Month: April 2009

Chris Cole Jewellery


Hiya readers – I want to advertise at you a moment, for the usual reason: some friends are up to something I want to support.
Our lovely friend Chris Cole, the jeweller who crafted our wedding rings, is striking out on his own and has launched his own business (aided and abetted by his partner, and our other lovely friend, Anne).
Chris and Anne were marvellous in creating our rings. We worked out the concept together and the realization was amazing – we are so pleased. (I love my ring!)
It’s still very early days for their business – their Flickr stream has precisely one image on it so far, which I’ve posted here – but Chris has been in the jewellery game for a long time, working for others. He’s got a really interesting sense of style and an interest in jewellery for men. I loved this Twitter update: “Making a Man’s brooch today. Bringing back the ‘Bro’-ooch…
So if you’re a bro, or a lady, and you’re in the market for some unique custom-crafted jewellery, give Chris a try at http://www.chriscole.co.nz/
I endorse Chris Cole.
(Extra credit: Chris was also in a crazy metal band once upon a time. I have the CD.)

Blog Weary, Boock

I don’t have the blog motivation at present. Not going to force it; soon enough something will happen that will ignite my outrage-burners and I’ll be typing away furiously before your knee can jerk. But until then, it looks like I’m rolling slow-bloggery styles.
If ever a demonstration was needed of the kindergarten logic of newspaper editors, one need only refer to the ongoing bottle of fun that is the Sunday Star Times – they prominently feature columnist Michael Laws in the Comment section, where he infuriates all the liberal readers by frothing over political correctness; and they hand over the back page of the Sports section to Richard Boock, where he infuriates all the conservative readers by being too politically correct. At first I thought it was a bit odd that the most trendy-liberal voice in the paper was in the Sports section – but of course it isn’t an accident at all. It’s how you maintain some energy in your paper. Its like sending out a wrestling heel to insult the crowd and draw a lot of heat – there’s nothing those wrestling fans like more than a good loud boo-session. It would be endearing if it didn’t have consequences for the national discourse, e.g. the massive rightwards slant of our news-oriented commentariat.
Anyway, this weeks SST Sports section featured a charmer of a Letters section (located under Eric Young’s section, where he reassuringly rails against “the PC clan who stole bullrush“). Simon Lawrence writes about Boock: “who do you think reads your sports section whilst the wife hogs the front few pages? Obviously it may be presumptuous to say we are all married, but perhaps not to say we are red blooded Kiwi blokes who just have a love of sport. Persist with Boock, and you are telling New Zealand, you are looking for a reader profile who is a left wing, liberalist forever searching for his feminine side…”
The next letter is headed Pinko!: “Richard Boock is a pink shirt-wearing, wine-drinking, Green Party supporter who has smoked too many funny cigarettes while carrying his wife’s handbag and should be writing for a women’s mag.” It is attributed to “A synopsis of feedback on www.stuff.co.nz”.
That sounds like an endorsement to me. Which is, sadly, exactly the point.
Right, things to do. Have lovely days everybody.

Lefty surprise!

Here’s a great recipe.
(1) Put ingredients in casserole dish
(2) Heat in oven for a long time at a high heat
(3) Remove from oven, take off lid, smell delicious food
(4) Pick up lid again slightly later, absentmindedly forgetting to wear oven mitt
Surprise! Now you’re left-handed!
(Typed with one hand in icewater.)

Hurry Linky

Got a meeting to get to, but haven’t given linky in an age so want to clear some bookmarks out. I’ve seen many of these in multiple places so apologies if this is all old news. Here goes:
Play sudoku for charity
Urban camouflage
Human behaviour in response to a cute little lost little robot.
NZ’s best investigative journo, Nicky Hager, gets his own site
Neat NYC montage photos
Nonwrestler marks a year of the weekly free mp3 posts – each week highlighting a neat, free choon from somewhere around the nets. This gives me the new music, which I like.
Reggaeton guy Jintero MC has moved to my home city and loves it. So he made a song about it. The video features more bikini babes grinding against local monuments than I customarily encounter, though. [LINK FIXED]
Tim Denee designs twenty covers for The Big Sleep.
And finally… Barack says: you can have my number, baby.

IP IP OORAY

After about four hours of messing about, finally got the new wireless router properly installed and running. Learned more about IP addresses as I tried, repeatedly, to answer the question “everything says this should work; why does it not work?”
This is not really four hours I had spare, but needs must and all that.
Home smells of feijoas right now.
(Cal and I both forgot completely about Flight of the Conchords on Monday. I’d forgotten how you can do that if you watch a TV show as she is broadcast. Forgetting to watch a TV show you like is a bit retro-cool, I reckon.)

Back From Melbourne

It was fun. I met several Australians.
But while I was gone the router spat the bolt, and I couldn’t coax a connection out of the cable. So I’m at work. Communications will no doubt be infrequent until this is resolved, which will hopefully be very shortly.

Dave Arneson, RIP

There are two people with their names on the first ever version of Dungeons and Dragons. Just over one year ago, Gary Gygax died. Now Dave Arneson has joined him.
This one won’t earn obituaries in newspapers all over the world. Arneson never had a high profile, but he was the guy who put it together first, who assembled the technology that would become the role-playing game.
The RPG world has lost a swathe of its early creative powerhouses in the last eighteen months. Like them, Arneson will be remembered in the most appropriate way – through play.

Wolverine of Fame

Just in case anyone has forgotten that I am a complete geek: let me tell you about the Wolverine of Fame.
The Wolverine of Fame was a random free comic that I picked up at one of the very first Armageddon events, over ten years ago, when it was just a small gathering of comic geeks in a clubrooms with a couple of overseas comic guests. Because I’ve never been much into getting stuff signed, I didn’t bring anything to get signed, but then I wanted to join in the fun. So I took my free comic, presented it to the guests, and said “how about scribbling all over this?”
So they did. Thus was born the Wolverine of Fame.

Now you, too, can thrill to the graffiti of the comics-famous, for I have scanned in the relevant pages and tagged ’em up. If you click through this link to see them, you are geek like me. Revel in it! The world belongs to us now!
Ahem.

Ian Tomlinson

At the big protests in London against the G20, a man named Ian Tomlinson died. The official story described the man as an innocent bystander dying from a heart attack unrelated to the protest; furthermore, police attempts to help him were hindered by violent protesters.
This sparked a post by lew at kiwipolitico, about anti-police bias in the media coverage of the protests; I commented to agree with him, which I thought was remarkable given my experience at the G8 protests and the way coverage there skewed heavily pro the official line. I had no doubt that many among the police were adding to the violence, but I also didn’t question the official version of Tomlinson’s death and its aftermath.
More fool me.
The Guardian has footage of Tomlinson moments before his death. It shows him walking away from the police with his hands in his pockets, not in the throng of protesters but by himself. A police officer approaches him from behind, batons his legs and then pushes him down. The police stand over him as he talks up at them from where he landed; a protester comes over and helps him up.
There is testimony that he was assaulted by the police a few minutes before this footage as well; I have no reason to doubt it, given the emergence of this confirmatory record.
Duncan Campbell writes well about the situation and how the police have not learned any lessons from the de Menezes shooting.
It makes me second-guess my response to this blog post by George Monbiot. I have huge respect for Monbiot, but this went too far for me: “…there has always been a conflict of interest inherent in policing. The police are supposed to prevent crime and keep the streets safe. But if they are too successful, they do themselves out of a job.” Reading over it, it still strikes me as a rubbish argument that does not hold up at all. But the overall thrust of the piece, that the police are pushed into violent confrontation with protesters by structural necessities, isn’t something I can argue with.
Add into the picture the UK’s new laws against photographing police and you have a deeply unpleasant set-up that is outright dangerous for democracy. There is a real risk that this kind of footage – the only way to counteract the police’s self-serving official stories of this and many other events – will be itself be forbidden.
Here’s part of one of my comments to Lew’s post. This holds up still.

Ultimately though, I point at the the media and police and almost every pundit with a public voice who unerringly frame approaching protests as riots in the making; this framing always goes substantially beyond what is reasonable. Furthermore, it fosters the conditions needed for things to escalate quickly. I think it is incumbent on the media and law enforcement to adopt more responsible policies in their treatment of protest, as they have much more power than the protesters do. (Not that police/media using a fully responsible frame would result in a fully responsible protest; but it would be nice to see such an improvement.)

I have no neat summary of this event. The Met have always been thugs; at the Edinburgh G8 it was widely known that the policing done by Met officers shipped up for the occasion was provocative and dangerous while the local Scottish police were much more reasonable. Its just an unpleasant surprise to see it captured so starkly like this.
Something has got to give.