Now, a bit of background: when Canadian students go out to get drunk and it’s not halloween we just get on with it. We put on clothing to cover out nakedness and, you know, drink. Kiwi students, not content with merely getting drunk, feel the need to dress up in costumes. At least once a year, perhaps based on some bizarre ritual that I, as a Canadian know nothing about, the Scarfies get dressed up in the bizarre, offensive racial/ethnic stereotypes one can imagine.

This years lot outdid themselves. We started off, at the low end of the scale, with idiots in ponchos and sombreros and fake beards. Things progressed rapididly down hill from here. There was a nice young fellow, a future leader of NZ industry or somesuch no doubt, in a conical hat (Vietnam) with a Japanese flag t-shirt (ehm?) and yellow face on. There were other young men (because it was mostly men) in rags with bones and clubs in blackface. The topper, the absolute best, was the fellow with a black sweater, little mustache drawn on with makeup and a red armband with a swastika on it.

Moving on from there, Christine and I were out for a walk a day or so later while the lad was off on a play date. We popped into a shop that Lucas doesn’t really like, so we could a leisurely poke about. The store sold what they called “Licorice dolls” and what others would know as “gollywog” or dolls. I remember my Mom telling me she had one when she was little, about 60 or so years ago.

Discussing this with Christine we had a moment where we wondered if much of this wasn’t racism, but rather just pure ignorance/naivite/the off shoot of a largely (or at least until recently) monocultural society.

Then I thought back to the young, drunk men we saw wandering by the chip shop. Dunedin, because of the University, the Polytech and the foundation year program at the Uni, has a small but growing Arab population. Waiting for their meals were two young men speaking in arabic while, outside, were there of their friends. The drunk young men wandered past this group. The looks on the Arab men’s faces ranged from worry/fear to disgust.

So I guess my question is this, is there ever a time when blackface/racial stereotyping of this variety ISN’T racist?

If blackface is worn in a cultural setting where it has almost no baggage is it ok?

I know how I feel, but I’m wondering what others think.

http://bit.ly/bfvxp I love the surprise by the journalists & the reasonable commentators. The mask slipped. They walk among us.

Click the link, I’ll wait.

Ok, so we can all agree that, regardless of what we think about Obama, his policies etc, that the comments about his daughter and her t-shirt start at racism and wander out, way out, to Crazytown with some really nice stormfronty shit and some lovely death threat/near death threat stuff.

A bit later I posted this:

RT @novenator via @RawStory Freepers refuse 2 apologize 4 calling Malia Obama ‘typical street whore’ http://is.gd/1wqdB http://tr.im/s2q4

Again, you can click the links. I’ll wait.

So, in the face of criticism they’ve gone and busted out the Photoshop fun (where “fun” means “homophobic bullshit”).

To this I received the following:

@ronindotca That Kos is disgusting isn’t it? Talking abt Malia Obama that way & not aplogizing. Just like Bristol Palin.

So, let’s stop for a second and think about this, shall we?

1) Kos? Eh? Ohhhh.. I see you’re talking about a liberal website that you feel aggrieved by. Ok. Thanks.
2) Kos didn’t say anything about her.
3) The comments about Bristol Palin were not about Bristol Palin. They were about the hypocrisy of a woman who wants to tell people how to run their reproductive lives having a pregnant daughter. The problem was a whole “do as I say, not as my family does” thing.
4) How old is Bristol Palin again?
5) (psst: this is the important bit, so pay attention)  ARE YOU SERIOUSLY USING A SERIES OF JOKES ABOUT A YOUNG WOMAN GETTING PREGNANT BY HER IDIOT BOYFRIEND TO JUSTIFY OVERT, DISGUSTING, IGNORANT, KNUCKLE DRAGGING RACISM (WHICH CONTAINS DIRECT THREATS OF VIOLENCE) DIRECTED AT AN INNOCENT YOUNG WOMAN WHO DID NOTHING WORSE THAN PUTTING ON A T-SHIRT?
6) Honestly, I have nothing else.

Oh, I replied to her:

@jaxbchgirl521 Umm.. you’re an idiot.

What else could I say?

Oh, as a sort of post script, I encourage you to go and read her twitter timeline, it’s a wonderful jumble of bigoted ignorance. I would suggest the medical application of whiskey after you’re done.

https://twitter.com/jaxbchgirl521

1. To my Kiwi buddies, or any random Kiwi readers: your country is lovely, it’s pretty and filled with interesting things to see and do. The people here are lovely. Many of your buildings are lovely (pity about the lack of heat and insulation). There is much to recomend your country to visitors and immigrants. Your stable (if confusing) democracy and it’s system, your laid back attitude towards much that is going on around you… it’s all lovely and wonderful. It’s just not my home.
2. When I am at home I kind of treat Canada Day as a bit of bunk. As a joke. Something to be mocked and ridiculed.

Ok, so that’s out of the way…

Where I am it’s already the afternoon of July 2nd, so for me Canada Day has come and gone and right now, I have to tell you, I’m feeling every cm of the distance between Montreal and Dunedin, all 1,516,900,000 of them.

To give a sense of how far that is, take a peek at this:
(this image is from Wolframalpha.com)

At the best of times, I miss home, but true homesickness comes in waves and is mostly managable. The pattern of day to day life (take Lucas to school, make dinner, clean the house, do the dishes, shop for food, job hunt - yes, still) tends to blot it out for the most part… but periodically, birthdays of family members, holidays, elections (yes, I’m a geek - sue me) etc, it just washes over me. For the last 2 days I’ve been basically engaging in the interwebs version of self-flagellation. I’ve been reading blog posts, looking at youtube videos, reading articles… like some kind of Canada junkie looking to score just one more hit of that Mapley-goodness.. it’s been a touch unseemly.. I’ll admit that I’m misty, and a bit maudlin and when I think about the fireworks and the crappy hotdogs and the mildly offputting flag waving etc I realize that I would give almost anything to have been at home today.

I think Christine put it best “Based on this experience, I think everybody should leave their country for an extended period of time in their lives to really appreciate what they have.”

There are some posts that I’ve read that I thought were really awesome, that showed what my Canada is like, if you follow me on twitter or are friends via FB you’ve seen them, but here goes anyway:

Galloping Beavers thoughts are those of an expat as well.

Dr Dawg has worked tirelessly to help bring a fellow-Canadian’s plight to the fore (others deserve credit as well, but I like this post the best.

This was a good whomp on the old heart strings.

From 2002, from the Sunday Telegraph.

This tickled me muchly, from the NY Times

This made me laugh.

And finally, this tweet was just lovely: @Rawnsley: “Pardon me for saying so, but I fucking love this country.”

O Canada! This native son misses you so.

What heroism looks like

GO HABS GO!

THEY WENT THEY WENT! 

6- 2 THHHHPPTTT

Anyway, as if to provide an example of their current subject matter Lucas asked a question the other day. 

A bit of context: Twang Town is a really good guitar (base/uke/etc) store here in Dunedin and Hyam who owns it is a really interesting character. He has a illuminated sign in his window to tell you if he’s open or not.

So we were walking by and Lucas asked “Why is the ‘Open’ sign red and the ‘Closed’ green? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Our boy. Already criticizing other’s designs.

So it finally bugged me enough to drop by the Vodafone store.. the nice man there (HI AARON!) said “oh, it’s probably lint and proceeded to pick out a huge piece from the headphone jack. He gave it to me and said “there you can go home and make a jersey”. Works like new. 

Which brings me to two questions:

1. Why is vodafone’s instore and email help so good when their telephone support is such utter complete crap? 
2. Why don’t cases for the iPhone ship with a little flap to cover the headphone jack?

Now if  you’ll excuse me I’m going to go and spend just north of $100 to get to and from the Dunedin Airport to pick up Metro. 

At some point soon I need to get a drivers license because I’m not even getting kissed when I’m being screwed.

It’s the little differences. I mean, they got the same shit over there that they got here, but it’s just – it’s just there it’s a little different.

Living here in Dunedin I now totally get it… 

They speak English (at least mostly - Kiwi English has it’s quirks), there’s Subway and McDonalds and Burger King and KFC and Pizza Hut etc etc. Instead of Home Depot there is Mitre 10 (same colours, same basic branding), it goes on and on… but it’s all like looking at a picture in a news paper where they have blown the registration, it’s all a bit off. 

Take the bank machine for example: At home you go to the bank machine to make a deposit, you take an envelope from the holder in front of the machine and pop your money/cheque in and then move through the process.

Here the envelope gets given to you by the machine and you put a deposit slip into the envelope. Almost the same, but a bit different. 

The post office is also an odd experience: you can do mail through it, just like at home. But it’s also a state owned bank, and a place to pay all your bills. 

Food shopping remains one of the great sources of odd. Apart from food being insanely expensive here (our rough calculation is about 1.5 to 2 times the price of back home)  things are often just a little different.

Take “tomato sauce”, we couldn’t work out why our homemade pizza (store bought pizza shells) tasted so sweet and odd.. The issue was resolved when I discovered that tomato sauce is what North American’s call ketchup. 

I haven’t totally figured this out yet, but chocolate chip cookies that look like chocolate cookies elude me: the butter here seems greasier (the difference between grass fed vs grain fed?) so our cookies always sort of spread out and look more fried than baked. 

Skim milk is trim, diet coke tastes like crap where as Coke Zero is lovely. What we call chips are labeled both “crisps” and “chips”, you get all your take-out food (take-away) from either a Chinese person or a “Turkish” person (most of the “Turkish” people are actually selling variations on Lebanese food - my theory is that Turkish is Kiwi for “middle eastern”). This includes burgers and fries and fish and chips…

The oddest thing remains dog food. 

A story to explain why: 

Our first weekend here I went off to the local grocery store to get some food… I basically got lost because nothing was where I expected it to be (little differences again…). I kept walking past this case of food and thinking to myself “Wow New Zealanders sure love their baloney”. 

Finally I stopped to look at what it was. 

It was a great big roll of dog food. Huge. Gigantic. Horrifying. 

Sometimes the differences aren’t so little.

When he pays attention he is actually coming along nicely. 

The down side of this is the first song that everyone learns is Smoke On The Water (the title of this post refers to the tabs of the song as played on the E string). I hate Deep Purple. So I have to be enthusiastic about him learning, all the while wanting to die as he plays this bloody song. 

I can’t wait till he learns another song.