Then there are music videos. Given the dross that is shown, how bad would a song and a script for the proposed video have to be to fail to secure funding from New Zealand on Air? Is there a sealed container somewhere containing music videos that were deemed too unutterably crappy to air even in the insomniac's hours when only the lonely and the socially crippled are watching TV? If so, can we please see them?
I'm intrigued by the names manufacturers give their cars. Not so much SUVs, because even though they're mainly driven by urban women with designer sunglasses in their hair on their way to yoga, you can sort of see the point of names like Explorer, Outback, Tuareg, Pathfinder. The carmaker is trying to evoke the spirit of adventure and create an association with the great outdoors. The name reflects the product.
But what about names like Lucida, Xsara, Sirion, Alera and Delica? Why give your product a name that means absolutely nothing? Who makes these words up? If they are computer-generated, what do they feed into the computer apart from the letters of the alphabet? Again, it would be interesting in a morbid kind of way to see the names that are rejected.
And do we really have a government as such? There's Mr English who pops up now and again to tell us things aren't too flash. There's this big-boned Brownlee character whose role is obviously to be the whipping boy for the long-suffering residents of Christchurch. There's a wee chap called Finlayson, who deals with the peripheral stuff. And there's John Key who does everything else.
Despite his phenomenal workload, Key finds time for endless photo opportunities and pontificating on such pressing issues as the England rugby team's new black playing kit. And he never stops smiling.
Money matters become ever more mysterious. There are these faceless outfits called rating agencies which assess creditworthiness. When they speak, the markets go weak at the knees.
Never mind the old saying about lies, damned lies and statistics; never mind that if you ask 25 economists what sort of shape the economy's in, you'll get 25 different answers; never mind that the rating agencies' horrendous balls-ups helped create this mess in the first place.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission appointed by the US Government to investigate the causes of the dog's breakfast that began in 2007 had this to say: "The three credit rating agencies were key enablers of the financial meltdown. The mortgage-related securities at the heart of the crisis could not have been marketed and sold without their seal of approval. Their ratings helped the market soar and their downgrades through 2007 and 2008 wreaked havoc across markets and firms." Seems pretty clear, doesn't it?
You'd think that these days, no one would take a blind bit of notice of anything the rating agencies said.
Yet strangely enough when Standard & Poor's decided that the USA was no longer worthy of a triple-A debt rating, investors around the world reacted by making themselves billions of dollars poorer.
Although the market functions on greed and fear, that doesn't stop those who work in it and participate in this lemming-like behaviour from blaming governments for everything that goes wrong.
Thus all week we've been treated to the spectacle of high finance types berating Europe's and America's political leaders for their lack of leadership and calling on them to "do something," even though they are supposedly philosophically opposed to government intervention.
When it comes to coolness under fire, these people make Dad's Army's hysterical Lance Corporal "Don't panic!" Jones look like Willie Apiata. If they were running the show instead of politicians we'd all be living in caves, eating bugs and nettles.
