Random raves

One of the nice things about going home this Xmas time was going to Daikoku Ramen, which, as it says on the tin, is a ramen shop that makes the real thing, in downtown Auckland, right next to the Britomart transport depot (the old GPO).



It's been there since the late-80s - I went there occasionally when I was at university the first time round. The place used to be heavily patronised by Japanese and Korean sailors back in the day (it's literally metres away from the docks), and of course now with the huge upsurge in immigration from east Asia, there are plenty of people who go there for a taste of home.

The place has barely changed. There is still the huge pot of stock simmering away on the stove, with mysterious items in it, and a stream of water constantly running from a tap to replenish what is lost in the steam. The cooks are big friendly Japanese guys with not-exactly-immaculate aprons on. The noodles aren't those slippery wriggly soft ones from a vacuum pack, and are cooked fresh every time in their own basket dunked into boiling water. The decor is bare-bones, to say the least, although the early-80s style oddly-shaped wooden seats have been replaced with more conventional metal-framed seats with padding. You can still sit at the bar by the kitchen area, on the benches that have coloured stripes to mark which is your half. The only notable addition to the menu is edamame, because naturally that was unheard of in NZ back in the day. Oh, and cold noodles - must give them a try, since I've liked hiyashi chuka when I've made them at home.

You can get all different styles of ramen, shoyu, miso, Hokkaido style. You can get extra corn, pork, wakame, mung bean sprouts, menma (bamboo) added to your ramen. There are side-dishes, including very tasty gyoza. On the tables are extra soy sauce, chilli oil, vinegar and shichimi togarashi.

If you like ramen, it's the only place to go in NZ. :-) And a great place to get a healthy and tasty meal for around $10 (or a bit more with additions and side dishes). Open 7 days for lunch and dinner!

I picked up my car today, which, after various comedies of error, I did literally 10 minutes before the place shut at midday. Getting a call from work because the mail server that was supposed to have been decommissioned 4 months ago (all it does is send bloody email and faxes from SAP) decided to have a minor melt-down didn't help. Still, fixed, collected car.

They tried to find a new seal for the screen, but unfortunately didn't in time. However, they did get the only screen that would fit that was left in Sydney. It's laminated, so it has a faint tint of exactly the colour I intended to get my windows tinted anyway. (Greyish.) So, yay, extra bonus.

I bought a bottle of Nick O'Leary Riesling, which is the first Canberra region wine I can unhesitatingly recommend. Most of them either have a peculiar taste that I don't like or they're ridiculously over-priced for the quality (viz. Clonakilla wines, which are nice enough, but not worth $35+, at least not the ones I've had). So, the riesling - very dry, very slightly astringent, lime flavours and a very very slight floral note, almost honeysuckle. And it was actually very nice with pizza. Pizza with anchovies. :-) $25 and worth it. Apparently he makes a rosé, which I must try (it's hard finding decent rosés!), and a shiraz. Haven't had any Canberra region shirazes yet - I wonder if they're more like the NZ-style syrahs, with the climate here.

Finally, yesterday, I caught a cab up to uni because I missed my bus, and I desperately wanted to go to the gym before my lecture. The cabbie, who was an elderly chap, was listening to some AM station with country music, and regaled me with stories about Slim Whitman  (who was playing at the time) and Paul McCartney. Then some chick came on singing Country Roads, and the old bugger joined in with the track on the radio, warbling along happily until we got to my destination. I have to say that I can't think of a true C&W song that I can bear (I don't mind some Anne Murray and Linda Ronstadt, but the more MOR end of the scale), but it was a cute moment.

Oh, and I'll be in NZ NEXT FRIDAY. For less than a week, but I'm going on a road trip from Wellington to Auckland, which will be FUN. I'm also going to take lots of pics, because I am fucking sick of certain people saying "Yes, the South Island landscape is spectacular." So is the North Island landscape, actually.

ETA: YouTube nostalgia of the evening: Fleetwood Mac (yes, late-70s soft rock, but Stevie was hawt, and I still love Rhiannon, Dreams, Sara and Landside, the original one, goddamit. And Tusk. Stevie Nicks twirling the twirly thing, OMG.), the Eurthymics (don't read the fucking comments on Annie's gender), The Cure (don't read the racist comments from morons who never heard of Camus, not that I like Camus) and this fucking fab fan vid of Placebo's My Sweet Prince.

ETA2: Ok, sometimes YouTube comments aren't that bad. Someone characterised PJ Harvey (yes, I was perving at her again, sue me) as: Polly Jean... the product of Iggy pop fucking Kate Bush.. Rock on.

(Meme ganked from reynardo )

...there are not one but two large harbours (the Waitematā and Manukau), with anchorages and inlets to spare, and a low tidal range (3.5m at spring tide). The narrowest point between the two harbours is less than a kilometre, and Maori used to carry their canoes from one to the other. Not surprisingly, the road that was built on that track is called Portage Rd (alas, the tide was out in the Manukau Harbour and the mangroves obscure the Tamaki River that drains to the Waitemata in that satellite image). And Captain Cook sailed right past both of these large harbours.

...on a slightly related note, the Auckland Anniversary Day Regatta has been running since 1840, when the city was founded. It is likely the largest one-day sailing regatta in the world. I've not been big into sailing - not being rich growing up - but I do know how to sail a P-class dinghy, and it was always fun to get somewhere close to the harbour and see it totally covered with boats. It's about the only city-wide event I have always enjoyed.

...there is the largest Polynesian settlement in the world, with over 175,000 Polynesians from various islands contributing 14% of Auckland's population. Samoans, Tongans, Fijiians, Cook Islanders, Niueans, Tokelauans, and so on. I can greet people in five of those languages, by virtue of attending a school that was 70% Maori/Polynesian. Maori aren't included in that population figure, although they they of course came from the eastern Polynesian islands at some point around 1200. The Pasifika Festival one of the largest of its kind, and is where I can stock up on pineapple pies, since a lot of corner shops in Auckland are now owned by Asian people, with not so many Samoans as when I was growing up.

...during WWII, the scandal of the day featured two women dancers at the Civic Theatre, Freda Stark and Thelma Trott. Freda Stark "was known as 'The Fever of the Fleet' after dancing in nothing but a feather headdress, a g-string and a coat of gold paint". Thelma's husband (a composer, nearly 20 years older than she) poisoned Thelma with barbiturates after he learned about their affair. He was originally sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment when the Labour Govt was elected. Miss Stark spent a number of years in England before returning to Auckland in her later years. I regularly saw her - she was a tiny woman - walking about in Ponsonby wearing a black trouser outfit and carrying a silver-tipped black cane. I totally want to be like her when I grow up. After she died, her ashes were interred in Thelma's grave, 60 years after Thelma's death. There is a bar in the Civic Theatre building named Stark's in her honour, but I haven't had a drink there yet.

...Germaine Greer was arrested for uttering the words "fuck" and "bullshit" in 1972 during a speech against anti-abortionists at the Auckland Town Hall. Her arrest sparked off an avalanche of student protests, and was also apparently one of the reasons she decided to live in England, away from the censorship in Australasia.

...there are 50-odd dormant (not extinct) volcanoes - the central isthmus is really just one big volcanic field. The last eruption was Rangitoto Island (in the middle of the Waitemata Harbour) about 600 years ago. The eruptions have been getting comparatively stronger the more recent they've been. They've got maps of likely lava flows and so on for each of the volcanoes, in case of one blowing, but geologists obviously have no clue which one will blow or when. You can see a seismograph in the Auckland Museum - I used to think that the line was supposed to be constantly wiggling a tiny bit. Apparently not. They might be small, but I really wouldn't like to be there if one goes off.

It's the biggest circulation paper in NZ, and has a pretty good website, but its right-wing bias has become increasingly marked in recent years, and now there is a right-wing government, they're just having a ball.

Onto the dire crap of the day. Paul Holmes is a talkback dj and general "media personality". He's also a little shitfaced toad who should get fucked (although I believe he's "straight" these days), and emigrate to somewhere socially progressive like Saudi Arabia, where I'm sure the sexual politics would suit him right down to the ground. He was interviewing the putative new leader of the Labour Party (Phil Goff), who was explaining how the Labour Party should be proud of so many years of successful government. Holmes' skewer-em-when they're down interview technique elicited the following journalistic highpoint:

But when I suggested to him people might have been tired of being told what to do by intellectual left-wing feminist women, he acknowledged there had grown the perception of the "nanny" state....

Look, Paul, you pathetic little fucktard. We have been governed by jumped-up little selfish unreconstructed sexist classist dickwad men for the last nearly 200 years (Westminister parliamentary system), and some of us "intellectual" left-wing feminist women (who obviously aren't "people") are tired of the Entitlement you seem to feel is due to you and your ilk, and are tired of being told what to do by inadequate blustering Neanderthals. If you think having a few declared feminists in government in the last 9 years is such a threat to the country's (and your) health and well-being, you'd better either harden up and get used to it (once we get rid of this new lot of morons), or die in a fucking fire because you obviously aren't going to cope with life in this century where it's not all about women pandering to your and your equally-dinosaur mates' pathetic little penises egos.

Fuck I'm pissed off. GAH. Why why why did I click on that link?

It's funny when they pop up. I've been avoiding emailing two very good friends of mine back home for the last month, for no particular reason (although I have been busy and I don't want to unleash grizzlings on them, which I was liable to up until a couple of weeks ago).

One of my old colleagues from Wellington, who is the most grooviest of guys and extremely hot (I might be a dyke, but there are a few guys, ok? his wife is hot too, so there), like a cross between a sarcastic Rochester and Jermaine from the Conchords, made a connection with me on LinkedIn today. One of our other ex-colleagues also now has a group there for those who "live, love or work in Wellington", which I promptly joined. So, meh, I'd love to be there right now - it's great in spring.

Maybe I'll head over at the end of summer. It'd be nice to smell the sea and the bush, and hang out with groovy friends and ex-colleagues.

Man, I'd forgotten what rainstorms can be like in Auckland. It's exactly like a firehose on full bore. If you're driving on the motorway, all you can do is slow down and try and follow the lane catseyes. I'll stay and drink another chai latte in this cafe, methinks.

A new MP, Louisa Wall, has been sworn into NZ's Parliament today. She's under 40, female (obviously), Maori, and a lesbian. This brings the number of out queers in Parliament to 6, out of 120.

5% of the parliamentary population is getting in line with the proportion of queers in the wider community! There are 19 Maori, which is spot-on. A few more PI (3) and Asian MPs (2)  wouldn't hurt - both of those ethnicities are about 5-7% of the population. However, the glaring lack is in women - the number needs to be increased by at least 50% (there are 39 at present), although I suppose that a third of Parliament being women (including the PM) isn't too shabby, really.

Of course, if you wander through the National Party's website, you'll see how dramatically those proportions will change if they get elected next time - two Maori MPs, total. There are a few more women (but not 30%). Of course, a rigid adherence to gender/race/sexuality balance in the governing body does not mean that body will do the right thing - but at least it looks like a House of Representatives.

Despite the popular propaganda, most of NZ is not any further south than Australia is. Auckland (36°52S) is half a degree south of Canberra (35°18S), and 1½ degrees south of Sydney (34°S).

Wellington (41°17S) is 3½ degrees south of Melbourne (37°47S). Christchurch (43°31S) is not even a degree south of Hobart (42°54S). At 42 degrees, the length of a degree is 111km. Auckland is merely around 166km south of Sydney. ¾ of the country is thus in the same lats as the bottom half of Australia.

In other words, most of the people in NZ live in pretty much the same latitudes as most of the people in Australia. It is a bit colder in NZ over all, since it's surrounded by sea and is more mountainous. But it's not that cold.

(PS. I know plenty of Aussies who aren't so clueless - the ones on my flist, for example - but it amazes me to hear the same crap from people who should know better).

An ad for a new "adult-oriented" channel on Sky in NZ:


I counted more than 20 naughty references after a couple of goes - I had to look up the more women-hating references like Tony Danza and Sanchez... and a "rusty trombone" was a new one for me! But I have no idea what the lost watch is referring to - help please!

And, yes, I know it's odd, because I'm here.

You know how it is with a friend you love and feel passionately about, and whom you miss every day, but whom you hardly write to or call because doing so is painful because you miss her/him more? I feel like that with my own country. It's going to be very very hard going back on Sunday. Partly because of some not-that-dire situations I'll have to deal with when I get back, but mainly because I'll miss this place so much.

Oh well, it's good that I get as much time here as I do these days. It isn't like when I was living in England, and I could only make it back for one week in 5 years.