Blue-Green bloom

From time to time, when conditions are just right, otherwise healthy bodies of water can experience a flourishing of a toxic bacteria, cyanobacteria. These “harmful algal blooms”, as they’re called, can cause major health problems for humans, dogs, livestock, and other animals. The organism itself used to be called “blue green algae, but the name was changed to avoid confusion with actual algae, which is a name for a collection of different organisms, which are generally different from cyanobacteria and which aren’t usually hazardous to animals. At the moment, we have a Blue-Green bloom of another kind happening in New Zealand.

After the General Election on September 23 ended with no party able to form government alone, punditry turned to talking about the party presumed to be the “kingmaker”, the New Zealand First Party (NZF). The party is socially conservative (they voted as a block against marriage equality, for example, the only party to do so), but their social and economic policies are a mishmash of Left and Right. Their membership has generally preferred that NZF go into coalition with Labour, but National wants them, too, in order to form a fourth term government. Except, they may not actually want NZF because of its mercurial leader, Winston Peters. So, National has approached the Green Party about forming a coalition—a so-called Blue-Green Coalition. There are several reasons why this can’t happen and why it shouldn’t happen, but a few suggesting that maybe it should, though not this year.

The Greens would probably commit political suicide if they went with National (whose party colour is blue). First, the party spent months and months campaigning for a change of government, and to go into coalition with Labour, so to help National continue leading government would be a betrayal of voters—ironically, exactly as Winston Peters himself did in 1996 when he ignored his party members’ wishes and abandoned Labour to go into coalition with National (which ultimately fell apart spectacularly). Importantly, any coalition deal the Greens negotiate would have to be ratified by 75% of the party’s members, and that would seem unlikely to happen.

It’s also important to note that the preliminary election results show that the combined opposition parties—Labour, the Greens, and NZF—together currently have 61 seats in a 120 seat Parliament. National has 58, and the one person Act “party” has only one, giving the Right a minority block of 59 seats. After the Special Vote count is released on or about 2pm on Saturday, October 7, it’s probable that Labour and/or the Greens will pick up one or two seats each, the total coming from National and possibly NZF. What this means is that the opposition parties will have an even stronger combined block than the current government has.

However, Winston is said to prefer a two-party coalition government, not one with three or more parties—but I suspect this notion is being spread by National Party supporters. In 2005, NZF was in coalition with Labour, United Future Party, and the Progressive Party—that’s four parties. It lasted the entire term, unlike his two-party coalition with National in 1996.

Pundits on the Left are arguing that what National is trying to do is strengthen its negotiating hand with Winston, to make him think they don’t actually need him because they have other options. This may be so, but what if National’s goal is to avoid a deal with Winston and they’re sincere? Could the Greens do a deal?

Putting aside for a moment how extremely unlikely it is, the Greens could demand a heavy price from National. They could demand action on climate change and on cleaning up rivers. National, whose base is rural and farmers, couldn’t agree to anything that would make dairy farmers pay for cleaning up waterways, nor would it reduce intensity on dairy farms, but there might be other ways to make progress. The Greens could also demand action on ending poverty and reducing inequality. Quite what that would look like is difficult to imagine because their worldviews on those issues are so very different—for example, National continues to deny poverty and homelessness are a problem in New Zealand, when literally everyone else says they’re at crisis levels. Still, if the Greens could extract change from National on these and other Green Party issues, would that be so awful? It would also spare New Zealand having to endure three years of Winston in government.

In addition to the above reasons why a Blue-Green coalition is all but impossible, propping up a fourth-term National Government, when the majority wanted change, would mean the Greens would be punished at the polls in 2020, and probably wiped out. This is why it’s described as “political suicide” for them. Moreover, NZF and Winston Peters have been good coalition partners with Labour in the past. Winston must surely care about his legacy, so would he really want to prop up National’s final term and risk political oblivion for his party in 2020 by doing so?

Still, in a compelling piece on his blog, former Green MP Nandor Tanczos argues that the Greens must look forward:

…even if the Greens are ourselves content in our current codependency, there is a more fundamental problem. If Greens cannot carve out a constituency beyond the ‘left of Labour’ cul de sac we are in, we will continue to play out the dynamic of this election over and over, soaring in the polls only as long as Labour is doing badly, but dropping back to 5% as soon as Labour turns left again. Or finds a charismatic leader. We may be mighty in opposition, but we will always be puny in coalition until we stop relying on discontented Labour voters for support.

Nandor makes a lot of sense in talking about a way forward, and in future years the Greens must be willing to work with National to advance the Green Party’s values—just not THIS year. I strongly disagree with him when he says, “there is very little genuine political difference between National and Labour,” though I know that’s how Greens supporters see it (as they lectured me over and over and over during the recent campaign). But the larger issue here isn’t about semantics or differing definitions of what the two biggest parties are all about, it’s about making MMP coalitions work for the benefit of New Zealand.

Right now, a Blue-Green coalition government is impossible. In the future, it could be a possibility, and that might even be a good thing for New Zealand, and not only if one accepts that there’s no real difference between the two biggest parties. That may be a satisfying view to some on the Left, but voter behaviour suggests that, at the moment, the vast majority of voters absolutely don’t see it that way.

Instead, if the Greens find a new constituency, openly campaigning on the possibility of a Blue-Greens coalition could give them a way forward. However, it would also mean that the Labour Party would have to actively campaign against the Greens. At the moment, the parties are fighting over discontented Labour voters (and discontented Greens voters, too, of course). That’s not a way forward, or a path to government, for either Labour or the Greens. A new way may be the better way for everyone.

At the end of the week, we’ll know the shape of the new Parliament. When we do, it may be clearer who can form government with whom, though negotiations for that may take the better part of ten days from now to iron out, unless the final result after the Special Votes are counted brings a huge and dramatic change from the result from election night, which seems unlikely.

A Blue-Green coalition? Maybe someday, but not now. Will it be a Labour-led government or a National-led government? That will probably still be determined by Winston (right now, I'm still leaning on the side of guessing that Winston will go with National).

At the moment, the only thing that’s truly toxic in this bloom of punditry is the deliberate diversion and distraction of some partisans, and also comments based on general ignorance of the fact that this is how MMP is supposed to work. Elections always have consequences, and this one is no different. While we don’t yet know what all those consequences are for this election, a Blue-Greens coalition will not be one of them.

Update October 3: Green Party leader James Shaw was quoted by the New Zealand Herald as saying that talk of a Blue-Green deal was "noise and no signal." He added: "Our job is to form a new government with the Labour Party. That's what I said on election night, that's what I campaigned on for the last 18 months."

Weekend Diversion: Lotto ads

The best ads tell stories, ones that draw us in and include us. Few advertisers in New Zealand are as good at as Lotto New Zealand, whose ad company has mastered visual storytelling—mini films, really—to draw viewers in so they can imagine winning Lotto and what it could mean for their own lives and families. Not bad for ads intended to sell what is, basically, gambling.

The ad above is the main ad currently running in New Zealand, and it has been for about a year. Part of their “Imagine” campaign, the ad is called “Mum’s Wish”, and it shows an answer to the question asked in the YouTube description: “If you won, what would you do for the ones you love?” Of all the Lotto ads I’ve seen over the years, this is one of my personal favourites.

The story ad running before “Mum’s Wish” was another story ad, “Pop’s Gift”, below:


Like the ad up top, this ad plays off themes of family and love, and how winning Lotto can enhance both. When it’s put like that, it sounds quite crass, really, but these ads are very effective and taking a crude message and making it heartwarming. It started running a couple years ago.

Both of these ads had several different edits of varying lengths shown on New Zealand television, but the versions I’ve shared here have all the elements of the shorter versions, and the longer versions have also been aired.

Before both of these there was a series of ads featuring Wilson the dog who dives overboard to save a winning Lotto ticket, and then travels the world to bring the ticket back home. The ending isn’t quite as heartwarming as the later ads, but it had a humorous end, which kind of made up for it. In its day, it was one of the most popular ads on NZ television.


There have been numerous ads for Lotto, and other games from NZ Lottery, and they’ve taken a number of different approaches. Some have been better than others, as might be expected, but but most have been pretty memorable, too.

And that brings me to the final ad I’m sharing, and it’s a flashback—you can tell because of the old TV aspect ratio. This ad was playing on New Zealand television when I arrived in 1995, and it ran for several years afterward. I always liked it, and still do, but it’s clearly an entirely different approach from their more recent advertising. But, like all really good ads, it was clearly memorable—for me, anyway.

Remembering stuff

As we age, most of us will have some trouble remembering things. It’s often short-term things, such as, where we put our car keys. As the old saying goes, “forgetting where you put your car keys is normal; forgetting you have a car is not.” Memory can be affected by any number of things, and it can play out in unexpected ways. Like, today.

A crossword question brought all this up: What is the 19th letter of the Greek alphabet? As it happens, I once memorised the whole thing, so I began strongly, and it went something like this: “alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon… [pause] …um… [pause] …lambda, mu, nu… [pause] …um… [pause] …omicron, pi… [pause] …um… [pause] …sigma, tau, upsilon… [pause] …um… [pause] …something, something, omega.” I remembered 14 out of 24 letters, but I missed so many that I couldn’t work out with one was 19th (it’s tau, by the way). I did remember a few more, but not where they were in the list: zeta, theta, phi, chi, and psi (a complete list is in the link above).

It’s actually kind of surprising that I remembered as much as I did, because I decided to memorise the alphabet when I was a freshman in high school, more than 40 years ago. It’s fair to say that I haven’t had any real use for it in all the decades since. And yet, I remembered 14 out of 24 letters (around 58%), and in the correct order—though I left a few out. All up, I remembered 19 (nearly 80%, though with several sort of orphaned). The fact I remembered so much of something I’ve never needed over all these years seemed kind of remarkable to me, up until I remembered that most people have trouble with short-term memory (where are those car keys I put down somewhere five minutes ago?), not memories from long ago.

Indeed, it’s common to enter a room and forget why we went there, though we usually do remember, often fairly quickly. Except when we don’t.

There are many things that affect memory, including lack of sleep and medicines. Both affect me, but the second one has been a particular problem over the past year. Statins, drugs to control lipids (cholesterol) in the blood, cause memory problems for, apparently, most users. They’re not necessarily severe problems, but they can be incredibly annoying and even frightening.

For example, the other day I was at my desk and decided to test my memory. I tried to remember the colour of the front of our dishwasher, and I couldn’t remember if it was brushed metal or white. I tried to picture it, since that usually helps, and despite putting things in or taking them out of the dishwasher every single day over the past seven months, I couldn’t visualise it. This scared me. I had a sort of hunch that the front was brushed metal (it is), but I wasn’t sure, I thought I should be sure, and that was the problem. Sure, NOW I think it’s silly I was ever unsure, but at the time, I definitely was.

I think I may have been tired that day, that I may not have had enough sleep the night before—something that affects anyone’s memory, but especially mine these days. This is an ongoing issue because I also need more sleep than normal—easily nine or ten hours a night—or I feel extremely tired the next day. I’ve complained to my doctors about all this, but so far they’re only addressing the tiredness by changing drugs. I need statins, and since they all cause memory problems, this problem is unlikely to go away soon.

All of which meant I needed to create some strategies to compensate for an unreliable memory, and—when I remember to use them—this is what I do:

I always put my car keys in the same place—well, two places, actually: In a basket by the front door (preferred) or in my coat pocket if I forget to take them out of my pocket. I never put them anywhere else. Similarly, I always charge my phone in one place and my iPad in one place (different places, but I never move them). That way, if the devices aren’t with me, I know exactly where they are.

If I walk into a room and see something I need to do, I do it immediately because I know I’ll forget about it if I don’t do it right then. This is a new strategy, and imperfect because it may cause me to forget whatever it was I was on my way to doing.

Sometimes I sort of chant to myself what I’m on my way to doing. I read somewhere that speaking a thing out loud several times helps one remember it, but I seldom actually say the thing out loud. So, for example, I might repeat to myself, “get empty hangers out of the wardrobe”, and I keep repeating that to myself even if I stop to do other things first. This has sometimes helped.

I also need to keep “to do” lists, something I’ve talked about previously. The problem is still that I forget to write things down, and also forget to look at the list when I do make one. Interestingly, the most recent time I complained to my doctor about the statin-driven memory problems, she suggested keeping lists as the way of dealing with it. Gosh, why hadn’t I ever thought of that?!

The video up top is about learning, which is useful information, but the opening part talks about writing notes by hand, that it's better than using a computer. There really is abundant research that backs this up, and it’s also something I’ve personally experienced: Writing things down makes me more likely to remember it (although when I was younger I didn’t need to look at what I wrote down, where now it’s vital).

This is all a work in progress, as so many things in life are. While a little bit has improved over the years, medicine has made some things worse. More to come on this—if I remember to write about it.

Crowd and funding

The video above from Vox explains crowdfunding, but not exactly how it works, rather, how it works best. Crowdfunding of one sort or another is often used these days to get money for a new project or product, and it’s a more satisfying model for independent creators of any sort, rather than having to rely on venture capitalists—who in addition to being hard to win over are also often called “vulture capitalists” for a reason.

Raising money isn’t the only, or even necessarily the best, use of crowdfunding, as this video explains. And what works for a specific product wouldn’t necessarily work for makers of creative works that are outside of normal product models.

Another form of crowdfunding was created to meet that need, subscription-based services for all sorts of creators: Writers, musicians, visual artists, video producers, even podcasters, among many others. The best-known of these fudners is Patreon, which is now used by a lot of YouTube creators in particular. This kind of figures because Patreon acquired Subbable, which was created by John and Hank Green, and used by them and a lot of big YouTube creators, including CGP Grey, who I’ve shared on this blog.

The basic point with crowdfunding is that it allows people with ideas to directly fund those ideas, and to aviod the loss of control that would happen with traditional funding models. It’s also a way to build a market/audience in advance of release, which is also great.

However, crowdfunding also underlines the new reality: Thanks to the Internet and all the many ways to connect to it and use it, literally anyone can now be a creator, whether of a product or of content. This is a democratising of creation that was never possible until the Internet came along. But until crowdfunding, especially subscription models, came along, there was no reliable way to actually get paid for that work.

The catch in all this is that someone has to create something that someone else wants to pay for, and a great many people (like me and most of the content creators I know) work without receiving any money coming in as a result of that work. There’s nothing wrong with people who create stuff just for the love it, and that’s sort of the flipside of crowdfunding: Very often people don’t participate in any sort of crowdfunding merely because they don’t want to.

In any case, it’s interesting to watch the growth of crowdfunding, and its increasing importance. These are certainly different times—different even than ten years ago. That's a good thing, I think.

About Hugh Hefner

Hugh Hefner died this week at 91. While most of us have probably heard of him, these days plenty of us would have no opinion about him—his heyday was a long time ago, after all. But the people who do have opinions often had and have strong ones, the strongest of which quite probably keep others silent. And yet, there are truths that must be told.

Hefner was not a saint, but neither was he evil incarnate. He was first and foremost a businessman who had been very successful, then less so as the years went on. He also challenged social norms in ways that had never been seen before, and he actually made the world a better place, despite what some of his critics want us to believe.

On the surface, the Playboy brand was about men objectifying women, and it was also about hedonism. Beneath that veneer that some found sleazy (or worse), however, Hefner also pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in sexuality. While it may have begun with openly talking about sexuality and sexual desire, along the way it made obvious that sexuality came in many varieties.

Hefner supported gay rights and abortion rights at a time when not even liberal politicians did. Many eventually caught up (or were replaced by socially progressive younger politicians), but Hefner was there before them all. To his critics, this is a “so what?” fact, but to people oppressed because of their sexuality, like gay people, it was a very big deal, and he made it concrete by setting up the Playboy Foundation to help fund progressive social change, particularly as it affected women, gay people, and other oppressed people.

In the early 1980s to early 1990s, I was part of a grassroots political group called the Illinois Gay and Lesbian Task Force. For most of that time, we were the only LGBT political group in the state. We lobbied the state legislature, Congress, Chicago’s City Hall, other local governments, and more agencies than I can even remember. We ran training sessions on LGBT issues at the Chicago Police Department and at Cook County Jail so they would be better equipped to deal with LGBT people. But we also worked with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) at a time when few LGBT groups dared to do so.

One of our major projects was to make sure that accurate and useful information and resources on LGBT issues were provided to the counselling departments in all public high schools. Our co-chair at the time, Al Wardell, himself a high school teacher in the CPS system, recognised the need to combat anti-gay bullying, and new project was born.

A graphic designer designed posters and other materials to support the project, the most notable of which were the posters: The central feature was a stark black and white photo of a row of school lockers with “Die Queer” painted on one. The text provided the phone number of a group called Gay and Lesbian Horizons, a social service agency now rolled into Chicago’s LGBT community centre. They had the resources, training, and expertise to deal with any phone calls that may have come in, which made them the logical choice. The IGLTF name was also on the posters, in smaller type.

Al approached (from memory) at least 15 different funding organisations to help fund the project, and every single one turned us down—all of them. In the early 1990s, most people didn’t even want to admit that gay teenagers even existed, and many of them even still believed we tried to “recruit” teens, because that lie and myth was still commonly believed. Funding organisations were no different, really, and reflected the conservative social attitudes that were still prevalent.

However, ONE organisation said yes: The Playboy Foundation. They provided an in-kind contribution, paying to print the posters and some other materials. This was a major victory for our organisation, sure, but more so for the young people we might be able to help.

Until, that is, politics—LGBT politics—nearly destroyed it all.

After the posters were printed and the project was ready to be rolled out, IGLTF had its annual meeting at which a new board was elected, and they included some fairly staunch feminists who objected to the fact we’d received this support from the Playboy Foundation. At a fiery board meeting, we were bullied and hectored until a vote was held to destroy all the posters. I abstained from that vote because I felt pressured and bullied and wanted time to think it all through, but the motion passed anyway, and one board member tore up one of the smaller posters with a dramatic flourish. I then resigned from the board, ending around a decade of my service.

The rump of the board tried to spin the decision, but got intensely negative feedback from the wider community, with some individual donors demanding their donations back, others demanding a boycott of future donations, and things even more unpleasant. The rump of the board then revisited the decision, backed down and decided not to destroy the posters after all, but, as I recall, and may remember incorrectly, they wanted IGLTF’s name blacked out.

IGLTF never recovered. Within a year or two it was dead, and is barely remembered today. Nearly 20 years of damn hard work destroyed over—what, exactly? Nowadays we’d call it “political correctness run amok”, but I hate that phrase. Instead, I’d say they’d let the perfect become the enemy of the good. Forbid the group from ever seeking Playboy Foundation funding in the future? Stupid, but okay. Voting to destroy already printed posters? Criminally stupid, and a betrayal of everything we’d been fighting to achieve, and the people we’d been fighting for, over two decades.

The facts here are simple: Absolutely NO funding organisation would fund the project, and some were hostile to it. ONLY the Playboy Foundation would fund it, and it wasn’t the first time it had worked to support the LGBT communities, nor was it the first time their support had caused political controversy within the LGBT communities of Chicago.

For more than two decades I’ve remained silent about all this, mainly because it’s just history, or maybe an historical footnote is more accurate. But even though I was sickened by the whole thing back then, and the atmosphere at that meeting which was like a bookburning more than anything else, I nevertheless felt intimidated into silence. What dredged this all up was seeing so many people choosing to heap scorn onto Hefner as if nothing he’d ever done had any value.

Of course Playboy Magazine objectified woman—as did most heterosexual men at the time, from what I could tell. But for some reason, Playboy’s objectification was deemed to be worse than that of ordinary men. Was it because they made a profit? Or because they reinforced male objectification of women? Both? Something else? It all seems so long ago, but similar issues rise up from time to time.

The reality is that Playboy Magazine also published some of the most important writers from its part of the 20th Century, and featured many important interviews, too. It provided a platform for the voiceless, and was an advocate for the oppressed—including gay people.

All of that funded the Playboy Foundation that, in turn, provided the cash for so much social change, including funding groups and projects that could never get funding anywhere else. Accepting funding from the Playboy Foundation never—ever—bothered me. As one of my colleagues put it at the time of the IGLTF disaster, the Roman Catholic church has always accepted money from the mafia, and by using it for good, they said they purified and even sanctified the money. I wouldn’t put it in quite those terms, but we did essentially the same thing: We took money that came from a business some people objected to, and used it to advance the social and legal equality—and the very safety—of LGBT people. It was money we often simply couldn’t get anywhere else. So I have no regrets for accepting the money: In the context of the times, it was absolutely the right thing to do.

Obviously Hefner was no saint, and he was perhaps cruder and more sleazy than most men would like to think they were/are, but a great many heterosexual men of the time were just like him in thought, if not in deed. Articles and advocacy aside, the magazine traded in sexual objectification, something many men did, too, though perhaps quietly. Does that excuse it? That’s not my call to make (not the least because I’m not heterosexual). But to this day many men of all sorts simply don’t get the anger directed at Playboy, especially when there were magazines that were far worse (like the widely circulated Hustler, for example).

I’m not an expert in social morés or sexual politics, and I would never tell women what they can and can’t see as objectification or as objectionable. But neither can they tell men—gay men in particular—what we must find objectionable. To me, all that is irrelevant. The 1970, 1980s, and 1990s were hostile times for LGBT Americans, and we fought hard against the prevailing repressive attitudes. The Playboy Foundation, through Hugh Hefner and his magazine, made a lot of progress possible when no one else would. And I damn sure won’t apologise for putting their money to good use, nor will I in any way feel bad about it.

Because of the great good that Hugh Hefner made possible, I won’t say a bad word about him. What others do is their business, but they have no right to tell me what I should or shouldn’t do, say, think, or feel about Hefner. And, that sort of personal independence was one of the core messages Hefner himself sold, appropriately enough.

Midweek Diversion: Ridin’ with chicken

The video above is an ad currently playing on New Zealand television for an international chicken fast food chain. The commercial is kind of cute, for lack of a better word, with unexpected imagery that makes the humour work. As such things go, it’s a good ad.

I liked the ad when I firts saw it, but I started to wonder about the song in the background. It’s kind of catchy, almost earworm-y, and I wanted to know more about.

The song is “Ridin’”, a 2006 song by Chamillionaire (real name Hakeem Seriki), a 37 year old an American musician, rapper, entrepreneur, and investor from Houston, Texas. The song features Krayzie Bone, who’s been part of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. The part used in the ad is the chorus:

They see me rollin
They hatin
Patrolling they tryin to catch me ridin' dirty
Tryin to catch me ridin' dirty (repeat three times)
My music so loud
I'm swangin
They hopin that they gonna catch me ridin' dirty
Tryin to catch me ridin' dirty (repeat three times)

The lyrics work really well with the imagery in the ad, and the idea of oldies “ridin’ dirty” using their mobility scooters is funny. But the rest of the song is a little out of sync with the ad. As Wikipedia puts it:

The lyrics concern racial profiling and police brutality, as well as the stereotyping of African-Americans driving a vehicle with drugs or other contraband on the inside ("Riding dirty").

While the idea of fast food chicken being contraband for seniors is kind of funny in itself, the resy of the lyrics are quite explicit and far naughtier than most seniors would like to hear. That would make it an odd choice for an ad for a mass market product—except probably not here.

New Zealanders are always laid back about such things anyway, but I’d thought that chances were good that not many people were familiar with it. Well, maybe: It turns out the song went to Number 2 in New Zealand in 2006. I must not have been listening to pop radio at the time, because I sure don’t remember it.

Choosing music for ads can be fraught sometimes, especially in the USA, less so in New Zealand, maybe. And, just because I’m not familiar with a song doesn’t mean it wasn’t popular; this isn’t the first time I’ve made that mistake.

This little journey started, as it so often does (like it did last month), because I was curious about background music used in an ad, and when I found that I needed to know more about it, the artist, and what, precisely, they were rapping.

I love the Internet.

The official video for Chamillionaire’s Ridin' ft. Krayzie Bone:

Politics respite

This past Saturday was New Zealand’s General Election. The September Equinox was also at 8:01am that day, though Spring still hasn’t actually arrived yet. And as if all that wasn’t enough, New Zealand returned to Daylight Saving Time at 2am that night/following morning. It was a busy weekend, many people are tired from the clock change, but we’ll all eventually get over that. The effects of the election, however, may last quite a while longer.

I'll eventually put down my thoughts on the election here on the blog, as I always do, but I need to gather my thoughts first, as I always do. It was a strange election in many ways, and until the 384,072 (approximately…) Special Votes—roughly 15% of the total cast—are counted, we won’t know the final shape of Parliament, and that, in turn, will determine who will form government. The final tally of votes, including the Special Votes and Ordinary Votes, should be released around 2pm on Saturday, October 7.

One thing I noticed as early as election night was the need some people had to attack those who voted for parties they didn't support. Sometimes it was because the parties they supported didn’t do as well as they’d hoped, sometimes it was because of ideology more generally, but none of it was helpful.

Attacking those one disagreed with in the NZ election must stop.

The election is over, sure, and that’s reason enough, but it's more than that: Whatever side we may have backed, we'll need to win votes from people who didn't vote our way this time, and attacking those people isn't going to suddenly make them more receptive to our point of view. Voting behaviour is as complicated as any other human behaviour, and no one votes to do bad things—and this is true no matter how much we disagree with them. They can't be won over by lecturing them on how evil, awful, and selfish—or old—they are. Instead, we must demonstrate that our ideas are better ideas. Sure, we know those ideas are better, but that’s something that's self-evident only to us.

I also think everyone needs to consider what they personally did to bring about the result they wanted—sharing things on Facebook and Twitter isn't actually doing anything, by the way. I know people who worked damn hard on campaigns of several different parties, but the rest of us? Not so much, and that absolutely includes me—but, then, I’m not the one complaining about or attacking people who voted differently than I would have liked.

What I’m really saying is that “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves.” There are structural issues to address with campaigns and messaging, absolutely, and there's a real need to look at what, precisely, the Left (in general) is selling. However, attacking people who didn’t vote as we think they should have is just ideological masturbation, and that’s not really something that should be done in public.

Whatever happens, whoever forms Government, and however we feel about that, it’s only temporary: The maximum term of any Parliament is only three years. Good or bad, this, too, shall pass. I just hope the negativity passes faster. We all need a rest.

The voting is done

Pōti ahau - I voted. That's my civic duty done! 😀🇳🇿 #nzvotes2017 #newzealand #lifeinnz

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Sep 22, 2017 at 4:37pm PDT

Today was, of course, Election Day in New Zealand, and the polls have just closed. As we wait for the votes to be counted, we don’t yet know what the total voter turnout was, but we do know that the Advance Voting turnout was heavy. That’s a good thing.

I did my civic duty today and voted this morning not far from our house. In fact, I walked to the Polling Place, which I haven’t done in decades. I found it a bit physically challenging, but considering it was the longest walk I’ve taken since we moved in back in February, the fact I survived is encouraging—but I think I need to build up the distance I walk a little more slowly.

My Polling Place was in a tiny local church, and while I’m not a fan of Polling Places being in churches, it was kind of nice to see the inside of this one, which is nicer inside than the non-descript exterior promised. The good news is, the building didn’t collapse when I walked in.

There was a pretty good turnout when I was there: All the voting stations were occupied, the officials checking in voters were both busy most of the time, and I saw small groups (they looked like families) going to vote together. I warmed my ol’ democratic (in this case, a lower case “d”) heart to see it—even if I suspect they may have cancelled out my vote a few times over.

The Advance Voting story is fantastic. According to the Electoral Commission, a total of 1,240,740 votes were cast in the Advance Voting period this year, as opposed to 717,579 in 2014, and 334,558 in 2011. Clearly New Zealand voters like Advance Voting, but is this a sign of something more, of a very large turnout? We’ll know soon.

Final enrolment statistics show that 91.1% of all eligible New Zealanders were registered to vote, but the least-registered age group is still 18-24 year olds (69.83%), though that number is up about five points from only three days earlier. Is this further evidence of a “youthquake” in action? Interestingly, the most-registered age group is my own: 98.75% of eligible 55-59 year olds are registered. Registering to vote is mandatory in New Zealand, though voting itself is not.

Facebook told me this last night, just after my profile photo reverted to its apolitical normality.

As I said yesterday, I was trying to obey the law regarding online activity on Election Day, but today I saw for myself how downright silly the law is. I was on Twitter and I got suggestions of “Who To Follow”, and they included NZ politicians and a political party. I saw “In Case You Missed It” Tweets that were expressly partisan—and quite old (19 hours or more, well before the midnight deadline). Add to that seemingly random partisan Tweets that seemed to be showing up just because someone I follow had liked the Tweet at some point. For all I know, the dearth of political Tweets today may have led Twitter’s algorithmics to fill in the gaps with Tweets about the stuff I was seeing and Tweeting up until yesterday. In any case, those Tweets would be illegal if posted today, but they weren’t, yet I saw them anyway. That’s just shows how dumb that 1993, pre-Internet law truly is.

Even so, I saw people go out of their way to avoid posting anything partisan today, and a few trying to get as close to the boundary as possible, usually in a joking way. That was kind of entertaining.

But the main word for today, especially after voting, was patience. Waiting was all we could do—that and keep our opinions to ourselves. Actually, come to think of it, thats not actually such a bad thing…

The photo up top is my—perfectly legal—“I voted” selfie. The Electoral Commission actually encourages such selfies, but, weirdly, the Electoral Commission’s official Facebook Page was taken offline. That meant one couldn’t access their “I Voted” overlay for one’s profile photo, something they encouraged people to use. My guess is that they were doing what they suggested others do: Take their page down on election day. In their case, it wasn’t what they posted—they’re non-partisan—but what others may have posted. If Facebook allowed page admins to turn off commenting that wouldn’t be necessary, but they don’t.

At any rate, that’s this year’s election done. Now the other waiting—to see who will form government—begins.

Today's "Google Doodle" in New Zealand.

To comply with the law (yet again)

As I did in 2011 and 2014, and I mostly stole this post from one in 2011 (and then adapted from the one in 2014), I have temporarily turned on comment moderation for this blog. You can still leave a comment, but it won’t be posted until sometime after 7pm Saturday NZ Time (7AM Saturday UTC), after the polls have closed. I’m doing this to comply with New Zealand election law, which mandates that I turn off comments (even though the law was enacted in 1993…). I’ll update this post after I’ve re-enabled un-moderated comments. I also won't be commenting or replying on social media, either. You can DM/PM me if you wish, or email me, because that’s private.

Also, I won't be posting anything here until after 7pm tomorrow. Apparently a new post might draw eyes to my previous election posts. Or something.

P.S. Two Ticks Labour! (I can say that because I’m posting this before midnight…),

Update 23 September: The polls have closed, and comments are again unmoderated. Thank you for your patience as I obeyed a silly law.

Bella helps

I wanted to post something non-political, and Bella said, "Pick me!", and who am I to refuse? Here she is, dozing on my lap. Awwwww... #goodkitty #furbaby

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Sep 22, 2017 at 4:01am PDT

I wanted something nice and non-political to post to create a bit of a buffer for anyone happening on this blog before 7pm tomorrow. Bella happened to be sleeping on my lap at the time, and the rest is now blogging history. She’s very helpful, really.

AmeriNZ Podcast 335 ‘Cliffhanger' now available

A new AmeriNZ Podcast episode, “AmeriNZ 335 – Cliffhager” is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast: This episode is mainly about the New Zealand election, which is tomorrow.

Sustainable disposal

Picked up this Bokashi composting system, which takes normal veggie scraps, plus cooked food scraps, and even meat (no bones), and when sprinkled with the stuff in the bag reduces the pail's contents to compost in about 4 weeks. You keep it inside, and it supposedly has no stink. I heard about this through an Auckland Council waste minimisation thing, and it sounds perfect for us. We'll see! #tidykiwi #compost #aucklandnz #aucklandcouncil #wasteminimisation

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Sep 19, 2017 at 9:07pm PDT

Auckland Council has been promoting a number of waste minimisation strategies in recent years, with an eye toward getting as close to zero waste as possible. Many of the solutions are easy, like recycling, some are more challenging, like planned changes to rubbish collection, and one is real work: Composting. But one of the compsoting systems they promote—Bokashi—is easier than many might think.

Sometime in the past few months, I read about Bokashi bins on something that Auckland Council published—though I can’t remember when or where. When I was visiting Auckland’s North Shore on Tuesday, I had some free time and I popped into one of the home improvement chains because I was interested in vertical gardens for herbs, but they were expensive. So, I decided to check out the other chain store nearby, and wandering through the aisles, I saw the ZingBokashi system. They had the 10 litre and 15 litre size, and I figured that the 10 litre was probably plenty big enough for us. I bought one.

Yesterday, I read in more detail, and also watched the video below to better understand what to do. It’s a little more complicated than I’d first thought, but not horribly so. And, ultimately, this can can become part of a regular composting system.

There was a conventional compost bin here when we moved in, but it was full to the top. As a result, we had nowhere to put food scraps, and they went into the rubbish. I didn’t like this because I knew they were compostable, and because they made the rubbish smell. The Bokashi system will take care of both—and cut down the amount that we send to landfill even more.

We plan on getting a new rotatable compost bit (which makes it easier to turn), and adding the Bokashi bin once a month or so will help enrich the compost, and probably speed up the process, too. At any rate, it will allow us to compost food scraps, including meat, something we couldn’t do with a conventional compost bin.

We already had their EnsoPet system for composting dog waste, but we hadn’t used it yet, mainly because I wasn’t clear on how to use it. Now that I know it has to be moved eventually, I can dig it in and start using it. This will fertilise the shrubbery, while also removing the dog droppings from the wastewater, reducing our “waste footprint” even more.

At some point I’ll post again about how these work, after we’ve had a chance to use and evaluate them fairly. It’s a start, at least.

Adjusting the system

I had my quarterly check-up on Tuesday, and the results were basically good. There were some adjustments however, including some that should improve things further. Well, that’s the plan, anyway.

I had blood tests this time, and the bottom line is that there’s still a problem. Basically, my HDL (“good”) cholesterol is still too low, though it’s up very slightly. My diet and exercise levels are basically unchanged, so the slight improvement is possibly down to choosing foods that raise HDL, including taking fish oil capsules, something I started taking again only a couple months ago, gradually increasing the dosage.

On the other hand, my Cholesterol/HDL ratio is unchanged, and still too high. The reason it’s unchanged is that my cholesterol and triglyceride levels were up slightly. The test this time was non-fasting, wheras the previous one in March was fasting, and this may account for some of the differences. My next tests will be fasting, so it should be clearer where things stand.

I asked the doctor to change my beta blocker tablet because I felt very tired nearly all the time, and that’s one of the side effects of the drug I was on. When I say “tired”, I mean that I might do something and have to sit down and rest for anywhere from 15 minutes to and hour or so, depending on what I’d been doing. This made me unable to make any progress on some of the last projects organising the house, especially my office: I just didn’t have it in me.

The new drug, Atenolol, is similar to the old one, and has similar side effects, so we’ll see how I tolerate it. This is one of those situations where there are other drugs that would be good for me, but they’re not presently funded by Pharmac, so to qualify for them I have to try every other drug available first and if they all are bad then my doctor can apply to the Ministry for special permission to get the drug. The difference is paying $5 for a prescription or unsubsidised market rates (no idea how much that would be, but obviously a lot more).

The other change was that the doctor doubled my allopurinol dose (to 100mg) because my urate levels are still too high. If I hadn’t had gout attacks, my urate levels would be in the normal range (though upper end), however, I need to have them toward the lower end. Some people, the doctor told me, are taking 600mg a day, though she doesn’t think I’ll need anything like that. The point is to prevent attacks, and I have still been having small ones, so clearly the increase in dosage was needed.

Other than that, things were good: Blood pressure is still well-controlled, weight is still down from August of last year (meaning I’ve maintained the weight loss), and apart from the tiredness, I feel okay physically. It’s just that the tiredness does kind of dominate things. Still, in a few weeks I should know if the new drug is any sort of improvement or not.

And that’s the update on where things are: Basically good, with a few adjustments to things. I can live with that—literally.

Weekend Diversion: Overrated?

The video above is the first in a new series from Vox, “Overrated”, which, as most things do these days, has its own Facebook Page. The page talks about a number of different things, and apparently the Facebook Page is the main portal for this effort, which is a change from the way this sort of thing would have been done in the past.

In this video, “Vox's Phil Edwards investigates the largely unheralded business reason behind the success of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird." In this particular case, the story isn’t about whether the novel itself is overrated so much as how it became so—what’s the opposite? Rated? It’s actually a very interesting story, I think.

Like Phil, I read To Kill A Mockingbird more than once, and for school—though in my case it was a more realistic two times. In fact, to this day it’s the only book I’ve read twice (so far, but more about that in due course). When I first read it, in the mid-1970s, I just assumed it was being assigned because it won the Pulitzer Prize, and because it had been a movie starring Gregory Peck. But now that I look back on it, ALL the novels we read in my high school English classes were paperbacks that we were expected to buy. The other literature books we studied—poetry and drama compilations, Shakespeare, and also the book-length epic poem John Brown’s Body by Stephen Vincent Benét, were loaned to us by our school. I’m guessing that their choice of novels to teach may have been based in part on how inexpensive paperbacks still were at the time.

I don’t personally think that To Kill A Mockingbird is overrated, and one day I may read it again—just because. Or, maybe I’ll watch the movie again, because I haven’t see it in decades. Maybe both.

I hope future videos in this series focus mostly on how something became so popular or talked about, and not too much on whether the adulation is justified. There are enough fights on the Internet as it is.

Tax truth

The video above is an ad from the New Zealand Labour Party to counter the deliberate falsehoods coming from the National Party. This shouldn’t be necessary, but it is, and the perfect person to stand up for Labour’s fiscal policies is Michael Cullen, who was Finance Minister in the Labour Government from 1999-2008—and a very successful one.

It’s true that debunking and even fact-checking are largely useless in political discourse, campaigns in particular, because one side doesn’t need it, the opposite side will never believe it, and those in the middle likely don’t know who to believe. On the other hand, relentlessly promoting the truth can help some of those in the middle to be reassured, in this case, that voting for Labour is safe, despite the scaremongering of the National Party.

As I said the other day, “it’s far more important to spread truth than lies.” Of course it shouldn’t be necessary to do so, but it often is. Of course spreading truth is sometimes ineffective, but in as close an election as this one promises to be, it’s important to get the truth out there.

Related: Labour's fully-costed, independently assessed fiscal plan is discussed in details on their website: labour.org.nz/fiscalplan

Disclosures: I’m a supporter of the New Zealand Labour Party, but have no position of any kind with them, nor am I in contact with party leaders. All opinions expressed are entirely my own, based on more than 40 years closely following election campaigns, as well as my personal values.

The birds

Stopped in Pukekohe for some dinner in the way home. The trees were filled with hundreds and hundreds of birds in the trees. It sounded like we were in Hitchcock's movie. #pukekohe #aucklandnz #evening #birds

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Sep 16, 2017 at 12:29am PDT

There are a lot of different slice-of-life things that people don’t share on social media. This may come as a surprise to those who think that social media is just for sharing photos of one’s lunch, or oneself. Nevertheless, it’s true, and the very short video above is an example of this.

We were on our way home from visiting family and decided to stop at have something to eat. As we drove in town, we could hear a large noise outside through the closed car windows. It was birds—many, many birds. When we parked and got out the noise was even louder—the video doesn’t really di it justice. I said something like, “where’s Tippi Hedren?”, but I realised that the remark ages me because the reference these days would be a bit obscure. So, I changed it for the Instagram caption to the simpler, “It sounded like we were in Hitchcock's movie,” which was, of course, The Birds (1963).

After a quick dinner, the birds were still at it, but starting to quieten down as the light faded. We just went home to very pleased furbabies.

This particular incident isn’t important, or even unique, but it’s nevertheless an example of an everyday sort of incident that I may not have mentioned normally. But once I shot the video to capture the sound, really, and then shared it to Facebook, it instantly became more shareable here, too. That, too, isn’t unique: I share some ordinary events on social media, then end up sharing them here, too, and talking more about what led to the sharing in the first place, among other things. It sort of closes the circle, I think.

It turns out, though, that this was not the first video I’ve shared on Instagram. The first was way back in January when I took my car for a carwash. That was an even more ordinary event.

At any rate, today’s video was the sort of slice-of-life thing that I don’t often share on social media. It’s just that this time, I did.

What we’ve come to

This election has been unlike any other in recent memory, with twists and turns and surprise developments, it’s been one unexpected thing after another—except for one thing: The return of the Nasty Nats. The National Party has been lying about Labour Party policy, and it’s been deliberate. They can see power slipping away from them, and they’re clearly getting desperate. The Facebook video above sets the record straight.

One of the biggest lies National is telling is that Labour will raise income taxes. As Jacinda makes clear in the video, that’s utterly false. What they base that on is the fact that Labour will cancel the tax cuts that National threw at voters, and that means that if Labour is elected, wage and salary earners will pay the same tax as they do now—NO change. But in National’s alternate fantasy universe, cancelling tax cuts is exactly the same as raising taxes—even though wage and salary earners will pay exactly the same tax. That’s beyond dishonest, it’s downright defamatory.

That stupid lie, along with several others, are in an “ad” National created (using American stock video footage…). After listening to the public, Labour changed course and announced that any changes to taxes for wage and salary earners will not happen until after the 2020 elections, so voters can decide. That’s fair. But National decided to re-work their lying ad with a voiceover bizarrely claiming nothing had changed. That’s not just a lie, or even defamatory—it’s delusional.

I haven’t shared National’s attack ad for two reasons. First, I consider it to be utterly false and defamatory. Second, it’s not actually been on TV yet, as far as I can tell. Instead, National is relying on people sharing their video widely, and I simply won’t do their dirty work for them. If they end up putting their false and defamatory ad on TV, I may reconsider that. Maybe.

In the meantime, National’s dishonest campaign is all over social media and the same false attack lines are being promoted by National Party candidates. And that’s why I’m sharing Labour’s social media video, and not National’s: It’s far more important to spread truth than lies.

National should be ashamed of itself. There’s only one way to make National understand how wrong this behaviour is: Change the government. Let’s do this.

The problem is numbers

Recently, New Zealand political commentators were thrown into a frenzy of commentatoring when a poll seemed to show the National Party had suddenly zoomed way out in front of Labour and could govern alone. Was it right? Commentators breathlessly commentatored about that up until a new poll came out a couple days later showing that Labour and the Greens could form government together, and National couldn’t form one even if all the minor parties (apart from the Greens, of course) backed it. What this actually shows isn’t who will win the election—which is far too close to call—but that New Zealand has a huge problem with numbers.

The first and most obvious problem is the polls themselves. Only three companies are conducting public polls this year, only two of them are doing so for news organisations. This means that we have very little data to work with, and the “poll of polls” averages are actually pretty meaningless. In the USA, presidential elections have dozens of polls, and many major ones, to draw on when averaging them out, giving those averages an accuracy New Zealand can’t ever achieve.

Another problem is with how the polls are conducted. Colmar Brunton, which conducts polls for TVNZ’s One News, phones 1000 landlines only, and not mobiles, in an era when people are giving up their landlines. Even so, they vet their respondents to make their sample match the electorate as closely as possible, so I’m not convinced that fact makes much difference—but inevitably, it will.

Reid Research, which does polling for Newshub (TV 3’s News), only samples 750 landlines, plus 250 “online”, which they don’t further explain. We can evaluate, up to a point, the phoneline surverying, but because we don’t how Reid does its online polling, we have no reason to believe it’s accurate OR inaccurate: We simply cannot even guess. This is totally unacceptable, and any company conducting political polling during an election campaign—especially during the final 2 weeks, when most New Zealand voters make up their minds—has an ethical obligation to be totally transparent with about their methodology so experts in polling can fairly evaluate the data, especially how it was collected.

Which brings us to the second numbers problem: Political journalists. All news organisations have a political editor, some of which are better than others. One who is often good, Newshub’s Patrick Gower, damages his believability with over-the-top histrionics which oversell whatever story he’s hyping, most recently the Reid Research poll. TV One’s Corin Dann, in contrast, has maintained a far more measured demeanour during this year’s campaign—as have most others.

But a few good individuals notwithstanding, NZ doesn’t have a class of journalists who are good at reporting on politics or statistics. They are too quick to accept what they are told, especially by the government of the day, without looking for supporting evidence—or contradicting evidence. They also don’t understand statistics, opinion polls in particular.

Even worse, the quality of our political commentators—pundits—is appalling and awful. Most are chosen only for partisan bias, and the commentary they make is useless and banal regurgitation of partisan talking points. They offer no insight, no unique perspective, just partisan noise. It’s implausible that in a nation as diverse as New Zealand, and despite its small size, those same few people are the ONLY ones who can offer coherent political commentary on the issues of the day. I’m beginning to think that the idea of “term limits” for pundits is a great one.

Where all of this leaves us is—well, no one can say. We have wildly conflicting polls, which we can’t fairly evaluate, we have commentators—both journalists and partisans—who can’t be relied upon to tell us the straight truth, and yet we also have a clear mood for change. This all adds up to this: No one can tell what will happen because the election is too close to call.

Despite that, in the first four days of voting, 229,259 people voted, as compared to 98,063 during the same four days in 2014. But even this number, widely shared on Twitter, is misleading. In fact, 2014 Advance Voting began five days earlier than it did this year, and during the whole 2014 Advance Voting up to and including September 14, 147,560 New Zealanders voted, as compared to 229,259 this year, in fewer days. So, Advance Voting is up pretty dramatically this year, and is on track to be another record year. [complete stats on Advance Voting are posted on the Elections NZ website at 2pm each day]

In 2014, Advance Voting favoured the National Party. I’m not convinced that will be true this year, but we’ll see on Saturday the 23rd. We’ll also find out then whether any opinion poll was even somewhat close to getting it right. What, leave it to the voters?! Imagine that!

Voting is open

The Facebook video above is from the Electoral Commission, and is from their "I Vote" Facebook Page. It's also a TV commercial currently being broadcast. Advance voting began on Monday, and continues right through until September 22 (Election Day is Saturday, September 23). Voters can vote at a number of places in or near their Electorate, and if they're not registered to vote they can register and vote at the same time, but they cannot register on Election Day.

I'm sharing this video because it's a TV commercial, but the video is only available through Facebook, which makes this a bit problematic.

Up until now, Electoral Commission commercials have been posted, eventually, to their YouTube Channel, but they haven't done that since August 6. The only videos they've posted since then have been instructional videos and short messages, the latter of which could be seen as sort of commercials, and may even be useful for sharing on social media, but they seem sort of orphaned on YouTube (they don't seem to have been posted to Facebook, for example, and as far as I know, they haven't been broadcast). This seems limiting.

I don't have any problem with any organisation posting their videos directly to Facebook—it makes it very easy to share them with other Facebook users, after all. But Facebook videos are not necessarily easy to embed elsewhere: Every single time I do it I have to figure it out all over again because it's not intuitive in any way. But the bigger problem I have with this trend is that Facebook is a mostly closed ecosystem, and posting videos only to Facebook necessarily limits their availability to people who want to share them, and to the non-Facebook using general public who may be interested in seeing them. I'm not sure that having them available for embedding outside of Facebook only to people with access to Facebook in the first place is good idea.

This is not a Facebook v. YouTube thing—they both have their pluses and minuses. Also, there are other options for sharing videos than just those two places. Rather, this is about maybe—just maybe—giving Facebook too much influence over how information is shared. Nowadays, media companies, politicians, and individuals alike are live-streaming events that are only discoverable to other Facebook users, while similar public YouTube live videos are accessible to anyone.

Another problem with Facebook, apart from only being readily available to other Facebook users, is that only things posted publicly on Facebook—posts, photos, videos—can be embedded outside of Facebook (which means nothing from my personal Facebook can be shared except with a very limited audience of Facebook users, and with no one outside Facebook; things posted to my AmeriNZ Facebook Page can be shared because they're always public). I can't remember the last time I wanted to embed a YouTube video that didn't allow that.

I don't have the answer, but I favour maximum shareability for things that are inherently public, like the video above. Right now, Facebook-only doesn't meet that requirement. Maybe one day it will. Right now, though, I think we need more openness in sharing and accessibility, and Facebook just doesn't provide that.

AmeriNZ Blog is eleven

Today is the eleventh anniversary of the AmeriNZ Blog: I published my first post, “I live in a land downunder. No, the other one…” on September 13, 2006. This has been the roughest blogging year yet for me, but I, and the blog, are both still here.

It turns out that the number of daily posts required to meet my annual goal of an average of one post per day continues to rise. When I reviewed my progress toward my goal back in July, I said:

At the moment, including this post, I’m 64 posts behind target for where I should be at this point, and that means I need an average of 1.4 posts per day from now until the end of the year in order to reach my annual goal. That’s a tall order

Well, nearly two months later and I’m still 64 posts behind target, and because there are fewer days remaining to make that up as well as publish one post a day, too, the average I now need has risen to 1.59 posts per day. Every day this becomes a more difficult goal to achieve—but I haven’t given up hope.

And that’s actually the story of this entire blog over the past 11 years: I haven’t given up. Despite sometimes feeling I’ve had enough, despite sometimes being unsure of how I should structure the blog, or what I should write about, I haven’t given up. Even though I’ve talked about my share of sadness and challenges and disappointments, I haven’t given up. Call it stubbornness, or competitiveness, or maybe even foolishness, but I haven’t given up.

I don’t know whether I can meet my annual goal or not this year, though I’m going to give it my best shot. I don’t know if next year will be any better for blogging than this year was, but I’m going to try to make it so.

I haven’t given up. And I’m not going to give up now, either.

Thanks for joining me on the journey so far.

Previous posts on my blogoversaries:

Anniversay Time (2007)
Blogoversary 2 (2008)
Anniversaries Three and Fourteen (2009)
Fourth blogoversary (2010)
Fifth blogoversary (2011)
Sixth blogoversary (2012)
Seventh Blogoversary (2013)
Ten years of the AmeriNZ Blog (2016)

This 2015 AmeriNZ Video explains the origins of the name “AmeriNZ”: