Month: December 2006

Ping-pong ball trick (Children of Men)
Revenge on the Easter Bunny (Mallrats) YouTube
String of saliva (Cruel Intentions) YouTube
Dance sequence (Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion)
Chainsaw High Noon (Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2)
Tracking shot turns out to be in mirror (Contact) YouTube
Wake-up speech (Aliens)
Intimidating the stoners (Brick)
Hey, kids! Why not add your own?

Census results are in.
On the ethnicity question, it was reported that:

The 2006 census results reveal 429,429 people – or 11 per cent of the population – called themselves “New Zealanders” or “Kiwis”. Their number increased five-fold since the last census in 2001 and they became the third-biggest ethnic group, behind European and Maori.

I mention this as a followup to two posts in March. I was concerned then about the fact that the campaign to get people to write in “Ethnicity: New Zealander” was going to lessen the utility of the census results. It has.
About one in ten Kiwis wrote in ‘New Zealander’; about one in eight of those ticked another box or two as well.
Take as a premise that some people of exact same background, within the same family even, can sincerely choose to indicate differing ethnicity – NZ European vs New Zealander. If we want an ethnicity question at all, we want to amalgamate these two responses.
It’s probably reasonable to stack those who ticked only ‘NZ European’ with the ‘New Zealander’ only results, giving us a total ‘NZ European’ category population. (Recall, in previous years ‘New Zealander’ was bundled with ‘New Zealand European’ by default.)
But what about someone who ticked ‘Maori’ and wrote in New Zealander as well? There were plenty of these, enough that they were mentioned by a Stats NZ spokesman in the print version of the Dom Post article linked above. Say two brothers exist – one sincerely ticks Maori and NZ European, the other sincerely ticks Maori and writes New Zealander. How on earth can we make the assumption to amalgamate this data? And if we can’t, how useful is the ethnicity question at all?
The ethnicity question was undermined by this campaign. In part, this was its purpose.
So why do I care? That, I’m no longer sure about. What do we get out of accurate ethnicity data? Arguments in March undermined my assumptions about the public health usefulness of this information – what other compelling reason might there be? Is simply knowing about ourselves enough?
Bah. I’m disappointed with the whole thing, because it means our ethnicity data becomes needlessly complex at best and misleading or opaque at worst; and because the whole affair emerged from some reactionary politics that were really quite silly.
I’m enjoying looking at the census results, anyway. Nice to see New Zealand get more diverse. We can handle it.

NZ’s independent news site Scoop featured this article which originated at Chicago’s Conscious Choice.
It looks at the shift in tone that has brought major companies to start Green initiatives and branding themselves as Green-friendly. GE, Wal-Mart, and BP all get a few paragraphs looking at how their claims stack up.
But what really appeals to me about this article is how it talks about the bigger picture. As it points out, it is unequivocally a good thing that major corporations are at minimum paying lip service to Green values, and in practice are taking some steps, however minor. The question becomes, how good is good enough?
It’s a corollary to the ‘We Won’ post I made a few weeks back. When the argument has been won, the result is that those who were on the other side colonise our side as quickly as possible. Part of being involved in progressive thought and the progressive movement is accepting that people you despise will end up espousing your position on things, shamelessly, as if they never thought any different.
Here in NZ, does it stick in your craw a bit to see the National party hasten to position itself in the Green sphere, after so many years fighting tooth and nail against any green initiatives and having a key role in scuppering our national response to Kyoto? (Although, it must be said, Labour did a fine job of scuppering that all by itself.) It should. But there’s only one response to the progressive crowd feeling grumpy about that: get over it. Let yourself feel like an honourable martyr, then let it go and get on to the next battle.
Because here’s the secret: winning doesn’t always taste good. Most of the time, those who fought the hardest don’t get to have a say in the future. Does anyone in NZ politics think this massive shift in our political sphere to welcome Green issues into the mainstream is going to undo decades of efforts to paint our Green party as loony eco-nutters? Nope. In fact, that’s going to remain an essential strategy: National and Labour, to keep votes that might otherwise go Greenwards, will claim to be sensible environmentalists, in contrast to the Green party who are loony eco-nutters.
If Wal-Mart invests billions in bringing organic food to the masses, does that make it a socially and environmentally conscious company? Only in part. They’ll still use mass-industrial methods of food production, and they’ll still operate massive and wasteful supply chains. One step up conceptually, and you have organic food supporting a consumer model that enthusiastically supports the destructive hypercapitalism that is messing up our entire global system.
But still – organic food at Wal-Mart! That’s a major achievement. There are other battles still to be won, but man, that’s good. That’s a step closer to the Another World that is Possible. I should feel happy about that, right?
Or is there another way of looking at it – that weak “successes” such as this sap energy from the movement, they are tactical maneuvers by the enemy to deny the moral high ground while changing little of consequence, and they are a sign of loss.
When you start digging into this, you quickly get down into some fundamental questions about human behaviour, about identity formation and habituation and rational vs. non-rational modes. Ultimately you’re talking about what human beings are, and that’s a very thorny area.
So how good is good enough?
(Oh yeah – read the article, huh? It’s great.)

It used to be a hidden thing for those Wellingtonians in the know. As recently as a couple weeks ago I sidled up, glanced left or right to make sure no-one was checking out, and demonstrated the secret to the Alligator.
The free photo email function hidden in the info kiosk on Cuba Mall is now official and out in the open. Right outside JJ Murphy’s pub, there’s an info kiosk with a touchscreen, and it used to be that you pressed a secret part of the screen and a hidden email thingy would pop up – you could snap a photo and email it to anywhere.
Well, you can still do that. Only now it’s out there in the open with a special entry on the main menu, “Photo Email”.
How uncool.
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Speaking of uncool, the online Achewood comic is not uncool. Thanks to Pearce, who was himself hooked up by Mike, I’ve finally succumbed to reading the whole damn archive. Man – this is the funny.
Read it. Begin at the beginning, which is here.