For an ant to have had wings would be his undoing.

“Green Cabs had another 45 minute delay to get a cab in Wellington this morning perhaps they should get more cars on the road.” —not what I would call excellent service, but only one of the flies in the ointment.

Around a flowering tree, one finds many insects!

Thanksgiving is a great time to be in America… unless you are a Turkey. Pretty much everyone buys their own 20 pound Turkey and the secret methods on how you best cook the big bird have been handed down through the generations. In New Zealand we don’t celebrate thanksgiving, and I know for a fact from my previous work with animals that New Zealand Turkeys are indeed very grateful. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if after reading this blog, several families of American Turkey’s attempted to emigrate to our fine southern shores.

Of-course thanksgiving is as much about Turkeys as Christmas is about Santa Claus… not much at all really. Traditions are great when they serve to connect and remind us about what we truly value. Otherwise it’s just like eating a much bigger chicken.

That’s all I want to say.

So I’ve officially been in Wellington for a month! Its amazing. I find I’m toggling back and forth between feeling like I just got here and like I’ve been here forever already! Its crazy the way time moves depending on your emotional headspace. I’ve had a mish-mash last couple of weeks. I moved into my apartment 2 weeks ago exactly (on Friday the 13th) and I’m happy to say I am still loving it. Its kind of like my little haven here in Wellington. I have spent more days than I care to admit holed up here. I haven’t made much progress on the job front, although to be fair, I haven’t really been trying very hard to find additional work. I have worked one full schedule (and been paid) at the video store, and rented 10 movies for free already, which I think adds up to about half my total pay, if I was paying for them that is. (the BEST perk ever!)

I’ve attended two TNP sessions (Thursday Night Posse) and I am really enjoying them – funny coincidence, tonight the movie they wanted to show couldn’t be found anywhere so instead we watched THX 1138, which unfortunately I just rented and watched yesterday! In fact, I actually returned the DVD on the way to the TNP meeting. So I just watched it again. ha ha.

Tomorrow I am mailing off my package to Peter Jackson including a letter, CV and copies of 2 of my films. I know that it will probably end up in the hands of one of his assistants or something, but I have to give it a shot anyways. I’m shoving everything in a big red envelope which will hopefully scream, “Open Me! Read Me!” from the mail pile.

Tomorrow I also need to actually make an attempt to apply for some more jobs instead of sitting on my hands. I really just wish I could get 1 more shift at the video store. Its not like I’m shopping or spending a lot of money here… but its just not quite enough right now for all my bills. Sigh. And here they tax you differently if you have two jobs.

Well.. I don’t really have much else to report. I have been working on some website updates (on drawnonwardfilms.com) over the last week or so so you should go check it out. I also posted some links here on the sidebar.

8 years since I moved to New Zealand from the UK. 8 years since I hugged my family and boyfriend goodbye and got on the first of 3 flights with no idea of what I was heading to. I cried most of the way from Glasgow to Heathrow, but thankfully got it together by the time I got to London. Just as well, as I was required to identify my bag on the tarmac after a x-ray revealed a ticking, metal object in my suitcase. Innocent enough (my mum had given me a Charles Rennie Mackintosh clock as a leaving gift), but taken very seriously as I was flying only a few months after 9/11 and tension at all international airports was running high. That goodbye ended up leading to 8 years away from my family and friends, although I had orginally intended to stay away for 6 months, maybe 1 year maximum.

It was in hindsight both the hardest and the wisest thing I have ever done. I grew and experienced in ways that just wouldn’t have been possible had I stayed in Scotland. I endured huge insecurities as I set up a new life in New Zealand, based on nothing more than knowing one person who was happy for me to sleep on his couch for a week or two. I was massively homesick and full of indecision, but I arrived in Auckland in the middle of a beautiful summer and I began to fall in love with the beauty of my new surroundings almost immediately. Anyone who has visited New Zealand will recognise this feeling. It is the little country that could. Full of humour, culture and pride – it might just be a little island in the middle of the Pacific but it has everything you need if you want to live in a country where people love their outdoor environment . It contains unbelievable scenery which, given the easily driveable size of the country, reveals awe-inspiring views  literally around every corner. You can ski (on a volcano) and surf in the same day. You can experience dramatic black sand beaches on the west coast, drive an hour and be sitting on a white untouched paradise on the east. 

I saw it all. Well nearly it all. Towards the end of my first year in New Zealand, I took my orange VW kombi camper and drove solo around the country for 2 months. It was amazing. It was also hard; travelling alone even in a country so welcoming is sometimes intimidating,  sometimes challenging but ultimately immensely rewarding. I might have preferred to have someone with me to enjoy everything I saw, but apart from that I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.

It marked a trend for me to travel alone. Not always through choice. As I have got older my friends are settling down, many with houses and children and marriages now, and it becomes less viable for them to pack up and take off for several months. But I’m the kind of person who would rather go and experience something alone than miss out through lack of travelling companions. I think I’d like that to change. The next time I go somewhere new, I would like someone to share it with. For one, I might have some photographs of myself in nice places. As it happens though, I have several photo albums of beautiful landscape shots if anyone is interested.

I want to go back to New Zealand. I’m currently in Australia and will soon be returning to Scotland for the duration of my masters which starts next September, but I still call New Zealand home. I think I always will.

“A DUSKY MOMENT” (QUEENSTOWN)

Oil

355mm x 455mm

COMMISSION

SOLD

This artwork is based on a photo that was supplied to me from my client.  The photo was taken in Queenstown at Dusk.

If you have a photograph that is special to you, and you too would like me to create you an artwork based on your photo you can contact me at  donnasteel1@xtra.co.nz

I have a pet peeve. Okay, actually I have pet peeves coming out my ears, but I just want to mention one today. Footpaths: namely, people walking on those footpaths.

Why is it so hard to form a semblance of order when walking in a crowd? To me it’s simple, walk on one side, and stick to that side as much as possible. It works perfectly well on the road; why not give it a go on pavements too?

Home in New Zealand I am a stickler for walking on the left side of the path (we drive on the left over there, for any non-NZ readers). People generally don’t seem too bad at dealing with that, there’s always going to be that one jerk pushing against the flow, but mostly it’s okay.

When I arrived in Spain, I was overly conscious that they drove on the other side of the road. I haven’t driven here, so I’ve mostly put this knowledge to use in my footpath behaviour. I dogmatically walk on the right whenever it’s an option. Everyone else though – they apparently just walk anywhere they want.

People in Spain confuse me. They can be so incredibly patient at times; I’ve stood behind people at a footpath bottleneck who seem nonplussed at the delay, or watched cars double-park to let passengers in and out while the traffic piles quietly up behind them. Yet at other times drivers will lean on their horn in ten second bursts at what is quite clearly a red light. Confusing.

So they walk on any which side of the pavement they like, and it’s not uncommon for someone to stop dead in the path in front of you with no apparent knowledge that you just narrowly avoided crashing into them. For someone with a particular peeve such as mine, it’s incredibly frustrating. Just the other morning, on the way to the bus stop, I got into a jam. As I came around a corner, a man had stopped to check out what some road workers were doing. When I went to pass him he turned to start walking again, directly into my path. I tried to squeeze between him and another oncoming woman (both walking on the left side). For my trouble I got a shoulder in the tit (from the guy, youch!) and the oncoming woman pushed my backpack out of her way. Good start to the day, no?

Last month I went to Dublin for a few days. First off I had to re-readjust my walking side, but once I did I was pleasantly surprised. People are so darn polite over there! They have a far more fluid footpath style, plus wider footpaths than generally found in Spain, so already that makes it easier. Then if someone does stop in front of you, say to detour into a store, they look over their shoulder, see you, and immediately apologise. I was in seventh Heaven!

What is footpath etiquette like in other parts of the world? I imagine I would have to check my sensitivities at the airport before entering a country like India. Anywhere else? Am I the only one who finds navigating chaotic pavements mind-bendingly frustrating?

I realise the title of this post sounds a lot more profound than the actual content.

I didn’t catch on for a couple minutes when we were on the plane. Clever!

It was the perfect evening. Good friends, blue skies, cold cider, interesting conversation, minimal bruises, not much shouting…

You see, I’m learning two languages in New Zealand: Māori and sailing. Yachting has its own vocabulary and style of communication. Mostly shouting, that is. At least, that’s what it feels like when you’re first learning and don’t understand the words yet.

Māori war canoe in Bay of Islands

There’s halyards and sheets, starboard and port, leeward and windward, gennakers and spinnakers and genoas, and my personal favorite, the vang. You have to figure out quickly why “coming about” means you could soon have a bruise on your head or what to do when everyone’s yelling about a “lazy sheet.” And in the world of the sea, everything is relative to the wind. For instance, I’m still struggling with the concept that make a right-angle turn has two words for it – tacking and jibing – depending on how the boat is changing relative to the prevailing gusts. That’s like trying to give someone driving directions relative to the nearest mountain – if the mountain liked to jump around a lot and change locations.

Why is a girl from land-locked desert highlands suddenly struck with sailing? You’d think I would have already picked it up in Seattle, if I was so keen, wouldn’t you? My only real explanation is that, well, it’s just what people DO in Auckland. Here in the City of Sails, there are approximately 135,000 yachts and launches – that’s 1 boat for every 10 people in a city of 1.3 million people. Keep in mind that a sailboat generally needs more than one person to take it out, and that means LOTS of opportunities to get onto a boat.

50 cent coin

Sailing is in the psyche, here in the “Land of the Long White Cloud.” After all, that’s how everyone got here up until the 20th century. Don’t let the image of a slim Māori war canoe fool you. They didn’t paddle all the way here from their Polynesian homeland. They flew before the winds in a double-hulled voyaging canoe, balancing on the high seas with sails and an outrigger. The first European ship to land here, Captain Cook’s HMS Endeavor, is memorialized on the 50-cent coin. Even air travelers are reminded that good winds matter here, when they drive past giant white metal sails at Auckland International Airport.

Yes, the most popular sport to watch in New Zealand is rugby.  But Aucklanders’ favorite sport to DO is sailing. Not surprising, then, that I showed up and was signed up for a local yacht club before we even moved into our apartment. We have our all-around sportsman fellow American, Bryon, to thank for introducing us to the Richmond Yacht Club. Lest you hear “yacht club” and think we’re walking around in summer whites and tut-tutting with a bunch of wealthy boat-owners, you have to understand two things. First, “yacht” really just means “sailboat.” Even better, the word comes from the Norwegian word jaght meaning“fast pirate ship.” I love that! Second, RYC draws a pretty down-to-earth, even somewhat blue-collar crowd. We know boat owners who are firemen and builders and university professors, but no corporate moguls or trust-fund heirs. Hell, there isn’t even a dress code for the post-race prize givings!

Tall ships at Auckland Anniversary Day Regatta

Didn’t I mention that most of our sailing is races? Ah, well now perhaps you understand some of the shouting. And the bruising. We got started with RYC’s Friday Night Special race series, where they let rank beginners (i.e. me) onto a succession of different yachts over the course of 8 evening races. The first thing you learn is how not to get hit in the head – or knocked overboard – by the boom.

For you beginners, the mainsail is attached to the mast going upwards and the boom going parallel to the boat’s deck. “Coming about” is when the boat is turning sufficiently for the mainsail to change from one side of the boat to the other. The boom is that huge metal rod going over your head very quickly. DUCK! Oh, and scramble to the other side of the boat while you’re doing this!  Since you’re not very important ‘cause you don’t know anything, you generally don’t get to do this in the recessed cockpit where you can just bend down a bit. You have to climb over the top of the cabin, banging yourself on every metal bit sticking out. And you’re on a keeled boat that tends to, well, keel over at 45 degrees to the water, so you need to do this at the right time so you don’t end up trying to climb up the boat to the high side. And try not to sit on any of the lines or get in the way too much, eh? That’s the first day.

Cooling my heels on the Coastal

It gets better. Really! For instance, we newbies get to spend plenty of time relaxing on the rail with our legs hanging off the boat where one can admire the view, chat with fellow sailors, wave at or taunt other boats, and listen to the experienced crew discuss strategy. If we get bored, we can admire all the bad sailing puns in the boat names: Prawn Broker, Knighthawk, Xtsea, Deep Throttle, Aquaholic …

The best part, though, is when you actually start knowing what you’re doing. Even the shouting becomes kinda fun then. The first time I started to feel that way was on the 2009 Coastal Classic in late October. The Coastal is a long-distance sailing race that starts in Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour and terminates at Russell in the Bay of Islands. We were lucky to get invited onto Peppermint Planet, owned by brothers’-in-law Rodney and Peter. Realistically, I think Chuck was invited and I somehow managed to tag along.

We showed up on the dock to discover that Peppermint Planet had no less than eight crewmembers. This seemed like a lot of bodies for the number of jobs aboard. As one of the least experienced, I was pretty sure I was destined to be “rail meat”, i.e. ballast that does what you tell it to. I was feeling a bit blue, since I was hoping to do something useful and learn more. Chuck spoke up and volunteered me to run the keys, which meant learning a whole new set of skills. I was thrilled!

The keys w/ Auckland skyline

Little did I know that I was signing up to be the eye of the shouting storm. Rodney and Bryon quickly explained which lines went through the keys, how they worked and what problems to watch out for. I should point out that there are no “ropes” on a sailboat. Every line has a special name. Woohoo! More vocabulary! I eventually worked out that most of the keys control lines that go up and down. Phew! Means I don’t have to think about the sheets, which pull the headsail back and forth horizontally. That doesn’t stop me from starting every time someone says to do something with the sheets, fervently searching the keys to find that they’re not listed and finally remembering they’re not my problem.

Peppermint Planet

You’ve probably heard that old adage that describes flying as “hours of boredom interrupted by moments of stark terror.” That pretty aptly describes running the keys. You’ve not really needed much of the time. But when it’s time to change the headsail, to take better advantage of the winds you’re getting, it’s panic time. There’s lots of shouting and gesturing coming from several people at once. Often, you can’t hear them as their voices get lost in the wind. Oh, and apparently everyone on the boat has a slightly different term for the SAME damned line! Who knew that “uphaul” was the same thing as “toppers,” which is marked as “topping lift” on the key itself? And there’s an outhaul and a downhaul to remember, too. Yeah, it all makes sense when you sit down and work out what everything does. But during all the shouting and boat tipping and hauling on lines, that all goes out the window.

What I’m saying is that it was AWESOME! I mattered! I was doing something that actually affected the boat! And, I could spend some time in the cockpit, where the under-boom scrambling was less painful. The bruises on top of my bruises breathed a sigh of momentary relief. And I was learning the whys behind all the words and shouting. Very cool.

Rodney aboard Peppermint Planet

It was a thrill to get to know the crew better, too. We were an international mix of people of quite varied experience. Our nimble Kiwi skipper Rodney kept us in good form, only occasionally doing his angry Rumplestiltskin impression when we’d really mucked something up. Sailing queen “Skiff” originally from Portsmouth, England, kept the headsails trimmed – and showed how great it is to have some clear female communication onboard. One of three professional sailmakers onboard, Brendan remained almost imperturbable running the mainsail. Charlie from Rarotonga saved me from being the newest person aboard, as this was his 3rd time on a sailboat. He spent the entire time grinning ear-to-ear or grinding on a winch whenever Skiff yelled, “Trim, Charlie!” When not working the bow, slim eighteen-year old Jay told us about his experiences growing up on sailboats in Spain and the Bay of Islands, while our buddy Bryon put up with Rodney’s jibes about being better ballast than the rest of us because of his large frame.

The race was lovely. The sun was shining the whole time, and we had a lovely wind pushing us up the coast most of the way. Most boats were flying their spinnakers, which made the start line a many-hued rainbow of colorful kites. The weather was so spectacularly beautiful that some crazy kiteboarder was racing right behind the record-setting winner, Alfa Romeo. He made it 261kms, only giving up when the wind gave out near Russell. We made our own record, finishing in 14 hours 7 minutes.

Sunset at Bay of Islands

So, I’m learning to understand and even speak this new language, bit by bit. Sailing isn’t exactly a democracy, but there are often multiple voices putting their oars in on what oughta happen next or, more often, “what the heck happened there when everything went to custard?” It’s been fantastic to finally understand what all the chatter is about. And Rodney’s let us know that we’re now “expected” on the more hardcore Wednesday night race series.

I’m finding myself part of a community I never expected to join. Last night, Peter showed me how to pack the spinnaker properly. As we started, I thought he asked me, “Do you have a clue?” After a heartbeat, I realized he was talking about the lower corners of the sail. And as I grabbed the clew, I realized that I felt like the answer to the question I thought I heard was finally “yes.”

See what it looks like at: Coastal Classic 09 by jocuteca

Want to know about something specific about New Zealand? Leave me a request for a blog about it!

Te Anau, New Zealand.

Nikon D40x, Sigma 10-20mm @ 10mm, f/9.0, 1/160s, -1EV, ISO 100.

Hugh Cook – The Wordsmith and the Warrior

by Dan Rabarts

Hugh Cook might not be a name instantly recognised by readers of the fantasy genre, but to his legion of dedicated fans across the world, mention of the man and his work inspires a sense of reverence.

Cook remains one of New Zealand’s unsung heroes of fantasy literature, despite his achievements outshining those of many of our more well-known authors. Between 1986 and 1992 Cook released his Chronicles of an Age of Darkness series, a ten-book cycle of stand-alone fantasy novels.  Set on a world ruled by bloodthirsty emperors, threatened by swarms of monsters, and blessedly devoid of goblins and elves, the Chronicles capture a history of Cook’s lands and their people in a multitude of voices, spanning continents, and all occurring roughly within the same timeframe of a decade or two. Characters recur across the books, making cameo appearances from one story to the next, weaving a complex web of events that draws the reader through the series, however unrelated each volume may seem to be at a glance.

Cook was among a group of authors who eschewed the traditions of Tolkienesque high fantasy, choosing instead to write about the dark, unsavoury aspects of human nature in the grim harshness of a world bent on crushing the meek. In Cook’s world, orcs are hunted for their blubber and sea dragons are vain creatures who pretend to recite poetry in their sleep before sinking into snoring heaps. Empires are driven to war by syphilitic emperors, who are in turn murdered by warring sons. Heroism is a constant theme, usually as a partner to vanity, folly and ultimately death, and can be summed up in the immortal line, “vaunting their boasts with the blood of their lungs on their lips.”

Suffice to say that Cook rebelled, writing unorthodox fantasy in an unorthodox world. He dismantled old tropes and bent the genre like light through a smoked lens. He replaced the tired theme of good versus evil with one which instead pitted brutality against barbarism, and rarely delivered a clear victor. Cook not only rejected the clichés of the fantasy genre; he subverted them with an almost malicious glee.

To judge Cook’s success by book sales alone would be misleading, but the numbers are certainly impressive at first glance. Altogether, the Chronicles sold around 450,000 copies, and that in itself is reason for celebration for any New Zealand author. The Wizards and the Warriors, together with its US incarnation, Wizard War, sold over 160,000 copies, a phenomenal sales record for any fantasy author. Unfortunately, as the Chronicles became less conventional and more obtuse, sales began to decline. This was compounded by the decision made by bookselling chain W.H. Smith to drop Cook’s books from their shelves when sales slowed, which inevitably led to an even steeper fall. Despite a rebounding of style and content in the last three books of the series towards more action-based storytelling, Cook had largely lost the means to supply to his mainstream audience, with sales for these three books falling to between 7,000 and 10,000 copies each. I bought all my copies of Hugh’s books in my local Whitcoulls here in New Zealand, where his books enjoyed pride of place on their shelves with every release. But if the books were not on the shelves overseas, then Cook’s fans had little chance of finding them.

Cook’s prose drew heavily on the landscape, places and mythology of New Zealand, from the legendary Taniwha of Quilth, to the Ngati Moana, to a prison called Maremoremo (after Paremoremo in Auckland). Our native flora and fauna often made cameo appearances in wild locales, including weka, kauri and rimu, to name but a few – all of this well over a decade before Peter Jackson delivered our country up to the world as Middle Earth. Cook refused to suffer from cultural cringe; he embraced our country’s uniqueness and used it to flavour his own inimitable world and style.

China Mieville, author of Perdido Street Station, sums Cook up nicely; “Hugh Cook was one of the most inventive, witty, unflinching, serious, humane and criminally underrated writers in imaginative fiction. Or anywhere.” It remains a shame that so few New Zealanders know that Cook was a Kiwi writer, but there is a good reason for this: Hugh Cook may have lived in New Zealand and written in New Zealand, but I suspect he saw the same tired faults with our nationalistic model of publishing and author recognition as he saw in the failure of the fantasy genre to redefine itself. Accordingly, after publishing Plague Summer here in 1980, he bypassed the New Zealand publishing model and went instead to the London market, where he secured publishing deals almost simultaneously for both his science fiction novel The Shift (Jonathan Cape, 1986) and the first volume in the Chronicles series, The Wizards and the Warriors (Corgi,1986).

What separated Cook from so many of his contemporaries was his ability to alter his prose style from book to book, while he never lost his unique authorial voice. Two of the Chronicles, The Wishstone and the Wonderworkers and The Wazir and the Witch, take the form of actual recorded histories, thick with the idiosyncrasies of both the imaginary scribe and subsequent editors, and are thus peppered with redactions and long, apparently unrelated diatribes. These books are full of acerbic dark wit and bleak philosophies, and represent, in some ways, Cook’s ultimate success at writing fantasy that transcended the sword and sorcery models of the genre. For all their apparently random digressions beyond the story, these two books might be seen as the pinnacle of Cook’s genius, for there is a depth to these tales that no amount of Feistian swashbuckling or Eddingsesque adventuring could rival. Some readers even suggested that ‘Hugh Cook’ was not one writer but many, a collaboration of individuals writing in isolation with a single grand design in mind. But Hugh Cook was just one man, a prolific author and poet, whose storytelling skills ascended beyond the formulaic norm into something infinitely more enduring.

Ironically it was these two books, with their challenging diversions into philosophy and metaphysics, that seemed to undermine Cook’s mainstream success. Book sales for these two volumes showed a steep slide from his earlier highs, and may have contributed to the W.H. Smith decision and its consequences for Cook’s publishing career. Cook did with fantasy what hard science fiction does to that broader genre, by delving into in-depth ruminations of the unknown and fantastical in the body of his storytelling. Cook teased apart the nature of magic and the supernatural as demi-scientific concepts, as well as exploring the brutal underside of human nature as represented by its practice in politics and warfare – stark metaphors for the real world, despite being dished up in the barbaric soup of a fantasy setting. Apparently, booksellers suspected that works of this complexity and wisdom would not be appreciated by fans of the tales of blood-soaked armies, pirates, and torturers that had preceded them. This was truly a pity.

Cook’s epic plan for a sixty book series was accordingly cut short, and after publishing the brilliant conclusion to the Chronicles, The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster, he went on to champion print-on-demand technology and electronic formats, constantly moving into newer and stranger worlds with his writing. He was among the first authors to publish works through Lulu.com with the Oceans of Light trilogy and later, Cancer Patient. Even so, the Chronicles remain Cook’s legacy, and copies of these volumes continue to fetch outlandish prices in second-hand book markets around the world (my own collection must be worth a small fortune, according to Amazon – but it is most certainly not for sale).

Cook was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma in 2005. He endured months of chemotherapy and radiation treatment in Auckland, which briefly sent the cancer into remission. During this ordeal he wrote Cancer Patient, a collection of musings, poetry and recollections which document his struggle with the disease and what he learned about life and the human condition in the process. This book is available for free as an online e-book or as a download from zenvirus.com, one of Hugh’s many websites (http://zenvirus.com/cancer-patient/index.html). Unfortunately in 2007 the cancer returned, and Cook passed away on November 8^th, 2008, after bravely battling the disease for so many years. It is a testament to the scope of his fanbase that the obituary I wrote for him, which was published in the New Zealand Herald and which I posted to my blog in December last year, remains one of my most frequently visited pages (http://freshly-ground.blogspot.com/2008/12/hugh-cook-obituary-published.html).

Ultimately, Cook was both Wordsmith and Warrior. Poems, stories and characters were his tools and his weapons. He wrote with a passion, producing fiction at a prolific rate, and the English language would be greatly enriched if all the words and terms he had coined in his oeuvre were to be introduced into common parlance. He fought to find new ways forward in the publishing world, exploiting technologies that are only now starting to establish their true place in the electronic market. He maintained his integrity as an author to the very end, determined to always share the stories he had to tell, and not those that others wanted him to tell. At the end, he fought an unseen enemy – fought it and beat it, if only for a short time. Even in this, he had a story to tell, one that may not have been able to completely defeat that insidious foe, but which may yet bring comfort to others who face those same demons at some stage.

For those of you interested in reading Hugh Cook’s work, samples and full-length copies of some of his books can be found at http://zenvirus.com/. Also, keep an eye out for a reissue of The Walrus and the Warwolf, due for release in 2010 by Piazo Publishing (http://www.colinsmythe.co.uk/books/walwa.htm), with an introduction penned by China Mieville. Walrus is recognised by Hugh’s fans as his finest hour, and well worth a read by any lover of epic fantasy.  To quote Mieville again, “To honour the memory of this wonderful and generous-spirited writer and man, those – too bloody few – of us who know his work should do all we can to bring it to the world’s attention.”

Hugh Walter Gilbert Cook (1956-2008): Wordsmith; Warrior; New Zealander.

Man’s first death is the random potential

Of aeons before conception,

And the surf, merging life with form,

The surf is creation and rebirth.

(Cicada Sun, Landfall #118, 1976)

Dan Rabarts can be found at http://freshly-ground.blogspot.com/ and http://podagogue.blogspot.com.

I would like to thank Colin Smythe (http://www.colinsmythe.co.uk/), China Mieville (http://www.chinamieville.co.uk), and the Cook family for their kind assistance in preparing this article.

It’s special to me because it’s great; it’s wonderfully creative; I love books; it comes from New Zealand.

A long thread of links lead me to this post - here.

New Zealand Book Council is here.

will be pukekoes and geocaches. Tomorrow – ‘ cause today is running out on me. Promise.

Hoje depois do almoco como a professora tinha falando rolou um filme, mas achei que era só um filminho rapido mas na verdade assistimos o Twilight (Crespusculo), que no meio de Japoneses, Thailandeses, Sauditas e Coreanos eu era o unico que nunca tinha visto. Por nao ter nenhum legenda nem em ingles foi meio dificil entender tudo e ficou uns detalhes faltando, mas nao fim de semana pergunto pro pessoal ai pelo Skype, conheco umas viciadas (né Cá, Van e Daya). Ah, e o mais legal que rolou o filme todo mesmo com direito a pipoca e balas de goma pra comer durante o filme. Quinta feira que vem vamos no cinema ver o New Moon (Lua Nova).

Depois da aula fui pro centro mas como me perdi por lá, nao cheguei a tempo no banco pra agendar a abertura, vou ter que tentar outro dia sem me perder.

Como já estava por lá passei na agencia e fui com eles em uma casa de Pool, acabei conhecendo um “arabia” muito gente boa que ate me deu carona ate em casa. Acabei ficando uns 20 minutos só pra aproveitar a carona hehe

A pedido do Caique vai ai umas fotos do quarto aqui, da casa e da sala de aula, que vao ver que é toda de vidro e dá pra um gramado que já é a rua, a escola nao tem nenhum tipo de grade nem nada, é totalmente aberta igual a narioria das casas.

bom. ta dando erro pra postar, outro dia mando mais fotos e fotos da escola hehehehe

Since NZ On Screen first went live we’ve had requests from people wanting to embed the videos we have on site. It’s not quite as simple as just making it available as an option, because everything we put online has to be cleared with copyright holders first. Our initial licence agreements were for putting material on NZ On Screen only. However now we have developed a gorgeous embed player, which includes the ability to see the different clips for each title, as well as the synopsis and some of the credits. When the copyright holder says yes, the “embed this” option will appear under the player. There are a few titles now that are ready to embed – more will be added as we revise existing agreements or make new ones.

NZ On Screen Hat tip: Russell Brown

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Yesterday I walked the “The Bridle Path” and this is the view from the top. Below is the Heathcote Valley, with the estuary and Christchurch city beyond. The Bridle Path is the route taken by European settlers from Lyttleton (on the other side of the Port Hills) to the plains of Christchurch. From 1850 to 1867 (when the rail tunnel opened) immigrants carried their essential household items over on this track. Yesterday was a hot day, the path was steep, and I was grateful to be carrying nothing but my camera and a water bottle.

Below is also the view from top of the Bridle Path – the other side – looking down into Banks Peninsula. The port town of Lyttelton is closest, with the Diamond Harbour settlement across the water. In the foreground are the spear-like seed heads of flax plants (Phormium tenax, different from the “flax” plants of the Northern Hemisphere, and distinct to New Zealand), and the yellow flowered gorse bush (Ulex europaeus), brought to New Zealand by Europeans as a garden shrub. The conditions for the gorse bush proved to be more than ideal and the plant proliferated way beyond expectation. It is now a major invasive plant species in New Zealand with millions of dollars spent every year on its “control”.

I took the remainder of The Bridle Path down into the Lyttelton township, had a delicious lunch at Lyttleton Coffee Company, and caught a bus through the tunnel back to my car in Heathcote Valley – relishing the comfort and convenience of modern transportation all the way!

So I needed my parking validated and also needed some dinner. Having just had my teeth seen to I was ready to take them to town on some food court food.

So I hit up Cantina Rialto for some Mexican food, and settled on the beef burrito with a side of fries.

Now, this isn’t exactly fast food. If you’re looking to zip in and out for a quick meal you’re better off going with someone else in this particular establishment.

Now when the meal came out I wasn’t sure about the look of the fries.

They actually look a little better in the photo. At first glance they appeared a little shrivelled. But looks can be deceiving. They were seasoned really nicely (just the right amount of pepper) and the sauce was about as good as you could have with fries, I didn’t even miss having tomato sauce. I would definitely go back to those again.

The burrito was pretty good too. Nice amount of sour cream, guacamole wasn’t really to my liking though. I like to have a little more and have it a little thicker. The refried beans look a little shady inside the burrito but still tasted great. All in all, not bad.

Verdict: *(BURP)* (pretty good).

So Phil Goff has gone in on race relations. Basically he’s just yelling “LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME!”

So don’t look, it’ll only encourage him.

A follow up to my initial post here on what is becoming known as Climategate.  Now news comes from New Zealand about massaging of data by global warming proponents.

The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there.

The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre.

In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century.

We compared raw data for each station (from NIWA’s web site) with the adjusted official data, which we obtained from one of Dr Salinger’s colleagues.

Requests for this information from Dr Salinger himself over the years, by different scientists, have long gone unanswered, but now we might discover the truth.

What did we find? First, the station histories are unremarkable. There are no reasons for any large corrections. But we were astonished to find that strong adjustments have indeed been made.

About half the adjustments actually created a warming trend where none existed; the other half greatly exaggerated existing warming. All the adjustments increased or even created a warming trend, with only one (Dunedin) going the other way and slightly reducing the original trend.

The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming, as documented below. There is nothing in the station histories to warrant these adjustments and to date Dr Salinger and NIWA have not revealed why they did this.

One station, Hokitika, had its early temperatures reduced by a huge 1.3°C, creating strong warming from a mild cooling, yet there’s no apparent reason for it.

We have discovered that the warming in New Zealand over the past 156 years was indeed man-made, but it had nothing to do with emissions of CO2—it was created by man-made adjustments of the temperature. It’s a disgrace.

NIWA claim their official graph reveals a rising trend of 0.92ºC per century, which means (they claim) we warmed more than the rest of the globe, for according to the IPCC, global warming over the 20th century was only about 0.6°C.

NIWA’s David Wratt has told Investigate magazine this afternoon his organization denies faking temperature data and he claims NIWA has a good explanation for adjusting the temperature data upward. Wratt says NIWA is drafting a media response for release later this afternoon which will explain why they altered the raw data.

“Do you agree it might look bad in the wake of the CRU scandal?”

“No, no,” replied Wratt before hitting out at the Climate Science Coalition and accusing them of “misleading” people about the temperature adjustments.

Manipulation of raw data is at the heart of recent claims of corrupt scientific practice in climate science, with CRU’s Phil Jones recently claiming old temperature records collected by his organization were “destroyed” or “lost”, meaning researchers can now only access manipulated data.

Go here to read the whole story.  Climategate is rapidly becoming a very big story indeed.

Editor’s note: this is reprinted from the UK Higher Education International Unit’s most recent newsletter (International Focus issue 48.25.11.09).

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Ahh – the end of the workday and time for a glass of wine: a fine New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, perhaps?

The first time we heard that education generates more ‘export earnings’ for the New Zealand economy than does wine, we were both knocked off of our seats, and not because we had too many glasses! We were surprised because New Zealand’s white wine industry is world-famous – indeed almost as famous as Australia’s tourism industry. But wait: here too, it is now clear that education exports (ie, the provision of education across a border, either physically or virtually) generate more revenue for the Australian economy than does tourism, and is pegged third after exports of coal and iron ore.

Recent data released by the governments of Canada, the UK and Australia all point to similarly striking figures. In Canada last month, for example, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade noted that international students generated 83,000 jobs, C$291m (£166m) in government revenue, and contributed C$6.5bn (£3.7bn) to the Canadian economy. The last figure is higher than Canada’s earnings for coniferous lumber ($5bn/£2.8) and coal ($6bn/£3.4bn).

In 2007, the British Council estimated the value of education and training exports to the UK economy at nearly £28bn, which is more than the automotive or financial services industries. And just a few days ago, NAFSA, the US-based Association of International Educators, noted that international students and their dependants contributed approximately $17.6bn (£10.5bn) to the US economy in the 2008-09 academic year.

It is increasingly common to hear about such numbers, and more often than not even experts within the higher education sphere are surprised by the significance of the impact of providing international students with an education. Given this, we would like to flag three key issues to think about when faced with these admittedly staggering numbers.

First, it is important to think about why these numbers are being sought at this point in history. We would argue that these numbers are being constituted, and debated about, in the context of an ideological transition – one that increasingly enables views to emerge of higher education as a driver of economic versus cultural-political change. For example, a decade or two ago, it would have been impossible to imagine creating tables such as the one profiled in Kate Geddie’s entry in GlobalHigherEd in which education is measured against ‘scrap plastics’ or ‘chemical woodpulp’. Thus, a new organising logic, to use Saskia Sassen’s phrase, is emerging: one that reframes higher education as an urban/national/global services industry, for good and for bad.

Second, it is worth thinking about the emerging capabilities to generate such analyses. Interestingly, almost all of the analyses have been generated by consultants working on behalf of ministries of education, or ministries of foreign affairs and trade. It is noteworthy that there is little capacity within the state to assess such impacts, so representatives of the state reply upon consultants with track records of studying an array of economic development impacts. Most noteworthy, though, is the increased involvement of ministries, other than education, in the sponsoring of such analyses. Thus, the reframing of education as a service industry is dependent upon a reconfiguration of the responsibilities of ministries for the education sphere, such that ministries of trade, as well as immigration and sometimes foreign affairs, are coming into the picture. This emerging trend has huge implications for the future of the governance of higher education.

Third, there is striking variation in the nature and quality of the analytical models adopted by ministries, and their consultants, in accounting for the economic impact of education exports. Despite our comment above about emerging capacity to assess such impacts, and of the role of more powerful ministries in this analytical exercise, the numbers are not yet comparable (nor, in some cases, trustworthy). For example, should all levels and forms of education be accounted for? Or, to what degree is national support (e.g., research assistantships, fellowships, associate instructors) for foreign students accounted for in the analytical models on offer? These are but two of dozens of questions that could be asked about the numbers that have emerged to date. International comparability is impossible at this point in time, and one has to wonder why this is the case if the sector is so seemingly significant in economic terms.

In closing, the globalisation of education, including higher education, is undeniably creating a diverse array of economic, social, cultural impacts. The export-earnings issue is starting to capture the attention of powerful stakeholders, public and private, for-profit and non-profit. Yet the quality of the analyses to date is patchy at best, and certainly not comparable internationally. Why might this be the case, and what could or should be done about it?

Kris Olds & Susan Robertson

Luke McAlister is a hori like Horiwood is. Luke plays rugby football for The New Zealand All Blacks. The All Blacks are the best rugby players in the world. Luke has got quite a powerful kick on him. But with hori thighs, it’s not his fault. Maori (horis) are naturally strong and good at sport. To read more about Luke and his sporting prowess, go here to The All Blacks website.

~Posted by Horiwood.Com, Hollywood California, USA. 11.25.09~