My suggestion of how to organise public rankings of list MPs is this:

Parties select and arrange their party lists as at present.
Voters choose their electorate MP and vote for a party list as at present.
Once final vote counts are available, list places are filled in the following order:
The list candidate and unsuccessful electorate candidate with the greatest number of electorate votes;
The list candidate and unsuccessful electorate candidate with the next greatest number of electorate votes;
and so on, and so forth, until there are no electorate candidates left on the party list, at which point the remaining list places are filled from the remaining list members in the order in which they were arranged by their party.

To me this seems a fairly simple formula, one which wouldn't change what is expected of a voter at the polling booth and which neutralises the argument that candidates rejected by the electorate 'sneak' in on the list; if an electorate candidate is comprehensively rejected by the voters, they have much less chance of getting in on the list than if they had widespread support, but just not quite as much support as the winning candidate.

No sound but what a vision.

That made me think of Roy Montgomery's instrumentals so I put on Scenes from the South Island while I watched it. It worked quite nicely.

via Thurn and Taxis, W.A.S.T.E. or Bolger's lot?

I think the current owners of the Thurn and Taxis infrastructure (after half a dozen corporate and/or national upheavals) are Deutsche Post A.G. Which, for some reason, are the people who Amazon use to post things from America to New Zealand. No idea why.

I can't really add much to what George said at 1.24 pm.

The bits of the Internet that are truly awesome - Reading the Maps and a couple of my favourite web comics are the first examples that spring to mind - are that way because of the people who created them. They may have existed without the Internet, or they may not; but without the Internet it's highly unlikely that I'd even have heard of them in the first place.

I've got a couple of friendships of a decade or more's standing that I can thank the Internet for, as well. Basically, the Internet is made of people, not computers - it's the people who make the pictures, who type the words, who wrangle with code and curse at CSS, that make the Internet what it is.

The competition might be over but these might still be of interest:

Catastrophic failure: Flying Pig. (Although it was probably just as well for my own finances that they went under...)

Absolute character: Bruce Simpson (he of home-made cruise missile fame).

Book: "Ghost Towns of New Zealand" (David McGill). There's some absolute characters in those pages... possibly the most amusing failure being one John Cathcart Wason, who tried to set himself up as Lord of the Manor at Barrhill, near Methven. That project was about as successful as one could imagine...

We're too used to earthquakes here, so we get floods instead. I've already heard anecdotally that they're Southland's worst in 25 years.

My sole substantial experience of "reality" TV was an hour-long summary of one of those "Survivor" type shows. The thing about it that I noticed the most was that the anthropology backing up its premise was a load of bollocks. Not that I actually know all that much about anthropology myself, but as the plot-line of the show (such as it was) fairly much faithfully followed the plot-line of an older serial in which it was a major plot point that the anthropology was a load of bollocks, that was a bit of a dead giveaway.