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Detritus | Sep 04, 2009 12:12

I buy odd stuff at second-hand shops. I like the small, printed things: pamphlets, leaflets and small books. So the chaotic shop on Abel Smith Street, near Real Groovy, proved a considerable diversion to me. I plucked four things from the knee-deep detritus of house clearance (and yeah, at 10 bucks the guy saw me coming):

The official brochure for the New Zealand International Trade Fair 1964 fairly bustles with optimism and faith in hardware. A spry-looking Jack Marshall blesses events, and on page 57, Dr Daniel Yu-Tang Lew, Chinese ambassador to New Zealand, touts Taiwan as as "the gateway to the China market of the future. Trade with Taiwan is investment in the freedom of China tomorrow while enjoying the fruits of commerce today."

But my favourite is page 55, which features an advertisement for this tasty bit of kit:

Do want, historically speaking.

Also, cyclostyled onto pale green paper, a leaflet for "Values Party candidate for Karori 26 year old industrial relations lawyer BRIAN DREADON." He bears a handsome droop moustache, and he writes by way of introduction:

By the time I am Mr Marshall's age New Zealand will be in another century. At the present rate of development the world will then be so overpopulated that natural life supporting systems will start to collapse. Our natural environment will be unrecognisably scarred and polluted. Most of our best rural areas will have been devoured by urban growth and industry. Auckland will cover one of the largest areas of any city in the world. In a country of such growth and change we will probably not even know our neighbour.

Among his party's solutions is:

Indirect Government measures to reduce the birthrate and stabilize population at a constant level. This is known as Zero Population Growth (ZPG) and occurs when the number of births roughly equals the number of deaths.

Government measures to reduce the birthrate should include sex education in schools, increased availability of contraceptive advice and facilities, and liberalised abortion in the first three months of pregnancy.

It appears that Ian Wishart was right all along.

The party also proposes a cutback in economic growth, equal pay for women, measures to "humanise" jails, and "partial decentralisation to ease the rigid and uninspired control of education from Wellington." The leaflet does not have a date, but if it's from the 1972 election, that would be the one in which the fledgling National Business Review urged its readers to vote Values.

Brian can also be seen in this video of The Amazing Frank E Evans Band in 1969 (colour film of the band playing in Albert Park starts at 4.18):

Ah, jug bands. Were they the white dreadlocks of their day? I thought I'd see what Brian was up to now. Still fighting the good fight in his way, it turns out. He's here , sans moustache, as the midlands regional manager of the Legal Services Agency.

An hour earlier, at a community fair in Northland (that Saturday was the day I learned that Northland is a suburb of Wellington) I picked up another gem: Freedom of information and Open Government published in 1978, published in 1978 by the Hutt Valley branch of the NZ Federation of University Women. It's really rather good, not least for a section of case histories covering everything from 'Secrecy in the development of the Health Department computer system' to 'Secrecy surround the selection of a film censor'. Such was life before the OIA.

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I had heard that the Herald's tireless media hound John Drinnan was making urgent enquiries this week as to whether Auckland supermayoral candidate Len Brown was interviewed by Guyon Espiner on Q+A because a conflict of interest was feared if Paul Holmes did the job. I think it's vasty more likely that that Espiner did it because he is the programme's main political interviewer, but Drinnan's sticking with his story:

However, TVNZ is risking the credibility of its premier political programme because its host has not declared his intentions regarding standing for the Auckland Super City mayoralty.

Only TVNZ would allow a journalist to host a television debate when he is considering being a candidate.

Q&A producer Tim Watkin said TVNZ had not asked Holmes his intentions for the mayoralty and did not intend to.

It was some time before he was obliged to put his name forward and Q&A would certainly change its approach if he did.

….

Holmes - who provided political training for Don Brash before the 2005 election - probably has not decided yet whether to stand.

I confess, I have personally failed to declare whether or not monkeys are flying out of my butt. Indeed, I have made no statement whatsoever with respect to monkeys flying out of my butt. But if it should prove to be the case that monkeys are in fact flying out of my butt, the situation will be reassessed.

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Last night's Media7, featuring the lively anti-smacking discussion, Tracey Barnett and John Dybvig on US healthcare reform and Bevan Rapson on the downsized Metro is here.

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Real Groovy has a free download of the song 'Slow Down' from the David Dallas debut album, Something Awesome. Smoove.

I have two double passes to give away to what looks like being a pretty special show by Pitch Black at the Control Room on Saturday September 12. It also features DJ Automatic, Pig Out, North Shore Pony Club and what I am informed will be something much more than your average multimedia production. Pitch Black play at the fairly oldster-friendly hour of 11.30pm.

If you'd like to be in for that, hit "reply" and email me with "Pitch Black" as the subject line line. [The problem with the "Reply" link is now fixed. I wondered why no one liked me this week ...]

And on Hype Machine, another remix (this time it's Kanye) from disco drum-and-bass dude High Contrast, who also turns out to be a film nerd with a very readable blog.

And, indie kids, Fred Falke remixed Grizzly Bear's 'Two Weeks'. Pretty good!

It being Friday, post links as your heart guides you in the comments. (Remember that for YouTube clips, just paste the URL and it'll embed itself.) Have a good weekend …

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The son that got away | Sep 03, 2009 12:08

There's a good deal that can't be said about the so-called "Timaru Lady", whose Section 59 acquittal on charges of assaulting her son with a riding crop and a cane really began the recent smacking madness. The permanent suppression order the followed her acquittal has seen to that.

But I can say that she has an older son in Auckland, with whom I have occasionally been in contact. His first email to me, last year, included this passage:

Let me start by firstly saying I left home during high school because of the physical abuse and have nothing further to do with my mother other than through countless family court hearings with me trying to get my brothers and sisters removed from her care.

Anyway the point of my email is that I talked to Family First several times years ago and they were aware of [redacted]'s past and I even gave them more informed details but they were more than happy just to brush it over and use her as a political catalyst. It makes me really angry and I did fire back at them at the time they were supporting violence against our children. But however. You will find a couple more organisations such as Anti-Cyfs organisations .... that fully support her. I really think someone should bring this to light.

There are problems with bringing it to light, including the fact of the name suppression (imposed, ironically, to protect the woman's children) and, as the son put it in a later email:

It would be nice for a media outlet to maybe blow the case open, but most that I've talked to only will if I put my face on the TV and talk which well not really prepared to do. I have taken myself completely out of a situation surrounded by abuse/drugs amongst other things, put myself through uni and now live in Auckland so don't want to have to drag myself back through it all.

I'm excerpting these emails because I (with permission) put them in front of Larry Baldock on Media7 last night. I gave him the main one before the show, because I didn't think an ambush would be fair. My point was to do with the dangers of minismising the actions of these parents, and of allowing and encouraging them to become media stars. Jimmy Mason, who lapped up media attention and negotiated a soft exclusive with the Sunday programme – despite having been found to have punched his small boy in the face – is another example.

Students of these matters will recall that Bob McCoskrie made a media star of the "Timaru Lady": he flew her to Auckland to appear on his radio show and promoted her as a good parent done ill by the socialist nanny state. When that perception finally became untenable, McCoskrie tried to pretend he'd had nothing to do with it. The young man's email suggests an appalling moral lapse at Family First, which, as we all know, is basically McCoskrie himself. Baldock is not McCoskrie – as he was keen to point out – but they did work together soliciting votes for the referendum.

You can see Baldock's response on the show tonight, TVNZ 7, 9.10pm. I should say that I respect the fact that he came on the show, and I think he put his case well – although there was an audible gasp in the room when he told me he smacked his grandchildren. (Which may simply prove that the room was full of the very same liberal media elite who got their come-uppance in the referendum.)

Anyway, a last word to the son, from an email yesterday on the topic of the withdrawal of the Section 59 defence:

My point is that the removal of the defence stops parents passing off abuse as discipline (reasonable force) - and it is a classic case of the minority affecting the majority. Jaywalking is technically illegal and so is smacking, but you won't be tried for it (case law is yet to prevail with smacking) but it means that some of our kids are protected by those that used to abuse the loophole.

It's a simple enough point, really.
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Also on the show tonight: Tracey Barnett and John Dybvig (who should hit the road as a double act) on the US healthcare reforms and Bevan Rapson on the new, sensibly-sized Metro magazine.

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The next bylaw will ban irony | Sep 02, 2009 09:27

It strikes me that the great achievement of Michael Laws' hard-won bylaw banning gang regalia in central Whanganui is to have conferred authentic victim status on people who don't deserve it. If you weren't amused by gang members conducting an orderly protest yesterday with modified logos and police blue colours in the city yesterday, you have no political soul.

The alternative logos and colours did not fall within the text of the bylaw; raising the prospect of additional regalia descriptions having to be added to the bylaw. Can they ban police blue? Even the acting area police commander Greg Hudson seemed to see the joke in interviews last night.

And now, on day one, some thicko from The Tribesmen has set himself up for a court case that will test the bylaw against the Bill of Rights. Way to make bad guys look like good guys.

The week's other irony is, of course, that the Chinese embassy's protest against Maori Television's screening of the documentary The 10 Conditions of Love, which tells the story of the oppression of Western China's Uyghur people through a portrait of Uyghur nationalist leader Rebiya Kadeer, had the effect of encouraging viewers to tune in and watch it last night. It certainly alerted me to the programme.

The documentary is sometimes quietly compelling, not least because of the charisma of Kadeer herself, but it's no great work of film-making. Occasionally, its sympathy for its subject becomes cloying. It could have told us more.

The film skips over the Uyghur unrest of last year (which extended to bombings and shootings) and was completed too soon to cover the ethnic riots in the Xinjiang city of Ürümqi in July of this year. The well-referenced Wikipedia article on the riots certainly suggests there is a complex story to tell there.

And that was persumably the story the Chinese government was trying to tell with its rebuttal video purporting the "truth" of the July 5 riots. But it was a story told with all the art and nuance of a moving breeze block.

I changed the channel after 10 minutes of what seemed to be endless surveillance video of innocent Han Chinese being beaten to death by rioters. It was sickeningly violent, and largely without context. Perhaps this kind of thing plays well to the home crowd, but I found it unwatchable.

I seem to be alone amongst usual-suspect media commentators in not at all minding Maori Television's decision to screen the Chinese embassy's "documentary" after The 10 Conditions of Love. I actually wanted to see it. It could stand or fall on its merits. And it basically fell.

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Dead Elephant Frenzy | Sep 01, 2009 10:05

I just sat through a Digipoll survey on business telecommunications services being conducted for, I'm fairly sure, Telecom. It was a struggle. But these things always are. You're told it will take 12 minutes and, even at the best possible clip, it takes 25 – largely because you're obliged to mechanically plough through a list of exercises in rating redundant, soundalike propositions from 1 to 10.

There were a great many questions about my awareness of various Telecom IT services and some mildly interesting mentions of voicemail services, including transcriptions and what I'd be prepared to pay for them. But at no point did the survey actually seek from me what I wanted to say about my current services from Vodafone – that their billing system is messy and that their inability to make all online account services available via a single website is lamentable.

These surveys are designed to produce presentable results: how many of those results are truly useful is another matter altogether. And they are far, far too long – had I not been somewhat interested in the content of the survey I'd have bailed out after 10 minutes, as I'm sure most small businesspeople do.

Still, at least it wasn't a brand perception survey. If I never again have to say how much a certain petrol station chain "cares about the community" on a scale of 1 to 10 it'll still be too soon.

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I was cursing not getting to Magnum Mac in Wellington on Saturday, but it turned out it didn't matter anyway. The only shop in the country that had Mac OS Snow Leopard in stock was Magnum Mac's swanky Newmarket store.

So on Sunday morning, I phoned the Newmarket store to check they had Apple's new operating system. It's running out the door, the young man said. They had five copies left of the five-user family pack, which was pretty good value at $99. (It's just a shame that the half-price sale of Mario Batali cast-iron cookware in the Rialto centre on the way back added $115 to the price of the outing. But you should see how big and deep my new sauté pan is.)

Warning: what follows is subject to a fanboi alert.

Installation was, predictably, a breeze, and, as advertised, finished up with more than 10GB extra of free disk space. It's not really a bug-fix release, as some are suggesting: more a code-optimisation release. The Mac OS Finder, for one, is sharply quicker.

It does seem likely that the optimisation – and the introduction of under-the-hood features to facilitate the use of multiple processors and allow CPU tasks to be shared with graphics processors – is aimed at setting up the OS for what comes next. Which is cool.

But the answer to my question about what QuickTime Pro users get out of the new QuickTime X is very mixed. I've played with a couple of the Snow Leopard betas and noticed that the ability to both edit and export video had been dumbed down. Or, rather, re-orientated towards the needs of the average user – so there are easy options for posting to YouTube or Mobile Me, but no way of exporting to DV, which is something I do every week for the TV show. The new iPhone-alike "Trim" feature is also a poor substitute for being able to select and edit video in the old player.

The mercy is that QuickTime Pro users get a special version of QuickTime Player 7 installed in their Utilities folder. But that doesn't take advantage of the new and better API of QuickTimeX. Indeed, that's the point: QuickTime 7 needs to be there to avoid breaking all the third-party applications that rely on the old API. I hope this gets sorted sooner rather than later.

Having blagged a copy of Office 2008 (an irritatingly bad install) to replace my non-compatible Office 2004, I struck compatibility problems only with iStat Menus (an excellent system monitoring utility that I'd be delighted to pay for) and Azureus (a problem opening files with a drag-and-drop workaround).

I haven't installed Snow Leopard on my MacBook yet, but it looks like I'll get access to three-finger multi-touch commands.

Subject to conflicts with third-party software (largely the fault of developers who haven't caught up with new APIs), I'd recommend this update to anyone using an Intel Mac. (Just quietly, and contrary to Apple's PR, it appears you can install it over Mac OS 10.4 Tiger.) See Macintouch and Mark Webster's Mac-NZ site for more advice.

Fanboi alerts for the next little while include a new line of iPods on September 9, possibly with iTunes 9 (which boasts a belated embrace of social media features), and then The Thing. Mebbe a meaningful upgrade to Apple TV would be in order?

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I had no idea what was happening when I pulled out of our street yesterday morning, but clearly it was something big. The streets of Pt Chevalier were filling up the way they only do for Pasifika, and more so than for a major concert at Western Springs. Out on the main road, I could see streams of families: thirtysomethings and their families; the parents just of the age to have been captured by the legend of Kashin the elephant as small children themselves. They were heading for The Zoo. It was Dead Elephant Frenzy.

It got, frankly, mental. The Western Springs exit of the northwestern motorway was badly backed up, and the eastbound lanes turned into a car park for some time, possibly as the result of an accident. But, even if it meant nothing to me, Kashin's passing was clearly a take-your-kids moment for very many Aucklanders, who hung on even through several downpours. It's clearly a cultural touchstone I missed through not growing up in the city where I live.

Did else reading go? How was it?

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And finally: in tomorrow's Media7 recording we'll be exploring the "smacking" debate in the news media with Brian Edwards, Larry Baldock and the Herald on Sunday's Matt Nippert, who revealed last week that Focus on the Family New Zealand has received a million dollars in funding from its US affiliate in the past six years.

We'll also take a look at the US healthcare "debate" with Tracey Barnett and John Dybvig.

If you'd like to join us we'd need you at TVNZ from 5pm tomorrow. Hit "reply" and let me know.

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