Back in Wellington

Safely back in Thorndon after a lovely trip to Christchurch. Wonderful catching up with friends and family. A highlight was the new jazz bar down His Lordship's Lane/SOL Square, called "Fat Eddie's". Amazing atmosphere, it is genuinely like an old jazz club, with a loft upstairs that feels like France in a WWII movie! Amazing amazing, I'm jealous of Christchurch kids now.

Rats, anyone?

You can buy rats on TradeMe. Is anybody a little concerned?

What is scarier is the number of very very specific, non-ironic questions at the bottom.

Click here to see the rats and the even scarier people who are interested

28 weeks to go

Yes only 28 weeks until Monday 15th October, submission date for 40,000 words.

Thanks to my department's stringent 'early topic' requirements I now have three of four topics sorted and can start researching right away. This makes the target a little less daunting!

For Politics of Market Creation in Europe I'll be looking at aspects of the political economy current 'format war' between Microsoft's new Office Open XML format (as used by Office 2007) and OASIS' (not the Manchester lads') Open Document Format. Complicated? Yes!

For Politics of International Migration I'll be evaluating migraiton policy responses by the new post-soviet border states to the EU (Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova) since EU enlargement in 2004. This topic might change though if information is too hard to procure.

For Global Civil Society I will compare Civil Society education and management in Western and non-Western contexts (cases undecided as of yet).

Obviously I'll have some better 'cocktail party lines' about each of these sorted when I know more about them!

Ok go listen to some Cat Power - her Greatest is an excellent introduction.