Posts by Russell Brown
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Just to note that the consensus on Twitter yesterday was that the bargain price probably indicates a fair bit of earthquake compliance work is due.
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Hard News: Stories: Home, in reply to BenWilson,
Auckland is getting this too. Tuis cavort in the trees around my section, and I’ve seen them in trees in at UoA. No kereru hereabouts, but at Waiheke they’re everywhere – they seem to particularly love doing strange falling-out-of-the-sky maneuvers – it’s so non-functional that I think it must be some kind of courting display.
Tui were a rare sight when we first moved in – now they're a part of summer. There's usually one that sets up for the season and we hear its particular call for months. One Christmas Day that summer's tui started up and I looked out and it was trilling from the very top of the pinus radiata in the reserve over the back – like it was the fairy on a Christmas tree.
We will very occasionally see a fantail – they're more common in the trees over on Meola Reef. And Fiona thought the other day that she glimpsed a kereru flying past with all the grace of a frozen chook.
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OnPoint: The Whaledump Saga: Scooby-Doo Edition, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Yeah, a lot of what he said at that time takes on a different light now.
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OnPoint: The Whaledump Saga: Scooby-Doo Edition, in reply to Keith Ng,
What? No! Nobody’s been hacked here (except Slater, by Rawshark). Those pictures were *sent* by Rachinger to Slater, and by Slater (directly or indirectly) to the other blog.
How Rachinger got them is another matter, but no, it wasn't via spooks.
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Hard News: Stories: Home, in reply to sandra,
I think Maori have a great advantage with always having a ‘home’ on one or several marae.
For sure. The gift of making a bicultural TV show show is that I've had access to a deeper understanding of the Maori experience and way of thinking, and that common concept of a place to go home to is certainly part of it.
But the other thing this makes me think of is the interviews I've been doing for a story about K Road. The concept of people leaving – to have relationships and babies and jobs and live in the suburbs – and coming back again, even years later, has come up a couple of times. It will find its way into the story, for sure.
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Up Front: Fringe of Darkness, in reply to putting the pieces together,
But thank you for talking about it and your brave ideas for a forum to listen and be heard.
Thank you for coming here and sharing this with us. I know it can't be easy.
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Hard News: Ten Thousand Maniacs, in reply to Jason Kemp,
Iyad El-Baghdadi tweeted about how the "cut off the funding" thing doesn't apply so much any more. Isis is largely self-funding – and two thirds of its money comes from extortion.
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Hard News: Stories: Home, in reply to Hilary Stace,
And this place is a home.
Thanks Chip. Genuinely touched.
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Hard News: Stories: Home, in reply to william blake,
We wonder who the new neighbours will be, we’ve had pot growers with mastiffs, who were sweetie pies once they knew we carried tux biscuits (the dogs, but come to think of it it may have worked on the owners too) A toothless, paranoid, amphetamine taking truck driver, a professional jazz drummer and the worst, a misanthropic curmudgeon from an old settler family. We think we will most likely get a young family as the schools are quite flash around here, possibly poms (Britirangi) but we dread the rental investment; “secluded with ample garaging”, shouts clanlab to me.
Ah, neighbours. We’re in a cul de sac with half a dozen Housing NZ properties in it. That has meant some interesting times – for a while HNZ sent us some really difficult tenants, including Chris, who was schizophrenic and should not have been living alone. He was exploited by his “friends” who would come around and party up (lighting fires!) on the driveway.
But the heroin homebaker next to him was actually a reasonably good neighbour and he looked out for the old folks. I wrote a letter for him when he got busted (that was a surreal morning – I opened the front door to see the street crowded with a hazmat truck and multiple cop cars, all with their lights going) and helped his sister go through the place after he sadly came out of hospital two days earlier than we expected, baked up and ODd on his kitchen floor.
There has been a bit of drug excitement over the years. The people who ran Feel, the E-friendly speakeasy got raided (cops in front door, helicopter with searchlight hovering over the back). The duplex on the corner was a tinny house for a while (idiot young customers doing donuts at the bottom of the cul de sac). There was the couple who lost the plot on P (became rather wearying to to talk to, especially after they fell out). Steve, who moved into the former tinny house flat, wasn’t so funny – he was fresh out of jail, mentally ill and on the P and he kept bringing stray youths home.
Nowadays, we have two elderly Chinese couples, Old Dave, and Shannon, who’s in a motorised wheelchair, in the Housing NZ properties and they’re all cool. Next door to us is a young couple who’ve had two babies since they arrived and are lovely people – he has a commercial electrical business, which allowed them to spend a shitload of money fixing up the place. Young Dave lives next to Old Dave and restores classic Toyotas.
It’s not a bad street to live in, all in all.
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Hard News: Stories: Home, in reply to Francisco Blaha,
bFM was my first “home” even if my body rested in a boarding house in Balmoral.
Yeah, I totally get that. It's the place where people like us live.
PA folk who feel the same may also wish to chip in a little to this week's Bombathon pledge drive.
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