Posts by Tom Semmens
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I walked over the Sydney harbour bridge last year on the occasion of its 75th anniversary. To digress - the authorities closed the entire roadway and issued every walker with a lovely orange cap with a blue LED in it's front for no other reason than to create an effect at dusk/dark, as you turned and looked back over the bridge, of a sea of thousands of blue dots - a magical sight to behold and a shared moment of pride for Sydneysiders in their city & as their celebration of an icon of public architecture. There were fireworks, Aboriginal concert parties and (I think) a flyover.
Imagine, then, dear readers of P.A. the bah humbug reaction of the small minded and vocal cabal of our local "business leaders" if the Auckland City Council had proposed such an event for our harbour bridge for no other reason than to have a party to celebrate its 50th birthday a little while back and you will have the perfect illustration of the national defeatism that curses so much of our discussion of major (and minor) infrastructure, and why nothing ever gets done in Auckland.
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"...This flaw was the waiting time. One of the advantages of cycling in comparison to buses is that you are not tied to a timetable..."
Now, I know of another major flaw in general with Auckland's public transport, and it is about waiting as well. If you want to commute in the morning from, say, Kingsland to the shore from south of the bridge and vice versa in the eventide, then you have to hub and spoke it on two buses via Albert Street. There is not a single bus that travels along from Great South Road/Newmarket/Symonds Street, or New North Road, or Great North Road that can take you all the way to the North Shore busway without having to get off in the city and wait for a second bus to take you to the shore, and the same in reverse. Not having a direct service effectively makes the bus at least as expensive as driving in terms of the weekly petrol bill and three times longer in the commute, which is deeply unattractive. I would use the bus in a flash if such a service existed, because apart from anything else "I've got to go - my bus is coming" is one of the best excuses possible to get out of a meeting that is threatening to run well past knock off time.
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I thought Brian Rudman was being excessively cynical with this piece in the Herald - the other week. I live in the city and work on the shore, and commute a distance of 13km, 26km round trip, every day. I am reasonably sure that by the time you park, etc etc cycling wouldn't add a great deal of time to my commute and probably save me time on a Friday. I think I would use a cycle way, thats for sure. In Auckland nothing evcer happens. They should just bloody well build it.
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There is something peculiar in the state of Denmark over at APN with this "want to see wages drop" business.
At first glance it looks like John Key has had a word with Martin Simons, head of APN, and, it seems, another member of our wannebe oligarchy. And it seems that in response, like a gallant Sir Walter Raleigh, word has come from on high to the journalist minions to lay a cape over the puddle of bad publicity to ensure the anointed one’s serene journey to victory at the polls remains unruffled.
I am not sure if I am mixing metaphors or keeping it tightly Elizabethan, but hey.
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I have to say, those ESPN sports jocks have got a wonderful patois all of their own, its like listening to a Frenchwoman speak English - it doesn't matter what she is saying, you just like the sound.
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But good news...Liverpool 4, West Ham 0
Could someone tell me - and I am genuinely fascinated to hear a sensible answer - why so many people are obsessed with a foreign domestic competition on the other side of the world?
I am puzzled. Is it colonial cringe? Cultural cringe? Why don't people get all hot and bothered in the same way about the NFL/NHL?
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I am wondering how long editor Tim Murphy can keep claiming with an injured tone that the Herald isn't running a honest and openly partisan editorial line AND a dishonest and manipulative anti-Labour news line.
Also, that particular editorial and the Armstrong column confirm (at least to my mind) that the Herald gets most of its information these days from blogs. The telling comments "admittedly based on a tiny number of respondents" & "Admittedly, the samples of minor party supporters are tiny" to my mind can only come from reading Idiot/Savants analysis on norightturn. It would be nice if the Herald admitted that they no longer have the headcount to allow their staff to actually get out of the office for the op-ed stuff anymore and acknowledge the real journalists out there doing their work for them.
The Hong Kong test is probably an inevitable development in the professional circus era of rugby; But I can't help worrying that its another step along the road of turning the All Blacks into the rugby equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters, a bunch of performing seals whose primary mission is to provide thrilling athletic exhibition matches for their richer betters in other parts of the world.
And as for Murray McCully - he's long been the political equivalent of something absolutely disgusting that you have to occasionally scrape off your shoe.
Oh yes, and TVNZ 7 has finally persuaded to buy a freeview box today (if it stops raining), if only to see if I can spot the slightly dishevelled fellow with the bowtie.
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To me, opera is like a musical equivalent of Shih Tzu's - an over bred species designed for pampered people with an over-refined aesthetic. I mean, you can look at a Shih Tzu and understand the triumph of inbreeding that produced it, but it isn’t my pooch of choice.
But then again I am a huge fan of electronica - a genre barely regarded as music by even the most modest of cover's band, so I’m probably just bitter.
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It seems to me its also probable that SSRI's are heavily over-proscribed to a society that thinks being happy is a right and that a pill can absolve them from also making the personal effort that dealing with depression requires. SSRI's certainly worked for me when I needed them - my six months worth of SSRI's provided the initial foothold that allowed me to then scramble me from the pit of blackness that my character had somewhat inconveniently cast me into (not that I mind being someone who suffers from the black dog - its bloody horrible - but then, no one who doesn't get depressed can possibly appreciate the world in the same way person who gets depression does - melancholy FTW!).
Having said that, far to often I see people taking these SSRI's not to treat depression, but simply to mask its symptoms. taking Prozac, for example, for years is something I find deeply unattractive.
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I spent some time watching Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama debating on CNN the other night, and I was stuck by the amount of time each candidate was given to deliver their response to set piece questions. Nothing like this exists in our TV - not on pay TV and definitely not on free to air television. Public opinion in NZ is heavily influenced by a TV "news" culture that has driven serious discourse on public issues to extinction. Instead of serious debate on electoral finance reform we get hysterical grandstanding. Instead of measured investigation of the agenda of the anti-smacking brigade we get un-examined hypocrisy from Family First and a Trojan horse anti-progressive campaign that has unexamined & scary social engineering goals all of its own.
And even get me started on talk back radio. The ignorance, fear and loathing the reeks from the sewers of ZB is enough, after half an hour of listening, to make you question the wisdom of the universal franchise - and that’s just the hosts.
Much of the current atmosphere of faux-crisis can be laid at the door of a media that has, in its race to the bottom, abjectly abandoned any attempt at rational and serious discussion of issues designed to inform the citizens of a participatory democracy. Instead we get conflict presented in a state of permanent amnesia, designed primarily to deliver consumers to advertisers. Its reached the point now where it is hard to distinguish the flagship TV news broadcasts from the trashy women’s magazines and what passes as current affairs is, frankly, a disgrace. No one demands TV be a vehicle for an elitist coterie of political aficionados, but equally - does have to be aimed at ignorant half-wits all the time?
Clemenceau once remarked that war is too important to be left to generals. I am beginning to wonder if in a democracy television to important to be left to the advertisers.