He shows no sign of recognising her as he hands back the eftpos card that she keeps expecting to decline. She thinks there is a sadness in the way one corner of his mouth twitches as he punches numbers into the cash register. Like he’s too tired to even put much effort into being properly sullen. He doesn’t recognise her but tonight is the fourth night in a row they’ve met under these circumstances. Charlotte buys Skittles and cigarettes and walks home with the wind tumbling in the streets and powerlines buzzing overhead, the city’s vermillion tinge against the night sky. She thinks about people she has known, places she has seen, and she knows something is slipping, somewhere.
Something drifting away. In her room she sits at the window and smokes cigarettes and plays music quietly. She listens to sad old Prince songs and turns up the heat in her room and leaves the window wide open because she likes the sharp contrast of winter air and cloying warmth, the cold like a knife. The fluorescent lights on the roof of her room hum quietly. She doesn’t look in the mirror. Lately she’s been spending hours painting her nails, tracing them with intricate multicoloured designs. In one corner of her room sits a pile of this trimester’s textbooks, pristine, unopened. Anthropology, History, History again. Charlotte looks from the books to her MacBook. She puts the cigarette out and flicks the butt out the window. She feels awake, free.

4:30 AM, say the green digits of her alarm clock.

Charlotte sits at her laptop and opens Wikipedia. Lately she has been binging on genocides, massacres, war crimes, atrocities, devouring them, horrible facts that seem to throb and pulse on the screen.

She reads that Hitler may have had syphilis.

She reads about the Cambodian regime led by Pol Pot, which executed more than two million people.

She reads about cults, religious splinter groups, dubious paranormal events. She reads about bizarre and obscure artists who worked all their lives without ever achieving recognition or acclaim, even after death.

She reads about murder-suicides, mysterious disappearances, unusual deaths.

Eventually sleep comes through the sickly glow of the laptop’s screen and keys. She curls up in the gigantic old chair that had been her father’s and wakes at eleven the next morning with a stiff neck, golden sunlight smeared across the wall behind her desk.

“What’s wrong with you. You alright? Like, you’re all distant and shit.” Sara stubs out her cigarette and sits back in her chair and gazes quizzically at Charlotte from behind knockoff Gucci glasses. They sit at a table on the pavement outside Copyright, the café down the road from the university. The sun is bright but gives no warmth and to Charlotte the whole scene is hyperreal, glossy, the sky an impossible shade of blue. From where Charlotte sits she can see the fine hairs on Sara’s face and some not-so-fine ones speckling her upper lip.

“I dunno.” Charlotte picks at her eggs benedict. “I’m pretty tired I s’pose.”
“Tired. You look like you’re on antidepressants, babe.”
“Nah. Nah, I just, I dunno.”
“Cheer up. I’m worried about you. You need to like, get laid, or something.”
“Haaa. Whatever.” Charlotte looks away. Some men are at work across the road. All wear sunglasses and brightly coloured orange vests. With shovels and jackhammers they’ve torn a long gash in the street’s sleeping back. They gather in a circle and confer in loud voices. Now one lowers himself into the hole, crouches inside, removes the succulent innards, handfuls of brightly coloured plastic cables.
“Charlotte. Are you gonna eat that?” Sara leans forward. “I heard the eggs here are like amaze.”
“Nah. I’ve got a class now anyway.” Charlotte doesn’t move.
“Yeah. You haven’t been to hissed two-two four in ages. We’ve got an essay due, like, next week?”
“I know,” says Charlotte. Sara prides herself on telling it like it is, it’s something she says often; because of this she talks as if everything she says is a controversial but undeniable fact, everything a possible source of debate, as if she’s forever waiting for somebody to deny the obvious.
Charlotte pushes her eggs forward.
“You can have them,” she says. She hates it when people abbreviate class names.

Midnight. Charlotte has some weed that Sara gave her, free, or maybe just Sara’s still feeling guilty about that thing that’d happened with Trent last year. So anyway, a free fifty bag of weed, and at first Charlotte had said no but then she’d accepted, thinking that it might help her sleep. She rolls a joint and pauses with it stuck in her mouth, lighter in hand, thinking. Weren’t antidepressants meant to make people happier? Make them look happier? She shrugs, lights the joint, blows smoke.

After she finishes she sits before the laptop. Scans the usuals. She feels a start, thinking suddenly that she doesn’t know any of the people on her Facebook feed. She can feel the weed taking effect.

Sara Cloughton had a great time at lunch with her girl Charlotte Bingham today!

Charlotte stares at her own name. It looks strange tonight, simultaneously familiar and alien. She rolls another joint, her face lit blue-and-white by the screen. She thinks about killing herself. She can’t decide. She hates knives, razors. Too cold, too clinical. She doesn’t think she’d have the guts to jump off a building and anyways she’s heard about people surviving, even from ten, fifteen stories up. She holds her hands in the air, palms up, and gazes at her wrists, thin and pale in the light from the computer. The veins are faintly visible. She imagines the bright tracks of a razor, thin and beautiful. The way the cuts would look before blood burst free.

She Googles, how to tie a noose. There are a million hits. No, one and a half million. Some pages even provide a three-step diagram. She rubs her eyes and starts to laugh, feeling that her head has grown, that her scalp is tingling, her ears sprouting the size and colour of cabbages.

Five in the afternoon on a Thursday or maybe a Tuesday. Charlotte stands in the supermarket, in the third aisle, next to the tinned tomatoes. A green basket with black handles hangs from her left hand. Today she is wearing her prettiest and most brightly coloured skirt, pale blue. She stands with her feet neatly together and considers the stacked rows of cans. She has been in the supermarket for nearly half an hour but the sole item in her basket is a red capsicum, chosen for its smooth curves and bright, flawless skin. She’d taken it carefully from the stacked rows of its kind, feeling as if she was somehow separating it from its family, its friends, feeling that maybe she should buy another, to lessen the pain of separation. Now she stands with her basket and her capsicum and she contemplates the tinned tomatoes. She hasn’t eaten for a day and a half and there is a hard twisted knot in her stomach but she feels clean and pure. A few metres away there’s a boy with brown hair and a pale face and Charlotte watches him. He has dark quiet eyes and his nose is slightly too big and it’s crooked but his lips are beautiful, the colour of the inside of a strawberry. He wears a huge old pair of headphones and a black duffle coat with wooden toggles and in his own green basket there is a single blue-and-white packet of Budget spaghetti. Charlotte watches as he runs his gaze across the cans of tomatoes, looking for the cheapest. A dinner alone, maybe. Eaten before the glowing screen of a laptop. Can of chopped tomatoes, packet of spaghetti. A total cost of less than two dollars. Charlotte wants to push his hair out of his eyes and run her fingertips over the soft bumps of fading acne at the corners of his mouth. He meets her gaze briefly and then looks away.
The security guard is just getting on-shift when Charlotte comes into the building and punches the elevator call button, shopping bags dangling from her hands. She has milk, the lonely capsicum, a six-pack of Coca Cola and a packet of instant noodles. She tries to remember the guard’s name. Ron. No. Barry. That’s it. The sleeves of his cheap polyester windbreaker are pushed up to his elbows and the hairs are on his arms are thick and white. He nods at her and she smiles at him the way she always does but tonight he stares back at her as if he’s scared of something or confused maybe. The lift dings and she steps into it, confused, looking at her feet as the doors close.

Charlotte sits at her computer. She doesn’t want to go to sleep. She doesn’t know what she wants. She tries to imagine what Sara is doing right now. Sleeping, probably. Charlotte has no friends. This thought comes suddenly, an ominous shape, a ship appearing through the rain. Charlotte has no real friends and she is a different person with everyone she speaks to, effortlessly shifting the colours of her personality to better suit her surroundings. She stands up quickly. Grey morning light runs its fingers across the curtains. The pillows of her bed swim up towards her. What it means. What it means when you begin to draw meaning and warmth from everyday encounters, from people behind counters and at the steeringwheels of buses. When you face a professional smile and feel a jolt.

She falls asleep in her clothes, lying on the bed, above the covers.
Charlotte wakes at two in the afternoon. It is the fourteenth day since she stopped doing things for reasons she does not understand. She sits up on the bed and rubs her eyes. Her phone rings. She looks at the screen. Blocked number. She doesn’t answer.

Later on she sits at the laptop. In her inbox, two emails from two tutors. She ignores them both.

a scruffy vagrant, a
stormcreature, this
tinned-tomato boy:
i wish he said hello
to
me

Charlotte rolls her eyes at the screen. Bullshit. Trite nonsense. In high school she used to sneak down to the back field and smoke cigarettes with a girl named Martina. Martina called herself Marty for reasons nobody understood, not at the time. People’d made fun of her and said it was a guy’s name. Charlotte didn’t even really know Marty, she was just someone to smoke with, an extra set of eyes to watch for teachers, a spare lighter. One rainy lunchtime in the middle of bleak July, Marty had thrown her cigarette butt on the ground and turned to Charlotte. Charlotte was sixteen, Marty a year older. Marty rolled up the sleeve of her school-uniform jersey.
Look at this, she said to Charlotte.

Charlotte looked. Around Marty’s wrist a bright blue-yellow bracelet of bruising. A matching ring on the other wrist. Charlotte looked from the bruises to Marty’s face and saw nothing in her eyes.

Who did that to you, Charlotte said quietly.
Oh, well. My dad. He gets, you know.
Shit.
Don’t tell anyone, yeah?
I won’t.
Promise.
Yeah, ‘course.
Two weeks later Marty was dead, pills, and her father was in court, multiple charges. Charlotte didn’t go to the funeral. The father hired a million-dollar lawyer, escaped conviction on all charges but one. At her seat in front of the computer Charlotte picks at her fingernails. The polish is chipped again.

Women dislike sexist comments

Many amazed

Research conducted by Stephenie Chaudoir and Diane Quinn of the University of Connecticut in the United States has revealed that men who harass women with sexual comments are harming women’s perception of the male gender.

Apparently, these findings were a revelation to some.

The study asked a group of female students to view a video clip and imagine themselves as bystanders to a situation where a man either made a sexist remark toward a women or simply greeted her.

The subjects were then asked to rate their feelings of anger or depression and their desire to move away from or against men.

Astoundingly, the study showed that women were actually more likely to take a sexist remark as an insult to their gender, as well as more likely to feel anger or resentment towards men in general.

Flamenco Fuels Fury

FUCK!

Student journalists slaving over computers to bring you the award-winning magazine you now hold in your hands were left frustrated after flamenco guitarists attempted to serenade them once again.

A group of flamenco enthusiasts gathered under the balcony outside the Salient office in what appears to be a cheesy seduction attempt, or some kind of Romeo and Juliet Spain edition moment.

While some in the office can appreciate the talent involved in the playing, it was the constant repetition of passages that started dreams of other things that guitar strings could be used for. Rising fury was calmed after the guitarists decided to move on.

Salient suggests that a great time to attempt future serenades is on Fridays when we will all be in the office, willing to listen. Yup.

Prostitute gets nailed; unable to perform duties

Boyfriend pissed she can’t make him sandwiches

A prostitute sentenced to community service has been jailed after claiming her broken nails stopped her from completing court orders.

The Taranaki Daily News reported that Tala Jepsen, 19, was sentenced to 60 hours community services for charges relating to her stealing cheques from a man’s chequebook in 2009.

As a result, Jepsen had her fines of $1820 remitted and was sentenced to 21 days in prison for failing to complete her work at Wanganui primary school.

Scientists invent invisibility cloak

Harry Potter can suck it!

A three-dimensional invisibility cloak has been developed by German Muggle Scientists.

The cloak, made up of special lenses that bend light waves, is able to not only make small objects invisible, but hide the bump they would normally create. However, making large objects vanish before our very sights is still light-years away. Ha! Light-years, get it?

Tolga Ergin of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology spoke with Reuters during a telephone interview to explain the impact of the device.

“This is very exciting, because mankind has always thought about being invisible or having invisibility cloaks.”

In your face, J.K. Rowling!

Welly wants out of Wellywood

Fierce online opposition to the Wellywood sign isn’t deterring the Wellington International Airport (WIAL) and their main supporter, Wellington Mayor Kerry Prendergast, from their blindly determined path.

WIAL—which is 30 per cent owned by the Wellington City Council—has plans to celebrate Wellington’s contributions to the film industry by installing a giant ‘WELLYWOOD’ sign on the Miramar cutting, scheduled to be completed in June.

Located above the Miramar wharf, the sign will be 28m long, 3.5m tall and visible to passengers on planes as they approach the airport.

Wellington mayoral candidate and sign opponent Jack Yan contacted the Hollywood Sign Trust, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, and Global Icons, the latter two having intellectual property rights in the original Hollywood sign.

“This sign is tacky and unoriginal—two things Wellington is not,” Yan says.

Hollywood Chamber of Commerce President and Chief Executive Leron Gubler told The Dominion Post that the staggered Hollywood lettering was trademarked.

“If they do that with the Wellywood sign then I would think that would be a violation of our trademark … I am checking that with our attorney.”

As previous resource consent for the cutting included “large structures”, the project was approved without the need for public consultation.

The non-notified consent can be challenged in the High Court.

A one-line statement released by the Wellington Airport said: “We are confident we will meet all our legal obligations in relation to the sign.”

Opposition to the sign is growing, pushed along by a Facebook group: ‘Hey, let’s NOT have a Wellywood sign in Wellington’. The group had around 11000 members at the time Salient went to print.

Wellington mayoral candidate and Enterprise Miramar Peninsula chairman Allan Probert told The Dominion Post that a Wellywood sign had been talked about for the past 10 years, but was not well supported.

“The feedback I’ve had is that it is tacky and there are concerns about what it will look like in a few years.”

Wellington mayor and Wellington Airport Director Kerry Prendergast says it “will leave people in no doubt that this is the heart and soul of New Zealand’s film industry”.

In an interview with Radio New Zealand, Prendergast called the sign a “wonderfully creative idea” and pointed out that its parallels with the “iconic” Hollywood sign in Los Angeles would remind visitors of Wellington’s film industry prowess.

Prendergast told Salient the point of the sign was “satire” and not using Wellywood would “lose the point of the sign”.

She says she would not support an alternative installation.

WIAL refused to even consider not putting the sign up, regardless of public opinion and would not answer questions about supporting an alternative to the sign.

Yan told Salient the sign was “a very uncreative way to celebrate a creative industry”.

He called for Prendergast to use her place on the Wellington Airport board of directors to represent the views of the Wellington people.

Spokesman for Sir Peter Jackson, Matt Dravitzki, told The Dominion Post that Jackson had suggested a font that copied the Hollywood sign.

When asked by The Dominion Post for his opinion of the sign, Sir Peter Jackson said, “It’s Kiwi tongue-in-cheek humour at its very best, but beneath the leg-pulling is genuine pride.”

A sign generator has been set up at wellywood.skullandbones.co.nz.

Greetings be to you, I am requiring of your help. How are your business over there.

In the week that actually was, New Zealand police reported recently that Nigerian scammers have been posing as NZ Organised and Financial Crime Agency representatives and offering to ‘help’ the complete idiots people who have already lost money through their scams. A police spokesperson, Captain Obvious, said the scammers had requested more money to help with the investigations, and added that Organised and Financial Crime officers would never “contact people in this way or ask for money”. The victim in question was reportedly alerted by the “unofficial looking emails, bad grammar and broken English” which presumably was absent from the scam email which initially took her money.

Weight Watchers to partner with McDonald’s

Umm… ‘nuff said really.

Hummer going down, insert blowjob joke here

To the immense disgust of lottery winners and illiterate mainstream rappers everywhere, General Motors is planning to slow down its production of Hummer SUVs after its deal to sell the brand to the Chinese company Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery fell through. Reasons cited for the failure included difficulties with Chinese regulators, proving that the Chinese government knows a shitty deal when it sees one. The attempted sale of Hummer is part of GM’s greater ‘Oh shit, we went bankrupt and Toyota is kicking our asses SELL FUCKING EVERYTHING NOW’ restructuring plan, which also included the sale of Saab, discontinuation of Pontiac, and failed sale of its Saturn brand. The US military dropped its contract deal with Hummer in 2009.

iCouple’s iMarriage

Now married in the eyes of Jobs

We have found the world’s biggest Apple fancouple.

On the stroke of midnight on Valentine’s Day, Josh and Ting Li, wearing full wedding regalia, their pet shiba inu, Shio, and 20 guests walked down the glass spiral staircase at the Fifth Avenue Apple store in New York.

The couple met while shopping for iPods in the store.

The celebrant dressed like Apple god Steve Jobs in a black mock turtleneck skivvy and jeans and read the vows from his iPhone.

The only part of the ceremony that didn’t go to plan was the couple’s dog refusing to deliver the rings, which were tied to a first-generation iPod on the dog’s collar.

The groom is such a big fan of Apple and Jobs that his vows included a line from a speech that Jobs delivered at Stanford University in June 2005.

“You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down.”

Preach to us Steve, preach.

What else is there to do?

Honestly, it’s Timaru

A Timaru high school is introducing a programme to deter students from binge drinking and boy racing, and set them on a path to responsibility.

Timaru Boys’ High School was one of eight schools around the world to introduce The Rite Journey this year.

The programme, developed by Australian teachers Andrew Lines and Graham Gallasch, “assist[ed] in transforming the adolescent from dependency to responsibility”, the Timaru Herald reported.

Topics included gender identity, non-violence and feelings and beliefs.

It was hoped messages from the programme would spread into some hostels in the future, so the rich kids wouldn’t depend on mummy and daddy to fund their drunken way through university.

Chemical Warfare Suspected at Victoria University

Student Journalists look suspiciously at Craccum

Student journalists suspect there is a plot against them following attempts to gas them out of their new office.

Recently a strange plethora of smells have been present around the Student Union building, resulting in many exclamations of “Holy F***!” echoing around the Atrium.

Student journalists are vehemently denying they are the cause of the sewage-like smells around the Salient and VBC offices and prefer to place the blame on sinister plots from rival universities, aliens, terrorism and/or chemical warfare. A simple explanation of “pipe issues” has been rejected as ludicrous.

The problem is made worse by wafts of chemicals making their way across the Atrium, resulting in a charming cocktail of chemical smells with just a slight hint of poop.

Crazy Little Thing Called Love

Former News Editor wishes she was the midget

Major babe Rihanna got a lap dance from a midget stripper at her 22nd birthday, People magazine reported.

Rihanna’s rumoured boyfriend, baseball player Matt Kemp, threw the pop star a lavish party in Phoenix, Arizona, on the weekend.

The night culminated with a dance from the female stripper, who was less than 120cm tall.

At time of press, former Salient news editor Laura McQuillan was working up the courage to propose to Rihanna, who she described as “the person I’d turn gay for”.

The alleged crime occurred on Friday 2 October in the RB computer suite of Victoria’s Kelburn campus.

Witnesses say the accused, a 19-year-old Karori resident, had waited placidly in line to use a computer until “he finally broke and started going crazy”.

Reports say he was heard screaming at another student. “I HAVE A PAPER WORTH THIRTY FUCKING PERCENT DUE IN HALF AN HOUR! Get OFF Facebook! Some people actually need to use the computers! STOP PLAYING FARMVILLE! I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR RASPBERRY CROP!”

The accused then allegedly pulled the victim from his chair and kicked and punched him several times before sitting down at the victim’s computer.

Witnesses say he was then heard muttering “Print, print, gotta print this out.. ooh shit.. out of toner.. I’m soo fucked,” before police arrived and arrested him. The accused was not available for comment.

Salient has obtained an exclusive interview with the victim. “Yeah, I’m gonna press charges. He kicked the crap outta me. I had to go to the ER. And I peed blood this morning,” he claimed, from behind a MacBook Pro.

“And he was totally wrong, like, I wasn’t even planting raspberries. They were superberries and I was harvesting them. They wither in like half an hour, you know. I didn’t have my laptop so I used the university’s computers. They’re for everyone, right?

“FarmVille is important. I don’t mind suffering for it. Check out these windmills. I have five of them. And I made a status update about this and it got about twenty ‘likes’. That’s weird, you know? Why would people like the idea of me being beaten up?”

The case is set to begin in December, with the accused expected to plead not guilty on grounds of temporary insanity.

Launched in 2007, the program was initially a two-year trial period which expired in early September. After some deliberation, the US Government recently decided to extend the 12-month J1 Visa until further notice.

International travel and non-profit work organisation International Exchange Programs (IEP) company director Bex Gilchrist is optimistic about the options offered to young New Zealanders by the programme.

“On a twelve-month work and travel visa you can experience the real USA. Our participants come back from their time in the States with a real appreciation for the diversity of the people and the experiences it offers.”

IEP offers employment assistance to New Zealanders leaving New Zealand and during their time in the US in order to ease them into the tight, recession-affected US job market.

The plan is designed to improve bus ser-vices and create better pedestrian links, but not everyone is in agreement with the plan.

Residents’ submissions to the council showed 74% opposition to the proposal, contrasting sharply with an AC Nielsen survey which showed that of 500 people surveyed, two thirds supported the plan. The ‘Save Manners Mall’ group on Facebook has 4631 members.

On Tuesday 21 July, a ‘Chalk the Walk’ protest was held, where the public were invited to Manners Mall to write messages to the City Council in chalk.

Chalk the Walk organiser Benjamin Easton says he intends to file for a judicial review of the decision in the High Court on the 27th. He suggests the Council have made an error on how they went about the consultative processes.

“They went too fast. They plan now to run a special procedure that should have been run before they made the decision,” Easton said.

If Easton’s appeal to the High Court is unsuccessful, the changes to Manners Mall and lower Cuba Street are expected to begin mid-2010.

A few students attended the lecture anyway, to good-natured boos and cries of “Traitor!” from the protesters.
“Plenty of them probably thought there wouldn’t be a class today or something so they didn’t bother coming. It’s kind of ironic, really,” pointed out one CRIM211 protester. “We’re not attending class to protest against not being able to attend classes.”

Students stood amiably in the Kirk foyer, some holding a banner saying ‘CUTBACK? FIGHT BACK.’

The Victoria University of Wellington academic staff:student ratio has risen from 1:16 in 2008 to 1:18 in 2009, with an increase of English staff:student rations from 1:15 to 1:21.

Some tutors have resigned due to greatly increased workloads coupled with pay cuts, despite the 10 percent increase in fees this year.

There is no official word if the boycott would be a reoccurring fixture.

“It’s along the lines of policing where the people are,” said Inspector Michael Hill.

So, sometime soon, if you are on a train to Upper Hutt, Johnsonville, Melling or Paraparaumu, you may see a friendly policeman talking to the passengers and generally keeping order among the vicious hordes of well-dressed, commuting suburban businessmen.

“We work closely with the authorities and we are delighted that Police are using the Tranz Metro train service like so many Wellingtonians,” said Mark Pettitt, Security Manager of Passenger Rail at KiwiRail.

The idea is that people will use the opportunity to discuss local issues with police.