tallpoppy

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2010-04-11T20:32:00.003+12:00

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test

2010-04-11T20:32:00.001+12:00

Don't mind me, I'm just checking something.

there's a pun in here somewhere.

2010-04-01T23:09:00.004+13:00

Took the kids to see The Wiggles yesterday. The show was very similar to when they were here a year ago; lots of circus stuff, a mix of the classic tunes and some of the newer ones. The Wiggles always give a good gig. If you've got kids, I can highly recommend taking them. As Rodger noted, the crowd outside was about as rowdy as for AC/DC, but 3ft tall. Important difference to note: the crowd outside the Wiggles thought that a bloke on a bicycle was cool. This was not so much the case for AC/DC. But I'm pretty sure that both crowds were clamouring for the ladeez to get their tits out; except at The Wiggles, it was more based around nutrition. More la leche than le lech, really.

Similarly, as with Rodger, we took the kids to the Wellington Aero Club open day at the weekend. They loved it. Maggie has a big thing for planes, and the chance to see them taking off at close range made her very happy. We had to extract her with extreme prejudice from several aircraft. Rebecca enjoys anything where you get to climb into vehicles and pretend to drive them, so she was in her element. After a couple of hours, we had to leave in order to prevent the kids from passing out with hunger. And at that, as we crowbarred them out the door, they were still begging to have another look at a couple of the planes... bless their little cotton socks, the buggers.

There's been a recent proposal to put up a Wellywood sign on one of the hills in Miramar, so it's visible from across the harbour (and to planes making the northern landing approach). Leaving aside the general discussion about the sign, I've been amused to see that one of the arguments against it is that we should leave the natural hillside alone. Have the people arguing this actually seen the hillside in question? It's covered in gorse scrub and a couple of pine trees. 100m away from the proposed sign, on the other side of the cutting, is a light industrial zone, the most notable feature of which is a clearly marked paint factory. This is not one of our areas of outstanding natural beauty. Now, if they were talking about putting it in the hillside 2k further up the peninsula around the Shelly Bay reserve, we'd have something to talk about. But they're not. So yes, feel free to have a problem with the Wellywood sign - but for heaven's sake, don't argue that it would be desecrating our natural wilderness. That's one of the few parts of wellington where a brush fire would count as improvement.

A brief note to other cycle commuters: learn the light phasings. Why? So you don't end up looking like a dick running the red light at the corner of Featherston and Bunny streets, turning left up Bunny. Because there's no point running that light - you always have to wait for the lights to get onto Thorndon Quay. If you're going to act like a dick, at least get some fucking benefit out of stitching the rest of us up.

Mainly listening to: the Gil Scott-Heron live album from the 80s. There's a 23-minute version of 'Angel Dust'. It's astonishingly grand. Highly, highly recommended.

plus, they tried to cut my head in two

2010-03-22T21:56:00.001+13:00

Children are natural anarchists.

That's not a throwaway line about kids being terribly destructive, it's an observation based on the weekend. We had Rebecca's sixth birthday party yesterday. We prepared. We prepared some more. I personally made twenty individual servings of jelly, each with a sugar snake in the middle. And then the onslaught occurred.

Now, those of you without older children probably don't know how kids' parties go. Once they're in school, it's like this. The party is scheduled run from 2-5pm. Between 1:55 and 2:05pm, all the guests arrive. Their parents drop them off, make polite enquiries as to whether it's OK to just run away now; receiving an affirmative reply, they disappear off to the far corners of the earth, to reappear between 4:55 and 5:05pm and retrieve their hyped-up offspring.

So by 2:10, we had a house full of 6-year old girls. There was a lot of pink clothing and high-pitched screaming. Righto, we thought, let's get on with the scheduled merriment.

Except that we couldn't, because all the kids had run out to the back garden and spontaneously organised a game of tag. Then they organised "expeditions" to the bottom of the garden. Then back upstairs for a round of musical statues, for which one of them figured out how to work the volume knob on the stereo. Then off again to play dress-ups and pretend to be pirates.

During all this we (the adults) just sat back, had a quiet chat in the kitchen, and kept an eye out for injuries or social exclusion. The kids entertained themselves with a variety of games for the first hour. At one point I overheard several of them talking about how it was the "best birthday party ever" because they were getting to do what they wanted, rather than corralled into pre-defined games. They spontaneously formed themselves into groups and organised themselves. My anarchist comrades (by which I mean, my comrades, who happen to be anarchists, which I myself am not) assure me that this is the sort of behaviour that anarchism argues for. Hence, my argument that kids are natural anarchists.

After the first hour, we decided to throw a bit of order into the proceedings, because quite frankly I'd spent $25 on that piñata and I thought some sanctioned violence might be interesting to throw into the mix. The kids played Pin the Tail on the Donkey very nicely, only pinning the tail on me once. And the piñata went down very well. We started out using a bamboo pole, so all the kids got a chance to hit it; after five minutes, we upgraded them to a heaver bludgeon. I must say, The Warehouse is reinforcing their piñatas these days - after ten minutes of thrashing, its back snapped shortly before the legs finally came off. In a slight departure from tradition, I grabbed the corpse and ran upstairs to do a lolly scramble onto the back lawn - which meant that I came out onto the deck to a synchronised chant of "Lol-lies, lol-lies..." - it's that autonomous organising again. After this, we gave them iceblocks, jelly, and cake, and then let them run around screaming for another hour before releasing them back into the wild.

So the party was a success; many thanks to Suzy for the incredible cake and to the various other parents who stayed and helped us with the wrangling. Rebecca had a wonderful time, and the day ended without any major injuries. Well, nothing requiring hospitalisation.

On Friday night, we went out to meet Urs and Em's new baby, Piri. He's a braw wee lad. Rebecca was initially nervous about the venue - the anarchist centre on Abel Smith st - which she described as "scruffy" (an adjective also applied to me when I didn't wear a tie when we took her out to dinner on her birthday). But someone showed her the garden, which had some aniseed growing. Ten minutes later, she was walking through an anarchist squat, "selling" samples of "herbs". Well, she liked the smell of the aniseed, and she thought it would be nice to give some to all the other people there...

52 tons of pure fun

2010-02-28T21:39:00.003+13:00

Our tenth wedding anniversary worked out well. Heather had no idea where the hell we were going until she got to the airport. Once she'd realised that we were off to Christchurch, she put on a brave face (I probably shouldn't have dropped all those hints about tropical weather, taking a swimsuit, etc - though I had also been dropping hints about taking footwear that could for e.g. be helpful when atttempting to outrun a large predator on open grassland). Equally, she had absolutely no idea what we were going to do... right up until I made the hard left turn into Tanks For Everything. And even then - when she'd realised that I'd booked for her to drive a Centurion tank - she was still lacking a vital piece of information. It wasn't until she'd got changed into camo kit, spent an hour climbing in and out of various tanks, got behind the wheels of 52 tons of Bad News for Immobile Objects, and actually driven it around about 900m of the 1k course that she found out the full story: I'd also booked for her to drive the tank over a car.

Subaru Impreza, if you're wondering.

I think we can safely say that Heather greatly enjoyed the experience. Several of the other punters there that day seemed bemused that I'd got this for H as a wedding anniversary present; my response was, I know my wife, and she's wanted to do this for a long time. Video and pictures to arrive via the usual sources fairly shortly. I can also thoroughly recommend the crew at Tanks for Everything, who were excellent. They were enthusiastic, energetic, and played along with the surprise aspect of it all - to the extent of swearing the other punters there that day to silence as regards the upcoming car crushing. Top blokes, and if you like driving gert big lumps of metal around they're definitely the people to talk to.

Apart from that, we had an excellent weekend away in Christchurch. If you're in the vicinity, I can thoroughly recommend the botanic gardens. Obviously, I'm rather a fan of glasshouses, and the big glasshouses there are awesome. There's a very nice display of carnivorous plants in the main glasshouse at the moment - though to be honest, I was more impressed with the glasshouse itself than with the specimens on display. Mostly nice specimens, but of fairly common species. The only specimens in the main glasshouse that I haven't seen in a garden centre here were the Heliamphora - which were stunning. But if you're there, do yourself a favour: swing through the main glasshouse, hang a left, and go through the room full of cacti. There's a lovely wee room tucked in the back, full of orchids and some of the more exotic carnivores I've seen in NZ. They even had a beautiful specimen of Nepenthes hamata, which I didn't even know was in cultivation in this country. And full marks to them for including a magnifying lens in front of the best pitcher, so people can see why it's such a magnificent plant. Beautiful.

Then back to reality. A whirlwind week at work, then our housewarming barbecue. The weather came to the party in spades, with rather a lot of beautiful sunshine and very little wind. A planned mellow six hour barbecue turned into a rather epic ten; we're still picking the grit out of the carpet. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves, although as a host I did find it very hard to actually have an in-depth conversation with anyone. There was always a sausage to grill, a child to remove from a drain, or a bridge to cross. The kids had a great day, marauding around the place - Rebecca lead several expeditions down to the bottom of the garden. Great fun.

And in which vein: I finally made it up to the top (and sides) of our property today. I can confirm that it's a really, really steep slope covered with loose pine needles and leaf mould, and that it goes back quite a way. And then I took a very long time to get back, as the footing was incredibly loose and the consequences of a misstep were a 20m rolling fall down into a river. Still, that's a 20m rolling fall down My Bloody Property - and that's the sort of risk I like to take (disclaimer: I did not break anyone's leg).

brief

2010-02-15T22:46:00.001+13:00

Saturday morning, we were walking through Civic Square. I mentioned to R that the Yayoi Kusama exhibition was being taken down. "What do you mean?" "Well, they're taking all the big paintings with the dots on down, and some other artist can come in and do some different paintings now." "You mean, like... stripes?"

post shower

2010-02-10T21:39:00.000+13:00

An addendum to my previous post, which I should have included as one of the final bullet points:

Try not to remember the dicks. Chances are the people who did good things for you outnumber the dicks; try not to fixate on the negative. This morning on my ride into work, three separate drivers paused and waited for me rather than try to blat through turns they could probably have made without affecting me. That's got to outweigh the bloke who deliberately drifted to the left to stop me filtering through 5kph traffic going out of J'ville. It's not always easy to remember the nice people - it's much, much easier to focus on the stuff that spikes your adrenaline and makes you want to hurt people - but for your own peace of mind, it's worth trying.

I am currently wearing a bathrobe, reading Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago", and listening to avant-garde hip-hop on my hi-fi stereo. Clearly I am more of a pretentious wanker than I'd thought.

a general principle about life, told through the lens of road usage behaviour

2010-02-08T21:04:00.001+13:00

Here's a good principle to keep in mind: dicks stand out.

Which is to say, some people are dicks. They do dick-ish things. Like running red lights; like tailgating; like not stopping at pedestrian crossings; like driving with booming sound systems; like not giving way when required.

But most people aren't dicks. Most people are at worst uninterested, and at best fairly positive. And there's a lot of nice people out there: people who go out of their way to make things work more smoothly. But the dicks are the ones who stand out.

Think about it. You commute in to work. Chances are the vast majority of the other road users follow the rules and it goes smoothly; several people are courteous and make way for you when you merge across lanes; and one fucktard cuts you up something rotten. What do you remember about your commute half an hour later? You remember the dick. You don't remember the vast majority of people who just played along, you don't even remember the people who actively helped to make things go smoothly for you; you remember the fuckwit who cut you up.

This is why people mutter about "bloody cyclists ignoring red lights". When I cycle, the majority of cyclists are actually law-abiding and sensible. But there's always a few who are, and you can see where this is going, dicks. To the average motorist stopped at a red light, the law-abiding cyclists waiting patiently for the light to change are basically invisible. But the fixie twat who blats through the light? That's the cyclist they'll remember. That's who they think of when coming up with a mental picture of a cyclist.

So:

Don't be a dick. It annoys people, and it doesn't help the already fraught atmosphere out on our roads.
Appreciate and acknowledge the people who aren't being dicks. Say thanks. To be honest, I set the bar pretty low on this one: when drivers show basic courtesy to me as a cyclist, I try to make my appreciation clear in an unambiguous way. I give them a wave or a salute to say thanks. Yes, it's often just basic courtesy - but the person could be being a dick, and by acknowledging that they aren't, it's helping encourage them not to continue not being a dick.

You may generalise this to other situations as you see fit.

different values of must

2010-01-29T20:33:00.002+13:00

So. As briefly alluded to, we've moved house. It was a long, stressful process, but it now seems to be all over except the shouting. So how well did it all go?

As these things go, fairly smoothly. There were the expected hiccups. I got a bit too involved in the packing, and forgot to leave some basic cutlery out until the last minute (always have at least one fork). The forecast was for rain. And on the morning of the move, we got a call saying they'd be delayed two hours. That's not going to be a problem, is it?

As it turned out, it wasn't. At 10:45, we got a call that they'd be there at 11 after all. So when they arrived I was still cleaning the fridge. The movers had a quick look around, and then merrily hove to with the moving. Nice blokes, even if one of them was wearing a home detention electronic tag. This was followed at 11:30 by a phone call notifying us that the sale of our house had gone through and that we were thus officially homeless. Excellent. From our chat with the estate agent the night before, we knew that the new owners weren't moving in until the next day, so that wouldn't be a problem.

Except that twenty minutes later, a fully-loaded station wagon pulled down the drive. As it came, I distinctly saw the passenger doing a double-take at the moving truck in the driveway, and lipread what I can only tactfully describe as mild obscenity. I popped out and had a polite chat. To their credit, they were extremely nice about the whole thing. It turned out that they were actually both keen cyclists, and the bloke was heavily tattooed, so with a bit of luck the neighbours might not even notice the change. I finally convinced them to leave by giving them a set of shelves, and we got on with the move.

Around 1:30pm we got confirmation that we own the new place. Handily, this came just as they were closing the doors on the moving truck. So we popped into J'ville and picked up the keys. My word, the security precautions these places take. None whatsover, as it turns out. We went in, asked the receptionist for the keys, and she gave them to us.

The rest of it went pretty smoothly. The movers seemed quite surprised that we'd actually labelled the boxes of stuff, so they could tell where stuff went by simply reading the labels. From their reactions, this is less common than I would expect. Anyway, thanks to my obsessive packing and labelling - together with a remarkably unWellingtonian ease of access at both ends - the move was over by quarter past four. Thank god. We even had time to do a bit of unpacking so the girls' beds were in order before they arrived home.

In the days since, we've mainly been frantically unpacking. To be honest, it's more or less done. We need to spend a bit of time going through the shed, and sorting out a filing cabinet, but that's about it. Result. Here's to not having to bloody well do it again for another few years.

And we now own our own bush section, full of precipitous drops and slippery steps. And a stream.

In other news, Australia's censorship debate once again wanders into batshit insane territory. This time, the censors are demanding bigger breasts in porn. Well, they're treating all porn where the actresses have A-cup breasts as potentially pedophilic. I think this is evidence that some conservative politicians in Australia are seeing patterns that no-one else is; and quite why they're seeing those patterns is left as an exercise for the reader.

yes

2010-01-25T21:27:00.002+13:00

We survived the move.

We are now firmly ensconced in Johnsonville. The pretentious may weep for us. I stand on my back lawn, look out at the bush slope, hear the stream gurgling at the bottom of the garden, and breathe out.

insert standard 80s hair metal reference

2010-01-17T22:27:00.002+13:00

It's Sunday. We move house on Wednesday. You can draw your own conclusions about what we've been up to recently. I've become mildly obsessed with packing; I am, increasingly, made nervous by the simple presence of Stuff That Is Not In A Box Yet. I've been careful to pack stuff in increasing frequency of use. Now the only things left are our minimum set of clothes, food, and cooking implements. But soon I can scratch my itch: with three days to go, I can start merrily boxing up plates, mugs, tins of tomatoes and sacks of rice. Soon, all bets are off, and then I can get some serious work done. The problem is, we started early (during Christmas) so as not to have a huge bolus of packing right at the last minute. But there's some stuff that you simply can't pack until the last minute, and starting early has just drawn this out and stretched the stress and strain until I'm sitting here unable to look around the living room without automatically measuring each item by eye and deciding the type of box required and what I can pad it out with. By 11am Wednesday everything will be packed, and that will be good. And then we get to the new house, and have the immense fun of unpacking all the blasted stuff and deciding where to stick it.

I checked on a map today. As far as I can figure it, we're actually moving 1.8km as the crow flies (that's 1.1 miles for our friends still in old money). There's a rather large hill in the way, which means that the shortest practical distance is more like 3k, but that's the situation on a map.

In the meantime: anyone got any suggestions for keeping a curious two-year old out of half-packed boxes?

live-action tetris

2010-01-11T18:19:00.000+13:00

A few months ago I made the observation that you never know how much stuff you've got until you have to hide it. As part of the process of selling a house, you do what the estate agents refer to as "depersonalisation" - hiding your own posessions to make the house look more generic, so prospective buyers can imagine themselves in there. You move your stuff to cupboards, you take down your kids' pictures from the fridge, you try to make the place look as tidy and large as possible. But it's still your home: your furniture is in place, your bed is there, your kids' toys are still in their room.

In preparation for our imminent move, we've been packing everything. This isn't depersonalisation, this is deportation. If you can pick it up, into a box it goes. I started over Christmas, and we're most of the way there. By now we're about down to the stage of having packed pretty much everything that we don't use day to day, plus a few things that we do ("Hey, didn't we have oven trays?"). I spent a couple of hours over the weekend taking pictures and mirrors down. Then I went through and carefully pulled the picture hooks off the walls. As I pulled the hooks out, they left small holes from the nails. Occasionally there were rust spots where the hook had touched the wall, or bits of paint knocked off from the wall as pictures had been bumped.

And now the house looks much emptier. It echoes more. Just taking down all the pictures has profoundly affected how the place feels. Before, it was our house, but with a lot of our stuff sitting in boxes the garage: now it's a house that we haven't quite moved all our stuff out of. The replacement of a few paintings with blank expanses of wall, some tiny holes, some rust marks: removing our pictures has somehow removed us from the picture.

In a week and a half we'll be gone. Soon we'll only be scratches and holes.

intermittant summer

2010-01-06T21:11:00.002+13:00

Happy new year to all.

Resolution this year: survive.

I spent the Christmas holidays wavering between packing and administering medical treatment, not least to myself. A variety of virii and bacterial illnesses beset most of the family. I was, understandably, a total wuss about it all. So: not exactly a relaxing getaway, but a change was as good as a rest.

The other day, riding home up the Ngauranga Gorge, I came across a group of skinks basking on the sun-warmed concrete footpath. As I got about two metres away, they leapt up and darted off into the vegetation. This gave a beautiful "bow wave" effect, as the panic about my arrival propagated through the group.

I've found something about walking at night. I've recently acquired a few hoodies. When I'm walking around, listening to stuff on my iPod, I've found that having the hood up helps muffle external noise, so making it easier to hear the iPod. But I've noticed that at night, when I'm wearing the hood up, people avoid eye contact and stride confidently past. I keep wanting to stop them and say, "Hey, I'm actually listening to National Radio." But I can't, because that would be creepy. Humanity, eh?

Tonight, as Heather and I were about to start singing her lullaby, Maggie tried to count us in. "1, 2, 3, 4..." - she's got music in her blood.

Two weeks today until we move. I'd estimate we're about 50% packed. 14 more days to eat an entire pantry's worth of tinned goods. It's going to be fun on the run in to the final day.

better not shout OK

2009-12-24T08:29:00.004+13:00

It's on general release now, so the NDA no longer prevents me from pointing out that I'm in the credits for Avatar. I'm rather chuffed. OK, so I'm credited as "Software Developer & Engineer" rather than "Technical Writer", but it's all good. Modesty prevents me from going into any real detail, but suffice to say that any rumours about a more "fundamental" role are true, but I didn't get credited for it. Ahem.

Christmas Eve: when the children alternate between exaggerated hyper-conforming virtue and bouncing off the walls with excitement. I was firmly informed last night that we needed to leave out a bottle of beer for Santa, and about seven carrots for the reindeer: one each, plus two for Rudolf. This morning, she's considered it a bit more and wants to leave 10, in case any of the reindeer lose or drop their carrot. About to take them swimming to burn off some nervous energy.

Ah, the internet. Heather spends twenty minutes searching the net for ham glazing recipes, then gets depressed with the results (who glazes a ham with peanut butter?), tweets her disbelief. Within two minutes the lovely ladies at Filament reply with a link to their Christmas ham recipe, completed with rudeboy crumpet. Excellent.

do not pinch her

2009-12-19T19:21:00.002+13:00

At the Capital E Pacific Santa event today, "Mrs Claus" (who Rebecca loudly pointed out bore a striking resemblance to the wonderful Fairy Trina) told the children stories. I spent the time going through the slightly incongruous Happy Christmas Assault Course with Maggie - she was a devil for getting stuck under those nets you crawl under (not joking; I'm still not sure how it fitted with the Christmas theme, but the kids loved it). Ten minutes later, the stories finished and Rebecca ran out to join us. I noticed a certain something in the other parents' eyes from then on. For some, contempt; for others, a certain wistful longing, an almost "If only I dared... but no! Such a course is not for me!"

Four hours later, Rebecca told me that Mrs Claus had been suggesting to the children that they help their parents in the run-up to Christmas. Rebecca had stood bolt upright and said "I know! I can get Daddy beers from the fridge!"

Mind you, this is the same kid who got bored halfway through watching (what had, unbeknownst to us, turned out to be) an animated version of the book of Exodus, and asked to put on Shaun the Sheep. Atheist parenting: win!

that's not hyperbole

2009-12-17T19:18:00.001+13:00

I had a good moment this morning. Every Sunday night, I spend a bit of time with Rebecca going through news items so she find something to report to her class on Monday. As I don't particularly want to have to explain the introduction of martial law in the Phillipines or civil war in Congo to a five-year old, we tend to concentrate on the more natural history, sciencey end of the BBC News web site: how hammerhead sharks' eyes work, new astronic telescope arrays, and on one memorable occasion the controversy around the Anglican Church's ordination of its second gay bishop. That was fun putting it into phrases she could write our herself, let me tell you.

So I was quite chuffed this morning when Rebecca piped up apropos of nothing and told me about how octopusses have been observed carrying coconut shells to use as portable shelters. Someone in her class had brought that one into school yesterday. Excellent: I am not the only parent who does this. But c'mon! Octopusses using tools! How much cooler than that could you possibly get?

Which is just one reason why my next planned tattoo is going to be a slightly stylised/abstracted octopus, around my left thigh. That's on the cards for April of next year: plenty of time to save up and get the design worked out.

Speaking of tattoos, I saw a close relative recently who knew that I had tats, but didn't know that I had recently got a few more. She was quite shocked - she thought that I'd got over it. We had a chat about it, and she remained resolutely anti them (while being perfectly pleasant to me). One thing did stick out: she asked whether the tattooist thought it was odd that someone as old as me was getting more tats. I was a bit mystified by this. I am, at present, 34 years old. Yes, I got my first few tats between the ages of 18 and 21; then there was a bit of a hiatus, until I turned 33. But it occurred to me that my relative probably thought of tattoos entirely as something you do when you're young and dumb, then regret after you turn 25. In contrast, I'm actually pretty middle of the range when it comes to people getting tattoos. If nothing else, how many 21-year olds can actually afford a full sleeve? People who ask me where I got my tattoos range in age from 16-year olds to people in their fifties; when I'm in getting inked, the people wandering into the studio for a look follow a similar age range, with a notably bump around the late 20s/early 30s. Indeed, I've had both a GP and the mortgage manager at my bank ask me for tattooist recommendations. Tattoos: not as bad as your elderly relatives may think.

But enough of this idle flim-flam. I'm off to go to a klezmer gig with an accelerometer strapped to me, in the name of SCIENCE!

twitter, misogyny

2009-12-09T21:18:00.003+13:00

It's been an interesting time, and specifically an interesting weekend last week. For various reasons, I won't go into details.

The other day, I achieved a goal of mine. I signed up to Twitter specifically to be able to tweet "Pod of dolphins in Evans Bay now". And on Monday, I got to send that tweet. There was a large pod of dolphins hanging around just by the end of the airport runway; I sent the tweet. I have now officially Won Twitter. Now I need to try a speedrun. Come back, dolphins! Come back!

Or playing it on Hard. That'd be "Killer whales off Lyall Bay" (does happen, just less often).

There's recently been a lot of talk about a major sports star who has allegedly been cheating on his wife, with an ever-increasing number of women coming forward to claim that he's scored holes in one (so to speak). One thing that does rather annoy me about the tenor of the discussion has been the prominent argument that runs something like: "But his wife is so incredibly attractive! How could he want to cheat on her?" This annoys the hell out of me for two reasons:

It reduces the wife to a rubber doll. The only thing that matters about her is that she's attractive. How could you want to cheat on someone this beautiful? I mean, look, she's beautiful! Never a word about personality, about what she might want out of life, or about the dynamics of parenting and relationships. Why, taking that into account would imply that she was a real human being who interacts with her husband on a reasonably equal level. No: none of that matters, it's all down to whether the wife's a hottie or not. Way to remove all agency from her, people.
And conversely, it implies "Well, of course if she looked like the back end of a bus, then it'd be perfectly understandable and basically fine."

Both of these implications annoy the hell out of me. Look, clearly the bloke's been cheating on his wife; this is (presumably) not something she was OK with, and is thus a problem. But FFS: it's not any better or worse because of how she looks. And if you use her looks as the only descriptor about her, you're reducing her to a doll.

Plus: "He has a beautiful wife at home." Yeah, the "has" there isn't implying ownership at all. She's her own person!

And if I hear one more person make a food-based comparison ("why go out for hamburger when you've got steak at home?", etc) I'll retch. When, oh when, did it become non-dodgy to routinely compare women to food items? How is this not terribly, terribly objectifying?

And finally: there's a serious undercurrent of virgin/whore here. "Why, oh why, would he ignore his beautiful, ash-blond, scandinavian wife, in order to cavort with those cheap sluts?" The wife's on the pedestal, the mistresses are rutting in the dirt. It's the third millennium. Can't we get past this cartoon thinking, this slotting people (living, breathing, complex, real people) into simple roles and using it to form an instant opinion or flog a paper?

I'll be honest: I couldn't give two stuffs either way what the bloke's marital transgressions are. But the reaction, among the media and among people I respect, has really put my teeth on edge. More so that I realised: I thought this would be a three-line throwaway point, but it's rambled on a bit more than that.

When I was a kid, I didn't realise the underlying rationale behind a lot of adult activities. I thought that letters to Santa were an actual way to get Santa to sit up and pay attention to what you want; I also thought that my parents sent me on school holiday programs because they genuinely wanted me to learn more about Maori culture/gymnastics/art. Now, as a parent, I have realised the truth. You get the little buggers to write letters to Santa so you have a fighting chance of finding out what they actually want for Christmas and thus avoiding screaming tears on Christmas morning. You put them in holiday programs so you only have to burn a couple of weeks leave over Christmas and can actually get back to work sometime before February. If they learn to do a forward roll as well, it's a bonus. It's a hard truth, people.

That said: Rebecca has started negotiating to swap her bedtime story for a session on the computer before going to bed. No, not what you think: she's eschewed the joys of barbie.com in favour of Microsoft Word. Yup: every evening, she asks to spend twenty minutes on the PC writing a quick story about whatever's on her mind. Tuesday night, it was hornets. Last night, Cinderella. Tonight: who knows?

the end of a project

2009-11-18T19:45:00.003+13:00

In the last 6 weeks, as we finish various projects, I have acquired five work-related garments. I am also currently involved in designing/acquiring a t-shirt for my team.

Rather unusually, most of these are garments that I am quite proud to wear in public. It's a step above my "CMMI Level 2 Implementation Team" polo neck, or my ActiveSmart t-shirt.

I'd say I'm going corporate except that my workplace doesn't give two shits if I work barefoot (or, probably, topless, though I've not tried that one yet). So "corporate" probably isn't the word. "Native", possibly.

waffle and a bad pun

2009-11-09T20:58:00.003+13:00

As we all know, it's now a bit illegal to chat away on your mobile phone will driving. But that's just part of the recent revisions to the road rules. There's another few changes that slipped under most people's radar. From a cyclists' perspective, there are a few sensible ones: hook turns are now OK (useful at multi-lane intersections, or for less confident cyclists), cyclists don't have to signal at roundabouts if it's not safe to ride one-handed, and bike lights just have to be visible for 100m, rather than illuminating the road 100m ahead - which indicates that someone's actually worked out that the main use of cycle lights is so that other road users can see you, rather than so you can see where you're going.

But the interesting one is this:

It is proposed that there will be an infringement fee of $100 for a person who rides a cycle, mobility device or wheeled recreational device on a shared path at a hazardous speed.

Amendment concerning use of shared paths.

Basically, it's codifying the "don't be a dick" aspect of using shared paths. Hooning it around is now punishable by a $100 fine. Which is good - the problem with shared paths is that they mix multiple users with different requirements and abilities, so getting it down in black and white that the faster ones need to pay a bit more attention to the slower ones is a good thing. It's simple recognition of the nature of riding in a mixed-use environment.

So this is basically a recognition that cyclepaths are only for people who want to ride at a relaxed, mellow pace. For the rest of us - and I'm speaking as someone who just wants to get to bloody work and doesn't mind sweating a bit - the road's usually faster and often safer.

Anyway. Went for a walk at lunchtime today, ended up going through Strathmore. The name means "Large Valley" in Scots Gaelic, and you can see why: it's a big valley tucked in between the airport and Seatoun. This is the site of the first state housing in the country, presumably because it was cheap land and the valley meant that you could tuck all the poor people neatly out of sight. It's still densely packed with council accomodation, though most of the original state houses now seem to be in private ownership. It's one of the few places in New Zealand where you can see UK-style terrace blocks of state flats. Walking around I felt like I'd landed back in the Hedges (that is, King's Hedges council estate in Cambridge, where we lived for five years). Rather a lot of tinny houses, I'm informed, ditto P. Interesting neighbourhood.

Mocking someone because their name sounds like a rude word: argumentum ad homonym.

Thank you, I'm here all week.

don't ask about the itching

2009-10-28T21:50:00.000+13:00

We have now gone unconditional on the sale of our house, and the purchase of another. Moving in January. So expect our Christmas to be mainly spent putting things in boxes. Anyone got any recommendations for moving companies in Wellington?

In case I hadn't mentioned, we'll be moving from Newlands (civic motto: "Close to Johnsonville!") to Johnsonville (civic motto: "We have a mall, you know!"). We'll be exchanging a view of the neighbour's brick wall and an old shipping container for a bush-clad gully - which we will own most of the visible arc of. So that's quite cheery right there. Plus an extra bedroom, an actual study, and a decent deck. Minus a garage, but you can't have it all. Some form of housewarming party is almost certainly going to occur; watch the skies in late January or early February.

You know how when you fall over on concrete, you can skin your knee? Last weekend, Maggie skinned her forehead. Impressively acrobatic, and looked very painful. Now she has a perfectly ring-shaped scab 3cm across in the middle of her forehead (for some reason, she didn't lose any skin right in the middle of the impact site). We get funny looks, but thankfully Maggie is now prolix enough to be able to say "I fell off a step!" to people.

This is usually followed by "Wiggles!", as she is currently on a Heavy Wiggles Kick. She's obsessed with Dorothy the Dinosaur, and can point all the Wiggles out of a line-up. We have not yet gone through the Greg/Sam distinction, but it will come soon.

What I've been listening to recently.

Gogol Bordello, "Live from Axis Mundi". In the old days, this would be a Peel Sessions album. Sadly, Saint John is no longer with us, so many of the tracks are just marked "BBC Session". It's lovely. Raw, hard, and passionate. It has the immediacy and grit of a live performance, with the advantages of working with serious audio engineers who've put effort into getting a good mix. American Wedding knocks out a few teeth, and Mishto really gets rather frenzied. Worth it. On eMusic if you've still got an account.
The Mamaku Project, "Karekare" and "Mal de Terre". I can't believe I hadn't heard of these guys until recently. Of course, one of the reasons I can't believe that is that they used to gig with the Benka Borodovsky Bordello Band, but the other is that they're intensely good. Mainly jazz influences, with klezmer, dub, and French chanson in the mix. C'est bien, innit. Mellow, but catchy, and with enough of an Eastern European flavour to add spice. Wellingtonians may have heard them (I didn't) doing the intro at the recent World of Wearable Arts. I heard of them from a track played on National Radio (UK: Radio 4; US: PBS), which is possibly less funky than may be expected. But they're definitely worth it.
The Herbaliser, "The Herbaliser Band Sessions". Two albums of instrumental versions of hip-hop tracks performed by a full live band. This may not sound promising to some listeners. It's gold. There's the odd sample or two still in there, but mostly it ends up as a double album of neo-70s soul funk. Upbeat, danceable, and funky as. Pointlessly good. Actually, it seems that the first album was recorded in 2000, and the second has only just come out. Regardless, both most excellent, and both also on eMusic.
Still listening to a fair bit of the Tiger Lillies. The albums blur together after a while, but mostly I've been listening to "Bad Blood & Blasphemy". Not exactly party music, but interesting stuff. The auditory equivalent of an old, waterstained wank mag you find under a tree at the park when you're 13.

hard day again

2009-10-16T21:43:00.005+13:00

Another day, another four hours under the needle. Went out and had my birthday present to myself today: finished my sleeve. Tim out at Pacific Tattoo was excellent as ever, and carefully spent the first three hours going over the rest of the sleeve and reworking where needed to get the full depth of colour (black, mainly). We only had a rather small bit to go, and to be honest the choice of design was pretty obvious: another woven/textured section, to match the top of the inside forearm. We were done by 3pm, and I went and spent an hour walking on Paekakariki Beach before heading home. That's the way to do it.

How NZ works in a nutshell: I tried to tip Tim for his good work; he refused and gave me a free t-shirt instead. Needless to say, I'm booked in for the soonest appointment to start on my left thigh piece. Details to come, but it's a reasonably abstract piece representing an animal, hopefully taking up the whole thigh. Should be good.

You know how there's that stereotype about tattoos, "Yeah, I woke up with this one today!" The drunken sailor archetype. Not to say that it's not applicable in some cases (say, assembly line shops near naval bases), but pretty much every tattooist I've worked with has had long waiting lists. In this case, my original idea for getting a full sleeve on my right arm was this time last year: my birthday present last year was to be getting my arm tattooed, and a year later I've finished. My next project project is well in order and designs are being drawn up: the first session is booked in.

For April 2nd next year.

Because that's the first free appointment he's got. Legitimate tattooists have long waiting lists. So with a bit of luck, by this time next year I might have my leg somewhere near finished.

It'll take a while to get the bodysuit finished, then.

Pictures for the curious here at flickr. Not much new work, to be honest: I didn't have much room left. Mainly we spent today sharpening up the existing bits.

How NZ works, part 2: later, in Johnsonville mall, I popped into the pharmacy. "Some bepanthen, please," I said to the lady behind the counter. She looked me up and down and said "Is it for a tattoo?" "Um, yeah," I said, "... I take it there's a specific market share for this?" "Well," she replied, "it's either for nursing mothers with cracked nipples, or people with tats. It's what my husband uses when he's healing a new one." And we had a two minute chat about good tattooists around Wellington. That's how we roll here in NZ, folks.

raising dust

2009-10-13T21:54:00.000+13:00

An interesting couple of weeks.

Firstly, we spent the first half of the school holidays in Auckland. It hammered bloody rain for six days out of the seven we were up there, necessitating rather a lot of indoor activities. Unfortunately, we were also hit by some serious viral illness: I was flat on my back for two days, Heather similarly, and the kids very sniffly, coughy, and generally vile. Still, we fitted in a trip to the museum, the zoo (on the one sunny day), and a variety of indoor playgrounds and shopping malls (embarassed cough). All the relatives were seen, a certain amount of mucus was produced, and leisure was the winner on the day. I spent a surprising amount of time rather enjoying driving a manual car again (I didn't know any car rental places rented out manuals any more), even if it was a 1.3ltr Daihatsu Sirion (a cross between one of those ride-on scooters for OAPs and a surprisingly grunty go-kart). Ah, second gear: it's the Swiss army knife of driving. There's nothing it can't solve.

While we were away, we missed out on a tender for a house. By $20,000, so we were more annoyed than gutted (gutted would have been missing out by $1,000). This was a bit annoying. But we threw ourselves back into the whirl of open homes, going around a couple of likely-looking places. One place turned out to look quite likely; we offered on it, got a bite, and lo, we had our offer accepted. Cue a certain amount of frantic running around trying to sell our place (our purchase is conditional on the sale of our current house). Anyone want to buy a 3brm character villa in Newlands, completely updated & modernised? It's a nice wee house, and a good neighbourhood.

For the curious: we're moving about 3k, out to Johnsonville. Coincidentally, just off one of Wellington's better road cycling loops. Handy that. Further details once the sales involved actually go unconditional.

You know you're selling your house when you're mowing the lawn at 8am.

Rebecca is currently obsessed with the Lego set Heather got me for my birthday. It's a set of Star Wars lego - Darth Vader's TIE fighter, specifically. Every night, we have to do another ten minutes. Heather bought it for me: I think I've managed to put about three pieces on it. Mostly, it's Rebecca carefully poring over the instructions and slotting bits into place. She's loving it. One of these days I'll have to actually show her the movies.

haunt of coot and hern

2009-09-25T19:02:00.001+12:00

Brian Edwards has clearly read Derailing for Dummies. Or, if not, he's internalised a lot of it. He's posted a rather contentious opinion piece on his blog. A large number of people have leapt on it. I'm particularly impressed with the way that he ignores the well-reasoned comments from people who clearly know what they're talking about, in favour of making snide comments to the more annoyed commentators (thereby subtly equating the serious points with the angry ones). Bonus points for rewriting the original post to remove some of the language that sparked off the vitriol, thus making his commentators look more unhinged. Why, they're flying off the handle at nothing!

Brian Edwards may be a well-respected New Zealand media commentator. But put him on the net and he's just another opinionated blowhard acting like a dick on discussion forums.

In any case, his argument seems to be that writing is hard, so he should get paid more for it. After all, people are taking advantage of his writing by borrowing it from libraries - that's money he's potentially missing out on. Ignoring the various flaws in his argument - check the comments on the original article for an examination of them - I'd just say this. Was he, prior to undertaking this hard work of writing his books, unaware of the relative remuneration? Had someone hidden the existence of libraries from him, and kept him unaware of how they work and the financial consequences thereof? No? He knew all that and decided to do it anyway? Then he can shut his whingeing cake-hole. He knew the deal, there's no bloody point whining now. Tch.

Times have definitely changed. The other day, I had reason to visit my bank manager. I went in the middle of the day, so I was wearing my work kit. My work dress could best be described as scruffy casual. My concession to discussing the loan of a pointlessly large amount of money was to wear long trousers. While I was sitting at the bank waiting, it occurred to me that twenty years ago I'd have felt the need to get dressed up in a suit. Seeing a bank manager was a big deal, and you had to look your best. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis, eh?

This was brought more forcibly home on Wednesday night, when the mobile mortgage manager sat back at the end of a discussion about requirements for potential further lending and asked me who my tattooist was. I was in short sleeves, and he liked the forearm tat; turned out he had a backpiece and a half-sleeve. We had an amicable discussion about tattoo styles, and the deal was done. So remember kids: when your parents tell you that getting a tat prevents you from getting a good job, take it with a grain of salt, eh?

And then he txt'ed me to let me know how the pre-approval was going. Truly, we are living in the future.

play misty for me

2009-09-21T21:07:00.003+12:00

One day I shall decide that I never want to get anything productive done again. Upon that day, I shall create an account on facebook.

Which is to say: apologies for the lack of posts, and I don't even have the excuse du jour, facebook is killing blogging. I blame a high workload and the recent purchase of a computer game.

Psychological violence in late 1970s/early 1980s girls comics.

I realised last week that the vast bulk of the music I listen to can be categorised as follows:

Music with accordions. Gogol Bordello, Golem, the Klezmer Rebs, the Tiger Lillies, Kultur Shock, and so on.
Bleepy bleepy twiddle electronic music. Future Sound of London, Orbital, Miss Kittin, DJ Shadow, that sort of thing.
Music by lesbians. Sleater-Kinney, Chicks on Speed, and Le Tigre, mostly.

There are a few border cases - I'm not quite sure about PJ Harvey, for instance - but those three categories do cover about 90% of what was on my iPod at the time.

But recently we've been having a clean-out of the CD collection. We've weeded out a lot of stuff that we don't listen to any more. One consequence of this is that we've come across rather a lot of CDs that we haven't heard for a while. So I got organised and ripped rather a lot of this stuff to iTunes so I can give it a blat on the iPod at work. The net result is that I now have 4GB of stuff I haven't listened to for years knocking around on my current playlist. It's a rather mixed bag: the Aphex Twin, Missy Elliott, Coil, Liz Phair, Autechre, Nine Inch Nails, Meat Beat Manifesto, Front Line Assembly, that sort of thing. It's kind of like, a snapshot of the music that I really liked a decade ago, but not so much that I still listen to it regularly. It's been an interesting exercise, and one I highly recommend.

Sometimes life leaves a hundred dollar bill on your dresser, and you don't realize until later that it's because it fucked you.

Shit My Dad Says

the pusillanimity express

2009-09-01T16:32:00.001+12:00

I was at the supermarket at lunch yesterday. As I went in, I saw a couple with a young child. The father was about 6'2", big with it, with gang tats on his neck and hands. He and a woman, presumably his partner, were doing what looked like the weekly shop, with a preschool kid sitting in the trolley.

After my shop, as I was loading the stuff into the car, I heard a lot of shouting. "What the fuck you looking at?" was interspersed with more general yelling and threats, plus wailing. Looking around, I saw that the family were having a screaming match in the middle of the carpark. The bloke was alternating between screaming at the woman, and turning around to shout threats at any bystanders who appeared to be paying attention. They were also struggling over the young boy - the woman holding him in her arms, the man trying to pull him away. This was in the middle of a busy carpark at lunchtime; counting myself, there must have been about 50 witnesses.

But what struck me was the reaction. All of us kind of expected someone else - maybe someone closer, maybe someone bigger, maybe just someone Not Me - to do something about it. But none of us did. We watched while the dad grabbed the kid and marched off out of the carpark, with the woman sobbing after him.

But that's not true. From where I was, about 20 metres away, I could see three separate people clearly calling the police on cellphones. They were standing just out of sight behind cars, occasionally stepping out to look over and answer some question from the despatcher before stepping back out of sight before the bloke threatened them. As the family left the carpark (on foot, for some reason) you could clearly see these people moving so as to keep a view of what was happening, constantly updating the despatcher on the other end of the phone. And the rest of us relaxed, because someone was doing something.

It just struck me as an odd consequence of our connected world. The ability to call in the appropriate authorities removes the imperative to do things yourself. When no-one else can become involved, there's an onus on those who are there to do something. Cellphones remove that, and we can all go about our cowardly fucking ways with a clean conscience. Or rather, we still feel the need to do something; but "doing something" is now just making a phone call.

In a refreshing contrast to the self-loathing of that last paragraph, it seemed to work. As I drove off, I saw some other bystanders further down the road pointing a police officer towards the couple. The last I saw was the bloke running away as fast as he could across the grassy centre margin of the road, having pulled off his coat to reveal a sleeveless jacket with a Nomads gang patch. So it seems that our disengaged, report-rather-than-remedy culture can get it right on occasion.

Last couple of episodes of the Fabric podcast have been most interesting; Surgeon going through his influences. Nice. I'm a sucker for anyone who drops the Art of Noise, Coil, and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop into a DJ set.

Go, go Greg Henderson. Stage 3 of the Vuelta d'Espagna, beating out a lot of the world's best sprinters: well done. He's now second in the standings, after Fabian Cancellara.