A good friend of mine currently living the United States drew to my attention the headline chosen by the New York Post this week to report on the Iranian election crisis: ‘Turban Warfare’.

Obviously some little misinformed spade at the Post came up with this irrelevant pap some months after 9/11 and has been waiting for a ’suitable’ time for its publication for the best part of eight years. When turmoil erupted in Iran recently, they presumably ignored the advice of several more-educated interns at the paper and ran the headline anyway.

It’s a real shame for them, getting it wrong on such a grand scale. All they had to do was open an ‘Atlas of the World’ and look up Iran’s main religion to see that this headline wasn’t actually appropriate in this case. This is the level of research readers’ hard-earned money is put towards at good newspapers.

My friend in the States saw the headline on a copy of the ‘paper’ in a cafe. He left, having remarked, in ink, on the front page: “Racial Propaganda”. I suggest you do the same.

It’s been a little quiet around here for the last few days. The first reason for this is that a friend and I have been busy setting up a new project: WollyDong.com. The other is that it was my 28th birthday last Saturday and we headed out of town for the weekend and up north to a place called Matakana.

Matakana, situated in Rodney District, is a small village just off a roundabout by a river. We stopped for a cream tea and a rest before heading through the rain into the village. We were fortunate enough to turn up during the weekly Farmer’s Market, which was pretty cool. Loads of local people selling locally made foods, drinks, sauces, you name it! We invested in some Feijoa, lime and chili sauce. Excellent on pizzas!

We stayed up the road in Leigh, in the Leigh Sawmill Cafe to be exact. The rooms were nice and big, with a tidy ensuite. I always love it when a lodge has a shower floor, rather than a step in shower, and that’s precisely what our room at the Sawmill had. It’s probably just an excuse not to worry about getting the bathroom floor wet more than anything else, but I love shower floors!

We rested our wet and tired souls for an hour or so in the afternoon, before heading for a wine taste at Heron’s Flight. We were served by the drummer from Kiwi band The Brunettes, which meant the chat was pretty interesting. He knew a fair bit about the wine as well!

We headed back to the Sawmill and, after establishing that we really should have booked a table, the cafe and micro brewery served us up some excellent pizzas, wedges and risotto. The beer was pretty good too!

The next day, we had a quick look at Goat Island before breakfast. The island is a protected area with no fishing allowed. This results in quite a lot of fish hanging out and you often see them leaping out of the water in front of you. We then spent the afternoon having a wander round Tawharanui Reserve, which turned into a bit of a long trek after we passed through the first field of bullocks and decided that we couldn’t do that again!

All in all, a good weekend. I feel I must apologise for the somewhat briefness of my descriptions on here. The reasons for this are because I plan to launch a proper travel review site very soon and I want to review Matakana properly on there as my first location. All in good time, all in good time…

Good stuff. Since the very first time I watched the Dudley Moore classic ‘Crazy People’, I have been wanting more advertisers to take gambles on campaigns like this. Not full on detrimental stuff, just a bit more honest.

Cadbury’s and Moro have done just that with their latest gem of an ad: ‘New Zealand’s 4th Favourite Bar’. It’s totally not honest (well, it could be, but for the ‘allegedly’ featured at the end of the ad), but it makes a refreshing change from bores like ‘the diamond standard’ or ‘kills 99.99% of all known germs’ (both from other choc ads!). To make matters better, it’s a really funny ad too…

Has anyone else ever surpassed your expectations with an advertisement? Anyone ever deprecated their own product in the name of sales? Comments below, please. I’d love to know…