AFL: St Kilda v Carlton

A crowd of just over 12,000 enjoyed the Anzac Day AFL fixture at the stadium in Wellington today, witnessing a come-from-behind victory by Carlton over St Kilda. Having been exhorted to support St Kilda as 'the home team' through some sort of trans-Tasman deal, the crowd witnessed Carlton storming back from 25 points down after the first quarter, to taking the lead midway through the third quarter, and finally stretching out to victory over St Kilda by 40 points. The final score: Carlton 121 - 81 St Kilda. For a novice like me, who has only been to a single match before and that approximately 10 years ago, it was an ideal way to spend Anzac Day afternoon, and for the uninitiated the game is much easier to follow live than it is on TV.   

Anzac Day eve street parade

Video of this afternoon's lunchtime parade from Parliament to the new Pukeahu Memorial Park, with plenty of WW1 vehicles - most of which are from Peter Jackson's personal collection. It was perfect capital weather for it!

The glory of Venetian democracy

[A]n insight can be gained into the labyrinthine Venetian mind by describing the process by which a doge was elected. On the morning of the election the youngest member of the Signoria, one branch of the administration, fell on his knees to pray in the basilica; then he went out into Saint Mark's Square, and stopped the first boy whom he met. This child then became the ballotino, who drew the nomination slips from the urn in the ducal palace. In the first ballot the great council chose thirty of its members. In a second vote nine were chosen out of this original thirty. In turn the nine chose forty, each of whom had to receive seven nominations. A new ballot would then reduce this forty to twelve, who voted for twenty, who voted for nine, who voted for forty-five, who voted for eleven. These eleven then voted for forty-one. The final forty-one voters would then elect the doge. No more cumbersome and intricate procedure could have been devised. Its only purpose was to eliminate individual chicanery and special interests, but it suggests an almost obsessive preoccupation with communal solidarity.

- Peter Ackroyd, Venice: Pure City, London, 2009, p.140.

See also:
Blog: 96 hours in the Eternal City, 16 October 2010
Blog: Three fair ladies of Italy, 30 September 2010
Blog: Napoli, 3 April 2008

Decent exposure in Montana

Rep. David Moore on Tuesday introduced House Bill 365 in the House Judiciary Committee in response to a group of naked bicyclists who rolled through Missoula in August.

The proposal would expand indecent exposure law to include any nipple exposure, including men’s, and any garment that “gives the appearance or simulates” a person’s buttocks, genitals, pelvic area or female nipple.

The Republican from Missoula said tight-fitting beige clothing could be considered indecent exposure under his proposal.

“Yoga pants should be illegal in public anyway,” Moore said after the hearing [...]

Rep. Virginia Court, D-Billings, said she is concerned that the provision prohibiting garments showing the outline or appearance of a woman’s nipple unfairly targets women. “I think you are kind of being a little prejudiced against women,” Court said.

- Billings Gazette (Montana), 10 February 2015, spotted by Brendan O’Byrne & quoted in Private Eye no. 1388, 20 March-2 April 2015

[Moore later claimed it was all a joke, but the AP reporter disputes that. Here's the original bill, which goes into quite a lot of anatomical detail about the bits Mr Moore isn't keen on seeing in public. The bill was quickly voted down by legislators.]

Air New Zealand: 75 years of international travel

On Friday I went with some family visitors from out of town to see the Air New Zealand exhibit at Te Papa, which runs until 7 June, and is free to enter. I particularly enjoyed the advertising posters from previous decades, and a not-entirely-related slice of New Zealand aviation history that I didn't even know existed. We didn't bother with the long queue for the interactive video or the design-your-own-plane installation, but they both looked interesting.

Below is the prop and part of the engine from Richard Pearse's world-famous-in-New-Zealand prototype flyer that scudded over cow paddocks inland from Temuka near Timaru. Pearse himself said that the attempt on c.31 March 1903 could not be described as the first controlled heavier than air flight in the world, which is what the Wright Brothers achieved at Kill Devil Hills just under nine months later. But his endeavours show that around the world a generation of inventors had been infected by the great flying bug, and that a New Zealand farmer very nearly beat the Wrights. A great exhibit, although what it has to do with Air New Zealand, founded 37 years later, is another matter.

The art design of the wide range of Air New Zealand posters was particularly enjoyable. These three immediately below advertise South Pacific destinations, always popular for sun-seekers, while the set below depict New Zealand destinations for domestic and international travellers. The international airline was first known as Tasman Empire Airways Ltd - TEAL - from 1940 to 1965, and the National Airways Corporation - NAC - served domestic routes from 1947 to 1978. When the Government became sole owner of TEAL in 1965 its name was changed to Air New Zealand, and the NAC joined in 1978 to create an airline serving both international and national destinations. Despite 20 years of the 'Pacific Wave' design, I still think this is the best Air New Zealand livery, from just before NAC joined the fold.

See also:

Aviation: Seattle Museum of Flight, 25 April 2013

Aviation: MOTAT 2, 3 April 2013
Aviation: Le Bourget Air & Space Museum, 18 March 2011

The occasional jaw-dropping beauty of Elite: Dangerous

I was flying the Hauler when I had my first realisation that Elite: Dangerous might be something special. I was pulling in to land at a space station, and I couldn’t find my designated landing pad. When you ask for docking permission, you get assigned a pad to land on in the cavernous interior of the station and it could be anywhere around you, zero gravity being what it is. As I looked around I suddenly understood - this is a spectacularly beautiful game.

This sounds like a superficial appraisal and something of a statement of the obvious, but visuals matter - not merely in the sense of who can boast the most polygons, or the highest-resolution textures, but rather it is the ability to create the world of the game and give it a sense of reality. Elite: Dangerous delivers this sense of a coherent visual world more than almost any other game I have played, and certainly on a far greater scale.

I hadn’t really seen it at first because for everything Elite: Dangerous has in terms of graphical clout it plays things very low key in its design. There are plenty of pictures and videos of Elite: Dangerous looking pretty on the Internet, but when you play it those moments are rare. The universe of the game is displayed in a naturalistic style and there is little embellishment of the wonders of the cosmos, it doesn’t bombard you with lens flare or cinematic flourishes. The spacecraft are mostly brutish and functional and your point of view is by default limited to the first person view in a usually austere cockpit. As such you can play Elite: Dangerous for quite some time before you see something that really causes your jaw to drop. You can get used to the way everything looks and start taking it for granted but then suddenly everything lines up just right and pow.

For me, it was seeing this bustling cylindrical space dock - the little trucks whizzing around on the roads between pads, the different ships lifting off and settling down, the landing lights and holographic projections indicating who should park where - while I was peering through of the windows of the Hauler cockpit, surrounded by it all. It was everything I’d imagined such a place to look like when I was a child, and more. I would have been more moved but I still couldn’t find my damn parking spot. I swear they change them around.

- Phil Hartup, 'Elite: Dangerous shows there's a lot of fun to be had in being an interstellar delivery driver', New Statesman, 30 March 2015