Month: April 2005

Alternative-ness

I just had coffee with Catherine down in West end, and was reminded by the myriad interesting people who wandered past our table how similar Boundary road is to Cuba st in Wellington, and generally how cool it is because of it’s unconventional mannerisms and contradictions.

There were the happy dressed up semi-drunks spilling out of the cocktail bars, and the shabbily theme-dressed student types obviously off to a party, and the guys in dreadlocks all sitting at a cafe smoking and playing backgammon, and the homeless guy walking down the street engaged in vibrant conversation with a friend, and the two guys wandering surrepticiously hand in hand, and I could go on and on…

Anyway, I always love it. It’s the kind of vibrancy and diversity which keeps society intersting, and worth talking to, or at least about.

Nostalgia

In the last few weeks I have been suffering from quite frequent bouts of inexplicable sentimentally and nostalgia (particularly great word that, from the Greek Nostos, “Return home”, and algos, “Pain”, so literally “the pain of returning home”) in relation to my time in Dunedin when I was doing my first degree in biochemistry.

Firstly, while re-exploring the Otago university website I found a bunch of great semi-abstract, very memory provoking photos which change to something new every time you reload the page (go to the site, let it load, then hit the F5 key and see what I mean).

Then I specifically went looking, and found some more galleries of photos from around otago, which of course only exacerbated the problem.

Then today, while looking for some long lost friends, I found my way to the Knox College site, which was the hall of residence I lived in for the first two years of my university life. On it there was all manner of great stuff, but I particuarly liked the Garden party page and the page entitled Four Seasons at Knox, which has some great photos of the college covered in snow. Man does that bring back some superb memories.

I also just found a page with links to a number of webcams located around the city (although by and large I couldn’t see much (given that it’s 1:15am there at the moment).

Anyway, it’s funny how you can look back on a period that clearly had some pretty significant shortcomings (most obviously being freaken’ cold, because it was snowing) and still think it was pleasant and memory worthy.

This is such a great mental image

New contender for best album title: “Blunderbusses at dawn” by an English electronic outfit called Revolvo. It really is something that would be cool to see, even if it was only firing blanks. They would of course have to do it wearing safari suits too.

In an aside, you can also download the album from their site if you want to listen to any of their stuff.

Wierdword

Apparently they have issued a 2005 edition of the scrabble world list, and amongs the newly added words are “Google” (as a verb, not a noun) and “Bootylicious”.

I’m looking forward to the next time I get to play Scrabble (which we frequently do when we go to see Simone’s parents, so it may not be too far off) so I can try and fit one of them in.

Well that didn’t take long

As if on cue, the Vatican has resumed it’s quest to alienate europeans, and invalidate itself within the modern word.

From the second article, a quote from the Spanish prime minister:
“One of the guarantees of democracy is the freedom of religion, freedom of opinion and freedom to carry out a political project with the citizens’ vote.”

And on the specific topic of the spanish gay-marriage bill:
Justice Minister Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar argued that the bill overcomes “the barriers of discrimination, many of them with deep historical or primitive roots, which affect rights and freedoms and, in a specific way, the extension of free choice in the search for happiness, an unwritten basic right”.

I keep hearing this word around, and when I incidentally found it while perusing the dictionary the other day (“Hi…. my name is Dave, and I am a….. a… a linguaphile. It’s been 3 days since I’ve played the dictionary game, and at the moment I really need another hit..) I thought I should share it with the world.

Inshallah – “If Allah wills it”.

It does of course have a lot of associated islamic and religious bagage if you will, but I still like the concept.

Another cool use of language is one of the recent Penny Arcade posts, in which Tycho uses some really cool words. I want a vocabulary with as many perty and redundant words as that!

Something for Rob

A few years ago, during his heady engineering student days, my brother Rob (on the right in this pic) used to do a radio segement on the Canterbury University student radio station RDU. At the time my attempts to listen to it were confounded by my internet connection not wanting to connect, and he has subsequently stopped doing it (as far as I am aware).

Anyway, today I remembered this all, and finally managed to connect and have a little listen. It was good

RDU – Listen online here

When he was in he also liked the Vic uni radio station RadioActive.

Radioactive – Listen online here

Just something to do..

Rock on

I followed a link today which took me to the official site for both the New Zealand and the Australian National Air Guitar Championships. Fantastic!!

The site also has a link to the Australian national Paper Rock Scissors championship, and if the Queensland round of the competition wasn’t being held in Darwin (??!??!!) you know I’d be there with Bells on.

Medical Student Debt Case Book

On March 31 the New Zealand Medical Association, in conjunction with the New Zealand Medical Students’ Association, the New Zealand University Students’ Association realeased a publication entitled “Doctors and Debt: The Effect of Student Debt on Doctors“. It was a cohort study of first year house officers (interns) in New Zealand, and outlined the impact that high university fees and correspondingly high student loans have had on the members of the cohort, both individually and on a statistical level within the entire cohort.

For New Zealand Students (medical or otherwise) it serves as a depressingly predictable validation of the claims that have been made since the begining of the student loan scheme about the detrimental effects of such debt on young graduates, and the subsequently the economy and infrastructure of the country as a whole.

For my australian readers it’s worth a read, as it is a stern warning of the effects of allowing such policies to be implemented, because while Australia is currently benefiting from the immigration of NZ doctors into higher paying locum positions within Australia, the current push by the federal government to allow full fee paying medical school positions, to increase the fees attached to government subsidised HECS medical school places, and the failure of certain states to maintain competitive (ie market driven and realistic) award pay rates for junior doctors could combine quite rapidly to leave Australia in the same medical staffing crisis that New Zealand is increasingly experiencing.