Posts by B Jones
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Of course Towai etc was a reasonable transliteration for a first contact ship's captain. But if Wanganui should be retained as part of our Pakeha history of screwing up other languages, then so should Cook's spellings, which at least have better documentation in support of them :-P
It's interesting that while one 3 News reporter managed to google up the Nth Is Minisprint Club, nobody bothered to google Eskimo. According to wiki, Canadians sure as hell think it's offensive, but Alaskans use it uncontroversially as an all-encompassing term to describe the various arctic groups collectively. I used to have a penpal who described herself as Eskimo. Not that the original namers of the lollies and pies probably considered what they prefer.
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Steve Parks - exactly. The way you've described the story in your second paragraph is accurate and certainly interesting and newsworthy, but it's a human interest or minor bureaucracy story rather than a lead. 6:15 to 6:30 territory, with a few teasers before the ads.
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Got to get rid of the surplus aitches.
Nah, if you really want to be consistent with the whole Whanganui thing, you need to misspell them as spectacularly as Cook did: Toai Poonamoo and Ea Heinom Auwe.
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Good timing on the Media 7 panel subject. The top three stories on TV3 last night seemed to be pitched specifically to generate maximum race relations outrage: Maori names sought for North and South Islands, Eskimo lollies slammed as racist by Canadian tourist and the UN conference.
The first two in particular were of relatively minor news value and none would have led, IMHO, without playing up the controversy angle. This in particular wound me up:
3 News searched for groups that use North Island in their title. We talked to the North Island Minisprint Club whose spokesman said they have no intention of becoming Te Ika A Maui Mini Sprint Club."
Whoever came up with this kind of journalism had no idea of either what the NZGB actually proposed, or what its powers are (hint, they don't have jurisdiction over the naming of clubs). Or they just didn't care. They may as well have said "Prepare to go ballistic over this" in the intro.
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I have always understood the best defence against action for defamation to be having the money to pay for expensive lawyers.
Or the opposite. I vaguely recall a story told by the eminent Jonathan Boston, of when he was a young reckless student and got on the wrong side of some kind of lawsuit threat from some kind of powerful American. The lawyer asked for a list of his assets, and gave up in disgust when the best he could come up with was his bicycle.
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To me - one of these approaches is the one that a man who realised it isn't ok to break a woman's back would take, and the other, well the other is not how any man I would respect would act.
Almost. I think the way this one goes is that "of course it's not ok to break someone's back, but I'm an ok person, therefore I must have either had a good reason or it wasn't me (in the sense that I'm not myself when I'm enraged)". Thus an abusive but morally aware person talks themselves into treating their victim even worse in order to protect their vision of themselves as a moral person.
Not how anyone I respect would act, but it's common as hell. A lighter version is skewered by the Conchords - "you're so hot, you're making me sexist. Bitch."
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I think the thing that bugs many people about organised religion is more its organisation than its religion. Non-specific credulous flim-flammery is given a free pass to a great extent, but only up to the point it becomes organised enough to start campaigning on state funded homeopathy, for example, or sending hundreds of black-clad men down Lambton Quay chanting "enough is enough fluoride." It's the power the big religions have to mobilise supporters and use the group dynamic to promote their beliefs that makes free-thinker types uncomfortable.
Which makes me realise why state-enforced atheism (as opposed to a secular state) isn't something I'd feel comfortable with either - using the state's organisational power to whip up mass rallies and suppress other beliefs is bad news whether it's done promoting something that's objectively true or demonstrably false. And I think a lot of atheists are turned off by attempts to build atheist organisations or communities, having become atheists in the first place because of a certain independence of spirit.
So perhaps the shortage of strong religious communities in NZ is there because people want it that way? That we're a bunch of ornery independents wanting to find our own way in the cosmic scheme of things and don't like being told what to do by anyone?
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Weirdly, I've often thought the Battlestar episode Dirty Hands is the best public argument of the need for a labour movement I've seen in any format in recent history.
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None of the BSG discussions I've ever been involved in have really discussed spaceships as such. Certainly none here. More like the elements of drama that's been about, well, a collapsing society with political leaders that have lied to their people and wrapped it up in a greater good argument that regularly gets challenged and re-examined.
On a couple of pages that spent a lot of time on the League scores, focusing on BSG as a non-serious distraction from the real issues of the day seems a bit mistargeted.
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Crikey, google "CFL wiring" and you quickly find out who are the real experts on such things are. Some very enthusiastic amateurs out there amongst the indoor gardening community...