Pop CultureAugust 30, 2016

Hosking Week: NZ Fashion legend Colin Mathura-Jeffree reviews the jackets of Mike’s Minute

Guest writer

Bridging the vast gap between Fashion Week and Hosking Week, we asked the icon Colin Mathura-Jeffree to critique some of Mike Hosking’s boldest looks* from Mike’s Minute.

five

This isn’t bad. The lapels are a bit ’70s, you know, and then we’ve got the, the pocket flower which is internally in the pocket square. I can see what he’s doing. The jacket lapels are a bit large. I have to hand it to him: this is a wicked conundrum. You know? It’s ironic, like everything he does.

I like the lapel flower, it’s very forward-thinking to match it with the pocket hanky. His gayness is right up there, for a straight man he does very well.

He’s got such a face: he’s like the evil prince in a Disney movie, don’t you think? The evil, petulant prince of New Zealand media. His eyes do sparkle when you meet him though. I’ve met him a few times and he always says, “What are you doing here?”And I feel like saying to him, “I’m your Uber driver.”

Score: 6/10 but the lapels are still too big.

hosking

Oh no, no. Look, I come from modelling. I was baptised as a model in 1991. These are the kinds of things I wore back then, you know? Harlequin was very big back then. No.

He says “The War on Drugs”. Well, to wear that jacket, you have to take drugs. To look at that jacket, you have to be on drugs. I mean, look, he’s got the lines. He’s trying to be controversial, like ‘this is the war on drugs and I’m going to wear sleeves of cocaine’.

Score: Negative. For irony, I’d give it a 10 but otherwise, I’d give it a a 0.001/10.

one
I don’t mind this look – it’s very classic, the lines are clean, you know? He is representative of his age and his actual demeanour here. It works for me. I love the jacket for him, but would I wear it? Let’s just say if there’s nothing else to wear, I would wear this.

Score: 8/10

two

I know what he’s trying to do here. He’s trying to match the t-shirt with the lines of the jacket. This actually, to me, wrong to do. The jacket is actually wrong for him, in terms of his character. It may be a bit of a shield, you know?

Would I wear that? Yes. Would I wear it better than him? Of course. He’s got pretty eyes, but terrible hair.

Score: 3/10

hosko

No… No no no. First of all, it’s not ethnically appropriate. I would imagine someone like Kanye West in this, you know? Not this man. It’s like something you’d see on a 22-year-old, 23-year-old. If I was presented with this to wear, I would be particular about wearing it.

The byline doesn’t work with the look and he knows that. When something is, is askew, we take more notice, you know? Even the lady behind him is disgusted. She’s going, “Should I throw my Maggi’s cup of soup on him?”. There’s no fresh take with this outfit. This t-shirt might work if you’re at the beach, but no. Again: no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Score: On me? I’d give that a six. On an amazing rapper like Kanye West? I’d give it an eight. On him? I’d give it a one.

The white t-shirt doesn’t match the lapels. Wear something else underneath that Hosking!
That’s where he fails it. Wearing a t-shirt like that says, “hey, I’m relaxed.” Wearing a jacket is saying, “Hey, I’m business”. This is just too much of a contradiction. For me, I’d get away with that – but I wear it better, you know?

It’s also too small for him in the shoulders. It should be one size bigger. He’s clearly picked up a stock size like “hey, this is cool and edgy. This is my electric future.” And then he’s just peaced out. But there’s no peace for me, and the woman behind him is disgusted because she knows he’ll never own an electric car.

Score: 5/10

This is actually good, this is a good style for him. Everything works. The blue goes with his eyes to make them sparkle, he actually looks sophisticated. I’m tearing up, I even think the woman behind him is tearing up. This is how you do style, Hosking.

I think not only is this about “telling it like it is”, but it’s got a good “older man that owns a boat” vibe, you know? This is a guy close to his fifties, who’s actually got money, relaxed about that, and has a hot wife. This says: “I’m good with life, you know, telling it like it is.” It’s not challenging in any way.

Some of his other looks challenge people and you should never do that. You should never sort of have a nervous reaction looking at him when he sits in front of you on the telly.

Score: 9/10

We know there’s no way he would want to celebrate Waitangi Day. He’ll celebrate New Zealand day, that’s the way Hosking goes. You know, he’s all about Pākehā lives matter [laughs].

I like the jacket but, you know buddy, just wear a shirt. A beautiful, crisp white shirt under that would be amazing, or even a blue shirt to bring out his eyes or his fake tan.

Score: too enamoured with tan to give response

nine

Oh, here we go. See? Now we’ve got a shirt. This is not bad. I like the jacket, but sadly the shirt is still wrong. He’s got that National Party blue, it’s like a secret message to the audience that says “I support Key no matter what’s going on,” you know? It’s like the Illuminati.

I believe if anyone’s in a secret society, it’s Hosking and I think that his clothing is giving secret signals to his secret brotherhood. And look at those triangles behind him, and the sacrificial blonde behind him. Illuminati.

Score: 6/10

panama

That’s nice. He suits these kinds of neutral, passive colours. Now that we’ve worked out Hosking’s Illuminati code, we can read the secret messages in here. If you zoom in on that person’s desktop, she’s trying to tell us something. It’s like, break the code. This is like The Matrix.

I think the hidden message he is putting out is what he always says, “Whatever the autocue says, I’m gonna contradict it in the reality of the real world I live in. And also, Pākehā lives matter.”

Score: 7/10

As told to Alex Casey

* Sharp-eyed and fashion-forward readers will note that three of the ten jackets are, in fact, identical – a fact which eluded Mathura-Jeffree and The Spinoff until we were too close to publication to care.

This content, like all television coverage we do at The Spinoff, is brought to you thanks to the excellent folk at Lightbox. Do us and yourself a favour by clicking here to start a FREE 30 day trial of this truly wonderful service.

Pop CultureAugust 30, 2016

‘I have become death’ – who will die and who will live?

José Barbosa

Senior Content Creator

No Man’s Sky is a bust and we don’t have enough money to buy the new Deus Ex game. Where now will The Spinoff’s gaming editor deal out his sweet gifts of pixelated murder? As a last resort José Barbosa examines a new gamey-ish project from MIT.

There’s almost no doubt the near future will be full of these little people-carts driven only by little computer brains. Driverless cars sound cool as, eh? But consider the fact that we’ll be handing off control of what are essentially missiles packed full with human meat. What happens when little Timmy barfs expertly in your face making you point the car off the road and into a Burger King? In those nano-seconds just after things go south a computer may have to make decisions about who will die and who will live.

What would a human do if it had a pico-second reaction speed and 3D scanners for eyes? This is the model machine intelligence should surely follow. Fortunately the moral consequences and the choices us meat-sticks would make when presented with hard-core dilemmas are being mapped via MIT’s Media Lab and an online crowdsourced project called the Moral Machine.

The web page throws up a series of random scenarios extrapolated from a base setting where the brakes fail on a moving car just ahead of a pedestrian crossing. You’re prompted to choose the lesser evil of two decisions. This sounds like an awesome lark, to be honest, so let’s give it a go.

moralmachine.mit.edu-[01]

I’m told I can choose from the option on the left where I pilot the unstoppable car into two elderly women and an elderly man. Alternatively I can choose to save their lives and instead wrench the car into a barricade killing the occupants, two women and a man. They are not old.

At first glance this seems like an easy if harsh choice. The old perambulators are close to death by dint of their age. They’ve had their time, best to keep the young alive as they have their wholes lives ahead of them.

But on second glance the four women and two men in each scenario are dressed almost exactly the same. This can’t be a coincidence. What we are in fact watching from our privileged flat perspective position above the clouds is two versions of the two women and one man, one young and the other old, somehow existing in the same time-frame.

We’re dealing with time travel here, of course, but has the old threesome traveled back in time or have the young threesome traveled forward in time? As the oldies are casually limping across the road my guess is this is their time period. But why have the young version traveled forward in time? For no good reason, I fear. I believe they’re actually trying to kill the older versions of themselves in a millennial-funded mission to relieve the future of an ageing population.

Well, bugger that. They didn’t work hard all their lives not to experience the joy of subsidised public transport and tolerated lapses into casual racism. The car hits a barrel of Winston Peter’s Dapper Dan hair gel that fell off the delivery truck and careens into the barricade. All the occupants in the car die.

But, lo! The old versions blink out of existence! What a time stream meddling invoked cock up! Not so, gentle reader. This is a just result because I dream of a future where if you’re a dick, you die. You just die.

Well, that was easy. This game thingy’s good fun!

moralmachine.mit.edu-[02]

Oh God.

Two men, a baby, an elderly woman and a “large woman” on the left and a man and baby on the right.

Well, err. I guess the man and baby on the left are technically breaking the law by crossing on a red light. That’s pretty bad right? I mean that baby’s clearly not with the guy because it’s too far away from him, so I guess it thought it could flaunt the rules just so it could make the train in time. Maybe it saw a friend in its pram across the road, but its friend couldn’t hear because its got little pink nubs for ears, so it trundled across the road to catch up without looking both ways. Rules are rules though. They’re there to keep us safe.

Oh man, that was tough. Should be a cake walk from now on though.

moralmachine.mit.edu-[03]

Shit.

Car: two women, two homeless people and a criminal. On the crossing: four pregnant women and one executive.

Just briefly: for some reason I’m slightly uneasy out that the criminal looks like a ninja turtle carrying a marine buoy.

moralmachine.mit.edu-[04]

I guess you could argue the car is clearly occupied by some sort of Fagin-esque pickpocket gang and therefore their combined deaths would probably harm society less than the deaths of four pregnant women and an executive. But look at how the pregnant woman are forming a protective circle around the executive. That’s unusual and suspicious behaviour for women in their third trimester. This can only mean the “executive” is a high level super villain transporting ill gotten McGuffins with her elite Mamma-bot security squad. That motley crew are none other than a rag-tag group of unlikely heroes who’ve stepped up to the plate to save the universe. In this case good must beat evil; the car swerves to the right and takes out the bad people like a harvester chomping on wheat.

If I can be honest I’m starting to feel an immense weight on my soul. The day began incandescent with hope and purpose. Now it seems a drab thing, all the colours in the world now appear faded as if seen through a ragged veil covering my eyes. We are the dead skin of the world, a putrefaction of empty lives.

mm002

Oh God.

mm001

No. Please. No.

mm003

I don’t want it.

deathhead001

He is here, the final answer for all who live. The reaper is here.

deathhead003

God forgive me, I am the monster. A very sexist monster.

This post, like all of our gaming content, is brought to you by the legends over at Bigpipe, chauffeuring you into a safe future of high speed internet and driverless cars.