Posts by George Darroch
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Hard News: Stories: Home, in reply to Bart Janssen,
That moment of seeing green made me realise how much of home for me is the green of Auckland and New Zealand as a whole. Not 100% pure, not all wild or natural, but alive.
I had a very different version of that moment in 2013. I stepped off a 777 in Auckland, and was walking towards Customs. I looked out the window and thought ‘it must be the wet season…’. It took a while to remember how things work.
Even home can feel strange sometimes.
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Home follows me around.
It will always be my parents' place in Mangere, bought in the 80s when it was ramshackle and barely a house at all, before expanding like an accordion and becoming the place where 4, 5, 6, and 7 people lived (and sometimes more). It stays, the family changes shape.
It will be wherever I live. When I lived in Australia, I thought 'this is a nice place to live', and stayed. It felt like home. Wellington is as close to comfort as I know, and despite the constant wind and rain living here is easy. There are people here I care about. I'll follow the person I love to another city shortly, and I'll call that place home because that's where our hearts are.
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I've said it before; people want their pools and libraries (both around $10m plus operation) and they care about these much more than $50-100m roading upgrades.
Can someone near to Phil Goff get him to promise free pools across the city? People would go wild for it.
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Hard News: The good guys, in reply to Peter Darlington,
It’s one of THE celebrity venues of choice in London, apparently. Does seem a bit weird, but there you go.
The more you know.
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Wait, what…?
You are in central London and you’ve just won the World Cup and cleaned up at the World Rugby Awards: where do you go to celebrate?
Members of the victorious team were photographed emerging blear-eyed and worse for wear from the back door of Platinum Lace strip club, reports the Daily Mail.
With no strippers/sex-workers, reportedly. A friend bumped into the All Blacks in the London Koru Lounge, and literally had no idea who most of them were (she recognised McCaw, but had to Google to check she’d chatted with SBW). When she asked a couple if they were excited they told her that they were mostly just happy to be going home to see their family. The choice of venue sounds completely incongruous and slightly weird – perhaps there just wasn’t much in the way of ‘discreet’ venue hire.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=11539712
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With Carson, Cruz, and Trump collectively catching about half of all stated Republican voter support, they have to be very worried.
Neither of those candidates are electable by a plurality of voters. Too many negatives. Bush was thought to be, but in his absence only Rubio really stands out.
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An off-topic question, but one that's perhaps worth asking: When will New Zealand produce it's first Asian All Black?
The team is a tapestry of shades of white and brown, but we're more than that now (and always were, to greater and lesser extents). I expect it has more to do with the pipeline than with demographics.
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Hard News: The good guys, in reply to Russell Brown,
Steinlager continues to buy its way in, as it has done since 1986, and we get inflicted with bullshit nonsense like this attempt to claim the All Blacks’ virtues for a nondescript commercial lager.
They've also pretty much cut out sugar, an interview with their nutritionist reveals. Which makes them a weird fit for Coca-Cola's sugar-water brand Powerade, but the commercial reality remains.
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The postscript to the SBW video comes with this RadioNZ story about him being given a second medal.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/sport/288596/sonny-bill-williams-given-second-winners-medal
And isn't it a richly illustrated story, with pictures, video, and Twitter (see, it is good for something!). I like where RadioNZ appear to be going.
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Diet is now the leading cause of ill-health in New Zealand, and has overtaken tobacco. It deserves a response at least as strong as tobacco (which has actually been very weakly regulated considering how toxic it is).
The large majority of this "plan" (there is little supporting documentation) is in fact education of children. We know that education is a weak mechanism of behaviour change, particularly when it is not supported with other interventions.
However, the plan sidesteps the issue as deftly as Julian Savea, by narrowing obesity as a social problem to children. Obesity in children is highly problematic, and deserves a response. But most obesity is in adults, and most weight gain occurs during adulthood, and the risks associated with it increase proportionately. This is a continued process and does not stop with age. The MOH knows this and has very good data in Understanding Excess Body Weight: New Zealand Health Survey, but the plan ignores this entirely.
It's easy to say that children are ignorant and will do better with education and information. But when confronted by supposedly rational decision-making adults, this becomes more difficult.