Posts by Robyn Gallagher
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Labour may have seriously lost their appeal for the general roll, but they won three Maori seats that had been held by the Maori Party or the Mana Movement for almost 10 years. That is very significant.
I was expecting National to win, but I thought it would involve a coalition with NZ First. As things are at the moment, Labour just seem to be treated like the Greens or NZ First - just another established minor party.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Mo' Nina, in reply to Russell Brown,
I’m not sure whether to be happy about the benefit for my wallet or sad that the value of such music has been driven so low.
Yeah, that's what I was getting at. It's a mixed-feelings thing.
The way I see it, minstrels have been making money from music for centuries. A few changes to technology in the last decade or so isn't going to have a huge impact in the long term.
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I made an advance vote on Monday and it was really thrilling. Today my Easy Vote card arrived and now I want to relive the thrillz all over again.
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Here's "Break the Beat" by the Chain Gang, a New Zealand attempt at Belgian house from 1990. Given the talents of all the players involved, it is a case where the whole is most definitely not greater than the sum of the parts. It reached #22 on the singles charts.
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I've just watched the documentary Musical Minds, about Nick and JB, two music fans who have been hosting a hilarious music show on a public access TV station in America for over 10 years.
Nick and JB are both on the autism spectrum and while the doco starts being about their show, it ends up being a portrait of two young dudes on the spectrum.
There's not a lot of actual music in the doco (which I assume is just down to licensing costs) but music love runs through it. There's an interview with one of the film-makers here, and you can watch the whole film here:
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Hard News: Friday Music: A Strange Road, in reply to Samuel Scott,
I’m just going to jump in here with some self promotion;
That’s a good one. It reminds me of being 19.
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3 News has an interesting article on Watson’s decision to remove “Planet Key” from the web.
Watson tweeted on Tuesday that he would be removing it from sale “by order of the Electoral Commission” – but the commission says it has made no such order.
“We haven’t ordered anything to be taken down, or removed,” a spokesperson told 3 News. “The commission does not have any power to prosecute."
Watson is calling it “censorship”, but he’s the one who is voluntarily removing the song when it doesn’t have to be removed.
One thing’s for sure – all this publicity isn’t going to be hurting sales of the song. I will be very interested to see if it’s reached the top 40 when the latest chart is released later today!
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In one of the early reports that annoyed me, Radio New Zealand’s political editor Brent Edwards, talked about smears being unleashed to “blogs” and “the blogosphere”. Actually, we’re not all like that. The multitude of bloggers, political bloggers included, have no part in this.
I've been blogging for over 18 years now. In that time the only PR offer I've had was to write about a well known brand of baked beans in exchange for one (1) can of the baked beans. Meanwhile, W. Oil gets $6500 a month for writing about how smoking is cool.
So yeah, most of the "blogosphere" (worst word ever) is nothing like the 'Oil.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Anonymous Coward,
the most likely scenario is that either the DDoS attack is a read hearing
Totally off topic, but "read hearing" is the best eggcorn ever. It fills my heart with joy!
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FVEY – the title is a contraction of “Five Eyes”
I might be the only one who didn't know this, but I thought FVEY was a bizarre title for an album until a rogue Wikipedia link led me to discover that Five Eyes (and its military abbreviation FVEY) is the name of an intelligence alliance of the US, Canada, the UK, Australia and NZ. So fitting right in with Shihad's targets of rage.
I got a clatter of responses back on Twitter to the effect that they weren’t really independent, because they had, well, views.
Independent is not the same as neutral!