Well here’s a post I never thought I’d write.

I read in the paper today that families of those that died in the February 2011 quake are calling for someone to be accountable for the deaths of their loved ones and asking for an apology.

While I am very sad that people died in the disaster, I think the need to blame someone is wrong. Nobody is to blame unless gross negligence was displayed and I genuinely believe this was not the case with the Council. As Steve McCarthy says, they did their very best and if you think anyone at the Council was out to try and cut corners at the risk of safety you are wrong.

What killed people was an earthquake that was not on anyone’s predictions. It is very sad but life goes on and apportioning blame only villainises a bunch of people who go to work each day in an effort to make the city safer. All that this discourse will achieve is to make those in charge even more risk averse and nobody will get anything built while we all stand round playing the blame game.

As someone that has gone through a stringent building consent process I can attest to the fact that the Council are very careful with everything they do and aware that they are responsible for things that are unsafe being given permission.

So that’s my be nice to the Council message. If an apology can resolve things and we can all move forward I’m all for it, but lets not stand around and point the finger when it is much easier to construct a narrative in hindsight. At the time all the Council workers were doing was their very best.

I will continue to be critical of the Council where I think it is justified, but saying they are to blame for people dying is wrong and not fair on these people who choose to do this as a job. These guys have to sleep at night and telling them they are to blame is not fair.

Merry Christmas CCC, from your most difficult customer.

Xx

As a teenager, whisky was my poison of choice, blocking my nose and skulling straight out of the bottle until I vomited all over the carpet.

Then one day something miraculous happened and I grew up. I became exclusively a beer guy and whisky was left in the past with baggy jeans and huffing nitrous. I learned to enjoy drinking as a social event instead of getting so pre-loaded before going anywhere that any hope of interaction was gone.

Just the thought of whisky made me cringe. I couldn’t think of a less pleasant drink. That childhood excess had ruined me for enjoying what should have been my birthright as an individual of Irish descent.

Then a whiskey nerd forced me along to an evening Whisky Galore were hosting and I discovered the highfalutin world of whisky. A world where getting drunk was a consequence of all the fun instead of the stated goal. I discovered that in-fact I liked whiskey and the more you paid for a dram, the better it tasted.

From there we developed a great whisky selection at Goodbye Blue Monday. Then it fell down in an earthquake and I was so obsessed with craft beer that when I opened Smash Palace I neglected the whisky list.

I have now seen the error of my ways and am pleased to announce that I have taken a trip to Whisky Galore and asked Michael to provide me with a shit-hot selection of whisky. So we now have an excellent whisky selection and you can all sleep a little better knowing that.

You should come down and check it out before Tim – the Whisky Monster – comes back from overseas and demolishes the lot.

In exciting news a duck has moved into one of our planter boxes and laid her eggs. Now, I’m sure there is some argument you could pitch that this is a silly place to lay your eggs and this is evolution in action. A silly duck with weak genes lays her eggs in a stupid place and her genetic sequence is wiped from the earth when a couple of drunks smash her children before they are born.

I also wonder if you could frame an argument that it is a smart place to lay your eggs. In a pub where people have taken to giving her the last of their burger and we make sure people aren’t fucking with her or the eggs.

So the duck is either an idiot or a genius, I can’t tell.

We have had a number of suggestions for names of which the most popular so far are:

- Dukka Dukka

- Deefa

- Admiral Duck-bar

- Jemima

If you happen to be here when the eggs hatch, we will be running a drink special in honor of that momentous occasion.

Hey, Thursday today so that means bike night which just keeps getting busier. Tonight Garry and I are also giving a talk at 6pm as part of Festus. We will be discussing our take on temporary architecture and how we got to where we are today. The seats are limited to 35 people, so get in early if you want to hear all the crap I write on this blog verbalized.

This Saturday night Tim is in town. This calls for a few drinks and we have decided to have a Goodbye Blue Monday reunion from 7pm. We have all your old favorite DJs, I’ll drag some crappy couches up, make the bar smell like weeze and I think we we’ll call it a party. As part of deciding what to do for a GBM reunion, I came to realize that really all that was important at GBM was the music and the people. The rest was neither here-nor-there.

So come by and Saturday night and you can catch up with all the old gang and moan about the good-old-days.