| 25/2/2011 "There once was a boy called Ali in love with a girl named Sally, they went, took acid, his penis went flacid, and so now poor old Ali's alone." There's a reason I enjoy the scribbles that you find in public toilets, some are truly inspired. The writer of the poem above even signed it, albeit with a pen name: 'Shorty'. Hmmm, one who fancies herself a street artist, eh? Using a hip-hop term of affection as a pseudonym. 2 days ago I switched on the TV in the hopes of finding something to entertain me for an hour and was stunned to find out an earthquake had hit Christchurch NZ. So I found myself watching a commercial-free commercial channel and seeing live footage. I had never before experienced a channel completely disregarding its schedule to broadcast live footage of a disaster. The way that many Australian channels were focussing on this and reporting this made me think of Australia and New Zealand having a relationship of very close sisters. Seriously, the disaster was treated as something that very much affected Australians as much as Kiwis. (A number of Aussies were/are in Christchurch as it happened.) Amazingly the interviews on the ground and the live broadcast from New Zealand's Parliament also made me realise something else: the Kiwi accent. I know I know, I wrote in the last entry that the noticeable differences were in the dialect and vocabulary, but as I was watching I noticed how differently they pronounce "work". It seems I've been in Australia so long, surrounded as I have been by the Aussie accent, that the Kiwi accent is now distinctive to me. |