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6:00 am, December 21st, 2025 - 30 comments
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Open mike is your post.
For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose.
The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).
Step up to the mike …
Only 5 more days and then all this Xmas crap will be over.
I try to avoid shopping malls during the run-up to Xmas Day – and about now I avoid going anywhere near a motorway.
The up side of the coming week is that I enjoy being in Auckland after the mass exodus.
Yes. Boxing Day is the best. The only things about Xmas I like are in the fridge. No traffic and a whole 364 days before this nonsense rolls round again.
"Eternity is a ham and 2 people" I think Dorothy Parker said that
Of course these days who can afford a watery ham from China.I don't even think I've seen a mutton dressed as ham for a while either
And if there's good weather, I enjoy that, too.
Agree. It's crap. Never used to be 65 plus years ago when I was a young. There was the Santa thing which we loved and we made our own streamers and hung them up on the walls and ceilings. Xmas Day lunch was a bit more elaborate. No TV back then and the [two] radio stations played Xmas carols all day. That was it.
we had streamers from the cutouts from bottle tops from milk factory.
Morning tea and presents (which were as much about the adults as the kids), big Christmas lunch and then leftovers for days. No Boxing Day sales, people got to stop and chill.
we had streamers from the cutouts from bottle tops
I'd forgotten doing that as a child (it was communal activity). Milk bottle tops were stiff waxed cardboard in the 1950s, then replaced by thin aluminium in the '60s with a smaller diameter top. Pierced tops alternating with colour paper streamers was a popular school design, I vaguely recall…
we had Xmas at the (pretty basic) bach. There were presents and all day on the beach if the weather was fine. Then there was the long summer holiday by the (very uncrowded) beach.
We had access to a basic bach too. Built by my paternal Grandfather in 1947. Lots of WW2 surplus materials went into that building, the water tank was a float from an American seaplane, cutlery from the English Navy, plates from the US Army, and a whole war's worth of Readers Digests to wile away the time when it was too wet for the beach.
Cool. That's what the original Kiwi baches were like. These days "baches" aren't really baches but a 2nd home.
First few years we went to that place we had a caravan and a leaky tent. Then we got an awning attached to the caravan, then my parents replaced the awning with a basic little cabin. Toilets were a smelly hole in the ground for people using the site.
No hot water or showers. But lots of swimming, including on rainy days.
In my early days at the beach (Waikanae camping ground, late 1950s) people could get plenty of fish if they had a boat. Probably, they took many in retrospect; the boats would come in loaded down with snapper and gurnard. Maybe they preserved them by smoking.
We just enjoyed the beach as it was. No need for bikes, skim boards, frizbees, jet skis and all the other stuff people take with them to have "fun".
Can’t be soon enough .Can’t stand it
Back in the day We got a book and an orange and a chook down the back yard got its neck wrung.
I loved it , but not now that its become such a ruinous expensive spectacle it sickens me
Oh yes the orange in the toe of the stocking which were left discarded on the floor for Mum to pick up and put back in the fruit bowl. I recall getting a grapefruit once.
By the time Christmas finally arrives, I think most if not all of us are SALE-d out and completely over being urged to buy buy buy. And the whole bloody cycle will begin again the very next day, with Boxing Day sales (some good bargains to be had, I admit, if you can stand all the rugby-scrum stuff). Then it's New Year’s, Valentine's Day, Easter, Mothers' Day, King's Birthday, Fathers' Day, Halloween, Black Friday … enough already!
As Israel continues to break the cease fire in Gaza, each and every day, and the US, as guarantor, sits on its hands, the situation in Gaza deteriorates at an alarming rate. Any meaningful aid is stopped at the border. It is freezing cold and very wet. Babies as well as children and adults are dying of exposure. Out of this sea of suffering emerge stories such as this:
https://x.com/ezzingaza/status/1999924466508234928
The full quote is unbearable.
We are no longer in a geopolitical situation , we're in some kind of charnel house of the soul .If we do nothing in the face of this, civilisation is gone,humanity is gone.
Dehumanising seems to be produced by ideology. Behaviour conforms to the tacit othering rationalised by the belief system. Jews believe Israel is the promised land, so they had a moral right of return to it (zionism). Palestinians believe prior occupation by jews is irrelevant, and prior occupation by Palestinians is the moral imperative to use.
Competitive antisemitism therefore takes the form of these mutually-exclusive prescriptions. Seems like semites are incapable of inclusion, yet many on both these sides seem inclusive when the media reports their personal views, so ideology is only effective en masse. The solution can only come from Palestinians accepting the 2 state option or being provided civil rights within Israel's state control. Palestinians have established a track record of evading both options, as if peaceful co-existence is too hard.
I'm not sure there's any equivalence in the value systems of the Israelis and the Palestinians .The Palestinians just want to live …. and not in refugee camps for generations
I don't know of this is the harbinger of our collapse as a civilisation. But it is at the very least barbarous, sickening, and inhumane.
If Israel wants to continue to have a moral licence for it's ongoing membership of the international community, it needs to stop this. Now.
Israel lost its moral licence to be part of the international community ages ago. Being committers of genocide tends that to do that to you.
Zionism and Netanyahu are evil. But when the USA aids you in your genocide it’s all good.
Francesca Yes – have we lost all the ability to triumph over evil, which we are part of just by being of the human race. I can't do much for Palestine, try to speak up FTTT. Jung's shadow was voiced about 1912 before the internet and the rise of gargantuan fortune. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung)
Meantime I watch NZAO being dismantled and know that these devourers were voted in. After NZ fighting in two world wars for the UK they found it appropriate to enter the EU putting our reliable trading partnership aside. We panicked. Then the UK opts out of the EU a short time later on the slimmest of votes.
Time to panic again, and try for different democratic measures for running our country. The old systems had been bent and contorted beyond repair. Germany and the organised abbatoirs for people who were not wanted on voyage didn't convulse us to action. Now Palestine – our values have been brutalised and the net has I think dulled minds now vitalised by social media and warped commercialised media.
I can't think how to salvage the values my father went to war and died to save. Why – love of the sweet life, and the challenge of money trading as a sport misses the point of being alive, which must be to live on this earth (W.H.Auden's recipe for us 'of Eros and of dust') alongside your fellows, and remember that each of us was a small miracle.
Can we hold onto that thought and stop our present dreadful decline? The people at the top are blinded by inhumane visions of dissipation, some to debauchery but all of us affected by the final dissolution. *W.H.Auden in 1September 1939 writes that Love is the answer; but must be realised by people at the top asking the honest question.
*…And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. https://www.poetryverse.com/wystan-hugh-auden-poems/september-1939
A great quote Greywarshark
NZAO, there are those unable to see, there are those unable to hear and there are those who can and yet …
NZAO?
New Zealand On Air and
https://nzao.nz/
NZAO meaning New Zealand Aotearoa which as far as I'm concerned is the best name for the country going forward, is not extant not having appeared on google. AO does though, as an acronym on its own. But NZAO as the country acronym can't be seen so I have to take my troubles to the optometrists at NZ Assocn of Optometrists or Orthodontics. Something to chew on.
As a country name we might find it useful to disappear off the world map by putting Aotearoa first, and when 'they' are dialling up who is going to receive today's long range missiles, they won't know where to find our coordinates.
When Palestine is flattened 'they' might want a practice field for the latest war weapons and training. We have regular armament sessions here already.
I wish that was an impossible nightmare but history is stranger than fiction.
At the nation state level we have options.
Not being ANZUS embedded, but with Five Eyes Eyes and Rocket Lab utility and thus immunity, some room for diplomatic nuance (UNSC 2334 to Obama, or Seymour-Peters to POTUS47 & BN).
We have South Pacific nuclear free zone vs AUKUS. We do have interest in the Oz security well-being (they really really should choose the Japanese sub option and only later get SK built nuclear ones, if necessary), they would save so much money and get better subs now.
The more we are not a partner to US led imperialism, the safer we will be in our domestic lives – given they seem to want obedient compliance from their vassals.
Then there is becoming a 7th state of Oz in 2040 (and hiding behind Tasmania).
I think about Tasmania and us FTTT. What do we know about them? Do they still have their original stability acquired or have they sold out for short-term gains as we have?
No one should be targeted because of their identity notes the ACT Party leader.
He meanwhile remains capable of ignoring statements originating in Israel in support of the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians (and dispossession from their land and property in both Gaza and the West Bank).
https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360917590/david-seymour-speaks-kiwis-against-antisemitism-march