunteers if this isn’t managed well.

On October 5th, the cargo ship Rena ran aground on a reef near Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty, a couple of hour’s drive from Auckland, New Zealand. It leaked 350 tonnes of fuel oil, which blanketed nearby beaches and killed or injured dozens of seabirds and seals, among them Blue Penguins (Eudyptula minor), the most common penguin species around New Zealand coasts. Thousands of volunteers went to Tauranga to help shovel oil-soaked sand, and veterinary specialists set up a facility for cleaning oil-soaked birds. The Rena spill was and is a national tragedy, and all around the country people wanted to know what they could do to help.

Back in 2000 a similar oil spill near Phillip Island, Australia, left many Blue Penguins oil-covered, and a bird rescue team through trial and error developed a little knitted sweater (or jumper, in Australian) that would keep penguins warm and stop them from preening oily feathers. The Tasmanian Conservation Trust organised a knitting drive, hoping volunteers could supply them with 100 or so. As often happens with unmanaged email requests, it was wildly over-successful: they ended up with 15,000. The Trust page now politely requests people stop sending them jumpers; they’re supposedly filling a small room somewhere waiting for a gigantic oil spill, but are actually being sold at the Phillip Island gift shop, adorning toy penguins.

© saskyumchar on Ravelry

Six days after the Rena grounded, in a discussion forum on the knitting website Ravelry, one keen knitter posted the Australian penguin sweater pattern, and said a friend’s daughter was in contact with the bird rescue crew, and there were Blue Penguins in need of sweaters. A Napier wool shop, Skeinz, volunteered to receive completed sweaters and send them on to Tauranga. Having seen what happened in Australia, I created a Ravelry project page that anyone knitting could link to, partly to make a gallery of completed sweaters, but mostly so there was a single place that allowed control over the message and would let me notify knitters when enough had been received.

My concern from the start was that we had no direct link to actual rescue workers: our only contact was the coordinator’s friend’s daughter, who was “in touch with” the veterinarians (note the similarity to that classic “friend-of-a-friend” setup we see in urban legends), and all communication was by two-stage mail, channeled through Skeinz in Napier. The coordinator at Skeinz then went on holiday, and the fun began.

First the pattern was linked to by multiple different forums in Ravelry, and knitters from all over the world got busy. Then it started being emailed to knitters not on the network. Most critically, the call to action, full pattern, and mailing address were posted in the Skeinz online newsletter, where anyone could link to it, up to October 25th. And link to it they did: knitting blogs, conservation websites, the popular craft site Etsy, the Huffington Post, and the world’s most-read blog, BoingBoing.

© beforesunrise on Ravelry

Hundreds of sweaters started flooding in, far outnumbering the rescued penguins. Skeinz was contacted by local and international media wanting pictures of cute penguins in sweaters. The organiser’s holiday coincided with a long weekend, so there was another delay in shutting down the campaign. But by now the horse had bolted, as the online newsletter content remained unchanged and was easy enough to copy and paste into emails; the penguin sweaters had gone viral.

And by now it turned out that none—not one—of the sweaters was actually used. The rescued penguins were being kept in warm water and recovering under heat lamps, much less stressful for wild birds than dressing them in a cute knitted sweater. Nobody seems to have asked the vets and rescue workers if they in fact needed penguin sweaters, and those interviewed seemed a bit surprised by the international knitting effort.

The end result is that “hundreds, possibly thousands” of unneeded sweaters will continue arriving at Skeinz. The organiser claimed, “the sweaters were a way for people to help, even if they weren’t going to be used.” Apparently the sweaters will be sent to a conservation group in Australia, though with crates of penguin jumpers already in storage it’s hard to see when they’ll ever be needed; some might be sold for unspecified fund-raising purposes. It all seems like rather a poor use of thousands of hours of volunteer effort: the knitters would have made more of a difference supplying gloves and hats for the volunteer clean-up crew, or donating a few dollars to Greenpeace, or writing to their MP with their views on maritime safety or offshore oil drilling. Knitters didn’t sign up to make sweaters for sale; they made them for penguins.

© jenromero on Ravelry

So history repeats itself in the Great Penguin Sweater Call To Arms, and the result is once again squandered effort and goodwill. This is an example of how not to use social media to rally the troops; how should a similar effort be organised in the future? Enlisting the crafting skills of volunteers really can work: see for example the knitting drives of WWII, the Knitted Periodic Table project, or the campaign to knit a cosy for the shipping containers of Christchurch. Here’s what I’d do, if we had a chance to rerun the project:

1. Set up a dedicated website: say, using a WordPress blog (these can be updated from any computer) or even a Facebook fan page. Registering a domain name would help its credibility and make for more concise links.
2. Make sure all URLs in tweets, emails, and forum postings point to that top-level domain name (e.g. www.volunteerproject.org), not an individual page with a knitting pattern (www.volunteerproject.org/whattoknit.html).
3. Get the visible support of the group being helped: say, a short message and photo from them on the home page. In this case, perhaps show a sweater actually being worn by an actual rescued Tauranga penguin. Most importantly, the group being helped should also have editing privileges for the site, so they can correct mistakes and add a news release as soon as any target is reached.
4. Date-stamp everything, especially any page that might be linked to or emailed out of context. Add day-to-day updates on targets: the number of rescued birds, how many sweaters received, and so on, so volunteers can judge whether their effort is still needed.
5. Keep any pattern or instructions from being emailed. Make the instructional text hard to copy and paste by embedding pictures and CSS styles, so it’s more convenient for a supporter to just pass on the page URL (write out the URL on the page itself and tell them to only mail this). Block search engine spiders so the pattern won’t be indexed (and cached) by Google, only the home page. The goal is to have the pattern existing in just one place, on that web page.
6. Put the mailing instructions on a different page from the pattern, preferably the main page. Make sure this has a press kit link and instructions for media, in case the whole thing goes viral.
7. And when the target is reached, put a big THANK YOU on the home page, post a gallery of the finished project (say, happy penguins in their sweaters), and… take the pattern down.

Phrase I did not expect to read in a Dashiell Hammett crime story: ‘“I knew a fellow once in Onehunga,” he drawled…’ (Nightmare Town, 1924) Amazingly, nostalgic about paying $14 to see a DVD projected onto a screen the size of a bath towel in a 15-seat cinema. Much like watching at home, except you can’t pause for toilet breaks, and there are three complete strangers on your couch. Great Zoological Discoveries 27: Cows sound just like people saying “moo”. Or, sometimes, trying to muffle screams of agony. Amazing new tool for de-cluttering computer desktop: put everything in a folder called “Desktop [Sort]”, never to be heard from again. I used to be disgusted by people who ate raw cookie dough, but now I find there are folks who eat raw frozen pizza. Thanks, Internet. Why should del.icio.us be the only one having fun with country codes? Quick, nicega.ms is free. Also goldarn.it, gottabe.in, iyamwhati.am, fakesteve.jobs, and (very proud of this) jorgeluisb.org.es Kazakhstan is apparently still hung up on Borat. Just let it go, Kazakhstan. Let it go. Everything made much more sense when I realized Tom Waits is a werewolf. If you see a car with Hawai’i plates in the mainland US and steal it, there’ll be a pot of gold in the trunk and you’ll get a wish. I think we’re all in agreement that the biggest letdown with Inception was the lack of a Joseph Gordon-Levitt dance sequence. Call me stuffy, but I refuse to buy my kazoos from someone who believes in Atlantis. Dear Mr Obama: why not come and be President of New Zealand? I guarantee less than 18% of us think you’re Muslim. Apparently I appeared in a friend’s dream and yelled, “You can’t stomp on Incas: they’re part of history!” I’d heard of Robert Evans’ success, downfall, comeback, book, audiobook, and movie, but a cartoon show too? That, my friends, is a career. The fastest starfish is the Sunflower Star, Pycnopodia helianthoides, which can reach 75 cm/minute, or 0.045 km/hr. Starfish racing would be like greyhound racing, but more restful. And with a terrified fleeing abalone. @adzebill

Auteurs are not like you and me. For example, the German director Werner Herzog is at first glance something of an eccentric. When you learn more about him, however, you realise he is not simply an eccentric, but an ECCENTRIC, written in foot-high capitals carved into an enormous granite boulder that has crushed our will to live.

Recently there was a fad for listing fake facts about actor Chuck Norris: “When Chuck Norris does a pushup, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the Earth down.” These even have their own website, novelty book, and amusing t-shirt.

After reading a recent interview, I realised that one could compile a similar list of Facts About Werner Herzog.

It would be just like chucknorrisfacts.com, except everything would be true.

1. Werner Herzog was invited to guest star on The Simpsons, but asked for a DVD because he had never seen an episode.
2. Werner Herzog saw Avatar, but didn’t care what happened in it.
3. Herzog was once shot during an interview but rather than stop, tell the police, or get first aid, he kept speaking dourly.
4. Herzog hates introspection so much he won’t look in a mirror and so doesn’t know the colour of his own eyes.
5. To propose to his wife, Werner Herzog walked a thousand miles across the Alps, because that is what a manly man does.
6. Herzog (unlike Oliver Stone) read the Warren Commission Report into the JFK Assassination. He quite enjoyed it.
7. Werner Herzog only respects people who know how to milk a cow, and he can tell who knows how just by looking at them.
8. Klaus Kinski and Herzog simultaneously plotted to kill each other; Herzog was about to firebomb Kinski’s house, but was too scared of his big dog.
9. More people die in Werner Herzog’s movies than Chuck Norris’s if you count his crew.
10. Herzog thinks of himself as a little girl in a fairy tale who steps out at night and holds open her apron and stars rain into it.

If you were to put these on a t-shirt, I think Herzog himself would hunt you down, fix you with his pitiless gaze, and anatomise your sad buttonless-shirt-wearing hipsterness until you cried. This is, after all, a man who really believes the twentieth century was a mistake; the entire twentieth century. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.