Posts by izogi
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Field Theory: And they're off!, in reply to Russell Brown,
Aren't the judgey sports sort of the point of the Olympics, though? It felt wrong yesterday watching S. Williams v Jankovic at Wimbledon. Switching over to the gymnastics felt more Olympic.
Maybe this is an argument for bringing back Olympic events in sculpture, painting, music and literature (including drama, epic and lyric literature), all of which were part of the original modern Olympic vision? :)
It's hard to believe those athletes would be any more professional these days than someone like S. Williams.
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to Tess Rooney,
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Yeah. Me and and Colin Craig: we're not going to surprise you with our views on gay marriage.Yeah. Me and and Colin Craig: we're not going to surprise you with our views on gay marriage.
What have I missed about why so many people care about what Colin Craig thinks? (Not criticising you, Emma, but he just keeps coming up all over lately!) Few people voted for him, and aside from all the cash he has to blow, he doesn't have a say in any direct way. Is this just a case of media wanting to give equal airing time to the most accessible and obviously extreme critic of whatever's going on, no matter how irrelevant they might be?
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Hard News: John Banks: The volunteer did…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But I thought there was something legal about the act of putting your mark on a document. Along the lines of "if you sign it you affirm that the contents are true".
I'd go with what Graeme's said, but I do find myself now really really wanting to know if John Banks had anything to say during the Paintergate saga about 10 years ago. The ACT leader of the day certainly did, but I think Mr Banks was busy being a mayor at about that time.
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Hard News: It's not funny because it's…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Presumably it's bad form to draw attention to the fact that he's also morbidly obese.
It's probably bad form considering likely links between high workloads, stress and obesity, but if the intent is to appeal to the same crowd who were convinced to rationalise a genuine, serious hate of Helen Clark by reasoning she was ugly and female at the same time, it might catch some attention.
I'd be interested to see some opposition election campaigns that highlighted what I think is disgusting and dismissive behaviour in the house, but I'm also not convinced many voters would care or do anything but rationalise it away to match what they already think.
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Hard News: Moving from frustration to disgust, in reply to Russell Brown,
I feel angry at the way we're all being led down this road by our dipshit Prime Minister.
No argument but it it enough to just focus on the guy at the top in this case? In the past few years I've see a lot of people slagging off John Key and imho he deserves it, but he's also frequently pushed to the front as a fall guy more than a leader or policy-maker, for no other reason than to make it easier for others to get on with the job of implementing the actual agenda without attracting so much criticism. In 12 pages of comments for this post so far (just as an example), I had to reach page seven before there was a single reference to Hekia Parata, compared with frequent and repeated references to John Key or Prime Minister. Focusing on criticising the PM at the expense of everyone else involved is playing their game.
There are at least five other people who need to be strongly and directly criticised, associated with by name (not just abstract positions), held responsible for this during their current and future careers, and that's just those with direct ministerial responsibilities.
The same thing's happening with asset sales and mining and a score of other things. The PM isn't there to lead or especially care or be relevant to what's happening. He's there to attract the criticism, file it in the trash and smile so that people forget. Helen Clark was also associated with nearly everything that happened in her government for better or worse, but she at least made it her business to actually know what was happening and be able to speak intelligently and accountably about it. Our current PM's just a wispy wave of flatulence which the rest of the government emits to distract people away from where the real action is.
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Hard News: For want of some purpose, in reply to Islander,
I've just ditched Sky ..... I may get Freeview - but it is uncertain the service is available in the wopwops.
You should be able to get it from anywhere in New Zealand using a left-over Sky satellite dish, but you'll need a Freeview-compatible set-top box to translate the signal. (Just make sire it's a satellite box and not a terrestrial UHF box if that's what you're planning to do.)
Unless anything's changed, the built-in decoders that are inside most new TVs today require the ground-transmitted UHF signals, which are also required for a Full HD transmission (if you care about that sort of thing).
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Hard News: For want of some purpose, in reply to Rob Stowell,
I know a few folk with analogue TVs and Sky boxes, who may miss Freeview entirely, though.
Me too, to be honest, but in most of the cases that I know, I think the people pay for Sky because they're most interested in the sorts of content that Sky offers and so TVNZ7 would not have been their priority. Maybe there was also an element of Freeview channels getting visually lost between everything else Sky pushes through.
That said, I have known people who have Sky or a set-top box on a a TV or possibly two and just left anything else in the household collecting analogue signals. From there it's easily possible to run into the problem whereby if the person controlling the main TV in the household wants to watch something like NZ's Next Top Model, nobody else can watch (and often can't even record) any alternatives except from a very limited range of non-digital content.
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There are a couple of reasons the viewers took a while to roll up. One was programming. [--snip--] The other, much more important, impediment to 6 and 7 was the lack of external promotion.
I can't speak for all those people who weren't given programmes they wanted, or weren't told they existed, but for us the biggest incentive to start watching TVNZ6 and TVNZ7 was actually having them available at all. Once we finally bothered to buy a digital TV and could fluently flick back and forth between them and other channels on equal terms without any impediments, we watched them frequently. Digital guides seriously changed our viewing habits, just through being able to see what's on everywhere now (or soon) without caring about the politics or tech behind the channel, and with that we watched a lot of 6 and 7. (Having a PVR has been the next big thing that's changed our viewing habits, but that's another story.)
I'd always introspectively assumed the lag of viewership increase would have been closely proportional to the number of people who'd properly switched to digital TV. Do you not see this as significant?
I hadn't thought that merely owning a set-top box would cut it as far as putting the channels on equal terms when selecting programmes to watch, especially if it's only available on one TV in the household, or if there are still incentives to flip back to the analogue signal from time to time. They'd have to be as completely available as any non-digital channel.
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Wow, thanks for posting this. I was drawn to some of John Pascoe's mountaineering writings several years ago by some of his legendary "colourful" descriptions of the Tararua Range (one of my favourite New Zealand mountain ranges but not everyone's cup o' tea) which he spent a fair amount of time exploring near the war-time years. This is a side of his work I hadn't seen before.