spleen

lets compromise. cylinder earth.

UPDATE: I told this to my dad and he almost threw his tablet across the room

much better footage of the haka that shut down parliament today

@endless-demon thank you so much for asking! it's a little complicated but I think simplification does a disservice to the issue and is exactly what people like David Seymour rely on to spread lies about historical context and current consequences. I'm putting this in a reblog because it's long, and I'm putting it on this post because I'd rather this video be the one to get seen. as always I'm pakeha and also not an expert, so I'm very open to corrections on details but im confident of the broad strokes.

so when the English first arrived to build settlements in aotearoa, they formed a treaty with Māori (te Tiriti o Waitangi), the people already living there, that the English can govern their own settlements, as long as they allowed for continued māori sovereignty (tino rangatiratanga). there exist two versions of the text, English and te reo Māori, which do not perfectly match. after this, the English settlers began acquiring massive swathes of land by legally questionable means, and asserting absolute sovereignty over these areas. these culminated in the land wars, which then lead to massive land confiscation as a form of both political punishment and colonization. the end result is that now the crown own nearly all land in aotearoa and claim absolute sovereignty over it.

now, the Māori text does not claim sovereignty over the property that the crown recognizes Māori own. the text promises, among other things, self determination for Māori, which is essentially impossible under a westminster system of government because they are currently a demographic minority. it's only very recent in our history that the crown has acknowledged the legitimacy of the te reo Māori text, and even more recently that we began to actually implement any of its principles. one of the biggest ways the treaty is used in modern day is to guarantee Māori have an opportunity at the table for major national decisions (particular those of environmental significance), and to defer organizational power for Māori issues to Māori communities.

the treaty principles bill seeks to water down these promises by allowing these rights to all new zealanders, "democratising" the treaty and removing those guarantees that have been so hard fought for by Māori. but, more importantly, it seeks to seed division and racism within this country to gather more support for the ACT party who are sponsoring this bill.

this bill was part of the coalition agreement by our current 3 party right wing government. the national party agreed to sponsor this bill to first reading (allowing public submission on the bill) but no further. I personally believe, along with many others, that when the time comes to vote for the second reading the act party will threaten to pull out of the coalition if the bill is not passed again, and our prime minister will not have the strength of character to stand up to his deputy. regardless, the relationship between the crown and Māori has already been damaged, both by the simple introduction of the bill as well as all the changes our current government has implemented.

as Paul Goldsmith, Minister for Treaty Negotiations outlined in his speech during the bill, the National party believe that te Tiriti must be killed, not in a single action, but by a thousand cuts, like the removal of references to the treaty from our legislation and curriculums, and the disestablishment of agencies like the Māori Health Authority, cuts to Māori advisors to govt departments, removing māori seats from local government, etc.

there's so much more to this issue, like the centuries of abuse and mistreatment of Māori by the crown authorities, how this abuse is ongoing to Māori children and adults today in state care, how iwi voices are our last line of defence against environmental and ecological damage by industry, the unilateral natural of the treaty reparation settlement process... but this is why this protest was staged in parliament today.

(in fact, there is a much larger protest taking place nationwide, scheduled to arrive the day the bill was supposed to be introduced. the bill was in fact introduced a week earlier, in a move many suspect was done to prevent exactly this kind of protest.)

as far as I'm concerned though? I think te pāti Māori achieved exactly what they wanted by this protest. they forced the government to drop the mask of civility, and force the protestors out of the building. and they showed their supporters that their protests are working - they felt threatened enough by this that they lashed out, felt a need to retaliate by suspending hana-rawhiti maipi-clarke from the house for 24 hours. the coalition are getting nervous

I ever tell you guys about my ethically dubious radio show back in college? The Mad Dad Hour?

it was an entire radio show built around perpetuating a very simple joke, but it was uniquely powerful in its capacity to prompt the reaction I was looking for.

so my slot was at the tail end of rush hour, and i got a fair number of listeners/callers who were on the way home from the office. And like, I had a lot of callers, who almost all wanted to request songs that really didn’t fit with the aesthetic. I had pitched a power pop show when i got my slot, but the callers were not having it; they invariably wanted classic rock.

this made sense in a way. if you think about the demographics of the people who listened to the radio for music in 2010 instead of their ipods or cds or whatever, you’d expect them to skew older right? accordingly, i quickly realized that almost all of the people who called to request songs were Dads of a Certain Age. It was honestly annoying at first - I’m all for most classic rock, but that wasn’t what the show was supposed to be.

And so one day, when i was feeling particularly annoyed with requests that just didn’t fit thematically, i came up with the joke that rapidly became the only reason I kept the show going. Per station rules, I had to play a certain number of pre-recorded PSAs during my show, and before I cut to one I was supposed to read out the song titles and artists for all the music i had played before the break. So this one day when i had to inform the world before the break that the song they just heard was, per a listener’s request, Hey Jude by the Beatles, I decided to do a goof. I said:

“and finally, that last song you heard was Hey Jude, which was of course written and performed by the Rolling Stones.”

I barely had time to get the ads going before the phone started ringing. See, I had been assuming people would realize i was making an obvious joke by claiming one of the most well-known Beatles tracks was a Stones song, but i had failed to consider that my listeners were mostly 55-70 year old dads who were irritated from a long day in the office.

And when those dads heard me, a millennial woman, get the artist of an extremely well-known beatles song WRONG???!

they HAD to call in to correct my ignorance. never in a polite way either, it was condescending and annoyed or nothing. and like, they were just SO personally insulted by my inaccurate reporting that it took a massive amount of effort for me to avoid cracking up during the call. I had never understood why some people would enjoy trolling random strangers on the internet before, but in that moment, I understood the appeal entirely.

obviously i did it again right before the next commercial break, immediately after playing Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen David Bowie.

the phone immediately began to ring.

“ARE YOU AN IDIOT?” one of the callers began, “DAVID BOWIE???? THAT WAS QUEEN!”

“I thought David Bowie was the lead singer of Queen though?” I replied with as much innocent earnestness as i could conjure.

I could hear an intake of breath as the infuriated boomer on the other end of the line struggled to figure out where to even start.

And thus, the Mad Dad Hour was born.

@eduards-stuff I kept doing the same joke for an hour a week for an entire year, and the dads NEVER caught on. After episode 1 of the new format I started taking the angry dad calls on air, which added another layer of hilarity to the whole concept.

My friends on campus knew that hay I was doing and enjoyed tuning in, but only one actual listener ever figured out what I was doing, and he was literally a random 30 year old guy from the netherlands with access to an early internet connection radio service. He was possibly my only actual fan. I only know about him because he went to the effort of making a skype and paying for international service so he could call in, and while I got a few calls from him, the first remains my favorite:

DEVASTATING! one half of the themes in a song you like fits a character perfectly however the rest of it does not at all

If your parents didn’t have children, there’s a 100% chance that you won’t either

stone cold do not remember this post. what was i cooking in 2010. also jesus fucking christ FOURTEEN YEARS I’VE BEEN HERE???

just overheard my wife spelling something on the phone and i shit you not saying the words “E as in Eeyore” i am on my hands and knees wailing screaming crying pleading and begging people to learn the NATO phonetic alphabet

like the reason this exists is because none of the words sound like each other, which means that even with a terrible signal both parties should be able to clearly understand the words being spelled

i am dead serious that i believe this should be taught in school

I actually really like the thing when you're starting to get the hang of a new language, enough to understand and say simple sentences but you gotta get creative to get more complex thoughts across, like a puzzle. I remember a time in the restortation school when a classmate who wasn't natively finnish and did her best anyway dropped something and sighed, telling me "every day is monday this week. I have had four mondays this week." And I understood.

I don't think I speak much of spanish anymore, but in the nursing school training period I did there, I did manage to get by with making weird Tarzan sentences. I got a nosebleed at some point and startled another nurse. Not knowing the words "humidity" or "stress", I managed to string together: "This is ok. It is hot, it is cold, I have a bad day, I am sad, I have blood. This is normal for me." And she understood.

And sometimes you just say things weird, but it's better than not saying it. One time, I was stuck in a narrow hallway behind someone walking really slowly with a walker, and he apologised for being in the way. I was not in any hurry, but didn't know the spanish word for "hurry", but I did know enough words to try to circumvent it by borrowing the english "I have all the time in the world."

The man burst into one of those cackling old man laughters that they do when something in this world still manages to surprise them. He had to be somewhere between 70 and a 100 years old, and I guess if there was one thing he wasn't expecting to hear today, it would be a random blond vaguely baltic-looking fuck casually announce that he is the sole owner and keeper of the very concept of time.

I’ve mostly learned Chinese in school, so I know a lot of academic vocabulary while having the language skills of a toddler in some basic areas. Once, I forgot the word for sad, which is a really dumb thing to forget. A bunch of the ways to say sad in Chinese are literally just “not happy”, but I also momentarily forgot how to say happy. So instead I said “there is an economic downturn inside my brain”.

When my wife and I were in Japan we went to an izakaya on our first full night in the country, and when it was time to pay we weren't sure where to do it, at the table or at the counter up front? Our waitress didn't speak much English, so I threw myself on that conversational grenade with, "Okane ga koko desu ka? Okane ga asoko desu ka?" Literally translated that's, "Money is/goes/should be here? Money is/goes/should be over there?"

She very gratefully confirmed that "Money goes over there," and we paid and left.

This is exactly what I was taught to do when I took Spanish (and I took a decades' worth, and my main teacher was amazing). He always tried to get us to tell him what we wanted or needed or was trying to say in the best way we knew how, because that is how people actually use language. Rather than have it be a barrier, he taught us above all to keep communicating. He never really told us why, or how valuable a skill it would be, he would just pretend he couldn't understand us anyway when we asked for a word we didn't know, and basically forced us to do exactly that. So it became completely normal to just...do that when we didn't know something.

Later, when I was in college and/or in the real world and I didn't know a word or couldn't remember or didn't have the words for a concept, I would I automatically do what I always did, what had become normalised: I would talk around it, which is what my teacher always called it. I even had one of my professors compliment me on getting what I needed that way, and she said that she'd never had another student do that and how helpful it was for her to be able to help me. I know that when I encountered others in my job with whom I had to speak in Spanish, and I couldn't communicate with them in the "proper" way, I could still get what I needed, or they needed, and there was always a sense of delight that even though my grammar was far from perfect, and I didn't always use the right words, that we all accomplished what we were there for. Most people don't care if you get it "right." They just want to be able to communicate effectively. (Can't speak for the French, though. 😉)

I also highly recommend doing this in your native language if you forget a word or blank on something. When I have conversations with people and they tell me they're blanking or can't think of something, I always, always ask them to describe it. Most people don't because they think it's weird and so either they don't get their point across or the conversation simply stops. But if they were more willing to keep communicating, we might get there. So I'm subtly trying to train everyone around me to do the same thing.

it's so much less frustrating and more funny when you can forget the word for windows and just say 'the doors for light to come in the wall' and if you forget the word for noodles you say 'you know the bread worms? from soup?' and if you forget the word for tiger you say 'those big assholes in the jungle, with stripes, they're orange.'

genuinely people love it when you do this. it makes the rest of the conversation so much more fun.

official linguistics post

wikipedia editors are like if redditors were monks

I'm bored at work!!! Help me think of more ideas for this forklift safety sign

Happy Monday! Here’s an update with some additions:

Thank you to @pyrohydriscence @ativanpire @formlesschromatic @the-autistic-spider @cespool-thinktank @baconcupcake @theforestknowsmydreams and others for the ideas. Especially @blackratbighat for dressage, which made me laugh the most. You’ve won this round of Forklifts Against Humanity.

And to everyone asking: Yes, you can print them out and hang them up and edit them.  Do whatever you want with these.

forklift dressage sounds like a Jackass stunt

I'd watch jackass for that lol

Absolutely. That sounds awesome.

Admittedly I'm so southern that I've been to a tractor pull, so I may be biased

I didn't even see the URLs and just accepted this as a normal interaction on this website

why is the human body composed of such capricious tubes

"which could mean nothing" and other essential phrases for the modern speculator