This is exciting. Gareth Shute has won the Montana Book Aware for Lifestyle and Contemporary Culture for his book “Hip hop in Aotearoa.” Having battled through a few misconceptions, like hip hop fans are illiterate and therefore the book would never sell, Gareth managed to produce an impressive volume of an important part of New [...]
I was mucking around with the speech-recognition software on my computer. It’s fairly limited, responding only to particular phrases that trigger particular commands, for example, “close window”, “paste clipboard here”. I noticed that a few commands only seemed to work if I said them with an American accent. The New Zealand way of dropping Rs [...]
Just before seven o’clock this morning I was waiting at the pedestrian crossing outside Sky City Theatre when this fellow sauntered up to me and said- Well, I didn’t hear what he said because I had my iPod on. I took one headphone out and said, “What?” “Did you win,” he enquired. He didn’t look [...]
I went to the New Gallery today. Now, I once read a book about shopping behaviour. It reckoned that most people, when they first enter a shop, will turn to the right. But I always turn left. This may have something to do with me being left-handed, or perhaps it’s just an inbuilt contrariness. So [...]
I was thinking about dairy food today when it occurred to me that New Zealand might be the only place in the world to have dairy food. I’ve been googling and indeed the only websites I can find that have “dairy food” associated with that stuff in the supermarket fridge near the yoghurt (not describing [...]
I’ve been amusing myself with the new world of things I can do with a computer that isn’t partying like it’s 2002. For example, I can surf the interweb and listen to music at the same time on iTunes. This means I can use Audioscrobbler, which will silently note down all my music choices before [...]