More musical frivolousness, with a diversion int' middle

[trixtah]

Yay! My next door neighbours are having a party, which seems to have killed off my downstairs neighbour's music-making efforts. And the nice thing is that the music is groovy, being mainly bhangra (and the occasional Bollywood number, but I can cope with that from time to time).

Actually, it's funny, I seem to have gravitated to the one apartment block in central Canberra where us honkies are a minority. Most of the inhabitants here are Indian, with a good portion of South-East Asians. They mainly seem to be post-grad students at the ANU (given their age, and the number of families that are here).

Speaking of matters "race", I've just noticed that the New Zealand Herald has been using pakeha to matter-of-factly refer to European-descended New Zealanders. This article, which is talking about the demographics of people flatting in Central Auckland, was the one that highlighted it to me, but on doing a Google, it appears that the word has been creeping in more and more over the last year or so.  About bloody time!

As you can probably tell, it's a Māori word that was used very early on in the colonial period to refer to us. Some kiwis find it vastly insulting for some bizarre reason, and mythology has spread in certain groups that the word meant things like "white worm" and so on (which was never the case). People like my mother hate it. But seeing The Herald use it, when they had avoided it for so long, gives me hope that the tide has turned. I love having a word that specifically addresses my cultural heritage. I am not European (and I so felt that when I was living there in Europe, if England counts). "White" seems to demand that there is a "black", and if Māori and Polynesians call themselves anything colour-wise, it's actually brown. However, there is one Māori word that I find insulting, and that is tauiwi, which means, simply, "foreigner". My family has been in New Zealand for 165 years. No bloody "foreign" about it, any more.

Getting back to The Herald, my god, what is happening? They're even using Ms as an honorific now. I wonder when that happened? They refused to use it for donkey's years, preferring to use someone's full name, no matter how uneuphonious it was in the sentence. And I think it's one of the reasons the Prime Minister refers to herself as "Miss Clark", even though she's married to Peter Davis. At least then The Herald could then refer to her using some kind of honorific, especially when she was in Opposition (and thus not the Rt. Hon.).

Anyway, getting back to the subject of music, the musical preferences of geeks were summarised in The Register sometime last year. Being Microsoft-qualified, I should apparently be into mainstream pop - and, actually, I do quite like Britney, but not for her singing, per se - but I seem to be quite firmly in the Linux camp, with large smatterings of DBA and CIO-ness. Really, though, these divisions seem to be more of a function of someone's age group when they hit a certain job level. I am so not going to become a developer (see, I knew there was a reason I don't have a programmer's brain), and if I do get into project management, I'll put myself out of my misery before I listen to the fossilised soundtrack on offer.