Peace on Earth

Video: Click on title above for link to our family Christmas greetings. Merry Christmas :)

Beards are back

(Source: The Guardian) For years, beards were shorthand for sandal-wearing hippies of a certain age. But no more! It's time to throw away your razor, writes hairy-chinned Charlie Porter

Post Modernism is the new Black

(Source: The Economist) Fascinating article on how modern retail was influenced by the Post Modernists.

The Cult of Genghis Khan

(Source: The Economist) This article shows how Genghis Khan's exploits have been re-written to become more palatable from a marketing perspective, and the growng issues between Mongolia and China over land and economic dominance.

So many lucky men, restless in the midst of abundance

(Source: The Economist) A rambling, but interesting article on economics - "the dismal science" and happiness at work. Read this with a glass of wine in hand... :)

Ponsonby

Leys Institute Community Centre and Library

Eclectic Parnell street

Painting by Michael Smither

One of my favourite NZ artists: "Rocks with Mountain"

http://outofsight.co.nz/Taranaki/michael.htm

'Breakfast at Tiffany's' dress fetches £410,000

(Source: Radio NZ) A black dress worn by Audrey Hepburn in the 1961 film [[Breakfast at Tiffany's]] sold for £410,000 in London on Tuesday. With a premium paid to auctioneers Christie's included, the total cost for the sleeveless, floor-length Givenchy dress rose to £467,200. It was bought by an anonymous telephone bidder in a long and tense session.

Shot of New Zealand from Space Station

Image shows bottom on North Island and top of South Island - hey, Chris and Lisa - can almost see your place :) (Hanmer Springs - for those who don't know).

Subliminal Messages Drive the Mind to Distraction

(Source: Scientific American) What you don't "see" may distract you anyway.

TROUBLE FOCUSING? Could be subliminal messages playing with your mind. A new study shows that images people don't even realize they're seeing can break their concentration. A new study shows that subconscious signals interfere with concentration, causing people to become easily distracted and falter on even the simplest of tasks. When people concentrate, they focus on the task at hand and filter out information irrelevant to what they are doing. A new report, however, published in this week's Science, says that sometimes unrelated info slips through, even if it is not consciously processed.

Ebola virus epidemic killing gorillas

(Source: Scientific American)
GORILLAS and many chimpanzees in the Republic of Congo have recently been targeted by the Zaire strain of the Ebola virus, which kills 80 percent of its victims. In parts of the Republic of Congo in equatorial Africa, nearly all the gorillas are gone. Since 2001 gorilla and chimpanzee remains have showed up near and in the Lossi Sanctuary, close to the Gabon border. Just what was killing these great apes was unclear. Now researchers finger the Zaire strain of the Ebola virus as the culprit.

Against the tide of chic climate change gloom

(Source: NZ Herald) Deborah Coddington's alternate view on global warming and the Stern Report.

Interesting Movie House Ceiling

Shot of the Day

Ponsonby shop:

Robert Fisk: Who's running Lebanon?

(Source: The Independent) Devastated by Israel's bombs, threatened by the looming might of Iran and Syria, and divided from within by its own ethnic bloodletting - Lebanon is an unfolding tragedy with little hope of salvation. As the nation rushes headlong towards civil war, Robert Fisk, who has lived in Beirut for 30 years, picks through the city's wreckage to identify the agitators, military leaders and politicians who now wield the real power.

Shot of the Day

Lisa

A coffee table shot

Office Xmas Party Shot

The theme was Scouts and Guides Jamboree - our team was the Tartan Firestarters

- call me Che McGuevara :)

Shot of the Day

Dude on the bus

Video: Christmas in the Park

Couple of 100,000 people watched this show in the Domain Sat night. We perched at our mates' apartment close by to stay out of the rain and people-watch. Fireworks were fairly impressive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcMlox_3pRg

Monsoon intensity increasing with Global Warming

(Source: Scientific American) The monsoon is the great life-giver and the great destroyer of the subcontinent. Without rain from these annual storms, crops wither, animals die and more than half the world's population suffers from potential famine. With too much rain, crops are inundated, animals drown and people suffer from floods and the diseases that follow in their wake. Observations of this critical climate system stretch back decades, and the overall level of rainfall has changed little over the years. But now researchers have discovered a trend within the annual measurements toward fewer, more extreme downpours--a trend that bodes ill for flooding and other natural disasters.

Ancient Meteorites from Outer Solar System May Have Provided Raw Materials for Life

(Source: Scientific American) Meteorites rich in carbon and water fall to Earth once or twice every few decades. But when a truck-size meteorite crashed on frozen Tagish Lake in western Canada in 2000, researchers received a specimen speckled with stardust that promised to offer clues about the chemistry of our early solar system.

Global Warming Could Disrupt GPS Satellites, Study Says

(Source: National Geographic) A buildup of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere could require changes in the way satellites are launched and might impact the function of global positioning systems (GPS), an international team of atmospheric scientists suggests. Networks of orbiting GPS satellites send signals back to Earth that allow everything from jetfighters to cell phones to pinpoint their exact locations.

Global Warming Already Causing Extinctions, Scientists Say

(Source: National Geographic) No matter where they look, scientists are finding that global warming is already killing species—and at a much faster rate than had originally been predicted.
"What surprises me most is that it has happened so soon," said biologist Camille Parmesan of the University of Texas, Austin, lead author of a new study of global warming's effects.Parmesan and most other scientists hadn't expected to see species extinctions from global warming until 2020.

"Alchemy" used to create great violins

(Source: National Geographic) A fascinating snippet on how tests have revealed how Antonio Stradivari made some of the great violins.

War of the World

When I was at junior school, we were fed a diet of state-approved history. Even then we could see how much it was slanted to show the white settlers in a positive light. Similarly, the British colonial adventures were always presented as such - the exotic adventures of free-rolling, high-minded imperialists who were out to civilize the "natives". When I got to high school, history was plain dull and boring, so I dropped it - they seemed to focus exclusively on European history.
As I have got older, I have started revisiting some of this material - one of the writers I have come across is a guy called Niall Ferguson, who is a young history professor who has put together some interesting work on the British Empire - called "Empire" - was a BBC or ITN series, and I am just reading his new book called the War of the World, examining the root causes of conflict in the last century. I recommend him because of his easy style, and incisive commentary - have leant a lot from reading his work.

http://www.niallferguson.org/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0713997087/qid=1150993536/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl?tag2=niallferguson-21

Shots of The Day

Taken this morning in Parnell.

National Geographic video: Time Running Out to Save Seafood

(Source: National Geographic) A thought-provoking video clip - preceded by an ad ! - someone has to pay the bills - about over-fishing of the oceans.

Circles

Hope you enjoy this poem with video. Click on title link for YouTube connection or this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUIhg8ft6qw

Potential Ice Shelf Collapse

(Source: Stuff) The Ross Ice Shelf, a raft of ice the size of France, could collapse quickly, triggering a dramatic rise in sea levels, scientists warn. A New Zealand-led drilling team in Antarctica has recovered three million years of climate history, but the news is not good for the future. Initial analysis of sea-floor cores near Scott Base suggest the Ross Ice Shelf had collapsed in the past and had probably done so suddenly.

Pub Talk

(Source: The Independent) - make sure you read all the way to the end... :)

"Miles Kington: Slavery, the Ashes and other sorry international affairs...
'Wasn't moving convicts to Australia a kind of slavery? I wish they'd kept Shane Warne's ancestors back here in Britain...'"

Snow leopard fitted with GPS tag

(Source: BBC) The habits of the most elusive of the big cats, the snow leopard, may no longer remain such a mystery. For the first time, a team has fitted a snow leopard with a Global Positioning System (GPS) collar to track the secretive creature's movements. The 35kg (75lb) female was captured on the Purdum Mali ridge in Pakistan.

High Country Weather

A poem by James Baxter, NZ poet:


Alone we are born
And die alone;
Yet see the red-gold cirrus
Over snow-mountain shine.

Upon the upland road
Ride easy, stranger:
Surrender to the sky
Your heart of anger.

Shot of the Day

Thought for the day

'Act justly, love tenderly, walk humbly with your God' (Micah 6:8)

The Plot thickens: Polonium detected at Berezovsky's office

(Source: The Guardian) Detectives have found traces of polonium 210 at the London offices of the exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, it was revealed last night. Officers were searching 7 Down Street, Mayfair, after the discovery of the radioactive substance that killed Mr Berezovsky's friend and former employee, Alexander Litvinenko.

Dawkins takes fight against religion into the classroom

(Source: The Independent) Richard Dawkins, the Oxford geneticist, best-selling author and campaigning atheist, is to take his battle against God into Britain's schools after setting up a foundation to counter the religious indoctrination of young people.

The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason will subsidise books, pamphlets and DVDs for teachers to fight the "educational scandal" that has seen the growth in popularity of "pseudo science" and "irrational" ideas.

The foundation will also conduct research into what makes some people more susceptible to religious ideas than others and whether young people are particularly vulnerable. And it will aim to "raise public consciousness" to make it unacceptable to refer to a "Catholic child" or a "Muslim child"; Professor Dawkins believes that "it is immoral to brand young children with the religion of their parents".

Aussies decimate Brits in first Ashes test

For those of you living on Mars :)

(Source: The Independent) Australia completed an emphatic 277-run win in the opening Ashes Test after England's resistance crumbled in the first 21 overs of the final day at the Gabba.

Churchill 'borrowed' famous lines from books by HG Wells

(Source: The Independent) Winston Churchill was a closet science fiction fan who borrowed the lines for one of his most famous speeches from HG Wells, says new research.

Robert Fisk: Dragons of Lebanon's past emerge for Gemayel funeral

(Source: The Independent) Robert Fisk comments on the implications of yet another political assassination in Lebanon.

Zulu king who crushed British Army honoured with historic blue plaque

(Source: The Independent) King Cetshwayo's struggle with the British, at the head of an army equipped only with shields and spears, seems to make him an unlikely recipient of an English Heritage blue plaque - the commemorative marker affixed to buildings linked to great figures of the past.

Read more by clicking on the title link above.

Stunning store window

Taken in Auckland city

Anniversary

On Saturday we celebrated an anniversary with Robyn having been in Auckland for 2 years. Here are some pics from our evening out:

The universal diarist

(Source: The Economist)

Interesting story about Mena Trott, one of the pioneers of the blog

Very Funny Beer Ad

enjoy !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95-IHuDScfo

Video: Rio de Janeiro

(Source: Turnhere) LARANJEIRAS Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
In Laranjeiras you can dine and dance the night away, and take an electric train through the jungle to see Brazil's famous Christ statue.

Another great travel video short from the team at TurnHere.

Liberty Pic

From the launch in Auckland harbour.

Independent Articles on Lebanon (Fisk)

(Source: Independent) You may be aware of a recent assassination in Lebanon. These two articles review the likely impact - a potential resurgence of the civil war.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2004230.ece
http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/article2004204.ece

Video: Statute of Liberty comes to Auckland

Check this out ! Last night we went to the Air New Zealand Holidays launch - complete with arrival of the Statue of Liberty - done by our agency - pretty cool, huh ?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5duiyfK-do

Wellington trip

Snapped this shot in Wellington today

Day in pictures

(Source: BBC), some stunning pics but check this one: A young girl sits among other worshippers during Friday's prayers at Tehran University in Iran.

Java sunken treasure to be sold

(Source: BBC) Scientists in Indonesia are preparing to auction tens of thousands of artefacts salvaged from a sunken ship off the coast of Java.
The items, which are believed to be more than 1,000 years old, include ceramics, tombstones and swords.

Birkenhead Point shops

We went out for some coffee, lunch and window-shopping Sunday at this trendy shopping area on Auckland's North Shore. Some pics that hopefully capture the sense of place.