Posts by Robyn Gallagher
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I saw my first ever episode of Outrageous Fortune last week. I was surprised to discover that it wasn't a half-hour comedy show. If I'd originally known that, I would have watched it right from the start. Now I'm going to have to catch up on DVD.
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The Herald is virtually unusable for me in Safari. Occasionally I'll strike it lucky and the page will load, or I'll be able to stop the page loading and it'll display the article text, but most of the time I'm left with the top navigation bar, the masthead, and a whole lot of blank.
But also, for the last three weekdays, I've found a free copy of the Herald on my doorstep. It appears to be some sort of summer promotion, but how curious that the free paper coincides with the unusable website.
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Stuff's new site is up, and I'm surprised at how similar the new Herald and Stuff sites look. They're not clones, but they both have a cool, spacious blue and white design. In fact, it even looks like the same shade of blue used in headlines and links on both sites.
I'm not complaining - they're both a vast improvement on the old sites (and a sweet farewell to the '90s) and indeed news websites are primarily about news, but it's going to take me a while to mentally differentiate between the two.
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Using a commaless sentence by Mr Campbell over here as a starting point, I came up with this, composed mainly on the bus home from work today. Oh, it's been ages since I've written performance poetry.
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SOME BANDS I LIKE THAT AREN'T AROUND NO MORE
CHRIST THE CLEAN WERE A BRILLIANT BAND. Cos they were there. They did it. They recorded that one song that started it all. Boodle Boodle Boodle. (Whatever that means, but say it again and make your own definition.) Boodle, boodle, boodle, boodle, boodle.
DAMN THE SKEPTICS WERE AWESOME. I knew this guy who liked them so I pretended to like them too and then I realised that I really did like them because they sounded like nothing else that had come before and nothing that will ever come again. But no one believes me.
JESÚS THE 3Ds ROCKED. But they also popped. They could do pop better than most of the top 40 at the time. And how could such aural violence (I see hate rising daily) and such sweet tenderness (I said, I stroke your pubic hairs) be simultaneously contained in one band?
FUCK KING LOSER. No, really, fuck 'em. Stairway To Heaven was great, as was Surf Lost, but everything else was rubbish. Consider my heart broken.
But
MAN GARAGELAND WERE COOL. They were like my friends, just some kids with guitars, writing and playing jangly, jangly, jangly pop-pop. If pop is like a drug, then you wanna be using the good stuff, right? And it doesn't taste that bad.
GOD STRAITJACKET FITS WERE ROCK GODS. They passed me by for so long, but then one day I realised how dirty and sexy and fun their music was. I kicked myself for having taken so long, but then I realised:
All that matters is the songs (, man). They were there, and they are still here.
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I turned off in disgust, so please put me straight if there was a NZ angle or some wider global significance.
A vile serial killer is murdering prostitutes. How often does that happen outside fiction?
British people aren't some alien race with attributes far removed from New Zealanders. If it could happen there, it could happen here, so we want to know about it to help us understand why we can be so awful.
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Nah. I thought about it when I was editing, but sometimes leaving out the comma gives you a certain punch.
I learned my word skillz on the streets, so I'm totally open to punk-arse comma use.
Try and imagine Brian Turner enunciating it as an opening line ;-)
Hey, this gives me an idea for the Flying Nun competition.
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Christ The Clean were a brilliant band
Goodness, that sentence really, really, really needs a comma. (Unless I'm so unhip that I've never heard of this band called Christ The Clean).
But in case someone accuses me of not seeing the forest for the trees, it was a pleasure to read that piece. I love it when people write so well and so enthusiastically about music that it's almost as good and as inspirational as the music itself.
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I keep trying to buy the Amy Winehouse album "Back in Black", but iTunes says no, no, no.
Or more specifically, it gives me this strange error message:
Purchase of this item is not currently available
This item is being modified. Please try again later.When will this mysterious modification end? Oh, the anticipation!
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But the Census does not ask you to fill in your citizenship in the ethnicity question.
Prior to the last census, I did not understand the difference between citizenship and ethnicity. I was one of those people who wondered why it was suggested that I call myself a "European" when I'd never been to Europe, and since my passport said I was a New Zealander, didn't that make me a New Zealander?
But then I started thinking about things. If there was a descendant of a, say, Chinese immigrant who'd come to New Zealand for the Otago goldrush (and let's assume that her whanau all married other Chinese New Zealanders), it would seem very obvious to me that even though she might be a third or forth generation New Zealander, that her ethnicity was still Asian.
And the same goes for me. I may be a fifth generation New Zealander, but my ancestors still came from Britain and Ireland, so therefore, I am ethnically European.
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I saw the 3Ds play at Waikato Uni in 1994 and they were quite good, yeah.