WTF?

OK speaking of conspiracies (I really was - see my post of earlier today here), I just got sent this poll on Facebook asking me to vote on whether the President of the United States of America should be allowed to speak to school children in a few days. Now I must say I’m way way past being surprised at some of the thinking currently emanating from the land of the free but this has got to be the pick of the bunch – the chatter on FB is that most respondents have said that ‘No’, it is not appropriate that President Obama speaks to the nations children but I’m not sure how they’d claim to know the results when the ‘poll’ is still open.

As far as I can ascertain the speech is going to be about persisting and staying in school – have I missed something? How can the president speaking directly to the nations children about their education be a bad thing? Is it really an evil plan to brain wash US children with baby eating liberal propaganda?

WTF?

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*EDIT* I now see references to Hitler’s Youth rallies popping up around the place but the connection fails me.

Rock and roll

You may have heard that NZ’s been getting a good shake up over the last few days. We’ve had around 30 decent shakes plus hundreds of small ones following the big one on Wednesday which measured 7.8 on the Richter scale.  I felt the ground rumble briefly this morning and it prompted this post on the subject.

A 7.8 quake is pretty massive, in fact it was this magnitude quake that killed 240,000 people in 1976 in Tangshan, in north-eastern China. The Japanese Kobe quake was a 7.2 and nearly 7000 lost their lives. Luckily the quake this week had an epicentre in NZ’s most sparsely populated region at the very bottom of the South Island. It was only 12 kilometres down too which is extra dangerous. By all accounts it lasted nearly 30 seconds which is a very long time by earthquake standards. It was a ‘rolling’ quake rather than a shake which means the ground appears to move in a wave formation – I saw one years ago and I’ll never forget it.  New Zealand straddles the Indo-Australian tectonic plate and the Pacific plate. These are 2 of the 15 plates on the Earths surface. The plates are enormous, rigid plates of rock up to 100km thick. These plates are always moving and at their edges they are constantly grinding into each other. This movement causes stress to build up in the brittle, upper layers of the plates. When this brittle rock finally breaks, an earthquake results.

The Pacific plate is forcing itself under the Australian plate at a rate of about 48-50mm a year. The Pacific plate can move this fast because it carries only a minimal amount of land mass. The edges of the Pacific plate form what is known as ‘the ring of fire', a zone of frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions stretching from New Zealand’s Southern Alps mountain range across to Washington state’s Mt St Helens. The image below shows the location of volcanic areas along the rim of the Pacific plate. The city I live in, Auckland, has around 50 volcanoes. In theory they are classified as dormant though in practice they are unlikely to erupt again. More likely is the formation of new volcanoes due to Auckland's position on a magma ‘hot spot’.

Never a dull moment.

Double take

These signs have gone up in my town, Papakura, over the last couple of months. They’re certainly eye catching though creepy.

To voicemail from now on

He’s rung again. Twice. I think he’s so desperate that he’s grabbing on to any link to her and I appear to be at the top of the list right now. I firmly told him he has to stop ringing as he’s starting to freak me out. I told him we’ll talk more after the funeral if he promises to stop ringing me now and to lean on his friends and family for support over the next week.

I hope he hears me.

I’m glad he only has my cell number and my first name. The cops did get my full name when they took my statement last night but they don’t share that information around right?

***UPDATE 9/5/09, 3.30pm*** No further contact. Whew!

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FYI: If this makes no sense check out -

• My post of last night
• My update post of this morning

The Lucky Country

An Australian friend sent me this a couple of days ago. She obviously does not want me to come visit this year. Tourism Australia commissioned these guys to write a song in an effort to increase international visitor numbers (not really).

Does it work for you?

It’s the snakes that do my head in – we have none in NZ so the idea of something pouncing when you’re innocently walking through the grass and step on it by accident, freaks me out. Spiders etc at least you know they’re trying to get away.

Just to continue the theme of scary animals check out this photo. I have no idea where it was taken but I am guessing it was probably taken off a New South Wales beach :-)

Just noticed that the body shape  and the tail didn’t look quite right on this ‘shark’ so I went hunting for Kurt Jones and this photograph and here’s what I found.  We don’t need to be freaked out by it after all. I still think it’s a great picture though even if it is not entirely based in fact.

With malice

 

 

Ring ring, ring ring (my land line)

 

 “Hi, Lou here”

(Mature woman’s voice) “Whoever you are, stop ringing me”

“Sorry? Who is this?”

“My name is (bleep bleep) and I keep getting missed calls from this number on my cell phone with no messages left.”

“Oh. It’s just me and my kid living here – wait a minute; I have a teenage son, any chance you have a teenage son or daughter that he might be trying to reach?”

“My children are grown up. Stop ringing this number or I’ll call the police. I will only warn you once. I’m filing an immediate complaint with Telecom about the malicious calls.”

..and hangs up. Hard.

Total over-reaction to a wrong number I think but as I don’t have caller ID on my land line, I don’t know if Rory has been calling her number for some reason.  He’s at his dads tonight but I’ll figure it out when I talk to him tomorrow.

I’ll be checking the next phone bill that arrives. Weird. 

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I always want to say ‘have a great day’ or some such at the end of my posts but I can’t as a couple of you are reading at the end of the day straight after I post while others are reading at the end of the previous day and still others of you are actually reading earlier on today (I think that about covers all 5 of you who visit)

It’s  a life long mystery actually, I’ve never fully gotten my head around the concept that the Antipodes have already finished the day when the other side of the planet is just starting out – surely we down under should be able to take advantage of this situation somehow - it just seems plain ungrateful to squander a God given head start.

Auckland, NZ    

Good night. Good day.

Goosebumps

I am still home today and still feeling nasty, though not quite so bad as yesterday. In between frantic, but less frequent, dashes to view the porcelain sculpture, I have been reading my book, browsing blogs and watching a bit of TV.

It’s only 11am and I am bored already.

I should now be logging in to my work e-mail and seeing what’s there but I figure what the heck, it’ll wait…

Instead I am going to share a weird, tingly story that mystifies me to this day. All my friends refuse to listen to me talk about this anymore so I’m going to share it with my friends in cyberspace.

In my early 30’s I had a short stint as a part time nanny but I was not a very good one. What I mean is I was responsible and all that and really liked the kid I cared for but I just didn’t really love being a nanny and I think it’s one of those jobs that’s actually more of a calling that a job. It fitted in nicely with what I needed at the time as I was studying part time, Rory was 3 and I could bring him with me for the couple of days a week I was needed.

Anyway…

I was lying on the lounge floor playing with Rory and with 4 year old Imogen when Imogen’s mum, Sandra arrived home to their small farm 30 minutes south of the city. As she came in the front door she called out “Hi, where are you all?”. Her coming home unexpectedly was not unusual so we just continued playing and I yelled out to her in the hallway “Hi, we’re in the lounge”.

I heard her walk up the hall into the kitchen, open the fridge and then she asked “Have you guys had lunch yet? Shall I make us some sandwiches?”. I said that would be great and then heard her taking things out of the fridge and getting some plates and glasses out of the cupboard. 

A few minutes later the Lego zoo that Imogen, Rory and I had been building was complete and so we washed up for lunch. 

When we got to the kitchen the breakfast bar was set with plates and glasses and the bread, butter and some sliced ham were set out but Sandra was nowhere to be seen.  The fridge door was hanging open. While I started preparing sandwiches for the kids, Imogen went to find her mum. A couple of minutes later she was back saying she couldn’t find her. I called out too but still Sandra didn’t respond. Now I was worried, had she fallen or something somewhere in the large house? After unsuccessfully searching  for her again myself, I rang her flash new cell phone (it was still quite fancy having a cell phone here in NZ in the mid 90’s).

Sandra answered sounding flustered. She couldn’t talk right now as she was just going into a meeting with a client in the city and she was late and still needed time to prepare for her presentation.  “Is it important?” she asked me. I was speechless. And completely and utterly spooked. And I still am to this day.

Rory and I never set foot inside that house again.