Kept Man

So I rolled into WINZ on Tuesday, armed with the 3,746 pieces of paper that they tell you to bring these days - proof of identity, proof of bank account, proof of earnings over the last year, proof of IRD number, WINZ building sudden-subisidence-causing-injury waiver, proof of who really killed JFK, proof of intelligent extraterrestrial life, statement of intent to not commit terrorist acts on United States soil, note from your Mum, and so on. I pushed them up to a desk in a shopping trolley, and a guy named Tai had a look at the mall. Eventually however I reminded him he should not be paying attention to some shopping complex, but instead to my pieces of paper, so he stopped looking at the mall and had a look at them all instead.

"Hmmmm" he said.

"Hmmmm?" I replied.

"Is this your partner's complete earnings?" he said.

"Yup" I said, "But she's just started a new job." I added, like a complete FOOL.

The calculator came out. There was some tapping of keys. Inputting of codes into computers. Scratching of heads.

"You aren't going to qualify for a benefit" said Tai. "Your partner earns too much" (now).

"Ah" I said.

"The good news is we can still sign you up for the Accomodation Supplement" Tai said.

"Ah, good!" I said.

Additional calculating. Inputting. Scratching.

"We'll give you 3 dollars a week" Tai said. "Oh, and to get it you'll need to ring us up every week and detail your earnings for that week."

"I may pass" I said.

"I thought you might" said Tai.

So that's that. Her Majesty's Government have evidently come to some kind of conclusion, and that conclusion goes like this:

gigolo
One entry found for gigolo.
Main Entry: gig·o·lo
Pronunciation: 'ji-g&-"lO, 'zhi-
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -los
Etymology: French
1 : a man supported by a woman usually in return for his attentions
2 : a professional dancing partner or male escort

"Iiiiiiiiiiii ain't got nobody" etc.

Now this is the year 2005, so I don't really have any silly ideas about the guy going out and being the breadwinner or anything, I'm more just sort of surprised about the relatively low amount of money Karen has to earn before WINZ decides she's just fine to act in sole support of me. In fact I went and told them the whole truth thinking I would still get an actually useful amount of money in some form. But no. I wonder if it's too late for something like this:

BEN: "Hi, I need to apply for the Unemployment Benefit again, please."

WINZ: "Don't you have a girlfriend that earns too much money for you to do so?"

BEN: "Uh, no, we broke up."

WINZ: "Oh! That's a shame. OK, let's see your rent details...wait on, it says here you're still sharing a room."

BEN: "Oh yeah, uh, that's with Karen, neither of us have anywhere else to go, we put a piece of tape down the middle of the room. It's very awkward."

WINZ: "Hmmm, perhaps I had better call her about this."

BEN: "No! You can't, because, er...she's dead."

WINZ: "She's dead?"

BEN: "Uh, yeah...actually it was why I broke up with her. She just wasn't the same after she died."

WINZ: "Then why is she still renting a room with you?"

BEN: "It's a religious thing."

WINZ: "Which religion?"

BEN: "Er...Zombie?"

I'm not sure it'll fly. Never mind. Back to the job hunting it is. In the meantime, randomly, I suddenly have some more work to do at university, so with luck that will keep me in Coke for a little bit. I have been writing notes / converting handouts for INCO 222, Issues in Biosecurity, which last week (they have classes 9-5 on Wednesdays) dealt with how we're all going to die. What I learned is that smallpox is a bad time. Which I already sort of knew, of course, but then you think of it as something that is gone, whereas...well, the break-up of the Soviet Union can generally be regarded as a good thing I suppose, but when you see now-defected scientists who formerly worked in the USSR biological weapons program (that was at one point producing 4500 tonnes of anthrax annually) saying things like "Yeah, we played around with stocks of smallpox. We found we could raise the fatality rate to nearly 100 percent (in the 'wild' it's apparently about 33 percent). No, I don't reckon we can accurately trace where all of our stocks have ended up now", there's a little bit of cause for concern. The thing I don't really understand is the mentality here - and you think people might have worked this out as early as WWI, where they would use chorine or mustard gas and the wind would blow it back onto their own lines - you release smallpox or some other highly contagious nasty onto your enemies, then you're going to end up with it too. Because it's highly contagious. I suppose you could run around innoculating your entire population pre-attack, but that's a bit of a giveaway. The whole concept doesn't strike me as particularly far-sighted, anyway.

Mind you, in one documentary we watched, they were talking to the guy who was in charge of the US's offensive biological weapons program at Fort Detrick during the cold war, and he was talking quite happily about the cost-effectiveness of biological weapons in the casualty-causing department, so that's the kind of mentality you're dealing with. Apparently a study in the 1970s looked into the cheery statistic of expenditure needed to cause 50 percent deaths per square kilometre, and found:

conventional weapons: $2,000
nuclear weapons: $800
anthrax: $1

So gosh, why use conventional weapons to kill folks when we can save so much money? Ack. Amusingly, one of the guys who was the main driving force behind shutting down the American offensive program didn't really point out the humanitarian, or you know, we'll destroy society sort of concerns, but instead the fact that it perhaps wasn't actually in America's interests to find new ways of killing huge amounts of people at low costs with few technological barriers to entry (indeed, another fun figure to come out of the day was that it is estimated that the average 2nd to 3rd year microbiology student knows enough to culture something that could cause a pandemic, if they have the right sample), and the ability to wipe people out en masse should surely be the right of a very select few rich countries...anyway, the biological weapons program in the States is a 'defensive' one now, we're led to believe. The difference between an 'offensive' and a 'defensive' biological weapons progam is apparently defined by the following: intent.

OK...comforting. Following a day of that I went to take notes in an Antarctic studies course for an hour where it was revealed that West Antarctica (melting) has enough ice to raise the world sea level 6 metres. Not so good...East Antractica however (not melting, yet) has enough to raise the world sea level 60 metres. Super. Still, 'a little learning is a dangerous thing' and all, so I'm trying to forget about our potential demise at the hands of disease or the rising seas and concentrate on hostile alien invasion instead.

And now for something completely different: best of Apple Trailers I've watched lately.

The Matador: Pierce Brosnan as definitely not James Bond, complete with silly moustache. Looks potentially pretty entertaining in the 'criminals are quirky, ahhh, a situation, a situation and we're becoming EMBROILED' sort of area .

Underworld: Evolution: Yeah, OK, so the first one was pretty pants, but it had a good trailer. This also has a pretty good trailer. Things exploding. Kate Beckinsale. (This does not have a good trailer, by way of comparison. Oh nooo.)

Syriana: George Clooney fell over backwards making this film and cracked his head on concrete and spinal fluids came out, that's how seriously he was taking it. Looks pretty good in that tense political 'ooo, you dirty, dirty CIA' way.

Casnova:Something for the lads and the lasses? Positively screams 'date movie' really. Haven't really had my swash buckled much by Hollywood lately though, so will probably be worth a look. And look Tim, Oliver Platt!

And now I believe I shall go and eat a muffin.