Brian Rogers Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

You'll need to read this column slowly, as it has been written slowly.

Due to personal injury; dislocating several body parts in a mishap while pursuing a fly around the office.

Clearly the brain was already dislocated when I thought it a good idea to chase a blowfly, using the first magazine grabbed off the desk. It just happened to be a copy of ‘The Dissector' Journal of the Perioperative Nurses College of the New Zealand Nurses Organisation.

Man, the fly saw that title coming and didn't know which way to buzz.

I've no idea why the good people at ‘The Dissector' thought I needed a copy, unless they had a premonition about a blowfly plague heading my way.

You'd be surprised at the stopping power of 48 pages of ads for endoscopic tissue retrieval bags and a feature on the development of anaesthesia in World War I.

The result was one blowfly in trauma and one magazine wielder presenting symptoms of muscle strain and hyperventilation.

I'd like to thank nurses everywhere for your part providing us with a journal capable of stemming the spread of disease and the tirade of annoyance from the common house fly.

Unfortunately, I may also need your services in recovery from said journal-swinging activity.

Insidious slick

Here's the good oil. And the bad. RR goes international this week, due to a lack of much local or national news of note. When playing with a ponytail dominates the domestic news scene for a week, you know it's time to look offshore for enlightenment.
Except of course, the heavy, insidious slick that has crept upon us; a dark scourge that suffocates the life and hope from all it touches.

No, not Winston Peters. He's done good this week. More on him later in the programme.

We're talking about the oil spill, which has been a mini-Rena disaster inside Tauranga Harbour. At least Mobil had the decency to front up about their rusty pipe, although really, there was no hiding from this.

The weather was against any early clean up, but it's clear the harbour authorities are woefully unprepared for such spills. If the booms don't work in storms, we have a problem.

Not being an expert in oil spill avoidance – just someone with a passion for a clean harbour (aren't we all?) – I'd have thought Oil Spill Avoidance 101 would state: 'No pumping oil in conditions that, if a spill happens, we can't contain the mess”.

I also question the time it took for official word to get out on this; a good six hours at least after the event. I reckon the public deserve a bit more warning than an email half an hour before dark that an oil slick of unknown proportions has been sloshing for hours on our beaches, boats and waterways. Or was it a case of hoping it would all go away, under cover of darkness and the outgoing tide?

I was out on the harbour as the darkness fell and the huge oily slicks languished around every nook and cranny of the Town Reach and the upper harbour. It was clear that this was going to be a major problem, but the real impact took days to dawn on the public, boat owners and harbour users.

This is outrageous

To be fair (which doesn't happen often) we have to give full points to Winston Peters for speaking out on the outrageous situation of Kadhem Chilab Abbas, 42, the Isis fighter who left Napier to go back to Iraq, to be killed by an Isis rocket.

A man supposedly a refugee, yet clearly not so threatened by his enemies that he couldn't 'unfled” himself from New Zealand to go back to fight. (Unsuccessfully, as Paul Henry pointed out this week).

Supposedly so injured that he couldn't work; yet found the strength to go warring.
While the sucker taxpayer has been paying for his repatriation, benefits and, let's not forget raising his 24 children, 12 of whom are in NZ.

Winston asks: 'I don't care if six are adopted or not, but who's looking after them all now in this country? How could he have been a genuine refugee if he was able to go back to the Middle East on countless occasions after he came here? If he escaped a danger zone why did he go back to it?”.

Bloody good question, Winston. Good on you for taking a stand against this sort of abuse of good natured Kiwis.

Of course there are soft-brain do-gooders who blather about how, since he's dead, it's not right to talk about the situation. What bollocks. This is our country, our law, our taxes and now, our problem. It absolutely needs talking about and solving. There are too many takers and too few contributors.

The Bali Seven

In other news, The Bali Nine are going to have to find a new name.
There's been a lot of gnashing of teeth and hand-wringing over the death sentences carried out in Indonesia. This case has created worldwide anguish, pain and suffering for a lot of people.

Then again, so has heroin.

The death penalty might not be the right answer, but it's their country and their law – if you don't like it, don't go there and, hey, maybe don't deal in drugs? Just a thought.
Perhaps those who abhor capital punishment should reconsider their support of those countries, such as tourism and trade.

If you can come up with a better deterrent to drug trafficking let me know. We'll apply the same punishment to those who use leaf blowers when there are perfectly good rakes and brooms available. Although, in the case of relentless leaf-blowing, perhaps a life of torture would be more appropriate since the rest of us have to put up with a life sentence of two-stroke persecution.

As far as killers, bombers and general terrorists go, there is little point in keeping un-rehabilitatable (is that even a word?) killers caged up for ever, not to mention the ongoing cost to the country of providing for habitual losers.

America, it seems, has adopted a new approach, which isn't really finding favour, but apparently there's a pre-trial execution option available, and you can be selected at random. It has not proven popular.

Flag of the Week

Meanwhile, back in the cheerful department: Here's this week's suggestion for John Key's campaign for a new flag.

Send in your flag suggestions, comments and any other rants to brian@thesun.co.nz
And ‘like' Rogers Rabbits on Facebook, where bad taste is always on the menu and growing in popularity every day.

You can ‘like' RR even if you don't like it, but just prefer to torture yourself with a weekly flogging of 'puerile nonsense” as one regular reader describes it. Have a great week and remember to always pack your own boogie bag.