Wedding-o-rama

Muchas weddings this summer season. Tomorrow is the fifth or sixth (and last) I’m attending this season, and also the most important – my sister’s. First of us childer to marry herself off, and about time too (even if I do say so myself… it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a blog must be in want of a wife, etc etc.)
So, with the travel in there too, it has been a busy time. There are some major things I want to write about here but I’m waiting until I have enough time to do them justice, instead of writing blog posts in unseemly haste like I’ve been doing all month.
Last night went to the International Wellington Ukulele Orchestra gig in the Botanic Gardens, part of a long series of free concerts in January. Their version of Outkast’s “Hey Ya” was my fave moment. Even though the weather has been memorably poor, and even though this is the only one I’ve been to this year, I understand it has been another good season of free gigs so far. A few more to come, as well as other free shows at the Petone festival and the Cuba festival and so forth. Truly, the abundance of free music in this city over summer is something to be treasured and celebrated.
People were out in force for the ukulele players, too – thousands of folk crammed into the soundshell area, they were turning people away it was so packed. Love it. And what I love best is the ukulele players maintain the session that started it all, gathering in Deluxe cafe at 8am on Thursdays once a month to play for people grabbing pre-work coffees.
Wellington’s ukulele champions have a website you can check out here. They play next at the Fringe festival picnic.
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Tomorrow the wedding, and the long-delayed Return of the Kilt!

Teh Powar 2 Internet Destroy U!

Google’s crush on me has lessened somewhat – I’m not in the top ten results for ‘morgue’ any more – but it isn’t gone. (It doesn’t leave anonymous love notes in my locker any more, but it still writes ‘google 4 morgue 4 eva’ on the odd toilet wall.)
And a side effect of this is that some of my blog posts turn up really easily for people who might not be so happy about that.
For example, google ‘David Capitanchik’ and results 1 and 2 are posts of mine deriding prime nutbar David Capitanchik for some particularly boneheaded commentary on the risks of terrorism in the UK. (One of them is even entitled Capitanchik suxxor!) The man himself only turns up as result 3. Man, that’s cool. That’s kinda like victory.
My post on Monday about 8 Tribes is fourth on the google results for that search term. Not very complimentary about it, either.
I come 9th on searches for ‘Wellington Bypass’ – for linking to another blogger, as it happens.
So that’s quite nifty. Right now, for stuff at a certain level of obscurity, I can get some wicked Google impact. How can I use this power for good?
And, while I’m wondering, how can I avoid using this power for EVIL? For example, anyone googling ‘ernesto’s wellington’ will get my Ernesto – Disapppointing post first out of the box (and a bit further down if the apostrophe is skipped). That feels kinda bad. I went in there a couple times, and it did disappoint me, but that’s mostly because it’s a restaurant not a cafe. And, a lot of the concerns in that first post have been dealt with, like the table layout. I am misleading teh world! Should I really be feeling guilt about this? Well, probably not, because according to Sitemeter only one person has searched on those words in the last month. But. I guess, with great power, comes great responsibility…
And, er, coming second for searches on ‘childrape’ doesn’t exactly make me comfortable either. But if someone has to search for that term, my carefully-considered post about censorship might as well be what they see…

On RAW

Robert Anton Wilson died recently. Among many excellent responses to his passing, a brief one at Early Days of a Better Nation hits a personal bullseye:

What stuck in my memory were two concepts: the reality tunnel, and the SNAFU principle. The ‘reality tunnel’ refers to the tendency to notice only what confirms our beliefs. The SNAFU principle points out that in a hierarchy, each person tends to tell their superior what the superior wants to hear, i.e. what confirms their beliefs. By the time information reaches the top of a hierarchy it may be degraded beyond recognition. These two ideas explain much that is otherwise incomprehensible. We tend to assume that, whatever else may be said about them, our leaders are better informed than we are. If RAW’s insight is correct, they are likely to be far worse informed than the average citizen. (See? Suddenly, it all makes sense!)

Add these to your model of the world.

8 Tribes In New Zealand

8 Tribes: The Hidden Classes of New Zealand
8 Tribes calls an end to the myth of the “typical New Zealander” and gives us a new vocabulary to talk about New Zealand in the twenty first century. This snapshot of contemporary New Zealand explores our unspoken class system and the hidden social boundaries that separate us from each other.

On the same day I stumbled across this attractively-designed book in Unity, hottieperm stepped in to point out that it was, perhaps, unwise for the authors make quite so prominent use of the word ‘tribe’ to denote a lifestyle/values category. Quite apart from the fact that (as hottie p points out) NZ already has an important set of tribes, the word isn’t even well-deployed on its own terms. Clearly intended to echo the Wired-crowd’s adoption of the word ‘tribe’ to mean a community formed around a shared cultural interest set, the word is here used in a way neo-tribalists wouldn’t understand. (A throwaway comment on the 8 Tribes site that suggests you can change your tribal allegiance for 3 weeks at Christmas is really quite mind-boggling.)
In fact, there’s another word that fits this whole system rather better: stereotypes. The book presents eight stereotypes and calls them ‘tribes’. Like all stereotypes, the eight “tribes” have a superficial, prima facie legitimacy that gets them just far enough to start causing trouble. And like all stereotypes, when you look at them with a critical mindset, they collapse entirely. Luckily, the grandiose marketing language is just marketing. This isn’t going to be the new language for understanding New Zealand, and these aren’t the social boundaries that matter.
This isn’t meant to be a big hate-on for 8 Tribes. I don’t hold any malice for the book. I just think it’s really very silly, as if it was all just a livejournal meme that somehow found itself in a respectable bookshop despite being created by a Mountain-Dew-fuelled teenage girl between bouts of Hermione/Draco slashfic. And I think that New Zealanders, by and large, think the same, or will soon enouigh. So I anticipate the swift disappearance of the 8 Tribes idea from the great New Zealand conversation.

[morgueatlarge] Moa, Moose & Maeroero

Or: Creatures of the South

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There are moa down there. New Zealand’s largest flightless bird, the moa, is reputed to be extinct since before the arrival of Captain Cook – but I choose to believe it’s not. Because the world would be a cooler place if there were still gigantic, curious birds stomping around its most mysterious recesses.

Besides, a moa was seen just a dozen years ago. By a guy who ran a pub in the area. The pub then becoming a well-patronised tourist destination. Hmm. His name was Paddy Freaney, and yes he’s Irish, and you can see the photo he took of the moa at Wikipedia. Unless it’s a photo of a sock puppet. Or perhaps a seagull.

So now that we have established beyond all doubt that the moa exists, it is with regret that I report Aaron and I failed in our quest to find one, despite making numerous moa-appropriate calls into the bush wilderness. Inexplicable.

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And moose. The moose of the deep south were confirmed to exist in 2000, with the discovery of a verifiable clump of moose hair in the depths of Fiordland. The http://www.nzwt.co.nz/projects.htm New Zealand Wildlife Research Trust is working on finding out more about them, and perhaps snapping an elusive picture of the Fiordland moose in its natural Fiordland habitat.

As an aside, I love that a large chunk of New Zealand is called ‘Fiordland’ because it is entirely made up of fiords/fyords. That’s how they do it down south – no fancy dressing things up for them. They call a land of fiords a Fiordland and crack open a Speights mate, pride of the South.

And despite the drinking of Speights, and Monteiths, in abundance, and making numerous moose-appropriate calls into the bush wilderness, no moose came to disturb our campsite. Or if they did we were already asleep in our tent.

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And the maeroero. The sasquatch of the Catlins, on the South Island’s southeast tip – as it says on http://www.catlins.org.nz/iwi.htm the Catlins site, “Maori legend has it that large hairy monsters inhabited these valleys of forest, their name was Maeroero, meaning wild man of the forest and were feared by all Maori.”

We did our best to lure a maeroero to our table by playing abundant cribbage and drinking bourbon and making numerous maeroero appropriate calls into the bush wilderness, but no maeroero emerged from the darkness. The only wild hairy men of the bush were Aaron and myself.
And perhaps that’s the truth in all of this – that you can go looking for the secrets of the wilderness, but all you find there is yourself. With a beard.

—

So, given our lack of luck with the moa, the moose and the maeroero, what creature did make an impact on our Southern Odyssey? It was the sandfly. New Zealanders, and travellers who’ve experienced them, will give a shiver of acknowledgement at the thought of these creatures. They are tiny, millimetre-long flying insects with a disturbing desire to drink your blood, and they leave behind swollen irritations which in their numbers can be atrociously uncomfortable. Tenacious and pernicious, the sandfly accompanied us all down the West Coast, out to Milford Sound, and turned up again in Piano Flat on our last night together. They came at us in great numbers, hundreds, even thousands of them, clustering against our tent and flying into the car and landing on us all over. They were constantly drawn to us. I do believe they worshipped us as Gods, whole sandfly civilisations rising and falling over different interpretations of our holy writ. They loved to get on to our exposed skin and bite.

We hated them. Strict biosecurity measures, learned at the NZ border crossing, maintained the integrity and safety of our tent. Outside of that, we relied on some very effective insect repellents, which had the effect of convincing a sandfly that has landed on you not to bite, but instead to fly to another part of you and see if it can bite there, and so on and so on.

The sandflies were fairly intense in tiny Haast, at the south end of the West Coast road. Haast, you will recall, is a tiny hamlet of a few hundred people – this total a huge advance on the population in 1990 – with a single small “supermarket”. It gave me no end of bewildered pleasure to note that sandfly-beset Haast’s only retail outlet had a sign out front saying that no-one wearing insect repellent was allowed within. The owner, it seems, is extremely allergic.

One supposes she married into the region.

Wayback Machine link to archive of original message

In Memoriam: My White Hoodie

So. Farewell, then,
white hoodie
from Mexico
You visited six countries
and crossed jungles
and mountains
But people still thought
you were a chav.
—
A baker’s dozen of pictures from the last flight of the white hoodie, my southern adventure with Aaron, is now up at Flickr.
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You will all be excited to hear that I have a new hoodie. It is dark brown, and by Kiwi clothing label Kia Kaha. I am very pleased to have a new item of clothing.

Checking In

Internet cafe in Invercargill.
Haven’t sent out many travel emails (i.e. only one so far) on account of camping in remote places. You can also see them without signing up to anything at:
http://lists.topica.com/lists/morgueatlarge/read
Reason I don’t post travel stuff direct to here is the morgueatlarge list has only about 20% crossover with blog readership, if that.
Back soon…

Expectations

“People will expect Morgan to wear something unusual.” – my sister, in an email to my mother, about her wedding. Email leaked to me by operative known only as ‘Long Neck’. Looking forward to seeing the sibling and her Matt!
The Alligator and I are off to the South Island. I am inordinately excited, and very grateful to the Alligator who did all the work to make it happen.
Farewells were offered to the King of France, Leon the God, who has returned to London. (Any Londoners looking for a gamer to bolster their numbers, get in touch.) Go ye well, Royal Donkey.
Back in Welly on the 18th. If possible there’ll be a morgueatlarge email or two before then. Go sign up now!

Oil Industry Copies Tobacco Industry

It will be a surprise to no-one, I imagine, that (leftie) U.S. science body the Union of Concerned Scientists has issued a report that documents “ExxonMobil’s Tobacco-like Disinformation Campaign on Global Warming Science”.
(Direct link to the report: Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air. How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science, .pdf, 1.71MB)
It’s a damning picture, and it isn’t a new one – when I was investigating a letter to the editor that denied climate change, it was a trivial matter to find links between the letter writer and ExxonMobil’s money machine.
It’s worth looking a bit more closely at how this works. It would be wrong to claim that Vincent Gray, for example, is a liar, or is being paid to claim a position he doesn’t hold. It is clear that he does hold his views, very strongly. Gray’s morality is absolutely not in question here.
The corrupting influence of ExxonMobil operates because of two truths:
(a) science is uncertain, and there are always those who interpret things differently
(b) the real-world power of a scientific view is determined by the amount of patronage it receives
ExxonMobil’s work is not to create pretend dissension, but to funnel patronage to the dissension that is inevitably already there.
The report’s real genius is in its heavy referencing of the tobacco lobby. It is now clear and undisputed that Big Tobacco used exactly these techniques to cloud the issues surrounding the health risks of tobacco for literally decades. By making reference to these, the report is able to directly attack the integrity of the company without coming across as an ‘extremist’. It’s very clever message management.
I recommend downloading and reading the full report – it’s an easy and engaging read, very well presented. It includes several pages of potential responses to the disinfo campaign. I will quote one of these in full:

MEDIA ACOUNTABILITY
Too often, journalists’ inclination to provide political “balance” leads to inaccurate media reporting on scientific issues. Far from making news stories more balanced, quoting ExxonMobil-funded groups and spokespeople misleads the public by downplaying the strength of the scientific consensus on global warming and the urgency of the problem.
Citizens must respond whenever the media provides a soapbox for these ExxonMobil-sponsored
spokespeople, especially when the story fails to reveal their financial ties to ExxonMobil or those of their organizations.
Toward this end, citizens can send letters to the editor highlighting the financial ties that quoted
“experts” have to ExxonMobil or ExxonMobilfunded organizations. They can also encourage
individual reporters and media outlets to report science accurately. Well-established scientific
information should be reported as such, and members of the press should distinguish clearly
between those views of their sources that are supported in the peer-reviewed scientific literature
versus those that have only been propped up in the ExxonMobil-financed echo chamber.

Take it seriously. There is power in this (especially in New Zealand, where our few newspapers are read avidly by politicians with real authority over our collective future).