mCgRRR

Long time no post

2011-10-20T07:53:00.002+13:00

Here's something to make up for it...Huge In Japan's EP is finally online! You can stream and download it free.

http://hugeinjapan.bandcamp.com/

New blog from Andy and me

2011-01-15T11:30:00.000+13:00

http://uzutjustmoi.blogspot.com/

We love New Zealand. It has formed our view of the world for most of our lives, and a critical part of that is the ability to 'take the piss', to be self-deprecating in the extreme. And boy, does Aotearoa provide a shit-load of ammunition! A few years ago we decided to write down some of our best material for the benefit of the internet. As we traveled, we observed more shit-head behaviour and noted that down as well. You are bound to be offended, so please take note of our three-part disclaimer: we are irreverent, inaccurate, and above all, hypocritical.

Photos from Russia

2010-01-20T12:52:00.001+13:00

Full documentation of the whole trip!

Facebook has really crappy photo resolution, but it does have my commentary:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=137761&id=703999762&l=3dbc5960e3

so I've also posted these (without commentary)
here: http://tinyurl.com/yevrm7k
and here: http://tinyurl.com/yexkahs

Today we celebrate (y)our Independence Day!

2009-07-14T06:01:00.002+12:00

President Whitmore's words were certainly ringing in my ears last weekend as I watched fireworks over the Hudson River up in NY with some good friends of mine. Happy Birthday America!

My good friend Ara was in town for the long weekend, on the way back from a business trip. Here is an abridged version of our itinerary to entice any other readers to visit:

Friday - met Ara near JFK and took the subway to his accommodations in Columbus Circle. Took a stroll round Lincoln Center and Central Park before returning to said accommodations to be harangued by a nice lady who remembered the awning used to say something about 'home for wayward christian girls' and couldn't believe how cheap the accommodation was. We set her straight on as many counts as we could. Boarded train to Amy Ruth's in Harlem for waffles. Ara had blueberries on his, I had a large piece of fried chicken. Walked waffles off down MLK Blvd, hiked up the hill to Columbia University and discussed life's intricacies, as we are wont to do. Then subway down to the Lower East Side to meet Polina, Claudia and Andreas. Found a nice place with a garden on Ludlow St called 'Tre' to pass the night away.

Saturday - Ara went for a run and got slightly lost in Central Park. After that decided it was an excellent day to head to the sea (as did half of NYC), so got on the Long Island Rail Road out to Long Beach. $10 each to get on to the beach! And this in the country of freedom? The sand was very nice though, if the ocean a tad cold. Soaked in rays for a while before returning to Manhattan. Wowed the crowds in our carriage with a soft-loud-soft version of Phoenix Foundation's 'Damn The River' and then some nice Beirut by Ara, taught to him by Andy (this was all with ukelele mind you). After dinner we headed to Manhattan and towards the Hudson and promised fireworks but for whatever reason (proximity to start time perhaps) were prevented from reaching water's edge by NYPD barriers and loudhailers. So watched the excellent display through a park grating, then headed to Claudia and Andreas' lovely apartment with a view of the UN for the rest of the evening. Ara stayed until 4am arbitrating a good-natured sparring match between some of Mexico's and Brazil's finest minds.

Sunday - got up 'early' to go queue for tickets to Shakespeare in the Park, arrived midday. Got through 3/4 of the 400-metre line but then were told tickets all gone, and the last tickets went to someone who queued up at 5:45am. Reconciled the wasted time with the fact our sardonic southern-hemisphere humour had entertained small segments of the crowd. Ran into Claudia and Andreas and drowned sorrows with excellent brunch on Upper West Side. Then headed to SoHo for shopping, including at least 90 minutes at UniQlo blowing Ara's hard-earned cash, before walking the Brooklyn Bridge. Couldn't be bothered waiting an hour in the line at Grimaldi's Pizza, so split for Fifth Avenue (Brooklyn) to meet Polina for dinner (excellent Mexican, including AVOCADO FRIES!) and then The Chocolate Room where Ara died of cocoa excellence, before we saw him on to the F train bound for Manhattan.

So all that being said, if you're heading to New York City any time soon, give me some notice and maybe I'll meet you there...

Bad 'Models'

2009-07-10T07:03:00.008+12:00

No, not clothes models. Models of social, economic and other processes that are really just glorified drawings that could be made by five-year-olds.

What can one actually learn from such a model? Often that 'everything is interconnected' (knew that already), or 'everything is dynamic' (yup got it) or that 'there is a clear sequence of events here' (either obvious or false).

Until I start a real blog to collect these up, I'm going to start here with a doosey from the UK-based 'Consortium for Service Innovation'.

Let me point out some of the key features of the Bad 'Model', expertly implemented in this example:

absolutely key is the mid-late nineties Microsoft(tm) PowerPoint(tm)(c) cloud shapes - putting them at the top of the diagram really helps users orient the page
awkward stick figures doing 'zany' things EVERYWHERE on the diagram
random punctuation marks in a 'wacky' font that emphasizes just how fun this all is
funnels and cones of causality, showing...uhhh...that things that start large can get smaller
you got your arbitrary numbering of 'levels' in there, nice!
arrows connecting almost everything to everything else (note to self: bi-directional arrows are WAY cooler than those boring uni-directional ones)
the ability to form cool new buzzPHRASES by stringing together the buzzwords already in the diagram, for example "Level 1 Knowledge Base(d) Community Conversations" or how about "Assisted Self-Help Community" - sounds like a retirement village advertisement!

And then, just in case part of this isn't clear, they provide a clarifying diagram:

AH, I get it now, KCS captures the collective experience of the support organization! So you mean "our call centre operators type stuff into their computers which we don't delete but rather store for future use".

Source: http://www.serviceinnovation.org/our_work/

We were on a boat!

2009-07-02T08:16:00.002+12:00

These are my 2008-09 Ann Arbor roommates Tim and Alex.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1912316&l=a386f5b53e&id=703999762

And here is some context for all y'all dying to know what all the fuss is about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QwM4vXex7c

Washington, D.C. / It's paradise to me / It's not because it is the grand old seat / Of precious freedom and democracy

2009-05-26T14:46:00.004+12:00

By now you may have heard I'm in Washington DC for a few months. Why?

I'm going to be a Research Assistant for the Board on Science, Technology and Economic Policy at the National Academy of Science (NAS), starting tomorrow. A mouthful, yes!

Here's a little excerpt from something I already wrote about it:

"The National Academies are the 'advisors to the nation on science, engineering and medicine'. Though funded by Congress, they remain independent of the Executive and Legislative branches, and less than half of their work is commissioned by either branch; they have significant discretion in directing their investigatory resources. This allows the NAS to maintain both the credibility of independence and the kind of clout needed to make a real impact in policy debates. The Board on Science, Technology and Economic Policy (STEP) of the NAS is at the nexus of policy debates over patent systems, high-skilled immigration, government investment in renewable energy technology, and national innovation schemes more generally. These are exactly the types of policy, and the types of policy-making process that generate them, that I came to the US to study. From their website:

In 1991, as concern about international economic competition intensified, the Academies created a standing program on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy (STEP) to identify means of accelerating innovation, advancing competitiveness, and improving monitoring of the nation’s economic performance through the Academies’ process of convening expert committees, conferences, and workshops, and issuing thoroughly reviewed, authoritative reports. Under the guidance of a committee of industrialists, financial executives, former policymakers, and academic economists (including three Nobel Laureates) STEP has addressed questions of trade, tax, human resources, intellectual property, research and development, information, and statistical policy.

The STEP Board then, was created by a federally-funded organization (NAS) to ensure America's economic competitiveness in the 21st century. My research interests could be summarized as “how do governments use their resources and apparatus to encourage economic development and competitiveness through technological development”, and so the STEP Board is almost the best fit imaginable. While there I would be working as a research assistant to the Board's permanent Director, researching and writing reports on immigration, patent reform, and whatever other work commences in my time here."

So that's a little bit about what I'll be doing, it should be fun. Here's the website of my group: http://ping.fm/Y2ZQJ

I'm in a hotel for the next few nights (semi-affordable thanks to priceline.com's name-your-price feature), then some BnB/couch-surfing until I can move into my new place in Columbia Heights on June 7: http://tinyurl.com/2k74kr

Thanks to Fulbright New Zealand's Sir Wallace Rowling Award for funding my stay here! http://ping.fm/lKzxG

Photos from recent parental visit

2009-05-25T05:57:00.002+12:00

Mum, Dad and my Aunt Lindy visited for the past few weeks. We went to Chicago, Ann Arbor, DC and New York.

Photos:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=77154&id=703999762&l=3059dc788a

More photos:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=78695&id=703999762&l=936c736d4c

Leaving the Rez

2009-01-09T11:06:00.004+13:00

When I left you last, I'd described my eventful journey out to the Cheyenne River Youth Project in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. What did I do out there?

We spent the time from arrival until Christmas Eve 'picking and wrapping'. Picking involves reading the Dear Santa letters sent in by kids who participate in the CRYP's after-school kids and youth programs (it is these programs that the other volunteers staff during normal business weeks, such as Andy did earlier in 2008). The kids write a little bit about their year, how they've been doing at school and why they deserve their presents. Then they have space to list a few items they'd really like for Christmas.

Most of the letters are identical to what one would read anywhere in the developed world (can I have an Xbox, a Bratz doll, a basketball). But the odd one was truly heartbreaking: stories of obvious poverty and young children prematurely aware of the difficulties of life on the Rez, such as those that wish only for more blankets and clothes. After a few moments of quiet contemplation at your own fortunate situation you get back under control and back to work, picking out four or so presents for each kid, and then putting them in a garbage sack. Then the sacks go into a box labeled for the family, and then wrappers come pick up a box at a time. The system really was quite a marvel to behold.

The 23rd was a loooong day...16 hours of wrapping. After coming in with very few wrapping skillz, I emerged as somewhat of an expert, sought throughout the center to consult on difficult objects such as skateboards and toy lawnmowers. Over the day the speed picked up about two-fold without a noticeable drop in quality which was good.

The real warm fuzzies came on Christmas Eve when I was selected for Santa duty, no doubt due to my portly stature and ability to do a damn fine Santa accent. The suits were excellent, the pillow worked well, and we loaded presents into three pickup trucks to make deliveries across Eagle Butte. Unfortunately, Santa has to sit in the deck of the pickup, huddled out of the wind. I was so glad I had three pairs of gloves and underarmour thermals on! Some of the kids we visited were quite skeptical of the whole Santa act, and one poor little boy was scared out of his wits by the intruder (he would only take presents from Dad or my elf helper, not me directly) but most were over the moon to see Santa and his offerings. I had a tear in my eye more than a few times at the reactions of the little ones.

After deliveries were complete, my job there was effectively done and it felt strange to be doing nothing on Christmas and Boxing Day after working so hard beforehand. But the rest was welcome. We had an amazing Christmas lunch thanks to Christmas coordinator Ben (from London) that was reminiscent of home with great roast potatoes and even steamed pudding with custard and cream. I ate more than anybody and was quite content. Then later, at my suggestion, the volunteers watched 'Requiem for a Dream' at my suggestion. NOT A GOOD CHRISTMAS MOVIE despite the single Christmas reference in there. On Boxing Day we made some Karaoke magic at the Christmas-thank-you party. CRYP really knows how to look after its volunteers. We thanked them back with stirring renditions of Ziggy Stardust, Smells Like Teen Spirit, and of course the obligatory Down Under (a duet of Julie the director and me).

The next day I packed up and left the Center, a little sad and more than a little attached to the place and people. I'm sure I'll return some day for a longer stint. Julie drove Ben and I to Pierre, where we all stayed the night after a meal and a few drinks. I had my first taste of Buffalo meat and it was a religious experience! Think of the beefiest beef you've ever had, and then square the taste and halve the fat and cholesterol and you've got Buffalo. Hopefully one day they will roam the prairie as they used to: there is a decent change of this as many good people are devoted to their return. A cure for America's obesity epidemic perhaps? Not at current prices but perhaps one day.

The next day I had a quick look around the SD Capitol building, which had lovely Christmas decorations, and then Julie took me to the airport and I flew back to Detroit, which was blissfully uneventful. Except when I arrived home to no electricity at my house. Flooding and 'high' winds (35mph?) had knocked out 200,000 Michigan customers and so it was morning until my street was back online. Lucky I could sleep by the gas fire. A few days later I traveled out to New York City for New Years, but that is another story for another time (soon).

Photos of South Dakota trip: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=47756&id=703999762&l=04af807ad5

Back on the road, this time to South Dakota

2008-12-21T16:57:00.003+13:00

Why South Dakota? I'm at the Cheyenne River Youth Project, in the town of Eagle Butte on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation of the Lakota people, aka 'The Rez'. Why am I here for Christmas? Well I'll get to that.

The journey here stared yesterday at 5am when I woke up and found out my flight hadn't been cancelled, against all odds. Alton's roommate Tyler drove me to Detroit airport, which took over an hour when it usually takes 35 mins on account of snow on the I-94 reducing traffic to 1.5-2.5 lanes of largely freestyle traffic. At one point we pulled to the freeway shoulder to scrape ice off the wipers. So getting to the airport and checking in was quite a relief.

A relief quickly curtailed by news that my flight to Minneapolis would be departing so late that I'd definitely miss my connection to Pierre, SD. So I sat in the NorthWest lounge, which I'd paid $50 for the convenience of admission, checked my email and munched on what turned out to be a very expensive bagel. Then the first of many Chrismas miracles: the incoming flight arrived earlier than they thought and my flight was rescheduled such that I'd have plenty of time to make the connection.

We boarded, backed out and then sat on the de-icing pad for 15 minutes. Then we taxid over to que up for spray-deicing...a 15 minute wait followed by a 15 minute spraydown with glycol to get ice off the wings (essential for flying apparently) and then a 15 minute taxi to the runway. Now I'm reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance not just because it's a good book but to calm me down. Turbulence during the flight is not as bad as over the Southern Alps on the way to Hokitika but the rest of the plane is freaking out.

We land at 11.10am and my next flight is due to leave at 11.50 - heaps of time! Unfortunately there is nobody out there to wave us into the gate so I start to get nervous again. Finally, once we make it to the gate I exit gracefully and swiftly, run down to the lounge to check in with Julie at the Rez, and then run back to my plane. The way people look at me it's like they've never seen anybody do it before. Anyway I make it to the gate momentarily before boarding begins, and meet Winifred, an Irish woman also heading out here. Even in the US, as your final destination decreases in size and gets closer, degrees of separation decrease exponentially. We board, and the hunters (obvious by the fact they WEAR THEIR CAMO ON THE PLANE!) behind me are heading to a peasant farm owned by a guy that knows the South Dakota musician living in NYC sitting beside them.

Then the captain asks us to get back off the plane - a routine maintenance check needs to be performed on some unnamed widget. So we get back off and wait for 20 mins before reboarding. It's nice though, as a young family who otherwise would have missed it can make the flight, and the next one is 10 hours later. Once we're back on board we take off without incident for a brief stopover in Watertown, SD before heading onto Pierre, capital of South Dakota. We land there in almost white-out conditions, undergo deicing and are ready to take off when a discrepancy is discovered in the passenger numbers, even though people only left the plane. We sit there in growing heat (prop plane systems don't work fully without the engines or a ground electrical unit) while the pilots argue with NorthWest HQ about the reality of the situation versus what their booking computer says. Eventually they work it out and 40 minutes later we've touched down in Pierre, almost on time after a thoroughly comical series of delays.

Winny and I were met by Alex and Angela from the center, and we go shopping in Walmart (great food selection, and cheap compared to Ann Arbor!) before the two hour drive to Eagle Butte. The roads are clear of snow and traffic and we get acquainted and caught up on the recent goings on at the Rez. Winifred has been here five times previously, though this is her first Christmas. She came initially to do something a little different and to engage her interest in Native American culture, and now is drawn back at semi-regular intervals by the bonds developed.

So how did I come to be here of all places? The simple answer is that Andy volunteered here over the summer, and bought 20 tickets in a quilt raffle for me, which I promptly won. The quilt is amazing and to say thanks I sponsored one of the Santa letters (of which I've been packed dozens over the past few days) as part of the Christmas toy drive. Andy heard about this and at the end of a letter wrote: "PS - I think it's awesome you're sponsoring a Santa letter. I hear Christmas is a pretty magical time out on the Rez and would probably bring guys like us to our knees." When I read that, I had been thinking of what to do for Christmas, and that remark seeded the plan I'm now on. I emailed Andy, asked if it would be appropriate to ask Julie if they needed any help out here over the Christmas break, and things proceeded from there.

Why am I here? The cynic in me says I'm exorcising some kind of white liberal guilt at not having volunteered on Christmas before, and not having worked with an indigenous community in my own country. The opportunist says this was simply the first 'offer' I had for Christmas while the too-polite Kiwi retorts that I simply didn't want to impose on anybody for Christmas and so found some way of avoiding awkward 'what are you doing for the break' questions from American friends. The traveler says I jumped at the opportunity to do something different, while the scholar says I'm here to learn something about the culture of the First Americans. The son, relative and friend in me says I wanted to be with other people who are away from home for Christmas.

I really don't know what the real reason is, surely some convex combination of all the above.

Regardless, I'm really happy to be here, even though the air outside freezes your nostril hairs on the 30 metre walk from the accommodation in the Main Center to the Teen Center where the packing is. The staff and other volunteers are friendly, welcoming and inquisitive, and I've been working hard wrapping presents all day today. We address every present "from Santa" and it is humbling to imagine how excited they will make the kids on Thursday.

Guess who just saw Springsteen down the road, free?

2008-10-07T13:41:00.002+13:00

That would be me. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=33240&l=8f558&id=703999762

huzzah!

Photos of U S A

2008-09-14T12:38:00.001+12:00

Here go the final set of photos from my travels:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=31246&l=875ac&id=703999762

The home straight - part two

2008-09-09T10:25:00.003+12:00

After NYC I went to Portland (this is now 18 August we're talkin about) for the Fulbright Orientation at Portland State University. I had been looking forward to experiencing Portland, the indie music capital of the world according to some, but sadly did not get out to see any music. The programme was jam-packed with various briefings during the daytime, with scheduled events for two of the three nights. On the third the only gig on was way out east somewhere. The vibe of the place was really nice though, very laid back (yes the east-coast/west-coast division is noticeable) and people walk about 50% slower than NYC. My fellow Fulbrighters were from all over the world, meeting them all was pretty cool, and I was sad to miss the leaving dinner.

I left the leaving dinner early so I could get to Seattle to hang out with Grant. Almost didn't make it...but managed to beg the check-in staff to let me do a late check-in and the tiny prop plane was so empty that I got on just fine. Grant and I had a good stroll around downtown Seattle, drank plenty of beers of varying qualities at various establishments, and generally yakked on about a lot of our usual topics: sport, politics, music etc. This was all capped off by seeing the Count Basie Orchestra (minus the Count of course) live in concert at a jazz club there. Simply the best jazz band I've ever seen - they were so tight and the arrangements were great. Well worth the money.

After Seattle I began my voyage to Michigan, this time via Phoenix, Arizona (again, cheap flights in the US take you on crazy routes). Just after we landed my seat neighbour got a call from his mom saying "your connecting flight to Detroit has been cancelled" which sent the passengers around him on that same flight (myself included) into panic stations. Thankfully on exiting the plane we found the flight had only been delayed 1.5 hours, not in fact cancelled. So after walking all around Barry Goldwater Terminal at Phoenix airport I finally settled on some fast-food mexican that was actually not too bad, and sat down to wait. The flight out to Detroit left when they said it would, and so I got to Rob and Jana's house in Ann Arbor too late for the bulk of the farewell party they were hosting for a colleague, but just in time for a cold beer and some decompression. It was great to arrive in my new home of Ann Arbor AND be in familiar surroundings with nice people who knew me already (Rob taught me last year and I also stayed with them in April when I visited for recruitment weekend).

The next day I had my first US driving lesson and passed with flying colours - switching isn't really that difficult. Then on Monday math camp started (an exercise to brush up on high-school maths in advance of Michigan's legendarily rigorous political science mathematics training) and Rob and Jana left for a conference, so I had the place to myself, apart from their cat Lola who I was charged with looking after. The week went well, the math wasn't too challenging, and the all-important process of bonding with my incoming class ('cohort') began.

My cohort is full of great people. Within a few days of math camp we'd already made plans to 'tailgate' (that's boot party/bbq) before Saturday's football game, and organised a labour day bbq. And drinking after math camp, etc etc. I'll say it again - my cohort is full of great people, many of whom will become very important friends over the coming years I'm sure.

Saturday August 30 was my first football game - Michigan vs Utah. The stadium here is crazy, it seats about 110,000 people (yeah you read that right) at the moment, and probably more after the renovations are complete. I spent the first 30 minutes once we found our seats just speechless in awe of the spectacle. The amount of people and their collective energy, the marching band that moves up and down the field in a perfect M shape, and then the madness of American football itself. After only a few minutes I was already yelling at our quarterbacks to THROW BETTER PASSES MORE QUICKLY OTHERWISE YOU GET TACKLED. In the end we lost narrowly after a brave final-quarter comeback. Michigan takes football seriously (we're the winningest program in the country don't you know) but this season could be mostly about 'transition'...

When we got back home from football, Andy was waiting at our house, just having got in from Toronto. We immediately went back to Rob's house for the last night of house-sitting, drank duty free and played pool. Like all mediocre players, we improved as the night wore on and more topics of conversation were covered. Andy stuck round for the first week of classes and again it was good to have familiar faces (and accents) while making some pretty large adjustments to a new life. Two Sundays ago I handed Rob and Jana's keys back and moved properly into my house on Iroquois Place. It's really really nice, and my roommates (aka flatmates/housemates) Tim and Alex are cool guys, and very patient with my incessant questions about the intricacies of American Football!

Other than that, there's really not a lot else to report. Classes are going great, I'm managing to keep up fine and make intelligent contributions to the discussion here and there, and I'm actually looking forward to some more work piling on.

Not sure what will happen to this blog now that my travels are over and I'm starting to get busier, but if anybody reading this wants to get in touch with me, you know how. My new laptop will arrive in a few weeks and from then I'll be on Skype relatively often.

Ciao for now, thanks for reading.
Shaun

PS - remaining photos coming soon...

Final set of Europe photos

2008-08-30T17:07:00.000+12:00

Here's the last lot: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=29322&l=18de5&id=703999762

The home straight - part one

2008-08-27T10:07:00.003+12:00

With memories of NYC specifics fading fast the accuracy of the below cannot be guaranteed...

Last time I posted Andy and I were about to head out to Mercury Lounge, with high hopes. Again we couldn't quite understand how the shows are meant to hang together. I don't remember any of the bands and I don't really care (what could beat the Shackletons?) So we went round looking for a bar called Whiskey Ward. Here's a testimony to NYC's friendliness: we went up to a bloke on the street, they kind of guy who you probably wouldn't talk to on a street in many places, and asked him. No, he said, but I'll find out. Pulls out his phone, googles the place, and directs us round the corner. Awesome.

Saturday we reprised our running escapades up Park Avenue, this time starting from further downtown, up round Grand Central and into the Park again. Many more New Yorkers out and it was just as cool a feeling to dominate the streets with feet and tyres, Andy and I both were absolutely stuffed by the end of it though. Luckily we got back to the hostel in Chelsea just in time to see NZ's very good run at the rowing. We're not overly patriotic people, but we were yelling at the tv screen as the Evers-Swindell's approached the line. Headed out to Brooklyn again that night and caught a wee bit of quite a nice (but in no ways dangerous or revolutionary) band that was playing at a cool venue in back of a record store. After that another authentic NYC experience: seeing a heap of cops blocking off Bedford Avenue with a helicopter circling overhead. We dived into the subway and headed to Cake Shop for redemption. The band was called Hidden Power, just a bunch of crazy kids from Queens who didn't care what the scene thought they were or should be, they were there to have fun. And they had floor toms out the front for us to hit while we danced, and we're their number one fans now. http://www.myspace.com/hiddenpowernyc

Sunday...last day. Oatmeal again for breakfast...so cheap and healthy. Then we went...I don't know where. Oh that's right to Roosevelt Island which sits in the East River. It used to be an asylum/quarantine but now people are flocking there to live. I can see why...the peace and quiet, only a few hundred metres from Manhattan, was palpable. Last night in NYC and we had to repent again musically...where else but Cake Shop? And another great band called Boat were playing the end of their set. Then there was a break so we talked to Boat from Seattle, and they were cool and we're number one fans now. (Pattern complete). Some of them are teachers and heading back to school soon so this was near the end of their tour. http://www.myspace.com/boatmusic

Monday was sad and happy...leaving NYC and the fine company of Andy, and also happy to leave the place well before I got sick of it. Got on the old subway out to Queen's then a bus rest of way to La Guardia to catch my flight to Portland, Oregon for Fulbright Orientation.

Arrived!

2008-08-25T16:07:00.004+12:00

A post about the home straight since NYC will come later on, but for now some more photos of Europe:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=28567&l=167c1&id=703999762

New York Cares

2008-08-16T09:22:00.006+12:00

New York Cares is a volunteering campaign by the city which features black & white photos of famous New Yorkers (Whoopi Goldberg, Jimmy Smits) encouraging citizens to give up some of their time. It's also a lyric by Interpol. Everywhere you go in NYC you find things you vaguely recognise but never understood, until now. This is a "short" summary of what we have done, realised and discovered since Andy's report on Saturday.

Saturday
First up for the evening we went to Katz's diner on Houston for an authentic NY Reuben sandwich. Yes it cost US$15, but it had about half a cow worth of pastrami and it tasted amazing. After that we popped along to the performance in the urban park by the artist John who had cycled from San Francisco. Needless to say, it was unusual. It involved planned improvisations with various gathered/garden objects, a lot of water and risk of electrocution. It also involved the rest of the audience probably thinking we're missionaries: saying you're from Christ Church seems to have that effect on people so now we just say Wellington.

After the performance we went down Houston St to Mercury Lounge. That's where the Strokes and Beirut cut their chops and made a name for themselves, so we felt sufficiently infused with history. Best $10 we had spent in NYC. We arrived to the start of the set by a band up from Pennsylvania called The Shackletons (cool name huh?). They got both Andy and I moving (nobody else dances in NYC, its not cool enough) and pretty quickly won us over with a very indie, very NYC-tinged, very rocking sound. After their set we talked to the lead singer for ages and pulled out the line "we don't have XYZ like you guys back home" for the first of many times. It worked, we got their album, signed, for next to nothing, and instantly attained number one fan status. We think that bands in the US are so good at what they do because there actually is a chance they could make it one day, and The Shackletons were a great example. Remember that name and this tip... Click here for their MySpace page if you're interested in the music. Rest of the lineup was trash, Shackletons killed!

Sunday
Sunday we spent out at Shea Stadium in Queens partaking in a time-honoured NY tradition: watching the New York Mets lose (quite badly, to the Florida Marlins). Nevertheless, the tickets were cheap(ish) and it was an outstandingly American experience, what with planes taking off from La Guardia right overhead, and the 7th-innings stretch (break) where they bust out God Bless America. After that we had good chinese food on Lexington Avenue and arranged our adventures for the next day...

Monday
We got up early and left the Y with the intention of catching a train to Bethel, Connecticut, to have a farewell lunch with a friend of Andy's from "the res"(ervation) in South Dakota. Sadly, after much to-ing and fro-ing in organisation the previous night (including battling with four separate payphones) we got to the station a half-hour the morning train left. So no Connecticut, back to an internet cafe to book some more accommodation for the rest of our stay, which SOMEHOW worked out just fine. Went to the Museum of Modern Art in the afternoon, which is a great building with a great collection. Some of it I really really liked, and I could easily have spent $10,000 in the gallery store afterwards...

Went back to our hostel and "invented" Extreme Table Tennis in the basement bar, where anything goes. Then it was music experience #3, again on the Lower East Side. Every local we'd talked to had been telling us "you gotta go to Pianos and Cake Shop", so we tried Pianos. At $8 for entrance to the music area we thought what the hell? and it was hell. The next day Andy described the NYC bands we saw as "the two worst bands in the world" - I don't think they would get on a stage back in NZ. We were starting to think that perhaps the shine was wearing off NYC...until

Tuesday
I can't recall what we did during the day, but in the evening we headed out to the Alligator (I think) bar in Brooklyn for free pizza with your pitcher of beer. Needless to say it was very good. Then we wandered round Brooklyn for a bit before heading over to the Lower East Side (LES), this time avoiding Pianos like the plague and heading to Cake Shop instead. By day its a Cake Shop, by night the basement opens for your entertainment. And how entertaining it was! 5 musicians, all very good at what they did. Fruit Machine are from Jacksonville, Florida are a punk band with some serious chops. They duelled (song for song) with a friend of theirs who raps along to her laptop, the lyrics cannot be repeated in this setting but were hilarious. Powerful Power is a Japanese-American solo guitar dude who is probably the best guitar player Andy and I have seen up that close, and his songs were great too.

Then it was Ghosty from Kansas City, Missouri, who I'd heard of courtesy of RDU. They played a great set of catchy SIP (Sunshine Indie Pop) that got the New York crowd going (as much as they do move, which is not really at all). After that was Bears from Cleveland who were so great that I bought the CD. We were dancing hard for this last band and they noticed. Because a ring of exclusion formed around us that no New Yorker dared enter... After the gig, yes, "we don't have bands like you guys back home, you should totally come to NZ some time" and again, instant super-fan status just by talking to the bands. We were sooo buzzing after that experience on the subway back about 2-3am, it was our highest high since The Shackletons.

Wednesday
Laundry day - glamourous times round the corner from our hostel in Chelsea. At one point Andy, walking back from buying us some water, almost walked into a store of questionable taste...but didn't. Then it was off to meet Sam, a contact of one of Shaun's former bosses, who has worked on political campaigns and is now in PR for a New York. We had a great chat about NZ and US politics. Sam took us to a FANTASTIC burger place underneath a hotel lobby near 6th Ave, called Burger Joint. After being constantly overwhelmed by the America of Choice (what sort of bread do you want, what sauce, you want a pickle, blah blah blah) their menu of "Hamburger, Cheeseburger, tomato, onions, lettuce, if it's not on here we don't sell it" was a god-send and it deserves its reputation for the best non-gourmet burgers in Manhattan. Plus the chocolate milkshake tasted like the old McD's chocolate thickshake, only it was made in front of me from milk and icecream only. Hmmm.

Finally cooked our first meal that evening, and then did something else you can only do in NYC - go to the Village Vanguard. That's the venue where Bill Evans recorded one of his most famous albums live, with Scott La Faro on bass just before he died too young. On that stage has stood everybody who is anybody in the world of jazz. Unfortunately that act that night wasn't as jazzy as we were hoping, was more jazz-infused singer-songwriter stuff, but was nevertheless very very well done. Went to the Green Room afterwards and said "we don't have..." you get the picture.

Thursday
Which brings us to yesterday and last night. During the day we took the Long Island Railroad out to Stony Brook University to meet Joel, a good friend of Rob's from their student days. His dissertation was in a pretty closely related area to what I'm interested in right now and he had some wise words of encouragement for my first year. Definitely worth the two hours trip each way (I think LIRR is some of the slowest railroad in the world).

Another shocking music experience last night, this time over in Brooklyn, where its apparently all at these days. The place was called The Trash Bar and we should have taken the hint, but the headline act's music sounded OK through the hostel computer's rubbish speaker so we decided to take the punt. First up was Very Early 90s Riff Rock with Anti-Establishment Lyrics - so bad they cleared the room after one song. Disillusioned, we went and got an outstanding cream cheese bagel for $1 down the road. Returned to the crime scene just in time to see the headliners, who Andy described as a band doing an ironic style-over-substance thing, but without any style as well. Left after one "song"...wow. So the score so far is:
- great bands playing in NYC but from elsewhere 5+
- native NYC bands that suck 5+

Friday (today)
Earlier today we went to the Bronx to see Yankee Stadium, possibly so that we could say we've been to all four of New York's major boroughs. Saw some really top skateboarding in front of the courthouse, indy kickflips over flights of stairs and everything. Then wandered round Harlem again and tried to go to a famous diner which was closed, so split and came back to the hostel for dinner.

Tonight we head back to Mercury Lounge hoping for some more magic. And after that I'll have only two nights left in New York!

Stealing from Andy is really OK

2008-08-11T10:12:00.002+12:00

In the interests of getting somewhere back near writing about the same week that I'm in, I'll steal from Andy's recent group email. Steal the entire thing in fact. Thinking of staying in NYC for all of next week too, there is just too much to do here.

From: Andrew Horwood
To: Everyone
Subject: It's fun to stay at the YMCA

Howdy,

No, I'm not gay. I just like Wayne's World.

It's not long since my last groupie but things are going so fast here that I had to write another. If you haven't worked it out, this is also my diary.

I shuffled through the city (Manhattan) on August 6. I'm staying with Shaun (from Huge in Japan) which is excellent, as you'd imagine. We both arrived late at night on the 6th so we drank some beers in our rooms and caught up on Europe/SoDak. The YMCA is a weird hostel as it has many small, single rooms.

On the 7th we hit the ground running. We went to the United Nations building which was unremarkable. Then we went up the Empire State building which was worth the wait in line and the US$19 fee. We got some kai and took the subway top Harlem which is an amazing neighbourhood. We were the only white people on foot (the rest were in a double decker bus). The place oozes black-ness. I expected it to be like Compton or Inglewood (in LA) but it was just a funky soul party. We walked past the Appollo theatre and saw a store that sold full on check pimp suits for US$100! We resisted but if I wasn't living out of a backpack...You can get your hair braided 'African' style and but local indie rap on the streets. It is an alive neighbourhood and I felt as safe and welcome there as I have everywhere else in Manhattan. Manhattan seems like red carpet sometimes. When we arrive at the subway station, the train arrives. When we arrive at an intersection, the lights change our way. I want to use the red carpet metaphor in a song to go up against other Manhattan songs ('My Blue Manhattan' comes to mind). If you beat me to this then good for you.

After Harlem we went to the Lincoln Centre, outdoor arena for some free live jazz from a French trio (gat, bs, drm) and flamenco dancing which was part opera, part tap, part ballet and all passion. It was good and the price was right. We finished our eventful day by hitting Times Square, that houses advertisements more than Moorehouse Ave hosts car yards or Manchester St is home to prosties. It is possibly the only thing more retina burning than the Bang! Bang! Eche! myspace page.

Yesterday we met up with a friend of Shaun's who is off to Geneva to work for the World Health Organisation. We strolled around Greenwich village (which is full of homosexuals and places to eat), then headed to the Lower East side which is the Indie district. This is where the Strokes cut their teeth and Ryan Adams makes many references to it in his work (Houston and 3rd, etc). We stumbled upon an urban community park in which we met an artist who biked from San Fransisco (respect). We are going to party with him tonight. He sort of lives in the Park which is maintained by members of a volunteer group. It is not large, maybe 8m by 12m, but it is an urban oasis. We talked to him for a while and Shaun tried to control the karaoke machine he had plugged in that was delivering feedback and not much else. I had a go on his clarinet which he got for free, intending to teach himself. The whole thing was a little surreal.

Then we caught the ferry over to Liberty Park, NJ, to see Radiohead, the New Pornographers and Andrew Bird at the All Points West festival. There were other acts but we were there for those 3 reasons. The crowd was large but still. Radiohead to 2 encores, totalling 8 songs but none of the Americans clapped loud enough to deserve them. The festival was interestingly white. I did not see one black person there. America is very segregated like that. All the security staff were black. I have never seen a whitey shining a black man's shoes. I have never seen a woman getting her shoes shined.

Today we ran around Central Park which was cool, particularly because we stumbled upon a new event in which the streets were closed for runners and cyclists to promote healthy living. We didn't know that when we jumped the fence and started running with them though... I felt like Manhattan was not only made of red carpet but was parting like the red sea. Now that's hospitality. I heart NY.

There are a few homeless people on the streets but not as many as I expected. In order to feel good about ourselves, we have bought some apples which we carry around, giving out to those who are begging. This negates the common objection to financial benevolence: "oh, they'll just spend it on booze."

Peace,

Andy

Leaving Paris and the Green Island

2008-08-10T08:03:00.002+12:00

So now I'm one week behind on the blogging...but when you're in New York City and the sun is shining you don't want to spend time on a computer. This post will be quite short then...

Last Sunday I snuck out early to go to the last remaining Paris Museum on my todo list, Musee d'Orsay. Another impressive building, another impressive building with an amazing collection. D'Orsay is the home of the impressionists (Van Gogh, Monet, et al), and they were predictably good. Like every other gallery (the theme continues) I seemed to like the minor artists more than the big guns. Speaking of guns, my favourite painting was of a French street (done in classic impressionist pastelly style) with a dead soldier, woman and child in the foreground, powerful stuff.

After that I raced back on the Metro to Pere Lachaise cemetery, and did what every rock n roll fan is bound to do in Paris, visit Jim Morrison's grave. We found it eventually, he didn't rise up or anything. Then it was back to base to get my bag, say au revoir to Kieran and Menna, and get the train to Charles De Gaulle airport.

Really nice Easyjet flight to Belfast, which was COLD and GREY and a little BORING. Got boozed with hostel people on the first night which made it all better. Monday I got on the bus to (London)derry, scene of much of the violence of the Troubles, including Bloody Sunday. I've never actually been anywhere properly dangerous, and Derry is the place of been where there has been the most recent danger. But now its very safe to walk round both Poorer/Catholic/Republican and Richer/Protestant/Loyalist neighbourhoods and look at the murals. More commentary will follow with photos, but it was a good experience.

Next day took the bus through Armagh, (where some of the McGirrs are from) to Dublin. Armagh was cold, but nice. Dublin was a little boring and samey. I'd like to go back to Ireland with more time, and a rental car to see the countryside, the best part of the place.

Paris days 2 & 3

2008-08-06T01:03:00.001+12:00

Just found out Kieran and Menna got robbed of a bag at the station leaving Paris yesterday. Of course it had to be the bag with passports, camera etc, so they're stuck in Paris until new passports are issued. Makes me wonder about all the times I've put a bag down for just a few moments while i adjust something, and how lucky i am not to have anything nicked. Kind of taints the whole experience for me, but I'll continue reporting anyhow.

After the big catchup on sleep it took a while to get going Friday morning. When we finally did, we got on the tourist bus again, this time for a proper look at the Arc. You'll see what i mean from the photos, but suffice to say a lot of French history is recorded there.

After that we strolled down towards the Eiffel, but along a non-main road. It always pleases me just how quickly anything tacky fades when you get more than 50m from a tourist route in any major European city. Came across a frozen yoghurt stand outside a cafe packed with Parisians, near the Seine. When we got to the tower the queue for lifts was predictably long. I decided i would enjoy the walk halfway up, and see about as much from there as from the very top. Kieran and Menna wanted the real McCoy, were happy to queue for it, and were happy with it. I was happy with my 670 steps (did i count them? Hell no...they're marked off at intervals) and it also meant i got down about 3 hours before they.

In that time i walked up towards Ecole Militaire along Champ de Mars, grabbed another supermarket lunch, ate it outside Hotel des Invalides, then went to Musee Rodin.

August Rodin was one of the most influential 19th century sculptors (don't quote me as i don't have wikipedia on my phone!), and all his most famous works are at the Museum. Including The Burghers of Calais, The Kiss, Orpheus, and my favourite, Le Penseur (The Thinker). The best thing was that most works also had their predecessor studies in marble or clay exhibited, so you could see the evolution of each work, sometimes over several years. Exhibiting this way helps document the practice of, and i think humanise the work of, the greats. They were selling casts of his major works in the shop, but the price tags (€150-650) put me off!

The other museums were mostly shut by that time, so i met up with Menna and Kieran at the Louvre for a quick run-through of the majors. Free entry for 'youth' (under 26) on Wednesdays and Fridays after 6pm! There was plenty more classically-themed sculpture (the French love that stuff), plenty of artifacts from ancient Mesopotamia (now mostly Iraq) and Egypt. It was the largest display of archaeological stuff I've ever seen, and i felt pretty dodgey looking at it in a French museum. It's all very nice that Western publics have access, but that stuff should really be progressively returned to where it was, and lets not dress it up in khakis and a silly hat, mostly stolen from.

Then it was to Aphrodite (Venus de Milo), some French large format paintings, including Napoleon crowning his empress (can't remember artist or full title), and of course La Joconde (Mona Lisa). I think its hilarious the the Louvre's two most famous works are both generally known by other names. Not sure who the joke is on though...

After a few hours of browsing and gazing we were stuffed so headed back for a nice pizzeria dinner (very French! But cheap...) before bed.

Next day, saturday, i headed to the Georges Pompidou centre, which among other things houses the Museum of Modern Art. Commentary of that really has to go with the pictures, but there was plenty of good stuff to see, including several good Pollocks, and a few more artists for me to follow up on, mostly minor surrealists that i liked.

As the weather had cleared a little by the time i was done, i took a gamble and headed out to Versailles. Couldn't get in to the Palace because it was closing early that day, but i was more interested in the architecture and gardens anyway, which are free to wander round. It really all is bloody impressive in every respect, and its great the Republic held onto it after the former occupants vacated. It was reasonably quiet at the end of the day and very, very peaceful strolling.

In the evening i met back up with M & K at the height of Parisian cuisine, the Hard Rock Cafe, and then had a horrendously expensive beer back near our place. And that, my friends, was most of Paris!

Paris day 1

2008-08-05T00:25:00.002+12:00

I'm writing this on a bus from Belfast up to (London)Derry. After Europe (yes i exclude the isles), Ireland is visceral, edgy and dirty. For example, this bus seat has chewing gum stuck to the seat in front. Reminds me of home.

Anyway, Paris! I spent wednesday back in Riseley/Bedford. Menna, her friend Katie and i tried to be cheap sods and go to the local swimming pool using tokens off the kelloggs box. When we got there, the buggers had a sign up saying 'only applies to children with a paying adult'. So we paid and swam anyway, fighting our way through hordes of elderly patrons in the 7 lanes that weren't roped off, or slow people in the one that was. Then there was the nasty one who a) had a go for us being in her way and b) had a go for us getting too far out of the way next time.

Back at the ranch that evening we packed for Paris and turned up to Bedford station at 2.30am. Shit that was a fun ride into London... At St Pancras we boarded the Eurostar, which really is a dream. Plus it bloody goes underwater for a bit...brilliant! I may have even slept. Got to Gare du Nord at 8ish and had a cheap breakfast in the vicinity before checking into hotel nearby. Then it was time to hit the sights.

Jumped on an open-air tourist bus that i thought would be crap but wasn't. Ok the pre-recorded commentary was rubbish ("there are over 6000kms of roads in Paris" wow thanks man) but it was nice to be sitting above the traffic but still experience the atmosphere of the street. Sounds cheesey, i know. And it was a ripoff, but it was a pleasant way to get round.

More detailed, humorous and possibly fabricated commentary of the sights will come later with the photos, but for now here's another list thing.

- Cathedrale Notre-Dame: impressive, i kept saying it like an american, people who can't turn off the flash or shut the hell up in churches really piss me off, should have yelled at them in faux Italian or something
- Lunches de supermarche: the only way to not burn money in europe is to avoid eating. At any kind of establishment. With the ready availability of supermarkets in Paris i reinstated if tradition Joe and i followed at camp. Fruit, salad, liquid. €3 yeeha!
- Bastille: a mildly unimpressive statue in the middle of a hilarious roundabout commemorating some kind of revolution or something. When will the French get over their Republicanism? I resisted the urge to remind them that about 20 minutes after libertee, egalitee, fraternitee, they embraced a ruthless dictator who made himself emperor then tried to take over all of Europe.
- Place de la Concorde: was expecting to see a fast plane parked up here but was sadly disappointe. Until i looked round and realised that its pretty much the centre of the republic. With an ever better roundabout, awesome.
- Champs Elysee: Anglo-consumerism is the latest conqueror to march relatively unhindered through the Arc, and set up camp here. Slightly more than mildly offensive, somewhat less than downright outrageous. I guess the French need somewhere to buy touristy tat as well as tourists.
- Arc de Triomphe: large, another excellent roundabout.

Then got the metro back to do battle, once again, with a large service organisation in French. Last time it was La Poste in Lausanne, this time Western Union. I don't know about you but I've always viewed WU with skepticism, what with their claims of zapping money across the globe like that (snaps fingers). I'd managed to transfer half of my downpayment on the rental via their NZ website off my credit card, relatively easy. But for complicated reasons the rest had to be done a la Francais. Take a ticket, then this non-employee gives me a form to fill out with the amount, recipient etc. Lucky for me most of the other customers weren't so good at French either. See, Western Union takes care of most of the non-corporate cash transfers of migrant workers, aka remittances. A humbling experience indeed to be worrying about securing my lease while my fellow customers are worrying about whether they earned enough this month to support a family back home. When i got to the counter i tried to credit card it again, but they don't do it. So managed to communicate a la Gesticulation that i needed to know how much cash to bring back to equal X US dollars. Walked up to the ATM, withdrew a shitload, walked/ran back to WU without getting mugged and it all went fine from there. The non employee guy and i chuckled, he had a prayer book so i think he just stands there most days doing customer information/crowd-queue control. I hope they give him a sandwich at lunch. Obviously after all that i was stuffed so went back to hotel and slept for 12+ hours. That was day 1 in paris, and i already had a great feeling about the city.

London

2008-08-01T05:16:00.003+12:00

That night after Cambridge (Sunday) I went to London to stay with Alaina and Sam in Wembley Park. It was great to see them having made the successful move over earlier in the year, and they are ticking along nicely. As they work and almost live at a Garden Centre, they have a big backyard which is great for making bonfires, so we did, had a few ciders, and watched suspicious looking cars drive down the road to the reservoir to to dodgey things there at night.

Next day (Monday) they had off, so we all took the Tube into town. God I love Metros, not just because they are a great way to get around, but for the individual character each city's has. London's character is 'stifling hot' - overall I had bloody marvellous weather the whole time in the UK. We had lunch at the second English pub we found nearish Baker St (the one we wanted appeared to be recently derelict) and then I set off alone for a bit of a walking tour: Green Park, Buck Palace, The Mall, St James Park, Parliament and the Abbey, then across to Southbank for a bit. All very impressive old chap.

Then I somehow managed to get to Oxford Circus at rush hour to meet Shaun (no typo) who I worked with a bit on census in 2006. He is now back working at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (Playstation team), project managing the production of top-secret projects for Sony. Needless to say the discussion was nerdy, but aided by several beers (my higher-earning london people always taking pity on this poor traveler despite his protests and proffered cash) we pretty quickly got on to solving the problems of the universe. Then I took the tube back to Wembley (innate sense of mapless navigation functioning perfectly) and went to bed/couch.

Next morning (Tuesday) it was up and at em, sort of, for the Tate Modern, predictably the highlight of my very short and underfunded time in London. Special thanks to all my friends who have visted and raved about it for years, not even the fact there was NO BLOODY PROPER LARGE SCALE EXHIBIT IN THE TURBINE HALL could dampen my enthusiasm. Seriously, it was good, and I got a lot of names of artists new and old I need to see more of.

After my Southbank experience I wandered round St Pauls then tubed to Trafalger Square area to catch up with a fellow Fulbrighter, Olivia, who works for MFAT there currently. NZ House is so classic, kind of garish, kind of nothing, but very tall and dominating the fine works around it. After afternoon tea I tried my hand at rush-hour Underground to get across to Harrods, and did just fine thankyouverymuch. There met Gareth, who flatted with Dan for bit when we were all blissfully un-/partially-employed in the winter of 2006. Went to a cool pub in Notting Hill, which was super-trendy about 100 years ago. Now its Shoreditch, but people debate that. What is clear is the coolness travels east across the suburbs of London...interesting.

Overall my time in London was very nice. Next time I'd like more time, a lot more money (i couldn't stop multiplying to NZ $ and freakin out) and a super-central location. Maybe a cushy summer research posting to LSE then? I see a theme emerging slowly here...

The rest of Riseley

2008-07-31T11:19:00.003+12:00

On Friday I began my recovery/rest/relaxation time in Riseley. Slept in, dealt with emails etc (ugh), then headed to the big smoke of Bedford to stroll around the shopping area. It is quite a nice quaint little town. Then down to the river, all very English and reminiscent of several places in NZ. There we watched people row Norse-themed boats incompetently on a little pond, while eating icecream and laughing at them. Then to the 'American Diner' for lunch, which was actually very good despite the poetically cheesey surroundings.

Friday night was spent out and about, first to an outstandingly authentic English pub called the Wellington Arms. It has a sign outside saying: "REAL ALE PUB. NO FOSTERS!! NO STELLA!! NO CARLING!! NO CRAP!" Needless to say the beers were hand-pulled and ever so slightly warm. Then Kieran and I met up with Menna and her mates at some other place in town.

Saturday was more cricket, me again on the Riseley team, this time in the full 40-over game against an all-Pakistani side. They bowled first and really shook our openers, dismissing them cheaply. By the time I got in I was facing spinners, and had quite a lot of fun! Only scored three runs before being caught out after stupidly playing at a bouncing ball, but did stay in for about 20-30 minutes and the highest-scorer in our partnership was actually extras (wides, byes, no balls). They chased the target down easy in the afternoon sun, but not after some good wickets were taken and I was worked hard (also enjoyable) in the covers. After our defeat we went to a barbecue in the village where good times were had, including dj sets and getting told off at about 10pm by a village grump, classic.

Sunday we visited Cambridge, about 45 minutes drive from Riseley. You park outside town at the Park & Ride, then take a huge double-decker bus into the middle of town...arriving after a few crazy turns at intersections that required the reversing of several other buses. Despite all the touristy touches (no less than a dozen people asked us if we wanted to go punting...all the punting seemed to be punt-your-own though...) the town has retained some character, and then you get to the Colleges and they truly are as they've always been. Pristine lawns and really nice stone architecture, and sooooooo quiet. Cushy summer research fellowship in 2010 here I come...

Photos of Europe, Part One

2008-07-25T22:48:00.002+12:00

So now I'm finally up to date with the writing, and now the photos too.

Photos available here (you don't need to be on facebook to see them):
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=24879&l=3a09d&id=703999762

Let me know if it's not working for you...
Shaun

Barcelona, London Luton, and cricket in Riseley

2008-07-25T21:39:00.002+12:00

The morning of our full day in Barcelona (Tuesday 22nd) we decided to devote it to some Gaudi, after transferring hostels (by time we booked demand was very high). Second hostel was in same chain, Sant Jordi, and possibly even better than the other one given it was purpose-built.

Caught the Metro across town to the Vallarca stop and made the climb to Park Guell. Except most of the street that you climb up has been escalatorised! We were glad that there is at least a few hundred metres of walking though, makes the views more rewarding. The park was built from 1900 to 1914, was designed by Gaudi and financed by a wealthy guy (Count Guell) who had commissioned Gaudi's first works. Guell wanted to create a serene garden city in Barcelona, with 60 plots on which your house could occupy only a smallish fraction. In classic Iberian vision-exceeds-execution fashion, construction stopped in 1914 after only three plots had been sold. The silver lining though is that now it is a public space, with some cool architecture (see photos coming up) and great views out across Barcelona.

After walking back down we caught the metro to the Sagrada Familia, the other great Gaudi unfinished work. He designed it, and work has been underway almost continuously since 1882. It's supposed to have 18 towers at the end but they've got plenty to go to finish it in the target year of 2026. Its a highly polarising building. The scale and grandeur are certainly impressive, and I love the modernista influence in places. But it is quite over the top, and very scatter-brained. I hope to see it again, completed, and make another personal judgement then.

That evening we returned to the hostel and cooked a proper meal of pasta (having subsisted on fruit, tuna sandwiches, and salad for the entire festival) and then got boozed at the hostel with others. Alex and Irene from the Venice hostel randomly turned up, I've never spoken so much Russian in my recent life as I have on this trip!

Another too-early wakeup call on Wednesday morning to get to the train station by Metro, to catch the bus to Reus airport (one of two 'Barcelona' airports Ryanair flies out of). Thank goodness we didn't just wait out the front of the station, as the bus left from a mostly-obscured stop that you can't see on exiting the station. Luckily we got the bus for the earlier Ryanair flight, which saved us some stress when traffic made the journey 2 hours instead of 1.5.

So we played 500 in the carpark of this tinny little regional airport underneath a tree, packed and re-packed our stuffs, and went to check-in. Joe came in 1kg over allowance (€15), and I came in 0.5 under! This was despite having picked up a 3kg tent - i did it by putting everything heavy into my hand luggage, it's the Ryanair way! The flight ended up being delayed an hour, which through out Kieran's pickup at the London Luton end.

Then when we landed the queue for non-EU passports took about 45 minutes, and after some probing questions, that had all taken so long that our bags were nowhere to be seen. Because Luton is a hellhole budget airline airport, there were of course no airline staff round, so we just had to watch all four baggage carousels until, finally our bags appeared. Relief! Then Joe met his sister and we parted ways on different trains, Joe for London and me for Bedford, where I saw Kieran for the first time in at least two years.

He drove me to the quaint village of Riseley, which as Menna (Kieran's girlfriend) calls it, is 'gateway to the whops'. But it is a great wee place, got the walking tour round the village yesterday from Menna (she grew up here) and saw houses built in the 1400s and 1500s and a Norman church from the 1100s - amazing! The night I arrived, I'd been in the village two minutes before Kieran pulled over to say hello to some cricketing mates, and I was instantly recruited into the team.

The game was last night on the village green. We had 3 players plus 4 ring-ins, against Henlow's B-team of 11 men. They smashed 124 off 16 overs, but not before a few nice dismissals. Kieran was keeping and got a great single-handed catch down leg side, while I caught the captain out at backward square leg for a golden duck! Nobody was more surprised than I... Our batting performance was atrocious, all out for 21, so we lost handsomely. Then over to the pub for an excellent steak burger to put us all to sleep.

FIB day 4 and the dramatic escape from Benicassim

2008-07-25T03:43:00.003+12:00

Sunday we went to the beach as usual, via discovering that one of the supermarkets was closed on Sundays, and the other had closed before we got there. Never mind, paid higher prices somewhere else...

Before the nights proceedings we met Joe's girlfriend Joelle's friends from London, Marcia and Renee. Classic case of 3 degrees - they'd studied in, or knew, the Canterbury polisci department. And they fed and watered us very well.

Sunday (highlights in bold)
The National - so great to finally see them live. They were in the big tent which totally could have backfired (it almost did due to persistent technical difficulties on that stage) but they pulled it off. The music isn't naturally crowd-moving, but it did succeed and the performance, especially by the vocalist Matt Berninger, was compelling.
Leonard Cohen - wasn't expecting to stick around for all of this, but the show turned out to be quite charming despite the inherent cheesiness of an ultra-polished session band. Played a good mix of the hits (Hallelujah, So Long Marianne) and some that I didn't recognise but did enjoy.
Micah P Hinson - according to Joe his recordings are great, live his three-piece was a little 1998 Rockquest.
Richard Hawley - great old-school rock and roll, full stop. Told us we were the best festival crowd they'd ever played, and for once I believed somebody saying that.
Justice (Live) - absolute madness in and around the big tent, we stayed for about five or six songs including their iconic remix of "Never Be Alone" by Simian.
Morrissey - a disappointment. I'm a big Smiths fan, and for I'm not sure what reason, I always came down on the Johnny Marr side of the band's messy breakup. Maybe it's because I'm a guitarist that loves the way he played on those records, or maybe just because he's not a tosser. Steven is a tosser and his banter (anti-techno, pro-vegetarian, possibly a dash of racism in there), while electrifying the English, was groan-worthy for the rest of us.

After that we went back to camp to drink some more wine, then hit the hay. 7 am wakeup call, packed up our stuff, walked to the station. Thank god for overcast and cool temperatures. Reason for so early was that 20,000 people try to leave Benicassim the day after the festival (camping continues for another 3 days), half each for Barcelona and Valencia, and even though this was the 14th FIB, renfe (Spanish train company) hasn't got the idea that YOU NEED TO PUT ON MORE TRAINS TO COPE WITH DEMAND!!!

We were first in the queue and lucky to have a door right in front of us when the train stopped. After much pushing and jostling Joe and I both managed seats, but the rest of the train filled up completely. The doors kept trying to close and stopping when people were in the way. Eventually the unlucky ones had to step off, resign themselves to the fact they would miss their flights, and we were underway. I felt bad for the Spanish people who then couldn't get on the train later down the line - we FIBers represented at that time the very worst of unsustainable tourism. When we got to L'Aldea an hour later, we piled onto the platform and then onto another regional train 20 minutes later. This one was less full, but filled up to practically overflowing as we approached Barcelona. Talked to some English guys about horse racing.

Arriving at Barcelona Sants 3.5 hours after we left Benicassim was basically a miracle, Joe and I had little idea how we'd managed to arrive both together and safely. The Metro to our hostel was a dream, and the hostel was pretty nice too. After a nap we got some pastries from the place downstairs and some beers from the hostel, and took a walk down the main avenues towards the water, and back again to sleep.

FIB days 1, 2 & 3

2008-07-20T22:04:00.003+12:00

I'll cover the day-time activities at the festival in one go:

9:30am - wake up sweating
10am - head to beach via supermarket for water and food
11:30am - arrive beach, try get shade
11:30-5pm - swim, rest
5pm - head back to camp via supermarket and salad tv dinner in the square
8pm - arrive at camp, cold shower, hit the €1.30 red wine
9pm - head into festival venue

So who have I seen and what did I think? Highlights are in bold...

Thursday
Nada Surf - got the crowd going but nothing spectacular
Sigur Ros - 8 rows from front. One of my must-sees at FIB. Did well to please a festival crowd that wanted "all the hits" (such as they are) but that cost their set the cohesiveness evident in their albums. Now I really want to see them in a setting of their own choosing, playing an album start to finish.
Black Lips - 5-10 rows from front. Dirty dirty punky rock, favourites of Vice Magazine. Massive mosh pit fun with goodnatured pushing and shoving. Joe lost (and regained) both a shoe and his glasses.
Battles - pushed through to 5 rows from front. Amazing set. Most there didn't get them, we did and it was awesome. Unbelievable that this music can be played live.

Friday
Babyshambles - the 50,000 brits here all went to see Pete, and we didn't.
El Guincho - great boogie to this spanish guy from the canaries who mixes electronica with live drumming and crazy singing.
New York Dolls - saw half a song, way past it, and they sound nothing like interpol.
Hot Chip - 5 rows from front in the biggest dance tent ive ever seen. Hit after hit, so nice to see geeks making music and having thousands of people in the palms of their hands. Crazy crazy dancing and facepaint with 'our gang'
My Bloody Valentine - must be broke, they reformed just to play 'Loveless' to the gathered faithful. It was their first and last album, and was so good it both defined 90s shoegaze indie and destroyed the band. Hearing it live was a bit depressing so only listened to a few songs.
Danton Eeprom - another amazing dancey time in the big tent, this time with time to move and breath. Minimal techy house, pulled off live with aplomb and not a downbeat in sight.

Saturday (last night)
Brian Jonestown Massacre - nothing happening, stuck in the 1990s. Don't recommend attending the chch gig unless you like their recordings.
American Music Club - ok, but soft and a bit Counting Crows for my taste.
My Morning Jacket - 3 rows from front, great set for the fans (not that many hence easy to get close). New stuff not so sure, old stuff magic.
Raconteurs - 5 rows, and a let down. Pushed out past people who were severely pissed that we were getting out of their way...weird.

More from Barcelona when we get there tomorrow...

Ryanair, Valencia and getting to Benicassim

2008-07-18T21:44:00.002+12:00

The Ryanair experience begins on their crazy website, which has so many advertisements its hard to trust it when you put your credit card details in. It continues at the airport...one feels in the middle of one of those popular late-90s UK airport show. Thankfully I was 2 kgs under so no troubles checking in...but almost everyone else was having to put on three jumpers, seven belts, and put shoes into their carry-on luggage.

You get to the plane by bus...packed in like sardines. Everyone is in a gigantic hurry to get the best seats (whatever they are) as seating is not pre-assigned. Kudos to Ryanair for an amazing business model: low fares on face value, pay-for luggage, and no assigned seating means they save on fuel, plus everyone RUNS to get on the plane. That helps them get away on time. On the plane the advertising onslaught continues, and the seats don't recline. But having said all that, they get you there on time.

Valencia airport is wondeful, and the metro is soooo good, one of the best i've taken yet. It doesnt yet go into the old city but will soon, so there was a wee bit of a hike to the hostel to meet Joe. Another great hostel experience, heaps of character and super-helpful staff. They told us where to buy a cheap tent for the festival, and it was done within the hour. Joe and I got on swimmingly, like always. Went out to one of the oldest family-owned tapas bars in the city, which was delicious and great, then along to Flamenco night at Radio City (again on recommendation of hostel). To be perfectly honest, we were there to see spanish women dancing in frilly skirts. Instead we got four sweaty men in the band, and an even sweatier man doing the dancing. Impressive but a let-down nonetheless. Then we wandered back to the hostel with the two other kiwis in our room (!!!), both Londonites.

Next morning we went and bough train tickets and some groceries, and a croissant for €0.50 from the amazing market across the street. Its under cover and has at least 100 stalls. I think its instead of a supermarket, because they really only have 7/11 type stores in the city. Valencia was great, is very alive all the time with narrow winding streets and heaps of bars. I hope to visit again with more time.

In the queue for the train we met a classic american guy, a trainee pilot from Atlanta, Georgia who talks like a wannabe gansta. Through security (side-effect of Madrid 05 bombings) and onto the train, called the 'Talgo' service. I think Talgo means "built in the 1980s, not particularly comfortable or fast, but quite expensive anyway¨. An hour later we were at Benicassim station and it was (only) 40-50 minutes walking/standing to get to our campsite. But we got there eventually, set up our tent (three person highly necessary with all our stuff), realised we were way underprepared compared to kiwi camping (when you have a car-load of stuff...) and buggered off to town. Thats also quite a hike, about 25-30 minutes, but worth it for the beach.

Dodgey camping food for dinner - sandwiches with tuna, cheese tomato, and the best cheap red wine you've ever tasted for €1.28 a bottle. Ow!!! We tried to sleep but were kept up by our neighbours, who I almost correctly picked as from Blackpool (id said manchester based on accents and music playing) who were drinking until about 4pm. But managed to get a few weeks at least before RAIN (!!!) woke us up at about 7am. Thank god we bought a decent tent and didn't just rough it.

The best thing about Benicassim as a town is that there is NOTHING to do except write emails, buy and eat food, and sit on the beach and look at continental european girls. Presumably due to the temperature (im sure its not been below 20 at night and 35 during the day) the music starts at 8pm and goes through to 4am. Its hell i tell ya...

I'm writing this after one night of festival music, so am still a few days behind on the blogging, but will report later today on night one (Sigur Ros and Battles...)

Firenze

2008-07-17T09:34:00.000+12:00

I arrived to Florence on Sunday evening after another good train ride through the Tuscan countryside. Train travel is so nice: no security checks required, and no waiting around at the station at either end.

Florence struck me immediately as a very different city to Venice...aka "things are happening that aren't tourism" - most of the people around at that time of evening are Italians living their lives.

Walked the 20 mins to where google maps said my hostel would be, only to get lost again. In venice it's several names for each street, in florence it's two sequences of numbers for each street, black and red. I had just told google '104' and that had defaulted to 104-red, a few blocks down from 104-black. But when i found it, Ostello D'Gallo Oro was amazing. A friendly 'ciao bello' on entering, and just the most laid-back atmosphere. The room was great, with shared bathroom and a balcony. Met Baz from Perth, who is on 13 weeks long service leave after working 7 years as an IT project manager for the WA state goverment. I told him that our labour laws had been somewhat more liberalised in the 90s and we joked about life as public servants. Also did the whyPhD/whyAcademia/whyUSA spiel for about the 200th time in the last three months. Getting those business/life story cards printed any day now... The hostel also had free internet, free distilled water, and free breakfast - ace!

I woke up early monday morning hoping to hit the galleries, only to discover monday is the city's attractions' day off...bugger. So Monday was church day, visited about 4-5 cathedrals in the central city, Duomo excluded (big queues by time i got there). The buildings were amazing. I'm not a big fan of renaissance art, because of the repetitive subject matter, nor am i religious, but something about those buildings made my spine tingle. Probably just the cool temperature.

After churches, the Palazzo Vecchio (where David stood until the late 1800s, there's now a copy there), and being mistaken several times for an Italian (highest compliment for a tourist, prob something to do with my facial hair, sunglasses and two necklaces), i crossed the Arno river on one of the 'new' bridges. All but the Ponto Vecchio were destroyed by the retreating germans in 1944.

Then up the hill to Pallazo Michaelangelo, which has a view over Florence that i think is better than the city itself. Terracotta roofs, punctuated by church domes and towers, with the hills of Tuscany behind. Also up there was some kind of Korean wedding party: couldn't quite work out if there were multiple brides and grooms because everyone was to the nines, and the locals and tourists alike were fascinated. A short walk later i was at the highest church above the city, and then continued around the hills on Galileo Galilee drive. Loads of cars but no pedestrians so i had the pavement and flora to myself. Then it was down through some nice gardens, also to myself apart from the aforementioned wedding party(s), and back into the city.

After about 4-5 hours walking in the heat i needed a good rest back at base, but not before meeting the two kiwis (!!!) in my room, both cops in South Auckland who reckon John Keys will be good for the police and fuel prices. I said i hoped he could deliver on what he's promised the Police Association...which is probably nothing and everything yet. Popped to the pizzeria down the road with other roommate Christian from Austria, a political science student, so thats what we talked about.

Tuesday morning i slept in, took a last stroll round the neighbourhood, realised once and for all that the real Tuscany (and Italy) must be outside the cities, despite their obvious beauty, and got on the train to Pisa airport. Might have got to tower and back, but decided it safer to leave that sight for another day.

Arrividerci Italy, i'll be back asap for some closer inspection!

Venezia

2008-07-15T21:53:00.000+12:00

The transition from Swiss Alps to Italian Alps was predictably noticeable. Carbinieri checked (the existence of) passports while the engine was changed up front. We were running behind schedule after the first italian stop, because italian stops are one cigarette in length, not the swiss two minutes.

Changed train in Milan, an industrial wasteland as everybody says. Forgot to weigh bananas in the fruit area of supermarket so had my first yelling-at experience at the checkout. Train to Venice was unremarkable: hills, villas, the odd turret.

Arriving into venice is as spectacular as it must have been for the past 500 years. These days across the causeway, but if you think of Shakespeare and ignore the parked cruise ships you can almost see the fleets arrived with spices from the east.

Despite my hostel being just across the canal from station, it still took 20 mins to find. Streets in Venice have a few different names with multiple doors at one number. Eventually got it, and what a hostel it was. €35 gets you air conditioning in your room, fridge, great bathroom, and a real bed. Met Americans Dave (just finished PhD molecular genetics) and Daniel (masters biomedical science, just finished military service in Taiwan) and we went for dinner at a good cheap place where the pasta fresca is cooking in front of you with ample oil...delicious.

Back at hostel we met Americans Alex and Irene, originally from Ukraine and Belarus, now in LA doing programming and family therapy. And Laura, an Aussie over from London just for the weekend. Walked around for ages trying to find a not-too-trendy not-too-touristy bar. Ended up at an Irish pub! Alex outdrank me 3 to 2, proving he was in fact Ukrainian.

The next morning Daniel, Dave, Laura and i began our super-trek around Venice, taking in all the sights and trying to avoid other tourists as much as possible. Alex and Irene had given us the name of a mysterious photographer/boatdriver called silvio, who'd taken them on a three-hour boat tour for €100 total, cf the same each for a slow-as 40 minute gondola ride.

Sadly when we found the spot we got a thunderstorm and downpour instead of Silvio. So we soldiered on towards San Marco and weren't disappointed by the spectacle. By now pretty hungry, lunch was at a small corner cafe serving great foccaccia sandwiches for €3.50. Then across the street for the darkest chocolate icecream ever. The old adage stands true: trust the locals' choices and you can't go wrong...the tourist traps are so obvious. They're the ones with 'menu turistico' on the board outside. The locals are obvious, anybody with a newspaper and/or walking stick and no camera. I wonder what they must think of their city's invasion by the rest of Europe (and the world).

Several times we railed against the presence of so many tourists. But thats like railing against all the other cars on the road. In the end a night and a day in Venice was the perfect length of stay. I'd visit again, but outside peak season.

We got back to the hostel about 3pm, then up the road for a quick beer before jumping on the train to Florence.

Postscript Geneve

2008-07-12T22:52:00.001+12:00

Just done the geneve-lausanne route for 4th time, this time on the way to Milan.

My roommates last night were classic: two brit schoolkids on some kind of UN trip, and two mexicans youngins on a tour round europe. Brit 1 was talkative...after school he wants to go travelling, to New Zealand to 'stay with a Maori tribe' . We then all played Texas Hold'em (the most luck-ridden of all the pokers) and though youthful exuberance won out in the end, it wasn't before sage 20-something wisdom had double-bluffed the entire table a couple of times. After that i took a walk along the lake shore in the rain. Its not unusual in Geneve to pass a parked porsche and ferrari in quick succession - the wealth drips from everywhere and it is very international city (aka heaps of tacky themed restaurants). Went to a kebab shop for dinner, serving NZ lamb. Then i wandered back to hostel (did i say how great this hostel was?) to undertake the most glamorous part of the backpacker experience...laundry. Thankfully the system was made by germans and run by swiss, so worked perfectly.

Following free breakfast (take all complimentaries possible in Switz) i jumped on this train to Venice via Milan. There is a tortured middle-aged English man in my carriage that for god knows what reason has decided to take his elderly mother travelling. The scene could not be more Coronation St meets every other nightmare soap. Note to parents: if you travel in the third age it will be in the care of trained professionals.

Also on the train is a little Italian boy whose musical book plays Frere Jacques in Italian. I grinmace (mock grimace) along with the young French family i'm sitting with. If only i could tell them we learn the original back home. There is a sense of failure when admitting ne p.v. francais, i promise to know more on my return.

Overall i have really enjoyed my time in French Suisse. The pace of life is hectic and leisurely at the same time, something Anglo-influenced cultures strive but fail to achieve for whatever reason. It has been very very expensive, especially the conference, but i'm glad i came. Without the conference i probably wouldn't have left home early for this holiday. I'm already learning how to relax properly again, after too many months on the edge.

About to head into the Alps, more from Italia soon...

mega-post - Lausanne and conference

2008-07-12T10:04:00.003+12:00

The previous post was written on my cell on the train, and just after sending it I fell asleep and slept through Lausanne stop, waking up 7 minutes after it, and was stuck there til Geneve. Thankfully I could jump on a train straight back...

I walked up to my accommodation and met Doris Getaz, proprietor of Ada-logements B&B. She was classic...and I wished I could have spoken French to her. She did speak English but I'm sure something was lost. The room was small but very nice, about the best you can get for CHF50 (NZ70) a night in Lausanne. 8 of the 45 television channels had the Tour on, and another had overdubbed McLeod's daughters - surreal! I was so tired I slept through the conference pre-drinks, but never mind.

The next morning I made several convincing bonjours in the breakfast room...enough to convince people a) that i spoke French and b) was tired and didn't want to talk to them in French. The language thing hit me harder than expected - not because it made anything particularly difficult, but simply because of the mixed opportunities for local conversation with the locals. Will have to be tooled up when I visit again...

After a stroll to the Metro in the summer sun (free ticket for all tourists staying in Swiss cities) the Metro sped me to Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EFPL), officially the most
confusingly-laid-out university I've ever visited. All buildings seemed to be 'building C' (the one I needed to be in) yet all I could find were dangerous-looking labs. Eventually I found somebody to direct me upstairs.

I presented in the first session, and though I think I delivered well, the audience was far from electrified. Probably never going to happen at a conference on e-government though. I did however make several useful contacts, including the Director of Standards Srategy and Policy at Oracle UK. Apart from the contacts, most of the content was far out of my field and not much higher standard than one would expect in NZ/AUS.

After resting back at B&B at the end of the day, I woke up late and almost missed the conference dinner. I ran to the station and looked for the metro line to take me to Ouchy (shore district) that was on the map. Sadly it hasn't yet been built and its just a bus for the moment. It got me on the boat 3 minutes before sailing though, so good enough.

The cruise itself was almost painfullly picturesque: just imagine every photo you've seen of Swiss hills and vineyards composited together and that was it, enough to make you cry. Dinner was 1) salad, 2) bread cutlets with soup poured over them (even my french dining companions were confused), 3) sauerkraut and sausage, 4) meringue. Very good, and probably the main reason conference was so expensive...

The boat berthed back at Ouchy at exactly 11 (bless the Swiss), after passing Montreux (jazz festival currently on, and the subject of Deep Purple's 'smoke on the water'), the village of Evian, and standing on the bow watching thunderstorms to the north.

This morning nothing interesting was being presented so I slept in and went to an internet cafe to catch up on ~50 emails. Got back to B&B in time to see Doris' note "check out 11am" on the door. I handed the key back to her at exactly 11 with a sense of swiss satisfaction. Lunch was gaspacho, fish, and fruit salad, again good.

The afternoon session scared me shitless - an expert on electronic voting machines told us just how shoddy the standards, specifications, manufacturing, and independent certification. He predicts a 15% chance that the upcoming US election will be stricken by evoting maching difficulties in at least one crucial state. Floria2000-Ohio2004 anybody?

In general the conference participants were obsessed with the 'e' of e-government, to the point that some view adoption of ICT in government to be simply a technical challenge. Pain pain pained me as a political scientist to see this naievety (sic) from smart people. But I did have some great conversations about why there is e-government for certain thing for which there is actually no need for government - a refreshing dose of skepticism. No point having toys for the sake of toys. It was these people that turned into useful contacts. After attending 3 interdisciplinary conferences now I have serious doubts about their value to me as a political scientist. It just seems that while multiple perspectives are interesting and important, the various contributors don't seem to speak enough of the same academic language to really make headway.

Departing Lausanne involved a hasty back-pack re-arrange and clothes-change before heading down the road to do battle, sans francais, with La Poste. You can't pay with credit card, and there is a ticket-queuing machine, but in the end we worked together and got some of my dead-weight sent forward.

The train to Geneve today was 'slow' and 'old', and after arriving I had a pleasant stroll down Rue de Lausanne in the thunderstorm, before heading out for some dinner and the glamour of backpacker laundry. A few additional remarks to come soon...off to Venezia via Milan tomorrow morning.

Finally on a real computer in geneve for this mega-post

From the Zurich sidewalk

2008-07-10T16:22:00.001+12:00

Only a kiwi would notice this...

4 cool things about Zurich

2008-07-09T22:12:00.001+12:00

From my 3 hours in the city i have to say:
*Nice job with the public transport! Especially trains which really do run exactly on time, with announcements in german, french, english to help the plebs like me.
* Yes food is expensive, but get over it already... Switzerland has the highest per-capita gdp so what'd you expect?
* A certain understated extravagance 'yeah we're filthy rich but we don't flash it 24/7'
* Endless narrow medieval alleyways to explore (in daylight)

Flight from Singapore was good...screaming kids replaced by swiss health freaks who opened their windowshades at 5am, flooding the cabin with beige light. 777-300ER has even bigger and quieter engines, and outfitted with brand new entertainment system (better technology than AirNZ but few things worth watching). Lost 30 games of chess against computer, mostly because i can't move in <5 seconds every time and therefore blew out the clock by the endgame... Made the 5 victories all the sweeter.

Now on a train to Lausanne, a real bed and the conference opening drinks. This is the life!

PS - this was sent from my cell via vodafone email, but gmail mobile still not working so replies will remain sporadic.

Singapore T3 Transit Hotel rocks!

2008-07-09T02:11:00.001+12:00

Flight from Christchurch to Singapore was ok, but not the best of doze-offs. Listening to Sigur Ros made me a bit teary for family and home. I did however watch all 213 minutes of Ben Hur. Apart from some very hammy acting in parts I thought it was excellent, and the chariot race at the end is a testament to the realism possible with 'low-tech' production techniques. It was probably a little ahead of its time too, portraying progressive attitudes to leprosy (it's not actually contagious) and strong historical Jewish-Muslim relations when Palestine/Israel was Roman.

I'm not very good at optimising my airport experiences. I like to have plenty of time between flights, and I like to be through security etc early so I don't miss any flights. But when you have all that time you just wander endlessly and pointlessly. And often, like today, fate lands me a 6-hour stopover when leaving the airport is not an option.

Never fear, Singapore Changi is here! Thanks to Rachel and Mike's excellent tip, I came to the Transit Hotel in Terminal Three and paid S$30 (NZ$30) for: use of their gym (treadmill, cycle, weights did me world of good), loan of gym clothes and shoes (not too naff), good shower, free soft drinks and food, free Mr Bean, and free email. Yussssssssssssssss. One day I'll get that airport lounge membership that this experience so desperately demonstrates I need...

Two hours til boarding for Zurich, next post from Europe!

Final countdown

2008-07-07T13:06:00.000+12:00

Fewer than 24 hours to go!

Enright House - 'Scattering the Sun' video

2008-01-24T20:22:00.000+13:00

My friend Dan shot this video for his friend Mark

It's a really flippin great video for a beautiful song. Shot mostly on the way to and in Wellington, July 2007.

Van Halen 'Jump' right into atonal mess on stage, fans don't notice/care

2007-10-20T10:51:00.000+13:00

Synthesisers are wonderful things, but in the wrong hands can be extremely dangerous. Like when you pre-record a synth part at 44.1kHz sample rate but play it back on-stage at 48, and the pitch shifts up more somewhere between 3 and 4 semitones (or is it 5 and 6?)

It happens to the best of 'em...including a recently reunited (again) Van Halen on stage in Greensboro, NC in September. Watch them soldier on though, turning 'Jump' from a loutish 2am karaoke hit in to a screaming, proggy-jazz atonal mess. And listen to the cheer at the end...seems some can do no wrong! Bonus points for the giant inflatable microphone at the end though.

RW370 via BoingBoing via Gizmodo

Honours part one, done

2007-10-15T19:37:00.001+13:00

Yep, today I've handed in just over 40,000 words. Relief and exhaustion. Euphoria hopefully tomorrow.

Lifesize X-Wing launched, and destroyed

2007-10-13T17:46:00.000+13:00

Latest column on www.theset.co.nz - How much should free speech cost?

2007-09-26T21:38:00.000+12:00

Hey folks, my latest column has just been published on www.theset.co.nz

It touches on the Electoral Finance Bill and aspects of the 'spending money is free speech' debate.

Enjoy

Halo 3 is the future

2007-09-25T14:15:00.000+12:00

Not just of gaming, but of the world. A very well done clip!

100% Pure New Zealand

2007-09-18T17:10:00.000+12:00

You know a blogger got allllll lazy when it just start posting videos...but this one is quite cool. Cheesy, yes, and the song is quite repetitive, but the presentation of NZ is nicely simple and unpretentious, kind of like kiwis at their best I suppose.

A must-see show - Flight of the Conchords

2007-09-13T20:06:00.000+12:00

FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS begins Monday 17th September at 10.00pm on PRIME. It is a truly unmissable take on how kiwis approach the big wide world, and what the world thinks back.

Here's a clip from the show:

Other FOTC stuff on YouTube

Obesity is Contagious, and so is Junk Science

2007-09-09T23:19:00.000+12:00

TCS Daily has a good piece on the recent study 'proving' that obesity is contagious. The experimenters examined the Body Mass Index data of a particular group of people over time, saw some nice correlations, so instantly jumped to the conclusion that fatness spreads through people who know each other.

By what causal mechanism you say? Apparently 'social contagion' means if your friends are fat, so will be you, because you emulate their lifestyle. Unfortunately what the study 'proved' are really just some interesting hypotheses that need some real testing. Unfortunately all that the media (rightly so) seizes on is the bottom-line.

And here's a joke for all the physicists out there. The study 'proved' that having fat friends makes you more fat. It also found that the distance of friends from each other didn't matter.

'The jump from association to cause may be most evident in the conclusion drawn by the researchers with regard to the association of weight gain in friends living far from each other. "We were stunned to find that people who were hundreds of miles away had just as much impact on a person's weight status as friends who are next door."'

Now that, my friends, is spooky action at a distance.

Stephen Colbert can really sing

2007-08-25T11:20:00.000+12:00

Amazing.

320 views is quite a lot of views!

2007-08-21T21:38:00.000+12:00

Wow, Huge in Japan's one and only music video is still ticking along! Check it out: "Huge In Japan - Magpie (Live)"

And if you're after a copy of our EP, contact me through the link to your right.

Dylan genius, Ticketek/TSB Arena/Chugg Entertainment not

2007-08-11T20:44:00.000+12:00

7 June 2007

9:00am - Bob Dylan tickets go on sale
9:19am - 'Bronze Reserve' Bob Dylan tickets purchased for myself and four friends

10 August 2007

7:30pm - Arrive at TSB Arena, keep walking walking walking down the side to our block of seats
7:35pm - Locate seats, sit down. "Wait a minute, we're actually behind the banks of PA speakers"
8:30pm-10:00pm - listen to the genius of Bob Dylan, well at least his band because could hardly hear a word the man sung. Naturally he has reverb on his vocal channel, but by the time this bounces of the back and corners of the Arena and gets back up front to our ears, the vocals are just one big muddle. Great view though!

Take-home lessons for the kids out there

Concert promoters, ticketing agencies, venue management will ALWAYS screw you wherever they can (in this case by selling tickets that did not so much require a 'restricted viewing' warning but rather a 'restricted listening' warning...none was forthcoming at purchase time and some would say the listening is quite an important part of music)
Never, ever, skimp on important concert tickets. Get the second-cheapest or higher. Don't expect the cheapest seats to actually really be part of the same concert experience as the rest.

Bruce Willis/Robert Duvall WILL save us

2007-08-07T23:13:00.000+12:00

From asteroids that is. Remember the dual-threat asteroid-doom movies of 1999? You may have tried to forget Armageddon but Aerosmith's epic theme song "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" sticks to your heart like bad cholesterol. And you can't forget Deep Impact because that was that other asteroid movie of 1998 and you're positive there were two.

Well it turns out that, as usual, the folks at NASA are watching everbody's backs. Slashdot reports that TopSpin rights that Flight International reports (god I love the blogosphere) "scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center have developed designs for an array of asteroid interceptors wielding 1.2-megaton B83 nuclear warheads. The hypothetical mission for these designs is based on an Apophis-sized Earth impactor 2 to 5 years out."

What's an Apophis-sized Earth impactor? The scenario is based on the REAL Apophis asteroid, which on April 13 2029 "will pass closer to earth than geosynchronous satellites orbit." Wowzer!

10 weeks to go...

2007-08-06T17:51:00.000+12:00

...until I hand in my four research papers. Things are going very well indeed. Just gave another seminar on one paper, which means I've done 80% out of 400% of assessment.

Now just one seminar to go on Friday 17th. That last one isn't marked so no more assessment until final deadline!

----------------
Now playing: Two - Ryan Adams
via FoxyTunes

Jon Stewart gives Parliament the smack-down...

2007-07-28T10:32:00.000+12:00

Parliament passed a law outlawing the use of the new permanent broadcast for satire.

Jon Stewart's Daily Show has got our back, in its regular 'America to the Rescue' segment.

Why we have the internet

2007-07-25T22:34:00.000+12:00

While searching the internet to see what the 'Fruit Leather' in Cookie Time Christmas Cookies is made of (I've always wondered) I came across a site that reminded me of pretty much the entire internet circa 1998. Before all this fancy-schmancy Web2.0 guff came along.

Check it out: Mom's Fruit Leather Innovations and The "Magic" of an Egg Explained

Latest column on www.theset.co.nz - Youth Parliament and voting age

2007-07-23T21:57:00.000+12:00

Hey folks, my latest column has just been published on www.theset.co.nz
Enjoy

12 weeks to go...

2007-07-22T15:43:00.000+12:00

12 weeks until deadline for papers, they're going well and I'm preparing to give presenations on two of them over the next few weeks (one presentation done already, went well).

Oh, and a website: http://www.shaunmcgirr.com/

Awesome-ist lego creation ever

2007-07-17T22:32:00.000+12:00

Yes, a 350-pound lego aircraft carrier.

14 weeks to go...

2007-07-08T17:01:00.000+12:00

Well its 14 weeks since I last said how long it is to go until I have to hand in my four research papers. Just working on one of them now made me remember and look at my countdown calendar. Thankfully its not 40,000 words on October 15th...actually only about 30,000 now due to stuff already written and them not all needing to be 10,000 words exactly.

Peace out.

I'm a teacher!

2007-07-07T13:32:00.000+12:00

Well, a tutor more accurately. For POLS112 - 'Introduction to Political Ideas' here at Vic. Bascially, its about all the -isms... liberalism, conservatism, socialism, etc. It will be my first time tutoring a university course and I'm pretty excited!

Ok so we didn't win that big auld mug, but...

2007-07-04T12:31:00.000+12:00

...we did get listed as one of the eight best geek vacations by Wired magazine!!! Surely that's some consolation, no? Ok, it was Lord Of The Rings hangover, but still.

Wired Magazine: The Best Geek Vacations

What we're all eating

2007-06-16T13:23:00.000+12:00

Wow - Time Magazine Photo Essay

Research update - Politics and Markets

2007-06-06T19:05:00.000+12:00

Part II in the never-ending quest to find the perfect 'cocktail party lines' to succinctly and accurately describe my research. Actually, it's very helpful to a researcher keep restating her/his theses!

For Politics and Markets I am integrating document formats into the recent literature on the "networked information economy". The central idea of that literature is that this new information economy (with the Internet at its foundation) has replaced the previous, capital-intensive "industrial information economy". Any change to the structure of an economy threatens its incumbents, who in this case are both the traditional media and (ironically) the large telecommunications companies that own the infrastructure of this new network that so threatens their interests. Skype on your Xtra broadband connection to save on Telecom toll calls anyone?

What seems to have been missed is that most of the electronic work of the world is still done in documents, discrete 'containers' of specific information. For documents to work as tools, they need to be based on standards, so I can read what you have written and vice versa. Microsoft gained a monopoly on desktop computers with Windows through the 90's, leading to dominance of Microsoft Office and its proprietary, binary (i.e. non-human-readable) file formats. They became defacto standards. Recently, a competing XML (human-readable) file format (Open Document Format - ODF) was developed and released as an 'open file format'. This means no one vendor is in control of its development, and anybody is free to implement it in a free or commercial software package.

When the State of Massachusetts IT office mandated that government documents be stored in these formats and not Microsoft's defacto standard formats, there was a media and political furore. After the shouting, Massachusetts began the implementation using a plug-in for Microsoft Office that allows documents to be saved in ODF. The recently-released Microsoft Office 2007 has its own 'open format' (though there is some argument over just how open it is). This is in part a move by Microsoft to allay government and customer concerns about how their information is stored - everybody wants to access all their documents forever. After all, it is their data and they want to hold the keys to it. So now there are potentially two competing document standards, that for most users will be indistinguishable for most everyday uses. But what happens when you get emailed a document in a 'foreign' format? What if your government stores documents in only one of these formats?

This is a debate about:

the cost to users of accessing public information
the persistent storage of that information
the ability of users to easily exchange their information
whether one standard and competing implementations is 'better' than competing standards
whether strong network effects of a defacto standard may, even after they open their standard, give one company "too much power to control the course of innovation" (James Boyle)

This is a difficult paper! I have to sift through technical arguments, economics, law and politics. It is, however, very very interesting.

Friends in far-off places

2007-05-18T08:43:00.000+12:00

My friends Christian and Clare (the CCIA - who do you think invented that?) are about to embark on a super-tour, going it seems, EVERYWHERE in Europe. Follow their progress at http://christianclare.blogspot.com/

The Bolger Years MkII - 3rd column on www.theset.co.nz

2007-05-15T18:17:00.000+12:00

My latest politics column on http://www.theset.co.nz is an expansion of my earlier 'Bolger Years' post. Enjoy!

Post: http://www.theset.co.nz/home/node/262
Previous posts and profile: http://www.theset.co.nz/home/taxonomy/term/87

Good old RiffRaff4

2007-05-03T21:05:00.000+12:00

Some time ago I was a member of a jazz quartet in Christchurch called RiffRaff4. They were good times, but the band doesn't exist any more.

However, if you are in Christchurch, New Zealand and want some good jazz for your event, then send me a message via the following page and I'll put you in touch with the right people - www.contactify.com/a4a94

au revoir

Carolyn the Caravan for sale

2007-05-03T20:21:00.000+12:00

RDU is finally letting go of beloved Carolyn, its faithful campervan of many years. The campervan is pivotal to the station's history (Wammo and Spanky broadcast out of it from Victoria Street during renovations) and is listed on TradeMe here. Get in quick, it's going to fetch an amazing price!

More info: http://www.rdu.org.nz/cheapaschips2007.html

The Bolger Years

2007-05-03T19:40:00.000+12:00

Last Friday and Saturday I attended the seventh annual Parliamentary Conference, organised by the Stout Research Centre and the Political Science Department at Victoria.

An amazing experience, reliving the politically turbulent 1990's, the era that got me interested in politics in the first place.

We heard from all the major players, including former Prime Ministers Bolger and Shipley, former ministers Birch, Richardson, Kidd, Burdon, as well as various media people, public servants and party officials.

The final session was the best. First Sir Douglas Graham, then Sir Tipene O'Regan, and finally Chris Finlayson spoke about the Treaty of Waitangi negoatiations process. Sir Douglas gave a very moving speech, concluding that he hoped he had done some good in the process, but what he received was ten times more. He was overcome with emotion in making this final point, no doubt as a result of the task he was given in the 90's - to begin 150 years worth of healing between Iwi and the Crown.

Two things struck me at the conference. The first was how convincingly the neo-liberal economic agenda introduced in the second term of Lange Labour government and the first term of the Bolger National govenment has won the policy debate in NZ. Now it is a given, and accepted by all major parties that we are tied economically, for better and worse, to the fate of the world economy.

The second thing was that no matter how you view that policy victory, and its inevitable social costs, I think most can agree that the Bolger government significantly shifted the Treaty discourse in Aotearoa New Zealand. This shift was towards a mode more constructive and beneficial, one of reconciliation, reparation and remorse.

Back in Wellington

2007-04-17T17:00:00.000+12:00

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?

2007-04-04T18:12:00.000+12:00

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

2007-04-03T00:10:00.000+12:00

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.

Tourists and cricket

2007-03-31T12:53:00.000+12:00

Overheard while walking past a cricket game and some tourists this morning: "Ah I've been wondering about zis - dey are all wearing white, so how do you know who is on which team?"

Fascinating! To people more accustomed to overtly adversarial sports, those pitched battles between teams striving openly for domination, cricket must seem very strange, sedate, and English.

A little too fishy...

2007-03-29T19:08:00.000+12:00

This evening I started to make the wonderful Tuna & Cannellini Bean salad from Cuisine (http://www.cuisine.co.nz/index.cfm?pageID=50971) when I realised the tin of fish I had just open was actually JW salmon.

I had been seduced at the supermarket a week earlier by its cheap price and proximity to the tuna I also bought at the time, but used earlier. I decided to persevere with the salmon.

On opening the tin I was horrified to discover a small bone, the sort that riddled that underwhelming whole fish you unwisely ordered at that restaurant last year. 'Ok' I thought, 'maybe they just do things like this with salmon.' Then I saw a piece of skin. Then I saw more bones...but not just little hair-like bones, actual cylindrical spinal-cordy-looking things.

Arghhhhhhhhhhhhh! What the hell is this? When I buy a tinned good, I expect it to be reasonable well prepared inside, and not just the entrails of somebody's first salmon-hacking training lesson. Straight into the bin with that, not spending an hour extracting the real fish from the fish meal ingredients and still being mortally afraid of the result!

Or have I got this completely wrong? Up 'til now I lived what I have come to realise, all too abruptly, a gilded salmon life. Being grandson of an accomplished Rakaia fisherman means I don't think I ever opened a can of salmon before. Perhaps it is always like my experience tonight? God I hope not.

Anyway out of all traumatic experiences one can extract a silver lining. Mine was this salad:

Shaun's Rescue Salad (thank you Ryan Adams)

one can cannellini beans
half a can beetroot
some sprouts
a red onion, chopped in half vertically, then into medium slices horizontally, to create nice half-rings of various sizes (soak in water for 5-10 minutes if the bite is too much)
torn spinach leaves (however many it takes to even the colour balance)
a few drizzles of olive oil and some lemon juice
some cottage cheese if you like that sort of thing

The best photos from Camp A Low Hum

2007-03-28T11:09:00.000+12:00

From 2007-02-02 (C...

see them all here: http://picasaweb.google.com/worksong/20070202CampALowHum2007

Would you live in Plato's city?

2007-03-25T21:16:00.000+12:00

Disturbing and interesting news from the UK recently, courtesy of two reports by the lecturers' union there. It seems 'core subjects' are being gutted from many universities, meaning some can't offer basic science subjects or foreign languages to students.

Strange isn't it, when there are fortunes to be made on the continent, that:

"The number of higher education institutions offering French has fallen by 15% in the past decade, institutions providing German courses have dropped by one-quarter, and institutions offering Italian have fallen by 9%, the report says."

http://education.guardian.co.uk/universitiesincrisis/story/0,,2008543,00.html

European integration? Perhaps Margaret lives on. I wonder what the numbers are like in New Zealand. I know Spanish has taken off remarkably in the last five years, after previously being only offered at Waikato. Likely not for trade with Spain though. Russian at Victoria was axed at the turn of the century, and the department at Canterbury is now under threat. I have no idea about European and Asian languages, may do some digging.

I attended a celebration on Wednesday of the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, the 'founding document' of what is today the EU. There Terry Ryan, a former Member of the European Parliament spoke in passionate Wigan-ese terms about the value of language education in unlocking business opportunities in Europe. We cannot simply rely on the good fortune of being native English speakers.

Also, we cannot simply rely on science to solve all problems. Thanks to science, there is probably enough food produce on Earth to feed the entire population. But it doesn't. And thanks to science, there are some amazing treatments for debilitating and deadly illnesses. But these aren't available to everyone. Why? The problems are economic and political.

I was particularly struck by the sometimes arrogance and hubris of science in comments about the above reports in The Times Higher Education Supplement where I originally spotted the story. Unfortunately it's subscription-only so I can't quote exactly, but in the front-page story, a professor at the soon-to-be closed Reading University Physics Department said "I can't believe they're cutting out physics. At times like these we need science, not wooly courses. Only science can solve the world's problems."

He has a point, physics departments shouldn't be closed, and we do need science. But science can only solve some of the world's problems, for some of its people. At the same time that the heralded advances of modern science are available to relatively few, is it any surprise that the academic world, becoming increasingly subject to market forces worldwide, is introducing new fashionable degrees and forcing out 'core' disciplines in arts and sciences?

Those wooly courses referred to are, presumably, all humanities, and probably most of the social sciences. The professor forgets that science is only part of the picture. Once a technical challenge is solved the solution must be propagated to 'save the world' - time and again we have seen this is the tougher challenge. How will that happen without students of History and Sociology to track its course and provide us with feedback of its impact on societies? Who apart from Political Scientists will theorise and examine the possibilities of new governance mechanisms to regulate the wonderful world of science?

Perhaps a more productive stance would be to focus on the well-being of academia as if it were a human whole. Cutting off small parts ('courses with decreasing demand') may reserve more blood ('money') for core competencies ('vocational degrees in profitable industries') but eventually the organism loses manual dexterity and eventually thought (the ability to critique itself). Infighting will help neither sciences nor arts.

Perhaps the professor will say 'scientists should govern'. The idea of technocracy - government by those most able to govern - is not new and might indeed spread the achievements of science equitably across the globe. But I think not. Besides, such a conception elevates scientific knowledge above all else, a fallacy. In Plato's city, the myth of the metals was used to explain why certain social classes existed. The 'Golds' were the rulers, philosopher-kings whose lives were devoted to the consideration and application of 'perfect rule'.

What if we should forgo politics and submit our destinies to those who 'know best'? I for one would rather live in the world of uncertainty and turmoil, and feel I have some say, however small, than be ruled by an all-knowing cult of science.

My latest on www.theset.co.nz

2007-03-20T14:04:00.000+12:00

My latest article is up on www.theset.co.nz - official website of the Smokefree RockQuest. This one is called 'Representation - is it a good thing?' Here's a snippet:

"it can be hard to bear what often seems the dominant form of political discourse in this country – ‘moaning’. Yes government by its nature is imperfect, we all know that. And that politicians sometimes do naughty things is a given."

Read the full thing here: http://www.theset.co.nz/home/node/176

Cyborg anybody?

2007-03-17T16:36:00.000+13:00

One can argue that we are already moving towards becoming cyborgs by the technological devices we adorn ourselves with, and feel pain to be separated from. This guy though, has taken it one step further. He has implanted an RFID tag (like those to be used in NZ for tracking dogs) in his wrist, enabling him to logon to his systems with proximity rather than passwords. Interesting, and I imagine quite convenient. Imagine the consequences of large-scale adoption though...no driver's licenses, credit cards, door keys...and if the state got control of the technology?

http://www.rubbervir.us/projects/rfid/

Maps of data

2007-03-15T14:36:00.000+13:00

Came across these amazing visualisations of two datasets - first is scientific paradigms and their relations, second is the relative strengths of nations. http://didi.com/brad/mapOfScience/

easylowdown

2007-03-14T21:43:00.000+13:00

Rather than checking a blog site, which can make you look obsessive, why not subscribe to the changes via email? Put your address in the box to the right, and click the button. Then verify your address in the email that it sends you. Simple!

Course correction

2007-03-14T21:35:00.000+13:00

Last Friday was a tough one. Having tried out almost all the Honours courses I had to choose which four to do. There were six I would have been happy to do, but the best combination for me was:

Politics of International Migration - looking at an under-researched area of politics, formerly considered 'low politics' and outside the remit of serious, realist IR. But increasingly important. Why do people migrate? How much control do states have? Who sets and benefits from immigration policy? So moving beyond economic cost/benefit equations of migration to bring in political considerations as well.

Politics of Market Creation in Europe - one of the International Political Economy (IPE) -based classes at Vic (there are several offered). Looking at major theories of the relationship between politics (including but not limited to states) and economics (including but not limited to markets) and using examples from Europe to illustrate. Trying to unpack 'Globalisation' a little too.

Global Civil Society - looking at all the stuff that happens 'outside' states and inter-governmental organisations. So NGOs and social movements, and their effects on development at local, national, regional, global levels. From the discussion in class today, definitions aren't that simple though. Also looking at what 'Globalisation' might mean and what people do about it.

Political Sociology - reading and discussing the 'big ideas', the big frameworks of political systems and political change. Starting on Friday with Fukuyama and Huntington, proceeding from there to look at electoral systems, political choice etc.

Hard-core? Yes, more so than what I started at Canterbury. I'm very happy with the choice and combination. Plenty of intertwining, but minimal over-lapping (I won't be reading the same authors twice!)

And now just a bit over thirty weeks and 40,000 words separate me from an Honours degree.

News, on the run

2007-03-09T22:47:00.000+13:00

If you ain't got time to be reading New York Times articles (they're so long!) and when the BBC just seems so dry, why not try 'The First Post'?

At The First Post you can read a variety of mostly one-page articles about the current events of the day. And not just the hum-drum of politics...but arts, culture, and a really nice 'picture of the day' section.

A small excerpt from their 'About Us' page (I love About Us pages, especially when they are a major link on a site) says "Our political OPINION has been described as 'ill-defined' and even 'all over the place'. This is what we want to hear." Nice.

www.thefirstpost.co.uk - hopefully the name is an ironic gibe at blogs

Camera Obscura at SFBH

2007-03-09T22:03:00.000+13:00

Wow what a gig! Camera Obscura are a band from Glasgow, and they play plaintive, melancholic, hopeful pop music that harkens back but has modern synthey bits too.

Their set at the San Francisco Bath House (formerly Indigo) on Wednesday got off to a wee bit of a shaky start. They'd only just flown in from Sydney, and they looked and sounded very tired. This led to a little shakiness to begin with, but they soon became unstoppable.

The real turning point was 'Books Written For Girls' off their second album, 'Underachievers Please Try Harder'. For this, the drummer moved to percussion, the percussionist/trumpeteer moved to guitar, and TracyAnne Campbell the lead singer put down her guitar. Kenny the guitarist got out the old metal slide and I almost teared up.

Total magic. After the idiots in the front-right corner (yes you know who you are!) realised they were the only ones talking in the gaps and shut up, there was absolute silence. How often does that happen? I have it on good authority that the number is never for SFBH.

Here's an excerpt from that song:

You can compliment me on the style of my hair
Give me marks out of ten for the clothes that I wear
You probably thought I had more upstairs.

Thanks to AbsoluteLyrics.com

From then on the whole band seemed buoyed by the raucous applause, the banter increased, TracyAnne became sweeter, and the crowd was more enthralled. They left 'Let's Get Out Of This Country' til last - and it rocked!

And then, to my delight, a genuine encore. Yes the real thing folks - five minutes of applause, yelling and stomping, and then a nice little two-song send-off.

If you're an RDU listener you'll already be familiar with 'Let's Get Out Of This Country' and 'Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken' (thanks Pip!). Rest assured the 2006 album 'Let's Get Out Of This Country' has plenty more to offer than just the hits. It has to be one of my top five albums of last year.

Another thing that pleases me immensely is that Camera Obscura has a great flash-based website (including compilation tapes, recipes, film recommendations, wisdom, top fives and book reviews - one theme per member) www.camera-obscura.net

Take note bands...a SpyMace page may be good for accumulating 'adds' and for letting people listen to four of your tracks free, but your 'rad' yellow text on semi-scrolling black background with the tiled, moody cover photo from your latest EP just doesn't cut it I'm afraid. That is all.

Battle of titans

2007-03-07T19:12:00.000+13:00

I had a farcical battle yesterday morning on the hills of Wellington. I was running along Mairangi Road and just when it changes into Pembroke Road, a man on a mobility scooter darted out of a driveway.

Initially he pulled away, but I caught up, and turns out his model scooter was the perfect pace-setter for me. I stayed behind for about 10 minutes, wondering whether I could pass or whether that would get me tooted at and run down later if I slowed.

Then a complicated hilly intersection! He had to slow right down to get to the kerb round the corner, and I sped past, on to victory.

I'm sure to an observer it must have seemed quite an absurd battle, or else some weird training exercise from my geriatric running coach. All I can say is watch out for terrors on the footpaths...

Oh, that great gig

2007-03-05T19:17:00.000+13:00

I turned up late, but the first of two pre-sales, to an extremely under-subscribed gig on Saturday.

Jon Auer of The Posies and the rejuvenated Big Star (they wrote the original version of the theme song from That 70's Show) played a wonderful solo gig in support of his new album 'Songs from the Year of Our Demise'. Tracks on MySpace here.

In the end it turned out great, about fifteen people and a legend of alternative-power-pop with a fantastic honest voice and really nice guitar work. He even took us outside to the street with just his guitar at one point, and wove charming tales of each song's creation in the gaps between.

I also had an interesting conversation with the support act, Jeremy (didn't catch his last name) about the state of modern music. He said 'it used to be that you would have to use two or three bands and/or genres to give someone an idea of a fourth band's sound, but now you can often just say 'sounds like A'. I said 'maybe we need some better adjectives' and he said 'maybe we just need some better bands'!

We agreed that there is perhaps just too much music out there, too accessible, too permeable. I decried my always-too-big pile of 'current listening' and identified with his constant returns to the familiar, those comfortable classics of one's collection. And whereas previously NZ music existed in semi-splendid isolation and was distinctive and special because of it, the widespread availability of ANYTHING via several media ranging from free to cheap, has perhaps lead to a loss of innocence and uniqueness in NZ music. Yes, perhaps more NZ music is being sold now, and its profile is higher, but is it still NZ music? Interesting to consider.

On arriving I met and chatted with the promoter, a nice guy called Jim, who is also bringing Camera Obscura to the San Francisco Bath House on Wednesday! Woo hoo! Hopefully it will sell out on the night.

32 weeks to go

2007-03-05T18:44:00.000+13:00

Just had a marathon first day of Honours classes, and I'm not even enrolled in any Monday classes yet!

As often happens, a course that was moved to avoid a clash with two other courses, now clashes with only one course, which I, of course, am enrolled in. I enrolled in:

Global Governance
Global Civil Society
Bureaucratic Power in Western Democracies
Sociology of Political Change

...which sounded like a good combo. But the last two clash, so in this first week I will be visiting every class and 'testing' each one as much as possible.

Today I visited:

Comparative Politics: Europe (which is really more of an IPE course, using European examples to explain marketisation of societies)
Politics of International Migration (very interesting and under-explored topic, of special interest to me via my semi-accidental background in censuses)
Insurgency and Counter-insurgency (looking at theories and examples of non-traditional political violence)

All of them were great, which shows how impossible it is to judge course content, approach, and teaching method from a course description...I had initially passed over all of these!

So now I am in quite a happy dilemma. After being satisfied with the four courses I originally chose, I am now in the difficult but also encouraging position of potentially picking, and being happy with, ANY of the Victoria POLS/INTP Honours courses. What a programme!

32 weeks to go until Monday October 15th, the blanket deadline for all Pols Honours written work.

When you need a friend

2007-03-02T16:49:00.000+13:00

Think soaring Houston melody...

That's right friends, if your SpyMace page isn't yet 'pimped' with all the 'hotties' you need to be cool, then FakeYourSpace can save your bacon.

Simply splash down some money, and you get a 'hot' new friend on your SpyMace page. (Be sure to make them a top friend so that people cruising your hopelessly formatted page with no content see your candy!)

http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/fakeyourspacecom-a-place-where-you-can-rent-a-friend/

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

2007-03-02T15:52:00.000+13:00

My actual hero is Bob Dylan. Not to take anything away from Wayne.

Anyway, the 1965 documentary of Dylan's final acoustic tour through the UK is about to be reissued. Here's a preview clip of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" from "Don't Look Back". A great song, and a wonderful performance.

And the lyrics, as with all of Dylan's, are helpfully catalogued on his site: http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/babyblue.html

Wayne Anderson you are my hero

2007-03-01T21:15:00.000+13:00

At the student union building on Tuesday, I was live witness to the musical genius that is Mr. Wayne Anderson, "Singer of Songs".

With a commanding stage presence and a three-and-a-half octave range, Mr. Anderson took on a swathe of sultry songs from across the repertoire, including 'Sheryl Moana Marie' by John Rowles.

Wayne was recently featured on his own TV2 show, in an unforgivable graveyard weeknight timeslot.

If you missed is here are some educational links:

Official website: http://www.wayneanderson.tv/
MySpace page (come on, every self-respecting serious musician has one): http://www.myspace.com/mrwayneanderson
YouTube videos of the show: http://www.youtube.com/butobase

See especially Wayne's treatise on the relative virtues of Manurewa living and canned goods: 'It's Got Sausages In It' - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWSEieQAaOs

We flagellate ourselves for our performance at the gym

2007-02-26T23:09:00.000+13:00

Yes Lawrence Arabia, you got it right alright.

Attending my new gym in Wellington is fun. I get to spot a whole new set of poseurs and voyeurs. Like the guy doing a 'lat pulldown' which involves lifting off the seat slightly, leaning far back and engaging in a full-body tuck in order to bring the bar down.

Or the go-go dance bicep curl. Or the lazy-row. I could go on...

Here's a tip: go with a weight that you can actually do correctly! Weights can be dangerous if used improperly, and even machines don't enforce good technique. Be careful out there kids.

You want a quick fix? Go buy an Abflex Kingomatic 9000.

Note: Flagellate (verb) not to be confused with Flagellate (noun). Or for a conservative take on Flagellate (noun) that helps defeat the liberal US media machine, go to http://www.conservapedia.com/Flagellate. Thank you.

Drains...

2007-02-26T23:01:00.000+13:00

These guys explore drainage systems in Canada! And some nice photos and words come out of it all.

"The built environment of the city has always been incomplete, by omission and necessity, and will remain so. Despite the visions of futurists, the work of our planners and cement-layers thankfully remains a fractured and discontinuous whole, an urban field riven with internal margins, pockmarked by decay, underlaid with secret waterways." - http://vanishingpoint.ca/about.html

Thankfully indeed! Add it to your list of hobbies to take up.

A good date is hard to find

2007-02-26T22:38:00.000+13:00

Yes, we all know a good date is hard to find. But for any event, there comes a time when you have to set the date and just be done with it! And, importantly, let everybody know the correct date.

Already I have been extremely put out and led astray by the VUWSA (that's pronounced view-sah, it's like UCSA uk-sah) and their orientation magazine. Luckily I checked several SpyMace pages and the VUWSA site itself to make sure I wasn't mistaken.

Spare a thought for all the first-year students, who, unknowing of such problems, won't be attending So So Modern at the San Francisco Bath House on TUESDAY night not WEDNESDAY. Yes.

So So Modern are a great band, I recommend seeing them at the earliest possible opportunity. Here is a picture of the crazy kids in their jumpsuits entertaining the indie kids at Camp A Low Hum.

Youf R our fytr

2007-02-26T22:31:00.000+13:00

Youth are our future. They are the future payers of taxes, and the future lookers-after of the people always just a wee bit older than they are.

With this heady and noble mission in mind, I have become (thanks to Spanky) a 'political columnist' for www.theset.co.nz - the official SmokeFreeRockQuest website.

From time to time, I may post links to articles on said website, like this one by me: Politix: Your awkward introduction to the P-word!

Oh that's right, 'welcome to my blog'

2007-02-26T22:28:00.000+13:00

Just remember reading somewhere that one should always welcome readers to the blog.

Welcome. This will be a place for needless and senseless commentary on all things mundane and fantastic. Including, but not limited to: the new city of Wellington; music; news; the WWW.

Under no circumstances should it be read. And Firefox and IE7 users, certainly please don't subscribe to it by clicking the little orange wavey icon up the top there.

Nickname etymology

2007-02-26T22:14:00.000+13:00

Shauny or Shaunie? Tough question. As far as I can remember, the nickname was first given to me by a family friend, Helen, over two decades ago ouch.

Took a break for a while as 'Scrauny' dominated the mid-90's, care of The Scout Assocation of NZ. Also Shaunis (mid-late 90's), McGrrr (new millenium nickname project care of Lee Ann at Stats).

Then 2006 and a true dialectic was set up, between 'Shauny/ie' (care of Pip) and 'Bills/sy' (care of JuJu).

Which remains dominant, and whether any new contenders enter the running, remains to be seen. Wellington is, after all, fertile ground for nicknames.