Public Address - Up Front (Home)

First Footing | Oct 01, 2008 16:23

I'm not, as has been pointed out before, much of a chick. Any sentence that begins with 'women like' is probably going to end with me saying 'you what?'. When it comes to Mother's Day, the family will be set when they can work out what it is that's the exact opposite of fluffy slippers and a book recommended by Oprah. I don't like chocolate or ice cream or hating Keira Knightly. I regard a Women's Lifestyle Expo as the kind of thing that would leave me in desperate need of a beer and a fag after about fifteen minutes.

And I don't get shoes.

I've always hated shoes. It's possible I was savaged by a shoe as a child and I've blocked out the memory, leaving only a lingering morbid dislike of footwear. Whatever the reason, the chief glory of spring for me is the ability to once again go barefoot. Freedom from the tyranny of footwear is totally worth all the dodging of broken glass and weird smears of unidentifiable 'stuff' on the footpath.

As a result, I have the sort of feet you get from thirty-odd years of going barefoot – the sort of feet beloved by the Khmer Rouge. They're broad and flat and peasanty, and I don't care. For a while my party trick was shoving pins into my feet – you had a good centimetre of callus before you even hit skin, let alone any kind of responsive nerve ending.

As I've grown older, I've started to notice something very odd. Other people look at what people are wearing on their feet. People look at me funny for not wearing shoes, and some – and I mean at a 'strangers in the supermarket checkout queue' level – will make comments about my feet. Sometimes they'll even make those comments to me. I particularly love the remarks about hygiene, as if the soles of my frequently-washed feet are in some way inherently dirtier than the bottoms of their shoes.

I've also had to sign waivers on occasion, declaring that I won't sue the movie theatre should I slash open my delicate little bare sole on a particularly vicious piece of popcorn. That's not even slightly weird compared to the apparent requirement for me to wear shoes while flying. I struggle to conceive of the kind of accident I could have involving an airplane where shoes would be of any protective value. Still, the next time I'm required to dig through my luggage for safety reasons, I want to be able to pull out a pair of these. (Why yes, there is no length I will not go to in the cause of sarcasm. Try me.)

My mother is particularly bugged by my habit of digging over the vegetable garden in bare feet. When I was little, she gave me a book of cautionary stories for children which featured a story where a girl was digging her garden in bare feet, and put a fork through her foot. Unfortunately from a 'correcting behaviour' standpoint, the explicit moral of the story was that this had happened because she was gardening on the Sabbath, instead of holding it sacred by not working (and cooking her family a huge roast and then washing all the dishes instead). Rather than making me wear shoes for safety, this just entrenched my suspicion that God was a Vindictive Bastard

I'm slowly learning that noticing feet is normal. Not at this level, there's nothing normal about that, but my total inability to notice people below mid-calf is apparently kind of weird. Ugg boots, platforms with fish in them, clown shoes – I promise you, I won't notice. Never in my life has the phrase 'what a pretty shoe' gone through my head, let alone made it all the way out of my mouth.

And it's not that I don't care about clothes. I like clothes. I like hippy skirts, jeans that come all the way up to my waist, and bras that push my breasts together instead of tucking them discreetly into my armpits. I'll get all dressed up for an evening out, jewellery and hair and makeup, and then get all depressed when I realise I have to put something on my feet or I'll look weird.

My total loathing of shoes, and the discarding of them at the first possible opportunity, is I'm sure in no way related to either my current protracted bout of bronchitis, or my on-going hip problems. When my physiotherapist suggested corrective insoles for my non-existent shoes, I just stopped going to my physiotherapist. And yes, it has been suggested that I'm in need of the kind of therapy that doesn't start with 'physio'.

I was in the supermarket the other day, and a woman looked at me a couple of times, then furtively scurried over. "I just want to say," she said, "how nice it is to see someone in bare feet. I'm from Auckland, and you never see people in Christchurch with bare feet". I was very sweet and thanked her, instead of suggesting it was either to stop people spotting the webbed toes from the in-breeding, or to protect us from the debris from the constantly-exploding P labs.

Let her find that out the hard way.

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What Sixteen Is | Sep 23, 2008 12:25

When I first wrote for Public Address, I talked about difference. I said "the heavy shit can wait for another occasion, and get here on merit". Since then, apart from a tendency to laud porn and smut up the cleanest threads I've been very samey. Despite a reluctance to look like a total drama queen, however, it seems to be time to dance like Tze Ming's watching. Merit is still up for debate.

When I was sixteen my boyfriend tried to kill me. Not very hard, but when I tell this story people tend to look at me like I'm crazy, which tips me off that it might not be normal. Obviously, in order to tell this story names have to be changed to protect the everybody. In doing this, I've picked up on Jolisa's excellent suggestion that more people should be named after inanimate objects.

We were doing school sport one day when someone pointed out that there were a couple of big leather-clad guys leaning on their motorbikes watching us. It turned out one of them was Table, a guy I'd gone out with briefly in 3rd form before leaving him for his best friend Pickles. Anyway, one thing led to another and next morning I'm in the Deputy Head's office getting a bollocking for smoking and riding on the back of a bike while in school uniform. Lesson? Always carry a change a clothes.

Turns out Table has these three friends, and they're all very close. Table's friend Standard Lamp is tall, wiry, pony-tailed, covered in tattoos and one of the sweetest and most selfless people I've ever met. They're friends with two brothers, Crawdad and Catfish.

After I've been going out with Table about a month, Crawdad and Catfish's parents go on holiday, and the rest of us basically move into their house. My mum knows where I am, I'm still going to school, but I've basically become a sort of combination mum and girlfriend for this bunch of guys. A murlfriend, if you will.

Table loves me. He cooks me dinner, teaches me how to use a butterfly knife and play Strip Poleconomy (not at the same time). He may wear a lot of black leather and look like a brunette Billy Idol, and he might have a tendency to be overly aggressive and have flashes of violent rage, but I know him. He's fiercely loyal, devoted to his Mum, and he loves the theatre. He's bright and frustrated. He's not coping very well with the death of his last girlfriend or getting kicked out of the army for getting caught with drugs. (He says he was framed. I say that'd be a hell of a coincidence.) He and Standard Lamp are Prospects for the Road Knights.

Me, I'm falling in love with Catfish. He sings and plays guitar – mostly he does Elvis covers down at the Bowling Club, but there's talk of a recording contract. He's got this little dimply smile like a human version of John Barrowman. He's got me listening to Randy Travis and liking it.

There comes a day we're briefly alone in the hallway, he reaches for a cupboard behind me, and suddenly we're playing Bobbing for Tonsils. Then he says something to me that I shan't repeat, as its awesome power as a flawless pick-up line makes it too dangerous to release on an unsuspecting public. An interruption prevents us setting a new land-speed record for trousers.

Things get very tense. Aware I'm slipping away from him, Table asks me to marry him. I tell him we have to break up. He presses me. Whatever's wrong he can fix it. I admit I'm in love with someone else. He says he'll share. I refuse. He asks who it is. I won't tell him, on the grounds that if I do, he'll kill Catfish. I leave.

A couple of weeks later I run into Catfish in the chippy. He tells me he took about an hour of listening to Table talk about me and this mysterious guy before he couldn't take it any more. He's said to him, listen, we have to talk, but first you have to drink this rigger. Then he's told him.

Table got up, walked out of the house and down the road. Catfish followed him, and sat with him at the top of the Ben Venue cliffs in the freezing dark for four hours so he wouldn't jump.

I extract the salient fact from this story, which is that a guy who'll do that for a friend isn't going to have sex with me.

About a week later I get a call from Table asking me to go round to his place. He sounds weird. When he lets me in he's wearing cammo gear and sunnies and carrying a loaded crossbow. I figure I'm not leaving in a hurry.

So I sit down and he holds the crossbow to my head and talks to me. He's had a fight with the boys, and if they don't like him any more what's the point. They're his life, everything's wrong and nothing will make it right. Not once does he mention he knows about me and Catfish.

Gradually it dawns on me that he thinks this is the only way he can get anyone to listen to him. And I can do that, I can listen to him and let him let himself be talked down. I'm not scared. I'm annoyed, because I did the right thing and didn't have any Catfish and I'm still being punished for it anyway. I'm a little apprehensive that Table's going to make me have sex with him before he'll let me go.

But I do talk him down and the crossbow gets too heavy to keep holding to my head and he lets me go home. I run all the way, crawl into bed and bawl my eyes out. I tell absolutely no-one. That was 1988. I spoke about this for the first time in 2004.

This is sixteen to me. When people talk about teenagers as if they're children this is what I think about. When they demonise hoodie-wearers I get myself all in a tangle. People used to judge Table as dangerous and stupid because of the way he dressed, and he was a sweet guy who was just a bit fucked up. I argue this, and my partner says 'wait a minute, isn't that the guy who tried to kill you?'. And all I can do is shrug and say 'yeah, but not hard'.

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Mmmmmm, MMP | Sep 16, 2008 10:25

Confession time. I was a member of the Labour Party from 1987 until 1989. In '88 and '89 I was the Aorangi Regional Rep on the Labour Youth Council. Despite this (no, not because of it), I have never voted Labour in my life.

This peculiarity is all a matter of timing: I wasn't eligible to vote until 1990. This was no obstacle to my fresh-faced ideology, and it was a hell of an interesting time to be in politics. By the time I started voting, I was less enthusiastic about politics than I had been for years.

I was raised from the time I was six by a Values-voting 'weave your own yoghurt' lefty liberal hippy. (Thanks, Mum.) I was taken on Hiroshima Day marches and smelter and dam protests. We had those Muldoon cartoon calendars in the kitchen. By the time of the '84 election I was clued up, paying attention, and dead enthusiastic. We were finally going to get shot of the bastard.

Labour won. There was the Oxford Union Debate, the Buchanan incident, the Rainbow Warrior bombing. My country and I were becoming teenagers at the same time: lippy, defiant and dead impressed with our own importance.

What happened next was a bit confusing, I have to admit. We'd won, things were supposed to be good. Not quite so many people out of work, a bit more giving a shit about those at the sharp end. Still, someone was bringing some jam some time, best not to worry. I joined the Party through a friend just before the 87 election.

The next couple of years involved several trips to Wellington and a lot of 'mouth shut ears open' for me. I'll admit I got way more out of it than the Party got out of me. Cheers Labour Party, Air New Zealand's blueberries were choice. There was much sitting in student flats listening to Billy Bragg and talking about Nicaragua. This world where people actually cared about ideas seemed a hell of a lot better than what was going on in the rest of my life at the time.

The Council meetings themselves, though - the bickering, the being sent off with the other women to talk about wymyn's issues, the inability to actually effect anything – they were unfreshening my face. It wasn't all waving a bottle at Security and saying you were headed for Jonathan Hunt's birthday party. Talking to MPs and realising they were pushing a policy they actually knew was wrong because it was the best compromise they could get isn't something that goes down too well with teenagers. I'd spent my last two birthdays in a pub with a picture of Michael Joseph Savage over the door. The Labour Youth magazine was called The Red Flag. We weren't pissing about with compromise, surely.

Roll on April 1989, and the split between the parliamentary wing and the rest of the party cracked wide open. Jim Anderton walked. My ex-Hero David Lange said something nasty about a personal friend. We called an emergency meeting of the Council in Auckland, after which we split down the middle. I was in the half that resigned and drank all the wine. Most of them went on to join New Labour. Me, I was seventeen and exhausted with politics. I also shared the concerns of a close friend about some of Anderton's behaviour. One last (unsuccessful) go at sleeping with the secretary and I was done with party politics.

1990 was off to university, and a pol sci course that introduced me to a very strange concept. In other countries, they had different ways of electing governments. Some of these were proportional. I really liked the sound of this German system. It seemed, well, fair and democratic. A couple of years later and I was campaigning again. I'd like to take a moment to thank Peter Shirtcliffe: we couldn't have done it without him. That's one of the things I really like about the Kiwi psyche: any time someone spends obscene amounts of money telling us we're stupid, we really like to tell them to get stuffed. Even if we don't actually understand the issue.

I supported MMP like I never had the Labour Party. I drove people crazy never shutting up about it. At the 1993 election I was sitting in a car outside a polling booth with an ex-boyfriend having this conversation:

"And then, in 1981, it happened again. More people voted Labour than National, but National got more seats."

"Really?"

"Yep."

"That's stupid."

"I know."

"Back in a minute."

I don't know whether he voted just to shut me up, or because he thought if he ate the cereal there might be a surprise free gift in the bottom of the packet, but he voted, and that was a first.

I have a certain sense of satisfaction about that campaigning now. Nineteen years after Jim and I both quit the Labour Party, I'm sitting here in his electorate. And even though I'd rather swallow a live rat than vote for him, I know I'll still have one vote that counts.

I think he'd be a bit grateful too.

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Young and Sort of Free | Sep 09, 2008 10:23

Australians. They're just like us, only brasher, freer and stronger right? We're all nanny-state and worrying about feelings, they're all 'whadaaaaarya' and biting the heads off snakes. Except apparently Australians can't go on the internet without someone holding their hand.

Like a lot of people around here I was pretty happy with the result of the last Australian election. Yet amidst all the apologising and signing up for Kyoto, Kevin Rudd's shiny new government did something that slipped under my radar. Probably a lot of things, really, but this is what bothers me now: the Aussie Clean Feed. They're intending to filter all content at an ISP level, to remove child pornography. And other pornography. And R-rated content. And violence. And 'inappropriate content'.

Let's be fair. The British started it. As of the beginning of this year, the British 'voluntary' clean feed has now been applied by all ISPs. Because the filtering isn't mandatory there's been no legislation, no vote and no debate. If British users try to access blacklisted pages, they will be shown a soothing 404 error, to avoid the distress of being informed that the content has been censored.

Even in Australia this isn't really the Labor Party's baby. This is policy that the Australia Institute and the Family First Party were pushing back in 2003. The Liberals were in on the act by 2005, though reading their speeches, you can understand the concern. Apparently, the internet works differently in Australia:

Even in our own homes, you go home, turn on your home computer and bingo-out come the pornographic sites. You are hit again and again.
~ Senator Guy Barnett, Lib, Tas

you have only got to press P on the Internet and all this stuff appears free of charge in front of you
~ Senator Paul Calvert, Lib, Tas

I can only hope I never work out how to 'press P on the internet' so I can avoid getting punched in the face by bingo-porn.

The Rudd government is getting the job done. There's AU$75 million set aside in the Federal budget over the next two years for implementing the compulsory clean feed scheme. Some of this funding will come from the now-defunct NetAlert filter scheme, which provided filtering software free of charge to Australian households.

In July, the government ran a trial of various filtering systems in Tasmania. There's an excellent round-up of the results here. In brief:
- while load testing was based on thirty users and only blocked 3930 sites, network degradation was as high as 75%. The more accurate the filter was, the worse the effect it had on performance. One filter caused a 22% degradation in speed when it wasn't actually filtering.
- at best, sites were correctly blocked 92-95% of the time. At worst, more than one in ten got through.
- at best, sites were incorrectly blocked (blocked when they contained no objectionable content) 1% of the time. That doesn't sound too bad, but imagine that's your business, one of the one in a hundred sites blocked from the entire Australian market when you've done nothing wrong. At worst, over-blocking hit over 6%.
- the only way to filter content on instant messengers or peer to peer protocols was to block them completely.
- The filters do nothing to protect children from actual dangers such as cyber-bullying or stalking.

This has been touted as a success, and the project is powering on to its next step, a real-world pilot program.

Now, let's assume that protecting children from child pornography is a pressing need. Let's assume that it's easy to define pornography and Kevin Rudd is inarguably correct when he calls this picture 'disgusting'. Let's assume that Telecommunications Minister Stephen Conroy has people's best interests at heart and his opponents can justly be characterised thusly:

Labor makes no apologies to those that argue that any regulation of the internet is like going down the Chinese road. If people equate freedom of speech with watching child pornography, then the Rudd-Labor Government is going to disagree.

Worried about free speech? Concerned that nobody seems to know what's on the blacklist, but that it will cover legal material? You're obviously a pervert. They're thinking about the perverts too, though. You may be able to opt out of filtering by contacting your ISP and asking to be put on the 'filthy uncensored internet' list. Though as the filtering software will still be running on your connection, it'll be filthy uncensored slow internet.

This system will be applied to every public and private net connection in the country. It will be applied to every household, even though only a third of Australian households have children and only a third of those have filtering software installed – even though it's free. Oddly the policy is being aggressively pushed despite it being very unpopular with internet users - 51.5% strongly oppose the plan, while only 2.9% strongly support it.

But even if you assume that pre-chewed baby-food internet for adults is an acceptable sacrifice for protecting children, the simple fact is that filtering doesn't do that. All filters both over-block and under-block. They don't protect children from chatting to people they shouldn't, putting silly things on their MySpace pages, or being bullied by other kids. They don't help children learn to make good decisions about using the net.

Yes, some parents want their children's internet filtered. They were able to do that, using the previous government's NetAlert free filter program, which is being discontinued and having its funding diverted to the CleanFeed. Obviously not enough parents were Thinking of the Children, so now it's the Federal Government's job.

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I Don't Think it Means What You Think it Means | Sep 02, 2008 14:24

One of the joys of raising our kids has been teaching them to speak our language. I don't mean English, I mean the particular little dialect that's unique to our family. Like any group language, it's an agglomeration of cultural references and code-words: references to events for which I guess you had to be there. Like any group language, it's designed for speedy communication between the members, and bonding through exclusion of outsiders.

It leads to little hiccups in life (RL, meat-space), of course. Luckily, people were very accepting of my son being the only kid in his kindy using the words 'whom' and 'whilst' correctly – or indeed at all. The only problem came when he did a painting that was just the word 'HELL', painted neatly across the bottom of a large piece of paper. "Were you writing 'hello' and you ran out of room?" his teacher asked. No, he explained patiently, it said 'HELL'. "That's where Diablo lives".

I'm not sure whether their concerns were allayed by the information that Diablo was also the reason he could read three-digit numbers and knew what a bardiche was, but they shut up about it, which I'm calling a win.

Now that our kids are older, we've been introducing them to our televisual cultural icons. They're now learning why we say 'they're all dead, Dave' and 'fire bad, tree pretty'. I'm looking forward to teaching them about 'dammit Janet' and 'I didn't make him for you'. Some flummox me, though: I've no idea any more where the pervasive 'I've fallen and I can't get up' came from in the first place.

I'd love to see what happens in someone's brain when they get a casual pop-culture reference, because I'm sure there's a big reward ping. Echo-response didn't do much for me when it was:

May the Lord be with you.
And also with you.

but give me:

You're wet.
Yes, it's raining

Or

I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit
It's the only way to be sure

and I has a happy. I once introduced myself to another Honours student solely on the basis that she was singing 'I'm going to eat you little fishy' under her breath. One of the things I love about PA System is the astonishing breadth of the cultural references – all the way from Evelyn Waugh to Ferris Bueller. The more I get, the more I feel like I belong.

At Bardic Web we can often tell how old someone is or what kind of groups they've come from by the language they use, their punctuation and grammar and which abbreviations they understand without explanation. We drew up a glossary so people could look things up without asking and highlighting their difference from the group. It's geared more towards knowing NPC and WTF than IANALB, which we've never needed. Then we drew up another one for the language that we'd developed together as a group, and which was never going to be useful anywhere else. So for instance 'this looks well Rikerable' means 'on the face of it, this plot situation is intractable, but I reckon if my character boffs that NPC we'll be right'. Then there's another layer of admin-only terms, because we found we needed words for splatter-guns and attention-whores. That's three dialects for a fairly small group.

Being from four different countries, we've had to learn to speak each other's meat-space English as well. Generally that's not been too much of a problem. I've learned what 'pony up' means, and they've stopped going OMGWTFBBQ when I describe a task as 'a piece of piss'.

In the time that Public Address has been running System, we've gone through a few words of our own. Theatre seems to have done its dash, but at the same time, I don't think I've seen a Theatreable situation for a while. Pendant will hang around in the background, and I'm predicting lolnui will have a slightly longer shelf-life than $%#&-quaxing, which has already mutated to just plain quaxing, but neither is in it for the long haul. (I could well be completely wrong about this. I Am Not A Linguist, but...)

Most people don't seem to really be aware that they use group language, and effortlessly slide between different dialects as the situation demands. You only tend to notice when something goes wrong – like the woman who went into her office supplies store and said 'I can has printer paper?', or the time I tried to return something on the basis that it was 'borken'. I can't see my own group language to the extent that I often have to get someone else to read over my columns to make sure they're intelligible. (Or in some cases to see if they're offensive, because I've lost all concept of where a 'normal' person's line is in that respect.)

Language indoctrination hasn't been entirely successful, I have to admit. I got an email from my daughter in the weekend asking if she could have AIM installed on her computer:
u now the one that u can, like, chat 2 each other?
That'll teach me to let her use MMORPGs. Still, as long as she's still emailing me from her bedroom instead of walking down the hall and talking to me, it's not a total loss.

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