Random Play by Graham Reid

Have a look. It's a very different but much improved (search function! tags!!) Elsewhere

Indeed. I used that search function today, to look for a particular artist. And since I couldn't find him, I'll put in a word for Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. The best music I've heard this year, in any language.

Life went on.

We went to movies and saw bands play, had dinner with friends, complained about the weather (or went for walks at Mission Bay on fine days), read some very interesting books...

My break is enforced by a thesis and a Firefox add-on, but the results are much the same: less time in the frantic blogomediaplex, and more time for baking pizzas and tending the garden. It's been a very rewarding trade-off.

Geez Steven, have NZ banks started begging for a private sector bailout plan now?

By not engaging with these great events of our time sent to test or divert us, I was probably dead.

It just didn’t seem like it from where I was standing.

I actively choose not to engage in most political discussion. It's very freeing.

when I moved back to NZ I was looking for a bank, went from bank to bank asking what their deposit insurance limit was (I was moving enough for a house) I kept getting blank stares "what?" - took me a while to figure out that no one had any

So what does happen when my Aussie owned bank goes belly up? they do have some form of DI in Oz - does their govt get first call on my money?

(and should I move my money to Kiwibank?)

I actively choose not to engage in most political discussion.

In this discussion, I actively choose not to talk about banks. It is all we hear these days.

Life is quiet in this thread. Perhaps this shouldn't surprise us.

We're not on the internet anyway.

The first half of this year sucked for me, and it's all the media's fault. Between oil price shocks, financial collapses and stock-market disaster, I found this a pretty depressing time to be entering the working world. Had I graduated and started working at the end of last year as planned, things might have been a bit different, but as it ended up I was leaving university to enter an economy that was definitely on the turn downward, and I knew it.

Thus in April and May I was experiencing a level of non-specific anxiety and dread which almost had me off to the doctor. I'm not quite in that territory now, but it's still tough to make it through the morning business report without that anxiety gradually bubbling up through my consciousness. I think consuming less and better-quality media is a sensible idea.

The macro picture: apart from the few individual decisions left to us - working harder, saving more, and other hitherto-unfashionable ideas - the overall direction of things is largely out of our hands, and general anxiety can only make our lives less pleasant. The summer of global economic collapse needn't be all that unpleasant anyway, at least not if we imitate George and build up our cooking and agriculture skills early on.