Cracker: Air New Zealand: Flash as a Chow on a Bike
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Hi Damian thanks for slagging off us Wellingtonians. Appreciate that.
If you liked that, you'll LOVE the article I wrote for Metro called "Capital Punishment" in July 07. Based on my time in the Capital, it caused quite a stir at the time. Full of half-arsed humourless generalisations and observations. Well worth digging up. I even think I imply that all Wellington music is the same as Fat Freddy's Drop. Hilarious.
PJ O'Rourke does this shit funny. You, not so much.
No-one's forcing you to read it Pete. You might have noticed that unlike a doctor's waiting room, the Internet has plenty of reading material to choose from other than this blog. Go nuts.
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Like Jack above, I was very, very disappointed to discover that this post was not about cute fluffy doggies. With bikes.
But luckily, I can fix that.
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I am trying to picture the thought process behind the phrase, as originally intended. Seriously. Was the mental image meant to be a single dapper Chinese person cycling through, say, 1930s Wellington, which may well have been rather eye-catching for those around them? Or was it meant to evoke a Chinese person in China, just one of a critical mass-style group spinning through the streets? How do (or did) we derive the "flash" bit from the rest of it? Is the comical effect of the expression due to the supposed incongruity of the image, like minstrels in evening dress? In any event, it's clearly meant to be said by a non-Chinese person to a non-Chinese person, which is I think part of what Hilary was getting at with her question; it posits an in-group and an out-group, and assumes only the in-group is listening.
(I was trying to think of synonymous but more innocent phrases, and am rather shocked to discover that one that came to mind also turns out to have a potentially racist inflection. Go figure.)
But do you want to know one group, in my experience, who will try and blag free drinks and take advantage of them?
Yep. You know who used to turn up in droves to the free monthly drinkies at the NZ Embassy in Tokyo?
New Zealanders. Shameless.
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Yep. You know who used to turn up in droves to the free monthly drinkies at the NZ Embassy in Tokyo?
New Zealanders. Shameless.
the drinks weren't free. they sold drink tickets for 200 yen each (redeemed for a glass of nz wine or can of nz beer).
that regular meet-up was killed off over a decade ago by the embassy top brass.
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I found this in an Air NZ manual for Wellington based staff:
Aucklanders have a high opinion of their own personal standing. Despite domestic Business Class having been abolished some time ago, passengers from and to Auckland may still demand to be upgraded. Showing them to their First Class seats behind the small door at the back has been found to be a good tactic. -
that regular meet-up was killed off over a decade ago by the embassy top brass.
I've never even *been* to an embassy of either of the states I'm a citizen of. But Americans living here do seem to get US Embassy invites on occasion.
Is there some sort of alumni office, or do you just have to live in a place with a fairly small community from the country you're from?
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I even think I imply that all Wellington music is the same as Fat Freddy's Drop
I thought we had that whole downbeat thing beaten down for a while, but it seems to be making a frigging comeback. I blame Kerry.
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do you just have to live in a place with a fairly small community from the country you're from?
I've had some lovely freebies from the Brazilian embassy: food, drink and music. Cause they care about culture. It has occurred to me that keeping my ear to the ground about diplomatically-funded occasions and the odd gallery opening would keep one fed and watered quite a lot of the time.
And then there's funerals...
... one can have a Jolley time.
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stand-by topic of discussion in a taxi. Stops me being grievously but silently offended when some driver who obviously spends all day flicking between Laws and Leighton starts telling me what's wrong with New Zealand these days...
I reckon there should be some way of demanding a discount for the dubious pleasure of having to listen to the retarded views of some taxi-drivers---or those who tune their radios to Radio Rhema. There must be some effective but courteous way of saying "I'm hiring you to provide transport, not to subject me to your warped view of the world'
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I was on a bus, a bus, a **** bus, at some ridiculously early hour in the morning, and that Leighton Smith came on the radio to tell me that Sue Kedgley was a traitor. I did not pay for this, I did not want this.
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Is there some sort of alumni office, or do you just have to live in a place with a fairly small community from the country you're from?
the embassy monthly drinks were open to anyone (of any nationality) who could be bothered getting themselves up the hill from Shibuya. it's a decent walk. either you were fit enough to walk or rich enough to get a taxi. new zealanders who only had limited opportunity for contact with other nz-ers and news from the old country tended to go along once a month on a friday evening. you could always carry on your piss-up/chat-up somewhere else in the city...(after they kicked everyone out at about 9:30pm)
remember, until 1995 or so, with no internet/email, most people craved a bit of nyuzild contact once in a while...
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I do think to worry about the dogs name in Dam Busters misses the point of celebrating a war crime.
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"I'm hiring you to provide transport, not to subject me to your warped view of the world"
I've never had trouble with taxi drivers talking politics or talkback unless asked. This may come as no surprise..
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@Rich haha that's very funny, although I've got to say that flying every week does warp your view of such things - twenty weeks in a row of sitting in the first couple of rows, then one week I'm back in 10C, it's hard not to think "who did I offend"... obviously shouldn't have written this blog :)
@Jolisa: I was just talking to Robyn Gallagher at Avalon, she tells me that this blog is give or take the only use of said phrase on the Interweb, so we can perhaps assume it's fairly localised (or archaic racism isn't a hot topic on the net). In what little analysis I have given the phrase, I always thought it meant that for a "chow", having a bike was pretty flash, they couldn't hope for much more in life. But your suggestions are definitely making me re-evaluate that.
Poppa used to work at the University, and as an alcoholic, spent a bit of time hanging out in pubs with Colin McCahon, apparently often causing McCahon to miss his lectures. I wonder if McCahon ever uttered that phrase...
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Oh, and re Taxi drivers and their comments, there's a great thread somewhere on this blog from a while back. Uninvited racism from taxi drivers is always quite a highlight. But I refuse to listen to talkback in the car. I just ask for it to be turned off.
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Poppa used to work at the University, and as an alcoholic, spent a bit of time hanging out in pubs with Colin McCahon, apparently often causing McCahon to miss his lectures. I wonder if McCahon ever uttered that phrase...
That would be the (now long gone) Kiwi. Dad too was one of the regulars there -- the Chemistry department graduate students used to drink with Fine Arts bods at the Kiwi owing to geographical coincidence, as I am reminded every time McCahon comes up in conversation with Dad. The reminiscences are not favourable with respect to the art or the artist, I'm afraid. But anyway, next time I talk to Dad I'll ask whether this unpleasant phrase was ever used.
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I am trying to picture the thought process behind the phrase, as originally intended. Seriously. Was the mental image meant to be a single dapper Chinese person cycling through, say, 1930s Wellington, which may well have been rather eye-catching for those around them? Or was it meant to evoke a Chinese person in China, just one of a critical mass-style group spinning through the streets?
In David McGill's Reed Dictionary of New Zealand Slang (2003), he has it as:
Flash as a Chow on a red bike. Ostentatious. A West Coast saying going back to the goldmining era, when a 'Chow' or Chinese man on a red bike was unlikely, for the Chinese kept a low profile.
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Interesting philipmatthews - I've lived 40 years on the West Coast, and have never heard the saying...I suspect it might've died shortly after the goldmining era finished.
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I'm not sure how parochial you are Islander, but I suspect knowing its geographic origins won't be enough for you to try and revive the saying? Shame...
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My heart belongs to the south-east Damian (I love the Coast but my family are elsewhere as are other places I belong to), and I've noted many once-common West Coast (and elsewhere) expressions die with the older generations: nobody, but nobody, says "Boomer!" anymore, and a pony/shandy/handle are just out of the general useage now-
quite a few of the 'baiting terms remain current - but they're revived every season whereas the Tai Poutini pub culture became extinct in the 1980s...
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Aucklanders have a high opinion of their own personal standing. Despite domestic Business Class having been abolished some time ago, passengers from and to Auckland may still demand to be upgraded. Showing them to their First Class seats behind the small door at the back has been found to be a good tactic.
Contrast the above with the experience of me and my wife booked on to a flight to Dunedin which got truned back to Auckland becuase it couldn't land at Wellington in the fog. Air NZ found another plane to board and transport passengers to Wellington within the hour. Meanwhile those going to Dunedin got told to p**s off and come back tomorrow.
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I've lived 40 years on the West Coast, and have never heard the saying...I suspect it might've died shortly after the goldmining era finished.
So if Gerry Brownlee gets his way this phrase may well return. Racism goes so well with the Right along with beneficiary bashing. Before long we will have all the Maori Mums down the mines.
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And their kids, Steve B! Those dextrous little fingers, so good at picking out the uranium nuggets - or whatever-
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Uninvited racism from taxi drivers is always quite a highlight.
Best one I can recall, re. Pacific Islanders: "These people don't mind being hit on the head, but the one thing they can't stand is being bitten by a dog."
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