So the new Volvo, the new black, sleek, leathery, clean Volvo is getting packed and we are getting into it for a road trip. That feeling makes me shiver. And you know what – best of all is that, if it rains and blows a gale from the moment we leave to the moment we get back, I couldn’t care less. It’s the journey. I know nothing about Rangiputa but it looks perfect from the images I found on Google and at this time of year it won’t be stinkin with tourists. I plan to visit Cape Reinga, the northernmost point, and Spirits Bay. Expect photographs and reports later.

Share on Facebook

Share on Facebook

God bless you and thanks for your mail.Sorry for my late response as i have been little ill.I want you to know this transaction is real and genuine and i am a christian and intend using part of my share for charity purposes.

The deceased left no documented next of kin nor beneficiary and that is exactly what i want to do placing you as beneficiary.

For the percentage sharing 50 50 is okay.

cheung

Share on Facebook

O God. I need to go and try to forget.

Share on Facebook

Share on Facebook

I’m delighted and amazed at your offer first of all – what a splendiferous opportunity for you and me both! However, I have a few concerns, to wit:

As a conscientious opponent of the Iraqui war, there is a part of me that is hesitant to profit from it’s ill-effects so directly. I am heartbroken, Eric, at the thought of me sitting in the lap of luxury in the south of France (for that is where I am going to go) and some poor relative of Hanoun who was not tracked down may be living in abject poverty and deeply reduced circumstances in a country torn limb from figurative limb by what amounts to an expansionist, empire building exercise by the bloated west.

Thus, Eric, I would like a few more details on just what methods your fine organization has used, how much effort has been made, to find living relatives of poor Haider? The country, as I understand it, has been in such organizational strife for such a long time that there could be a (possibly fortunate) relative left alive that has simply not been tracked down. I hope you will forgive my hesitation in this matter but I would find it hard to enjoy my champagne and oysters as this possible Hanoun family member lay in, say, a rubble-strewn hovel in occupied Karbala. Uncontionable.

Also – I’m left in some conflict over what your organization might think about you and I enjoying the proceeds of misery in this way. I know that certain details may be ‘obscured’ from their watchful eye and that alone does not scare me. However, Hang Seng is a big organization and I worry that they may have the ways and means to track me down, even though I plan to live out my days in wealthy obscurity.

I’m thrilled that you have chosen me as your reliable foreigner with whom to execute this cunning ruse, Eric, I truly am and I hope you don’t think me ungrateful. I would just like to hear what you have to say on these two points before you and I go into business together.

Also, I’m not interested in anything less than 70% – 30% in my favour, if that’s not too much trouble? I feel my risk is bigger than the one you are taking and it’s only fair. I would be willing to take 65% plus goods to the value – say a car or property in a country of your choosing?

Yours gratefully

Derek

Share on Facebook

Share on Facebook

From: eure
Sent: Mon 8/2/2010 2:35 PM
To: eure
Subject: Dear friend

Proposal of $15,5 million contact me,cheungeric41@yahoo.com.hk

Hey Eric, I’m just contacting you about my 15.5 million. I’d like to get things underway as soon as possible, thanks.

Derek.

Share on Facebook

Stay tuned for possible contradictory posts…

Share on Facebook

Here’s the thing: it’s not like the NZ press don’t get the opportunity to report self-inflicted deaths – in 2007, 483 people took their own lives in New Zealand and 2670 people were hospitalized as a result of self-inflicted injuries. People from low socio-economic backgrounds are 3 times more likely to be the inflicters than the ones most reporters come from. If you’re Maori, 16.1 of you per 100,000  will kill yourself vs 9.9 per 100,000 for non-Maori population. The statistics are absolutely shocking and this is just the tip of the shock. So, to underscore - people in New Zealand definitely kill themselves: more pro capita, in fact, than the U.S., The U.K., Australia and, uh, Haiti?!

One official line has it that “media reports of suicide may increase the risk of further suicides for a period of time after that suicide.”
“May” is the only word I really give any creedence to in that whole sentence. There is, to date, nothing conclusive anywhere to back this theory up apart from the supportive results of ‘discussions’ between the media and suicide stat gatherers paid by the government. I wonder whether, if the media stopped mentioning a soccer team being shit, that team would suddenly become league-toppers? Perhaps we might want to give this fantastical method a go at some other unsurmountable social ill…say, cancer?

As someone who has experienced the complete devastation that suicide leaves in its wake, I abhor the head in the sand approach whether its in the press or among friends. Believe me when I say that nobody is comfortable talking about suicide. People say “I don’t know what to say” more often than you can handle hearing it. And that is often all they say. It’s an excruciatingly hard topic to broach and so nobody really does. Even your best friends and closest family are completely useless to you in the wake of suicide. But the accompanying silence definitely does not make it any easier.

I tried the not talking about it method myself for a couple of years. Were they good times? Was suicide rendered any easier to be around for keeping schtum? They were the most difficult and gut-wrenchingly, heartbreakingly sad years of my life, to be frank about it and I wanted more than anything to talk about it with someone. Anyone. I just didn’t know anyone I thought might want to talk about it. Oh I had a million and one fucking questions I wanted to ask: mostly of the one person who would never answer any more questions, but I’d have settled for anyone at all – a stranger even. I wanted to talk and talk and talk about suicide but it was three years before I found any help. When I did find it, I also found out it was the only Government funded bereavement counselling service for survivors of suicide in the whole of New Zealand. It’s in Wellington and God bless the people who run it – each and every one of them has been affected personally by suicide. They struggle every year to retain their funding, they want to expand to Auckland and Christchurch and everywhere else but they have to struggle to keep their one little program afloat. Do you think that the press not reporting suicide might be helping their cause?

It’s despicable logic and thank God someone in power has finally challenged it and said what nobody else is saying. While the press prattles on every single long weekend about “killer roads” and “deadly traffic tolls,” the bedroom light fixtures and rooftops and razorblades and pills and high bridges of this country kill more than double the amount of every thoroughfare put together.

Might the act of suicide be sensationalized? Glamorized? Made fanciable by truthful reporting? That’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard. People thinking about taking their own lives need no encouragement. They don’t take their own lives because its glamorous. They’re not scouring the press looking for ideas and methodology. No depressed person needs tips on how to take their life, for Chrissakes. You can kill yourself with a screwdriver. A person that deep in darkness needs, more than anything, to be confronted with the indelible, undoable harm that their non-presence in the lives of the people who love them is going to cause. If a single suicidal person in ten years read an article featuring the heartbroken words of a parent or loved one left behind and found the strength to not go through with it as a result – that alone would be enough to justify an upturn of these backward-assed rules. Shame on the New Zealand press for not only being pretty much terrible and broadsheet-sized tabloids, quality-wise, but for not ever challenging this absurdism in its  own rule book. The sooner people start talking about suicide for real, the better for everyone.

Share on Facebook