Posts by Gabor Toth
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My brief dabble in independent book publishing certainly didn't leave me with a good impression of Whitcoulls. When Great New Zealand Argument launched, Whitcoulls' copies hadn't left the Warehouse and later we started getting direct sales requests from regional branches because they couldn't get the books from their own head office. It was absurd.
I personally know of a similar case relating to a popular Wellington local history book. The (Wellington-based) author had their own small publishing company so had boxes of fresh copies sitting in their house. Whitcoulls was experiencing heavy demand for the book in the city with most stores selling-out but refused to accept his free offer to drive around to each branch to deliver extra copies as he had done in the (pre Red group) past with his previous books. Instead they insisted that he had to pay to have books couriered up to their Auckland warehouse so they could be distributed back to their Wellington stores. The books then "stalled" in the distribution warehouse and it was weeks before any copies made their way back down to Wellington and into their shops. The delay was so great that demand started tailing off though much of the slack was picked up by local independent book sellers who obviously understood the principles of supply and demand better that Whitcoulls did.
This kind of corporate inflexibility did them no favours. -
Hard News: Because it's about time we…, in reply to Paul Campbell,
I roast my own beans at home, partly for economic reasons but mostly for amusement....
Hi Stephen. Have also been roasting at home for about 18 months, and there does seem to be a lot of variance in the beans. Trade Aid in Auckland sells green beans, and seem to have quite a variety, but I have mostly purchased mine from Espresso Workshop, now in Falcon Lane Parnell
Green Bean House seems to have the best value green beans of those I've tried and I've had no issues with the quality. Likewise I started home roasting mostly to save money but also to be able to guarantee the freshness of the beans. There was a bit of a learning curve to begin with, but overall, it really is dead-easy. It also made me aware of the huge mark-ups that must occur as the beans get passed from person-to-person (or corporate to corporate) from the farmer to the cafe / shop. The pathetic amount a coffee farmer makes per kilo wouldn't anywhere so miserly if the mark-ups that occur at each step between the farmer and the Western coffee drinker weren’t so high (I suspect that those controlling the flow of Fair Trade coffee are just as guilty of this practice).
A case in point - I use Brazilian beans as a base for my blends which cost me only $11.30 a kilo bought in 4kg bags (1kg green = c.850grams roasted). These same beans would sell roasted for $30+ retail.
I may have up to 12 kg of various origin green beans sitting in my cupboards at any time but the great thing is that until they are roasted, they have a very long shelf life. -
I have a theory that the quality of a country's coffee is related to when there was a continental European immigration/influence.
Most certainly true. I managed to bang on about this for several thousand words in a dissertation I did for a Public History Masters (I think it may still be up on the web somewhere in a truncated form) though in NZ it was as much the Dutch, Austrians and Hungarians as the Italians. Though we did have a small-scale espresso culture happening in metropolitan centres in the 1950s, it's safe to say that the coffee now is far better than it was then. Firstly the beans used today are much fresher (with the possible exception of Starbucks) but also the quality and level of maintenance of commercial espresso machines is far better now than it was. Import restrictions (particularly in the late 1950s) also made obtaining parts to service machines very difficult. That Gaggia machine shown in Fails Café in Christchurch is a pre-electric pump model where the cranking of the handle built up pressure in a piston which forced the hot water through the coffee. This adds another area of variation for the barista to deal with (in addition to tamp pressure, grind, humidity etc) and makes it all the more difficult to get consistent coffee. Cafés often even had to get special insurance as there was a belief (unfounded) that the machines could blow up. The hand-piston espresso machine was standard until relatively recently in Eastern Europe and from experience they can make some spectacularly bad coffee unless you happen to have a very dedicated barista.
I’ve only ever had one coffee from a Starbucks and it was truly awful (Reading Cinema’s Branch, Courtenay Place, Wellington, come on down!) though I did once enjoy the guilty pleasure of some kind of iced coffee / icecream / cream / (+ chocolate probably) monstrosity.
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I've often thought how lucky we are in NZ that those damn Victorian-era acclimatisation societies didn't try to introduce otters along with their Mustelid cuzzie-bro's ferrets and stoats. I imagine it was only because they were thinking about their precious trout and salmon fishing resources (and not wanting to share them with anybody) that stopped it from happening. If it had happened I imagine they could have run riot with our native fauna like every other introduced carnivore. The nice thing is that we can still read stories about otters going to school and be charmed by them rather than being programmed to think that we need to bait them with cyanide.
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Another piece of strange-but-true / turn-your-brain-to-mush music is this recording made by the Voyager spacecraft as it flew past Jupiter in the 1980s. It's from radio emissions generated by combination of solar winds interacting with the atmosphere, charged plasma and the planet's magnetic field. Spooky but beautiful too.
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I'm looking forward to seeing the next issue of Metro under the guidance of Simon Wilson. Things can only get better with the last issue (June, sub-titled "The Money Issue") providing a vast cache of ammunition for everyone south of the Bombay Hills who likes to dump on Aucklanders. I have difficulty in recalling a more inane, vacuous issue of the magazine which sported "articles" such as a Remuera Wealth Map, who the richest people in Auckland are and everything you need to know about the local plastic surgery scene.
Interestingly, IMHO one of the few articles in the issue worth reading was Simon Wilson's article on Vanda Vitali and the problems at the Auckland Museum. -
Thanks David - I'm going to miss your work on PA. Your memories and anecdotes of Wellington in the 1970s and 80s were truly delightful.
I hope that your posts are going to remain here or otherwise be archived as I would hate to see them disappear (anyone in PA admin care to comment?). -
This is not what people typically think of when they envisage whaling. We already have DOC approved whalebone harvesting, and I can't see what's wrong with the local hapu having the right to harvest unsaveable beached whales. So, in this case, TOK may have retained Inwoods services not because they are interested emulating the Japanese approach, but that they wanted someone with industry knowledge to assist in their communications programme.
My concern is more in the related area of seal culling and the possibility that this issue will raise its head again. Sir Tipene O'Regan representing Ngai Tahu's fishing interests made a passionate call in 1996 to allow for the culling of fur seals because of the impact they have on commercial fish stocks. His idea was that in those areas where they were "endangered" they should be left alone, but where they were plentiful (Cook Strait? Marlborough Sounds? Kaikoura Coast?) they could be "sustainably harvested".
With Ngai Tahu's (and others) considerable financial interests commercial fishing and fur seal numbers continuing to climb at a steady rate, it is possible that certain PR “services” may be required in future to improve the look of an application to remove the absolute protection that fur seals have under the Marine Mammals Protection Act. The current number of fur seals is believed to be around 100,000 but 200 years ago it was more like 1.5 - 2 million. What kind of response could be expected from the fishing industry if seal numbers were to reach 200k? 500k?
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Airlines testing low-altitude flights, desperate to get in the air again? I imagine some interesting conversations with insurers.
I imagine that if they stay below a ceiling of say c.5000m, they could avoid the higher level ash cloud until they get beyond its limits then lift up to a normal cruising altitude if travelling beyond Northern / Central Europe. The problem with this is that the aircraft will burn through substantially more fuel at lower levels (and of course create more greenhouse gasses). Normally an airline wouldn’t consider this as the increased fuel consumption could be enough to wipe out their profit margin (as well as giving the aircraft a much shorter range) but under the circumstances I imagine they are willing to try anything.
That was actually quite scary.
Indeed it was. It’s interesting how the atmosphere in the room changes and how the quickly the laughter from the children disappears once the "aftermath" image is revealed.
I have an involvement with emergency management in Wellington and while things aren’t perfect down here, there is a general appreciation among the population of the risks associated with earthquakes. Correspondingly, a sizable proportion of Wellington households have made efforts to "prepare" (storing food, water, having an emergency plan etc). I was recently speaking to someone in a similar role in Auckland who was frustrated beyond belief that no matter what they did, he was unable to get Aucklanders to fully appreciate the natural hazards the city faces or to prepare their households for a possible emergency.
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"I saw the decade in wishing the world would change in the blink of an eye". This is relevant now because it is a new decade (just like the '90s was!!!)
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I've just noticed how they have changed it from the original "I saw the decade in when it seemed that the world could change in the blink of an eye" - thus managing to strip it of its Cold War reference to the fact that millions of people had been sh*t scared of a nuclear strike for a couple of generations.Edit : the decade "seen in" was the turn from the 1970s to the 80s (not the 80's to the 1990s).