land of the long white cloud

[Amos]

sez you, mister fox!

ooskau!

[Lyle]

yeah. well. you got me there.

hey man, you like my signature?
(all growed up now. Got a signature and everything)
I wrote it myself you know.......

[Amos]

it fiils my head with sorrow!

[Lyle]

that deserves a Mr. Burns " excellent "

that will be all.

[Anita Blake]

you two remind me of an bizarro-world version of myself and my coworker.

~waits for james to call lyle a rancid whore~

~waits for lyle to call james a festering slut-bitch~

~sits back and watches the hilarity ensue~

[Lyle]

James...

...you festering slut bitch!

heh heh...

[Lyle]

Huzzah!

My first double-post. Today is a momentous day indeed.
Anyway the reason for such sacrilage...I picked this up somewhere and thought it was relevent. Or more relevent than my last post in this thread anyway...

I'll just jot some of it down, it's all about the cultural insecurity of your every day New Zealander...who isn't Maori. Here goes...

This insecurity has some curious manifestations, among them defensiveness,
bordering on hostility. By way of example, in 1998 New Zealand First MP Tau Henare suggested that the North and South Islands be known instead by their Maori names, Te Ika a Maui and Te Waipounamu. Legal academic David Round objected strenuously to the proposal, appearing on national television to debate the issue with Henare. The Evening Post ran a story headed "when biculturalism goes too far" in which it was observed:

Round made it clear that the reason he objected to a name change was that he was fed up with what he called forced biculturalism...It was one of those rare moments when someone had the courage to articulate what a lot of New Zealanders privately think, but are either too polite or timid to say.
While the programme was on air, viewers were asked to call in to register their approval or otherwise of the proposed name change. At the end of the programme the results of the digipoll showed that 87 pecent of those who called were opposed to the idea while just 13 percent were in favour. The Evening Post took this as proof that most New Zealanders opposed the proposed name change, suggesting the reason as being that:

Like David Round, they resent the feeling that this thing called biculturalism is increasingly being imposed upon them, and their own cultural heritage devalued and pushed aside in the process, with very little regard for the will of the majority.

What is fascinating about this analysis, aside from the characterisation of our colonisers as "polite" and "timid" and the assumption that an 87 percent majority in a Hlomes Show digipoll is conclusive evidence as to what "most New Zealanders" want, is the suggestion that the names "North Island" and "South Island" somehoe represent Pakeha cultural heritage, which must be defended at all costs. Little wonder that Pakeha New Zealand struggles with the question of identity, seeking to create cultural icons of gumboots, black singlets, pavalova, kiwifruit and the buzzy bee toy. When travelling overseas, Pakeha leap forward to perform bastardised versions of the haka and "Pokarekare Ana", and adorn themselves with Maori pendants in an attempt to identify themselves as New Zealanders: when in Aotearoa it is often those same people who decry any assertion of Maori language and culture as a threat to their identity. Their cultural insecurity appears to know no bounds...

for those who don't know( shame on you) Pakeha is the Maori name for white man or in the dictionary: a person of predominantly european descent.
And Aotearoa means NZ and so on.
Pretty interesting stuff in my opinion. Catch you later.

[Amos]

Woman in court after grave dug up and suitcase stolen
22 September 2006

A woman has been charged with stealing a dead man's suitcase from his grave shortly after he was buried.

The New Zealand Herald reported today cemetery staff found a woman acting suspiciously near the grave of Raymond Teaonui.

She was moved on but allegedly returned during the night, dug up the grave, and removed a suitcase of clothes Mr Teaonui wanted buried with him.

The family told the newspaper they were devastated when police told them.

A 30-year-old unemployed woman has appeared at Waitakere District Court charged with misconduct in respect of human remains and remanded on bail until next month.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3805532a11,00.html

Pfft. As usual, NZ journalism has let us all down, leaving out all the important details. What kind of clothes were in there? Were they special clothes to wear in the afterlife, or clothes in case he actually wasn't dead, had to claw his way out of his grave, then change into something clean? What did the women want the clothes for? A post-mortem commitment to a drycleaning schedule? Or was there something else in that suitcase, something unaccounted for? Like maybe her crazy-pills. Or an ipod. I would dig up someone's grave to get an ipod.

[Amos]

New Zealanders are very proud of their sporting achievements, which is just as well because they don't have much else to be proud of. Both in and out of athletic competitions we present ourselves as being part of the elite ranks of modern civilizations, when we are in fact a little gang of self-centered, reckless, undisciplined, lazy, feeble-minded upstarts who seem to get by on luck alone. Lucky that our weather is bad but rarely disastrous. Lucky that we have democracy, even if we don't truly comprehend it. Lucky that anticipating the weather occupies so much time that nobody gets any really dangerous ideas into their head. Lucky that our Australian neighbors don't take our constant jibes too seriously. Lucky that nobody takes us too seriously, unless they are fools themselves. Lucky that we have plenty of firewood, seafood, clean water, and a tiny population. But hey, we haven't been here all that long, so we haven't had that much time to fuck it up yet. We definitely haven't improved it, and our "clean green" image is only plausible because of how recent we are. We're a seedling country, not the advanced, wise civilization that we choose to think of ourselves as. Stay that way for a few more thousand years, or even just a few hundred, and then we'll talk accolades and noble lineage.
We embody in a way the charming young man who goes out drinking all the time and comes home to abuse his wife. In public he claims to love her as he could no other. In private he treats her as a whore.
Let's see. First we brought cannibalism and tribal warfare - not too harmful as far the land is concerned, but far from intelligent behavior, which is a bad but not uncommon precedent. Somehow, despite their being relatively few of us, we managed to hunt the Moa (like an emu and at the time the world's largest bird) to extinction. Then more people came to join the party, words were exchanged, then blows, but we all made up afterwards because it was hard enough trying to settle as it was without being shot at by your neighbors. Order of a kind was established, but this required roads and farms, which seemed to just keep getting bigger and bigger. We felled more forests and razed more bushes as our population increased - not that fast, though, and we sold a lot of our surplus to other countries too smart to do it themselves. This money was spent largely on booze and uniforms for our athletes, but this trend is in the beginnings of a decline as I see it, since the increasing price of booze means that more people are growing dope, which in turn means that less people are playing sport. We are quite comfortable as things stand, although we have quite a large unemployment rate, and only a fairly thin swathe of ozone layer above us. If the oceans were to rise we would lose a small number of seaside towns but I doubt that anybody would complain all that much.
Have I mentioned how the smart ones leave as soon as they get the chance, to make their fortune in better places? A few of the less intelligent ones do the same but they all end up in Australia, which isn't really an improvement. Actually it's a step down if, like so many others before you, you wind up in some desert mining town with a handful of sweating drunkards and a lizard.
But hey, we're not so bad, we say. Come here and we'll tell you all about it if you throw a few dollars our way and pretend to like our slovenly lifestyle and our entertainers. Smoke some of our weed that we grew on the beach and goes down like bits of broken glass and shredded tin. Help a kiwi get ahead in the world by buying him a 24-pack of beer. Swim with our dolphins who are frankly the smartest individuals you will meet during your visit apart from a few of the other tourists. Look at our whales! Yes, our whales, we own them. We pretty much put them there, along with those melting glaciers and extinct volcanoes. Don't worry about tigers or anything like that, but watch out for our cows who are naturally evil-minded like all cows are and the least tolerable creature we could have chosen to introduce after rats (which we also introduced anyway). Take a load off at one of our windy rest stops built from freezing concrete and gaze at our lime green humps sitting like big poisonous frogs under a sky that is 90% shades of wet cigarette-gray. Meanwhile our hordes of nimble white sheep will lull you into a day-dreamy state of mind from which many never return.


(so yeah i was feeling patriotic...)