Posts by Paul Campbell
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It's Friday ...
1) go to google maps
2) choose 'directions'
3) enter 'japan' and 'china'
4) check out direction #43Also check out Siberian 'Ghost' Cities
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I was listening to Mallard on the radio this morning and all I could think was "he sounds just like DPF" - has anyone ever seen them both in the same room?
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I'm equally queasy - seems the Nats have our laws for sale to the highest bidder (can we all see John Key rubbing his hands: "my precious"), that whole national sovereignty thing is so darned inconvenient - next week we'll be signing that "let our nukes in and we'll give you that free trade agreement" agreement ....
Honestly I think that we've bought in to LotR/Hobbit/Jackson/etc too much as a point of national identity - to the point where it's a tad embarrassing (trying to explain this morning what just happened to american friends today involved lots of hand waving) - I guess I'm a bit biased - I saw it originally from the outside, I was living in the US when the LotR was being filmed/released and I kind of felt this way about it when I moved back to NZ and everyone was being so, well, precious about it, I had to bite my tongue a lot.
It's not that I don't think it's great that it's being made here - having a local film industry is great - we need economic diversity - but remember almost no NZ films were made while LotR was being filmed - we're not that big - we may be better off making more smaller stuff.
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He played for free at Burning Man - I'll give anyone respect for doing that.
Well it's not like you can charge a cover - for those who don't know Burning Man has a strong non-commercial ethic, there are no concessions - even barter is looked down upon - giving stuff to random strangers is considered OK (my kids always made out like bandits). Selling drugs openly is likely to draw a lynch mob long before law enforcement show up.
There is no organised music - some people provide venues, people show up and play or spin - there are a lot of DJs and oontz partly because bringing cherished instruments to an alkali mud flat is a bad idea. On the other hand for an up and coming band it's a great place to be seen by a large chunk of 50,000 people
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I saw "Eating the Dog" tonight in the Port Chalmers town hall as part of the Dunedin Arts Festival - decidedly excellent! Playing for the next 2 nights in Mosgiel, tickets are still available
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So let me ask the hard question: people love Etsy, but .... well .... it's full of crap .... and some great stuff, how do you make a web site that's compelling because it's known to be full of great stuff? who decides? how do you make sure it doesn't become the generic NZ slush pile?
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I'm imagining John Key and Rodney Hide com ing out of a hastily called meeting on "What to do about Auckland Now" and Nelson Muntz standing there going "ha-ha!"
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Salmonella Dub: "On the chemical make up of poorly made LSD samples and resulting public uproar and confusion" (Biochemistry Letters Apr 1993)
Before their success as a dub-step band this team of talented biochemistry researchers were well on their way to a Nobel, however an unfortunate food poisoning incident resulted in their being banned from the lab and forced them to take up their instruments.
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my parents met in the local tramping there are the wedding photos with the honour guard of ice axes - light sabers would be so, well 80s, the hair! - we got married in secret to avoid all that shit - we needed 2 witnesses at the registry office - it was Dunedin, you can't keep a secret - pretty soon people were walking up to us in the street "I hear you're getting married on Wed"- we had to race down on Sun and tell my parents "we're getting married on Wed, we'd really like you to come" - we had to dress up
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We got married in the mid 80s, largely for a visa, it was at a time when words mattered and being "politically correct" was a gentle in joke between lefties basically saying "haven't you gone a little too far?" - before it was adopted by the right as a slur
Anyway it took years before I could refer to "my wife" without squirming - it was the "my" part and all the implications of ownership that was the problem.
I have to disagree about giving up "marriage" to the religious - by all means only have the state bless one kind of marriage/CU/whatever for everyone and let the various religions do their own thing - but I think that to give up the word, with all its social connotations, to religion and make the rest of us only half married is wrong.
Mind you i guess the state has no right defining what a religion is so we can have atheist 'ministers' performing services - or we can just get a mail-order jedi reverendship and do it ourselves (do there really have to be light sabers?)