Speaker: North versus South, Part 1
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Which raises the question: what's a material line?
Maternal. And they're generally arse-plugs -- and would be no matter where they lived.
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So your thesis, after one month in the South Island, is that all Aucklanders are wankers and all folks from the South Island are ... what? Narrow minded bigots?
I quite liked the turn of phrase but the actual content of this ... well lets just say I don't have much time for classifying large groups of people into stereotypes.
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Fuck - aren't we over the "all Aucklanders are wankers" and all Southerners are "True and Honest Kiwis" shtick? Please?
I think we are in reality. But every now and then a writer or scriptwriter sets their brain aside and decides to be lazy instead of writing something real.
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Aucklander = wanker. Southerner = parochial halfwits. Wellingtonians = miserable, trench coated, civil servant trudging through the sleet and hail between anonymous governmental office jobs and overdrowded boarding houses in Mt Vic run by ageing alcoholic mad women.
west coaster = six fingered inbred. makes for fast typists :P
i dunno if such a thing exists already but if i were to write a book it'd be 'classic kiwi piss trips'. I'd love to spend a few days in each region hanging out with a true local and doing a 'piss trip' with them. Not the visit the local wineries shit either. I'm talking out of the way pubs with character and history.
Coming from milton sth otago. every now and then we'd see how far we could get up through central, stopping off for a handle/jug at every pub before we got too trashed and had to turn around again. I can't remember the exact order but it went something like lawrence, millers flat, beaumont, raes junction, ettrick, roxburgh, alex, cromwell, clyde.
one time we did it with the entire AC/DC collection in a beat up valiant. Of course we only ever got to alexandra once, cos cromwell was a hole even back then. nowadays i 'd be scratching to make it to ettrick unless i was knocking back schooners.
funny thing about going back is, i still get the evils in the pub from people i had beef with back in school so even now have to watch my back when taking a piss.
There's still a sneaker/shoe fence round about Waihola-
ahhh...waihola. i knew a girl from there once. hottest thing in school. she'd transferred to toko high from clutha. turns out we had an unknown thing for each other but were both too shy to do much about it. we both didnt even go to the school ball cos we didnt want to go with anyone else but couldnt ask each other out.*sigh*
i suppose i could face book her but i dont do facebook and i'd hate to see what she looked like now anyway cos ummm...i'm not the young man i used to be and if shes aged anything like my other old mates from milton then i'd rather not spoil the memory:)
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We need so much more kinetic sculpture around the place.
I travel the Lindis Pass on a regular basis and I do delight in the stone piles/sculptures along the Omarama straight
Due to lack of stones I think they get taken down and replaced on a regular basis
Of course this is where the cow cubicles are going to be (slightly out of sight though) -
Omarama straight... Of course this is where the cow cubicles are going to be (slightly out of sight though)
fuck cow cubicles ! bill gates needs to build a climate changed city of the future up there... logans run style:)
side note: best lamb shanks i ever ate was from the omarama pub and you havent lived until youve consumed a jimmys pie from roxburgh
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I do delight in the stone piles/sculptures along the Omarama straight
There are also the rock arrangements exposed at low tide alongside the motorway that crosses the Motueka estuary. There may be wit and wisdom there but you pass by too quickly to see it.
(yawn) up at 4.30am to send my family off to Japan for two weeks.
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Just for the record, I'm not saying all Aucklanders are wankers (just a proportion of people in Ponsonby), and so far my expereinces with Southerners have been all good, especially with Hairy Harry, thus my conversion to hunting-gathering.
Would also like to say thanks for the fish recipes, and that I think Islander said it best ... it all depends on the person ... but there's no denying certain Southern traits exist ... I guess I'll explore that more in part 2 ...
Merry Christmas from Wanaka.
One last thought ... my five year estimate of acceptance was perhaps a little naive, I now realise it's anywhere between 10 - 20 years ...
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Surely it shouldn't be a big problem in Wanaka, given that the population must be well over 50% immigrant. Alexandra or Oamaru however would be a different story
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Ben Austin - my Mum was born in Oamaru, in the house she again inhabits. It was built by her Pakeha grandmother over a Maori trade trail. Which is where my grand-dad (obviously her father!) came in handy - it was one of his tipuna who organised the trade trails...my Mum was schooled at WGS - her brothers at WBS. As were all the variegated cousins. And I was brought as a baby in 1947 to that house. So - we go from the 1880s to now-
which is why it is very difficult indeed to try and be an Oamaru local-
and why I can be .Everyone knows everyone - still.Good luck if you ever want to be a local in Oamaru Derek!
But, and really seriously, where we are born and brought up is a matter of chance. It's random. How we live - where-ever we live- is waaay more important.
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Islander, indeed and because the population is so stable (or suffering long term decline?) anyone new is immediately apparent no matter what they do or say.
I go back pretty regularly but I'm not sure if I moved back whether or not I'd be given local treatment or otherwise, despite my family being in the district since the 1860s (or was it the late 1850s?) as I've been away in Dunedin/up North and now London for a decade or so.
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Kia ora Ben - the population has increased but the oldies - and their successors - are still around.
Be assured - or worried- your comings and goings are noted!This is sort of jocular, but I was stunned to have a local say to me,
"It was nice of you to sign our cousin's book in Vancouver."
4th cousin.
Vancouver in 1995. Comment made last year. -
We have a wonderful amazing little country, but relatively speaking it's tiny, leaving us all practically living in the same damn place. So let's fuck up our little paradise by hating all over each other's faces, because of shit all. Yeah, great idea.
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Endorsing your uniting call for universal love. I will just quibble with you on being a "little country".
We are a country of average size by population.
Wiki has us ranked by pop as 125th in the world of 223 Countries.
Top 1/3 by size.
CIA World Fact Book has us as 74th of 239 Countries (yes the CIA has more countries than Wiki) .
We are the most Peaceful Country by the Global Peace Index and 1st equal in the education stakes, of course that is with Australia.
I suspect proximity to our large neighbour might bring rise to a size complex. Same reason my Dad thought he was poor growing up in Fendalton, going to a fully private school, but living across the road from Greystones (it hadn't been subdivided then either).
http://msn.realestate.co.nz/900916 -
JT: enough of that playing tricks with medians.
We've 0.06% of the world's population, and 0.18% of the land area. So compared to the mean of 0.42% per nation, we're quite small and very sparsely populated, especially down south for the latter.
Places are a long way apart down south too, a lot of mountains to drive around the end of to get from A to B, once you get off the main drag.
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Irrespective of geographical location, things are rather too quiet around these parts. Facebook is not really an adequate substitute, for those times I am looking for the usual lively PA discussion (especially on these rainy summer days).
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things are rather too quiet around these parts.
Right Geoff, give me 15ish mins ,I'll show you what took my brain space and energy these last couple of days and frankly I agree, pretty slack 'round these parts but I cant really hol until tomorrowishish ish.
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Thanks, Sofie. Sounds good--I will pop in and out, in between retrieving bricks from a demolished house, tending to my tomato plants, and playing some new music very, very loud (Them Crooked Vultures, in particular)
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This might be something to sink yr teeth into while listening to supergroup rawk.
None of the previous education "standards" threads seem worth reactivating, but the Minister gets a fair spanking from Prof Warwick Elley, drawing on his experience during implementation of similar testing 20 years ago in England:
Mrs Tolley has been told repeatedly about the serious flaws in the scheme, about how these schemes have been tried in Britain and the United States without any reduction in the tales of underachievement.
She has been warned about the distortions that occur when young children are exposed to "high-stakes assessments", whether properly standardised or not. She has ignored the logic of the professionals' arguments that the standards, if intelligible at all, will be too low for some and too high for others.
If she were to study the profiles of the 20 per cent she claims are failing to learn, she would find, as we have, that many are Esol (English as a second language) pupils, many have disabilities of one form or another, and many are disturbed children from dysfunctional families. All Western countries with diverse cultures and wide variations in economic status suffer from these problems.
Teachers know who the struggling children are, and they are frequently concentrated in low-decile schools without the benefits of reading recovery or other remedial programmes. Such schools need material support, not more and more assessments.
I'll keep an eye out for anything more.. contentious.
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Hope this works. I have spent the last couple of days tidying/changing the back garden. Man have i got some prickles and my broms/etc are rather nasty as well. It is most satisfying though.Now I just need to make new chair covers and my outdoor living room will be ready for relaxing in. Happily the laptop is working out there also.Still going away first.
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Prof Warwick Elley, drawing on his experience during implementation of similar testing 20 years ago in England:
Greetings, Sacha. Yes, I did read this--particularly taken with his descriptions of the problems with testing encountered by 'Miss Latham, the principal of Dymchurch Country School'. There is so much evidence piling up against primary school testing but I doubt whether Anne Tolley is toiling away on her hols, taking account of it. She is such a damn idealogue.
But I am toiling away (the wind has come up and the sun has drifted away in the Waikato), writing an Intro on the current state of New Zealand film, for the Directory of World Cinema. Came across a rather extraordinary quote from Guillermo del Toro, who describe New Zealand cinema as Hollywood the way God intended it. He might be alluding to PJ as 'god'.
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Oh and the Puka Tree is the one that was ravaged by the possum earlier this year and it did survive. All leaves are new growth.
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things are rather too quiet around these parts
Today I was going to write this, but someone already did.
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I have spent the last couple of days tidying/changing the back garden.
What a magnificent garden! Guillermo would feel right at home there.
Our back garden is dominated by softer foliage plants (cyathea, dicksonia, asplenums, cordylines)--including some whekis over 100 years old, apparently.
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Here's one that I'm sure will feed action by Tony Ryall early next year and should concern anyone with relatives who depend on residential support services.
The Auditor General reports limp enforcement of failed rest home audits including medicine management issues.
Provost said rest homes sent the reports to their auditing agency, which forwarded them to the ministry, but progress was rarely independently verified.
"Our reviews showed that [auditing agencies] largely rely on rest homes reporting their own progress," she said. "In the files we reviewed, the ministry accepted most progress reports and did not require the rest home to take any more action."
This type of reporting was not always effective in ensuring that improvements were made, and rest homes were often continually failing in the same or closely related criteria, she said.
...Canterbury District Health Board member Andrew Dickerson said it was concerning to see the same homes turning up in complaints.
While most performed well, about 10 per cent had a pattern of complaints that required investigation, follow-up and monitoring, but this did not always happen, he said.
"Not always effective"? This is the same performance 'system' applied by wimpy health sector bureaucrats to contracted disability support services. Favouring of ongoing supplier relationships over the duty of care to protect service recipients is part of what necessitated the 2008 select committee inquiry into quality of care.
Good to see some substandard operators actually closed down recently. That's the type of accountability that has been sorely lacking.
The source report is summarised and downloadable at the Auditor General's site, and the linked page gives a good overview of relevant arrangements.
The Ministry [of Health] uses eight designated auditing agencies (DAAs) to carry out audits of rest homes.
The Ministry has known since 2004 that auditing by DAAs is inconsistent and sometimes of a poor quality. Notwithstanding its recent efforts, and evidence that DAAs are improving some aspects of their work, the Ministry did not respond to these problems quickly enough or with enough effect.
There are examples from 2008 and 2009 where DAAs have failed to find or report instances where rest homes have not met the criteria in the Standards. Serious failures in the care of residents have been identified later by other regulatory bodies. The frequency of these events may have been low, but they are significant because the failings are serious.
Progress reporting is a mechanism that is supposed to ensure that rest homes take action to fix problems identified by DAAs. Progress reporting is not always effective and is not leading to sustained improvements. Our file reviews showed that DAAs mostly rely on rest homes to report on their own progress and rarely make follow-up visits to verify that action has been taken. Some rest homes are repeatedly failing to meet the same or closely related criteria in the Standards, and some DAAs are behind in submitting progress reports to the Ministry.
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