23 posts tagged “kiwi”

Great news! Flight of the Conchords has received three Emmy nods for directing, writing, and original music and lyrics. It didn’t get an Emmy nomination for best comedy series, which I think is a sin.
   Not bad for a show conceived by a bunch of Kiwis, even if it did take American money and HBO to get it off the ground.
   And thank goodness it did—how else would it have become so widely received? I can’t see a TV3- or TVNZ-funded Conchords cracking the US market—it would, like Outrageous Fortune, have been remade at best.
   Good luck to Bret, Jemaine and the others associated with the show.

Can fellow New Zealanders give Janette any advice? She’s a Kiwi who has lived abroad since 1999 (in Canada and Costa Rica) and is due to head back there. What changes will she see, especially in Dunedin, where she’s heading? Please hop over to her blog and post your thoughts.

Finally, one of the Bushes meets some New Zealanders—the First Lady is greeted by New Zealand soldiers and police officers in Afghanistan. The haka is a customary greeting, borne from Māori culture.
   I was going to go in to a bit more depth on this video about how nice it was for Mrs Bush to have some contact with our country. However, I am embarrassed by some 19-year-old New Zealander on YouTube who has entered several racist, anti-Māori comments at this video’s page.
   If any Kiwis want to comment on JZZ’s anti-Māori rhetoric, which I think embarrasses our country as it is hardly representative of what most New Zealanders think, please head on over to that page.
   Normally I would just consider him a teenage troublemaker and troll, but there’s another part of me that says if we keep turning a blind eye to our young people’s misbehaviour, then are we telling them that it is acceptable?
   Slamming a single race is hardly productive.
   I assume for the purposes of this discussion that the teenager is Caucasian, statistically speaking. I realize he could be another race.
   In one comment, while calling Māori unkind, a ‘wishy-washy race are full of fakes, liars and cheats,’ he also mentions that no Māori has over 50 per cent blood. Anyone see the easy target there? Using JZZ’s logic: the Māori were, after all, living in relative harmony before the arrival of the English—ergo dilution of their blood by pakeha has introduced criminal genes.
   In another comment, Māori are branded uncivilized because they only had a written language since the 1800s. I guess using that logic, that must make my own race superior since the Chinese have had a written language a few thousand years before Christ.
   And a teenager who posts videos of a Toyota Soarer is hardly, as he describes himself, a ‘car connoisseur’. The Soarer can only trace its automotive lineage to 1981, 96 years after the internal combustion engine automobile was first devised.
   Of course these are all silly arguments. By taking JZZ’s logic we get nowhere.
   This is not a politically correct demand for all New Zealanders to “just get along”. But we are obviously creating a generation of some New Zealanders who by their racism will impede national progress.
   The root causes of, say, there being a large Māori–Polynesian prison population stem from colonization and a failure to integrate cultures.
   We cannot turn back the clock but we can become steadily more open-minded to our own solutions that are distinct from the monocultural Westminster system.
   And as a community that once enforced its own standards, perhaps it is time we extended that same thinking to the online world.
   YouTube isn’t a forum to educate in any depth with its limited space. However, it is a place where we may signal disapproval of behaviour with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and perhaps the odd pithy comment pointing out the faults of racist thinking.

When I go on YouTube, there are a lot of commercials that the posters claim are ‘banned’. I’ve spotted quite a few that weren’t banned, which is rather annoying. It’s like going to Wikipedia and finding the car pages are wrong (about 90 per cent, by my reckoning, have factual errors that no “expert” writing about them would make).
   Well, here’s a commercial for Toyota that was actually banned in New Zealand by the political correctness movement. Probably the excuse was anyone seeing this TVC would surely then commit domestic violence. I would have banned it for a lack of originality and viewing it the second and third time, it is plain stupid. The message: buy a Toyota, destroy your marriage.
   However, not everyone has my tastes, so here is a real banned TVC for the Toyota RAV4 for your viewing pleasure(?).

   Un pub interdit pour la Toyota RAV4 en Nouvelle-Zélande.

To Jessica and my other Japanese friends, please forgive this post: it’s not meant to cause offence. This is the late Billy T. James, regarded as New Zealand’s greatest comedian, and a clip from his show in 1984. It was regarded as one of his most memorable gags. He also made fun of his own race a lot, too, so he certainly was not sparing!

New Zealanders, remember these? Bring back the great Kiwi jingle!

The latter first ran in 1982 or 1983, I believe, and it continued into the late 1990s. I hope my friend Chloë, whom I met in 2002 but was actually at law school with prior to that, made heaps from the repeat fees.

I learned quite a few things about Dan Chan at his funeral last Wednesday in the eulogy delivered by historian Dr James Ng.
   Dan was born in China in 1907 but was educated in Australia, where his father worked, from 13—both at a state school in NSW and Scotch College in Melbourne. This was, as James told us, unusual in its day as most Chinese fathers of Dan’s era would have sent their children back to the old country.
   This foreign education meant that Dan was bilingual and a very well versed and philosophical writer. He had returned to China and Hong Kong to set up a business there but the Japanese invasion meant that he and his family had to flee to the antipodes.
   His education meant that he could stay in New Zealand because his work was needed in editing a magazine for expatriates here and Dan also helped members of the diaspora get money back to the old country (one of his proud accomplishments being the mastering of a code to aid the transfers).
   However, his business in New Zealand, as I knew it, was in the restaurant trade—back in those postwar days it was rare to see anyone other than Anglo New Zealanders in white-collar professions.
   This did bring his family some security and Dan was a great benefactor in the old country, even having a high school built.
   His contributions to New Zealand society were awarded with a Queen’s Service Medal and he was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit, which I understand equates roughly to an OBE.
   His driving licence was apparently still valid at the time of his passing. He was so alert and capable that instead of having an annual renewal—which is necessary for people at his age—he was given his for two years at age 99. He gave up driving voluntarily.
   As I said in my earlier tribute, he had a better memory for faces and people at age 100 than I do today.
   When you hear this history you come to realize that men like Dan, whom I knew more as being active in the Chinese New Zealand community, were actually the trailblazers who bridged the gulf between the émigrés and mainstream Kiwis.
   He was respected in legal circles, a recent conference only being funded because someone had made a large donation in his honour.
   The Otago University library holds Dan’s papers, a collection of writings between 1939 and 1999, often dealing with philosophy, not just Chinese issues.
   At his funeral, even former restaurateur and City Missioner Father Des Britten attended, along with engineer, blogger and historian Steven Young.
   Without his contribution and his readiness to work with institutions to help Chinese people in New Zealand, we would have been much the poorer. Dan was a great advocate.
   Although Dan had made it into the MSM when his ONZM was bestowed on him with the 2007 New Year honours, I found it a great surprise that the media missed his passing and a well attended funeral at Old St Paul’s.
   It may be a slight exaggeration to say that we would still be expected to run Chinese takeaways, laundromats and groceries—when you think about it, those days were within the lifetimes of many of us reading this post today. But certainly the idea of the well versed, professional Chinese New Zealander might not have been as well cemented, because the cultural gulf would not have been bridged as successfully.
   Those of us who enjoy professional positions today owe a debt of gratitude to men like Dan Chan. God bless you.

The first time I read about Philip Glenister getting his driver off for speeding (35 mph in a 30 mph zone) I chuckled, as he adopted his Gene Hunt persona. The cop saw the actor and said, according to Glenister, ‘I’m terribly sorry about this sir, I’ll let you off this time if you don’t mind.’
   Glenister had apparently said to him prior, ‘Yes, I’m the one on the booze, not him. Go and catch some proper criminals.’
   Then I found the earliest article on the incident in the Daily Mail tabloid which contrasted this with others in the UK:

   Earlier this week it emerged that Sydney Duffy was fined for doing 35mph in a 30mph area when he tried to leave the road quickly as his wife had an epileptic fit. The 63-year-old has appealed against the fine from Cumbria police and will appear in court.
   And Stephanie Cornwall was issued with a £60 fine after rushing to hospital when her six year-old son Alfie was mauled by a dog. The mother, 40, from Leicestershire, was travelling at 37mph in a 30mph zone.

   One law for celebrities?
   The Met should have more sense than to fine people like Mr Duffy and Ms Cornwall.
   At least here the traffic cops allow for some speedometer error and that humans cannot be expected to constantly monitor their speed when traffic safety is at issue. If you kept staring at your speedo, you might get involved in an accident!
   It is worse here in New Zealand than it was 30 years ago but by and large, 5 mph is not something for the cops to get that upset about.
   I know there are exceptions but I am talking in a general sense. As we work in metric, 5 mph is roughly 8 km/h.
   The second incident probably would have been frowned on more today, less so 30 years ago: 7 mph goes past that 10 km/h leeway that some cops have as a rule of thumb.
   I tend to drive at the legal limit but realize that due to speedometer error I can be anywhere between 5 km/h over or under.
   The ‘Your speed is’ digital signs around some parts of New Zealand are helpful as a means of calibrating my own speedometer—so why do so many of them have their displays closed?
   They tend to show that my car’s 50 km/h is actually 47 km/h so I tend to go closer to 55 km/h on my speedo.
   The problem is that speeding here is governed by legislation that brings strict liability, which basically means “no excuses”.
   But I would think a Kiwi copper would have been able to judge in both cases somewhat better than his or her British counterpart.
   I am not sure if we would distinguish between celebrities and everyday folk. Any stories? I know of one incident told to me by an eyewitness (the passenger) where a rich driver was let off because of the car he drove, and the officers wound up going into macho mode to discuss the vehicle and neglected to issue a fine for excessive speeding. I cannot reveal more since I am not permitted to, and I would hope it is exceptional rather than commonplace.
   If a flash car could get me off a fine, I would have really opened up the Astons and Porsche 911 I have driven, but I prefer my clean licence (knock on wood) and was much more careful.

I know, cute, huh? My friend Bevan’s kids, Andrew and Jessica, at the barbecue yesterday, raiding Bevan’s cousin Sonia’s costumes (no, Chinese people do not regularly walk around like this).
   Remember when you went to family functions and there were strange “uncles” and “aunts” who could not possibly be related to you, making weird comments at you while you ran around and just wanted to play?
   Oh, man, I have turned into one of those weird-ass uncles.
   But the kids got used to me and actually understand Cantonese, though they tend to reply in English. They are both extremely bright for their ages (two and four).
   I really noticed how the tables turned yesterday and seeing Bevan’s kids made me feel a bit old. Bevan’s older brother, Aaron, and I were in the same year at primary (elementary) school. And Aaron and I did reminisce about school days and wondered what happened to that dude Karl Urban who used to be in our class. Wonder if he ever became famous or something … Remember how he used to like acting?

First there was Kath & Kim, the US version, for NBC. Now, ABC brings you … from the maker of Veronica Mars … the American version of Outrageous Fortune!
   I can see OF work in the US though no doubt the hard-out Kiwi fans of the show will join all the Brits (who have had their fair share of American remakes), and moan. We will say what an inferior version the American one is and how it misses all our Newzild subtexts.
   The American Outrageous Fortune will join the American Life on Mars and the American Kath & Kim on American TV screens this autumn, I mean the American version of autumn, which is called fall. 
   We are certainly not immune from taking someone else’s concept and running with it, what with the New Zealand version of two British shows, Strictly Come Dancing and Pop Idol, and a Danish show that is now called Sensing Murder here. It’s only notable because aside from Popstars, New Zealand shows have not made it hugely overseas in licensed format.
   And the Dutch can get angry about the British versions of some of their shows like Big Brother and The Generation Game.
   Actually, I welcome our trans-Pacific transplanting and I hope the creators of Outrageous Fortune can bring in some useful royalty income into New Zealand.
   The irony is that this is probably the sort of show TV2 would air here in an effort to beat TV3, which shows the original OF.
   If we are all licensing each other’s shows, then how about a local version of Alarm für Cobra 11 but with a Māori guy and a white guy?