No-oh-oh. Eurrrrghh (makes noise of utter disgust). Yeuurgh! No, one does not choose to Twitter. Damn no!The magnificent Mr Pop is 62.
I do not know at what age children’s brains fully develop and they start realising that ‘go back to bed’ are the four best words in the English language alongside ‘fancy a quick pint?’ and ’shall I wear boots?’The full post is here. It’s not one of his best, to be honest. Scroll down a bit for the bowls and chickens ones to get the full benefit.
We shouldn't forget Winston Peters either, though Lord knows I want to.
In a display that a European Union spokesman called “too bizarre to acknowledge”, Governor General Michaelle Jean gutted the seal and swallowed a slice of the mammal’s heart late on Monday.
Mrs Jean’s bold action came after an EU vote earlier this month to impose a ban on seal products on grounds that the seal hunt is cruel.
Hundreds of Inuit at a community festival gathered on Monday as Mrs Jean knelt above a pair of seal carcasses and used a traditional ulu blade to slice the meat off the skin. After cutting through the flesh, she turned to the woman beside her and asked: “Could I try the heart?”
After swallowing a piece whole and deeming it tasty, Mrs Jean, whose post is largely ceremonial, defended the hunt as a traditional hunting practice that is not inhumane.
Bit like the time he chased through my bedroom with the freshly shot dead rabbit.There is much, much more in this vein here. This, readers, is what I married into.
It’s a serious concern. The US is going to subsidise 92,000 tonnes of export product. In perspective, New Zealand only produces 105,000 tonnes, so it’s the equivalent of almost subsidising all New Zealand’s production.
A phenomenally talented actress, [. . .] Thomas’s fluent French and world-weary eyes are undeniably compelling.Which is to say, her fluent French is a phenomenally talented actress, as are her eyes.
An acclaimed novelist, his film embraces. . .His film is a novelist.
The best form of food safety is the ability to look the butcher in the eye.Monitor: The Week
Enjoying a leisurely meal or just getting enough sleep can seem like luxuries. But not so in France, where people spend more time dining, imbibing and snoozing than anywhere else in the mostly-rich countries of the OECD. Americans also get a lot of shut-eye, but (fond of fast food) probably suffer indigestion along with neighbouring Mexicans and Canadians. South Koreans and Japanese reportedly survive on an hour's less sleep than the French.We can take pride in the fact that New Zealanders score so closely on both measures to the French. All we need now is something like their sense of style.
Two points about Mike King’s “disgust”. Firstly – yes the pigs were screaming. Why? It was the middle of the night or early morning. The pigs had been left alone and were suddenly woken by human activity. What does this usually mean for them? Quite simply – feeding time. Free range pigs have EXACTLY the same reaction. If King and his companions had fed the pigs the screaming would have stopped. Guarantee it. Secondly – the chewing of bars and frothing of the mouth? Again, it is completely standard across all pigs. They chew things. Free range pigs it’ll be tree branches etc, for pigs in stalls or crates it’ll be bars. And yes, they froth. Christ, you should see them when they mate!UPDATE: More sensible comment from Home Paddock:
If pig farming in New Zealand breaches animal welfare standards it will have to change. But if higher – and more expensive – standards are imposed on the industry here nothing will be achieved if imported products from countries with lower, and cheaper, standards are permitted to compete with local produce.UPDATE II: Further sensible comment from Farmgirl here, and, of all people, Brian Rudman here.
Stopping imports or imposing higher standards on them is fraught with politics. Anything we require of imports must be based on facts or we’ll open ourselves up to chrages of imposing non tarrif barriers.
That won’t help the New Zealand pork industry and it will harm our efforts to free up world trade.
Fairfax Magazines New Zealand, publisher for some of this country’s biggest titles, is inviting staff to go on to a nine-day fortnight so it can avoid job losses.This result is less about New Zealand than it is about Fairfax Australia, which merged with Rural Press in a $A9 billion deal in May 2007. (Though this report from Crikey suggests that the resulting company is really Rural Press trading as Fairfax.) Still, the precipitous drop in advertising has hit all media hard on both sides of the Tasman.
Staff were told yesterday but it was not linked to a Standard & Poor’s surprise move to downgrade Fairfax Media’s credit rating. [. . .]
Fairfax Magazines is not alone among media companies stung in a dramatic advertising downturn. All media are having to adjust.
But corporate management at Fairfax Media in Australia faced another disappointment yesterday when Standard & Poor’s lowered long-term corporate credit and debt ratings for the media company to BB+ from BBB-.
The decision adds $10 million to the interest bills for Fairfax in the coming financial year.
Standard & Poor’s said that this and another rating action reflected ongoing deterioration of Fairfax’s advertising earnings.
Earlier this week, Fairfax warned its fiscal 2009 underlying earnings would fall by 27 per cent to about A$600 million due to a sharp deterioration in advertising revenues.
For starters, it does not gather data from the Web. Instead, its “knowledge base” is made up of reams and reams of data — ranging from the kinds of facts you would find in a World Almanac, to highly specialized data from physics and other sciences — that some 100 employees at Wolfram Research have gathered, verified and organized over several years.There are some screenshots here that give a preview of what will become available. Call me kinky, but those charts and graphs are dead sexy. I’ll be using it a lot. It will be great for any queries based on statistics whether weather, housing, unemployment, crime, you name it. Here, for example, is what it gives (click the image to see a larger version) in answer to the query “internet users in Europe”:
When a user types in a query, WolframAlpha tries to determine the relevant area of knowledge and find the answers, often by performing calculations on its data. If you type “LDL 120,” it will return a graph showing the distribution of cholesterol levels among the United States population, and display the percentage of people above and below that figure. If you type “LDL 120 male 33,” it will adjust the results to focus on that gender and age group.
In response to “how far is the Moon from Earth,” WolframAlpha will calculate the exact distance based on an algorithm that computes the ever-changing distance between the two bodies.
some shoppers are embracing austerity not just out of necessity but also as somewhat of a fashion. Ostentatious parsimony is the new conspicuous consumption. . .The paper is here as a 199KB PDF. Money quote:
Ryan Vinelli at New York’s Yeshiva University noted in a recent paper the emergence of what he calls “luxury shame”. Mr Vinelli reckons that outrage against the public handouts to rich bankers and businessmen has turned sentiment against eye-catching displays of wealth. Although his analysis applies to luxurious items such as designer handbags, similar behaviour may now begin to affect the grocery till. IGD’s research has found that whereas purchases are plunging for organic foods (seen as a personal indulgence for rich consumers), they are holding firm on fair-trade and locally sourced products (also sold at premium prices but seen more as a way to do good to others).
“Luxury shame,” or the anxiety felt by consumers for buying luxury brand products, is a radical departure from attitudes displayed just a year ago. There is increasing evidence that this anxiety, either in the form of guilt or shame, is forcing consumers to either forgo purchasing luxury products, or to completely change how they purchase them. For instance, the CBS Early Show aired a segment about women avoiding purchasing luxury goods in stores (i.e., in person) in favor of purchasing via exclusive websites that mail the goods in discreet packaging (i.e., anonymously). Exclusive online merchants such as Gilt Groupe (gilt.com), and Ideeli (ideeli.com) profit from the luxury consumers’ shame and guilt by offering luxury shopping away from the public eye.I don’t know – this is not my world. Sounds like a chick thing, really. I’ll have to ask the guys at Bunnings how they deal with it.
Arapatiki, which translates as “the way of the flounder”, is the name given to the sand flats in the Otago Harbour in front of my house. Material suggesting the inexorable ebbing and flowing of the tide and the call of the korimako (bellbird) are the basic ideas propelling the piece.Do stay till the end for the bonus interview.
The secret of a good dinner party is too much to drink – and a chocolate pudding.Monitor: The Week
It is clear the purchases of rural publications is to influence farmers to ultimately allow Fonterra to list which is the NZX’s end game. Hey, means more fees for them which is where one conflict exists.Meanwhile, more Mark Weldon news – he’s having a good day:
You are correct: you cant be a regulator and be in business at the same time. If Weldon wants to be in business then fine, give up the regulatory function.
If Jane Diplock has any integrity on this whatsoever she would question it and ask the same hard questions you have here. Based on current form I doubt this will happen.
The share price of stock market operator NZX has shot up as much as 10 percent today.According to Cactus, he is the third-largest shareholder in NZX, owning 6.51%. Talk about incentives.
It’s 1940 and George enlists to go and fight in North Africa and Italy in WWII. First he marries Ellen and this is the small misstep on which a tragedy unfolds. George is traumatised by the war - written in superb detail by Pettis - and doesn’t write home. Ellen suffers from this and the four years he’s away devastates their relationship. Ten years on Ellen leaves George. Fifty years on, the daughter Beth goes to Italy to see where George spent the war and try to understand him better. The novel is about the terrible tensions in a marriage and inside an ordinary man, and the extraordinary circumstances that caused them. There are three voices: George, Ellen and Beth’s, and the reader moves seamlessly between them and the three different times.Yes, exactly. And here is a brief note from Vanda Symon about the launch back in March. If you see The First Touch of Light in a bookshop, pick it up, read the two-page prologue and you’ll be hooked.
Pettis’ writing in the novel is sublime; from the first word you know you are in accomplished hands. Every word is purposeful, polished, translucent.
On Monday, in posting some of the data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Society at a Glance report, I noted that the French spent the most time per day eating, but had one of the lowest obesity rates among developed nations.Generally, it seems that the more time you spend eating (OK, a population does), the less likely you are (OK, a population is) to be obese. New Zealand - which eats nearly as slowly as slim France but is nearly as obese as the UK - is a striking outlier on this graph. (Click on it to see a bigger version.)
Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.
Here I’ve plotted out the relationship between time the average person in a given country spends eating and that country’s obesity rate (as measured by the percentage of the national population with a body mass index higher than 30).
There does seem to be some correlation (although, as we all know, correlation is not causation).
He’s like a man with a fork in world of soup.Monitor: The Week
Fancy a desk that looks like it’s puking its guts out? You’re in luck! Plenty of the world’s most buzzed-about designers will happily sell you furniture that will make your children cry.This rocking chair by David Pompa, in a style he calls Surreal Minimalism, is one of the least disturbing:
Why is the situation in an office such a stereotypical scene? I think that this is the reason why people don’t feel as creative in their office environment as they feel in many other places.Not in my office, you don’t.
Our consumerist society has brought us into the position that it’s not any more about designing one more chair or one more table, it’s about designing a unique experience.
I am convinced that our lives are driven very much by the relationships we have to objects all round and I think that as a designer I want to design the basis for these relations.
Interaction is often reduced to a functional basis; this collection is an approach that objects and humans can interact on an emotional level with the aim of stimulating creativity.
The surreal minimalism collection consists of objects which can be randomly combined to a series of office chairs. These chairs are a response to mental and physical needs of people in their office environment.
The visual language centres on personal speculation about the sources of ‘inspiration and creativity.’
I am still in disbelief that New Zealand can have a regulator that has to participate in the market to return profits to shareholders. Any offshore jurisdiction that I deal with that had such a set-up would be chastised by the OECD and FATF for such a conflict, New Zealand must be getting away with it for its perceived "first world" status. It would be the equivalent of the newly heavily regulated and reviewed Cook Islands Financial Services Commission setting up their own trust company to compete against the six licensed companies. Banana republic time indeed and of course the six licensed companies would complain, with good reason.There may be a lesson for NZX and its CEO Mark Weldon from across the Tasman. Few New Zealanders will be following the upheavals at the Australian current affairs magazine The Monthly, in which the highly regarded editor, Sally Warhaft, has walked because of interference from Robert Manne, chair of the advisory board, but there’s a quick overview by the SMH here, an update by Caroline Overington after the deputy editor also walked here, and an excellent critique of the mag by Guy Rundle at Crikey here. While the story itself may be of interest only to media junkies, there are some astute comments about magazine publishing in general which Weldon could consider - in particular, Rundle's key line:
To go into the magazine trade now is like starting a stable just as the first Model T Ford rolls off the line.
Fifty people — editors, fact-checkers and indexers — were on the team in 2000, at the peak of Microsoft’s editorial investment in Encarta. . .
That investment, however, seems to have gone unnoticed by Encarta’s users. Tom Corddry, a senior manager at Microsoft from 1989 to 1996 who headed up its multimedia publishing unit, said, “The editors overestimated the way students would say, ‘This has been carefully edited! And is very authoritative!’”
I recently met a man who entered a room containing the Prime Minister and found himself ducking to avoid a mug Mr Brown had hurled not at him, but at an official who was just leaving.
Never has a single fabric done so little for so many. Denim is hot, uncomfortable and uniquely unsuited to people who spend most of their waking hours punching keys instead of cows. It looks bad on almost everyone who isn't thin, yet has somehow made itself the unofficial uniform of the fattest people in the world.
It's time denim was called on the carpet, for its crimes are legion. Denim, for instance, is an essential co-conspirator in the modern trend toward undifferentiated dressing, in which we all strive to look equally shabby no matter what the occasion. Despite its air of innocence, no fabric has ever been so insidiously effective at undermining national discipline. . .
Although a powerful force for evil, denim has achieved a status that will come as no surprise to fashion historians. Like camouflage fabric, aviator sunglasses and work boots, blue jeans were probably destined for ubiquity thanks to an iron-clad rule of attire adoption. “The sort of garments that become fashionable most rapidly and most completely,” Alison Lurie reminds us in The Language of Clothes, “are those which were originally designed for warfare, dangerous work or strenuous sports.”
because it will annoy him about as much as it does when I get my nieces say to ask, ‘Daddy, where are you going to build the stable?’and insists I play along. Sigh. Here we go. I have to start with this, from her post:
1) Put the link of the person who tagged you on your blog.So here we go.
2) Write the rules (I don’t what they are, they must be these five points)
3) Mention 6 things or habits of no real importance about you.
4) Tag 6 persons adding their links directly.
5) Alert the persons that you tagged them.