Posts by Russell Brown
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Capture: Coast to Coast, in reply to JacksonP,
Without the intention of sparking a debate, this may be a good place to post the latest Auckland Council beach reports.
If you read this, you’d think, as Russell pointed out elsewhere, most of Auckland beaches are sweet, including the favourite Pt Chev above. Watching 3 News last night you’d think otherwise.
That 3 News story was such crap. Three of the four "unsafe" beaches are marked as permanently unsafe due to historical contamination -- including Cox's Bay and Meola Reef. No one ever swims at them.
The only place marked unsafe in the latest monitoring was the lagoon at Little Oneroa on Waiheke -- presumably because of the seasonal holiday-home influx. The current beach report is actually a good one. Only one very small area failed! But 3 News made it sound like the opposite.
It's also pretty dubious jamming the Auckland Council report together with the figure one-in-three-beaches-nationwide that can be prone to contamination. I think most of those are in regional places where the rating base isn't big enough to support a decent sewerage infrastructure. Auckland, by contrast, has spent the latest 20 years remediating problems.
I dunno, journalists ...
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Hard News: Media data, in reply to Yamis,
Catch up Sky and get your third party providers to unbundle their shit and work out how to produce a useful, cheap product. Maybe they could even get relevant local advertisers in the mix.
Ha. You said “Sky” and “unbundle” in the same sentence.
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Different days at the Chev …
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Hard News: Karen, and being kind, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Oh Geoff, that sounds terrible, but being with your daughter seems the right thing. My deepest sympathy.
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Hard News: Karen, and being kind, in reply to Greville Whittle,
I want to join the others thanking you for sharing this story Russell
You're about the millionth person who's thanked me on one forum or another today, and it's a response I genuinely didn't expect. So thank you, too.
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Hard News: Good work, in reply to Peter Calder,
Having worked often alongside Alison in the subbery, I can attest to her precise and painstaking professionalism and (important) her abiding respect for writers’ intentions.
This.
No copy leaves her desk without having been (usually invisibly) improved.
And this.
She will be hugely missed. And Finlay’s right about Tom McWilliams …
And this!
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Hard News: Karen, and being kind, in reply to Emma Hart,
Russell, your sister was obviously Quite Something, and she looks like one of those somethings was “a bunch of fun”. We are lucky to have had such people in our lives, for however long.
Example: Greg’s surname is also Brown. When they married, she went around insisting that she was going to be Karen Brown-Brown, just to make it clear she hadn’t taken his name.
She hadn’t been a big partier in the sense of drinking since her mid-30s, when she developed that allergic reaction that some women get (including Fee – I’ve never met a man who suffered it) to alcohol and wine in particular. The need to stay healthy was important after her cancer too.
Not drinking, as it turns out, is a very good attribute in someone who organises events where everyone else drinks. (See: charity queen Rose Horton.) I think she and I inherited the host gene from Dad. We like to have folks around at ours.
Seeing as it’s just us here, this story always made me laugh. When she was about to have her double mastectomy, she had the understandable fear that Greg wouldn’t desire her any more. She admitted this to him, and he said:
“Aw, honey … I’d still love you if they sewed up your box!”
Sometimes, you have to love Australians.
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Hard News: Karen, and being kind, in reply to Amberleigh Jack,
Amberleigh, the funny thing is that this year I encouraged you to do something I hadn't yet been able to do myself. And then Mum turned up yesterday with that photograph and I knew it was time. I'll be thinking of you and your mum tomorrow too. x
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Hard News: Good work, in reply to Evan Yates,
Perhaps you still need an “Alison” in your online life…? :-)
…or was that some sort of ironic sub-text thingee?No, it was me not typing as accurately as I think.
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Hard News: We need to talk about Len, in reply to FletcherB,
Um, a quick google or herald search brings up nothing about Len Brown today… care to link, or give us a clue what you’e on about?
Turns out Cameron Brewer did, sort of, declare his freebies, but only declared his Gold Coast junket on the day John Drinnan asked him about it in September 2011. Also never mentioned his SkyCity Rugby World Cup VIP freebie at any meeting where the council was deliberating casino policy. And still didn’t make any formal declaration to the register of interests.
