Posts by Russell Brown
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It is not about having no mercy but about saying "It's Not OK" in the most loving way early on in the piece to people in our community BEFORE it degenerates into serious violence.
And me. I have far less of an opinion about how anything Veitch has done should be punished, than that it should be accounted. It just has to be.
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Otherwise i fill in my idle gaps with bFM, Thursday drive is awwweeesssommme(!!!)
Oh yeah, was gonna mention that too. Thursday Drive with Matt and Chris is banal, profane, unprofessional and irresponsible. And, thus, totally choice.
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I have to give a not-at-all-biased plug for the good folk at Kiwi FM, who routinely get some of the most informative and entertaining interviews around, as well as a host of super weekly guests, including a few chaps well-known around these parts.
I was going to mention Kiwi, actually. I think there's a lot of talent at that station -- Wammo, Wallace, Karyn and Andrew, Michael Higgins at the helm -- but the format just kills their listenership.
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Well, Paul, I also think it's perfectly reasonable to wonder how that post actually contributed anything to a serious public policy debate. At least, if you're going to imply a political party doesn't really give a shit about preventing violence against women and children make a slightly stronger case than drawing a very long bow indeed from abolishing the Families Commission.
It was actually a reasonable point, although, of course, I wouldn't have phrased it in Standard-speak.
The quote is from written responses to questions from Kiwi Parent, which is published by Parents Centres NZ Inc.
**Families Commission - What value do you place on the role of the Families Commission in New Zealand? What is your party's intentions towards the Families Commission, do you intend to keep it, disband it, or change its current form?**
National believes that the Families Commission should focus on supporting everyday parents. We are not convinced that all of their current work, including advertising campaigns worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, are necessarily of practical help to mums and dads.
The implication being that social campaigns are chiefly of interest to Wellington bureaucrats rather than proper people. It's an expedient and meaningless response.
There's a lot of spin in the responses, and some really needless politicking.
Key even manages to sling off at Labour in his answer to a question about breastfeeding. He'd have been better off just saying his party cautiously supported the Employment Relations (Breaks and Infant Feeding) Amendment Bill, which comes back from select committee this month.
Compare Labours's positive response, and that of the Greens and the Maori Party. None of them sling off at other parties.
The only thing I'm not clear on now is the actual date of the questions and response, but I presume it wasn't long ago. But the more I look into this, the more National's offering looks like one big fucking dog whistle, and the less I mind the Standard having a crack. Somebody needed to.
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I like NatRad, but that smugness is there and its possibly bringing on a rightward swing in me ...
I know what you mean. Laidlaw and guests are the worst for it. There's too much "Well, of course everyone knows that such-and-such is a bad thing ..."
It's like people mouthing cliches about George Bush. It's just not interesting any more.
OTOH, the equally cliched small-minded Tory drone that emanates from The Panel at least a couple of days every week provides some wretched sort of balance ...
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Now if we could just convince Mitch to use Graeme a bit more often say on 9:00 - noon weekdays???
Wouldn't work. The joy of Graeme's show is the remarkable degree of freedom he has. If he wants to play the Skeptics (the band, that is, not the redoubtable unbeliever organisation), he plays the Skeptics. He can bang on about astronomy or etymology as he sees fit.
He just wouldn't be able to do that 9-12 on weekdays. In par, that's because Live has a very different audience at the weekend. I think Mitch basically developed that weekend programming in pursuit of a new audience -- because the weekday audience just didn't listen on Saturday and Sunday.
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I'd more interested in whether someone not "tech savvy" gets close to it. The clueful, such as RB, will be painfully aware of their data usage, mentally cataloguing every byte in order to avoid paying $100/GB in overage.
I'm very much looking at the 3G capacity as "only when strictly necessary" -- the phone is an excellent Wi-Fi device, and that's where Vodafone has dropped the ball. Where are my Wi-Fi hotspots? I don't even expect it to be free, but I would have expected a modest add-on to my monthly package to cover an urban network. Other carriers are doing it.
Driving past the university down Symonds Street yesterday was interesting -- the boys were seeing no end of Wi-Fi networks coming up on the phone.
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Agree with all the above, Russell. However, it'd be nice if we could get outgoing email to work. It's not happening - either via Wi-Fi or 3G. This despite the network settings being identical to our macs at home. Grump.
Er, yeah, I need to nut out why my GMail's not authenticating too ...
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One of the more delightful by-ways of the English language is the study of eponyms — words derived from people’s names. From Beijing to Harrare, when politics and sport get together, you’re bound to invoke the ostracism of Captain Charles Boycott in Ireland 138 years ago. Eat a sandwich, calculate an algorithm, or catch sight of a reference to America. You’re using an eponym.
The media storm around tarnished sport media star Tony Veitch has inspired a new addition to the list.
**Veitch**, 1. (noun) A voluntary spasm of prurience disguised as moral high-mindedness in the public interest. 2. A carefully designed bank of fog people are expected to believe is transparent.
2. (verb – veitch·ed, veitch·ing, veitch·es) To eject an unpleasant obstruction through the nearest media outlet, in the form of a sour, foul smelling liquid that closely resembles a mixture of faeces, urine and vinegar.
Let’s get the statements of the bleeding obvious out of the way. While there are people who find sado-masochistic activity within relationships a turn on, I don’t. If my better half ever “lashes out” at me physically, he can look forward to charges being pressed and a letter from venerable law firm of Sue, Grabbitt and Runne regarding the division of property. And I fully expect the same treatment if I hit him.
If the allegations against Veitch in the Dominion Post are even only half true he’s a nasty piece of work, and his carefully scripted statement to a press conference on Wednesday did nothing to change my mind.
As this is being recorded, there is the possibility of disciplinary action being taken by his employers, TVNZ and Radio Sport. There’s also speculation around a Police investigation and charges being laid. It’s neither prudent, or fair-minded to anyone involved, to speculate on that here.
But I sure have a thing or two to say about the screaming headline on Thursday’s New Zealand Herald:
**'What DID you do to her, Tony?'**
The capitalisation of “DID” was a particularly fine touch. But I’ve got a counter-question for the media bitch pack: Whose interests do you think you’re serving by getting an answer to that question, really? Other than the circulation and advertising departments, that is?
Violence isn’t OK. But neither is the sight of media whores suddenly playing the outraged virgin and expecting to be taken seriously.
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Is the SDK of the iPhone sufficently open to allow a third-party to write an MMS implementation? (Windows Mobile is!)
It is. There's at least one MMS app at the 1.0 stage, a video capture app for the camera on the way, etc.
Also (to answer Simon's point further up), the 2.0 software includes viewers for all Office application types. No, I can't edit an Excel spreadsheet on my phone, but I don't actually want to.
The lack of copy-and-paste functionality is vexing. I can only guess that they haven't come up with a user action for it that's regarded as satisfactory. And why won't the keyboard tilt around to landscape mode for email composition? Bah.
OTOH, the web browsing experience is superb, YouTube looks great (aspecially via Wi-Fi), GPS/maps works, the third-party games have met with approval from the household experts, and compared to the button-palooza of a Blackberry, it's very clean and simple to use.
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