Posts by Russell Brown
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Bart Janssen,
This is both tangential and anecdotal, but I was told (by a christian working in the education sector) that Parachute is responsible for a larger number of unwanted conceptions than any other NZ festival.
I so want this to be true – is there any data?
I was told much the same by an acquaintance who was well into Jesus through her teens, and attended a number of Parachutes. Heaps of teenage fumbling and fornicating, apparently.
And many, of course, will have lacked the ability to make good, informed choices.
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Hard News: Chill out: it's a party, in reply to Paul Williams,
Fark, this story, is exactly what we don’t need. There’s dickheads on both sides of the Tasman who take the rivalry too far, Quade Cooper’s one of them, but I reckon as hosts, it needs to be reigned in, off the field at least.
Was just reading it. Ugh.
Prepare now for it to lead both 6pm news bulletins.
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Hard News: Angry and thrilled about Arie, in reply to Sacha,
The concerns included “whether their actions may have constituted an attempt to pervert the course of justice by placing undue pressure on the property owners to stop them acting as complainants and whether there was a potential breach of the rules of sub judice, as the matter was at that time before the court.”
Good grief. And this was the same senior officer who called the owners and tried to pressure them into getting TVNZ to drop the report?
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Hard News: A work of art called Chimney Book, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Thought I would just have a quick look. 15 minutes later …
Powerful.You can imagine how it was on a big screen in a dark room, through a PA system.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to BenWilson,
Actually, I think you’d be very surprised how many have travelled and how many have been to New Zealand
Surprise me with some numbers. I’m searching myself, but these are hard figures to come by.
I think it is true that serious travel is more common in the kind of demographics we hang with, but "middle-class white kids" is still a big demo in New Zealand. My guess is that distance makes us more likely to undertake extended travel or to live in other countries.
I do see Australia as a foreign country. We share remarkably little of each other's news, and it feels somewhat culturally different when I'm there. Simon's difficulty in distinguishing the accents is, I suspect, a function of living in neither country. The two places look, feel and sound different if you live in one of them. I lost the ability to tell the difference when I lived in London -- and gained the ability to tell a North Dublin accent from a South Dublin one.
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Hard News: A work of art called Chimney Book, in reply to Robert Urquhart,
Just get the words Flash Flash in place of the video when browsing on Chrome on Mac here.
Ditto Firefox 6, Windows 7 Pro 64bit. Link to NZOA and video there works fine though :)
Gah. Fixed now, I think. ClicktoPlugin re-enabled itself during my last editing pass, which buggers up the code. Most annoying.
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Hard News: Media7: Covering the Coverage, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
See you there, with another minibus load of students. Will try to get there, this time, before all the snacks disappear.
The way the snacks disappear is really quite remarkable.
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Hard News: LATE OCTOBER: Life in the…, in reply to Jackie Clark,
I recieved my tickets today – I have to say if you have to pop your Late at the Museum cherry, this is the one to do it with,
There's quite a lot of work to do yet, but we had a good meeting at the museum today and I'm hoping it will be something people haven't seen or heard before. This Is Where We Came From is certainly going to be more than just a drag show.
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I thought someone else would say this, but no one has. So …
Among the more frustrating experiences on return will be estrangement from gossip. When you initially socialize outside close friends and family, you will be engaged in conversations about people you don’t know, which are of negligible interest to you.
By the same token, you may find that people in the same settings seem irritatingly uninterested in your fancy overseas talk.
Happily, it passes, and your local cultural connections and cosmopolitan circle of friends will speed the passing.
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Hard News: Media7: Covering the Coverage, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Will we go the whole show without mention of Australian gossip columnists taken more seriously here than by their own outlet, recently wed English captains gone wild (maybe) and a concern troll moral panic dressed up as an intervention?
The introductory video track does contain the words "Don't Tindall", in a sort of aliens-have-taken-over-my-TV context. On the bright side, Jean-Luc Picard also features.