In them thar hills and everywhere!

As a Beverly Hillbillies fan from way back, I was familiar with the term 'black gold'.
Newspapers and those who comment in them describe oil, real and potential in the same way nowadays, I guess to give it an exciting, even romantic aura.
When 'they' began calling the milk that flowed from Southland's dairy herds 'white gold' it was understandable, though it always put me in mind of King Midas.
But they found they couldn't stop. Southland's lignite became 'brown gold', the region's seemingly limitless water resource 'blue gold' and the radiata forestry 'green gold'.
It got very lame, imho, to be describing these elements of our natural world with the language of a bullion dealer but today 'they' went a step too far.
Scientist Dr Bob Elliot has described Tim Shadbolt's herd of insulin-producing Auckland Island swine as 'pig gold'.
There are so many reasons for me to despair at that unfortunate description but at least I can look foward to the day someone looks at the increasingly viable sewerage to methane fuels industry and breathlessly tells some cub reporter how excited they are about 'sh*t gold'!