Just thought I’d give a quick heads up on an animation a friend of mine back in London has lovingly produced. Here it is…
Before you ask, I don’t know.
Great radio blooper clip: Back-announcing the song just starting
I love radio. I love it when it's done well. I love it when it's done, err, not so well, but well enough that it still brings a smile to my face. Like this clip here: Thanks Josh and Tom for this. Made me smile.
Boy? Balloon? Balloon Boy? WTF?
From 3news.co.nz: "A six-year-old boy has been found hiding in a cardboard box in his family's garage after being feared aboard a homemade helium balloon that hurtled 50 miles through the sky on live television." What the...? No, really: WTF? (Play video to see John agree with me...) As if this story making 'news' wasn't bad enough, a video of the little grimer has now surfaced on youtube. Of him rapping with his mates. Sigh... Crapsicle.
Five Home Heating Alternatives
The main source of heat in our home is a wet-back log burner in the living room. It's fantastic at its job when loaded with tea tree logs and a load of dried pine cones. The fact that it is wet-back, means we save on our electrical water heating costs as well. Recently, however, the log burner was out of service for several days while we waited for a chimney sweep to visit. This occured during a really cold spell in Auckland and I am forced to admit we plugged the small, pretty hopeless electric heater in. Its inefficiency meant we ...
“Turban Warfare” – Utterly Unhelpful and Meaningless!
A good friend of mine currently living the United States drew to my attention the headline chosen by the New York Post this week to report on the Iranian election crisis: 'Turban Warfare'. Obviously some little misinformed spade at the Post came up with this irrelevant pap some months after 9/11 and has been waiting for a 'suitable' time for its publication for the best part of eight years. When turmoil erupted in Iran recently, they presumably ignored the advice of several more-educated interns at the paper and ran the headline anyway. It's a real shame for them, getting it wrong on ...
May – I’m glad that month is long gone!
My lack of posts throughout May was to simply due to the sheer expense and consequential stress the month managed to bring. A puncture on the return journey from Matakana at the beginning of the month was to set the bad luck rolling, this alone resulting in the need for two new car tyres to get the car through its WOF (Warrant of Fitness, like an MOT, but spelt different). On returning home that night, we prepared some food to cook, only to see the little blue flame of the gas stove flicker out and not re-ignite until I refilled the ...
Apr
17
I was doing something unusual earlier and washing up, when I spotted a terrible attempt at looking all ethical and green and stuff. At least, I assume that is what they were attempting when they wrote this on their bottle…
I’ve noticed these pretty meanlingless words popping up a lot on packaging in New Zealand. It is, of course, quite conceivable that they mean to tell us something else. For instance, it is perfectly possible that those words are meant to be read as “We jollied down the road in the (company) car and picked up a few bits and bobs, some of them not even needed in the production of dish soap, but hey, expenses! Unfortunately nobody local stocked everything we needed, so we ‘borrowed’ somebody’s wireless and went online. We found that the Taiwanese make some damn good replicas, so rather than check if anyone else in the country, say, like, the next town along, could help us, we went straight to them. Literally. And imported it ourselves.”
Or perhaps, a basic economics lesson is implied in the text: “In a free market, a country is just as dependant on imports as it is on exports to stimulate the economy.”
Either way, I’m still in shock that this apple flavoured dish soap contains anything more than ’soap’ and ‘a barrel of apples’, both of which are available locally and from afar, in New Zealand.
There may actually be a proper meaning here, aside from the obvious plain English one. I don’t know what it is, though, so I’m opening this phrase up to you for more potential meanings. Like a caption contest, but different. Type away!
Apr
15
I couldn’t get up this morning. Well, actually, I could. I did. But it wasn’t easy. It was flipping hard.
The reason for my slackness was because I, unlike you, spent the Easter weekend on Waiheke Island. ‘Where’s that?’ you ask. In terms of The World, it’s here:
It’s pretty great too, as far as islands go. Don’t get me wrong; I love islands, but I always find myself getting more and more upset when what looks like the island’s most interesting road ends up a ‘NO EXIT’. It’s an island repetoire of mine: I’ll spot a road and think ‘Let’s go up there’, only to find it’s a dead end. Or not a road at all. I used to do it on Guernsey all the time. Even on my tenth visit.
We caught the car ferry out to Waiheke from Half Moon Bay in East Auckland on Thursday night. It chugged along at about 3 knots, taking about 75 minutes to complete the whopping 20 odd kilometre journey. We noticed as we departed the ferry that we had been just two cars from The Mad Butcher, on his way out for the weekend, so I put the slowed ferry time down to the humungus amount of carcasses that must have been stored in his boot. Long weekend, an’ all…
We stayed at the rather friendly Punga Lodge, which dealt us one complimentary breakfast, a host of afternoon teas, a seemingly private spa pool (I didn’t see anyone else using it!) and a bed. We were also a short walk from Oneroa, which meant we could hit The Lazy Lounge for a couple of drinks and then walk home. Although this proved a little risky on ‘Good Friday’ as the little kiddies were out in their rusty Skyline performing drive-by paintballings. You missed.
The friendliness of the staff at View East vineyard made us want to return for a bit more than a wine taste and a coffee, but sadly time eluded us. We had to fit in the paddling of Punga Lodge’s twin-kayak round Oneroa Bay, a trip up to the World War II tunnels of Stony Batter, a meet up with GU2’s old Head of News Naomi and my sister-in-law’s birthday lunch at Mudbrick vineyard. We also narrowly missed out on seeing Ethan Hawke and Scarlett Johansson’s arrival at Te Whau vineyard, but as he’s grown up a bit since Explorers I didn’t think I would recognise him. Plus alpacas are way more interesting to look at.
All of this fantastic weekend was carried out without my camera, so a return visit will likely happen at some point. And then I can take some photos. And enjoy all over again…
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