Posts by Emma Hart
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Hard News: Unscripted Drama, in reply to Mike O'Connell,
No one really mentioned radio commentary in regard to the Eden Park test.
Martin Crowe. Hours and hours of Martin Crowe. I'm sure he's a lovely guy but his cricket "commentary" drives me utterly barking.
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Hard News: Unscripted Drama, in reply to Alan Perrott,
as for current prices, how do they compare to Super 15 and such?
Does it matter? I don’t think they’re comparable. I mean, I’m happy(ish) to pay $45 for a one-dayer. I’m paying for a whole game. $45 for one day of a test? Nuh-uh.
You might say, it’s not a bad price for a day’s entertainment. But it’s clearly the wrong price: you just have to look at the empty stands. If twice as many people would go for a day if the tickets were $20, NZ Cricket has its pricing wrong. That’s not even taking into account how much money people spend when they spend a whole day at a ground. And if their pricing is putting off middle-class people who love cricket? It’s just wrong. You're excluding too much of your market.
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Also, sunset from the roof. You may be able to see what I mean about Aswan being more “African” than the more northern parts of Egypt. The architecture is completely different.
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Up Front: Egypt: It's Complicated, in reply to Glenn Pearce,
The drawings on the sides of the houses depicting the family Hajj journey are fantastic also.
You can see some of the mural that ran all the way around the roof in this (permission-asked) photo of the woman of the house doing my henna tattoo. Three of us agreed to get the tattoos, and what we paid for them would have kept that family in groceries for a week. It was a way of giving something back.
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Up Front: Egypt: It's Complicated, in reply to Glenn Pearce,
Do they still have the white lines painted on the ground on the streets surrounding the temples that the touts are not allowed to cross?
There are definitely Touting Zones, everywhere but Giza, which was open slather. Those zones are positioned so you have to go through them, both going into and coming out of, the site. I didn't notice lines, but I might not have. When we were at Kom Obo, our guide spent some time negotiating with a little boy over a necklace. Every time she made an offer, the boy would have to run back over to the Touting Zone to check with his father. Once they'd agreed, she slipped him twice as much, and told him not to give it to his dad. She was a total sucker for kids.
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Up Front: Egypt: It's Complicated, in reply to Fiona,
One of my favourite memories is sitting on top of one of the little water taxis in Aswan as we cruised a bit further down the Nile stopping off at a Nubian village.
I forgot to mention this. The part of the tour that I was dreading most was the "dinner with a Nubian family". I was really concerned that it was going to be all Roto-Vegas style fake performative indigenous culture.
Instead, we went to a genuine village where Nubian people lived, into one of their houses, sat on the roof, and the woman of the house cooked us dinner. We got to talk to them (mostly the man) about their culture, the land confiscations, their identity, how much they felt "Egyptian". It was one of the best parts of the trip.
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Up Front: Egypt: It's Complicated, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Because almost everything is more complicated and because the simple-minded version of the world news we get is so very very inadequate.
The reporting on Egypt since I got back has been making me bugshit. To pick a random minor annoyance, I've seen two Beeb reports refer to the Muslim Brotherhood as "recently banned". The Muslim Brotherhood was banned in 1948. They were only legalised again in 2011. It's more complicated than that.
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Hard News: Growing up in public, in reply to Tim Darlington,
isn’t a bra pretty much by definition a “bondage bra?” It’s kind of the point…
I have many, many responses to this, but the safest is "No." In my vanilla life, one of the reasons I wear a bra is to not be in pain.
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Capture: Coast to Coast, in reply to Russell Brown,
The vessel in the pic of me looking at the water is the Spirit of New Zealand and contains the daughter of one Emma Hart.
I showed her this photo when she got home. She was dead chuffed. And then the "my spies are everywhere" implications sank in...
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Cracker: How Media Made me a Bad Person., in reply to Lilith __,
I know print journalists are often upset by commenters on their own paper’s website. These comment threads seem to attract the bottom-feeders, and are barely moderated. There’s a simple solution here: introduce proper moderation, and ban trolls.
The solutions are a bit more complex, surprising, and nice than that. F'r'instance, there's a body of research now confirming something I've noted as anecdata: comments are nicer on threads where the authors of the original piece (journalists, columnists) actively engage with the commenters. Stuff and Herald writers don't tend to do this (some do, but they're exceptions) and of course this can't be done if you're getting all your Life and Style content from the Sydney Morning Herald.
