Edmonds "Sure to Rise" Baking Powder advertisement, Dominion, 6 April 1925 - via PapersPast
Slightly Intrepid
Modestly adventurous, while also endeavouring to look both ways when crossing the road.
06 April 2025
03 April 2025
I've got a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome
Thursday music corner: MJ Lenderman, who played Wellington's Meow Nui on Monday night, is a 26-year-old North Carolina alt-rock / alt-country artist with a penchant for numerous collaborations. He has been a member of indie rock outfit Wednesday and played and recorded with fellow artists Waxahatchee, Indigo De Souza and This Is Lorelei. He has released five solo albums, five EPs and six singles.
Wristwatch is Lenderman's most recent single, and features on his current album Manning Fireworks. This performance is from the Jimmy Fallon show in September 2024.
MJ Lenderman - Wristwatch (live, 2024)
30 March 2025
27 March 2025
Retired layman looks on in scorn with a transplanted heart
20 March 2025
Just like that film with Michael Caine
Thursday music corner: The Godfathers are an English rock band formed in London in 1985, who performed together until 2000 before reuniting in 2008. After an initial album released on the Corporate Image label in 1986, the band released three major-label albums on Epic between 1988 and 1991. None of their singles cracked the UK top 40, but two singles (She Gives Me Love and Unreal World) did reach the US Modern Rock top 10 in 1989 and 1991. Birth School Work Death is their best-remembered song, which was the lead and title track on the band's first Epic album release in 1988. It features two guitar solos that rank amongst the best punk-pop efforts of the 1980s.
The Godfathers - Birth School Work Death (1987)
18 March 2025
Hobson's many challenges
[New Zealand's first Governor, Captain William] Hobson was experienced neither as a politician nor a diplomat when he arrived in New Zealand in January 1840 to take up his appointment as Lieutenant Governor. A successful but unremarkable naval career had done little to prepare him for this posting and in retrospect, the Colonial Office's selection of Hobson as New Zealand's first Governor was ill-advised, and perhaps even careless.
Had New Zealand been a colony with a negligible European settlement, Hobson may well have been equal to the task, but by 1840 the country had already witnessed two decades of increasing European intervention, with the accompanying emergence of factionalism between the various interest groups that had by then established themselves. Hobson's arrival stirred the ambitions of the missionaries, obstructed the designs of the land speculators, and unsettled the expectations of many of the British immigrants. Moreover, the whole colony was couched in intrigue, which Hobson initially approached as a naive outsider.
To complicate matters even further, Hobson had to contend with the instructions from his political masters in London. The policy he was expected to follow was sometimes vague and frequently impractical in its implementation. The delay of several months for communications between New Zealand and London often left the Governor marooned in an island of opposition and hostility.
- Paul Moon, Hobson: Governor of New Zealand 1840-1842, Auckland, 1998, p.306
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