A cold southerly has brought snow to the tops of the Tararua range.
Season 9 of one of my favourite shows, New Zealand murder mystery series Brokenwood, has just started. This 28 minute radio interview with head writer and co-producer Tim Balme is very interesting. 📺
Brokenwood is somewhat Tardis-like, he says.
It may appear like a small town, but once you enter it, it’s as big as you need it to be.
These golden plants at the beach are native Pīngao. Fantastic for binding sand.
I have an Olympus Tough TG-870 camera that I last used in 2018 when we went snorkelling in Niue. With a holiday in Samoa coming up I've dug it out, charged the battery and am now checking the manual.
16 megapixel, 21 to 105 mm zoom, 21 scene modes including 4 underwater.
Apparently when a Kōtare | Sacred Kingfisher hangs around I am compelled to take photos of it. 🐦
Their beaks fascinate me.
Just a little clip from the other morning of a Scaup and a Shoveler on the lake.
At Harrison's Garden Shop cafe for brunch with my friend J today I noticed Bushy Tailed Tea: green tea with echinacea and lemon. Turns out to be delicious.
Oh, and brunch was good with a different good green tea and perfectly cooked scrambled egg with halloumi.
Excellent conversation too.
Another Dana Stabenow book down: Play With Fire (A Kate Shugak Investigation Book 5). This one wasn't my favourite but is still a reasonable read. It's heavy on the discussion of extremist religion; not so big on the action that made the last few so compelling. 📚
Hah hah. I'd heard about the TV series Deadloch and have now watched episode 1.
It's definitely over the top, part sendup of small-town cops meet serial killer, part caricature, fairly funny, and inverts the usual sexism.
Nice to see a series from this part of the world.
I'll be watching more. 📺
Well! Watched a recording of the Nigeria v Canada football match. Lots of yellow cards and even a red card. I’ve now in two days watched more sports than ever before in my life I think. Also, I’m exhausted, after watching all that running around. 90 minutes is a long time! ⚽️
I wrote that word minorities
in my previous post and now regret it. In my world, as a pale-skinned woman born in England and living most of my life in Aotearoa, stories have always been about white men or boys. In fact, they are the minority in this world, far outnumbered by non-white & non-males.
Yay, Uhura! Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S02E06 — it's like they're getting round to telling the other stories from the Original Series … the stories about what the other crew members did. 🖖🏼
It's like real life: stories of what women (and minorities) did throughout history are surfacing.
Who am I? I watched the first match of the 2023 Women’s World Cup Soccer, NZL v Nor. ⚽️
Decades ago when I lived in Edinburgh for a bit I enjoyed Delia Smith's cooking show on TV so bought the books. Today I've referred to her fruit crumble recipe.
The apples were stewed up a while ago and frozen. They came from the tree at the property we used to rent out and have now sold.
We have several Barbary doves that hang around our place. This one by our gate was calling to another in a tree across the lane. 🐦
A particularly interesting fragment from a podcast episode, Gayle Lemmon on making the invisible visible | Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, 22 June 2023:
You cannot talk about Climate without talking about Gender …
We wrote a paper in 2014 for the Council on Foreign Relations … called Fragile States, Fragile Lives, about climate, natural disaster, and child marriage.
And the fact is that the minute you have fragility, it is girls whose lives pay the price. 80% of those displaced by climate are women.
Women are 14 times more likely to die in natural disaster.
If you got women equal access to inputs, you could make up for the food lost to climate, basically through better farming production.
And in places that experience drought, child marriage rates go up to 118% higher.
So all of this stuff matters, but we never talk about it.
Dammit, there are two items on the agenda for today’s meeting of the Horowhenua District Council that particularly interest me. They’re about Waikawa Beach. The live stream though lasted all of 4 seconds. I’ve reported it and hope they get the stream back online…
This is quite something:
As the Women’s World Cup approaches, a clever marketing video employed the latest deepfake technology to challenge gender stereotypes.
An ad by telecoms company Orange shows an epic sizzle reel of the French men’s soccer team displaying their skills, featuring huge stars like Kylian Mbappe, Antoine Griezmann, and Olivier Giroud. Except, it’s not actually them.
The twist comes halfway through the video when it is revealed the footage viewers have just watched is doctored. The soccer players performing the scintillating skills belong to the women’s team, not the men’s team.
Many thanks to Micro.Blogger Gunnar R Johansson for the link.
Heh heh. This Nike ad featuring footballer Megan Rapinoe as a superhero is pretty cool.
It's hard to take photos of Tīrairaka | New Zealand fantails — they flit and flutter so fast.
Photos often end up like this.
But occasionally you might get lucky.
They're so cute with their white eyebrows and necklace. They're friendly too. One of my favourites!
