Posts by Lucy Telfar Barnard
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Loath as I am to continue the bikini wax discussion*... waxing hurts less and less each time you do it. Maybe their voters keep thinking if they vote that way often enough the pain will go away, and they need to be smooth so noone thinks they're, y'know. Maybe the trick is to point out to them that they can keep saying they always vote National even if they don't! Noone but them will ever know!
*who'm I kidding? A dash of bikini wax'll spice up any conversation!
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I just looked at the Electoral Act. It says you have to be `a Maori' to register on the Maori roll, but nowhere does it define who is `a Maori'. There's no requirement for proof that you're Maori. There's no requirement for Maori descent, or whakapapa. So if feel yourself to be Maori, I can't see anything preventing you from registering on the Maori roll regardless of your descent.
If the Crown was unconvinced by someone's claim to being Maori and wanted to take the matter to court, it would have to prove that the person was not Maori. I'm not sure how you'd do that. It's not about blood, because of adoption and its variants (e.g. misidentified fathers).
So I'd argue that if you feel Maori, you can already enrol on the Maori roll, regardless of your bloodlines, and therefore it's not about "race" at all, it's about a sense of membership of a particular culture. Therefore, there is "one law for all": anyone who considers themself Maori can sign up to the Maori roll.The only counter-argument could be that the Electoral Commission information suggests that people can sign up to the Maori roll if they descended from Maori, even if they don't feel Maori themselves, whereas someone who's not descended from Maori and doesn't feel Maori can't sign up to the Maori roll.
So we have two variables: whether you consider yourself Maori, and whether you are of Maori descent. Three of the the four combinations can sign up to the Maori roll, but people who don't consider themselves Maori and who are not of Maori descent can't.
The thing I can't figure out is: why on earth would this bother them, or anyone else?
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I’ve been posting this around all over the place lately, and can’t remember where it came to me from (was it here? If so, oops, sorry.) but it’s relevant and I really like it so I’m going to post it again.
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He sat in her guest chair while she tied the black tie above her dinner jacket. The black and white attire set off her golden waves perfectly. She could tie a bow tie blindfold. Rather than watch what she was doing, she stared at him in the mirror, accusingly .
“Too bloddy right I am still cross, Stød. Vat ver you expecting when you dizappeared lazt time vit ze chob only half don?” She sighed “But zat is alvays yur vay, no patience, if it is takingk too long, get ze voman to finish it fur you.” She cast daggers at him from her ice blue eyes. “If I hed known you vood cop owt, I vould not hev invited you to participate in ze forst place. Zo do not expect me to be vorgiving you so qvickly.”
She paused.
“Vy are you here, anyvay?” -
So, I had a reply from the local distributor I was hoping might pick up importing Dovre. They said "The testing process for the last fire we tested cost closer to $50,000 and the manufacturer will not test any more unless we order a minimum of100 fires . The NZ standards are much more stringent than the European and US testing.
Sorry but it is not worth it." I don't blame them in the slightest. The retail price overseas for the Dovre Vintage 30 seems to be about NZ$3,000 at discount, but I don't know what the markup would be. Still, 100 fires would be $300K worth of stock to shift.So looks like I might be in the market for a locally produced funky model too. In some places, where open fires are still allowed, you could avoid the whole testing regime by doing open fires (like some of those uber-cool focus ones).
Otherwise, yeah, it'd be the testing that would be a cow.
Incidentally, some years back, I asked Pyroclassic if they had any plans to make woodburners that were a bit more ... aesthetically pleasing. At the time they responded saying no, and that they thought it was a "classic design" or something equally blind ( :-P ), though I see that since then they have introduced colour options for the surround.
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Bart, I'm going to have to disagree strongly with your assertion that science should be taught in English. From all I've heard and read, many Maori students feel better included and "at home" when they learn in Te Reo. Conversely, learning in English, they can feel alienated. If that alienation discourages them from developing a love of science, then the curent low Maori representation in the sciences will only continue.
As a fellow scientist, I work with people from all over the world. For many of them, English is their second language. It doesn't seem to be holding them back.
I also studied overseas (that school in Canada) with people from all round the world. Some of them had minimal English when they arrived, and thus only started learning science in English then, at the age of 16-17. Again, many of them have gone on to successful careers in science.Last, English is the main publication language for other fields besides science, which also have their own specific vocabularies, and which also include many scholars who presumably came to English later in the piece. So I can't see that science has any claim to being a special case.
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Stud opened his left eye 3 millimetres, because he had to use the metric system on the continent. He saw fibres of wool carpet and felt sheepish, realising he was face down on the floor, again. He tried to return to unconsciousness, but something kept nagging at him: It was his foot, vibrating. He was confused. He knew he’d set his shoephone to silent, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember putting his shoes on.
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Sorry, that was very long. The point, if there was one, was that at primary age, children in other parts of the world had already learnt foreign or indigenous (Welsh) languages to a conversational level; and I could learn their or other foreign languages, but Maori, the language of my own country, made only the briefest appearance in my schooling career, which is about as shameful as my attitude to Mutuwhenua, and probably came from the same pool.
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My schooling lasted from 1976 to 1990. I went to a bunch of schools, particularly at primary level, not all of them for very long, but they do provide an interesting comparative sample.
I started schooling at the Correspondence School. I don't recall any Maori in my curriculum materials.
Next, and in between most of the other schools, was little Colville school in the Coromandel. I have short memory flashes of learning Maori colours and numbers using those awesome coloured sticks - do they still exist? We also learnt waiata, and stick games (do they have a name?). However, that was a school with a student body where the old farming families had become outnumbered by the commune families, with liberal, educated and demanding (boomer...) parents, some of whom taught or assisted at the school, so was probably not typical of schools at the time.
I went to Mt Eden Normal primary from time to time, and for the last six months of primary. No Maori language there that I remember.
I went to two schools in the South Island in 1977-78: Makarora, and Hawea Flat Area School. No Maori language at either of them. Hawea Flat was a shock and a half: we had to call the teachers Sir or Ma'am (I couldn't, and therefore never spoke to them), and I recall a large God-quotient in the teaching (writing out prayers and hymns for handwriting, for example).
I went to school in Wales. No Maori there, obviously, but they did teach Welsh. The children seemed to have learnt quite a bit by the time I got there (aged 10); they were certainly far too far ahead for me to have had any chance understanding the lessons enough to catch up. There was no remedial Welsh for me though.
Next was school in Sweden. All the children my age spoke pretty good English, though there was a girl next door my age who didn't. I got Swedish lessons scheduled over most of the class English lessons. Although we were only there a few months, I came home understanding enough Swedish to read the letters my classmates wrote me, but it's all gone now.
Where else... a few weeks at the Michael Park Steiner school in Auckland. No Maori there, but German lessons which I understood about as well as the previous Welsh lessons.
Kowhai Intermediate had a strong Polynesian Club (which I felt too white to join), but no Maori language in class that I remember. And then it was on to Palmerston North Girls' High School, where I learnt French and Latin, and friends learnt German, but Maori was not taught and I wouldn't have taken it if it was, having somehow by that stage picked up some shameful attitudes. We did have to study Patricia Grace's Mutuwhenua in English in 3rd or 4th form, and I recall objecting to "having Maori stuff shoved down my throat". As I said, shameful, and I have no idea where I'd picked it up. I think one of my friends tried pointing out to me that there might be another way of looking at it, so it wasn't from them.
Then the last two years doing the International Baccalaureate in Canada. One of the teachers told me that a girl there from New Zealand a few years earlier had taken Maori as her Language A (first language level) option, which impressed me. Ironic to think that someone could be supported in independent study of Maori at first language level at an international school in Canada, but it wasn't available even as a second language at my high school in New Zealand.
'Course, it's not available at my daughter's school either, though there are other aspects of Maori culture included in the curriculum. Might need to have a bit of a think about that. -
The trouble is (if it’s the gyrofocus you’re talking about) it’s pretty near impossible to get an open fire to pass emissions tests. I say “pretty near” because I haven’t heard of any that passed, but don’t know enough to say it’d be impossible. Or it could be they don’t pass the efficiency requirement (the other thing required to be on the MfE list)
If you’re talking about one of the glass-doored models, you might have a better chance. I don’t know how difficult it would be to homebuild a model that would pass the MfE stesting standards, but suspect it might be challenging. The particularly difficult part would be that without your own lab, you couldn’t be confident it would pass the test, and each attempt would cost $10K.
ETA: I take that all back. Open fires are outside the testing standards, and rules for them vary from council to council. So it you want the gyrofocus, it wouldn't have to pass the testing regime at all - but your local regional council might not allow it anyway.