Posts by Andrew Feltoe
-
Know what you mean. Jumping on Guardian's website (I'm in London) Ed Hillary was its leading story. He's had a great run but you still feel a pang that you can't quite place. No doubt NZ media will go Ed-barmy for a while.
Oh, and BTW, Graham not sure if you've come across it, but your post was reminiscent of Ian McEwan's novel 'Saturday'. Well there you go.
-
I heard about John Key's gaffe from The Guardian website in the UK. Talk about embarrassing.
-
So much for England... just saw the match in Farringdon. It brought a smile to my face.
-
Ha, you should have had my teacher. I was going to continue with Physics in University until I discovered chicks didn't dig it. It's all a foggy memory now.
All this talk about joules and watts is making me hungry. Looking forward to parts 2 - 50. BTW, the BBC recently did a series on science called Look Around You. You might want to check it out.
[**REPLY**: Thanks Andrew I'll certainly have a look at the series. Cheers, DH]
[**REPLY 2**: Just watched the programme -- utterly brilliant! Oh, and it's so very tempting to do something like this with PA Science. Cheers, DH]
-
David this is brilliant -- I was reliving my high school physics classes through your podcast. Keep it up and well done.
-
Contextual advertising? Don't know what you mean.
John Battelle's book on Google paints a scary picture of the future of targeted advertising. Well worth a read to understand the methods your attention is (and will be) bought and sold on the market.
-
Yeah, like famines, menstruals, and the Black Cap's ability to bat well. ;)
-
Hey Kane,
A veritable tome here. Much appreciated.
I'm a British citizen who came to New Zealand ten years ago (and heading back in a month). In sociology and cultural studies in university we looked at the smoke and mirrors surrounding how people define themselves and their place in cultures.
I promise I'll read your post again, but for now I only have one question: What is it exactly that Maori want? A separate government? Land returned to them? Reparations from injustices imposed?
Perhaps I've travelled in different circles, but to me race relations in New Zealand have been something to aspire to. My friends have white, yellow, and brown faces. We laugh and joke, and share our cultures with each other in some hippy kumbya way. I'm in my twenties, so maybe it's a youth thing. It's strange then to to read rhetoric (to clarify, I don't disagree with you, I just don't understand). I won't lambaste you because even with some education and time spent here, I still feel as though I'm ignorant of the crux of the argument. Is there some simple way of putting it, without spin, and including rebuttals? For example:
1. Maori believe they were deceived by Crown in 1840.
2. The Crown accepted partial culpability in 1975, but this was ill-defined.
et cetera.As for me, my hermeneutics are developed from the angle of post-colonialism and globalisation. I wouldn't put 'kiwi' on the census, but I understand why some people want to identify themselves so. What it does do, however, is make it tougher to understand someone else's perspective. I've talked to a lot of people about this, and most of the white, mid-thirties, ex-Europeans just don't understand, so they get angry in response. Cue loud arguments, Michael Laws, iwi/kiwi billboards, mainstream NZ'er, and cronulla-esq 'I'm a kiwi' rhetoric.
Sometimes you just want to get all the culprits from all sides together in one room, lock the door and just get them talking. Must admit, other times I get frustrated at trying to understand the arguments and would rather throw away the key.
-
As a 'European' foreigner, I can't help but smile at these ethnic games NZ plays. I was in South Africa when Nelson Mandela was elected. The buzzword of the day was 'reconciliation', which was probably best played out in the six o' clock news.
Two anchors, one white, one black; one male, one female. They'd take turns reporting stories, but tell each story in one of the different eleven official languages in the country. Even better, the white person would generally speak only Xhosa or Zulu, leaving the European languages (English and Afrikaans) to the black guy. The result was both hilarious and disturbing, as you found that you couldn't understand about a three-quarters of what was going on in the place. But it made me smile, because the message was loud and clear: There's more diversity than you'd thought. Better get used to it.
So back to Godzone. Bring on the Aye-shans; bring on the Mooz-lems; bring on the Sa-mo-ans. I love it. I reckon it's high time to recognise that NZ is one of the few places around that manages to live together in such diversity without bullets flying, thank God.
-
It must be in Auckland. That's where most of the news no-one cares about comes from.