Posts by Howard Edwards
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Oh boy - so many memories of Studass in the 70s, so few active brain cells ...
Sitting at a desk in the foyer every year trying to sign people up to the Folk Music Club;
Folk club meetings in one of the upstairs rooms, including my first (and hopefully last) experience of bagpipes played inside;
Concerts and plays in the Ngaio Marsh theatre, both in the audience (as a school kid in the 60s and as a student in the 70s) and on stage (anyone remember the Beatles concerts that MUSOC and UCFMC used to put on?);
The stein evenings that others have mentioned which we used to raise funds for the folk club - being a barman at the beer table and being given a large metal torch and the instructions "swing it aggressively if they run at you all at once" - and concerts in the ballroom;
The pokey bookshop before it moved across the river into its own building;
Anyone remember Nigel Wyse? Whatever happened to him?
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Actually I had heard of Serco long before this - back in the 1980s a friend of a friend worked for them. My wife and I just assumed they were a local cleaning contractor in Palmerston North!
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This article by Kirsty Johnston in the Herald last week highlights inequality in our education system. The articles heading implies it is only about Auckland but many of the issues are in fact New Zealand-wide.
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Hard News: Friday Music: A night out dancing, in reply to Russell Brown,
And RIP Chris Squire, bass player (and co-founder) of Yes for 47 years. Rated with the late Jon Entwhistle of the Who as the best British bass players to grace the rock stage. Some nice tributes on YouTube and elsewhere.
I count myself lucky to have seen Squire with the core of the "classic" Yes lineup at their Auckland concerts in 2012 and 2014.
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Speaker: Living under bridges, in reply to Russell Brown,
What a website! I particularly liked Teaching Maths through the Years.
Where do they think the word "algebra" came from I wonder?
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Hard News: Behind Baltimore, in reply to Katharine Moody,
As pointed out in the documentary, the structure of pay in the US Police Force is such that officers receive performance pay based on the number of arrests they make
I didn't see the documentary (thanks for the pointers to where I can get it online) but I thought that every district or city has its own police force, i.e. there is no US Police Force (other than the FBI of course). Would they all use the same KPI?
There was an article in the NZ Herald recently (which I can't find online - searching for "police" or "US police" produces 100s of results) which made this point. As a result it is virtually impossible to find any national US police statistics as there is no nationwide requirement to either gather or report data such as number of deaths while in custody etc. So no-one actually knows what the levels of police misconduct and brutality are like in the USA.
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Speaker: Look in the Mirror, New Zealand, in reply to Steve Curtis,
If we're going to allow cherry picking, then I choose this guy - unlike your choice, he applied for asylum in NZ, not Australia.
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Regarding low ratings versus importance to society, there is an interesting interview of John Stewart in the Guardian - including the following:
Much as he might wince to hear it, for the past 16 years Stewart has occupied a place in America’s cultural and political life far greater than the small audience of his cable show would suggest.
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Hard News: The other kind of phone tapping, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
My wife and I use 137 to call one another when one of us is working in the barn and the other is back in the house.
Speaking of phones, I get annoyed when some expert pops up on one of the newspaper tech pages and raves about how the landline is dying and we will all be using nothing but cellphones soon. We live in Coatesville which is about 10 minutes drive from the Albany Mega centre (i.e. hardly the wop-wops) and our cellphone coverage is abysmal - some days it is impossible to call out or call in. Vodafone's response is to try and force us to change ISPs as their solution is to make us pay for some proprietary Internet box (VOIP perhaps?) that only works with their ISP service.
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I must admit that "Absolutely Positively Wellington & Porirua & Lower Hutt & Upper Hutt & bits of South Wairarapa & (etc)" doesn't have quite the same ring about it.
But the really important question is: will it fix your crappy rugby team?
Also interesting to read about the ChCh/Banks Peninsula merger - was the original ChCh merger (ChCh, Waimairi, Paparua etc) any less controversial?