Posts by George Darroch
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How could I forget these strokes of brilliance?
Local boy done good David Dallas:
Kwaito-infused Afro-futuristic township tech:
(So much more than this single, of course).
Drake, singing drunken emotion like I've never heard. The rest of his album touches the same places.
Did everyone else consume most of their new music through YouTube? And was there any good music made by women? A rhetorical question of course, but it seemed that this year was as bad as any for the promotion of women in music, pop superstars excepted.
Lykke Li.
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This is the year in which I discovered less music than any other. Not enough radio, not enough trawling through the internet's virtual crates of MP3s.
That said, I rather liked Radiohead's King of Limbs; subtle, rich, dense. Plenty declared their disdain, but Radiohead are simply getting more interesting. Feist's Metals was delightful. Did Cults come out this year? I loved, absolutely loved their album. Oh, and James Blake, if he was this year too.
The Justice album, or what I've heard of it, was probably the biggest disappointment.
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Hard News: Word of the Year 2011 -- The Vote!, in reply to Emma Hart,
See, munted for me was what I was getting/being in high school and the first year or two of uni...
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prohibit the replacement of the successful list MP as a list MP (i.e. Parliament would reduce in size by one list MP for the remainder of the term). Very interested in alternate views.
What's the reasoning? It seems to me to be the equivalent of banning list MPs from contesting general electorates in general elections, and all the same reasons against that argument apply.
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I take cheer from the mortality stats for fat old men
Ugh. I don’t. It’s a personal and public health disaster. Interesting question, but not one I look forward to. Peachey’s death didn’t effect things because it was within 6 (?) months of a general election, right?
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Hard News: Democracy Night, in reply to ,
Not entirely. In the last decade Maori have emigrated at a much higher rate than Pakeha New Zealanders. The rest is based on anecdata.
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An interesting comment on Joshua Arbury's blog. How many left voters went to Australia? It's not an abstract question, and I don't think asking it makes one a sore loser.
Almost by definition, if you're doing well you'll stick around, and those who've gone tend to be younger, browner, and feeling cheated by their current circumstances. Over 40,000 left NZ last year, and about that many the year before. Doesn't take too many of those and you're looking at sizeable parts of the electorate.
It's also been my experience talking to recent immigrants in South Auckland that most feel reluctant to engage immediately with politics; there's a lot to understand, and casting your lot with any group is something you don't do lightly. All of this makes for an interesting mix, and presents an opportunity for any party that is willing to engage (and not merely patronise, as some have done, producing a weak and sometimes fickle engagement).
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I mean, realistically, I suspect that on election day, more Green voters were turned out by the Labour Party than by the Green Party.
I'll post shortly (I'm off to wash my Grandma's ceiling, something I've put off during the campaign), but Labour and the Greens had an excellent working relationship this year, at every level. It felt like a love-in sometimes. They're in a hole and will want to pull out of it, so I'm not sure it will last. We'll move into different times.
And to echo some comments upthread, I went to a Mt Roskill candidates meeting to support Julie Anne Genter, and had the pleasure of hearing Goff speak. He was warm, commanding, magisterial, and entirely in-touch, even when speaking to a church audience on uncomfortable issues of morality. At that moment I wished that every New Zealander had had the chance to hear him properly, on his own terms. It's a pity that the hounds which have been baying for blood will no doubt get it, and he'll fade into history.
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Homebrew drop something incredible.
“Long term memory, the enemy of popular politics.” – Todd Ross, my Green candidate in Mangere. Although we don’t have to remember much for this video to ring entirely true. Caravan park at 2:18 is my neighbourhood, and it remained til the late 2000s, when the owner died.
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A lot of those Australian arrivals are kiwis. I get counted pretty much every time I cross the border.