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Freaky Money | Jul 12, 2006 11:24
It's not often I get a courier pack from the Reserve Bank, let alone one with money in it. In fact, it's never happened before. But a nice little media pack with examples of the new 10, 20 and 50 cent pieces arrived at Dubwise Towers this week.
The new money is, as you might expect, much smaller (the bank says the present 50 cent piece, at 31.75mm in diameter and weighing a hefty 13.31 grams, is one of the largest circulating coins in the world) and made of steel, rather than cupro-nickel.
The new 50 has a perfectly smooth edge, but apart from that looks like a miniature version of the old one. As does the 10, except it's now copper plated and (from memory) somewhere between the size of the deleted one and two cent pieces. Two 20 (slightly larger than the 10) is quite different and has "Spanish flower" edging.
There's more information on the new coins website. It's all very sensible I'm sure, but I hereby predict the following: on the first Friday night after the new coins are released (July 31) some young jack-the-lad at a nightclub, having partaken liberally of the disco biscuits, will receive one of the new mini-me fifties in his bar change. It will look freakishly small, and his palm unfeasibly vast. He will squint and close one eye and then the other and it will still look that way. And it will seriously mess with his head …
Speaking of altered states, this story is a bit of a 60s flashback. It reports the belief of researchers who gave psilocybin to some religiously-inclined test subjects that "profound mystical states can be produced safely in the laboratory." Well, yeah, but it works even better at Glastonbury …
And, staying with the theme, Syd Barrett is dead. There's lots of YouTube goodness.
PS: A notional chocolate fish to Rex Widerstrom for being the only reader to point out that yesterday I had Don Brash's director of "forward reconnaissance" as the director of "forward renaissance" - twice. I take some pride in my spelling, rather less in my typing. I can only plead that I am currently somewhat deranged by the hours I have spent working at my computer in the last three days. But I'm warming to the idea of "forward renaissance".
New old news | Jul 11, 2006 09:40
As DPF correctly pointed out yesterday, Don Brash's new director of "forward reconnaissance", Garreth Spillane, isn't that new: he started three months ago. DPF wonders whether the angle might be that Spillane is (a) gay, and (b) an opera singer, but points out that National's organisation has embraced both those sorts of human in the past anyway.
So we're left wondering whether Colin Espiner decided that old news was still news so long as no one else had written about it; or Brash's office talked up the "forward reconnaissance" guy last week on its own initiative. In which case, why? And wouldn't it be a bit ironic if Spillane had actually been involved in creating the infamous walking the plank photo-op two months ago?
So Jim Sutton's off, then, to be replaced from the Labour list by Charles Chauvel. I was distracted when I saw the news yesterday and it briefly occurred to me that they were making Chauvel Minister of Agriculture (which, of course, Sutton hasn't been for a while). Still, that'd be running with the diversity message, wouldn't it?
Poor old Jordan Carter. He can't post anything without a greeting from a familiar crowd of obsessives who seem to live solely for the chance to scream and writhe at anything he says on his avowedly Labour blog. Albeit at the other end of the political spectrum, they remind me of the very angriest people in the Alliance. And that's not a good thing.
Meanwhile, Gareth Davidson has found a copy of Saturday night's blistering performance of Kapa o Pango on YouTube. Funny thing is, it's uploaded by the busy information-liberators at AussieTorrents, so it's the Australian coverage - and the commentators do not seem at all aware ("It just gets better! First performed by the New Zealand team in New South Wales in 1884 ...") that it's a different haka.
Tracey Nelson reports that the event wasn't lost on the crowd at Jade Stadium on the night. Suspecting the decision to haul out Kapa o Pango was probably taken after all the nonsense about the Channel 7 ad, tse figured:
"It was the perfect way to answer it back. The Chch crowd just went off when they realised it was Kapa o Pango, and geez it was AWESOME - real hair standing up on the back of your neck stuff. Even the Aussies in the crowd were on their feet clapping and cheering at the end of it.
And it had to happen: someone has posted a version of Jerry Collins' onfield relief video with sound effects. Rather clever, actually. But Richard Le Gros emailed from London to say "the only clip I really want to see from the weekend's rugby is Ali Williams dumping George Gregan on his backside around the 63rd minute mark. Loop it over and over and add some yakkity sax over the top and I'd be in heaven (and I could show it to my Aussie flatmates)."
Meanwhile, The Techsploder has multiple YouTube clips from the World Cup final, including Zidane's moment of madness, and a link to a Time Europe story that observes what I thought was bleeding obvious: that Marco Materazzi's spectacular leap backwards and subsequent impression of a dying man was not entirely down to the force of Zidane's head-butt. One element of the World Cup I'm not sorry to see the back of is the sight of professional athletes feigning injury. All the damn time, to the point where players who might actually have gained some advantage in pushing through a clumsy tackle almost inevitably took the option of swan diving and doing the fixing-to-die routine for a couple of minutes. It might be a form of low theatre, but I don't think it's sport.
And, finally danah blogged New Zealand.
The Usual Bastardry | Jul 10, 2006 10:20
I planned to lead with something else today, but this finds me quite exercised. As No Right Turn explains, Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who was forced out for being "over-focused on human rights", has written a book on his experience.
The book draws on documents sought and released under Britain's Freedom of Information and Data Protection acts. But Murray has now been contacted by the British Foreign Office to tell him he cannot make those documents available because they claim that would breach Crown copyright. The abuse of copyright law to suppress information has become a familiar tactic of corporations (and the Church of Scientology) looking to suppress criticism; its use by a democratic government is simply risible.
This irks me for two reasons. One is that it is a story of the enthusiastic appeasement (more annual US aid than the whole of West Africa!) of a vicious, torturing plutocracy - under the cloak of freedom - culminating in the removal of a career diplomat who voiced an inconvenient truth. The other is that it is yet another example of Tony Blair's government's endless preparedness to subjugate open government to political management.
No Right Turn has links to various sources for the documents, including a torrent for a 12.8MB Zip archive. I have the torrent and will be seeding it for at least the next week.
The New Zealand Labour Party got a 90th birthday present over the weekend, in the form of the TNS TV3 poll, which had the party up four points to 46% support and National down two to 39%.
The result contrasts strikingly with those of two other recent polls, and the most that can really be said about the headline figure is that the various polls continue to demonstrate their established biases. Labour will be happy enough for any result out of a period when its caucus has looked spooked most of the time.
But there looks to be more in the leadership figures. Don Brash is down five points to 13% as preferred Prime Minister, and fewer than half of respondents believed he was a capable leader. Fewer than a third believed he was performing well in his job. And no bloody wonder. Has anyone seen him lately? I don't think employing a man to scout ahead for potential photographic pratfalls is going to help much. It's interesting to speculate how Dr Brash would be performing now if National had won the election. Given some of the extreme and impractical elements of National's manifesto, you have to suspect there would have been some fun and games.
A Telegraph story appears to confirm suspicions that the recent abduction and beheading of two US soldiers in Iraq was by way of retaliation for the rape and murder allegedly committed by their comrades. Unnervingly, the story suggests there are eight more revenge killings to go. And Editor & Publisher rounds up coverage and commentary on more horrible news from Iraq.
On (considerably) less grave matters, there are already a couple of YouTube caps of Jerry Collins' nervous on-field pee just before Saturday's test match kicked off. But you really don't want to watch that too many times. Meanwhile, also on YouTube, a reminder of how naff the All Black haka used to be, from 1979. No new instances of Kapa o Pango as performed on Saturday evening, but a number of older ones.
And for the geeks, CNet's Worst Tech of 2006 is pretty funny.
PS: Clearly, fart jokes touch your sensitive liberal souls. Downloads so far for Farting Preacher 2: Fart Harder (see below): 1600 and counting ...
At least it's not pr0n | Jul 07, 2006 08:08
Clearly, our happy home's father-son relationship is not the only one out there to embrace the living, giving love of the fart joke. So seeing as it's Friday, I've posted a copy of Farting Preacher 2: Fart Harder, which showcases the evangelical work of Robert Tilton and is about as good as fart humour gets.
It's an 11.67MB Windows Media file, and you may care to right-click and save it. I'll probably take it down after a few days, so as not to abuse our bandwidth arrangements. But for now, have fun and share the love. (If you really love it, I'll consider posting Farting Preacher 3.)
And don't forget to check out Newtown Ghetto Anger's take on MySpace and (thanks James Tyson) the CommoCofeee 64, a vintage gadget from Italy that uses a Commodore 64 as a timer for an espresso machine (and that looks like not a bad cup they've made there).
Note: none of the above applies to public servants. You guys should get back to work, pronto.
School Holidays | Jul 06, 2006 10:03
The younger boy was waiting for me to finish up so he could get on the G5 yesterday evening when he unexpectedly let rip a series of farts. Farts being intrinsically and immutably funny, we both fell about laughing. The older boy came in to see what the fuss was about.
"Your brother just did a series of farts," I explained. "An animated series …"
"Unfortunately," said the nipper,"the series only lasted 30 seconds."
"But," I chirped,"you can still get it on BitTorrent!"
At which point we all laughed until there were tears in our eyes. We had visited the mythical place where fart jokes and geek humour meet. Perhaps you had to be there.
Earlier in the day, on an expedition out West, I felt obliged to conduct one of my periodical pep talks about there being a difference between disliking Americans (kids really do pick anti-Americanism in the playground these days) and not approving of their government.
While it was perfectly reasonable to regard George W. Bush as a dangerous incompetent, there were, I pointed out many millions of Americans who did not feel themselves represented by him and his cronies. Apart from people who voted for the other guy, there were a lot of people who didn't vote or weren't even registered to vote, and people who did vote for him but were pretty disappointed now. This seemed to sink in.
"I saw a picture of a guy with a placard," the younger one ventured. "And it said 'somebody give George Bush a blow job so we can impeach him'."
Ahem. I thought I should explain that this was a reference to the previous president, who had had sexual relations with a member of his staff and this had caused a great deal of trouble for him.
It occurred to me that the phrase "blow job", having entered the juvenile vocab with the help of the Interweb, might now pop out into conversation at some inopportune time. Did they, I gently inquired, know what "blow job" meant? Well, no …
"It's when somebody kisses someone's penis," I said, carefully. "In the act of making love."
"Ewww!" shrieked the younger one.
"Can we stop talking about this now?" asked his brother.
Quite.
PS: The Herald site was brought down this morning by Drudge Report traffic. Drudge posted a link to the Herald story about NZ peace activist Christiaan Briggs, who handed himself into police in London after he discovered that a man he had punched had fallen, hit his head and lapsed into a coma (the news angle is that the man is a rock band singer). I gather that only one, unflattering account of events is in circulation at the moment, and that Christiaan's side of the story will be heard in court later this month. Obviously, punching someone is stupid, but this is a terrible thing to happen to anyone.
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