Laurie Fleming

I have held off doing this for a while, until I saw something on Stuff this morning and I couldn't not respond. Here's what I just sent him:

Dear Mr Hide,
I see from stuff.co.nz that you have written a letter to John Key warning him of a public backlash if the government ignores the result of the referendum.

Assuming that you have been correctly quoted by the piece, I have several concerns about this.

a) You assume that the majority of those who bother to vote in the referendum will vote "No"
b) You accept that not everyone who votes will actually vote for what they really want, thanks to the bizarre wording of the question
c) If the response is less than 50% and the majority of those vote for the "No", it is not a meaningful and useful response; this is an indicative referendum after all, not an election.
d) I assume from your continued use of the loaded phrases "nanny state" and "their views must be respected" that you are biased and are arguing from a position of prejudice.

As a member of parliament, I don't believe that you are not aware of the actual wording of the The Crimes (Substituted Section 59) Amendment Act 2007. To refresh your memory, here it is:

Parental control
1. Every parent of a child and every person in the place of a parent of the child is justified in using force if the force used is reasonable in the circumstances and is for the purpose of—
a. preventing or minimising harm to the child or another person; or
b. preventing the child from engaging or continuing to engage in conduct that amounts to a criminal offence; or
c. preventing the child from engaging or continuing to engage in offensive or disruptive behaviour; or
d. performing the normal daily tasks that are incidental to good care and parenting.
2. Nothing in subsection (1) or in any rule of common law justifies the use of force for the purpose of correction.
3. Subsection (2) prevails over subsection (1).
4. To avoid doubt, it is affirmed that the Police have the discretion not to prosecute complaints against a parent of a child or person in the place of a parent of a child in relation to an offence involving the use of force against a child, where the offence is considered to be so inconsequential that there is no public interest in proceeding with a prosecution.

Read point 4. Now go back and read it again and tell me how it could be construed that parents become criminals by simply smacking their kids. The whole point of the law was to remove the defence parents previously had of injuring them. I recently worked with a group of parents of young children who were all going to vote "No" (or is it "Yes"?) who were shocked when I gave them the wording of the bill to read - if it didn't make them change their minds, it at least gave them something solid to think about instead of hearsay.

You are reported as being shocked by the number of parents who had been "unfairly treated" by the law change. How many prosecutions have there been since the change? nine? Are you implying that all of them were unjustified? Should a parent be allowed to push his son to the ground in a violent manner? I am sick of hearing political phrases like "good New Zealand parents trying to do the best for their children" - what is the point at which you have to accept that some of them are bad parents?

I think that you are disingenuous, camping out on a populist platform supporting those who are ignorant of the wording of the bill.

Sincerely, but not yours,
Laurie

The Geographic Board is looking at changing the names for the unbelievably prosaic North and South Islands. Apparently they were never officially gazetted, despite their common usage. The obvious choices are Te Ika A Maui (Maui's Fish) for The North Island, and Te Wai Pounamu (The Place of Greenstone) for the South Island. I think this is a fine idea. Probably ultimately they will be afforded parallel names, similar to Mt Taranaki (anyone still call it Egmont?) and Matiu Island (also Somes).

Micael Laws is furious, bless him, because despite his inability to spell, Whanganui does have an 'h'. Just saying something, Micael, doesn't make it so. And your latest piece of stupidity is: Where else could you go in the world and the locals have actually two different names for everywhere? Well, Wales (Cymru) has many different names for its towns: Swansea (Abertawe) is an obvious one - and of course, the Welsh have never called themselves Welsh, nor said they came from there. Look at all the Gaelic names in and around the British Isles. Ever been for a skiing holiday in Österreich? or Italia? Been to the Uffizi Gallery in Firenze (aka Fiorenza or Florentia)? oh, silly boy - you only know it as Florence.

I live in Wellington, aka Poneke (aka Port Nicholson), but the harbour is also known as Te Whanganui a Tara - The Big Harbour of Tara. Wanaganui as a word doesn't exist. In this part of the country, the 'Wh' is pronounced as an 'f', I understand; in Whanganui it is more aspirated, similar to a Scottish one. It's a dialectical difference, but certainly pronounced differently to the non-word Wanganui.

Find something useful to get upset about. I have - it's you!

I was walking along Featherston Street this morning at about 9:30 and I walked right past Leonard Cohen.

Well, I didn't realise immediately, because I might have said something (although I know I would have been dumb-struck). I went on a couple of paces and the thought process was: The old guy looked just like…fuck it was Leonard Cohen.

I went into Unity Books to tell Colin Morris. I said, "Guess who I just saw?" He said, "Leonard Cohen?" "Yes." "You bastard."

[From the UN Climate Change conference in Poznan, Poland]

Keith Allott, the World Wildlife Fund's head of climate change, said: "This move by Mexico confirms a trend we have been seeing all through these talks, with the developing world coming up with the innovative ideas on how to move to a low carbon pathway. Unfortunately, the developed world has its fingers in its ears and is sitting on its hands."

I often moan about the unreliability of the trains on the Johnsonville line, and look forward to when the units are younger than me. It's a couple of years away at least. As long as they can keep on cannibalising them for parts so I can still get to work when its raining, that's OK I s'pose…

Today in Rumble's 25th birthday. He's looking pretty decrepit for 25 - oh, it's his shop's 25th birthday. Pop along to his semi-underground wine, spirit and deli establishment in Waring Taylor Street for some good deals. If you spend enough, you get to pop a balloon with a prize in it. I know one of the balloons has a voucher for a vintage port from 1977. Nice.

Looking even more decrepit than Rumble himself, over in one corner, is a couple of small crates of - well, it's hard to tell at first spotting. One of them is still wrapped up in metal bands, lying like it has for well over fifty years. Apparently a pub or somesuch in Lyttleton found these two crates and opened one. They had no idea what to do with the contents, but someone suggested contacting Rumble (for those who don't know him, by the way, his first name is officially Peter, but I haven't heard anyone call him that for years), 'cos he'd know what to do.

So what's the contents? 1953 Vintage Tawny Port. Yup - 55-year-old fortified wine. Generally for that vintage, the price would be $350-odd. And you'd be doing pretty well. But (limit two per customer) he's selling them for $120. Sheesh.

Edited: That was just the price on Saturday - unfortunately it's now up to a more reasonable (depending on your point of view) price of $200. And I've tasted a little of the originally opened bottle - outstanding. It's rather odd to consume something that was made five years before your birth.
Did I buy a bottle? Do I look stupid? It looks like crap, the label's all but disappeared, and it'll need two-three months resting to get over the shock of having moved for the first time since before I was born, but apparently the contents are divine.

This morning I was sitting in Arabica Cafe when one of the sopranos in the Orpheus Choir sat at the next table. We quite often see each other there, and she is another iPhone user (partly after having seen mine and suffering from technolust).

She had signed on to the new choir website, but didn't like the userid she'd chosen for herself; I'm the website administrator. "Hang on a minute," I said. Tap - tap - tap - Send. Tap-tap-tap - Send. "Now, what do you want it to be?"

Her eyebrows raised. "Umm - Rossi. No, Rozzi." Tap - tap - tap - backspace - backspace - backspace.

"OK - there you are. Try that."

"Wow - that's cool!"

This Friday evening, at 6:30pm, some singing and bow-ing friends and I are performing in a concert here in Wellington.

High Voices, an eclectic concert selection of solos and duets

Featuring:
Amy Bendall - soprano
Dimitrios Theodoridis - counter-tenor
Melanie Newfield - soprano
Laurie Fleming - counter-tenor
Michelle Harrison - mezzo-soprano

The first half is a selection of arias and duets, with the second half taken up with a performance of G B Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, with string quartet accompaniment.

Admission $15/$10, by programme available at the door.

Come and hear the delightful noises we make.

A couple of days ago I was having a chat with a friend in a café. The waitress brought over a couple of glasses of water while we were waiting for the coffee. I exclaimed, "Hot glasses!" The waitress took her hand up to her spectacles and said, "Thank you!"

When she realised her blue, she blushed. Being Indian, she went a bright chocolate-strawberry colour!

Result…

When I got home a few minutes ago, I saw that the letter-box door was open. Inside, still dry fortunately, was a box from Amazon.

Inside:
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's Stabat Mater in full score - a masterpiece of the late Baroque

La Cerise by Matmatah, a rock band from Brittany (a bit like Scotland's Big Country)

Edycja Specjalna (Special Edition is my guess) by Sidney Polak - Polish dub/reggae. It's got a teledyski, which I look forward to watching - Dobrego Materiału! Cool…

A few weeks ago we went to the funeral of a friend up the road - old age. The next day I had to have Psychokitty put down - old age. Sometimes people/cats etc just die. It was a shitty weekend.

Today I went to the Cats Protection League, to see what they had (and secretly knowing I was going to go home with a cat - I even took the cat cage to carry one home in.)

I came home with two - so-far called Jeremy (mostly white, with tabby markings on the ears and tail), and Godfrey (black-and-white). They're the same age - just under three - and grew up together. If they're not siblings, they might as well be. They quite similar scaredy cats, but both affectionate, especially Godfrey. So far Jeremy is under our bed, although he's done quite a few tours of the house, noisily. Godfrey is in the back of the coat cupboard where it's warm, dark and unpopulated.

I've not lived without cats for seventeen years, and I wasn't intending to start now. I'm much happier - I hope they will be too.

This evening while I was cooking dinner, the phone rang. Annette answered it, and because she was on the phone for a while and she's politer than me, I thought it was a research call. They always ring during dinner.

But it was worse than that. Jean up the road called to say that her husband, our neighbour and friend Ron Chapman, died this morning. He was 76, or thereabouts.

When we lived in Ngaio, we were referred to Ron by another builder. We needed some internal modifications done to our house. Ron came around and did a fantastic job. He's an old-school builder - everything done by the book, and beautifully executed.

A year or so later we moved to Crofton Downs and coincidentally moved three houses down the road from Ron and Jean. The unspoken arrangement was that I would look after their computer and Ron would look after our house. As an added inducement, Jean provided us with pickles, chutneys and biscuits. And Ron and I enjoyed our whisky.

Ron hasn't been that well over the last couple of years. He has had a low-grade leukaemia, and I know his dicky ticker has caused him problems. But I never expected him to go so quickly. He got really tired over the weekend, and died in hospital this morning.

I'm sad. You're a good bloke, Ron.

The other amusing thing at choir the other night: our musical director was leading us through some note-bashing; so we could get a feel for it, he said, "Let's start at the very beginng."

The whole choir intoned, with one voice, "It's a very good place to start."

A year ago I was in a Choral Federation mad-dash 24-hours-from-go-to-woah performance of Elgar's Dream of Gerontius. At a break I was speaking to one of the young sopranos, Amy.

In the meantime, Amy joined the Orpheus Choir and, as is the way of these things, we have had fragmented conversations of a couple of minutes at a time over the last year.

At this year's Choral Fed workshop (Brahms' Ein Deutches Requiem) we had a chat over morning tea. She asked me if I was the Laurie who went along to www.thursdaynightcurry.com - I confirmed that indeed I was. "Do you know Sam? he's my boyfriend." Click - click - ah.

This evening after choir practice (Dream of Gerontius again - but a more stately considered rehearsal - there's months to go yet) she asked, "Are you the Laurie who studies under Geoff Coker and is performing in a recital in September?"

"Why, yes I am."

"I'm in that concert too."

"Oh, you're that Amy."

Although I call myself a data-warehouser, my background in the discipline is not a formal one, albeit very long!

But I do get annoyed with badly organised and designed DWs. It's a similar feeling to what I imagine a synaesthete has when something looks as though it has the wrong smell, or the taste is the wrong colour. I have great difficulty in working with the data because it's the wrong shape and doesn't fit.

I'm currently working on a new data warehouse design which, although pragmatic in a few areas, is classically designed (Inman, if it matters to you) SCD2. I like that.

But it is running in parallel with the old one, and in the short term replacing the level 1 load. So I have to take the new shiny data design, and change its shape so that it fits in. And it's really, really hard and disheartening.

My Analogy For The Day(tm) is: it's really easy to sing out of tune, but it's really, really hard to sing out of tune on purpose. And I'm being forced to do that.

I was on the bus today, with a few teenage schoolgirls in front of me.

Verbatim: "I was in that shop yesterday and they had these really nice dresses. I was like wow."

"I was like wow"? Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

Now I'm hip with the argot of the young, and I'm well aware of how English is a living language and all that, but isn't this just a bit - umm - impenetrable?

I rang up TNT on Friday evening to check on the delivery time for Leopard, aka Mac OS 10.5. It wasn't going to turn up until Monday, and I'd have to be at home to sign for it.

So I asked if I could drive down to Ngauranga Gorge to pick it up personally. "Sure! how long will you be?" "Oh, about ten minutes…"

Ten minutes (actually fifteen, because I took the wrong turning on Centennial Highway), I had it, and drove home and took the next thirty minutes installing it. (I didn't have to worry about doing a backup, because I already had a recent one).

It really is shiny - the package is a nice holographic supernova behind the silver/grey 'X'. And the OS is shiny too. Literally.

Thoughts:
Filemaker 8 does not work, and in all probability will never work- I'll have to pay for the upgrade, which pisses me off

iChat screen sharing allowed me to sort out a few problems on my father's iMac, 1,000 km away - much better than I thought it would be

Bonjour screen sharing is almost as fast as being at the remote computer

Time Machine looks cool. I haven't needed to use it in anger yet, but it backs up wirelessly, and caused me to go out to buy a 1Tb drive at lunchtime! 1TB! When I were a lad…

Safari rendering, especially of graphics, is much snappier.

I don't like the Fan display of folders in the dock, but the Grid display is rather nice. I'm having to remember to single click, instead of clicking and holding like I'm used to

Being a point-zero release, it's not completely stable. I haven't had any Guru Meditation Messages yet, but there have been some serious slowdowns which have caused a Apple-Option-Esc salute

I thought that Spaces would just be eye-candy, but I really like it. I've got one screen set up for iChat and Skype, another for Mail and Safari, one for WoW, and I can set up another thirteen

Oh yeah - WoW works fine. Relief. Or not - it would be nice to have a life

Parallels, once I downloaded the most recent version, works fine

Parallels is the one big bug-bear with Time Machine. Because it works on changes in a single file, and I have a couple of Parallels files of 15g, the whole file would be copied to the backup. With 1Tb, you'd think that wouldn't be so bad, but it'll get chewed up pretty quick. I'll stick with Retrospect for those files for the time being.

Fortunately it's easy to add folders to Time Machine that you don't want to back up

Installing Leopard on this Intel iMac was easy; it's taking me a while to sort out the problems on my PB. I did an archive/install on both machines, but on the PB it didn't complete error-free. Of course, everything went into the Previous Systems folder, but the old user directories and stuff didn't get created. I'm having to manually put things where they were meant to go. Sigh. Fortunately, I can do it from here with Screen Sharing.

The folder icons look a little flat and uninspiring. Shame - but I won't lose sleep over it.

Disk Utility is reporting an incorrect number of extended attributes on a Verify - I'll reboot with DiskWarrior to get that cleaned up.

Picking up graphics from within Safari into Dashboard is very, very slick.

It's good. It's very, very good. And $250-odd for installing on up to five Macs. The specs say that the minimum requirement is an 850MHz G4, so the 450MHz Cube is out of the question. I'll do a backup of that and give it a go, anyway.

Did I say I now have a 1 terabyte drive?

From the Grauniad's Diary page, sourced from the US war department's Short Guide to Iraq...

Victory can best be assured, it says, "by getting along with Iraqis and making them your friends". Troops should "avoid religious or political discussions", because Iraq's Muslims are "divided into two factions". Nor should they "touch or handle an Iraqi" other than to shake hands; or, on any account, "strike him". American success or failure in Iraq, it concludes, "may well depend on whether Iraqis (as the people are called) like American soldiers or not".

It was just as valid when it was written, in 1943, as it is now...

On Saturday morning we had a 3.5 hour workshop/rehearsal for Beethoven 9, with coaching from the marvellous Margaret Medlyn. At the end of what seemed like a much shorter time, we were all - well - stuffed. It's hard and probably wrong to sing B-9 without coming out the other side pretty much exhausted, and my voice showed it.

That evening, with a song still in my heart, I went down-town to the Occidental for a friend's O-E leaving party. I was standing on the platform of the Crofton Downs station, with a few more minutes before the train turned up. So I did what one does in such circumstances: I burst into song. There was no-one around (I checked), so I let rip quite loudly, probably inappropriately, into Ye Sons Of Israel, Now Lament from Samson - I am the Prophet Micah...

I finished the first phrase and turned around to see both the train coming into the station, and my cat's vet standing there, peering into the gloom. "Ah, I thought it was you," he said.

I have just watched the most wonderful documentary on the Arts Channel, about Daniel Barenboim and the late Edward Said's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. I first heard about this when listening to last year's Reith Lectures - a collection of young musicians from Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, Spain, Syria and other countries who were brought together by Barenboim and Said. It wasn't a gesture for peace; it was all about the music, but also about introducing these people to each other.

Barenboim came in for quite a bit of stick for those lectures, and I can't for the life of me understand it. All he could do was introduce diverse people to each other and through the common language of music bring about a level of understanding. "We are an orchestra against ignorance."

After having these musicians play together across Europe over a number of years, through many machinations it was at long last possible to get them to play in Ramallah. The Arabs flew to Aman in Jordan, and were bussed across into Ramallah a day or two before the concert; they were issued with Spanish diplomatic passports to allow them passage across Israel. The Israelis came in on the the day of the concert, in individual cars and vans, and left immediately after the concert; the security was very tight. In between they played music of the utmost skill and musicianship. The final piece played (in the documentary at least), and continued underneath all the musicians farewelling each other, was Elgar's Nimrod from the Enigma Variations. It gets me in the throat every time, and the emotion of it all really got to me.

I lack the eloquence to be able to say what I want about this wonderful film - just search it out and watch it.

From Goethe's West-Eastern Divan poems:
Who the song would understand,
Needs must seek the song's own land.
Who the minstrel understand,
Needs must seek the minstrel's land.

From Frank Zappa:
Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Wisdom is not truth.
Truth is not beauty.
Beauty is not love.
Love is not music.
Music is the best

(Thanks to a link from megamole)

Haiku2 for lauriefleming
choir and new zealand brass in an hour take lid off tagine crank up
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