Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Sadly true. This is starting to become like L.A. 92, but with far less of the racial element.
Yes, in fact the races involved seem to be local, which makes it much more like Godwin times. Coupled with a massive double dip recession (which in the old days was called a depression, IMHO), it's quite scary.
Also, as Russell honestly notes, quite exciting. People realizing that their potential to cause damage can lead to real social change is empowering to them. That's if that is the outcome, of course. It could lead to them simply feeling the exhilaration of massive scale violence, something that can easily go the wrong way fast.
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Hard News: Fixing Auckland, in reply to st ephen,
so I expect they'll be setting up the the opposition as pantomime villains for us to be hating on.
Some TV might do that, but the game broadcasts seem very keen to mention the positives of the other teams. It's an infectious attitude - I found myself with a fist in the air at Ozzie scoring their decent try against us the other night, because skilled play is good to watch.
Bravado and bluster and trash talk can be fun, though. The trick is to know how hard to ride it. Australians love that crap, but you tend to find them quite conciliatory after a hard game, whether they won or lost. That's the point of sport, really. It's meant to be a ritual of violence, by which real violence can be avoided. Pick who you want to rark up. Hint: Don't rark up drunks, or groups seem menacing. Going for a rark should be about trying to make a connection with those people, possibly to socialize in an enjoyable way, rather than as a precursor to some horrible tribal shitfight. If they seem genuinely bummed, buy them a drink, or change the subject. Or back away, taking note of the exits, and potential trap-points (I always do this on the way in to any bar).
Personally, the group that scares me most is NZers. The quiet sulking is actually quite dangerous. We're notoriously hard to read, and can actually be quite angry whilst appearing not to be. Be aware that someone from another culture will not notice the subtle hints. Furthermore, realize that some people can appear to be a lot angrier than they are, again cultural factors.
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Hard News: Fixing Auckland, in reply to Mark,
Wouldn't it be great to have the overseas visitors hop back on their planes with nothing but good memories?
It's a nice thought. I expect most visitors will be on a holiday buzz, and having a good time no matter what happens with the rugby. But they could sure have their buzz crushed by bad experiences with the locals.
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When I lived in an apartment in a noisy part of Melbourne, it wasn't very long at all before street noise had no effect on me at all, and actually lulled me to sleep sometimes - the soccer World Cup, and the Grand Prix were especially noisy times, and I'd often roll over at the sound of a huge burnout or a passing crowd of singing drunks, settling deeper into sleep than before. Most nights, several times, one of the restaurants I backed onto would dump a whole wheelie bin full of empty bottles into a large bin, making a noise rather like a devastating car crash. Visitors would leap up, and I'd have to actually think about what it was they were doing, having not noticed the sound at all. Even now, I still find dead silence eerie and unsettling when I'm trying to sleep, and will put on some ambient sound to help me.
I can't, however, ignore a subwoofer - a pumping regular bass sound, changing every 3 minutes, is still fucking intrusive. I'm not sure why - I guess it's meant to be penetrating, and it's so damned unnatural, really does sound like some heavy object hitting the ground, which I think humans are probably programmed not to ignore. "Don't sleep through stampedes" might be a biological imperative.
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Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Classic. I was thinking last night about what would be the kind of things your readers would buy and mostly drew a blank. Holiday packages sounds like the closest to a useful advert - high margin, and as an ex-pat you might have readers that are back home thinking of coming here (when you write about NZ) or here and thinking about going home (when you write about the old country). Memory systems could be a rich vein of misdirected people, who realize that's not what your site is about, but hey, that ad in the corner might be. Books and gadgets strike me as the kind of thing your readers would already know how to find on the net.
I don't know how Adsense picks the kind of ads. If it's left on, does it home in on what people are clicking?
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Nothing I say will have any effect on the All Blacks, and it's fun to speculate. So I'm happy to remain the firm custodian of my emotional reaction to spanking the Wallabies. Of course I'm stoked. We won the Bledisloe, again!
But the World Cup is the WORLD cup. It's a bloody big ask for anyone to win it. I'm neither going to expect this win to mean a similar result during the Cup, nor am I going to discount how encouraging it is.
I think the obvious answer is forfeit all the games. In 1987 the All Blacks didn't play any tests before the World Cup.
Quite.
To me, the World Cup is like a game of nine-ball. In nine ball, the winner is the person who sinks the nine ball. The other balls usually get sunk first, so a lot of games end up with a battle for the nine ball. It could seem irrelevant who sunk the other eight balls on the table. And it both is and isn't relevant. There is a big psychological advantage to having knocked in all of the other balls, it shows your eye is in better form to the other player. But still, if it's down to a fight for the nine-ball, it often just comes down to luck. Even the worst player can get a flukey shot in.
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Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to giovanni tiso,
My blog will suddenly become your most trusted source for over-the-counter Viagra and Cialis. No-one will even notice.
I'd notice if you started doing the obvious thing and putting ads on your site. I'm quite curious what Google would pick for ads for there. Have you tried it?
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Yes, the area around the Viaduct is like an industrial area at night. But with worse parking. It's more dead even than what I remember as a small child - after going to the Teps we'd often wander to the Viaduct to watch the fishing boats come in, and there was a hustle and bustle of activity.
Nowadays when I go there, it's either for lunch or to go drinking, or I'm riding through. If for lunch, there's an obligatory 20 minutes dicking around trying to find a carpark, or just biting the bullet on getting ripped by a high rise parking building. Then there's a few places to eat, which are reasonably well frequented during weekdays.
If for drinking, a parking building is the only option, because the on street parking has particularly narsty parkos who I've seen holding back on near-expired parking so they can give you a ticket the moment the time is up, and the buildings have night rates. You wander through cold, dark, deserted streets to the Viaduct, which is itself often quite lively.
If I'm biking, I'm typically heading to Westhaven drive. I'm quite amazed at how dull and sterile everything is for at least a kilometer after the last bars in the Viaduct. It's pretty enough, if you like to look at extremely expensive boats (I do), the apartments are a blank wall of sameness for about 500 meters, and there's just no one around, even on a nice sunny day. Maybe a gaggle of lost tourists wondering what the hell this boulevard leads to. There's nothing whatsoever to see or do until the boating shop district and the beautiful, but also quite sterile, look at the marina along Westhaven Drive.
No real clue why it is that this residential area is so boring. I guess it's the total absence of anything else to do there. No bars, no shops, no stalls, no parks, just...nothing, except a pretty boulevard.
Must check out the Wynyard changes...sounds promising.
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Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to giovanni tiso,
(Makes mental note to do more spamming on PAS.)
I'd hate to see your account blocked :-)
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Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I doubt it. Russell would have established a "nofollow" regime in the links coming from this site I presume?
I don't see it anywhere in the html source generated.
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