Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: Trump 2018, in reply to Shaun Lott,
...stable genius.
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Hard News: Music: 2017 – this is not a list, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Nice to see Chad Morgan in there, the man who inspired Les Patterson's teeth. He had a dedicated fan following in the agrarian sector when I was a kid. Whatever he is, he's certainly the real thing.
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Hard News: The new medical cannabis law…, in reply to Rob Stowell,
Life being a terminal condition - no way out alive - we all might just have wriggle room :)
And death being the ultimate disability, we're all somewhere on the "spectrum" :)
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Capture: Besties, in reply to Lilith __,
Flowering time for the southern rātā. A different style of tree from its cousin the pōhutukawa: it’s bushy and flowers all the way from head to toe.
A joy to see, thank you! Here's one from a few years ago at Jackson Bay, South Westland. Photo by Walter Neumayr, son of the late Gudrun Gisela.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Who is the head…, in reply to mark taslov,
This Maori story symbolizes the influence of the Moon...
Then there's mooning as in whakapohane.
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Feed: Melting pot: A cuisine of immigrants, in reply to Nik Mavromatis,
Hop Yick Cheong
A nice image from a vanished time.
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Access: GTFO of Our Accessible Bathrooms, in reply to Rosemary McDonald,
Cape Reinga
Cape Reinga ablutions block hand sanitizer dispenser array, C.2012.
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Hard News: News Memories 2: The Twitter thread, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
I remember mid-to-late-sixties our class/school being bussed into the Regent Theatre in the Square to watch The War Game – harrowing and sobering stuff!
That would have been 1968. While it only screened for about a week in Christchurch, the movie's billboard provided a dramatic backdrop for the speakers who addressed the crowd from the Regent steps at a nighttime demonstration against the US Navy's proposal to build a vital component of its nuclear submarine navigation system in the Southern alps.
Further protests in Christchurch and Wellington seemed to have been effective, as the supposedly ideal site, which happened to be on land owned by the University of Canterbury, was dropped in favour of a location across the Tasman in Victoria. While the Omega navigation system is ancient history now there seems to be no doubt that siting it here would have significantly raised the risk of NZ becoming a target for nuclear weapons.
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Being taken on a past my bedtime drive to see public buildings lit up for "The Coronation". This jaunty slab of pomposity on the radio - "Now you've done it, reached the summit, won it for the red white and blue":
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Hard News: And so it begins ..., in reply to Ian Dalziel,
He probably had to go have a shower after uttering that blasphemous word 'solidarity'...
Followed by a wee lie down after a hard bout of barrel scraping. One suspects that Gould's attitude to his desperately retrieved "iconic image" hasn't moved far from 1968, when even the Evening Post's Neville Lodge produced one of his few blatantly racist cartoons decrying the intrusion of politics into the then sacred temple of sport.
Gould's clumsy attempt to duck behind that ancient Mexico City image suggests a happy knack for coming down on the wrong side of history. While the late Australian Peter Norman had his athletic career effectively ruined for his support of the two black athletes, he eventually received a full posthumous parliamentary apology. As an example of placing principle ahead of personal gain, his was a story to rival Chariots of Fire. Because it's not easily co-opted into a jingoistic morality tale there's unlikely to be a fully dramatised movie any time soon.
While Sydney's mural based on the "iconic image" was under threat at one stage, it's now been granted heritage protection. Venceremos indeed.
