Day: October 13, 2010

Our Former Mayor is a dunce

[edited to add “former” to the title. She’s gone, baby, gone! And for the record I vote for the Hutt mayor, but still feel Wgtn mayor’s power…]

Kerry really doesn’t like our single transferable vote system.
“At this stage, Celia [Wade-Brown] can’t beat me, but STV can. I don’t think members of the public have really understood the system. Some do, but the majority don’t understand.”

What an imbecilic comment. Of course people understand what they need to: you order the candidates into a list showing your preference. It just takes a while to work out which name appears highest on the most lists. I mean Kerry, you’ve been at the front end of local government for a long time, surely you understand –

“As they drop off, if you support one of the losing candidates, you get a second vote, whereas my supporters only got one vote.”

– or maybe not. As the kids say these days: FAIL.

Gremlins 2 (USA, 1990)


In this movie, virtually nothing coherent happens, and thousands of tiny green violent anarchists go wild in a high-tech tower. Still astonishing. Haven’t seen it for well over a decade, and I got more of the movie references – the referential density of this film might outweigh even Spaced.

I laughed and laughed, and then I laughed some more. Cal sat with furrowed brow; this movie is not for everyone, it seems. She at least had the good grace to be alarmed when the film apparently broke, in the film’s most famous sequence; the DVD film uses the theatrical version, in which gremlins in the projection booth have snapped the film and the usher fetches Hulk Hogan to scare the gremlins into carrying on. There’s also a video version which went out on the VHS release, in which the film greys out as VHS tapes used to do and the gremlins turn up interspliced with a John Wayne movie. Also of note is this bravura fan effort, updating the film break sequence to the DVD era:

(More info on this at BoingBoing)

Anyway, I love this movie. It’s an easy 100 out of 10.

(Scott Tobias at the AV Club puts it in his new cult canon.)