So, I decide to get to know the girl I like, finding out she’s in my bio class. Anyway, it’s not long before we’re all into the drinks, three of us having a good time. One of the girls was an ice queen, I tell you. After we finished off the bar tab between us (which really did not last with four people, it would with two though) we headed out.

My work called, I’d rang up and said that I couldn’t make it. Somehow they got me to agree to turn up at 9. Anyway, the other guy took us to a bar called Good Luck. While we sampled Sake to decide which one to order, the girls headed to the bathroom. As I understand, the girl I was into who happened to be the outgoing non-cold one, threw up. Wasn’t used to drinking, although she managed to hide it from me and the other bloke. Probably shouldn’t have got her to have the tequila shots… my bad.

Well, they left, and then our sake arrived. We looked at each other and drunk sake. For eleven dollars I got five shots. We were told it was 17 percent but it tasted like more. So that was good value for money. Heading to BK we grabbed a feed to help balance out all the booze we had, and sat and talk about our strange double date. We considered heading out to try and pick up some chicks, but decided that it wasn’t worth the effort. I tell you ladies, you make it hard out there.

Anyway, we split up, he headed home presumably, and I decided to head to work about five hours early. Free coffee and food there you see, and I got to type this up while it is still in my mind. All in all, it wasn’t a great night, but it was still fun. You can’t diss free booze after all. To the ladies we went out with, I hope the alcohol didn’t give you too much of a problem in the morning. Dosivdaniya! (That’s Russian for see you later people. Spelling may not be correct, but hey, am I Russian?)

Guy #2

With a nervous stutter, I called upon the bartend—“Ba… bu… Blind date?”—With that, I was directed toward a trio of two girls one guy, huddled at the far end of the bar. I realised then that this was no ordinary blind date; it was a double blind date.

Both the girls struck me as being quite cute, and the guy, from what I could see, had struck a friendly rapport with the brunette. Her friend, meanwhile, struck me as shy, contempt rather, with nigh a quiet sobriety. That’s right, no free high-priced booze for this one—I mean c’mon, wtf? With her, small talk never flowed into conversation, and our attention (with good reason) drifted to her friend. She on the other hand displayed a social enthusiasm: loud, full of energy and, what’s more, embracing the free booze. It was if I were dating Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, except with hot chicks. Naturally, I was more attracted to the party goer.

With the drink flowing, conversation lingered on dinosaurs and salsa dancing; it became clear we were all here for the same reason—to simply have a good time. In due time the bar tab was polished off, and despite sneaking shots from the bar (while the others weren’t looking) I was nowhere near as drunk as I had hoped. The brunette, however, was intent on letting the entire bar know “this is the first time I’ve been drunk since 4th form!” The quiet one was, admirably, concerned for her intoxicated friend. The suggestion of Rain (would you believe it) came up, I protested, and suggested we go somewhere a little more, let’s say, classy. We went to Good Luck, sat down at a table, and with four cringe-worthy words, the date was over—“I’m going to be sick”—with that, the brunette rushed to the bathroom. The pizza that once blessed our stomachs so fruitfully wasn’t done away with yet. Respectively, her quiet friend took her home.

So here I am—on a blind date—with a guy… sigh. We decided to drown our sorrows in some urine-warm saki, relishing in how messed up things had turned out. At least he engaged in conversation, and what’s more—fluently. We then ate some Burger King, and parted ways.

Lawrence Arabia a.k.a. James Milne has a musical résumé to envy. He’s been a songwriter and bassist with the Auckland twee pop band The Brunettes, been a member of The Reduction Agents (who wrote that ridiculously catchy song ‘80s Celebration’), and has also played bass for and toured with, Okkervil River.

With such a line-up you would expect nothing short of brilliant, and brilliant it is. The thing that makes Chant Darling so is not just the lush layers of vocal harmonies and the exquisitely crafted songs, but the underlying dry wit and humour of his lyrics. He seems to make fun of his situation, but at the same time he is lamenting for love lost. Therefore, the second album under his solo pseudonym, Chant Darling succeeds in my eyes and is even better recorded and more cohesive than his self-titled debut.

Chant Darling has all the instrumentation you would expect from an ex-Lil Chiefer, including trumpet and xylophone. The stand-out single of the album, ‘Apple Pie Bed’ is a sugary sweet song about an all-consuming love. It possesses a certain familiarity about it, that of a classic pop song. The guitar, twangy and treble fuelled, sounds like it has been lifted directly from an in-descript 60s pop hit, and likewise the backing vocals. The first track of the album, ‘Look Like a Fool’ is written about something we all can relate to—getting too drunk and trying desperately to get the attention of someone you probably shouldn’t be.

“I’m on the ground girl, I’m thrashing round it’s easy to see, what this display is called, to show what you mean to me.”

Another track that deserves a mention is the ‘Beautiful Young Crew’, whose lyrics pay homage to all scensters out there:

“They love each other. But they hate each other. They’re afraid of each other, because they want to screw each other.”

‘Dream Teacher’ the final track on the album is an a cappella song about school-boy crush on his teacher. This song makes wonderful use of Milne’s high-octave vocals and showcases the multiple layers of backing vocals.

While I am a self-confessed fan of Lawrence Arabia (he can do no wrong in my eyes), there are still critiques that can be made. Chant Darling is an easy album, there is nothing unexpected. The songs are timeless, but timeless doesn’t necessarily mean definitive of a generation. He cites many well-referenced bands, such as The Beatles, The Kinks, The Beach Boys, but makes it his own with his lyrics. Chant Darling is like a well-restored villa—classic, aesthetically appealing, tasteful, and has an undeniable air of class—well worth a listen, the boy can write a good melody.

Representatives from VUWSA, PGSA, VUWLSS, Ngai Tuaria and STUDiO have told Salient of a growing sense of unhappiness among their student ranks.

Of particular concern is the level of engagement between students and teachers.

The first trimester of 2009 has seen a significant decrease in the number of tutorials, seminars and labs offered compared with previous years.

Cuts to the sub-lecturer teaching pools from which teaching assistants and tutors are paid have left many schools with no recourse but to cut the number of classes.

VUWSA has fielded a number of complaints from class representatives on behalf of students who feel that the lack of engagement has been detrimental to their learning.

VUWSA President Jasmine Freemantle told Salient that the Association believed the cutbacks had had a detrimental effect on the quality of education offered at Victoria.

VUWSA’s concerns were echoed by the PGSA, who felt that the cutbacks had caused unnecessary strain to their members, many of who relied on tutoring employment.

In a statement released to Salient, the PGSA lamented the difficulties caused by the cutbacks both to themselves and to those they taught.

“We recognise that all universities are facing depletion in income, but this should not be passed onto the students and tutors,” the statement said.

The statement highlighted the overlapping benefits of tutorial classes for tutors, tutees, and the university as a whole.
Universities would be required to pay less for a postgraduate teacher without compromising much in teaching quality, with strong relationships developing between tutors and tutees.

The issue of increased class sizes corresponding with decreasing teaching numbers has been a particular concern in law circles.

The compulsory LAWS 301 Property Laws course which was once taught in two separate streams of 150 students has been merged into a single mega class of 300 for 2009.

VUWLSS President Amelia Keene believed this economy class style of teaching was detrimental to the ethos of learning law.

Law, taught in the Socratic style where students and lecturers actively engage in discussion and thought, is not suited to the large theatres of Rutherford House where LAWS 301 is now taught, Keene said.

The lack of intimacy prevalent in the larger learning environment was detrimental to the level of engagement expected of third and fourth year law students.

“[VUWLSS hopes] that it will not serve as a precedent for future streamlining of law lectures,” Keene said.
Funding decreases have also raised problems with assessment at Victoria’s School of Architecture and Design.
2009 has seen unprecedented difficulty in wooing guest critics to attend the faculty’s all-important design project critique sessions.

Design and Architecture students are required to exhibit a presentation to their classmates and two critics, one of whom is from outside the faculty.

Architecture student Erika Wilson describes the sessions as being an important cog in the design/architecture degree machine. The importance of enlisting outside assessment is crucial in the development of skills and understanding, Wilson believes.

Wilson also highlights a disconcerting lack of organisation within the Faculty of Architecture and Design.
A number of architecture professionals have expressed a willingness to participate in the lengthy critique process. However, many have been put off by the faculty’s lack of organisation and reluctance to offer renumeration.
Maori students have been particularly disenfranchised by Victoria’s cutbacks, according to Victoria Maori Students Association Ngai Tauira.

The reduced capacity for students to engage closely with teachers is particularly off-putting for Maori students in tertiary institutions, Ngai Tauira’s Education Vice President Pania Lee said.

Maori students, Lee noted, were more likely to rely on student support services in fields outside of the Maori Studies Department.

“Insufficient support outside of Maori Studies will isolate Maori students,” she said.

“It will compromise their participation in the wider university community.”

Furthermore, Lee suggests, the lack of engagement would place constraints on the bicultural relationship endorsed by Victoria.

By reducing the capacity of Maori students to participate in tertiary education, the university would be at odds with Goal F of the University Charter, which moves to “encourage access, participation and success of Maori students and staff,” she said.

When questioned whether Victoria was providing the same standard of education as it had in previous years despite issues of affordability, Vice Chancellor Pat Walsh was optimistic.

“Despite these budget challenges, Victoria University is committed to providing the best possible education to its students and this is our highest priority,” he said.

Walsh described the cutbacks as the product of the university’s search for “efficiencies” in the way classes were taught at Victoria.

He maintained a high priority of providing students with an opportunity to engage with teachers, including tutorials.
The question as to whether budget cutbacks have compromised the quality of education offered at Victoria University has been asked of Victoria’s hierarchy before.

In an opinion piece written for The Dominion Post on 8 September 2008, Walsh suggested the quality of education provided by tertiary institutions would be compromised by a shift towards greater affordability.
“If the pendulum between quality and affordability swings too far toward affordability, students will be able to afford to come to university but the quality of the education they receive will be compromised,” Walsh wrote.

Pro-Vice Chancellor of Humanities and Social Sciences Deborah Willis was shorter in her assessment, saying that Victoria was still providing the same standard of education as it had in previous years.

Willis believed that there were other opportunities for students to engage in intimate study outside of tutorial classes. She also suggested that the university was keeping tabs on class-wide interaction, but failed to explain what this meant.

In spite of the uproar at Victoria, budget levels are expected to be maintained at current levels for the foreseeable future.

Aim

To prove a point that science is the guiding light that has and will continue to deliver us from the murky depths of human ignorance. Oh, and also to measure the wavelength of light using a fine diffraction grating.

Hypothesis

Science and the core concepts of science—experimentation through gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning, logic, rationality and critical thinking—are the most important ideas that humans have devised. Oh, and that light travels in waves.

Apparatus

Fine diffraction grating (about 300 lines/mm)
Metre rulers, 2
Lamp in holder, 12V 36W
Green filter
Power supply, low voltage, variable, able to supply 6A
One Salient Editor

Experiment

You only have to look around you to see the wonders of science. From the paracetemol on the desk in front of me, the plastic it is wrapped in, to the green ink on the foil that spells out Panadol.

We know why I get headaches and need paracetemol. The simple chemical reaction of ethanol turning into acetaldehyde and then acetic acid. How that affects my liver and leads to dehydration. The special isotonic formula of Powerade. The enzyme-blocking, pain-relieving properties of paracetemol. All developed and explained logically by science and the people who devote their lives to science.

Here is a simple—YET VERY DANGEROUS—experiment that you could do at home—if you were really stupid. If you do, you are really stupid and Salient takes no responsibility for any damage you do to yourself.

Set up a 12V 36W line-filament lamp high so you can see it clearly. Place a green filter in front of the lamp.
Hold a metre ruler straight out in front of you towards the lamp, with the near end of the ruler at your face. Hold the diffraction grating against the near end of the metre ruler and look at the lamp through it.

Record the observation.

Results

I have a cellphone that transmits data at a certain wavelength and I understand how life evolved on earth and how the universe started. We can even play remote control cars on another planet.

It wasn’t so long ago that everyday life was dominated by mystical beliefs. God, pixies, Kratos, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Mr Tumnus—fictional creations used to explain things that happened: scapegoats for ignorance and misunderstanding.

Divide x by the length of your ruler. This gives you tan A, where A is the angle between the line of direct white light and the light to the green in the spectrum marked by the pencil. From tan A, use your calculator to find the angle A, and from this find sin A.

Use the formula d sin A = wavelength to calculate the wavelength of green light. You will need the value of d, spacing, i.e. distance from one ruling to the next. If the grating has 300 lines / mm then the spacing is 1 / 300,000m.

Analysis

Is there anything other than science? Well yes there is, but nothing gets the same results as science. Everything from where life came from to the atomic structure of a jellybean can be explained—perhaps we haven’t found a way to explain it adequately. When Mendel wrote about inheritance he never suspected that 90 years later Rosalind Franklin would photograph the very units of genetic inheritance he could only dream about.

This is a good thing. With ignorance comes fear. When you know how something works—lightning, weather patterns, earthquakes—you’re less inclined to attribute supernatural properties to the phenomena and devise effective strategies to minimise the risk posed by them.

As shown in the experiment, things aren’t always as they seem. But there is a logical explanation. In this case that light travels in waves and that wavelengths in white light can be separated.

Review

Science isn’t about being right. It is about having an idea and proving. It is about testing a hypothesis and then finding the most logical explanation for whatever happened. That is why the theory of evolution and the big bang theory are called theories. There is observable data to back them up and there is a logical process behind them. If another theory were to come up that explained both phenomena better I then that would critically reevaluate. A scientist will never believe that their research is the end. It isn’t.

Our microscopes will continue to examine new and different microbes, our atom-smashers will smash more atoms and our telescopes will peer further into the past than our minds can imagine. Science is not only a way of understanding the world around us but translating what we have into ever more effective systems and products.
The National government’s move to support research and development are interesting. Will they work? Possibly more so if they realise research and development needs security over decades. Also it would be nice if they gave tertiary education the funding it needs. Without well-funded tertiary education institutions there will be no graduates to staff the labs of tomorrow.

Science is cool. Try it. I’ll have the equipment for this experiment in the Salient office on the first week back from the break.

Moana Mackey, Labour’s spokesperson on Science and Technology, and Research and Development, said that with the R&D tax break the former government was “genuinely trying to break new ground in the way we fund science.
“Private sector investment in science in NZ is appallingly low and the R&D tax credit was a way of not only funding science, but technology, and trying to get more value out of the products we provide.”

Mackey says the R&D tax credit was aimed at the private sector, which makes National’s move to axe it even more sur-
prising. Their policy on the removal of the credit sates “The tax credit subsidises a great deal of R&D that would have happened anyway, whether or not there was a tax credit. Therefore, much of the money paid out as a tax credit will affect no change in the level of R&D whatsoever.”

The second point is that the tax break made it unclear how much novel R&D companies were undertaking, and also the possibility of companies classifying their expenditure just to get the tax break.

Dr Jim Salinger, the former head of the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) and part-winner of a Nobel Peace prize, thinks that the removal of the R&D tax break isn’t a positive move: “If you want to encourage more research you need to give some incentives. New Zealand companies—not all of them—aren’t particularly good in investing in science.

“Spending the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development survey’s) average on R&D is a good idea. We’re quite below what other countries spend. Certainly in the private sector, unless it is the diary industry.”
Earlier this year The New Zealand Press Association reported that while our R&D spending was up in 2008 from the previous two years, it was still only about 1.2 percent of gross domestic product. This is almost half of the OECD average of 2.26 percent of GDP.

Minister for Research, Science and Technology, Dr Wayne Mapp says, “We have a different set of priorities to Labour…
“Budget 2009 rewards leading and emerging scientists and supports excellence in research,” Mapp said last Thursday after the budget had been announced. Instead of the blanket tax break to all companies engaging in work that could be classified as R&D, Mapp’s initiatives channel money into specific areas.

The Crown Research Institute Capability Fund is being boosted with an extra $40 million over four years, with another $36 million to the Marsden fund. Two areas in particular—health and broadband—have been given a tacit nod as the spearhead projects for the National government, with $32 million being spent on health research over the next four years and $16 million being spent on the Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network. There is also an additional $4 million over four years in Prime Minister’s Science Prizes.

Victoria University of Wellington Professors Paul Callaghan and Alan MacDiarmid said that this is an extremely disappointing budget for New Zealand science and technology.

They went on to say Budget ’09 “leaves New Zealand’s per capita GDP investment in R&D unchanged at around 0.52 percent, way below that of Australia, the OECD average, and small economies like Finland, Singapore and Denmark, all of whom have built prosperity from innovation.

“What we need are significant new investments to build our innovation system. The 2009/10 budget has not addressed that issue.”

The President of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Neville Jordan gave quiet approval to the initiatives, saying that they are a big step in the right direction. Optimistically saying the “on-going investment will be crucial to promoting productivity, growth and innovation to drive New Zealand forward.”

Free speech and the scientific method

Public scientists have often been at odds with the regime of the day. Galileo Galilei committed heresy for suggesting that the earth revolved around the sun. Unsurprisingly he was closer to the truth than the bible. The scientific method has won over the entire western way of thinking and, as shown by the amount of funding put into science, we value the input of scientists not only into policy, but we want and need the knowledge of public scientists to seep through society and into the public’s imagination and thought processes.

When asked about the role of public scientists in New Zealand, Mapp said “CRIs talk to the public through publications and connecting to the media and providing background.” However he was quick to point out that the issue with Dr Jim Salinger is not under his jurisdiction. “It is an employment dispute being handled strictly by the Chief Executive and board [of NIWA] that’s their particular role… this was not about the government having a different view on climate change,” Mapp said.

Labour’s Science spokesperson Moana Mackey elaborated further on what public scientists should be doing, saying “To do public-good research and to be an independent voice to provide the government with the information that they need to make decisions, [they] need to be seen to be independent, different from public servants. Their area of research might be guided by the government. The government might put more money into a certain area, but they certainly shouldn’t have any role in the outcome of the research. It is independent, it is quality.”

She then went on to say “My concern with Dr Salinger was that the minister wasn’t prepared to stand up and clarify public scientists were still entitled to and encouraged to speak out on issues within their areas of expertise.”
What does Salinger—the man of the moment—think about public scientists? When Salient spoke to Dr Salinger he said “Because they’re funded by the public purse they should talk about the work they’re doing and its relevance to society. If it is research with relevance to New Zealand then clearly there is a role there.

“If it is just plain science—what they’re doing and what they’ve found—I can see no issues at all. As long is it’s not the policy of the organisation or they’re talking politics. If it is simply about their science and facts then I can see no issues.”

Science is science. If you meet the scientific method, if you have evidence for your hypothesis, if you are willing to listen to criticism, then no government scientist should ever be told not to talk to media or be rebuked for doing so.
National have themselves just employed a very public scientist in the newly created role of Science Advisor to the Prime Minister. Dr Mapp explains professor Gluckman’s role and its attachment directly to the Prime Minister’s office as “an indication of the seriousness of the role.

“The science advisor is tasked to take a higher level view than the Ministry and is much more focused,” Mapp said.
Salinger is optimistic about the Prime Minister’s Science Advisor role, saying: “I think it provides a focus. You have one person that is recognised and gives advice directly to the Prime Minister. It’s good because science is technical and you need technical explanations for the politicians. It has elevated the role [of science].”

Dr Jeff Tallon from the MacDairmid institute also expressed excitement about the role, saying “I think the most important initiative from this government is not in this budget. That is the appointment of a Chief Science Advisor to the PM. This lifts the profile of science in government and sets in place a process for change. We desperately need change of cultural attitudes to research and science—in politics and business.”

The Royal Society also sees the appointment of a Science Advisor as a positive step. Jordan said that “such an appointment clearly demonstrates the Government’s commitment to science and its importance to our society.”

Rutherfords of tommorow

So where to from here? Salinger, whose part of a Nobel prize must be inspiration for many budding climatologists, says that New Zealand needs to provide strong career paths for the next generation of scientists. “Scientists become very specialised, it is not as though you do a medical degree and you have lots of choices. People tend to become very specialised. So career paths are important.”

As we head into a time when the government’s books don’t look like they’ll be back in the black for at least ten years, investment into science and R&D seems almost essential. We need to not only boost the standing of science through public scientists and promoting excellence in a few outstanding efforts, but to also implement policies that encourage wholesale innovation. Number eight fibre optic wires can only get us so far.

Mackey sums it up well: “We have a really great history in New Zealand of inventing fabulous things and then letting someone else make all the money off it.”

What is science anyway?

Daniel J. Miles
Science is questioning. Science is about asking why. Science is about coming up with a theory, and then doing your darndest to prove it wrong. Science is about never taking something for granted until the evidence is strongly in its favour—and even then, science is about always being able to admit you were wrong if newer, better evidence comes to light.

A scientist knows you can never prove a negative, so a true scientist knows that whenever they say “you’re wrong”, or “you’re right”, that’s really just shorthand for “on the weight of evidence, you’re probably wrong”, or “on the weight of evidence, I’d say you are right”.

A scientist accepts that scientific facts have been proven wrong many times, replaced by a new scientific fact which may one day fall victim to the same process. But they also know that this isn’t a fault in the process—rather, this is the beauty of the process. It is a system in which our knowledge can constantly be refined and improved.
A scientist sees no knowledge as sacred. Just because Einstein wrote it does not make it true. The Einstein of last century could be proved wrong by the undergrad student of today. Or maybe proved right.

And while a scientist might be in it for the glory or the money, inside every good scientist is a yearning curiosity about why things are the way they are. And it is that curiosity which has driven the renaissance. The technical revolution. The silicon age. It is that curiosity we have to thank for the way of life we enjoy today.

Look after the scientists—we owe them.
(Note: this was not written by a scientist)

It is the second petition presented by Latimer, after the first was dismissed for being unconstitutional.

VUWSA Vice President of Administration Alex Neilson explained that the original motion could not be put forward as it was incorrectly worded.

A quorum of 100 students at a Special General Meeting (SGM) will be needed for the corrected motion to be moved. Two-thirds of those voting need to be in favour for it to carry.

Tensions between Latimer and Freemantle have been high in recent weeks after it was revealed the Education Welfare Officer lost a laptop containing VUWSA’s Food Bank database.

Despite this tension, Latimer insisted his desire to see Freemantle rolled is not inflected by personal animosity, rather a duty to follow through with a student request.

He took umbrage with the way Freemantle conducted herself professionally, citing a perceived lack of professionalism in her dealings with the Exec and VUWSA staff.

“She is not personal, she is very brooding. I expected more openness from her,” Latimer said.

Despite a confidence motion hanging over her, Freemantle was confident in her work as president thus far, and was committed to seeing through her term.

She was equally assured in her working relationship with members of the Exec, prioritising a strong work and team ethic among a desire for strong accountability.

“There are some instances where individuals have chosen to opt [out] of this, which is most disappointing,” Freemantle said.

The last VUWSA exec member to have a motion of no-confidence moved against them was Scott Trainor in 2004, which he survived by a slim margin.

The fee disparity exists in COMP/SWEN 301 Software Engineering Principles. Students enrolled in a Computer Science major are charged fees of $610.50, while Software and Network Engineering majors in the same class are charged $726.00.

Third-year Engineering student Jared Armstrong believes the extra surcharge is unfair.

“For all intents and purposes are the exact same course, but we’re charged 20 percent more than the people sitting next to us,” he said.

The Bachelor of Engineering degree at Victoria is a relatively new addition to the curriculum, taking four years as opposed to the three years required for a Bachelor of Science majoring in Computer Science.

Head of the School of Engineering and Computer Science, Professor John Hine, believed the added status of an engineering degree outweighs the extra cost to students.

“As the engineering papers are accredited, students gain more credibility in the national and international job market,” he said.

While students currently completing the course would not be eligible for a refund, co-taught courses have undergone review and will continue as separated disciplines from 2010, according to Hine.

Amendments to 100- and 200-level papers will take at least another year to filter though to 300- and 400-level.
A group of unsatisfied Engineering students have contacted the Tertiary Education Commission and are currently waiting on a response.

Thanks to Jackson drunkenly stumbling along in search of food and/or shelter, this week’s Exec meeting was recorded in crystal clear digital goodness. Unfortunately, so was the heavenly serenade echoing in from Meeting Room 1. This dominated the entire meeting like some kind of Lynchian soundtrack. It was fitting.

The band kicked into gear: Sue Roberts, the University Librarian, was first on the set list. Roberts talked about the redevelopment of the fourth floor of the library which will sport fancy study areas that will cater to different study styles. So, if you’re the kind of douchebag who likes his academic critique by talking at the top of his lungs, then congrats, you’re in like prom night.

Changes were needed to be made to the previous meeting’s minutes, as there were a number of inaccuracies, including—get this—people’s names. Look, guys, listen. “Tim Wang” T-I-M W-A-N-G. It’s not that har— oh, we nearly walked into that one.

Education Welfare Officer Bobby Latimer was conspicuous with his absence. Salient suspects he was hanging out with his babes. Have you heard? Bobby Latimer’s got a posse—and they’re in two pieces. Prowl.
The pre-release party for VUWSA’s new album Association Manager will be held on 3 June. Mr Wheatly says it won’t make the iPod, whoever it is.

There was much ado about VUWSA-UNITE collective bargaining that took place on 22 May. The negotiations broke down, sadly for everyone, especially Matt McCarten from UNITE, who has to come down to sort this shebang out.

The Exec spent an insane amount of time discussing whether or not to opt in or out of buying outgoing VUWSA Association Coordinator Julie McKiernan a farewell gift. Jackson can’t remember how long it was, but apparently Jesus loves us and we love him too, so sang the voices from Meeting Room 1. PRAISE BE!

Alex rages. He’s so full of rage, and no one can stop him.

The meeting went into committee to discuss an employment issue—

[TEST SIGNAL]

And we’re back. Miss us?

Following that, Women’s Rights Officer Kassie Hartendorp put forth a motion regarding our good friends Joel Cosgrove, Alistair Reith and Ian Anderson, that said “VUWSA condemns the disenrolement of Joel Cosgrove, Alistair Reith, and Ian Anderson, and supports the students’ right to freedom of speech and political expression without fear of reprisal.”

Jasmine and Alex explain both VUWSA and VUW’s disciplinary policies, and made the point that it would be inappropriate for VUWSA to make any statement on the issue, ’cos they’re involved in the process, mang.

At this point, Kassie sighed really fucking loudly…

…but put the motion forward anyway.

Ayes—Kassie, Nathan, Nana, Georgina
Nays—Seamus, Freya, Alex and Jasmine
Fence-sitters—Timbo!

Jasmine had the deciding vote, and guess what happened then? Failblog.org.

It was at this point that Jasmine received a text message from Jackson asking where the Exec meeting was at. Kia ora, Telecom, kia ora.

There had been three requests asking for VUWSA’s legal expenses for 2009: Salient, Joel Cosgrove, and Bobby Latimer. Bobby, being an Execeteer, was granted access to the info, but the Exec needed to talk about the other two. Freya said re: Salient’s request, “It’s not even that important.” NAH-UH. YOU’RE NOT EVEN IMPORTANT, BEY. You. Me. Raptor Safari, Eng. Step up.

Alex didn’t wanna dish out the info because, well, it might have errors in it, hadn’t been beta-tested. Snort. The rest of the Exec seemed to be cool with it for transparency’s sake. This didn’t stop Alex from busting out more acronyms than Aftermath Records. It’s the D-R-E with Notorious B-I-G, and S-N-O-O-P.

The Exec revealed that VUWSA had spent the following on legal expenses over the past five years:
2004: $1,252.59
2005: $1,665.80
2006: $32,397.83
2007: $12, 553.56
2008: $17, 199.25
2009: $14,288.48 to date.

Finally, there was an acknowledgement of Alex’s last meeting. Jasmine joked that Jackson could bring cake. Oh, there will be cake, Jasmine Freemantle. Oh yes. There will be cake*.

*Note: There won’t be any cake. Tricks!

I bought my first vibrator today. What self-respecting, sexually liberated twenty-one-year old doesn’t own one? Well, I didn’t, and now I do. I own it.

My British parents have instilled in me a kind of deeply ingrained prudishness that has resulted in a series of disastrous sex shop visits. I remember standing outside the saloon doors of that dodgy looking shop at the top of Cuba—the one with the large sign advertising ten dollar vibrators. ‘Good deal’, I thought, ‘I wonder if they do student discounts?’I paused for a moment, trying to overcome my nervous fit of giggles, when I heard a friendly but intimidating voice boom “Hello?” He had seen my feet! What to do, what to do? Run, and lose face, energy, and the chance to meet the love of my life? Or go in, knowing that I could never now pull off the casual, collected look that most people adopt when perusing adult stores, managing to look cool even as they slide their fingers into silicone vaginas. I turned on the spot and ran.

With the help of Siobhan I actually made it through the lurid orange door of Peaches and Cream this afternoon. The owner barely looked up at us two leather-clad girls as we walked straight towards the dildo section. I wonder why? We searched the shelves for something unintimidating and pretty, preferably in glitter. I could feel the colour rising in my cheeks as my eyes fell on enormous plastic penises, so large that they looked like they would feel something like childbirth. ‘I’ll start small’, I thought to myself as I picked up a purple model called ‘The Little Vibrating Softee’. Although slightly worried by the words ‘injury’, ‘aggravation’ and ‘electrocution’ on the box, the price was right and the colour jolly.

I sidled coolly up to the counter, intending to act as if I buy a sex toy a week, and then out it all came. As soon as I opened my mouth things started to go wrong. “One vibrator please,” I said as I put the box on the counter. Not cool, Juliet.

The man was everything one wants in a sex-store owner. He laughed, checked the box, and informed me that I would need some batteries. I nodded furiously at his every suggestion, which resulted in my buying the largest pack of overpriced batteries he could offer. “That’ll keep me going tonight,” I blurted out, wanting to kill myself and my clichés immediately.

He didn’t even pretend to laugh this time as he put my new friend in a discreet bag and sent me on my way. “What’s your returns policy?” I asked on my way out. What had come over me?

As soon as Cressida opened the door I proudly thrust my new purchase in her face. We sat on her bed and took it out of its box, put in a battery, and spent a few minutes playing with it like giggling fourteen-year-old girls.
I went into my room, promising my flatmates that I would report back to them when I was finished. About twenty seconds later I emerged from my room a different girl. Men? What was I thinking? We have plastic! It wasn’t that moment that I realised that men are an obsolete species, good for nothing except for manning vibrator factories.

As you may be able to tell from the content of this column, I have no concept of discre­tion about matters of the delicate variety like masturbation. Zipping up my skirt, I graphically described the event to my flat­mates before texting anyone and everyone I know. Olivia, upon hearing the story, decid­ed to visit a Dunedin sex shop tomorrow to find out what all the fuss is about. It’s lovely to know that my story touched someone.

It certainly touched me.

While researching for some essays over the last few years, I often came across French statements being used in some of the older books. This annoyed me; I did not like that it was assumed that the reader should know French. Pissing French everywhere pêle-mêle, it just seemed arrogant of the authors—how was I, a lowly student of German, supposed to understand it all? Putain de merde!

The thing is, early to mid last century, if you were educated, you probably could speak French. It was compulsory to learn in many schools. But times changed, and so did the approach to academic writings. It is advised that you use more recent research, but this isn’t always possible. But even if you can understand the French ramblings in your research of Early German Colonial Expressionist Poetry, there is yet another language you are expected to know at university.

Latin. Latin. This is the true language of academia, back from the days when everyone at university dressed like they were in a Harry Potter movie, with the big black gowns, massive hoods that were fuzzy on the inside if you had to sit further away from the fire because you weren’t too smart, and funny square hats that made it difficult to walk through doors.

Oh wait. We still do that. It’s called graduation.

Latin was the true language of education, thanks to the legacy left by the Roman Empire. If you spoke Latin in the Middle Ages it meant you were educated; if you speak it now it probably means you’re a nerd. Latin also used to be a more complete language than many other languages, i.e., it had more words, such as religious expressions—which probably accounts for the large percentage of Latin-based words in the Germanic languages, as well as the Latin-based Romance languages.

Some Latin terms have made it to modern English through academia, just like wearing dressing gowns and wearing funny hats has. You’ve probably used some today. You might have specified a morning or evening time with ante meridiem or post meridiem, added something to your Cirriculum Vitae, or played a game of jeep versus velociraptor.
Hopefully you’ll recognise Latin abbreviations that are now common to English, e.g., i.e., R.I.P., et al., etc., etc. But do you know what they mean, and how to use them? We’ll start with some easy ones.

etc. Short for et cetera, which is Latin for ‘and the others’ or ‘and the rest’. You use it when there is an obvious continuation in a series and can’t be arsed listing them all. For example, right now I’m drinking a mixture of whiskey, red wine, absinthe, milk, etc., and it tastes better than Tui.

e.g. and i.e. Exempli gratia (‘for example’) and id est (‘that is’, ‘for instance’). Make sure you don’t get these two mixed up. e.g. is used for listing examples, and i.e. is used for a clarification, i.e., something specific.

One thing I found Latin abbreviations useful for was referencing in my essays. Be­cause I’m lazy, I quite often referenced the same book multiple times. Instead of repeating the book’s details over and over in your footnotes, you can instead write ibid. after the first occur­rence. ibid. is short for ibidem, which means ‘in the same place’. When refer­encing multiple books by the same author, instead of re­peating the author’s name you can use ead. (eadem) for female authors or id. (idem) for male authors.

et al. is one of my favourite Latin abbre­viations that I’ll probably never use again. It’s similar to etc., only used for people and not things. It is short for et alii and means ‘and the others’, although I always think of it as ‘and friends’. It’s usually used when referencing a book with multiple authors—you’ll come across books that are collections of essays written on a particular topic. For example, Salient, by Rory Harnden et al.

Questions about grammerz? Or email me here.

Repetita juvant
Repeating things is good.
Repeating things is good.

Requiescat in pace (R.I.P.)
Francophilia.
1000 velociraptors.

P.S. There’s also post scriptum, which comes after the main body of text and signature.

The real strategy of right-wing politicians

Newt Gingrich:

“Let me just say, I think people should be afraid. I think the lesson of 1993—the first time they bombed the World Trade Center—was: Fear is probably appropriate. I think the lesson of Khobar Towers—where American service men were killed in Saudi Arabia—was: Fear is probably appropriate. I think the lesson of the two embassy bombings in East Africa was: Fear is probably appropriate. I think the lesson of the Cole being bombed in Yemen was: Fear is probably appropriate.

“I’ll tell you, if you aren’t a little bit afraid after 9/11 and 3100 Americans killed inside the United States by an effort, if you aren’t worried about the second-wave attack that was designed to take out the biggest building in Los Angeles, I think that you are out of touch with reality.”

Host David Gregory:

“But, Speaker Gingrich, you make the point about how Vice President Cheney felt—personally, personal fear. And isn’t President Obama’s argument that fear as a basis of national security policy is not sustainable over time? How do you come up with a sustainable legal framework, a sustainable national security policy? Don’t we elect leaders to transcend fear for lasting policy?”

I was listening to NBC’s ‘Meet the Press’ over the radio (‘cause I’m one of those people, see). Newt Gingrich, Republican mouthpiece and former Speaker of the House, was debating Senator Dick Durban (D-IL) over the politics of national security. As you’ve just read above, Newt spilled the beans and admitted—in not so many words—we govern by fear.

Afraid. Fear. Kill. Attack. Bomb. 9/11. Fear works. Fear sells. We’ve used it repeatedly. We instill fear; we weave it into all our political issues and stances. We’re the Fear Party; we’ve been the Fear Party for a long time. Fear. Be afraid.
Fear has permeated American society. It influences our political decision making process. It dictates how and when we’ll surrender our rights. It justifies our bigotry. It’s our biggest crutch and our biggest detriment.

Who should we be afraid of?

You should be afraid of the other… of course. You should fear what you don’t know or understand. Be afraid of the vagina—it’s strange, she’s a witch, she’s a baby-killer. Be afraid of the black man—he’s big, he’ll take your women, he’s violent. Be afraid of the gays—they’re freaks, they’ll raise freak children, they’ll corrupt our moral society. Be afraid of terrorists—they have funny sounding names and that crazy religion, they attacked us, they constantly want to kill you, there’s one under every bed. Be afraid. They’ll all take your children to a satanic black mass—with real black people and drugs.

Why should we fear?
‘Cause we exploit your fear for political reasons to enrich ourselves. We had to make you afraid so you’d give up your liberties voluntarily. We waited for a time of utter chaos and utter tragedy. We told you to fear the terrorist. We told you to be patriotic and go shopping. Then we made you afraid of every common object that you could imagine. Remember model airplanes and pens, poison pen-guns, ferries, exploding cows? The smoking gun could be a mushroom cloud. Unmanned aerial vehicles could come here and spray you. Shopping malls are scary dangerous places every year at Christmas. But go shopping; don’t mind the terrorists. Hell, we sure don’t.

We use fear to win multi-million-dollar defence contracts. We knew you’d never allow this new defence industry we own. We knew we’d need some catastrophic and catalysing event––like a new Pearl Harbor. We wrote about it in ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century’. We wanted a wartime President. We knew you’d be less uppity that way.

Should we keep being afraid?

Yes, do. Vote against equal protection under law for an entire class of people because you fear them, or don’t understand them, or don’t know them. Don’t forget to fear God. Fear not going to heaven. Fear the notion that if you can’t get them to believe like you, you’re not going to heaven. Remember how your whole life is organised around fear. We have to keep you divided, see.

In closing, people are afraid of somebody or something all the time now. It has to stop. It’s led us down a really bad road. We’ve had eight years of fear and division. Take a look at who’s telling you to be afraid—telling you that if you’re not afraid, something is wrong with you. They are the right wing of America politics. They’re the ‘traditional values’ people. They’re the ‘law and order’ people. They’re the people who just lost power.

Fear is not sustainable. We must transcend fear. We must stop dividing. We need to orient ourselves. We have a lot to fix.

You’ve probably seen them around. They walk normal. They dress normal. Their belly button hair is normal. Their toenails are normal. Their underarm hair is the normal width, breadth, elasticity, temperature and humidity. They also eat normal; and poo with the standard degrees of variable pungency. They look normal, and their pimples are normal, but what you don’t know is that they are part of a sacred cult—no, a religion. A wacky religion called Science. A religion that is a cult that is millions of a billions of years old, in femtomicrons, x 10-9 over DX to the Coulomb.

So just what is this loony tunes backwards illogical religion called Science? People scoff at the claims of Science, like turning monkeys into men, and being able to splice tomatoes with walruses and vice versa, but actually, I believe Science can answer some of the questions we think up so when we’re wasted we’ve got trippy stuff to talk about. Like why did Stephen Hawkwind create the universe? Why didn’t he make it a bit warmer? Is this what globe warming is for?
Can you imagine the endless possibilities of walruses with tomatoes as heads? This would free the tomato species from being stuck on the boring old vine all day, or at Pak’n’Save, and be able to go and explore the ocean, or waterworld. Tomatoes have rights! Isn’t it about time the National party did something to give tomatoes back the world? These new tomatoes could defend themselves with tusks, and clap when they go to a Neil Diamond concert, unlike other Neil Diamond fans of the vegetable kingdom.

So I am now a member of Science, and I go to Science church whenever possible. I became a Scientist for the same reasons everyone else does: I like walking round the Captain Kirk building reading the funny cartoons on people’s doors. This is a religion involving wearing a white coat and using big words that I keep forgetting the meaning of. As well as this, Science gives me the technology I need to end sentences with a preposition. It also gives me great insight into life, like I know where the universe comes from, honestly, no shit, man. You see, one day there was this circus monkey called Charles Darwin, who was riding round on his unicycle, wearing his funny hat and smoking a cigar, totally minding his own business, when he saw that Stephen Hawkeye was dangerously close to the side of the pool, calculating the hotness of one of the lifeguards, and the probability score of a “score” if you know what I mean. Well, Charlie, being an impressionable young chap, full of testosterone, and wanting to be a bit of a comedian, having read in RALPH Magazine that sense of humour was number three in “the top ten things you need to pull chicks” list, decided to show off to the lifeguard by pushing Stephen down the Naenae water slide, smashing his voicebox computer MAME Atari Streetfighter VS Tekken emulator and creating what scientists have called “The Universe.” This really annoyed everyone, because now we all have work in the morning. This is why people who don’t like science are always slagging off Charles Darwin.

Why Become a Scientist?

Well why not?

That’s Not A Proper Answer

Oh alright. Here’s why: Who do you think is cooler and more badass? Ice Cube or Snoop D.O. Dubble-G? Or are they both dicks? These are the important questions facing scientists these days. Life truly hangs in the balance.
I became a scientist because I want to win the “Nobel Prize”—this is a very prestigious award, given to the scientist with the funniest Far Side cartoon on their office door. As you can imagine, there is some pretty heated competition going on, with some scientists using invisible glue to stick their favourite Far Side panel on the inside of their door window so no one else can swipe it, and take it to the centre of the universe where the Elves make the prizes.
The one thing that all the scientists want to know is “Is there room for Science in God?”—this is what billions of dollars of funding is going into. Naturally scientists have to spend lots of money getting real drunk so they can get their confidence levels up to explain their hypotheses to hot chicks at parties. Unfortunately the system sometimes backfires, and the scientists end up buying heaps of drinks for her and not getting any action, then of course they say that there can’t be a God. Some internet nerds hypothesize that this is a bias in the treatment of evidence, but I don’t think so—I think it’s just the way of things, the way of nature, human nature, life nature. Sometimes you have to put something in her drink as well.

How the Universe was Created by Stephen Hamperwilly and the NaeNae Water Slide

There are many different hypotheses on the creation of the universe, but only the one I just told you is true and proven. What happened was, Stephen Hawkwing was a teenager and going out with this real hot but prudish Christian chick, who wouldn’t even put out, even though they’d already been on a date! They went to Burger King. A chick should totally put out if you take her to Burger King. They’d been together a couple of weeks, and this chick was being a total prude, she was frigid as, so one Friday night Steve-o was totally plying her with all the top shelf booze, I mean he was giving her absinthe and straight voddie shots, Jaegers, ouzo, you name it, and all his mates were cheering him on cos they knew he was in.

So later that romantic night Steve finally hit a home run, after he’d carried this chick back to his place and threw her on the couch. Because she was such a hardout Christian, Steve hadn’t even got a low five off her, so he was totally backed up, man, his balls were like a pumpkin. Anyway, that night when she passed out and he finally banged her, it was a BIG bang—such a massive bang that it crippled him—and that’s what made the world and trees and frogs and the volcano gods and stuff. So that’s why everything exists. Which is what the world is doing.

And that’s also why Christians are scared of getting fucked by Science.

Slapping a few new coats of paint on the roof is the next big step in energy efficiency, according to US Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
At a recent climate change symposium in London, Chu presented the Obama administration’s plan to paint flat roofs with an energy-reflecting white paint.
This would keep buildings cooler and reflect sunlight away from the Earth, a change that could be equivalent to taking every car in the world off the road for 11 years.

Swine flu adopts vintage chic

Research by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown that swine flu is not so new, and may have existed for years.
Able to determine the origin of the each gene in the H1N1 virus, researchers have found a mixture of human, pig and bird genes—some dating back to viruses first present in 1998.
It is still a mystery as to how the H1N1 virus arose and how it transferred so easily from animals to humans.

Giant blob found in Nirvana. Fuck you, make your own Elvis joke

Scientists from the Arizona State University have detected a giant blob of rocky metal dripping like honey below the US West’s Great Basin.
The rocky abnormality, described by scientist John West as a “lithospheric drip,” consists of heavy rocky material sinking into the earth’s mantle due to intense heat.
The researchers believe the newfound drip poses no risk to the landscape, or anyone living above it.

NASA eyes up Moon, Moon eyes up NASA. Fuck you, make your own arse joke

In preparation for its return to the Moon, NASA is launching two satellites in June that will return a wealth of information about Earth’s satellite.
The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO—not the unsuccessful ELO tribute band—will map out potential landing sites for future human explorers, locate potential resources on the lunar surface, and test new technology.
There has been no timeframe set for man’s return to the moon, which Salient News Editor Michael Oliver finds most disconcerting.

Good Will Hunting (that soft-ass buddy movie with Mork from Dork in it) might have made his name writ large, but despite that I always said Gus Van Sant is cool. I met him on a 12-inch 4-track single cutting up William S Burroughs, The Elvis Of Letters, in the mid 80s. Cobain cut a track with Burroughs years later, though I don’t think they ever met. Van Sant not only knew Burroughs, he put him in a film. How’s that, looking back now. Hell! The dude is cooler than Cobain.

A few years after hearing that vinyl borrowed from the City Library I jumped at the chance to see the same two paired again in Drugstore Cowboy. I was not disappointed. It was a great road film, tense, gritty and above all, believable. A fact that attested to Gus Van Saint (GVS) being brave enough to take a script from a junkie-written auto-biography. Van Sant had (as later on My Own Private Idaho and Good Will Hunting) permeated his film with the smell, dust, grit and narrative of life lived hard and straight. GVS’s vision and bravery had sculpted a perfect gem.

Gus Van Sant is a cult. Like John Waters and David Lynch he has come in from the cold. In from the cold maybe but not softened or declawed. Unafraid to show tight relationships between guys with different needs and angles. His films love men. You come out feeling you have been touching and touched by the characters.

I didn’t get a chance to see his earlier indie Mala Noche until the World Cinema Showcase at the Paramount last year. This legendary Black and White 16mm small budget debut movie is beautiful. You get so near to these guys. Close up. Characters you can believe. A working man’s film with real people that suck you into their story and drag you along. On the surface a simple romance between a liquor store clerk and a disinterested Mexican street kid but something more profound is happening in the way things are seen here.

Maybe in some ways what really Van Sant offered was the first sighting of something that was to sweep the world in a few years’ time. A celebration of young adult male Average Joe in the grungy culture of the Pacific North-West. Cobain and co were the beast unfettered and let off the leash. The down and out as superhero. For a while these people rose up and stood steadfastly astride the world. Van Sant had chronicled them on the ground.

See these films projected up from 35mm prints on the big screen, they are good on the TV but Van Sant’s composition and camera angles are so beautiful you owe it to yourself to see them beamed up large. Wellington Film Society down at the Paramount has Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy coming up. Monday evenings at 1815 at the Paramount. Discounts for students.

Written and Directed by Gus Van Sant

New Zealand’s universities are potentially facing difficult times. Enrolments are on the rise as a result of the global financial crisis (GFC), but the National government indicated that there will be no significant commitment to increased spending on tertiary education. This week we’ll look at the attitudes of universities towards the current funding structures, and what the consequences may be for students if the government fails to commit to increasing funding for tertiary education.

How New Zealand stacks up

The 2008 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Education at a Glance survey showed that New Zealand’s public expenditure on tertiary education as a percentage of GDP was above the OECD average, based on 2005 figures. The figures, cited in the New Zealand Vice Chancellors Committee’s (NZVCC) November 2008 ‘Briefing for the Incoming Government’, showed that New Zealand’s public expenditure on tertiary education was 1.5 percent of GDP, with the OECD average being 1.3 percent. New Zealand’s public spending on tertiary education was higher than that of Australia, the UK and the US.

While this paints the New Zealand government’s contribution to tertiary education in a positive light in comparison with other countries, the OECD figures highlight one trend where New Zealand doesn’t follow the international norm. In New Zealand, 58.5 percent of government spending on tertiary education is devoted to funding the tertiary education institutions themselves, while the remaining 41.5 percent of spending funds student financial aid. The NZVCC’s briefing stated that “New Zealand now has an unusual profile internationally with respect to government expenditure on institutions and expenditure on student financial aid.” The briefing explained that the “average pattern in the OECD is for 82.4 [percent] of government funding to be devoted to institutions and 17.6 [percent] to student financial support.”

Compared with other OECD countries, it seems that students in New Zealand are getting a pretty sweet deal in terms of the amount of government spending that is devoted to their financial support. This is not to mention the fact that OECD figures also show that the annual average tutition fees charged by New Zealand universities are considerably lower than the average fees charged in Australia, the US and the UK. All these factors point to tertiary education in New Zealand being more afforable, and ultimately easier to access for those who wish to do so. So why are universities concerned about current funding levels? Is quality of education being compromised by too greater focus on making tertiary education affordable?

Show me the money

The NZVCC has frequently called for increased public investment in universities. The NZVCC argued in its briefing that “although New Zealand’s overall level of public investment in tertiary education compares well internationally, New Zealand under-invests in its universities.”

The NZVCC stated that there is “no point in reducing the cost of university study to students if the quality of the universities themselves declines.”

Despite the efforts of universities to make investment in institutions a high priority for the government, this year’s budget offered no joy for tertiary institutions, with National backing down on Labour’s previous commitments to increase tertiary education funding.

“There is no doubt that the Government should be spending more on tertiary education institutions as a proportion of the overall tertiary education budget,” an NZVCC spokesperson told Salient.

Victoria University’s Vice Chancellor, Professor Pat Walsh said that “successive governments have failed to deliver the appropriate levels of investment which would maximise universities’ economic and social contribution.” He added that “governments have consistently under-funded universities to the point where they are now unable to keep up with costs.”

The GFC should give the government further impetus to devote more funding to tertiary institutions. “[The] government can contribute to a more highly-skilled workforce by ensuring universities are funded at a level which allows them to respond to the growing enrolment pressures resulting from the economic downturn, by providing people with a university education instead of unemployment,” the NZVCC spokesperson said.

The NZVCC stated in its briefing to the incoming government that the “sustained increase in university student numbers” had “put pressure on government funding and on students’ contribution to the costs of their study.”
The NZVCC spokesperson also told Salient that “continued restraints on per student funding, particularly the lack of real indexation for increasing costs, and constraints on tuition fees may lead to the quality of university education being comprised in the future.”

Limited funding availiability plus increased student numbers must have consequences somewhere down the line. Universities may be forced to take drastic measures to ensure that they can continue to deliver quality education within the constraints of government funding. This will have implications for students.

“Universities may have to restrict entry into courses where demand exceeds negotiated public funding. Implications for students could involve exclusion from their chosen programme, or a requirement to achieve at stipulated levels for a particular course if they are to progress to the next level of study,” the NZVCC spokesperson said. “The continual decline in public funding per student means universities face corresponding, mounting pressure to maintain the quality of the education they provide to students.”

The uni, the government and me

The government remains to be the majority source of revenue for New Zealand’s eight universities. I got my Salient office minion to do some quick calculations with the figures from Victoria’s 2008 financial statement. It turns out that about 45 percent of this university’s revenue comes from the government, while a comparatively measely 20 percent comes from domestic students’ fees.

Government funding is allocated to universities by the Tertiary Education Commission (TEC), based on an each university’s individual investment plan. Over the course of the last Labour government’s term in office, the share of the funding pie allocated on the basis of enrolments steadily decreased, in favour of increased funding based on research output and quality. The government is committed to funding a certain number of students, under the Student Achievement Component of the funding system. PBRF was introduced to assess the research output of New Zealand’s tertiary institutions and allocate funding accordingly.

Universities faced with increasing enrolments have few options open to them to gain additional funding from the government to cope with the cost of higher student numbers. A fee maxima is currently in place to limit the amount by which students’ fees can be increased each year. Universities are required to bear the cost of increased enrolments, potentially without any additional support from the government, and without the authority to increase fees. “If the Government encourages enrolment at universities to exceed the current funding cap but refuses to fund those students, universities will carry increasing numbers of unfunded students over the next few years at a cost of millions of dollars,” the NZVCC spokesperson said.

How does Vic shape up?

Ah the GFC. Neither Vic nor Professor Walsh can escape its clutches. “Like all households, businesses and organisations, the university is looking at the best way to manage its resources in difficult financial times,” Professor Walsh said. “For the 2009 budget, the universities have received a modest increase in budget, which is only just enough to cover inflation.”

Based on current enrolments, Vic is within the three percent “tolerance band” for student enrolments allowed by the TEC. However, Professor Walsh said “until we have a better idea of what enrolments are like for Trimester Two, we are not sure what the extent of unfunded students are likely to be for 2009.” In the event that Vic does exceed the three percent tolerance band, the University may be able to enter into discussions with the TEC for increased funding for 2010, Professor Walsh said. “This very much depends upon what is happening across the whole of the sector and the amount allocated in the Budget for tertiary education, which needs to be evaluated in detail,” he said. However, he added that “the TEC expects the University to manage its enrolments within agreed targets.”

Vic remains committed to providing “the best possible education to its students,” despite the budget pressures it faces in the current economic climate.

“While funding levels from government mean that we are obliged to look for efficiencies in the way we teach, a high priority continues to be placed on the variety of ways of organising the opportunity for students to interact with staff, including tutorials, discussion forums on Blackboard, small study groups, discussions within lectures based on out-of-class tasks, and informal interaction,” Professor Walsh said.

So students shouldn’t be losing out, despite the reluctance of the government to increase tertiary funding in the GFC? The official line from the University suggests not. But if the government doesn’t cough up some extra cash sometime in the foreseeable future, don’t be surprised if New Zealand’s universities start calling for the extra cost of tertiary education to be funded out of students’ pockets.

The motion, which passed by a vote of 60–20, was tabled by AUSA Student Representative Council Chair Oliver Woods.
Woods said the $36,000 fee AUSA paid to NZUSA could be better spent on things that directly affected Auckland students.

“I think the referendum is great to hear the voice of students,” Woods said.

AUSA Administrative VP Joe McCory spoke against the referendum, noting NZUSA’s track record of student advocacy.
McCory took umbrage with the rushed nature of the motion, saying it had not even been discussed at the weekly Exec meeting two days earlier.

“It was an ambush, in my opinion,” McCory said.

AUSA President Darcy Peacock abstained from voting, explaining later that he felt personal politics were being inflected through the motion.

A number of students spoken to by Craccum voted for the motion as they felt it would lend them opportunity to air their opinions.

Craccum understands that even if AUSA does vote to leave NZUSA, it would be required to give one year’s notice of its withdrawal.

After the NZUSA referendum question was settled, debate moved on to whether or not Melissa Lee was a racist. This time the crowd voted overwhelming against the motion. At least students are consistent in their inconsistency.

Dunne, the Member for Ohariu, caught the surprise of many when he announced in Parliament a fortnight ago that he had “pretty much done” everything he had to do for the duration of his term in parliament.

In papers released to Salient, the office for Dunne said the Minister, “… really only had a short list of chores to do during this term in the house, and after vacuuming the cabinet room and clearing out Tolley’s closet, he’d pretty much done his dash for the following three years.”

Dunne’s boredom has manifested itself in a number of creative and perplexing ways. An unnamed source within government told Salient of receiving a love heart collage signed by the Minister.

“It was cellotaped to my door. It said, ‘Hey, just wanted to say you’re doing a good job, friend’,” he said. “It was… weird.”

Another source spoke candidly about the bored Minister’s daily musings inside the houses of power.

“He just kinda wanders up and down the hallways with his hands in his pockets whistling to himself, randomly knocking on doors to ask if there’s anything he can do,” he said.

“One time, he came in and asked if I was good for coffee. I was. I was good for coffee.”

An opposition MP, who declined to be named, said Dunne appeared to have also taken on a state of melancholy in his boredom.

“I was walking towards a select committee meeting, when I saw him sitting on the steps outside tossing a baseball back and forth into a catcher’s mitt,” she said.

“Another time, my press secretary and I were having lunch, when all of a sudden this frisbee gently soars overhead and lands right next to us. We look over, and there’s Dunne mid-toss with this look of unadulterated joy on his face. The moment he realised we weren’t tossing it back, he put his hands in his pockets, scuffed the carpet with his shoe and walked off.”

When questioned by Salient as to what the Minister planned to do with the following two or so years of his political life, Dunne’s office refused to comment, rendered mute that an outlet of the media had actually requested a response.

One of Dunne’s aides did, however, divulge an embarrassing letdown to Salient.

“He once called ZM to request a shoutout to all his friends in the National-led government, but they were all in caucus, so no one actually heard it,” the aide said.

“He had me put it on cassette tape to pass around, it’s just sitting there in the kitchen with this big stupid pink post-it note saying ‘YOU GUYS WON’T BELIEVE WHAT WAS ON THE RADIO!’ To think nobody’s gonna hear the Minister of Revenue request Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’ is a bit of a disappointment, I’m not gonna lie.”

The Prime Minister’s Office refused to comment, but the sight of a courier delivering a bouquet of flowers and a teddy bear to the 9th floor of the Beehive was passed off as a mere “creepy” coincidence.

For a year The Piano Teacher has been sitting on my shelf at home. It’s one of the few films by Michael Haneke I haven’t seen and supposedly it is one of his best, yet somehow I can’t bring myself to watch it quite yet. If you have seen this film, or any other films by Haneke you will know exactly why. To say Haneke’s cinema is unsettling is a gross understatement at best. In fact some of the most confronting cinema I have seen in recent years has been his. But what else should we expect from a director who claims Salo is his favourite film?

Haneke 101 should probably be Funny Games (the 1997 original or the 2007 American remake) and Hidden. The DVD case for Hidden claims Haneke inherited Antonioni’s mantle as the director of alienation, and this is certainly true in the case of this film. After Hidden I went on a Haneke binge, consuming Time of the Wolf, Funny Games and Code Unknown. Each film was a devastating experience which left me almost shell-shocked. A friend recently told me the experience of watching The Piano Teacher left him physically speechless. It’s rare cinema that has this power, but Haneke’s consistently does.

Haneke’s films are ice-cold, clinical exercises which display the meticulous control of an auteur whose mark must be one of the most idiosyncratic in contemporary cinema. They almost never feature soundtracks, use static camera set-ups and lengthy unbroken takes. Notwithstanding they are never boring simply because you never know what’s going to happen. Watch the opening of Time of the Wolf, the metro sequence in Code Unknown or the climax of Hidden for proof of this. The unpredictability of these scenes will shock you—in my case I am still uneasy a year later.

Despite this troubling introduction I must admit I’m hard pressed to think of a better director working today than Haneke. I’m not at all alone in this view, as last week Haneke picked up the Palme d’Or for his new film The White Ribbon which chronicles a series of unusual events in a small German town before WW1. Easily my most anticipated film for 2009, with any luck we may see it in the upcoming New Zealand Film Festival. With words like ‘chilling’, ‘austere’ and ‘elegiac’ being bandied around I think we are in for another Haneke masterpiece.

There is a very special kind of fear that comes from seeing films adapted from television series you love. Like the deep ache walking to the train station where you just know someone is about to break up with you, waves of optimism—maybe this will one will be okay, maybe maybe maybe this time they won’t have screwed it up—alternate with waves of dread—who would let this happen? Will the world ever make sense again? The TV series in question here is The Thick of It, a cripplingly funny mock-doc about the politics of spin and the spinning of politics in British government. The Thick of It is easily one of the finest pieces of television produced in recent memory, it comes straight from the brain of Armando Iannucci, the gruff godfather of modern British comedy—without him we wouldn’t have Chris Morris, Steve Coogan, Stewart Lee and many others—it is a post-faux-verite jump cut fest filled with snivelling MPs and enraged Scottish civil servants. But, most importantly, it has a writer whose sole job is coming up with creative and poetic ways to swear, and if there is one surer sign of something’s genius than that I don’t want to know what it is.

But now The Thick of It is bursting onto the big screen as In The Loop, and this is where that fear comes out to play. Luckily, the fear is wrong. In The Loop is a more than worthy spin-off. Being made by the same creative team and having a lot of the same cast—even if they’re not playing the same characters—makes sure that the distinctly fractured and fractious voice of The Thick of It isn’t lost.

The story is one of classic mis- or non-understanding. A member in the British cabinet states that war with the Middle East is “unforeseeable”, and with that the face is on from both the pro- and anti-war lobbies in America to claim this man as their savoir and either go to or entirely divert war. Malcolm Tucker, the enraged and enraging Scots civil servant mentioned earlier, is deployed to get everything sorted the fuck out. Hilarity ensues.

There is a lot to love in In The Loop. Peter Capaldi’s sneeringly brilliant performance as Malcolm Tucker. Capaldi does not only chew the scenery, he tears huge chunks out of it with his vicious maw and spits them in your eye and makes you like it, dammit. The direction and cinematography is self-reflexive and interesting without ever being masturbatory or pious. It is perfectly designed for an audience with no knowledge of The Thick of It, being much more of a side step than a sequel. But, best of all, is just how amazingly funny it is. It is kaleidoscopically funny. It’s saturated with one liners that will split your sides and then your fronts—my personal favourite being “Oh, come on, this will be easy peasy lemon squeezy.” “No. It will be difficult difficult lemon difficult.”

Better than Spinal Tap. See it when it comes or stop living.

Written by Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell,
Armando Iannucci, Ian Martin and Tony Roche
Based on BBC TV’s The Thick of It
Directed by Armando Iannucci
With Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander, Gina McKee, James Gandolfini, Chris Addison and Anna Chlumsky

Unitec and the Unitec Student Union (USU) held the forum in The Hub last Monday where candidates for the Mt Albert by-election tried to convince the 30 or so students who showed up and the various committed party supporters why they should vote for them.

National List MP Melissa Lee, ACT list MP John Boscawen, Labour candidate David Shearer and Green Co-leader Russel Norman spoke at the forum.

The candidates were asked what they would be doing if they were not in politics, what they believed the big issues for Mt Albert residents were, and why they were running for the seat.

All candidates spoke about the Waterview Connection and the Super City. Ms Lee talked about law and order, Mr Boscawen talked about living standards in New Zealand, while Dr Norman spoke about roading and public transport.
In the midst of talking about the Super City, the ACT candidate’s bald head was smeared in lamington.

Frustrated People Before Profit by-election candidate Malcolm France surged forward from the crowd and slammed the cake on the ACT MP’s head.

Mr Boscawen kept speaking with the cake on his head until someone came forward from the crowd and picked it off, to throw it back in Mr France’s face.

Later, when the floor was open to questions from the audience, InUnison brought up a controversial email they had received from Melissa Lee.

The email was in response to some light-hearted hip-hop culture related questions for a profile.

In response to which accessory she would prefer between a gun, a fur coat, a big diamond ring, or a grill, Ms Lee answered “I think a big diamond ring would be the most useful accessory during the rest of the by-election to knock some sense into the media (although a gun is tempting…)”

At the forum InUnison asked Ms Lee why she had said she would like to take a gun to the media, when the media was only reporting on the things she had said.

Ms Lee denied writing the email and said she did not know what the question was about. She later told the magazine the email was unapproved. She said she had answered some of the questions in the email, but not the specific gun-related one.

Ms Lee, who has already been under fire from controversial statements to the media, blamed an over-enthusiastic volunteer for sending the email.

National media took a liking to InUnison’s query, and the event was reported that night on TV3 News, as well as radio stations, Stuff.co.nz and The Herald.

Later that day, over-compensating for the “unauthorised” gun comment, one of Ms Lee’s media team sent through a new answer.

“I think an appropriately sourced fur coat would be handy for keeping warm with all the doorknocking I am doing. Something I could then donate to one of the groups in the electorate helping support those in need,” it said.
In response to another question about grills, Ms Lee answered “All politicians need to know when to keep their mouths closed. So I have put my grill away for the rest of the campaign.’’

Time and headlines will surely tell if this last statement holds true.

In his budget speech delivered last Thursday, Finance Minister Bill English said the government’s priority of curbing debt had meant for a budget with a strongly fastened belt.

English noted a number of departments faced spending reprioritisations, with the ministries of Education, Economic Development and Foreign Affairs and Trade being fingered particularly for large savings.

The government’s promised tax cuts have also been deferred, with English claiming they were largely unaffordable in the current economic climate.

The tertiary education sector also felt the savings pinch, with funding no longer allocated in response to inflationary pressure.

Universities will receive a stationary amount of funds that will not be adjusted to match the Consumer Price Index (CPI).
The removal of CPI adjustments is expected to save the Government $173M a year.

The rationale for the allocation of tertiary funding was based largely around unwinding pre-commitments and reducing high-compliance funds, while maintaining the core provisions of education.

VUWSA President Jasmine Freemantle expressed disappointment with the removal of the CPI adjustment.

“The government has effectively cut spending to tertiary education by failing to meet predicted inflation levels,” she said.

The Tertiary Education Commission was more optimistic, seeing the budget as the first steps towards a new tertiary education strategy set to be released later this year. 

A number of new initiatives were also mentioned, including the introduction of job summit summer scholarships, and the already announced voluntary repayment bonus for student loans.

Outside the realm of tertiary education, the budget included funding increases for health services, the police force, and the promotion of primary sector growth.

English also confirmed that KiwiSaver and the Working for Families Scheme would be maintained.

Lesbian Vampire Killers wasn’t awful. In fact, I was almost pleasantly surprised. My knowledge of the film beforehand was based only on the information given by the title. I thus knew a) that it would be about one of the following: lesbian vampires that kill, lesbians that kill vampires or people who kill lesbian vampires and b) that there would be tits and violence a-plenty. I was proven correct on both counts.

The film was a horror comedy about two friends, one of whom (Mathew Horne) has just been dumped by his girlfriend and the other who is overweight and unemployed (James Cordon) they take it upon themselves to battle the undead in a very British setting (sound familiar?). While it was clearly begging to be compared to Shaun of the Dead, it was by no means anywhere near the perfection of that film. It was neither as funny nor as scary as Shaun and it was nowhere near as clever. It did, however, manage to get a few giggles out of me which is more than I expected from a film entitled Lesbian Vampire Killers.

Part of the reason I found myself enjoying the movie so much probably had to do with the rock bottom expectations I had going into it and it was by no means a great film. The accents were laughable (the girls who became vampires sounded like they hadn’t made up their mind as to whether they’re doing a Dutch or an Eastern European accent or whether they were just channelling Leo from Blood Diamond), the humour was forgettable and the characters were nothing special (the vampire-hunting vicar could have been a standout character but his only quirky trait was that he occasionally said “fuck”). What we really need is a truly good new film where the vampires are sexual without being neutered (From Dusk Till Dawn remains my favourite vampire film). The sad fact is that the likes of True Blood, Let the Right One In and even Twilight remain miles better than this.

Negatives aside, the film was watchable, fun and ***MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW*** filled with both tits and violence. If you don’t go into it expecting it to be the next Shaun of the Dead or even a Twilight for boys, then you shouldn’t be too disappointed.

Heart attacks often come in two forms: Pies and deep-fried Moro bars (I actually feel like I’m having a heart attack right now—but that is probably from the butter chicken I ate for tea). Yet that doesn’t deter us from their sickly, savory goodness. The pie is often the first (and last) resort to a cheap, hearty meal. It’s usually the one thing we crave during those Sunday morning hangovers. What is it about that meaty aroma that has us coming back for more?

Pies take a special place in my memory. Breakfast was always a tasty delight for me. While all the kids had Weetbix or jam on toast, I had pies—most days of the week. I don’t think my mum ever realised that pies weren’t that healthy, and as a child neither did I. All I knew is that they made me feel all nice and warm. And of course, having pies for breakfast wasn’t an epidemic that we were warned of. It was only at school that I began to question my morning eating habits. I would ask, “What did you have for breakfast?”

No one ever said pies.

It was a disheartening memory. I remember the teacher playing a game one time. She would say a breakfast food, and if you had eaten it that day, you got to go to lunch. It really sucks to be the last one in class.

Those were some of my first pie memories. Then next ones came from Georgie Pie. I’m glad there is a national interest in resurrecting Georgie Pie, but to be honest, I never really liked it. It’s only recently come into my knowledge that they did more than pies. They did wedges, sundaes and fruit pies! I have a friend whose dad used to manage Georgie Pie, back in the day. I finally can understand his dislike towards McDonalds. Yes, they took away his dad’s job. But they did something far worse. They deprive him of his wedges and fruit pies. And it’s something he has never forgotten.

Of course, pies come in many varieties. In New Zealand, it seems there is a pie designed for every meat: fish, chicken, etc. However, in Britain, it’s the pork pie that reigns supreme. It’s often served with beer and eaten cold. The said pie resembles something like cat food wrapped in pastry (shudder). It even has that jelly-like substance congealed throughout the meat. Britain loves this pie so much that they made a bigger version, the Gala Pie, baked in bread tin, with pork, pork jelly and an egg in the centre…

I’m starting to feel sick.

Then there are the Christmas pies. Bleurgh. The thought of them make me want to vomit. Fruit and meat are two things that should never mix and this extends to fruit imitating meat. I can’t fathom why they are loved. Christmas pies are neither sweet nor savoury, nor do they make a satisfactory meal. They really let the pie family down. Also, they are disgusting (that’s why you’ll always find them at any work function). I talked about this very topic with a friend in a heated discussion. As it turns out, we were not the only ones with opinions. Some guy, walking in front of us, randomly joined our conversation with the vigour of any pie-enthusiast. It was strange. In the end, the conversation never really got resolved. But we never got his name. He shall always be referred to as ‘The Mysterious Pie Guy’.

When I think about it, I do love pies. But everyone does, really. It’s become a part of the New Zealand heritage. Just remember this: Pies now and then? That’s okay. Pies for breakfast? That’s
just Wong.

So, Sando Says! Remember how excited I was at how Joanne Black managed to find a way to write short snippets of infotainment via using communist boxes? Well, this week I want to test if it could work with non-communist boxes. My theme for this week? Smiley faces—how else would your mildly autistic friends know if you were joking online? It’s a visual clue that written language was quite happy to do without until computer scientists just had to start talking upon the internet in the early eighties. God damn you, father of modern emoticon usage Scott Fahlman, I’m going to go over to Pittsburgh and shank you one day. Shanking is of course when you provide someone lamb shanks at a dinner party. As New Zealand lamb is of such a high quality, he’d be asinine to turn down the offer.

Whanganui vs. Wanganui. Who cares? This guy. I’ll tell you this: if you don’t want to see an H in that city’s name you’re a racist. There’s no difference between you not accepting the correct Te Reo spelling of the word and killing Maori culture. And, anyway, by trying to stop this cultural rebranding you’re cutting into the already decimated financial pull that Whanganui has. Do you know how many jobs hanging the new signage up is going to create? Seven! That’s going to raise employment levels in Whanga-Vegas by nearly 9000 percent. Please Whanganuites, absorb what I’m saying and let the “H” back into your heart. You did it for “P”, it’s time to let the rest of the alphabet in too.

I’m addicted to not being in pain. Oh yeah, I have chronic pain, from when I had a football-shaped ‘inside zit’ removed from my tailbone a couple of years ago. The pain hasn’t really gone away, but does lessen during certain times of the year. Not as in that ‘time of moon when it neither waxes or wanes’ or ‘times when I’m not at school’, but as in, when it’s summer it is warmer and I’ve noticed less painful. So to further elaborate: I can tell the temperature by how much my butt pain makes me want to top myself. Sorry, I mean “better myself”, I wouldn’t want to mention suicide in an offhanded way, considering how serious the topic is. The point I am trying to make is that I take pain killers to numb my pain. I used to just take codeine, which, amazingly, did the trick right away. This week has been one of the worst weeks that I’ve had in dealing with my ass pain in quite a while. Even now while sitting on a very padded seat, with polypropoline leggings, pants and an Antarctic rated sleeping bag on, I still feel a dull ache and sharp pain down there, just sitting at the bottom of my consciousness while I try to type out my column. It is smirking at me right now. I take painkillers to combat this smug bastard, and some of them help. The best thing I was allowed access to was codeine. It was just so useful, 30-60mgs of the stuff at a time in the middle of winter and bang! I didn’t feel the pain any more, but I didn’t become a spaced out zombie who just slept the entire day. Less than this amount and I feel fragile, and start trying not to move too much, I don’t want to cause myself further pain by doing normal person stuff, like beating myself half to death with fruit. For a while there of course, I thought that it was a little bit romantic living with an ailment—I felt like Horatio Nelson, after losing an arm. Sadly the realities of living in this situation are as depressing as watching an armless rat going through the motions of cleaning its fur. Now, like many, I can’t get access to just codeine (because that would be silly, it’d have to be something like a codeine phosphate), and have to take it mixed with other substances like paracetamol, which is fine and all, except that over 2000mgs of paracetamol a day can cause kidney problems, and I’m taking at least that daily during times of high pain like… say June through August, or ‘Winter’ as it’s now known. Let’s not even mention the fact that I saw a close acquaintance try to ‘better themselves’ through taking a whopping great amount of it at once. Thank god they were ignorant enough to think that taking a huge amount would kill them faster rather than make their body want to hyper purge. I get why we demonise opiates, really I do, I wish I was less panic-riddled and could just discuss this with my doctor, but every time I do, I can see the cleverly placed Narcotics Anonymous poster on the wall, and my hopes dip just a little while my invisible arms try to free myself from the psychological dirt that peppers my pelt.

I am having one of those existential crises that I keep reading about in stupid magazines that litter the Student Health waiting room. You see, two of my friends have just had a baby, it’s not like they are the first in my peer group to birth a womb goblin, not by a long shot; I have emerged from as small town after all, and what happens in small towns? You do drugs, or become incredibly religious. Either way, chances are you’re going to have a baby, the options just determine whether it’s born addicted to PCP or Jesus at birth. I guess my biggest problem is that they were the sanest of my peer group. They probably still are as well. If they are still as sane as all out, and I am still part of that crew, it is now an indicator that I am either nearing a time where I should consider using some vagina-wielding person to birth a baby for me, or it is an indicator that I fucked up something chronic a while back. When is it sane age to start going all Spogworts Wizarding Academy for Semi Gifted Children, I ask rhetorically? It’s all so fucking frightening how normal the people back in Paraparaumu are finding this progression of getting married, moving into a small highly mortgaged house, and having babies is. Did I miss some sort of family memo that this is how life is meant to go? Well, yes, it turns out I did. Many thanks New Zealand Postal Service, your incompetency has cost me my future and the lives of New Zealanders in potential. Why don’t you go protest that, government-mandated abortion-picketing Christians?

My partner came in gabbling and babbling about some sort of psychotic homeless people making music out of objects. It turned out, after I had forced half a box of antipsychotic medication down the gabbling throat, that it wasn’t Blanket Man or the “shkews me” fellow who had been making noise, but the professional musical dance show Stomp. I promptly forced more hypnovel, or ‘midazolam’ if you will, down the offending throat, and went out to tub thump, what ever that is.

So, which 1st years frittered away all of their hard-earned $1000 course related costs without leaving themselves enough to get a coat for winter? Good luck guys, the op shops have been out of the non-smelling like rat pee ones since before the century started. Try not to die or have unprotected sex for warmth. Get money for it at the least.

Night yo.

The last time I felt this much anticipation for an album I was downloading live Radiohead bootlegs during the weeks and months that preceded the release of In Rainbows. I’d imagine that anybody else who watched Grizzly Bear’s advance live performances of ‘While You Wait for the Others’ and ‘Two Weeks’ on YouTube experienced the same sense of hope and excitement about what the rest of Veckatimest might have to offer as I did. Both songs are remarkable works of songcraft, with meticulous arrangements that balance unconventional chord progressions with moments of pure melodic grace.

At the heart of Grizzly Bear’s sound are the four-way vocal harmonies, which are put together with an impeccable sense of structure and timing. Everything, as Yorke would say, is in its right place. The musicianship, the quality of the vocals and the synergy with which the band combine these, and other components, is without peer. As much as has already been written about ‘Two Weeks’, I still can’t help but add a few words of my own. This song is a remarkable encapsulation of baroque pop beauty. I particularly like the way in which Ed Droste’s vocal effortlessly interchanges with the rest of the band’s harmonies (as well as with the backups provided by Beach House’s Victoria Legrand).

“Would you always / Maybe sometimes / Make it easy / Take your time.”

It’s a chorus so beautiful, with a melody so timeless that it’s almost absurd that no one else has come up with it before now. And that’s sort of the key to Grizzly Bear’s genius. As straightforward as their basic formula might be (vocal harmonies + a mix of conventional guitars, bass, drums and keys) they somehow manage to create music that feels familiar while still retaining a sense of striking singularity. It’s a rare blend, and one that we should savor. Compared to their preceding album, Yellow House, Veckatimest sounds more immediate, thanks to a greater emphasis on Christopher Bear’s complex, off-kilter drumming and a more driving set of contributions from Daniel Rossen’s guitar. But that’s not to say this isn’t still a dense work, because after all, anything created with the kind of attention to detail that Grizzly Bear always maintain is bound to take several listens to wholly absorb and appreciate. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Mainstream: 4 stars
Indie: 9.0
Kim: Genius

*****

Last week I promised to fill the music section with another round of hip-hop related content. Unfortunately, I encountered a few teething difficulties. First of all, Eminem’s album was so bad I couldn’t even get past the first song, let alone attempt a review of it. Secondly, after much deliberation (and a timely read of Juliet Buckler’s column from last week), I came to the conclusion that Lady Gaga, rather than Kanye West, is the greatest pop star of our generation.

Unfortunately she hasn’t been around for long enough for me to be able to argue her case with any serious amount of conviction, as I believe I would have been able to do for Mr. West. What about that Crackhouse 5 interview then? No luck there either, I’m afraid. In the end I just couldn’t be fucked emailing them. Perhaps next week? I guess it’s time to add Kelvin on Facebook…

That leaves me with the promised unconventional review of Jay-Z’s classic album, The Blueprint. This at least, I have managed to complete. I opted for the Haiku form, since it required the least amount of effort. [KW]

Jay-Z

The Blueprint

Jay-Z claims the throne
with Kanye’s sampled soul and
a watertight flow

Mainstream: 5 Stars
Indie: 10.0
Kim: Genius

This is particularly a hazard when it comes to sci fi.

You’ve got intergalactic space travel, robots, time travel, and aliens who travel through time and space to fight aliens, cyborgs, and time-travelling alien cyborgs (with nothing more than their trusty sonic screwdrivers and plucky human companions). There’s advanced medical technology, teleportation, and people with all sorts of biological enhancements. Some of this stuff is unlikely to ever happen, some of it could happen, some of it is quite likely given current science and technology, and some of it is pretty much already here.

At its best, the ideas, technologies and science in science fiction will not only be plausible given the science of the day, they’ll actually be pretty good predictions about the future of science. Take Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. At its core, Brave New World, like most other stories about a dystopian future, is a warning from the author about how society’s going to go down the plug-hole if we keep certain things up. But in among his characters’ pages-long monologues to lecture us about the perils to humanity of everything you’re doing right now, Huxley constructed a world with pretty accurate predictions of where technology was heading. While some aspects of his world haven’t eventuated (like movie theatres with sensation as well as sight and sound so that you can feel the fur of a bearskin rug and the heat of a fire), Huxley was impressively prescient when he wrote about helicopters, in vitro fertilisation, readily available mood-stabilising drugs, and birth control in pill form.

The purists will argue that if the science in sci fi (or ‘speculative fiction’ as they sometimes loftily like to call it) isn’t predictive or plausible, then it’s not really sci fi—it’s just fantasy where the wizards with magic wands have been replaced with white-coated scientists wielding teleporters.

Plausible and predictive are fine goals for science in fiction, but probably rather difficult to achieve. I would personally be happy if, every time there was some science in fiction that is explained by a character in a way that’s so inaccurate and outlandish to be laughable, that line was removed and replaced with the perfectly correct “a wizard did it” (as Lucy Lawless put it in The Simpsons).

Here’s what I mean: in Battlestar Galactica, the characters travel vast distances across the universe in alarmingly short spans of time. How do they do it? The jump drive, of course. What’s a jump drive? It doesn’t matter. All the audience needs to know is that it moves the ship and its crew from A to B in space really really quickly.

In Doctor Who, characters are always standing in for the audience by asking the Doctor annoying questions about things. Why is there so much room inside the police box-shaped TARDIS? Easy: because it’s bigger on the inside. Explain again how we’re travelling back and forth through time and not mucking things up? Well, that’s because time is not linear but more of a big ball of timey-wimey stuff. Done.

And let’s not forget the flux capacitor in Back to the Future. As Doc put it: “it’s what makes time travel possible”. Well, there’s that sorted then.

A great benefit of this approach is that it gives the writers a huge amount of freedom with their sci-fi objects. Example: “Oh no, we need to jump away from those Cylons, but the jump drive’s been flooded with radiation and it’s affecting the jump coordinates!” The audience can readily accept this. Because no one’s tried to explain what a jump drive is to us, we’re not going to have inconvenient thoughts like: “Wait a minute! Radiation wouldn’t affect the jump drive because [blah blah blah]!”

I’d be happy with less explanation rather than more when it comes to science in fiction if it avoids painful inaccuracy. It’s kind of unfair to pick on the 1995 movie Hackers because it’s one of those so-bad-it’s-good kind of films, but you’d think that in a movie that’s supposed to be about 1337 h4X0rs, they’d at least try to get their computer terminology right. But in Hackers one of the characters amazingly has an Apple Mac with a Pentium chip, and leet is pronounced “elite”.

If you’ve taken a couple of psychology or biology papers, watching Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse probably makes you want to stab out your own eardrums every now and then. Don’t get me wrong, I love Buffy, Fray, and Firefly, and I’m sticking with Dollhouse in the hope that it’ll get better any episode now, but every now and then I find myself screaming at the screen: “Get a better on-set science advisor!” In Dollhouse, people can have their memories and personalities ‘wiped’ so they can be imprinted with new personalities (and memories and “muscle memory”) so that they can undertake different assignments. Yeah I know, it already sounds pretty wacky. But, unwisely, instead of just saying “a wizard did it”, or “thank God we invented the flux capacitor”, the characters are forever trying to explain just how their wondrous technology works with perfectly acceptable pseudo-science peppered with totally inaccurate real science. It honestly makes me want to find the nearest fork to jam into my ears.

So there you have it. If you’re writing a novel or screenplay and you’ve got a bit of science in your work that you think doesn’t sound quite right, just remember that a wizard did it, and you will never, ever go wrong.

Have you ever wondered why New World does not organise drive-by shootings of Pak ‘N Save? Why, if Noel Leeming has a dispute with a supplier, do they take them to court rather than summarily execute them?

I’m sure that these questions seem absurd to you. But in one area of commerce—the sale of illicit narcotics—these are the decisions that enterprising firms sometimes make. What is it about the sale of drugs that causes people to commit acts of violence to defend their turf, to punish people who do not pay, and to ensure a constant supply of drugs?

Some might argue that it is the nature of drugs themselves—that drugs make people violent, and so it is natural for those who peddle drugs to end up committing acts of violence. But this hardly makes sense. Alcohol also makes people more aggressive, and yet we rarely see Mac’s Breweries undertaking rip and runs against Monteiths. Moreover, many drugs, such as marijuana, make people less violent rather than more.

Others might argue that those predisposed to purchasing and using drugs are more likely to commit acts of violence—that drug use corresponds to other indicators of violence such as race or socio-economic background. While this argument may have merit at first sight, I believe that it confuses cause and effect. Why, after all, are drug dealers more likely to come from poor backgrounds?

I think the real reason for the relationship between drugs and violence is the fact that drugs are illegal.

II: Why Illegal Drug Dealing Necessitates Violence

Drugs are valuable, and it is reasonable to assume that drug dealers want to protect their supply routes and enforce their contracts. If I agreed to supply fresh vegetables to New World for a month and then failed to do so, they would take me to court and get damages. Equally, when a drug dealer enters into a contract that is not performed, he wants recompense. He is unable to get recourse through the court system, because it refuses to enforce “unlawful contracts”. Is it surprising that to defend his property rights in drugs, a drug-dealer seeks other enforcement mechanisms outside of the court system?

What is surprising is not that violence is used, but instead that violence is so seldom used. Thomas Hobbes, an English philosopher, said that life in a state of nature (that is, in the absence of a state) would result in a “war of all against all” and that life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” People thought that he was right for ages. It would take modern-day game theorists to lash him out. Game theorists have demonstrated that, with iterations, co-operation would emerge spontaneously in a state of nature. This is one of the key ideas underpinning anarcho-capitalism.
Equally, in the world of drugs, violence is not the primary mechanism to ensure contracts are upheld. In fact, given the costly nature of gang warfare (some people go to jail and others die), it seems more likely that they rely on other factors to demonstrate their willingness to abide by their contracts. Some ways they can do this are through building a reputation for upholding contracts or engaging in joint ventures to ensure the interests of the two parties are shared. In countries with more sophisticated markets in drugs, the Mafia acts as a de facto enforcement agency. Tony Soprano is the Justice Tipping of the black market. But violence is still the last resort for gangs—whereas the courts are a last resort to New World.

What this means, if you accept it, is that it is impossible to win the war on drugs. If we crack down on supply, drugs become more valuable. That means people have to go to extra lengths to protect their supply from theft. That means more guns, more violence, and more innocent victims. As soon as we come close to winning the war on drugs, we sow the seeds of our own destruction.

III: Why Some Drugs are Illegal

If you’re following so far, you’ll be seriously wondering why drugs are illegal. After all, if it is the prohibition on drugs which leads to violence, surely the obvious answer is to legalise them—especially commonly used drugs like marijuana?
Those who think like this are suffering from a disease I call democratic romanticism. This is the idea that the government does what the people want, because hey, we all get to vote occasionally. You probably also think that votes are a good indication of what people want. Most of you who support democracy are suffering under a delusion—a delusion that politicians are concerned with the public interest.

There are several problems with this. First, when the public interest comes up against a special interest, you can be sure that the general welfare is traded away to secure money or votes from the special interest. Take New Zealand’s tariffs on hats. This harms each of us in only a tiny way. We pay slightly more for hats than we ordinarily would. But the benefits to the millinery industry are massive—they are concentrated in the hands of a few people who reap excess profits. When you go to vote, you do not think “I’m really pissed off that I spent $1 extra on hats last year,” but the milliner is certainly thinking “I earned 100k from the tariffs last year—I’ll be voting to keep them.”

But the special interests are not so dumb as to make their claims in self-interested terms. They never say “we want a tariff to protect us.” They say “we want a tariff to help New Zealand workers.” Behind every special interest there is a bootlegger and a baptist. The baptist is the guy who is motivated by the softness of his heart. The bootlegger is the guy who gets the benefit of the special protection. The term came about when the United States introduced prohibition—the baptists supported prohibition because alcohol was evil, and the bootleggers supported prohibition because they would make a mint from alcohol being illegal.

Today, in regard to drugs, the baptists are the do-gooders like Jim Anderton, who is obsessed with taking away your freedom. When questioned why marijuana was illegal when alcohol was not, he threatened the questioner with the line “Don’t tempt me.” Behind Jim Anderton and the we-know-best brigade are the industries that would be harmed if marijuana and other drugs were legalised—the alcohol industry, bars, and yes, gangs.

The second problem with democracy is that talk is cheap. Have you ever seen those surveys where people say they want to eat healthier? Those surveys piss me off. If you want to eat healthier, then do it. People say they want to eat healthier, and then buy McDonalds. In fact, when McDonalds adds healthy items on to their menu, the amount of unhealthy foods they sell increases. Because a vote—like talk—hardly affects anything, we indulge our biases and fail to research things adequately. Students vote for the Greens ‘cause they love the environment. Then use the dryer. Talk is cheap.

Third, politics is necessarily short term. The reality is that drug use once someone is over 30 seldom occurs. So, there is a group of 18–30 year olds who have an interest in liberalising drug laws. But liberalising drug laws does not just benefit you—it benefits the future generations of 18–30 year olds. But they don’t get a vote, and you cannot charge them for doing the right thing and pushing for drug liberalisation. So, despite the fact that the long-term impact would be significantly beneficial, a democratic polity will continue to not act.
Contrast that with the private market. Some trees take 60 years of growing before they can be sold. Surely any person who is over the age of about 30 would be mad to invest in such a forest? You’d think so, but the cool thing about markets is that they allow you to sell to a guy 10 years later who pays a premium because he only has to wait 50 years. No such system exists in politics. That’s why politics is notoriously short-sighted.

IV: How To Get Marijuana Legalised

All I’ve told you is that when drugs are illegal, we get violence. That means unnecessary killings, brutal violence, and innocent victims. But there are other reasons why drugs should be legal. How about the fact that people really like them, enjoy taking them, and should be able to gain that pleasure without threat of arrest? I think that’s probably the best reason. Or how about the fact that I should be able to put whatever I want into my own body, even if it annoys you? Or, for the law students, how about the fact that enforcing laws against consensual acts necessarily involves a violation of rights? The reverse onus placed on defendants who have large quantities of drugs on them is inimical to a free society.

So how can we actually get drugs, especially widely used ones like marijuana, legalised? I think there’s two things we can do. First, we must normalise the usage of drugs. Normal people—lawyers, doctors, students, parents—need to come out and admit that they use or have used marijuana. Second, we need to use the delusion of democracy against itself. If enough of us decide to vote on this one issue—explicitly recognising that to do so is just as delusional as voting generally—then we can force political parties to respond. The Greens already support it. Rodney Hide has publicly stated that he supports the legalisation of all drugs. If we can get National and Labour to fight over the student vote, then where are all the do-gooders going to go?

Humanity has always had a strong fascination with the objects that inhabit the sky over our heads. They were quickly ascribed an elevated status, due to their perceived orientation above everything, and the idea that they were watching over and had influence on the Earth. Early religions centered around Sun and Moon worship, and celestial objects were believed to have a strong impact on seasonal changes such as rain and drought. From the beginning astronomy has had strong links to mysticism and religion, ones that it has struggled to divorce itself from for many centuries.

The first astronomers were in fact priests, who studied the heavens in order to gain divine knowledge of the gods and their earthly impact. While astronomy and astrology have very different meanings for us now, initially they were essentially synonymous, a mix of highly detailed observations of the sky with applied mysticism. As early as Babylonian times astronomy had begun to take on a more sophisticated and scientific approach, applying mathematics to predict cycles and patterns of planets’ and stars’ appearances in the sky. Most civilizations began using the sun and moon for timekeeping, especially those with an agricultural focus, constructing elaborate calendars based around their movements, dividing the year up into days, months and seasons. Early astronomical activity was largely observational, and still had a strong religious feel to it, both through its determination of rituals and festivals according to celestial movements and its adaptation to fit in with and expand the various religions’ explanations of the universe.

The Ancient Greeks took astronomy to a highly abstract level, developing complex three-dimensional models to explain the motion of the planets and stars, and even involved the creation of the Antikythera mechanism, one of the first examples of a computer, known for its incredible intricacy and miniature parts, possessing technology which was previously thought to have been invented in the 16th century. Greek astronomy first proposed the idea of the Earth rotating on its axis, and formulated several variations of a geocentric universe, with Ptolemy and Aristotle proposing that the Earth was at the centre of a universe that acted as a complex system of concentric spheres rotating around it in constant circular motion.

‘Well, actually….’

This model was largely accepted and became the standard view throughout most of the Middle Ages, and seemed to fit in with the intuitive view people held when they looked up at the sky and saw the movement of the stars, moon and planets, seemingly around their fixed location, the earth. The Catholic Church, the dominant power throughout Europe, accepted this view as it fit in with their conception of God’s creation of the universe around the Earth and Man. During the Renaissance, Nicholaus Copernicus proposed a heliocentric view of the universe, in which the planets (including Earth) revolved around the sun. While fragments of this theory exist as far back as the origins of geocentrism, Copernicus’s was the first to attempt to provide mathematical proof. As Schatzman says in The Structure of the Universe, this “caused a complete change in the astronomical outlook”, and tripped a major shift in scientific thought in general, serving as a starting point for the Scientific Revolution. Strangely enough, Copernicus only partook in astronomy as a part-time hobby, being more interested in his other endeavors in math, art and philosophy. Galileo Galilei, another prominent Renaissance polymath, expanded and improved Copernicus’s theory. While Copernicus’s theory remained strictly theoretical, Galileo argued that it was a proven physical reality, which made it much more provocative. Denounced by the Catholic Church, Galileo’s heliocentrism was met with much initial opposition, and Galileo was threatened, initially dropping his theory. When he later defended it he was swiftly tried and found guilty of heresy by the Roman Inquisition and sentenced to spend the rest of his life under house arrest. Ironically, heliocentrism was accepted reasonably quickly in the years after Galileo’s death. However it took until Kepler and then Newton’s discovery of celestial dynamics and laws of gravity to finally explain the true motion of the planets, which developed out of discoveries made possible by Galileo’s greatest contribution: the telescope.

Technological developments

The advent of new technology has played a massive role in astronomy’s development, with several important inventions producing great leaps in the astronomer’s observational capabilities, at times completely revolutionising the way that space is understood. Before Galileo, all astronomical observation was made with the naked eye, using elevated terrain and tall buildings as vantage points, along with limited use of instruments. Galileo wished to see space in more depth, and using the rough descriptions he had heard of Lippershey’s early telescope, made one of his own, quickly improving on the design and greatly increasing the magnification to 30x the naked eye. Using this he made many important observations, such as the discovery that Jupiter was orbited by its own moons, thus disproving the geocentric view that everything revolved around Earth. It is for this and his many other contributions to science, including his theory of the motions of objects and arguing for the mathematical precision of the laws of nature that both Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein believe he is the father of modern science. The telescope has been greatly refined since Galileo, and telescopes can now observe on a variety of wavelengths outside the optical spectrum, which has in turn allowed for even more expansion and discovery. While other technological innovations such as photography and the invention and refinement of the computer have also had a large impact, the telescope more than anything else totally changed the way that astronomers observed space, and greatly expanded their conception of how incredibly large the universe really was.

Modern astronomy has a much stronger affinity with physics, and is split into two main sections: observational and theoretical astronomy. Theoretical astronomy uses complex computer models and calculations coupled with (now incredibly accurate) observations in order to make predictions and understand the behaviour of celestial objects. Theoretical astronomy asks many questions about the nature of the universe, such as its age, how it was created, and seeks to understand phenomena such as black holes, dark matter and cosmic inflation. The Big Bang theory is probably the most well-known modern astronomical theory, one that has gained wide acceptance (along with a continuation of the friction between astronomy and Christianity), and is fundamental to understandings of other modern theories. Observational astronomy mainly tries to find evidence to verify the theories, and the theoretical side also often helps to explain the new phenomena found by observers. The ever-popular search for extraterrestrial life is very much alive and well, and comes under the sub-classification of astrobiology, remaining strictly theoretical, and is popular with amateur observational astronomers.

Like Copernicus, many people engage in astronomy as a hobby, perhaps as a way to escape and travel beyond their daily lives, or because they are able to have an active role in astronomical development. Amateur astronomy has the advantage of being one of the only scientific disciplines whose enthusiasts still make regular important contributions. The constantly changing nature of observable space means that the huge amount of amateur telescopes pointed at the sky have a large role in collating variable data and making minor discoveries of new stars, comets and the like. Technological advancements have meant that amateurs are able to gain access to powerful equipment at reasonable prices, which has kept amateur interest steady since the massive boom in popularity of astronomy that came out of the public’s fascination with space activity in the 60s and 70s.

New Zealand and Astronomy

In New Zealand, amateur astronomy is hugely popular, and in fact has one of the highest astronomer-per-capita ratios in the world. Due to their geographic location, New Zealand astronomers are responsible for gathering information that is unique to the southern hemisphere. Marilyn Head, of the Royal Astronomical Society of NZ, says that as a nation New Zealand has made substantial contributions to astronomy. “The late Frank Bateson set up a huge network of amateur observers of variable stars and a system to ensure statistically reliable data, which provided astronomers with literally millions of observations of southern stars which were hugely important in understanding stellar processes.” This network still exists today, but instead of eyeballs, utilises CCD cameras to provide more constant and accurate information.

Professionally, New Zealanders hold many top astronomy-related positions, with Charles Alcock the Director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute of Astrophysics, Dick Manchester at the Parks Observatory in Australia (made famous in The Dish) and three of the eleven permanent astrophysics positions at Cambridge being held by Kiwis. Important discoveries by New Zealanders include work by Beatrice Tinsley, “who laid the foundations for modern cosmology (study of the universe as a whole) with her contribution to Stellar and Galactic evolutionary modeling,” and Gerry Gilmore, who “discovered the Galaxy’s thick disk, and the first example of galactic cannibalism within our galaxy”. For anyone interested in getting into astronomy, Head says that it is cheap at first, with a decent pair of binoculars and a star chart an easy way to start, but that “you do get addicted as there is a large number of things to get excited about—not only objects such as stars, galaxies, planets etc…but also techniques such as mirror grinding (producing your own telescope mirror from glass)”.

The Wellington Society holds meetings on the first Wednesday of every month at the Royal Society rooms and weekly Saturday night observations (weather permitting) at the Thomas King observatory. President Gordon Hudson says that everyone is welcome and they are always keen for new members, and that they are holding monthly talks at the Public Library as part of 2009 being the International Year of Astronomy, which would be a great place to begin finding out some more about the wonders of the universe that surrounds us.

2009 IYA

2009 has been declared by the UN to be the International Year of Astronomy (IYA), in order to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first use of an astronomical telescope. The aim of the Year is to stimulate general interest in the skies and astronomy, particularly young people, under the theme ‘The Universe—Yours to Discover’, and to provide greater awareness of the importance of the skies as a resource to be shared equally among all nations. Heaps of activities have been going on around New Zealand and Wellington, including the recent 100 hours of Astronomy and RASNZ conference held last weekend in Wellington. While these have passed, there are still plenty of activities to get involved in. A Galileo weekend is being planned for Labour Weekend and in October ‘The Great Worldwide Star Count’ is taking place all around the world. Anyone can get involved and the Wellington Societies will be holding activities as a part of this. In the meantime, the Wellington Library has set up several displays at the Library and around Wellington and is also holding monthly lectures and introductory talks about astronomy, which anyone can attend. Get out there and learn some cool stuff about the sky!

Further information

www.was.org.nz
www.rasnz.org.nz
astronomy2009.org.nz

As humans we thrive on danger. It’s why we love horror films, it’s why we love to rebel and it’s why we—well at least some of us—can’t help but get up on a stage. With a giant swing hanging from the ceiling and the audience in very close proximity, Shakespeare’s Richard II opening at Studio 77 this week is set to draw us into a world where anything could happen. This “carnivalesque space” is home to a King who’s an a crobat, a Duchess who’s a contortionist, and Lords who are Lions.

Richard II is the story of a King, put on the throne at ten and left to govern. “It’s a coming of age tale,” says Simon Haren, who plays Richard, “but he comes of age too late,” adds Ailsa Krefft, who plays Richard’s cousin and closest advisor, Bollingbrook.

It sounds like a wild adaptation, but rather than directly transferring the court setting to a circus, this production uses characterisations and dramatic set (I had a peek and I recommend you get there early to sit near the front) as a metaphor through which to see play.

As the young King walks a tightrope, audiences will tip to the edges of their seats to watch what looks to be the most tantalisingly risky production of a Shakespearean play in Wellington this year.

By William Shakespeare
Directed by David O’Donnell and Rachel Lenart
Interview with Simon Haren, Jeremy Keene and Ailsa Krefft.

Max Gimblett once told a journalist that he was a beagle in a previous life. Whether or not he was joking, the point remains that this type of comment is not completely unexpected from the artist. It is impossible to speak of Gimblett without referencing his variety of spiritual beliefs, specifically his adherence to Jungian concepts. Unsurprisingly, his works are extremely reminiscent of the abstract expressionism, especially the artworks of Pollock and de Kooning.

Eccentricism is, of course, something that modern viewers and critics alike associate with great artists, and Gimblett is undoubtedly one of New Zealand’s most successful contemporary artists. He has lived in New York since 1972, already has a monograph written on his works and is one of the few New Zealand artists who have exhibited their works in the Guggenheim museum.

Despite a colourful personality and a remarkable artistic career, don’t expect anything grandiose at his current exhibition at the Page Blakie gallery. Much like the art of the expressionists, the structure of Gimblett’s art consists of simplified geometric shapes. The most novel shapes he uses are the oval, circles and of course, the quatrefoil, which is made of of four circles overlapping each other at the centre. It is this shape that has become the characteristic calling card of Gimblett’s work, and is repeated at least fifteen times in this exhibition.

On these structures are a variety of stylistic paint applications, from monochromatic palettes to jarring juxtapositions of colour, from flat surfaces produced using paint rollers to calligraphic lines of paint. The effects can at times achieve a hypnotic surface quality. In some works, Gimblett has diluted resin into the paint to create a sensuous sheen, much like porcelain or varnish. In other artworks, however, the aesthetic effect is less successful. Although critics have stated that Gimblett uses gold in a way that “is neither tawdry nor purely about visual pleasure”, an entire canvas covered in gold, such as Mirror of Beauty, cannot help but emit a slightly tacky quality (Yau).

Whether these works successfully refer to something beyond their frames is an issue that has similarly plagued expressionist art, where the seeming simplicity of the artworks is seen by some as precluding any deeper meaning than simple surface aesthetics. Most critics, however, see the simplicity of Gimblett’s work as the very essence of their spirituality. The focus on the shapes of his artworks allow the viewer to explore their iconographical status. The quatrefoil shape is immediately recognisable as the shape of a flower, and also has a history in both Western and Eastern religions as symbolising not only a flower, but also a window or a cross. Similarly, the materials used also have religious associations, as precious pigments such as gold and silver often convey qualities deemed important across cultures.

Overall, the viewer’s first impression of this exhibition is undoubtedly grounded in the aesthetic qualities of the work, with the effects varying from sublime to kitsch. Whether or not you can read a spiritual meaning in the works, as the personality of Gimblett would suggest, is a completely subjective experience.

Max Gimlett’s work is currently showing at 19 May-20 June at the Page Blackie Gallery.

Mercury Crowe are a straight-ahead rock band. They are straight ahead, though, not in that their songs lack inventiveness or freshness, but in the sense that they clearly just want to write good tunes. That’s it. That’s what they’re about. Don’t expect to see them in Mighty Mighty on a Saturday evening doodling away at a synthesiser while wearing stovepipe jeans or flairs, or whatever the hell it is those indie hipster kids wear these days. No, Mercury Crowe aren’t particularly keen on following trends, playing retro tunes or fitting in to any particular musical style; they simply want to write interesting, bluesy, memorable rock songs. And they are memorable; they’re damn good songs.

Set Your Mind to Fly is their second release and their first full album, their first recording being an eponymously titled EP, and the difference between the two releases is stark. Mercury Crowe was, to be fair, a perfectly enjoyable piece of music, but that’s about it. In the two years since its release, the band has played a whole lot of gigs (more than fifty in 2008 alone) and written a bunch of new songs, and they’ve certainly got their shit together. The weakest song on Set Your Mind to Fly beats the strongest from their first recording easily, while the best really hits the spot and then some. Stand-outs from the album include ‘Pandora’, a catchy-as-swine flu ballad that will get in your head and stay there, ‘When the Red Light’s Gone’ (with Ed Zuccollo of Harbour City Electric guesting on the organ, and the phenomenally prolific Lisa Tomlins on back-up vocals), and the damn fine ‘The Game.’

To be fair, not every track on the album is a king-hit winner. But, in order to write this review, I absolutely thrashed this CD for two days straight, and remarkably I’m not even close to putting it away on my shelf—I think it’ll be staying in my stereo for some time to come. This, I should perhaps mention, is unusual for me. In short, at the very least I suggest checking these young men out live when you get the opportunity (if this year’s gig schedule is anything like 2008’s this shouldn’t be a problem at all), or, better yet, grab a copy of their beautifully designed, screen-printed and hand-assembled new album.

Check the band out at mercurycrowe.com or their MySpace

You can find shit beer everywhere. All super­markets and bottle stores will stock a fine selection of utterly bland brews, masquerading as imports but usually fresh from Auckland. However, to find a real beer you have to look a bit harder.

We’re lucky here in Wellington to have some of the country’s leading craft beer stockists, which I’ve mentioned a few times in my columns thus far. So this time I’m going to take a look at the where to find and enjoy a good beer, rather than the beers themselves.

Perhaps the best known venue for a good beer is the Malthouse on Courtenay Place. The Malthouse’s prime location makes it quite popular, so it is usually packed after 6pm on most nights. Being a small place it can get pretty cramped on a Saturday night, so I’d recommend visiting in the afternoon when the atmosphere is great for a pint with friends.

Their range is quite overwhelming, with 22 taps and 6 fridges of varying temperatures, but their knowledgeable staff are always on hand to help you select the perfect beer for whatever mood you’re in. Then you can relax on one of the many couches and drink up. Oh, and guys—check out the urinals.

Tucked away upstairs at 143 Featherston St, D4 is a relatively new bar/restaurant which stocks a large range of boutique beers. Other than the beer list, my favourite thing about D4 is the textured wallpaper—it’s awesome! Besides making me stroke the wall, it helps create the very classy atmosphere that exists at D4. Their 14 taps are complimented by a fine selection of New Zealand craft beer bottles, which ex-Salient beer writer Neil Miller helped select for the owner.

One of D4’s taps is a guest tap which changes each month, giving you a reason to keep coming back. Oh, the food’s good too.

If you’re after something to take home, then Regional Wines and Spirits is the place to go. The main reason for a student to visit Regional has to be the 11 ‘fill your own’ taps of New Zealand craft beer available. FYO is the cheapest way to buy great beer, as you’re filling a reusable plastic bottle and not paying for packaging or labeling. This is the place to go to find new, rare and excellent beers from all over the world, from Namibia to New Zealand.

The very friendly and educated staff will help you with anything you need.

Pretty much every beer I review will be available here, which might give you an indication of the sheer size of their selection. I urge you to get down to the Basin Reserve and check it out.

So now you know about these places, get out there and have a look. I might see you there.

If you have any questions about this week’s beers or any comments, please email me at davethebeerguy@gmail.com.

The concept, as the title suggests, revolves around plants and zombies battling it out. The zombies have come to your neighbourhood and want to make a nice tasty meal out of your brain. Naturally you’d like for this to be avoided. The good news is that you have a big 5×9 grid lawn in which to plant all the cute, exotic and deadly plants to protect you against the hordes of undead. If you play your cards right, zombies will be picked to pieces by your botanical arsenal. Such loyal plant ‘towers’ include the peashooter, starfruit plant, doom-shroom, gatling peashooter, exploding jalapeños, cherry bombs, cabbagepults and many others. There are 49 plants in total. The best defence will be one that manages to combine plants to form plant combos. PvZ allows for a great deal of experimentation and you’ll gradually unlock all 49 as you progress through the game. This gives you the chance to change tactics, adapting to the new kinds of zombies you face and preventing the gameplay from becoming stale.

To plant your plants and hold onto your grey matter, you need an ample supply of collected sun. This falls gentle down the screen on daytime missions and you can collect it with a simple click of the button. Also there are sunflower plants you can sow that will produce sun. The beauty of the whole system is that it’s simple. It is well thought through and tested game design. The combat zone changes every once in a while, as zombies try to find different ways into your house. You’ll move from the front lawn to the pool area and face down the boss in an epic rooftop battle. The adventure game continues to change and evolve as you progress, and once finished, unlocks a crate-load of different mini-games and puzzles. A particularly fun level allows you to help the zombies practise eating your plants and invading your house, essentially letting you play as the zombies for a while. And if the unthinkable should happen and you get bored of killing zombies (as if), you can visit your peaceful Zen Garden to water plants you’ve collected from various missions or nurture your ‘tree of wisdom’, which spouts words of wisdom and secret commands to alter the game. With so much content, it’ll be a long while before you get bored of this game.

By way of tutor and salesperson, you have your helpful and insane neighbour Crazy Dave. He introduces you to the basics of the game and will sell you any handy items you need from the back of his car. Crazy Dave wears a metal pot upon his head for reasons the game never goes into, possibly because as he’ll tell you, “I’m CRAAAZY!!!” If the content described so far sounds too off the wall or pun-heavy, don’t worry, it’s all part of the game’s loveable and good-natured demeanour. The colour pallet is full of bright, rich colours, and the music is bubbly with just a little menace thrown into the mix. Even the zombies are about as cute as decaying flesh will allow. There’s a basic zombie model, then there are the clever zombies that have decided to use road cones or buckets as helmets. These you have to watch out for, they’re a little tougher. Then there are quarterback zombies, pogostick zombies, bobsleighing zombies, miner zombies, dolphin-riding zombies, to name just a few. And while you know that they’re in pursuit of your brains, you can’t help but be charmed by them. These aren’t the vicious zombies of Left for Dead or I am Legend. These are their backwards idiot cousins, the ones who were at a children’s birthday party when they were turned. And if the zombie apocalypse is going to happen, I’d want it to be like this; brightly coloured, off-centre and endless fun.

If you have any doubts about the game, go download the free demo from the website, it’s itty-bitty—26mgs, go try it. And if you’re still not convinced, go check out this toddler’s endorsement. The full game is NZ$30, so neither the recession nor student poverty are valid excuses for not getting this game.

Developer: PopCap
Genre: Tower Defence
Platform: PC

Charm is Not Enough is the fourth production from the Babyshads. The ‘Shads, as those in the know refer to them, have made a name for themselves producing visually decadent, slyly humorous dance theatre, always playing freely with the line between that separates their abstract performativism from art crank theatre that exists to please no one but the makers’ deep-heat-like sense of pretension.

Charm is Not Enough is the apotheosis of this style. A gleefully cheeky work set in an art gallery, inhabited by a gay man (a serene Jake Preval), a woman (a wonderfully dazed Sherilee Kahui) and, as a matter of course, Death (a charmingly, electrically eclectic Milo Haigh) who interact with their chorus (the ever elastic and immensely watchable Jaci Gwaliasi, Tessa Martin and Patrick Powdrell) in a multitude of roles. Beyond that there is little story, the 75-minute running time being segmented evenly between the three leads and their inclement interactions with the chorus. Issues of representation, the gender politic and the search for love are discussed, if not at much depth beyond rather tired truisms.

However, the depth (or lack of same) in Charm is not really issue because if there is one true star here it is the design — done severally by Haigh, Preval, Hamish Guthrey, Kathryn Tyree, Nell Williams, Sally Ogle, Jimmy Sutcliffe and David Randall Peters. Charm is Not Enough is easily one of the finest visual feasts I have ever had the joy to attend in Wellington theatre. Totally consistent, which is saying a lot these days, all design elements from lighting to costume to music to set to props work in perfect harmony to generate within BATS’ stark white canvas a world of infinite visual treats. A giant fabric teapot and businessmen who are also attaché cases are but two of the almost indescribably brilliant pieces of design that litter Charm.

There is a rather painful in-joke that runs along that if a theatre maker asks you what you thought of their rather dreadful work, the easy way out is to praise the design. Not so the case here. Charm is Not Enough is not a work that needs apologising or lop-sided praise. It is one that needs seeing. You’ll never be bored. It’s snappy, it’s funny and it’s real pretty.

Written by Jake Preval, Milo Haigh and Sherilee Kahui
Directed by Hannah K Clarke
With Jake Preval, Milo Haigh, Sherilee Kahui, Jaci Gwaliasi,
Tessa Martin and Patrick Powdrell

At BATS, from 27 May–6 June 2009 at 8pm
Book at book@bats.co.nz or 802 4175

There are a whole bunch of neat films, for a wide range of interests (even Lesbian Vampires!) and concession (ie: student) tickets are just $12.50, so you don’t really have any excuses not to see something. Or better yet, get a Six-Trip ticket for $70, like me! If you can’t afford $70 (like me!), you should totally pop into VUWSA for a free food-parcel, and go anyway!
Nathan’s Picks: Une Autre Femme, Boy I Am, Love My Life, Was am Ende Zr’s Queer Ball to Saturday July 11, to coincide with that weekend—Double Hooray! Registrations have now opened, so if you want to come you should email email, or grab a registration form from outside VUWSA!

The UniQ Exec—with a lot of help from the beautiful people at Out There!—are working hard to make this year’s conference as good as the last one hosted in Wellington, in 2005. One of the focuses of this year’s conference will be improving the networks between Queer Groups and UniQs at other Universities, as well as workshops on Takataapui-ness, Transgender-ism, and Body-image-osity!

Plus, you get to meet a whole heap of cool humans! Register now! now now now!

Sandy Rankine, the library’s ginger cat, suffers diabetes and recently had an operation, creating vet bills totalling in the thousands. The CatFest concert, run by VUWSA and library staff, aims to take care of the 15-year-old-ish (around 70 in cat years) cat.

The university also plans to hold a staff raffle, with proceeds going toward Sandy’s bills.

NZPA reported University librarian Sue Roberts said “Many of our alumni will have fond memories of the library cat and I’m sure they would be happy to know that the cat is being well looked after.”

The concert, featuring Kitten Et Me, Gnu, DJ Duckling and Tom Martin, with special guests, takes place from 5pm at on Thursday 4 June at Mount Street Bar.

And now a translation for teh kittehs:

U can haz kat prrrty!!

A CONCERT 2 RAIZE MONEY 4 DA RANKINE BROWN LIBRARYS NUMBR WAN RESIDENTS VET BILLS TAKEZ PLACE ON THURSDAI NITE.

SANDY RANKINE, TEH LIBRARYS GINGR KAT, SUFFERS DIABETEZ AN RESiNTLY HAD A OPERASHUN, CREAT­IN VET BILLS TOTALLIN IN DA THOUSANDZ. TEH KATFEST CONCERT, RUN BY VUWSA AN LIBRARY STAFF, AIMS 2 TAEK CARE OV TEH 15-YER-OLD-ISH (AROUND 70 IN KAT YEERS) KAT.

TEH UNIVERSITY ALSO PLANZ 2 HOLD STAFF RAFFLE, WIF PROCEEDZ GOIN TOWARD SANDYS BILLS.
NZPA REPORTD UNIVERSITY LIBRARIAN SUE ROBERTS SED “LOTZ DA OV R ALUMNI WILL HAS FOND MEMORIEZ OV TEH LIBRARY KAT AN IM SURE THEY WUD BE HAPPEH 2 KNOE DAT TEH KAT IZ BEAN WELL LOOKD AFTR.”

TEH CONCERT, FEATURIN KITTEH ET ME, GNU, DJ DUCKLIN AN TOM MARTIN, WIF SPESHUL GUESTS, TAKEZ PLACE FRUM 5PM AT ON THURSDAI 4 JUNE AT MOUNT STREET BAR.

After more than four hundred years of performances, Shakespeare’s plays are quite regularly set in far-flung locations and modern eras. So the classic comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the 1980s would seem to be a match made in synth-pop heaven. Indeed, the MTV-era and its neon spandex effortlessly complements Shakespeare’s fairytale in Stagecraft’s production on at the Gryphon Theatre this month.

But just as the recollections of the eighties can inspire nausea from overexposure, this show suffers from one too many poorly choreographed glam rock numbers and excessive gimmicky choices. The play begins innocently enough, with the soon-to-be-wed Queen Hippolyta (Jasmine Emberchts) lounging on a deck chair, adorned with her leopard-print bikini and a trashy romance fiction. But no sooner have the houselights dimmed than several spandex-clad girls appear and begin to dance unseen to the zeitgeist favourite, Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. This is just the first of several seemingly unrelated ‘dance’ numbers (some sung by the cast to karaoke tracks) that occur throughout the duration of the play, a device that gets big laughs from the audience in the beginning, but become increasingly tedious as the play goes on.

That isn’t to say that setting the play in the eighties was all bad—in fact, far from it. Many of the jokes and adaptations worked particularly well, in particular, Petra Quince’s Academy of Aerobics Arts, a David Bowie-like Oberon, and a subtle but clever hat-tip to Pink Floyd. Much of the musical choices were inspired—when they were part of the sound scape rather than a production number performed by the cast—and included Jennifer Rush’s ‘The Power of Love’, Billy Idol’s ‘White Wedding’, and several Michael Jackson classics.

There were some standout performances from the cast, especially Melanie Camp’s Helena, who flips deftly from pathetic girlish mooning over Demetrius (Martin Brown) to charming pique, and the gender-swapped Petra (originally Peter) Quince, whose own crush on the cockeyed Bottom (Alan Carabott) gets the audience rolling in the aisles. Reuben Brickell makes an entertaining and mischievous Puck, whose delight for creating pandemonium is clearly displayed in a cheeky grin through most of the play. Overall, when the play stuck to the pure Shakespeare, the actors performed admirably.

But by Act IV there had been one too many scenes dragged out by an unfortunate dance or uninspired performance of dialogue. The entire play-within-the-play was at best tedious and often bordered on unbearable. Puck’s final speech was destroyed by an awkwardly-sung gospel number performed by the whole cast.

Most of the problems with Paul Kay’s production weren’t necessarily of vision or even in execution, but a simple failure to know when enough is enough. Too often, this Midsummer crosses over into ‘too much’ territory, spoiling what is at its heart an enjoyable and clever production.

Written by Willy Shakespeare
Directed by Paul Kay
With Rodney Bane, Anna Beccard, Matt Bentley, Gillian Boyes, Reuben Brickell, Martin Brown, Mel Camp, Alan Carabott, Heather Da Vanzo, Jasmine Embrechts, Margaret Hill, Michelle Jordan, Jessica Knights, Jane Maltby, Kirsten O’Regan, Aisha Pachoud, Elise Pallesen, Rebecca Parker, Ben Priest, Tom Rimmer, Grant Robinson, Stephen Walter, Helen White and Sarah Wood.

At the Gryphon theatre from the 27 May–6 June 2009
Part of the Compleate Workes Shakespeare Festival

These are all phrases that, presumably, are used to describe good wines. Wines that have a good taste. Wines that have a good odour.

Wines that don’t taste like somebody’s pouring vinegar and turps down your throat while playing Chris de Burgh music in the background.

I don’t normally drink (though this fortnightly column will see me doing a lot more of it than I used to), and usually only do so when it is a special occasion. This weekend was a special occasion—it was Thropy, the most excellent university debating competition in New Zealand, and it was being held in my hometown, the kind of shit Palmerston North. The Saturday Ethnic Muck Dinner, long a tradition of the tournament, was being held this year at China Town, which also happened to be a BYO. So I brought my own.

“My own” was the Banrock Station 2007 Semillon Chardonnay. If I remember correctly, it had a 7.2% alcohol content (which to me, the eternal lightweight, might as well make it fucking moonshine), the sassy taste of citrus fruits, and a melon fusion with an aftertaste of oak. Or something like that. I don’t remember. I did get a fair bit tipsy off of it, which will be my excuse for not remembering.

What I do remember was my first taste of that alcoholic liquid.

To be fair, I’m not the most ardent fan of cheap wines. They all seem to have the same irascible, gag-inducing aftertaste for me, and while this may be, once again, a testament to my being a goddamned lightweight, I’d like to think that it was at least partly down to the wine’s badness.

Or fully down to the wine’s badness.

The first taste hit me like a freight-train that doesn’t stop for hobos crossing the tracks. It was foul, on a par with being crapped on by a bird or being forced to walk into a changing room in a boys’ high school immediately after it’s been Lynx-nuked. I hunted for the citrus. I looked for the melon. I sought the oak. I desperately searched for anything even remotely sassy.

I found lemon. And a touch of lime.

But I mostly found shit.

I don’t think I can fully articulate just how awful this wine was. Drinking it was like being slapped with a flannel drenched in vinegar for five hours straight. And yet, against my better nature, I kept drinking it. Dammit, I’d paid eight dollars for this because I wanted to get drunk, not because I wanted my palette to be tickled by the butterflies of taste.

Regardless of my intentions, I only got two-thirds of the way through the bottle. I couldn’t stomach the taste any more. It was like some demented soul—a clone of Hitler living out a peaceful existence as a wine-maker, perhaps—had put lemons, limes and human faecal matter in a blender, thrown the result in some stale pond water, and then bottled it and sold it worldwide, unsuspecting wine tasters heralding it as some sort of marvellous alcoholic beverage. When shit like this can get mass-produced and put in a prime position (i.e. somewhere not in fucking Area 51, next to the Ark of the Covenant and the Roswell aliens), there is something horribly, horribly wrong with the world of wine.

The Banrock Station 2007 Semillon Chardonnay. A wine so miraculously awful it would probably make all the Wine Masters turn to Scientology or something equally hopeless if they knew it existed. Do not drink this. No matter what you do, no matter who threatens your family, do not drink this. It is like paying some dirty old man eight dollars to scour your tongue with a Steel-O. For the love of all that is holy, do not touch this wine.

Type: White Wine
From: Pak ‘n’ Save Palmerston North
Price: $7.98

Heartthrob indie kid makes EP. Gives EP to girlfriend as a valentine’s gift. Word gets around. Bloggers blog about it. Pitchfork gives it a 7.9. The single gets played on the HypeMachine a lot. Things go viral. You know the deal.

Right, that’s the banal backstory out of the way.

Passion Pit’s debut album is out now. It’s called Manners. The heartthrob, Michael Angelakos, has a band to support him this time around, so things are a little more muscular than on the Chunk of Change EP. Fuelled by live drums, sleek production and whirling oscillators, Manners is an exhilarating step forward. The original synth-pop formula remains largely the same though, and, as on Chunk of Change, the centerpiece is Angelakos’ attention-seeking caterwaul. It’s all heart-on-sleeve, high pitched and yelpy, blending Gibbard, and Mercer with enough neuroticism to make the Royal Tenenbaums seem like the Brady Bunch.

Some of you will hate him. I really thought the whole electronic-synth-indie thing was on the way out, but there’s something so damn fun about Passion Pit that makes me glad that people are still attempting this kind of stuff. Angelakos really shouldn’t be able to get away with it, but his impassioned earnestness and penchant for writing weird yet catchy chorus hooks carries him past the point of cliché and into the realm of pop glory. Sure, things start to get pretty overwrought by the end of the album, but moments like the sugary 80s chorus of ‘Kingdom Come’ and the immense open high-hat disco slam of ‘Little Secrets’ are so irresistible that you just can’t help but let Angelakos twist your heartstrings into an awkward indie-twirl dance. You should know better, but you enjoy it anyway. That’s what makes good pop. And that’s what this is. Nah-Nah-na-na-na-Nah hey-hey-heys and all.

Usually going into a final of such magnitude, you have a favourite and an underdog, and that aspect adds a kind of ‘David & Goliath’ quality to the build up. But in the lead up to this match, no one could pick between United’s all action, intense brand of football and Barcelona’s patient and beautiful possession play; between the twin powers of English and Spanish club football.

But now that Barcelona have been crowned as the kings of Europe, and at a canter after Eto’os 10th minute opener, can we conclude that the Spanish dominance of the international stage applies also to club competitions? With a victory at Euro 2008 and now the Champions League trophy heading to Spanish soil, is it really the case that Spain is the pinnacle of European and World football at present?

With regard to the international game, I feel there is little doubt. Spain’s side is as complete as any national side that I’ve ever seen, and I think they will certainly be the team to beat come next year’s World Cup in South Africa. The mercurial Xavi, Iniesta and Fabregas feeding Torres and Villa is enough to make any football fan drool uncontrollably.
But as for the lie of power in European club football, I think Barça’s status as Champions is certainly deserved, but isn’t reflective of the whole. They won the Spanish Primera División at a canter this season, and their closest rivals in that contest, Real Madrid, were easily dealt to by Liverpool in the Champions League’s first knockout round.

The Catalan club’s demolition of Bayern Munich at the same stage demonstrated the weakness of the German league and the absence of any Italian clubs in the quarter finals made it clear that that traditional powerhouse is struggling. However, all four English sides qualified for the quarter finals, and the maximum possible of three of them progressed to the semi-finals alongside Barça, as Liverpool lost out to Chelsea in arguably the tie of the tournament.

That the odds were stacked so against a Spanish victory at that stage make Barça’s victory all the more admirable, but without one of the most controversial refereeing performances in recent memory, they would never have beaten Chelsea to make the final. So I have to say that while Barcelona probably are the best club side in the world (and perhaps one of the greatest ever), I think they alone fly the flag for the Spanish league.

In contrast, the power of the Premier League remains dominant, with four clubs all at the pinnacle of the world game. However, ultimately this dominance hasn’t translated into success for the English sides this time around and on the international scene England have struggled of late too, with the presence of Ronaldo and so many other foreign stars hampering the development of English talent, while La Liga has more Spanish players, and only the occasional Messi.

Indeed, one could very well argue that the Premier League’s success has brought about the downfall of the England national team. In contrast, Spain’s league doesn’t have such a foreign presence, but their national side is flourishing as a result. So wherever the power lies in European football, the only conclusion to be drawn is that at present, Spain truly are the best footballing nation in the world.

I think most people could probably roast a chicken if they were forced, but there are a couple of tips that can make it better. The actual timing process of preparing a roast meal is often the most difficult part. Here is what I did to make a roast meal for my flatmates the other night. Do not worry too much about the exact vegetable quantities given (pp = per person)—they are just an indication of what a hungry student might eat. Any leftovers can be made into a roast vegetable salad the next day for with some feta and parsley tossed through it lunch. I roast a chicken breast-side down so that the breast meat doesn’t become too dry, and then I turn it over halfway through and blast the top to make it crispy. As always with chicken, keep your chopping boards and knives separate from the ones you use for vegetables, wash your hands etc. etc.

Ingredients:

For the meat

1 chicken (serves 3-4)
1 lemon
1 onion
4 chopped garlic cloves
2 rosemary sprigs

For the gravy

1 tbsp flour
Balsamic vinegar
Vegetables
2-3 small potatoes pp
1 carrot pp
1/6 small pumpkin pp
1/2 cup frozen peas pp
Generally: olive oil and salt and pepper

Preparation:

Turn your oven to 200°C. Peel your potatoes and chop into roughly even chunks (I like to chop a medium sized potato into three and a small potato into two—they will cook more evenly if uniform). Place these potatoes in a pot of cold water. Put these potatoes on to boil. Peel your carrots and chop into big thick coins. Once the water has started boiling take the potatoes off the heat. This is called parboiling and means that it won’t take hours for your potatoes to roast. Leave them in the water until they go into the roasting pan. Using a good knife, slice the skin away from the pumpkin (this is easier if the pumpkins are first cut up into at least quarters). Then chop the pumpkin into chunks about twice the size of your big thick carrot coins.

Assembly:

Take a large roasting tray. Put your potatoes in the tray and toss around in some olive oil, salt and pepper and about half of your chopped garlic and the rosemary leaves from one of the rosemary sprigs. In another ovenproof dish put the carrots and pumpkin with some olive oil and salt and pepper tossed in. Chop your lemon and onion in half. Put one half of the lemon in the fridge for the peas. Take your chicken and put it breast side down on top of the potatoes in the roasting dish. Put half the lemon and all of the onion inside the chicken. Draw the flappy skin bits together over the cavity and pierce them with the other rosemary sprig to hold it all together. Cut small slits in the chicken’s skin all over the body. Shove the rest of your chopped garlic in through the slits and under the skin. Drizzle a little olive oil over the chicken and season with salt and pepper.

Roasting:

Put the chicken and potatoes in the oven, along with the tray of carrots and pumpkin. After half an hour take the carrots and pumpkin out, ensuring they are soft by testing with a fork, and cover to keep warm. Then, get some tongs and turn the chicken over and amp up the oven to 220°C (on fan bake if you have it). Leave the chicken in for another 15–30 minutes (it is done when the juices between the thigh and the body run clear—if they run pink it needs more time). Depending on how big your chicken is the timing may vary—check on the back of the bag.

To finish:

Put a pot of water on to boil and take your peas out of the freezer. When the chicken is done put it on a chopping board to rest (it’s been busy!) Get a flatmate to set the table. Take out the potatoes from the roasting dish and put them into the carrot and pumpkin tray. Now, put the chicken roasting tray with all of its juices onto the stove over an element or flame and whisk in the flour and a good splash of balsamic vinegar. Voila! Gravy! Boil your peas until they are hot right through and serve them with a squeeze of lemon and some salt and pepper. Yum!

Diane Spencer is a lady. I verified this in the way that you usually do—through asking and being given a baffled look of incomprehension. On stage she was a little British hornet of darkness packed into a tight redheadedness that complemented her lovely grey jeans, recently acquired in a Wellingtonian store. If you’ve ever read Grant Buist’s Brunswick or Jitterati, you’d see much of Fitz Bunny in her. If you haven’t, well, learning city-specific pop-cultural references are an important part of being at Victoria University. Oh look! A fountain made of buckets! How refereshing!

I greatly enjoyed watching Diane as she orated through her mother, weddings, and other chick stuff like talking binge drinking tampons without it grating on my delicate sensibilities. She had a story that was about her becoming the red-headed yoghurt girl on the telly. This was quick, and many comic moments were had in the over-arching amusement which both vilified and agrandised Ms Spencer in that order. Why am I describing how this bit worked? No reason.

If you ever wished Sarah Silverman was smarter and from Somerset, go see Diane Spencer.

Announcement of the Government’s Budget last Thursday brought little for students in the way of the “Brighter Future” National promised voters during the last election.

While the current recession environment means the Government needs to make some tough choices, effective cuts to core tertiary education funding is not the answer.

The announcement of the Budget confirmed rumours that the main funding categories in tertiary education will not be guaranteed to increase in real terms during the next few years.

The amount the Government has increased spending in the tertiary education budget for 2010 – a mere 1.95% – won’t even cover predicted inflation. Tertiary funding beyond 2010 remains ambiguous.

These announcements are particularly concerning in the context of the economic climate, with unemployment forecast to rise to 8 percent or 179 000 by mid 2010.

Investment in tertiary education would help address skill gaps in the New Zealand workforce, and increase opportunities for individuals and communities.  

As I pointed out last week, the recession has led to a noted rise in student enrolments. With projections of significant increases to the unemployment rate, tertiary institutions are likely to see an influx in enrollments with higher numbers of school leavers, along with those wishing to retrain as a way of getting back into the workforce – and even to retain existing jobs in a tight market.

One likely outcome of the Budget will be increased cost cutting at institutions like Victoria University. 2009 has already brought significant reductions to the Sub Lecturer Pool (SLP), which has dramatically reduced tutorials in some disciplines. The Budget will likely force more cut backs in course delivery.

As yet no announcement has been made concerning the current fee maxima scheme, which restricts domestic student fee increases to 5% per year. In the short term tertiary institutions are likely to make up the funding shortfall by reducing staff numbers, holding down salaries and reduced investment in important educational resources such as library collections.

Academic staff will also feel the Budget pinch, following cuts to funding supporting academic salaries in universities. This will have significant implications for research, teaching and learning: the core business of universities which will be made more difficult under these cut backs. The reason that this funding was introduced was to assist New Zealand to retain our best academics and researchers, and to help recruit new staff from overseas. The New Zealand Government’s announcement is in contrast to that across the ditch: Australia recently responded to the recession by investing more than AU$5 billion in tertiary education. Similarly, the United States has invested over US$30 billion.
While students now know what’s on the cards for tertiary spending in the short term, funding beyond 2010 remains ambiguous.

What we do know is that during their 9 years in opposition National regularly opposed even modest spending in the tertiary sector by the Labour administration. There seems little reason to be optimistic about the future for students and the tertiary sector under the current National Government.

The Budget could have been used as an opportunity to increase investment in industry training. Last time National were in power they cut industry training and New Zealand paid the price with the skills shortages of the last ten years. It appears that unfortunately National have not learnt from the mistakes of the 1990s.

It was also announced that the promised 2010 and 2011 tax cuts have now been axed, despite National claiming as recently as February that they would still go ahead. The justification for this turnaround is the global recession, even though prior to the November 2008 election it was widely predicted that there would be a serious economic downturn. At the time National argued that these tax cuts would stimulate the struggling economy. But as is so often the way in politics, once the campaign is over the election bribes disappear.

The Budget demonstrates an irresponsible attitude toward education. The decision to deliberately under fund tertiary education sets the country up for a difficult future.

On 19 May, William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s ‘lost’ play, The History of Cardenio, reconstructed by Gary Taylor, premiered at Victoria University as part of New Zealand’s Compleate Workes project.

With Gary Taylor working alongside Theatre 302 students, developing this script in production has been part of the process of discovering what the original play might have looked like. Jacobean staging conventions have been simulated as much as possible within the limitations of Studio 77, a university course and as much as a modern Wellington audience might be willing to go along with.

There are two levels of audience seating, some on the theatre floor (on a graduated seating block) which surrounds the raised stage on three sides. In the galleries above the stage, audience members are seated on all four sides.

The theatre is lit by artificial candle light on two rather grand chandeliers that hang above the stage, plus some hidden modern theatre lights. The overall design of the production, mentored by Jim Davenport is well unified, genuine and effective.

Four musicians sit on stage right and play a mixture of diagetic music, which was composed in the Jacobean period and non-diagetic tunes composed by Music Director Simon Dickson. Music plays as the audience enters and comes back at times throughout the piece, creating a mellowing atmosphere.

The text is easy to follow and the actors clearly communicate their meaning thorughout, although often a little too much time is taken, lulling us into a monotony that leaves some of the weightier moments feeling indulgent on the actors’ part. More significant changes in the tempo of dialogue, action and music could have aided in raising the energy and breaking up the rhythm of the show.
On the whole, the production is very well cast. Kelly Irvine stands out as the endearingly naïve Sancho, boy side-kick to Senor Quesada, tragically portrayed by Christopher De Sousa Smith. Irvine earns her laughs in her consistent and entertaining characterisation, while bursts of energy from other characters stand out, appearing awkwardly choreographed among their sometimes loose characterisation.

Paul Waggott is superb as Cardenio. Kate Clarkin portrays a prudent Lucinda, who is all to aware of her weaknesses: her love for Cardenio and position as a woman. Every interaction between the pair is powerfully truthful to watch. Their ‘balcony scene’ is a highlight, full of energy and passion that earns Waggot the stillness his following soliloquy deserves. My only disappointment was that this scene was followed by an interval, just when I had been fully drawn in, I was forced to pause and the momentum took a while to build up again afterwards.

Jonny Potts creates a charming Ferdinando, his manner successfully masking the villian’s selfishly cruel intentions with the innocent Violante (Elle Wootton) making it understandable to us that she falls for him and distressing when the happiest ending she could hope for is to marry him. The vulnerability that Wootton portrays in Violante made her story the real tragedy for me, particularly in her song, ‘Woods, Rocks and Mountians’, the only surviving authentic text from the original play. I felt that perhaps this song would have been stronger without the guitar accompaniment, to heighten our sense of her isolation as her womb becomes “the tomb of [her] own honour”.

It’s exciting to see a new Shakespearean play, and the story is worth being told. It’s full of melodrama, tragedy and slapstick comedy, but in its essence it’s just a story about the best and worst parts of love.

By William Shakespeare, John Fletcher and Gary Taylor
Directed by David Carnegie; Assistant Director: Lori Leigh; Dramaturg: Gary Taylor.

Tom is a poet, or wants to be one, and it is often hard to tell if the laziness of a lot of the material is either the real author’s fault or simply an expression of listlessness that pervades the character of Tom. He sees the world as series of distractions from his forthcoming life as a poet and Pirie has done a very workable job of expressing the smug lack of self-knowledge that makes almost every first year think they are the smartest guy in the room.

Pirie is clearly very attached to exploring and examining the times and life of Generation X and it feels hard at times to share his interest, especially considering how late to that particular game Tom is and how seemingly superficial a lot of his observations are. However, I could very easily see readers already enamoured with Gen Xers getting a good chuckle out of Tom.

The most interesting parts of Tom are the two segments not written by Tom himself. The first being an outside introduction to the character and the book, the second being Kate, Tom’s occasional girlfriend, hilariously rebutting his love poems. “Hey, why do you always write to me/In words of narcissistic muck/When all you really want to do/is ask me for a f..k?” One cannot help but feel that Tom would have been a stronger work had we been not so stuck in the eponymous hero’s head and words.

However, Tom is a very quick read and nice way to while a way a free hour, but don’t really expect much more out of it than that.

Did you know that Phil Patston is openly disabled (what does that mean?) and gay? (I like men too, so “represent?”) I did, I had figured it out from the blurb of his pamphlet, and from vague memories of him on Pulp Comedy when I was a tween. For you see years ago, Phil Patson won an award. A Billy T Award which is a pretty high honour. It’s the Kiwi Comedy Guild’s version of the Paraparaumu College Principal’s Award for Outstanding Excellence in Chemistry, a much sought-after prize from an august organisation that recognises an outstanding talent from a small pool. In this case, chemistry students in Paraparaumu. Being a man more interested in comedy than the incorrect science taught to secondary school students I took this for a sign of quality and went along to his gig at the Fringe Bar.

His show was one where he told stories, talked to the audience and read some poems. As a performer he’s quite engaged with the audience and when nattering to them there was a sense of play that was rather delightful. However, I didn’t enjoy his show that much, peeps. I found it moved quite slowly, and that some how I had absorbed most of his jokes well before the punchlines came. Using my ability to retrospect I believe it’s just because some of his stories were ancient. The central stories in his act were about things that he’s obviously moved well away from by now, his ten? fifteen? twenty minutes? of being on Shortland Street 10 years ago, where aparantly he was Waverly’s boyfriend Josh that stole coffee, was well practiced yet mirthless. He also did an extravagantly long story about being a vegetarian before revealing that he wasn’t one any more and how betrayed people felt about putting up with his vegetarianism for nothing. I felt the same way, to be honest.

The last part of his show was full of his poetry, and you know what? I enjoyed the first couple, but… Fuck it, it’s time to talk about the elephant in the room. He talks slowly and is slightly hard to understand thanks to his motor skills being messed up. On the plus side, performatively, this means that his quips can be much slower and therefore better evolved than the usual charismatic comedian, a situation he exploits expertly. However, it also means that it takes him a while to get through something like a poem than it usually would. This means that unless his poems are frightfully awesome you’re going to be sitting there bored, itchy and listening to bad poetry. His last poem of his set was actually rather short, snappy and quite funny so I was glad to leave the show on a high note, we’d had more fun than not fun, you know? Then some fucker called out ‘Encore! Encore!’ And then he did one that he’d cut because “it’s pretty long guys.” I got so itchy.

Last week, a petition was handed to me from Executive member Robert Latimer, with the signatures of ten students, calling for the resignation of VUWSA President Jasmine Freemantle.

Now, for the sake of context: some may argue this, but I’m not some big VUWSA hack. 14 months ago I didn’t even know what VUWSA was. I got involved in student politics when my Film major was threatened last year. I was then exposed to a students’ association that was run by this bearded guy who did next to no work (though to be fair, he had good intentions, and is essentially a nice man—he just should have never been president).

I realized that my money was going towards this, and believed that I could help fix it (after all, after last year, Executive members that were at least half way literate was a huge improvement). What people don’t seem to realize is that it’s not logical to run for the students’ association executive for fame and power. Hah! People automatically hate you, are cynical about your motives, jump to assumptions about your beliefs and call you names—which is fine, it comes with the territory. This is something you must accept when you are elected.

Jasmine Freemantle is just the same as me. She is just a student who saw a bunch of muppets running VUWSA and volunteered herself, someone halfway decent, to replace them. That’s what she, and we as the President and Vice Presidents, are trying to do. We are trying to fix VUWSA up. We’re playing by the book. All we want to do is put our heads down and get on with it. These petty politics may be fun to read about I guess, but what I’m sure students really want is a really efficient students’ association that doesn’t waste their money each year, that takes their responsibilities as representatives seriously, and, most of all, does the job they are elected to do.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that, without tooting our own horn too much, we are comparatively one of the most committed, hardworking and competent executives VUWSA has had in a very long time. A lot of that has to do with the leadership of Jasmine Freemantle. In effect, it would be a waste of your money to roll her. It’s a waste of time and money as it is. But as it stands, your students’ association is the healthiest it has ever been, under the guidance of Jasmine Freemantle.

It’s pathetic, childish games like this rolling business that has plagued student politics and made it a joke in former years. Let us get on with our work, what we’re meant to be doing—serving students. Come along to the Special General Meeting (stay tuned—the date isn’t set yet) and vote against this ridiculous motion.

1. Sports.
2. Drinking.
3. An obsession with Sylvia Plath.
4. Force a smile on your gob and whistle in your step.
5. Just fade into the background, you’ll do it anyway.

Plays on swine flu

1. Swhine Flu.
2. Sriesling Flu.
3. S-why-do-no-white-people-die-from-this Flu.
4. Pigs Flew.
5. Pigs are Scarier Than Birds so this is more likely to induce mass panic Flu.

Products made from Pig

1. Snikts, pork crackling snacks.
2. Brawn, it’s pig jelly with bits.
3. Human substitute in ballistics tests.
4. Your mum.
5. Bacon-flavoured mayonnaise.

Trees

1. Tea tree.
2. Phone tree.
3. Money tree.
4. Nickle-nackle tree.
5. Dysentry.

Cute web animals

1. Sneezing baby panda.
2. Spaghetti cat.
3. That cupcake dog.
4. まる! (Maru!)
5. Slow loris.

Groups of people I’ve been asked not to upset

1. My step family.
2. The Chinese.
3. Ken Orr.
4. Sad people.
5. The Hard Deaf.

Best New Zealand Christian bands that don’t admit it anymore

1. Stereogram.
2. Brooke Fraser.
3. Supergroove.
4. The Deceptikonz.
5. Ken Orr and the Abortionists.

Headlines upon John Key’s ousting as PM

1. “Key — Cut.”
2. “Key — Locked Out.”
3. “Keystone of National Party Falls.”
4. “Out of Key.”
5. “Politician Seeks New Post: Keen?”

Causes of kitchen fires

1. Not looking while cooking.
2. Looking too intently while cooking.
3. Smoking when trying to gas yourself to death.
4. Letting toddlers make flambéd anything.
5. Arson.

Foods of oppression

1. Lamb Flaps.
2. Water melon.
3. Fried Chicken.
4. Palm Oil.
5. Breast Milk.

Sensing a dead end I turned to my next source of information—astrology. I checked my star sign obsessively in the hope that my goat would personally communicate with me. Most of the times I felt like he was only giving me general advice. Just once I would like him to say directly to me, “Everything you know is a lie,” “Follow the money trail,” “Eat that 5-day-old egg salad in the fridge—it’s still good!” Something I can use, sink my teeth into, something to take away the everyday speculation in my life. Yet there was something grand about the unashamed generality of it all. In any event it was a damn sight better than Ivonna’s “NO !”. But then just last week the Mountain Goat said to me:

“Don’t let others take the lead on a pending question. It’s a new beginning, and an opportunity will present itself.”

My entire life flashed before my eyes and all my suspicions were vindicated. I was on to something and they were desperately trying a cover-up. That night I had a vivid dream of being eaten by my star sign. Suddenly and out of nowhere came stampeding a ravenous P-crazed shit goat hell bent on eating me alive, he had a crazed look in his eye and foamed at the mouth. An agent of the beef lobby. It’s the sound that hits you first when you’re being eaten alive, the pain comes thick and fast but before long you feel nothing. The sound of your cracking bones comes from within and takes over all your thoughts, your mind is clouded by a deafening white noise. By the time I was fully digested I felt nothing. What little was left of my vision was half‑distorted by the white smokey cloud of tobacco‑chewing ex-convicts. Contrary to popular opinion the anti‑smoking programs in prisons achieved success rates even the free market would envy. Free-marketeers were outraged and every private contractor was called to an emergency town-hall meeting. The Mayor soon got word through:

Citizens and Contributors: My Advisers suggest we imprison the entire town, the boost in productivity will in a few short years pay off the municipal debts.

Standing by the newsstand I read the headline: Mayor accumulates city’s debts in months of unchecked, reckless gambling… Out of the corner of my eye I see a moustached man in a trench-coat surrounded by cigarette smoke—Mexican! I chase him down a dark alley. Halfway I get the fear, panic, turn around, and run back to the street. The newsstand now read: Mayor found dead in trawling net wearing concrete shoes. The coroner reported it a self-inflicted death. I smelt something fishy and I was damn sure it wasn’t the fish. Who was that smoking Mexican man? Who wanted the Mayor out of the picture?

Had the professionals let me down? I needed to get to the bottom of this so I rushed back to Aro Street to ask Ivonna. 5 cents later I got my answer—Number 22: “Beware Rogues Are About.” Vindication! I needed no more proof; all that was left to do was burn down the Mexican Embassy—if I could just silence this agent of miscommunication people could see reality for what it truly was. The Pentagon denied it but I could read through their non-denial denials—someone was pulling the strings here.I was no child and this puppet show couldn’t divert me for long. I remembered the smoking man at the newsstand; the patch on his coat bore the insignia of the Sanitation Division and he carried a medical bag. All of a sudden it made sense: the Mexicans, the Pharmacologists, the Sanitarians. This conspiracy was being run straight out of the City’s Sanitation Division right under our noses, the cover was perfect—reporters never had the stomach to get below the filth and retrieve the facts.