I had a 9am flight (a business trip!), and I had booked a taxi for 7.45 which, according to the taxi driver, was more time than I really needed. Except when the taxi got to Hillsborough, suddenly the traffic got slow and dense. He tried another side street, and then discovered there’d been a crash [...]
You will recall about a week ago when I was expressing outrage at the predominance of the “Nature’s Best” compilation CD as the hold music of so many New Zealand government departments and corporations. Well, this inspired Stacezilla to check out was what playing on his company’s phone system. He writes… Ugh I just checked [...]
bFM’s music documentary series Inside Track recently looked at the Hamilton music scene. Yay. It was interesting listening to it, because it sounds like things changed quite dramatically around the time I left Hamilton. Back in my Hamilton gig-going days (1993 to 1996), there were two main venues – the Wailing Bongo at Waikato University, [...]
I was on hold. I’d been waiting for a while, but was kept company by a selection of songs by New Zealand artists. First there was Dave Dobbyn’s “Slice of Heaven”, then Bic Runga’s “Sway”, the Exponent’s domestic violence classic “Victoria”, then Crowded House’s “Weather With You”. It was then it dawned on me. This [...]
Interesting things have been happening in the places where I grew up. First there was a P lab found in the old Matangi dairy factory, and now there’s just been a huge explosion at a cold-storage facility just across the road from Tamahere Model Country School (um, yeah, that’s its name, but it’s really just [...]