good things and bad

tomorrow i start training for self-care in dialysis. they had tried to arrange evening sessions, but this wasn't possible, so i am taking some annual leave.

this also means a chnage of days for the next two-three weeks, so i am going on monday, wednesday and friday afternoons at one.

this is good. i should get home by about six, and to bed at a decent hour.
plus, i get weekends, even if i will be too tired and drained to do anything on a sturday night.

there are two worries, though.
firstly, all dialysis is done in a chair, and the last three times i've used a chair, i've gone flat. the last time i vomited. i hope that the fact that i haven't had to take off that much fluid would address this.

the second concern is learning to needle myself. the nurse techs have two hands and are looking straight at my arm and they still occasionally manage to hurt me. i'll have one hand and will be looking at it upside down.

still, here goes

huh?

todays scandal du jour

the bit that has worried some people is this:

"Why are we fighting whakapapa against whakapapa? There's so much enemy that is not brown."

was the minister of maori affairs really advocating that gangs start a race war?

or is the result of lazy journalisim that forgot to publish what he meant or the full context of the quote.

i suspect the latter, or else the headline would have read "KILL WHITEY SAYS MINISTER"

this was discussed on natrad today with criminolgist (and ex-con) greg newbold. he suggested that the summit wouldn't make a difference to the supply of p and the gands are essentially anarchic. whatever committments the gang leaders make will be largely ignored by the rank and file

stillit makes it look that sharples is at least trying to do something

Yay

I’ve had Sky UHF for years. Well, in October Sky are going to close that service down. So they offered me a deal to get Sky Digital installed. Free installation, and the old price for twelve months. I said yes.
So now I’ve got 4 movie channels, three news channels, Comedy Central, UK TV, Documentary, History and a bunch of others. Its pretty cool.

Now there is always something to watch.
For instance, Angels with Dirty Faces is starting on TCM in half an hour

Dressed to bore

Interesting article in the listener from Douglas Lloyd -Jenkins on why New Zealand men dress so badly.

His contention is that our bad dress is due to gay panic. The logic seems to be

a) Only poofs dress stylishly
2) Therefore if I dress stylishly, people will think I’m a poof

If this is the case, I suspect that it’s a subconscious thing, but I don’t thing he’s right.

First of all, it assumes that men actually think about what they dress like, and I’d suggest that most of the time they don’t. Their main concerns on clothes would be comfort and cost. It would be a hang up from childhood that your “good” clothes a re always uncomfortable, so if you have a choice, why wear them? There is also the imperative that you’ve got to keep your good clothes looking “nice”, which often seems like a bore.

Dressing well for men often means wearing a tie. I can’t speak for all men, but I hate ties with the passion of a thousand suns and only wear them when I have to.

Then there is the issue of cost. I remember being horrified when a colleague at work bought a $400 shirt, not least because at the time, $400 was close to my weekly wage. And it was just a shirt. Why spend a lot of money on a shirt when you could get something that is conceptually the same thing for cheaper.

Then there is the shopping angle. Most men, I would suggest, think that buying clothes is like shopping for groceries-it needs to be done, but you don’t need to spend a lot of time on it. I can spend hours in book or DVD stores, but just going on memory, I think that over the last year I have spent less than an hour shopping for clothes.

As for dressing to emphasize my heterosexuality, I don’t think I’ve ever done this. I’m a firm supporter of Albert Einstein who claimed that he had several identical suits in his wardrobe so that he didn’t have to think what to wear in the morning.

Douglas Lloyd-Jenkins’ article was a precusor to his book on a History of Fashion. I suppose that a theory of gay panic will sell more copies than a theory that men just don’t care about fashion.

A cure for all ills

Just finished the latest Dalzeil and Pascoe novel by Reginald Hill. This is his best since Death’s Jest Book. No political undertones, just a relatively straight forward whodunit.

The fun thing about reading a series of books is that it is like visiting a group of old friends. A cure for all seasons is not for casual readers of the series. You would need to have read An Advancement of Learning, Dialogues of the Dead, Deaths Jest Book and The Death of Dalzeil to understand some the relationships between the characters, and if your going to read those, you may as well go through the entire ouevre.

There is nothing like reading a good book for the first time, where the twists come as a surprise. I read this pretty much over a weekend.

My only problem is that now it could be some time before a new book is released.

dead list

Sir Howard Morrison OBE died on September 24.
There have been plenty of tributes to him, the best being a 15 minutes summary of his career on radio live.

Interesting to hear that his OBE and knighthood wasn’t for services to music, but for the work he did for Maori children. This was a side if him that didn’t get a lot of publicity.

The tangi went on for five days and it was estimated that well over 10,000 people turned up to say farewell.

On the day of his death, talkback hosts Willie Jackson and John Tamihere opened the lines for people to talk about him. It was interesting to hear people in provincial New Zealand remember concerts from the 60s and seventies, or people who had met him.

The overall feeling I got is that New Zealand is, at heart a small town. And that‘s no bad thing.