clockworkfish

meme duty

After some other people did the Serenity Firefly Personality Test, so I did too (and I'm very pleased with the results).

You are Kaylee Frye (Ship Mechanic)

You are good at fixing things.
You are usually cheerful.
You appreciate being treated with delicacy and specialness.

Click here to take the Serenity Firefly Personality Test

cultural piracy

Today a duty free shop stopped selling cigarettes which were branded with the Silver Fern and had New Zealand written on them. I was fascinated by the parallels between the problem people had with this issue, and Maori wanting to protect use of tiki and koru.

I needed that

Words for when breastfeeding isn't as fun as they said it would be:

boohoobies: (n) 1. breastfeeding breasts which are suffering some kind of pain, distress or discomfort. 2. absent breastfeeding breasts which offspring are sure the presence of will make everything better.

quiet

Little L is off with C to visit relatives for an hour or so.

The house is *extremely* quiet. No snuffling, cooing, farting, wailing, grizzling, or adults talking to the baby or about the baby.

It feels like a mausoleum or art gallery.

Also the band called dave split up, so the bass playing will be more of a solo effort for a while. It's not so stink that the band broke up, but it's hard to not have an easy outlet for the music.

Ah, baby just came home, so we now have gurgles, snorts, coughs and wailing. I shall go feed him.

pidgeon bus

Today I met a pidgeon. This pidgeon was sitting on the driver's side windscreen wiper when we got into the car. We assumed it would fly away when we turned the engine on.

Instead it sat on the car until we had travelled (slowly) 3 blocks away. It looked faintly surprised during this activity, but also (I thought) slightly pleased with itself.

pr disasters of our time

I'm reserving judgment on the Meridian Energy disconnection fiasco until I can locate some facts.

I have noticed that the electricity companies involved (Mighty River Power owns Meridian) have spectacularly messed up the PR job on this. Okay, so it is a massive PR challenge. Hard to salvage anything from a situation where you cause someone's to die because of a bill of less than $200.

But giving the grieving family a cheque for $10,000 compounds the problem, and then saying you will no longer disconnect your customers (even presumably the noisy students who are spending all their money on booze) is just daft.

My reading is they either needed to:
a) argue that the facts were unclear and drop the issue into an investigation, or
b) mea culpa like mad and promise significant changes to policy (and possible sanctions against the contractor who did the disconnect).

Instead they are wandering erratically between a and b, and looking totally clueless. Which is sad really, as I get the impression from the interviews with the two CEOs that they are genuine people who are really upset that their companies have been involved in such a tragedy. I don't think anyone much believes that though.