Reading Viewing Listening - Lists

Having been treated to a week in Melbourne on a project, caught the Dutch Masters exhibition at NGV. Highlights:

Not the Vermeer (sorry!) - it's about the size of an A4 page and is frankly better done in reproduction on the catalogue's cover.

The Rembrandts - expressive faces, a certain dash in the line.

The landscapes (so many!) - the big-sky genre is my favourite. Low horizon line, and clouds/light effects are beautifully done in the best renditions. Names: van Ruysdael, Hobbema, Pynacker, Moreelse (Girl in a Mirror, just to confound the list...)

Like most world class galleries, NGV has benefitted from bequests and trusts. An early straw stuck into the rich vein of gold-rush money continues to fund purchases, and there are many astounding private collections which have been donated.

Favourites here:

The Japanese woodblocks (Utamaro, Hokusai, Kuniyoshi) - a small selection from a vast store, including many early-impression prints (tend to be sharper)

Durer - NGV has a massive collection, a fraction of which is on display. Again, many early impressions, which are even more crucial in some of the printing techniques such as drypoint, where the plates very quickly lose definition.

Impressionists - including a favourite JWM Turner, whose late pieces (1840's) are forerunners of the movement as a whole - but a very good selection of Pissaro, Sisley, Manet and a thoughtful grouping overall.

As for most decent galleries, too much for a single visit: and we didn't hit the Federation Square site (Australian and Pacific art) - ran out of time.

Melbourne as always, delights with the architecture in the central city - try 333 Collins for a quick sample (outer suburbs and industrial areas are the standard blah) and in the better suburbs around South Melbourne. The obligatory Acland St (St Kilda) tram pilgrimage but (sniff) no gelato - closed up for winter. Come on, Green Apple, it's officially Spring!

And notwithstanding the multiculti ninnies' opinions on oppression, art, kultcha and so on ad infinitum, the things that stay around to evidence said kultcha tend to be (surprise!) great artworks, and architecture which has survived the Darwinian selection process. And, bow to the vanished Bamiyan Buddhas and British church decorations, survived various iconoclastic episodes.

Reading has tended to concentrate on heavy topics interspersed with light ent:

Heavies:

Winning the Oil endgame - a wonderful summary based on hard data and private initiative. Dedicated to the proposition that the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of rocks. And the price signals are going to really push this sort of thing: nice aspect is that no 'to-be-announced' technology is involved in Lovin's suggestions.

The Command of the Ocean - N A M Rodger. Hugely detailed and notable for the sidelights into social history, from a historian of the old, pre-we-are-all-evil-colonisers school. Another engrossing old fart, in other words.

Landscape and Memory - Simon Schama. OK, cheating here, still reading it. Marvellous premise: that landscape is an artefact of human perception, and thus its depictions and commentary reflect the Zeitgeist - spirit of the times or age. Not forgetting the Weltanschauung - the world-view of the writer. How to tease these apart? That's a lifetime's work.

England- An Elegy - Roger Scruton. An unabashedly personal but deeply English book: he laments the loss of 'enchantment' as embodied in the rituals, clubs, brass bands, and generally bottom-up activities of Blighty As She Was. A quote (about church interiors) seems in order:

"That this [deep impression made on those who entered] had not come about without a painful history was evident from the very appearance of those quiet interiors. Iconoclasm and puritan vandalism had swept through these arches like a boiling tide through seashore caverns and, retreating, had left them bare. But you sensed too that the storms had passed, that the architecture was the purer and cleaner for the brutal torrent that had washed away its ornaments, and that the stunned tranquillity of those pitted walls would remain everlastingly."

Quite so. It echoes what we felt at those Evensongs - a quietitude which was the product of a turbulent yet burnishing history.

Light Ent:

Jasper Fforde: the Thursday Next series. Literary to a fault, Python meets Richard II meets Adams (Doug). It really does help (no plot giveaways here) to have actually read Jane Eyre. Great fun.

A Year in the Merde - funny and pertinent.

The Corrections - Franzen. I almost never read a book which is too hot-right-now - I prefer to take my time and read it when the fuss has died down and a bit of history and sanity has intervened. Loved this: oddly uplifting given the subject matter.

Listening:

Anything by Tom Waits: no,that's not a title. Look it up, you lazy sausages. I do think he needs to be listened to in order, to appreciate the transitions (say between Burma Shave - Foreign Affairs, to Gun Street Girl - Rain Dogs - to Another Man's Vine - Blood Money. And possibly not by youngsters - there is a cyclic element in Waits that demands a certain number of years under the belt. But of my own Desert Island Tracks on the Muvo, Waits owns a good chunk of the playlist.

Madeleine Peyroux - marvellous, old time jazz/blues crossover stuff. The earlier CD with her ex is thin and too much not-her.

Nick Cave - Boatman Calls and since. We have both found that the early tracks on Boatman have become strongly associated with England and our time in London, despite the fact that we heard NC for the first time well after the trip! This rather puts paid to the theory that smell is the organiser of memory. Must actually go inside Brompton Oratory the next trip.

Bob Dylan - early and late. The middle years are frankly forgettable. Another old codger getting better as he (and we) age(s).

Mile Davis - Kind of Blue. The cleaned-up version, from the tape recorder that wasn't running slow on the day. A true 20th century classic.

Here endeth today's Lists.

Gaia's revenge on Renewable Energy Policy

Not too long after our own little local 1-turbine Windy Power For the Masses experiment up on Gebbie's Pass was destroyed by a 'sudden change in wind direction', we hear of another Windy Irony.

As the inimitable Mark Steyn notes, who says Gaia doesn't have a sense of humour?

With a history like this, the insurance premiums on exposed turbine farms alone will be a significant chunk of operating expense. After all, it's like having a dam washed away...noooo - don't say that's happened too?

See this for a quick if irreverent survey of the current NZ state of play in Energy Policy.

A healthy (EU) Constitution

Telegraph | Opinion | A healthy Constitution is a succinct, pointed and thoroughly deserved riposte to the bloated, anti-democratic Pan-European effort termed the 'EU Constitution'. The old Constitution was decisively rejected by France and by Holland: this new effort should be the first of many alternative proposals. One detects the influence of the US Constitution, too, in the Telegraph's efforts - funny, that. After all, the US has been a democracy a couple of centuries longer than Germany, and substantially longer than France (where it took a good chunk of the 19th century to wriggle free of the Second Empire...). And it's (the Telegraph's effort) is - gasp - readable! The commoners will be able to understand it! Second gasp. Why, this will never do.

Sigh - another blogger says it better (if with a Canuck accent...)

This post from the ever-readable Gods of the Copybook Headings blog, demonstrates yet again the universality of human nature, and the ultimate futility of governments 'trying to help'. While GCBH speaks to a Canadian context, the themes echo loudly down in this poor, increasingly tribal, and thoroughly victimology-friendly corner of the Pacific.

Belly laugh of the day

Dr Suarez has read of DAS SNOW BOOT: What will those nastily clever narco-traffickers be able to purchase next? Sure saves laundering money through lots and lots of little business fronts. The money quote:

"When you think about it, cocaine is really a pretty brilliant option for sub-mariners. Instead of sharing beds, they wouldn't fucking need them! Any smooth, horizontal surfaces would be kept impeccably clean. The preponderance of mirrors would encourage good hygene. The crew would avoid catching colds, given that one errant sneeze could cost them $1,500 on the open market."

But of course, here in li'l ol' NZ, home of the 6 Herky-bird Air Force (2 serviceable at any given time) and the proud frigate Canterbury to patrol the high seas - whoops, no, sorry, they are just about to sink that one somwhere in Cook Strait to provide Equitable Housing Outcomes for a bunch of green-lipped mussels - a drug cartel with a submarine would be detected........just how again?

Sigh.

The future of dead-tree publishing

Power Line, in a piece entitled: Robert Burns, call your office, has quoted what I think is the best-put, most succinct (always a desirable quality) yet forceful argument for the ascendancy of electronic publishing. MSM, with their ludicrous blend of rigidity, now-obvious bias, a pervasive animus to things Webby, and most embarrassingly, a rather visible lack of intellectual horsepower compared to their on-line nemeses, are in the cross hairs.

From my own reading patterns over the last three years or so, future media will concentrate on things very local; the penetrating and real-time analysis will be Web-based; thoughtful pieces in quality journals such as Atlantic Monthly will live on; and there will continue to be niche magazines, in fact ever nicher.

But as the Powerline piece notes, trying to cover all bases, as the dead-tree newspapers and general purpose magazines (like our own funny little Listeria, ht NZPundit) is a recipe for irrelevance.

Who'd a thunk it? Osama as apostate

On reading this, two phrases meandered across the frontal lobes (or was that the amigdila - the older, reptilian bit?).

Hoist by his own Petard
Shooting Fish in a Barrel

Whatever: the image of OBL as a religious outcast, condemned as such by Spanish Muslims, is certainly one to savour.

Innovation as the driver

This Arnold Kling article says in much better words what I have been thinking out loud about in a more stumbling way and with less articulate language. Combining known elements in unknown combinations is the real value-add. There are pointed side-swipes at governments and bureaucracies, too. Kewwl.

Alive in 2005

Some juicy new sites, especially for NZ readers who are currently being regaled with tales about the Wananga, and down the maw of which we currently tip NZD 0.25 Billion. Like most white folk, I have no particular issue with public money going to what Tom Wolfe characterised in 'Bonfire of the Vanities' as 'steam control'. Having a lot of poor, young males hanging about idle is a recipe for societal distress at the very least, as Lee Harris discusses.

Roger Sandall (author of "The Culture Cult") on his site has some very pithy things to say about this sort of misty-eyed hankering after imagined pasts. Mostly, when translated into current-context policy, these 'designer tribalism' ideas are a disaster in the long run, as they act to increase a sense of identity, but at the direct expense of involvement with and understanding of the wider society.

It's all too recognisable here in the Shaky Isles.

Back to life, with Te Reo thoughts and a Billion 7500G wireless setup too!

It's been some time (OK, six months) since the last post, and pressure of work is as good an excuse as any to plead.

On the equipment front, the trusty but dusty D-Link DSL-500 has been tossed and a Billion 7500G wireless set-up substituted. With the addition of a work machine, we found ourselves with 3 Centrino laptops and lots of cables, so it was a natural choice. The selection process was aided by a marvellous Oz site which, together with the Whirlpool forums convinced me to steer well clear of Telecom's D-Link offering (the DSL-G604T+). The Billion worked out of the box, and I've added MAC address filtering plus port filtering to secure things. WEP and/or WPA to follow, but these are a bit trickier...

Another idealistic article recently in the NZ Listener from a writer who spends time in Quebec, about how golly gosh wunnerful it would be if we mandated a dual-language labelling regime here in Helengrad. I half-penned a letter to the editor, then realised, WFT, just do it here. Less constraints, more to the point, quicker. Here's the unbowdlerised version.


Barbara Burstyn's article on 'With language comes understanding', urges an enforced dual-language environment for New Zealand - English and Maori.

She bases her argument on the English/French admixture in Quebec. This will reap a rich harvest of unintended consequences if implemented.

Burstyn's comparison of English and French is instructive: both have common roots, and shared equally in the explosion of knowledge and the application thereof, that have provided us with our modern world. After all, the native speakers of each, are only 20 minutes now apart by EuroStar and half a day in a boat apart, for the rest of recorded history. One would be very surprised indeed if such close linguistic cousins were not able to co-exist in a mandated dual-language area.

But French and English are not at all like Maori and English. And Burstyn's choice of this particular pairing, obscures the issues.

To take the two most serious: the economic impact, glossed over in her article with the phrase 'importers and manufacturers of everything consumed..would be affected'. Let's think that one through. Every large supermarket carries around 20-30,000 SKU's. Every one of those would have to be dual-language labelled, and not just with a cosmetic transliteration: a heavy-duty, tested, completely up-to-date translation which would stand up to, for example, product liability legal challenges.

Supermarkets are a small fraction of the commercial environment.To use an analogy - suppose Melbourne (Australia, look on a map, around the same population size as the whole of NZ at say 4 million) had it's own native language. Let's call it Melburnian. What chance would it have, as a single city, of pursuading every supplier to supply Melburnian labels, workshop and training manuals, price lists, Web sites, credit card imprints, tram passes and street signs? Suppliers would simply decamp to Sydney, Brisbane or Perth and a thriving cross-state under-the-counter market in monolingual goods would rapidly ensue.

But by far the most damaging consequence of the enforced labelling regime would be for the Maori language itself. It's 'taonga' (treasure) status rests entirely on the fact that it is one of the very few pre-scientific and pre-literate languages to have survived alongside a global language. It has sufficient speakers and enough political wind pressure behind it to keep it alive in some form.

But to offer it up as a serious commercial partner to English in the manner suggested is daft. The Maori language is pure oratory, oral history, and essential if elemnetary survival knowledge. It is completely devoid of all Western scientific, engineering, mathematical and literature-based terms, concepts and context - elements which were themselves some 2,500 years in the making. It could not have been otherwise, and that is it's distinctiveness.

To attempt what Bursytn suggests would be to subject this survivor language to massive change. Just to translate, in legally acceptable terms, one line of the label before me on a bottle of milk: 'Calcium - 280mg per 200ml - 35% of the recommended daily intake' into Maori, is to require the importation of the Periodic Table, the metric system, and the mathematical concepts of fractions. And in their full sense, not just a 'William-to-Wiremu' makeover of word sounds without the concepts to underpin them. It is hard to imagine (something Burstyn seems to do a lot, in her article, BTW) that this would not fundamentally alter the Maori language by overwhelming it with neologisms and, in the truest sense of the word, 'foreign' concepts.

It is certainly possible to force such a change in the language, by mandating it and thus opening the valve to the flood of new terms, concepts, sounds, and their written equivalents. But it is certain that the Maori language which resulted from that process would bear very little resemblance to that existing now.

Somehow, I don't think that's what Burstyn imagined could happen.

But then, idealists rarely have to worry about the details. Wherein the devils reside.

Tribes Tripes Tropes

Richard Brookhiser has some pithy words about the difficult project of modernity. It would be nice to think that local advocates of 'da Tribe' should read them and pause. A little teaser:

"More and more, everyone in the world wants self-esteem; less and less, everyone gets it from the kinship group and village customs. For the missing extra jolt, they turn to totalist simplifying ideologies, or they begin the long slog into modernity."

It ain't easy being modern - all those choices! And it's very easy, as RB notes, to delegate the task to a 'simplifying ideology' - religion (think, Islam, where man is specifically regarded as unable to formulate new, let alone criticise existing, prescriptions), a State (think, Stalinist Russia or France), or a Tribe (you have a wide choice here, in NZ, some State subsidised). In all these cases, the burden of choice falls away.

Of course, it's a form of enslavement (something historically closer to many groups' actual practises than any would admit), a brake on innovation, and an economic dead end (read anything by Gareth Morgan). But it's a price that historically many or most have been willing to pay.

An aspect of the price is the group rituals which are needed to cement the 'us' against all 'others', which provide a certain surveillance to ensure that members do not develop seccessionist tendencies, which act to replace the ever-present danger of individual thought, and which provide a pleasing pattern or sequence to a day.

I have always had an aversion to these rituals without really knowing why - apart from the obvious anti-intellectual aspects. The ones that come closest to hooking me are the traditional church services we struck in England: but even there, the religion was a much watered-down version of high-church Anglican, and it was a visible triumph of faith over actuality for even the in-group participants. But certainly the pleasing rituals had a pull at the time.

As Jared Diamond notes in "Guns, Germs and Steel", one formative reason for religions is that they can regulate behaviours which cannot be left to chance - Hardin's 'tragedy of the commons' amongst them. By simply stipulating a prohibition, group outcomes are enhanced. Diamond's example is the prohibition on pig meat common to both Judaism and Islam: it solved a pressing issue in the newly-deforested and rapidly degrading Middle East of the time, as pigs' needs for forage in general and water in particular, competed directly with humans'. No eating them. No point in owning them. Problem solved.

But a growing issue is the reversion to tribal and religious thinking which accompanies the current exaltation of tribes in funny little NZ: a sort of mental irredentism. While the more risible forms (taniwha - monsters - which have impeded the planning for a major highway - you can't make this stuff up) can be dismissed, the underlying tendency towards 'magical thinking' is no laughing matter. Any abandonment of the intellect, in the sense of scientific thought, repeatedly demonstrable causes and effects and so on - is bound to undercut the very reasons for and energy of our current state of civilisation, however that's defined.

And this trend is not much better for art: which thrives at the edge of, or in the whirlpools between, great currents of thought. Ask yourself: how much good art over the past 300 years was produced by tribes, as opposed to by lonely outcasts, 'canaries in the coal mines' (as Kurt Vonnegut characterised the role of an artist), existential despair, war, love lost, alcohol and other chemical propellants, and some proportion at least, by individuals with certifiable mental illness?

Oh, there's that word again. Yes, Art is produced by Individuals. Hold that thought.

Prepare for the worst?

Both Ralph Peters and David Warren - two old hands in the Middle Eastern game - seem rather pessimistic to say the least. Their basic intuition - no more than that, at present, is that we are seeing the first stages of an implosion of the entire Arab culture. The money quote from Peters:

"The Arab Middle East has become the world's first entirely parasitical culture; all it does is to imitate poorly, consume voraciously, spit hatred, export death and create nothing."

The whole area hasn't exactly been on my own travel destinations 'one-day' list, but if this goes all the way one of the consequences will be the sequestration of the whole mess. If, as other writers have argued (see, perhaps, Belmont Club) the terrorist is an entirely parasitical method of warfare, then a simple and quite reasonable response is to exercise far stronger border control and movement vetting. That's certainly absent in the EU now. See it while you can?

Amusing Arabian Ablogger (had to make the alliteration work somehow)

Here's a guy will make you reconsider every stereotype you may have had. (And if you don't have stereotypes, how do you survive life in a crowded world?)

He's taking a big risk in doing what he's doing (think, a Luther but in 1510, not 1517) so the least we can do is read it all. And laugh a lot. My two favourites so far: (oh, the linky thing):

(It's a scene from an OBL play)..."I'm so s..s..sorry" howls Bin Laden, "I n...n...never meant to become a terrorist. I always wanted to b..b..become an Imam, but my IQ was over 30."

(On the rather inadequately developed Saudi execution as a satisfactory public spectacle).... "It’s magnified on a massive screen. There are endless replays from different angles. Then in slow motion. Two commentators, retired executioners, discuss the finer points of the swing. Sombre music plays as the corpse and head are removed. The lights dim. That’s it until the next time"

With a sense of humour like this, you just gotta love the guy.

Oil for Fraud is big news now

The irrepressible Mark Steyn, whose articles are always amusingly written and capital-F Forthright, has a good piece in the Telegraph on the tangle of deceit that the Oil-for-Food humanitarian relief effort in Iraq quickly turned into. No quotes (although starving moppets do make another appearance) - just RTWT.

As irrelevant as New Zealand

This assessment from Michael Totten takes our little country as an example of the altered state of relationships between America and Europe. It's a view often heard from the other side of the ditch as well: that NZ is essentially a neutral, and a neutered one (in terms of defence spend) to boot. If we need defending, we'll have to contract it out.

Update: Wog thinks much the same. Sigh.

Not great for the old self-esteem, but this sort of clear-eyed, name-it-for-what-it-is analysis is what I go looking for in the blogosphere.

And another chiller: Heather MacDonald writes about the continuing failure to be able to 'connect the dots': the triumph of privacy rightists (from the right) and civil liberties protectors (from the left) in preventing the projects which would advance this capability. Talk about a Pyrrhic Victory......

Oil for Fraud - UN to be implicated in massive scam

Looks like this is set to blow on April 22. The usual suspects - France (specifically, Chirac), UN officials, inspectors up and down the chain, and so on, are expected to be unequivocally linked. Sure explains France's efforts to keep Saddam rolling.

Are we surprised? Na. Chirac will go down in history as responsible for the nuclear reactor France provided to Iraq (the Osirak plant, known ever since the Israelis took it out in 1981, as the O'Chirac) plus the Oil-for-fraud palm-greasing (possibly quite literally...) that has, according to an investigator quoted in the article, the potential to be

"one of the world's most disgraceful scams" .

Read it all.

Iraq's first birthday

This little, heartfelt piece, from a so obviously different point of view, is a great antidote to the barrage of lazily misinformed news from the regular outlets. The joy at celebrating (April 9) the liberation just shines out.

Other insights I've found useful include an ongoing series over at Belmont Club, an opinion piece from the plain-speaking Ralph Peters, and the always reliable Cap'n.

Two aspects stand out from these pieces and other reading:

1. despite the spike in Coalition casualties, which are always reported accurately, the kill ratios are staying very high. Of the order of 50-100 to 1. That's good news.

2. The involvement of Syria and Iran in financing, infiltrating, fomenting and generally stirring, is now clear (vide Peters, who makes this explicit). June 30 is a drop-dead milestone for them: it means a freer Iraq and that cannot be tolerated.

Jobs in Hip-Hop

Apart from the obvious reaction to this little joyride (which of course is: "hey, that was our tax money you hosed up the wall - but then, what's new?"), let's stop and think about the recorded reason for this grant.

To the more gullible, a continuing justification for the trip - nobody has yet leapt to the defence of the reported 'chilling out' in Hawaii, Fiji, and Paris - is the quite reasonable notion of eventual jobs in hip-hop. One at a time, then.

Hip-hop is now regarded as being 25 (some would say 30) years old. That's a long time for any musical genre, and it shows. According to Nick Crowe (hat-tip to Dennis Dutton at Arts and Letters Daily),

"change is the only option left for a form once built on innovation, but now characterised by self-limiting dogma and paucity of ideas".

And that change, oh heavenly irony - is coming from.... po' white trash like Eminem. The article mentions "the state of emergency in hip-hop". Hmm: if this was a stock, I'd be selling.

So, it seems that the creative side of hip-hop is dying. And that this could have been discerned by a few minutes Googling by the grants advisers. But they're just bureaucrats (even if closely related to the applicant). What about those 'jobs'?

Any sort of artistic endeavour is generally driven by passion. Characters and storylines that rumble around the head until they have to be let out. Fingers that twitch around figures, riffs, patterns, sequences on any musical instrument you like. The need to adopt personae - masks - and parade around as not-oneself. The urge to make visible, in some medium, an inner vision. And early hip-hop was no exception.

Funnily enough, there tend not to be advertisements for 'jobs' in all this. Think how Marquez, JWM Turner, Tom Waits, or Peter Jackson got started. Not by answering ads. It was that pesky inner passion.

Sure, there are 'jobs' around art of any sort. Roadies, managers, ticket-clippers of all kinds, equipment, material and chemical propellant suppliers, groupies, lawyers, marketers, copywriters, security - the list is long. And they can occasionally be found (at least the more legal ones can) in the press, in specialist magazines, and on the tear-off tabs of hand-written sheets of paper on pinboards anywhere.

But, here's the catch. These jobs are generic and contractual. It's the film industry's MO: get the idea, script it out, assemble a company, make a team, make the film, disband the team. It's not a job as much as a series of projects. Anyone in or around these industry groupings knows that. And you tend to be invited in - head-hunted. And that's for the inner circle.

Further out - the security guys, roadies are just strong backs. Groupies, ditto, plus weak minds. Equipment suppliers, they're specialised retailers. Chemical suppliers, they're hoping to stay well under the radar, and that clients don't lab-test the marching powder for purity. Lawyers, marketers, as one artist, Robert Cray sang 'You can tell me a boat full of lawyers just sank' - enough said.

These 'jobs' are everywhere and nowhere. So: 'Jobs in Hip-Hop'. Generic, short-term, contractual, insecure positions, if you're not the artist(e). Bit like supermarket shelf-fillers, really.

If you are the artist(e) - why pick a genre so obviously flaring and dying? Why not create an entirely new one? Why not let those restless urges out on a world always eager for the next big thang?

Inside tip: don't wait till you see it advertised. It'll be waaay too late then.

So, where's the next kilowatt gonna come from?

Project Aqua - a large scale hydro generation proposal - has had - lovely irony this - it's plug pulled. Now, against a backdrop of increasing power demand and static generation capacity, folks are now asking the obvious: what's going to keep my business and my home a-hummin'?

A quick survey of the options:
Large-scale hydro: bzzzt - Aqua was to have used the last major resource that could be easily tapped. It had a high head and good flow, hence high energy potential. What's left tends to have one or other, not both, characteristics. And Aqua was in easy country geologically speaking.

Small-scale hydro: Maybe. But the same Byzantine processes of resource consent are needed, irrespective of project scale. Higher fixed cost equals higher running cost. And there will be a lot more generation points needed.

Geothermal: Maybe. That's if underground heat generated by vulcanism doesn't turn out to be a taonga, or be a major part of some taniwha's sustenance. And there's resource consent too...

Coal: probably. Although the Gummint doesn't like this turn of events: Govt Resists Coal Generation Option. Still, the vast lignite fields in Southland have to be a starter. The spectre of Kyoto is rather diminished these days, now that Russia has refused to ratify it. Oh wait, we stupidly signed up already? Sigh.

Nuclear: useful as a straw man to draw the impassioned bile of greens, and worth suggesting for the sheer sake of the ensuing spectacle. But chain-yanking aside, not, I think, a serious starter.

Wind: definitely possible, established in the Manawatu, but has already drawn NIMBY's in Christchurch (the sole generator, at Gebbie's Pass has had a rocky history, and the owners are still trying to quieten the gearbox, ferchrissake), and in Wellington, where a proposed Cook Strait facing wind farm got the evil eye from locals. The problem with wind is of course storage: power has to be used there and then (it does, after all, move rather quickly down them wires). So unless it's used to (say) pump water up into a hydro lake while the wind is blowing, it is rather useless for baseload generation, and by the same token, cannot be relied upon for peaks. And at around 0.5mW per tower, you need an awful lot of whirligigs to make even a modest amount of power. And then only sometimes.

Gas: maybe. Although we did seem to tear through the last major gas field we found rather quickly, no? The form of generation is here the major determinant: doing the gas jet under boiler, to steam - to turbine - to generator - to transmission, in a large centralised station, is not the most efficient usage of the potential. Dispersed generation - say via Stirling cycle technology like WhisperTech, is a better bet. That's big in the UK right now, especially for remote, isolated or small-cluster users. Watch this space.
Similarly, fuel-cells are another technology to watch.

But hey, there's another possibility! In the article, one of the NIMBY's down on the Waitaki river had this to say:

"there is a real head of steam developed for protecting the Waitaki River from such developments."

Quick: back up a turbine and generator, and hook 'em up to the grid!

Guns baaad. Explosive belts Gooood.

NZ Pundit reports on the, shall we say over-egged, response to kid-size guns. Note the rapidity and ferocity of the condemnation. The key line in the Parents' Centre quote runs like this:

"[the advertisement] sent a clear message to kids that it was OK to kill".

So I expect an equally vigorous affirmation from PC (cor, the coincidence...) for an American parent's commentary about Hussam Abdu - you will perhaps recall Abdu's 15 seconds of fame recently on global TV.

"If a bunch of men pressured some girl out of having an abortion the clever cheese-and-cracker set would be speechless with moral outrage.

Well, this is the new peer pressure in the Middle East.

And, it seems to me, bullying a kid into self-vaporization and murder is worse than teasing a girl into an eating disorder."

Teaching kids to kill - themselves! Shockingly unsupportive of kidz rightz. Let's hear it, Parents' Centre! Let's hear it, Minister(s) for Child, Yoof and Fambly! (Who is it, this week?)

I personally won't be holding my breath...