This is half-pie.

Note: yes, I know that the polls have closed for this year… but I found this draft posting which I was going to enliven after the article I wrote for the Forest & Bird website went live. But for various reasons that didn’t happen for a of couple weeks after I wrote this, and then I forgot about it. For my own records, there’s also the Facebook page, and a posting on the Wellingtonista too… but as we know, in the end, the Kiwi won, though the Kārearea did get into the top 10 for the first time ever…

It’s time once again to vote for New Zealand’s Bird of the Year over on the NZ Forest & Bird website. Voting starts tomorrow and goes through until October. (I’ll get the link sorted out when the voting page comes live.)

This year I’m taking a more active role in all of this: I am officially the campaign manager for the New Zealand Falcon, the Kārearea.

As part of all this I’ve convinced one falcon to join Twitter. While he may have entirely the wrong idea about Twitter (to him I think it sounds like the perfect place to find food) he’s happy to talk, for now. Follow @kakarapiti.

I’ve also had to write a campaign opening “speech” for the Forest & Bird website…

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Kārearea

No animal should to be anthropomorphised – but this is politics and I’m going to do it anyway: the falcon is a proud, fearless creature; as contemptuous of humans as it is casually brilliant at predation. The Kārearea, or New Zealand Falcon, absolutely deserves to be this year’s Bird of the Year.

It is our only remaining endemic member of the raptor family, a group with an interesting but mostly unfortunate story in these islands. There is the enduring ornithological mystery of why the peregine falcon, the world’s most widespread bird of prey, is not found in New Zealand. Could the locals have been too tough? There was the now-extinct Haast’s eagle, the fearsomely large cousin of the Kārearea, that would have been sufficiently large to carry off small children. Did explorer Charles Douglas shoot the last two of these in a trip up the Landsborough in the 1870s, or did he merely shoot the last two of the also now-extinct, but slightly smaller, Eyles’ Harrier?

Luckily the Kārearea is not as large and physically threatening as these birds, though it still has its moments. In defense of their nests the falcons are utterly fearless, and will remove hat, hair, and chunks of scalp tissue from any human daring to get too close. (There’s many a back-country musterer become unhorsed from accidentally riding across a nesting territory, though you’ll seldom hear tell of it. Their dogs get a fair share too: I’ve heard of one dog being unable to shake the falcon gripping its back until it jumped off a bluff into the nearest creek.)

Unlike most of our native birds, they actually seem contemptuous of humans. Once I tried walking up to one sitting on a fence post. It let me get to within about five metres of it before it gave a couple of wingbeats, enough to lift it over to the next fencepost; and all the while its eyes were on mine. I advanced on it, and again it beat to the next post. After a couple of repeats of this though, it took off, slowly flying away as if it felt I was of little interest and even less threat.

In hunting too, they are fearless predators, taking on much bigger birds on the wing. I’ve been told of watching a duck, trying to fly up out of a creek; it was high above the water when the falcon slammed into it from above. With talons jammed into its back and the weight of the falcon bearing down on it, all the duck could do was allow itself to be ridden down to the ground, and certain death.

Once, I walked across a ridgeline and paused for a rest, looking into some dead trees in the gully below, full of noisy roosting blackbirds. Over my right shoulder a dark silent shape sped past and down, at the last minute voicing its hunting cry “ki-ki-ki-ki-ki”. An upwards startle of birds met the falcon at equal height and a catch was made, as easy as that.

So by now you must be thinking: why should I vote for this steely-eyed assassin? Why should the Kārearea be 2009 Bird of the Year?

It’s simple. We need the wild.

New Zealand is not a garden: it needs the feral and free along with the pretty and cute. It needs a hint of danger, sharp of eye and red of claw, to leaven the sweetness of voice and plumage of the other candidates.

Yet there’s fewer and fewer falcons about, with the usual catalogue of introduced predators, together with newer threats like power lines, reducing their population. Falcons need our help.

And, help given, think of the benefits of a larger, stable population! Even us city dwellers might start to see more of them as permanent residents, more than just the occasional visitors Blenheim, Palmerston North and Christchurch have enjoyed recently. And while possibly not everybody would be happy to see them, to many people they’d be a fantastic addition to the avian fauna of our cities.

A resident falcon could:

• sort out, permanently, that rooster next door that wakes you up in the morning;
• dispose of those hooligan sparrows destroying your cherry flowers;
• scare off that juvenile tuī that mimics a car alarm;
• render to pile of windblown feathers the starlings nesting in your roof; and
• clean its beak on that blackbird that crapped elderberries on your clean washing.

Bring it on, I say. Vote Karearea!

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So. I think you should vote too. Hopefully for the kārearea; but then again it’s all about having a little fun and raising awareness, so vote for whatever you like. Just vote though, OK?

I just can’t stop singing this song: it’s insanely catchy, and the kids love it too:

It’s from They Might Be Giants‘ new children’s CD of science-themed tracks, which arrived for us from Amazon earlier in the week. Recommended!

Thanks to Owen today I’ve been listening to Humphreys & Keen’s The Overflow – an extraordinarily lovely 2006 album from two core ex-members of the wonderful Able Tasmans. I had not come across it before Mr Harris’s intervention, which does not reflect well on me, sadly.

Anyway, my brain got stuck on one track this afternoon, as I listened to it for the first time. I was grinding away on a piece of SQL, and the song was entitled Clancy. I immediately caught the reference to Banjo Paterson’s Clancy of The Overflow.

Of course, this was enough to halt my brain grinding on SQL, when only a click away I could satisfy my vague remembering of this poem. And so this I did.

Clancy of The Overflow is a rough-hewn but heartfelt thing, like many of his; a piece for the straight talking people of a young, urbanised nation that still doesn’t always like to think of itself as urban (just like ours, in fact). It’s based on a true story: Paterson was working as a lawyer and was asked to write a letter to Clancy, a shearer who was thought to be working at The Overflow station.

And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,
(And I think the same was written with a thumb-nail dipped in tar)
’Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
“Clancy’s gone to Queensland droving, and we don’t know where he are.”

The rest of the poem is spent imagining where Clancy has got to. It’s evocative stuff:

As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover’s life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know. […]
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars.

But then we’re back in town, the contrast between Clancy’s life and the author’s all too apparent:

I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall

And at that point I looked out the window and saw a ray of sunlight hitting the building across the street. But only just.

For the first time that day I wondered what my father and brother would be doing back on the farm, and whether the sun was shining there too, on their golden hill country east of the Clutha River.

And later, I thought of one of my other favourite poems: W.B. Yeats The Lake Isle of Innisfree, written four years after Clancy, and whose last verse was my email signature when I was living in London, expressing my wish to be elsewhere:

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

And every time my mind roved over those words I would see this place:

I still do.

Of course, these are just the idealistic daydreams of the cubicle-dweller.

Clancy himself took that whole beautiful romantic notion of the countryside around the back and shot it in the head with his own reply to Banjo Paterson, some years later (you can tell he was even a little bitter at being best known as the subject of a poem):

And my path I’ve often wended
Over drought-scourged plains extended, […]
And the stock in hundreds dying,
Along the road are lying,
To count among the “pleasures”
That townsfolk never know.

So yes. Chew on that, city boy.

Information:

• The City & the City, by China Miéville (Miéville doesn’t seem to have a homepage anywhere; here’s his wikipedia entry)
• From Wellington City Libraries, Wellington.

I had seen a little hype for this book on Boing Boing and elsewhere, but not read anything about it. This was a good thing, as it turned out, and in deference to your enjoyment of this book I must also forbear from revealing too much.

I’m a fan of Miéville; I’ve read almost all of his books. I’ve even got my daughter started on Un-Lun-Dun, his YA novel (though sadly she’s reverted to that accursed teenage wizard for now). His Perdido Street Station stands apart as one of the best examples of the new urban fantasy genre; if you read nothing else of his, read that.

The City & The City should also be on your list. It starts out as a detective story set in some decayed city on the edge of Europe: so far, so Miéville. But already by the end of Chapter One we start to get glimpses of something else, something bigger and altogether weirder that everyone seems to be complicit in. It’s forty pages before this thing has a name; and over the next 50 pages it’s introduced in such a way that we readers become complicit too.

This exposition is among the best and most enjoyable I have ever read – and I can’t go into more details without ruining it for you. Admittedly though, at times the narrative is a bit of a balancing act between being believable and ludicrous; but then again, humanity’s ability to self-deceive always provides a rationale to the proceedings.

And in the end, all I can really say is that this book is an exploration of the power and meaning of borders and boundaries; our perceptions of these boundaries and in the end, the idiocy of them.

So is it a fantasy novel? Yes and no. Is it a detective novel? Yes and no. Should you read it? I reckon.

The other week was Rebecca’s birthday. As always, I had a bit of difficulty getting that “something small” that was required… until I passed the wargames shop in the BNZ Centre.

“Uh-oh”, I hear you say.

OK, hear me out. I’m not about to turn into one of those bearded blokes that spend weekends playing Warhammer or re-enacting the Battle of Waterloo in miniature. (I don’t think it’s possible for me to even grow a beard.)

Over last Queen’s Birthday weekend we went to Napier. While staying at Rebecca’s Aunt and Uncle’s house they got us started on some interesting board games. They had an amazing kids game called Der schwarze Pirat¹; a travel board game called 10 days in Asia and another board game called Lost Cities.

We all had a lot of fun with these, and so I reckoned that the right game, one that we could play as a family, might be a Good (and “something small”) Thing. The wargames shop had a one called Fast Flowing Forest Fellers, which looked pretty interesting. A racing game (tick! simple objectives for the kids); 8 and above (tick! kind of²); plays up to six (tick!); and 30-60 minute play time (tick! for people with attention deficit – i.e., the kids and me). Just the thing! (Pity about the name though.)

Superficially the game looks simple – your lumberjacks race to the end of the board. But there’s a selection of printed boards enabling different “rivers” to be set up. There’s obstacles in the form of cunningly shaped watersources, floating logs, and of course other players. And there’s various backflows and currents that other, less charitable players will shove you into³, carrying you back towards the start.

Rebecca was well pleased with it (phewf). And since then, we’ve played it a lot, all four of us. We’ve all won at least once, showing that you can play with or without strategy and still win. If you want a fun family game for adults and kids-under-ten, this one will do the job nicely. And Rebecca and I sometimes play a game after the kids have gone to bed; although it has to be said that a crowded board is better, and it’s actually better fun with more players. We may have to modify the two-person rules a little.

Then, on the way to Masterton on Friday, we stopped at All Aboard, the board games shop in Featherston. There’s a huge, and fantastic, range of stuff there, and we were lucky to escape with only one major purchase: a game for slightly younger kids called Gulo Gulo.

In this game you are a sneaky wolverine trying to steal eggs from a nest. However, the nest is rigged with an alarm: as you can see above, if you disturb the eggs too much the weighted stick falls to the ground and you’ve triggered the “Egg Alarm” (and at this point the kids usually squeal with glee); and your poor little wolverine has to retreat back along the path.

This game is a pleasing mix of luck and skill, with only a small tactical component. And again, this one is a hit with the kids – their little fingers give them enough of an edge that there’s an even chance of them winning.

One of the interesting things about both of these games (and many of the others mentioned) is that they are from Germany. Wikipedia has an entry for these German Style Board Games, and there seems to be enough of a buzz about it for Wired to cover it recently. I’m sensing a deep and fertile ground for future obsessional behaviour on my part.

Meanwhile, we’ve gained a nice little bit of family social time – and a way more interactive time than any of the Wii games we’ve played except maybe for Wii Sports. Rosa is enthusiastic enough to get the games out and set them up, ready to dragoon us into playing with her. (She’s hard to turn down.)

It’s lucky that we don’t go past that shop in Featherston very often.

¹ In which you have to use a little bellows to puff your pirate ship about the board collecting treasure. Lots of fun. Watch out for that Pirate though – players each take a turn being the pirate on the roll of a die.

² In store they said that the ages on games are relevant for unsupervised use. And it turns out the Rosa, though six, is fine with this game.

³ Once Rebecca and I start on tit for tat shoving into the current, one of the kids will often win. I usually start it, I have to admit.

I couldn’t pass up this video.

The Punks Not Dad album is now available on iTunes.

[If you have trouble with this you can always ask the kids how to do it.]

A few weeks ago there was a little flurry of excitement here in this far-flung corner of the ex-empire at news that John Lydon was advertising CountryLife butter in the UK. Even our Federated Farmers got into the act, with a press release containing the immortal words “Never mind the butter…”.

I actually quite like the ads – they’re a bit of a laugh. But I like this response even better:

It’s true. Punks Not Dad.

I was going to rant about how disappointed I am in the latest album of my favourite band, the Super Furry Animals. But no rants – I love these guys.

I have almost everything they’ve ever done (185 tracks on my iPhone at last count) so this was a hotly anticipated release. And so I bought it from the band’s website in a feverish rush this morning, as soon as it became available.

Unfortunately, my initial impression is that of a grab-bag of mostly sub-standard tracks that I will persist with in case they somehow grow on me. I get the feeling that Gruff Rhys might be conserving his songwriting efforts for his various, and brilliant, solo stuff (under his own name, and Neon Neon) and the songs sung by the other bandmembers just don’t do it for me. Sorry.

There are two good things to take from this though:

1. the song that is probably the best on the album – a quirky love song for urban designers – is currently available free from their website. Recommended.
2. the US$8 I paid for the album went to THEM, and not to any poxy record label, so that they can go on to make a better album. Plus I don’t have another CD to try and find space (alphabetised) in the drawer for.

So, what now? What other powerhouses of Welsh rock should I be listening to instead?

I’m taken with the idea of The Peth. They’d appear to be the psychedelic stoner band that the SFA aren’t quite – they share some members, and of course have the one and only Rhys Ifans on vocals (who used to sing for the SFA in the very early days). Calling your first single “Let’s Go Fucking Mental” is a bit of a pointer to a possible direction. Or not. There’s a thoughtful review by the Guardian, and after reading that I’ve downloaded the album while writing this blog posting. Tomorrow’s walking-to-work music sorted.

And then there’s Punks Not Dad, a Cardiff punk band with the full on 1-2-3-4-GO! thing but singing of more contemporary concerns of the punk generation:

Nobody told me how it was gonna be
Working so hard to feed the family
Some days I feel like some kinda slave
Heating little jars up in the microwave
— The Filth And The Puree

I came across them this evening on Boing Boing, and it’s been the best laugh for days. Recommended.

The kids don’t understand us – they think were full of shite
But WE ARE THE DADS – and the Dads are alright!
Visiting the in-laws, drifting to the right
But WE ARE THE DADS – and the Dads are alright!
— We Are The Dads

Their album is out in May. I can’t wait.

…was to get reacquainted with Last.fm, the social music site. I’d signed up not long after the Last.fm / AudioScrobbler merger in 2006, but couldn’t get it to work nicely with my then iPod. So I switched to Mog.com.

Anyway, for whatever silly reason I decided it was time to switch back. And again, for no really good reason I wanted all the music play counts accumulated in the last two years to turn up in my Last.fm account.

Ignoring all the weather outside (some of which was actually quite good) I fearlessly wrestled with iTunes; the Last.Fm client; and various preference files, log files, and assorted other ephemera. I may report that:

• historic iTunes play counts can only be imported to brand new accounts only; not to accounts you may have opened years ago and not used; and not even to new accounts that just happen to have the same username as the old account you deleted 24 hours previously. You’ll need to open a new account. But try not to spend too much time obsessing about finding a username that’s a) not taken; and b) reflects your own vanity ineffable nature.
• if your iTunes folder is in an unexpected place then your historic play counts will not be imported to your new account. In fact, /Users/Shared/, which seemed like a good place to put the music because then your computer’s users could all use it, proved impossible for Last.fm to find.
• once you move your iTunes music folders to meet with the expectations of the Last.fm client importing still does not happen. When you check the console log files you’ll see that the client application is still looking in the old place for the music (oh yes – it apparently did know where the music was, it just couldn’t do anything with it). It turns out that deleting the iTunes preferences in ~/Library/Preferences, and getting iTunes to create a new preferences file, seems to clear up this problem.
• Of course, once you fix this it still doesn’t work, because even the act of unsuccessfully trying to import play counts (as you did previously) seems to have the effect of making it impossible to import anything later. So you need to open another new account.
• after overcoming your annoyance at having to choose yet another username, you may then import all the play counts.

And so I have a shiny new Last.fm account. What a bloody waste of time. I need to find a series of more productive fleeting obsessions, I think.

Mash Wednesday is that time when I post a single tasty mashup to halfpie.net.

Today: Radiohead. Creep. Boogie Woogie. Errrrr….

What I like about this is not so much the music, which is a fairly usual sort of “take a famous track and make it a bit bouncier” kind of mashup, but the video. The video’s maker would appear to have clipped these from around the net… and it’s easy to imagine Radiohead’s Creep being the subject of thousands of lipsynced efforts from the young and misunderstood. And here they all are.

I was just as ridiculous when I was a teenager. But I didn’t have the internet and so the radius of idiocy around me was a bit smaller.

Last week: The Cure vs Peter Bjorn and John

Next time: I’m not sure….