1886, Rotorua: a ‘brief ordinary dance’, or one ‘complete with indecencies, which they said the gentlemen usually preferred, for £3/10’.
Forgotten co-discoverer of the structure of DNA? No, not her; kiwi Maurice Wilkins. Shared the Nobel with Watson & Crick, not being dead.
“Don’t get arrested!” “No way, bro!” Five minutes later he’s haring drunkenly down Manners St with someone’s purse. (She got it back.)
Cock-throwing: tying a rooster atop a post & throwing coksteles (special weighted sticks) at it. Thomas More boasted of his skill at this. Yes, that would be St Thomas More who was expert at knocking chickens off a post. Also torturing heretics. Odd we care more about chickens.
Must be careful not to call tearful students “weepers” when they’re within earshot, composing themselves in the LSC toilet.
Meander: decorative border, a single line shaped into a repeated motif. Found in Greek art & also on the iconic NY coffee cup, the Anthora.
Lectures are a sanity-preserving collective delusion, in which professors can pretend they’re teaching and students that they’re learning.
Only had Windows on my Macbook for 20 minutes before it started acting like a dickhead. Windows “scrambled the clock”. Result: Mac password failed at login. Locked out of my computer, helpdesk bemused, frantic hunt for Mac Guy. “Oh, they all do that,” said Mac Guy. “Just unplug the ethernet cable and plug it in again.” Wanted to slap him.
Sigur Rós’s Með Suð I Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust is very nice, especially Góðan Daginn. Ooo, lookee me, I’m all Icelandic, call me Björk.
@adzebill
Archive for: November, 2010
Tweetdump
The Unbearable Sadness of Apostrophes
We give a short quiz as part of the Essay Writing course I help teach at the Learning Skills Centre. As you read it, see if you can guess how well a class of 20 students would do.
Put apostrophes in appropriate places in these sentences.
1. The four friends essays received grades that ranged from Ds to As
2. A collapsible life-rafts oars are important to its function in performing rescues.
3. The cats sat on the womens stairs while the two dogs owners discussed religion.
4. That signs up in all the shops; its message is that its a good time to buy CDs.
Ready for the answers?
1. friends’, D’s, A’s
2. raft’s
3. women’s, dogs’
4. sign’s, it’s
So how did the 20 students, mostly first-years, score?
4 out of 4: 0
3 out of 4: 2
2 out of 4: 3
1 out of 4: 4
0 out of 4: 11
See, this is why teaching writing can be a little depressing. Missing a couple of the questions: understandable. But none? We’re living in different worlds.
Tweetdump
Nearly every bus or train company logo has an arrow on it. But in Sydney they kick the arrows up a notch with some sweet motion blur.
A long bus trip through central South Island is lovely, except when driver plays ghastly Disney ice hockey movie (Mighty Chiefs 3, ★☆☆☆☆)
Oh, curse you, Wikipedia; here I am, at midnight, reading about the feud between Eminem and the Insane Clown Posse. With footnotes.
People keep mistaking me for the Grammar Police. At best I’m a washed-up private eye. Usually just a stool pigeon.
Favourite words from Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union: tohubohu, shpilkes, patzer, shaydl, freylekh.
Bringing a ukulele to a jam session is like bringing a knife to a gunfight where everyone’s firing their guns REAL LOUD WOO HOO YEAH.
Misheard “brick-throwing” contest at Stroud Country Show as “pig-throwing”. Like hammer throw? Ridgebacks more aerodynamic? Weight classes?
Although I love Björk and Sigur Rós, I don’t think we’ll be naming our band Eyjafjallajökull.
Headline: “Teens’ amazing escape from airborne car”. Nope, actually just “briefly-airborne”. A pity—I’d have bought that paper.
One happy side effect of not having a TV or radio is that I’ve yet to hear a Kiwi journo trying to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull. EY-af-yat-ly-a-kut, or EY-ef-ed-lay-uke, or AYE-ya-fyah-dla-yow-kudl. Depending on which native Icelandic speaker you ask.
Eyjafjallajökull is, sort-of: “Eh? a Fiat, la yoghurt”, said reallyreallyfast. There, sorted. Last volcano-pronunciation tweet, promise.
Just been served a vile meal at Etrusco, Dunedin. Avoid. They said their bread was fresh from Brumby’s; I wouldn’t feed my dog bread from Brumby’s. Tempted to actually get a dog, just to be able to truthfully make this claim.
Karl May’s Wild West stories (enjoyed by Hitler and Einstein) were later filmed in Yugoslavia with German-speaking cowboys & indians.
@adzebill
The Toothbrush Fence of Te Pahu
It all started, so they say, when Graeme Cairns (of the Big Muffin Serious Band) acquired, in the course of having numerous flatmates, a bucket of toothbrushes.
Te Pahu is half an hour from Hamilton, in the heart of Waikato cow country. The landscape is rolling green, dotted with trees and streams and small farms. It’s beautiful but rather samey, without much in the way of landmarks, until you turn a corner and see toothbrushes strung the length of a paddock.
At first the fence grew slowly, as friends and visitors added their own brushes. But its fame spread. Backpackers began making a pilgrimage just so they too could contribute to the Toothbrush Fence. Its GPS coordinates became well known amongst rally-car orienteers, who would use it as an eye-catching waypoint. People overseas even sent brushes to be added (c/ “The bucket on the toothbrush fence, 294 Limeworks Loop Rd, RD5, Te Pahu, NZ”). Celebrities added brushes, including Prime Minister Helen Clark, who hails from Te Pahu.
But surely the fence’s finest hour was its mention in Season 1 of Flight of the Conchords (Bret Gives Up the Dream) when Murray, responding to the taunts of the Australian consul, points out that while Australia might have Ayer’s Rock, we have “a fence made of toothbrushes.” New Zealand hearts swelled with pride upon hearing those words, for we know the Toothbush Fence epitomises all that is great about this fair land of ours.
Graeme Cairns is a member of the McGillicuddy Serious Party from way back, and the fence began as an absurdist art project, a satire on more earnest and legitimate tourist attractions. Its becoming a tourist attraction in its own right, despite being of no historical or political significance whatsoever, proves that people appreciate a little absurdism in their lives.
The fence is a success because it’s a participatory artwork. Nina Simon, in her book The Participatory Museum, describes a new generation of exhibits to which visitors can actively contribute; to work, the visitor interaction needs to be structured in some way, not forbiddingly freeform, and have a low bar for entry. Adding a toothbrush to a fence fits the bill, whereas painting part of a mural or carving a comment into stone is too demanding. (Perhaps vandalism at historic sites is just a frustrated way of taking part in the experience. There’s no vandalism at the Toothbrush Fence, though perhaps some locals view the whole thing as vandalism).
The other secret of the fence’s success is that it’s a work in progress. Visitors or donors feel like they’re adding to a project rather than observing a finished work, and they can point to their one small contribution. It started with just 50 toothbrushes; if Cairns had solicited a thousand toothbrushes in advance and created a finished artwork, it would have less appeal and fewer visitors.
In a country where tourist attractions are becoming increasingly marketed and packaged, it’s refreshing to come across one without its own brochure, or even a little plaque explaining what it is. The Toothbrush Fence exists happily without an AA signpost; it does not have its own domain name; it has no plans to tweet.
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