Heh, heh, heh - he said "Eagleburger" (plus - Helen Clark is wrinkly)

Reading blogs, I ran across the name "Lawrence Eagleburger" today.

This always cracks me up. Back in the eighties, the long-running NZ satire series McPhail and Gadsby had a running joke taking the piss out of trade minister Mike Moore who promoted diversification by making a reference to "lambburgers or venisonburgers".

(Of course, it turns out Moore was absolutely correct, just fifteen or twenty years ahead of his time, as witness the gourmet burger chains).

Anyhow, M&G proceeded to roll out a different burger every week. The Wetaburger. The Gumbootburger. The Kiwiburger - with beak still attached. I loved that. An American named "Eagleburger" can't help but trigger that association.

But, anyhow, the only YouTube clip existing of McPhail and Gadsby is from 1983 covering this piece of feminist history, a "celebration" of the 40th Parliament which had the unprecedented number of 8 female MPs. The audacity!

Prepare to cringe a bit:



The women in question turned out to leave their mark in history. They included the good, the bad, and the unnecessarily airbrushed.

Look, we have a 58 year old woman who has proven to be an effective and, on occasion, tough-as-nails Prime Minister for nine years. Her opponent on the right is a financial wide boy who has repositioned himself as wet just to work off Clark's martinet image.

And yet Labour feels it necessary to airbrush her official portrait back to her late thirties...



Not necessary. I'm tossing up in voting between her and Jeanette Fitzsimmons, and the decision isn't going to be made by who's prettier. Given that NZ voted for Muldoon for so long, and the man looked like the south side of a north-facing bulldog, and given that up to now we've kept returning Clark despite knowing that she looks like, well, a 58 year old woman, couldn't we stop pretending?

Helen isn't young, isn't pretty, doesn't have a good sense of humor, and is not the readiest speaker in Parliament.

What she is is effective, tough and disciplined, politically talented, aggressively intelligent, and concerned with the welfare of her people. I can live with that in a PM.