Posts by Robyn Gallagher
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I went to the new part of the museum on its open day, and it looks like a great venue, so I'm really excited about the Auckland Great Blend.
Also: Kiwi Foo Camp?! Where's my invitation, ow?
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The HoS sez:
gutless wonders who prefer to spit venom under inarticulate pseudonyms
Using a pseudonym doesn't necessarily mean someone wants to be anonymous or has something to hide.
Just looking at the blogs I visit daily, many of them are authored by people using a nom de blog, but I can think, "OK, that's Chris, that's Wendy, that's Sam," etc.
Yeah, there are people who hide behind pseudonyms and dish out awful abuse, but often the use of a pseudonym can be as simple as someone wanting to create an online persona that they can proudly write from.
A journalist friend is coming back from the UK for his first NZ holiday in years, and is wondering about Wi-Fi coverage during his trip
I went around the lower North Island last year and discovered well priced Wi-Fi in two of the crappiest motels I stayed in. I was impressed! I assume it will be similar in the South Island.
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A few years ago I was on a panel at the National Young Writers Festival in Australia, talking about artists on the dole.
Australia has a work-for-the-dole programme, with mixed results. The schemes are outsourced to community groups like the Salvation Army, and I heard a horror story from a guy who had to show up and make comic books for a week as his work-for-the-dole requirement. They weren't allowed to do any "real" work, because that would take away work from real workers.
On the other hand, there was a fellow who had run a theatre workshop with a group of unemployed people. It sounds hideous, but it wasn't. A lot of the group had never had any involvement with theatre before, but they ended up getting so into it that they were happily showing up every day, and on time, something that is apparently uncommon on WFD programmes!
Working for the dole shouldn't feel like a punishment - like periodic detention-style crap work. It should remind people on the dole that work can be an enjoyable, rewarding experience.
here were a few compulsory workshops to teach me how to market myself to a prospective employer.
Five years ago I was on the dole and had do to the week-long Worktrack programme. My fellow course attendees were mostly blokes looking for manual labour jobs and teenage girls who maybe wanted to be make-up artists, but weren't sure. Many of them told me how intelligent I was, which doesn't often happen outside the dole office.
After two different tutors attempted to teach us how to "think outside the box" by doing a join-the-dots exercise where you literally had to draw a line outside a box, I began to feel really really depressed. The pressure was there for me to get a shitty job just so they could tick a box, but I managed to avoid that fate.
However the next year, still dole scum, I moved on to the PACE programme and did a part-time year-long course called New Space for artistically inclined people who just needed a kick in the pants to translate their talent into paid work.
And indeed it kicked me in the pants, sorted through all my bullshit, and helped me figure out what I wanted to do more than any Myers-Briggs test ever did. And it lead to full-time employment in an entirely awesome job that uses my talents.
Things are working.
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Anyway, here's a thought: imagine how cool it would be to still have a tramway connecting K Road, Ponsonby and Queen St ...
Yes! The Link bus is cool, but there's something really personal and friendly about light rail that buses just can't offer.
I get the feeling that Auckland's hilliness tends to be overlooked by many people. Hills don't really matter if you do all your travelling by car, but if you do a fair bit of walking, you soon come to realise just how hilly Auckland is. Good public transport helps.
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I have this theory that because so much of New Zealand's national identity is based around mountains, rivers, and oceans, we tend to ignore cities. They aren't considered important, so we just build any old crappy buildings.
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It's very easy to piss off people, teenagers especially, by acting like an extreme version of something they're against. My good friend Dr Johannes Kraw has been annoying teenz for over a decade now.
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Did anyone else out there know that the Frank Black song "Hang on to Your Ego" was a cover? Of the Beach Boys song "I know there's an Answer"?
I heard it playing in a record shop one day and got stuck in a WTF warp trying to figure how why the song was familiar, but yet not.
Fortunately, Wikipedia was there to set the story straight.
[Written by Brian Wilson,] the song was originally going to be released on [the Beach Boys] classic 1966 album Pet Sounds. Mike Love however objected to the title of the song and some of the lyrics and insisted that it be changed.
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Right, so you've got a bunch of young guys with freaky haircuts, wearing make-up, playing an American-influenced, hip version of a genre that was popular 20 years earlier. Just like the emos of today!
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Re the gay, gay, gay song.
When it came to the "If you're a fag, he hates you too" aside, I laughed and spurted coffee on my jeans.
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**Ray'n'the Reptiles; She's a Gob:** Ill-conceived project by John Baker (of Wild Things fame) who aligned Ray Columbus with the re-formed Suburban Reptiles for this 87 punk version of She's a Mod.
Oh, we can laugh, but does anyone remember Double J and Twice the T and Ray Columbus' 1990 smash hit "She's A Mod/Mod Rap"?
"My mother was a teen back in '65.
She knew how to rock, yeah, she knew how to jive."