Spectator paragraph of the week

In the 26 October issue Marcus Berkmann reviews Keith Huston’s Shady Characters, a book about punctuation marks. Quote unquote:

The pilcrow (¶) survives as a carriage-return marker in word-processing programs but was originally the sign for a new paragraph on medieval manuscripts. In fact, the indented space that now signifies a new paragraph was put in there for monks to draw in the pilcrow afterwards, only after a while they stopped bothering.

In other punctuation-related news, my current editing project is a new short-story collection by Vincent O’Sullivan. It’s a dream job – I remove a comma from one page and then insert one into the next. That’s all I have to do, really.  I’m a comma chameleon.

So here are Culture Club in 1983:

Halloween 2013

God I hate Halloween. My own hyper children are bad enough; as Jean-Paul Sartre nearly said, other people’s hyper children are hell.

But one has to do it, even with bad grace and no swearing.  So there is a bowl of sweets by the door. However, as a defensive measure, I have had Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels on repeat, loud, and this large dead stuffed rat by the front door:

It hasn’t stopped them. What do I have to do? Stockhausen? James Blunt?

UPDATE:

This is what was blasting from 200 Motels as the children came home, “Magic Fingers” with Anysley Dunbar on spectacular drums. If the singers – Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan – sound familiar, that’s because they did the backing vocals on one of the best pop records ever, T Rex’s Electric Warrior:

Wyndham Lewis and Jack White

Wyndham Lewis was possibly the only novelist (Tarr, The Human Age) and magazine editor (BLAST) who was also a great painter. This is what he looked like:

And here is Jack White, formerly of the White Stripes:

 I wonder if they could, by any chance, be related.

Tauranga’s house of horror

Via David Slack, “Tauranga’s $12 million mansion”.  I am from Tauranga and proud to be, but sometimes the city is just embarrassing. It once elected Winston Peters as its MP, and now this. Do click the link for a walk-through.

The house has five bedrooms, seven bathrooms and parking for six cars. Odd. The real-estate agent – who is blameless – says in the video, “It’s majestic as well as sustainable.” And OMG, the furniture. It seems to be high up the Minden, which is between Tauranga and Katikati and affords wonderful views out over Matakana island and Mount Maunganui. And yet I find myself resisting its siren call.

Country matters #5: rural delivery

There has been a predictable chorus of outrage on Twitter about NZ Post’s plan to reduce mail delivery to three days a week in urban centres but keep it at five days a week in the country. Well, I have seen one tweet, but that would count as a “chorus” for the Herald and Stuff.

Urban types may think that rural delivery is just like the postie, except in a van rather than on a bicycle, but it isn’t. It’s a lot more than that. It’s a two-way service, collecting mail as well as delivering it: outside the towns, there is nowhere to post a letter. Every farm is a business that has to send and receive letters and parcels every day so rural delivery is also a courier service. In a town or city you can rent a PO box but that option isn’t available in the country. Nor, often, is the internet.

And what urban types may not realise is that rural delivery is user pays. When I send a letter or package to a client with a RD address, I pay extra. Quite a bit extra. The good people of Devonport and Wadestown can be reassured that they are not subsiding the hayseeds.

Here is what Rural Women NZ has to say on the issue:  

Rural Women New Zealand applauds today’s announcement that the special significance of the rural delivery service has been recognised in the New Zealand Post 2013 Deed of Understanding.

Under the updated deed, urban areas may see a reduction to a three day mail service from 2015, but the five day a week rural delivery service will remain unchanged, except on runs that already have a lower frequency.

“In our submission, which Minister Amy Adams has acknowledged, we highlighted that the rural delivery is so much more than just a mail service and anything that threatened its sustainability would have widespread unintended consequences,” says Rural Women national president, Liz Evans.

“It is a wraparound distribution service that is part of the fabric that holds rural communities together.“Our rural delivery contractors provide a lifeline, delivering supplies, repairs and spare parts, animal health remedies, medicines, and courier parcels.

“The five day service ensures people are able to run their farming enterprises and other rural businesses effectively, even from remote locations.”

Rural delivery contractors also pick up mail and parcels, meaning that it’s feasible to run a production-based business from a rural location. These businesses breathe life into rural communities, as we have seen through our Enterprising Rural Women Awards. Rural Women NZ’s plea to preserve the existing rural delivery service was also based on the limitations of other communications facilities, that urban people take for granted.

“In many rural areas there is limited or no cellphone coverage and we are still dealing with dial-up broadband connections in many cases.”

Public art works in New Zealand #2

Is this a meme, a theme or just a thing? See the previous post on scarlet tubular effusions in Auckland, Hamilton and Cambridge. Here’s another one, in Palmerston North. Clearly, they are heading south. Residents of Foxton and Bulls will be apprehensive. Even Otaki cannot be complacent.

This is The Giants Among Us by Konstantin Dimopoulos. The Manawatu Standard reported on 8 May that it is:

a two-stage work made of bright, slender fibreglass rods that sway softly in the breeze, or whip wildly in the wind.  Clever lighting will seem to set them afire at night. [. . .] The sculpture is the latest funded by the Palmerston North Public Sculpture Trust; the seventh to be installed in the city.
Tomorrow, Dimopoulos will install the other part of the work across Cuba St.
The installation work is timed to be in sync with Palmerston North City Council work to the intersection of Cuba, George and Taonui streets.

More information here.

Police report of the week

This just in from Perth:

A woman has been charged after police allegedly caught her driving while a man lay on her car bonnet dressed in a dinosaur onesie.

Broome police were travelling to Gantheaume Point, Cable Beach about 7.20am when they sighted a white Ford Falcon wagon travelling in the opposite direction.

Police allege the vehicle was travelling at approximately 60km/h with an adult male lying on the bonnet, facing the driver.

Officers stopped the vehicle and located the man still lying on the bonnet, smoking a cigarette, dressed in a dinosaur onesie and wearing a snorkel.

The 23-year-old female driver has been charged with excess 0.05% and reckless driving.

The vehicle was seized under hoon legislation. 

The woman will be summonsed and appear in court at a later date.

The pair are French nationals, believed to be backpackers living in the vehicle.

Via Tim Blair, who comments:

The French are a charming people whose ways are sometimes a mystery to others.

Waikato Times letter of the week #42

I made that number up as I can’t be bothered going back to count how many WaikTimes letters of the week there have been so far – possibly 23, possibly 47. But channelling Douglas Adams, I’m going for 42 for this one from today’s issue, hot off the press, and will continue the sequence sequentially:

Forbidden fruit

Within the New Zealand Parliamentary system today we note that the women members are still listening to the serpent of Garden of Eden days – the “feminist-tree” looks good to them – the eating of its fruit would ensure that they would have the knowledge of God – in fact they would doubtless be like gods!

Their rebellious imput recently inserted into our political ethos at Wellington, follows the same perverted lines as Eve’s reasoning, as she ate the forbidden fruit while heeding the voice of the serpent, and we have found out that her actions have caused us nothing but trouble and unescapable error!

A deep, evil blackness is settling down upon our society, covering the once “righteous-wisdom”,that formerly reinforced the understanding of our leaders over the centuries.  It is a known fact that our lower-natures are subjected to the lure of evil, as sure as sparks travel upward from a fire. So also with the encouragement of those “out-of-the-square” radical thinkers in power, we can only expect more pro-perversion legislation.

GLYWNN MCINNES

Hamilton

It is a known fact that punctuation, spelling and spacing above is exactly as printed in the WaikTimes.

Pink Floyd for Safety Week

Did you know it’s Safety Week, 14-20 October? Meither. Amazing what you learn by following Judith Collins on Twitter.

So here are Pink Floyd live in 1972 with “Careful with That Axe, Eugene”. It was the B-side to “Point Me at the Sky”, which was released in December 1968 and was arguably the first heavy-metal record. It would be worth a lot of money now, so of course I sold it to Real Groovy years ago for about 10 cents. 

Country matters #4

Statistics NZ recently released the regional population figures from the 2013 census. Quote unquote:

All regional council areas showed population growth or had steady populations between 2006 and 2013, except for Gisborne, which had a small decline.

Auckland was the fastest-growing region, increasing by 8.5 percent to 1,415,550 at the 2013 Census. Auckland accounted for over half of New Zealand’s population growth between 2006 and 2013.

Nelson was the second-fastest-growing region, up 8.3 percent to 46,437, followed by Waikato, which increased 6 percent to 403,638.

The overall figures are a bit misleading as they mask intra-regional differences.  As Elton Smallman reports in the Waikato Times, Thames-Coromandel, with a growth of 0.9 per cent, showed a decline in eight of its 12 monitored areas while 10 out of South Waikato’s 16 area units recorded a decline:

“At a national level, everybody is lauding all of the growth in Auckland but the rest of the country has got to deal with it,” said [Professor Natalie Jackson, director of Waikato University’s national institute of demographic and economic analysis].

“The district councils have got to deal with these areas that are not growing and it’s all lumped onto them as if somehow it is their fault,” she said.

“It’s not gloom and doom as much as realisation, and this is to me confirmation of the reality of regional decline and that trend continuing.”

South Waikato mayor Neil Sinclair said there was widespread concern among rural communities over urban drift and the problem needed to be addressed. “Certainly our young ones are leaving in terms of jobs and that’s why my council has taken the strategy of more jobs and better promotion of our district.”

Declining population put pressure on essential services and Mr Sinclair said his council was expected to pick up “the central government slack”.

“We have a basic infrastructure to maintain and if you are losing ratepayers then you are losing your rating base. But you still have to do that infrastructure.”

Indeed. But where I live, “Swayne Road area, Cambridge”, has grown by 524%. Take that, Auckland. We now have a population of 1461. Mathematically inclined readers will be able to work out what the population was in 2006.  Truly, it were all fields around here then. Still is, mostly