back in the old hot seat August 31, 2006  

A big feature of Rebecca's trips to the library or various playgroups is the bit at the end where the woman (almost invariably) running the session stamps her hand with a rubber stamp. Stamps on the hand are like crack cocaine for the under fives. This morning, Rebecca saw the tattoo on my arm. "Daddy, you got a stamp!" she cried. "Yes, Rebecca, I have a special stamp called a tattoo." I replied. She looked me in the eye and said very seriously "Did you say thank you to the nice lady?"

For those of you who thought the Cambridge IT scene was a bit incestuous: going through a CD of documents given to us by an outsourcer, I found documents written by three separate people that I'd known socially when I was a student.

Having made a bit of a fuss about seeing goats the other week, I can now reveal that I've seen them every time I've ridden home since. I've even seen them from the car. They're pretty bold - if you're driving up the Ngauranga Gorge, look to your right before you get to the railway bridge and look for the white spots halfway up the hillside. Those are the goats. There's about a dozen of them, and they're very unafraid. You can even hear them bleating as you go up the gully track. All I need to do is borrow a .22 and we've got curry for weeks to come.

The Tour of Britain has started. Annoyingly, my pick for winner (Andreas Kloden, riding out his contract for T-Mobile) has already abandoned. Nice to see that Roger Hammond got a stage win (ahead of Tom Boonen, which is saying something). If you're in the UK, do yourself a favour and head down to Westminster for the final day this weekend; looks like it should be a good one. I'd love to be there. Ach, well, next time.

a few thoughts on recent events August 24, 2006  

I don't have a problem with a company offshoring to cut costs. Manufacturing in a first world country, labour costs end up being a huge proportion of the manufacturing expense. A number of companies that I like and whose products I use are successful precisely because they were quick off the blocks in the mid '90s to leverage the cheaper manufacturing expense of Taiwan or China - Planet X/On-One, Surly... or closer to home, Icebreaker, Macpac, or Swanndri. The design, marketing, and retail of the product is still in one place: it's just the tedious business of actually assembling the raw materials into a saleable product that happens somewhere else.

Indeed, offshoring has become so prevalent that a wave of smaller boutique bike or equipment companies have sprung up, doing small runs of fairly specialised kit (Dialled Bikes, Omega Cycle Works, Cotic, ...). Now, to manufacture something, you don't need to invest in any form of capital: all you need is a bit of design nous and the contact details for someone like XACD. This sort of diversity in the market is a good thing.

Of course, like any good thing, this can be taken to extremes. Go to any outdoors shop and pick up the kit. The vast majority of it will have been made in Southeast Asia (typically China, Vietnam, and the Phillipines). Go to any bike shop and look at the bikes - well, OK, they don't tend to have 'made in...' stickers on, but the vast majority will have been made in Taiwan (or assembled onshore from parts made in Taiwan).

I say the 'vast majority' - but there are bikes that have a 'made in...' sticker. These are bikes that proudly declaim that they were made in a first world country. Part of Cannondale's undeniable pimp factor is the US flag on the seattube, proclaiming that it was designed and constructed in the US. Ditto Orange: rufty-tufty "all mountain" bikes are one thing, but when you put your hands on a Patriot 66, you know you're getting something machined out of aluminium sheet and hand-welded in Yorkshire. Timbuk2 sew their bags in San Francisco; Ground Effect keep a sewing machinist busy in Christchurch; Norsewear still make their woolens in Norsewood.

Kona are an iconic mountain bike brand - designed in Canada, manufactured offshore, and sold worldwide. Rocky Mountain are designed, built, painted and shipped in Canada, and lusted after worldwide.

Often the only real differentiator as perceived by the consumer between a company that has offshored and one that hasn't is the "premium brand" association with the company still manufacturing onshore. This is part of the reason why companies that offshore try to keep it as quiet as possible, and hold on to their "iconic national brand" image for as long as they can. And this is the reason why I think that attempts to muddy the waters should be resisted. At least part of the reason why I'd like a Carradice Nelson Longflap saddlebag is the fact that it's still manufactured in Lancashire (with the name of the machinist written inside); knowing that the Cactus Climbing Subductor was sewn in Christchurch gives it that local, punk-rock feel.

The move to designing in one country and manufacturing offshore is so prevalent that it's easier to pick out the exceptions. That's what campaigns like "Buy NZ Made" are about: pointing out the exceptions, so we all know what's what.

The other morning, Rebecca came into the bedroom as I was getting dressed. "Daddy, I done a poo," she said. "OK, Rebecca, I'll change you in a minute," I replied. She nodded and walked back out into the living room. Thirty seconds later she was back, this time wearing the cat mask she made at nursery. "Daddy, Scarface Claw done a poo!" she announced triumphantly.

Riding home up the Wakely Gully track last night, I saw a herd of wild goats on the other side of the gully. They were wandering along quite unconcernedly, on one of the old terraces cut near the top of the hill. I know they're a noxious pest, they eat the regenerating native bush, and they destroy people's gardens, but it was still pretty cool to see them in the wild.

If I was to record a hip-hop track, it would be called "Fuck the stakeholders".

My word, what a lot of fuss over this year's Boobs on Bikes parade. Repeat after me everyone: they're just tits. We've all seen them before and society has not yet ground to a halt. Prannet of the week award goes to Dick Hubbard's tendentious moralising, effectively giving the parade massive free publicity. I'm sure the organisers were quite gleeful. On a personal level, I'm in favour of public nudity. Though I do think that the current climate must have made the parade a bit reminiscent of a line from the rather poor British comedy Bottom, where one character is explaining why British nudist beaches are better than on the continent: "It's colder," he says, "so the nipples are bigger."

The older I get, the more I look like Alan Moore.

sore knees, sinus August 21, 2006  

It's that time of year again. Everyone's got one of the colds that're around the place. Rebecca's been fairly snotty, Heather's escaped relatively unscathed, and I've spent a week either feeling like my chest is drowning in mucus or that my face is going to explode (me and searingly troublesome sinus infections - we're like that [gestures]). It's taking some of the glamour off my life, let me tell you. Mind you, everyone else at work seems to have the same problems, so there we go.

We spent an hour or so yesterday at the large indoor playground (UK: soft play) area out at Tawa. It was great. Rebecca really enjoyed herself, running around, climbing on things, jumping up and down and leaping off stuff. At one point, a small boy went down a slide just in front of her, making loud roaring noises as he went down the enclosed slide. His roars echoed and bounced up the slide tube. Rebecca paused at the top, carefully said "aaaarrr" and - having completed what were obviously the appropriate formalities - went down the slide. Unfortunately, childrens' play area equipment is often not designed for people who have actually developed kneecaps. I spent a fair bit of time crawling through small spaces after her to ensure that she didn't leap off something that was too big for her, and I can confirm that crawling around on hard plastic surfaces after about the age of 12 is a very bad thing the next morning. Next time I'll have to take kneepads.

Rebecca's latest phrase is "I'm so busy", as in "Rebecca, stop watching the Wiggles and come have some dinner." "No, I'm so busy".

It's nice to know that seeing exotic beasties around the corner is universal. No sooner have I left the land of the Beast of Bodmin Moor, and the territory of the Fen Tiger, than I get back and find that a panther is supposedly stalking around Canterbury. Woo hoo!

A number of Wellington suburbs are named after the prevalent local foliage at time of settlement. Tawa, Ngaio, Johnsonville...

bingo, now i'm hitting a six August 14, 2006  

The other day, I had a one of those moments that you treasure after you hit 30. I was buying a couple of CDs. The shop assistants were all under 21, dressed funky, probably students working part-time. The girl who was serving me looked at the first CD I was buying and said "Oh, I've been meaning to get a copy of this - it's really good." Ha, I thought to myself - I'm still listening to funky, young persons' music. I'm still down with the kids. Youth power, man! No matter that I have a wife, child, station wagon and mortgaged house in the suburbs, I'm still relevant. Then she saw that I was also buying the latest album by the Pet Shop Boys and I could actually see her face change as she assumed that I was gay.

The 'approved youf music innit' was the album Arular, by M.I.A. It's very, very good indeed. Solid songs, serious beats, a good sense of humour and the rhetoric of warfare; NWA meets the Powerpuff Girls via West London. I can highly recommend it.

The other day I took Rebecca on the cable car. She loved it. She jumped up and down, she smiled at everyone, she waved at the other cable car when it passed us, and she now tells everyone that she went on it. On the way down, we were sitting down at the end of the car, by the driver. The driver got on and sat down, and Rebecca said "Daddy, who is he?". I said, "that's the driver, Rebecca". She immediately started singing "The driver of the bus says 'please sit down, please sit down, please sit down', all day long"... and he joined in and sang a couple of verses with her. Respect.

misc ink August 10, 2006  

During a conversation with a friend the other day, it transpired that she had been unaware of the difference between Morrisey and Neil Morrissey. Accordingly, she thought we'd been talking about Morissey from The Smiths doing the voice for Bob the Builder. I reckon it's a genius idea. Can you imagine it?

Scoop, Muck and Dizzy: Can we fix it?
Bob: *sighs* What's the point? Will it dull the aching pain of my burdensome existence?

It reminds me of the time that another friend misheard someone discussing the reason why Richard Pryor missed his appearance on the Muppet Show - and thought that it was Richard Briers who'd set himself on fire while freebasing crack cocaine.

Connection: Richard Briers does a voice for Bob the Builder as well - Bob's father, Robert the Builder (yes, really).

Oh for fuck's sake. How much are four people's lives worth? £180, if they're cyclists (oh, and six points on your licence). How much is an unquantifiable amount of motorists' time worth? £300, if you're a cyclist who chose not to use a cycle path.

The Onion comments on the Floyd Landis affair, while both The Guardian and the BBC point out that Britain has a completely unheralded world-class athlete in Nicole Cooke, who has just won the Tour de France Feminin, and is basically unassailable in the World Championship rankings. I greatly regret that Cooke crashed out of the Wellington round of the World Cup race earlier this year before we could see her in action: she's an incredible athlete and a pretty inspiring person all around.

I haven't had any tattoos for about a decade. I'm starting to think it's time to change that. And looking at this guy's incredible tribal/abstract work [via the extremely NSFW ModBlog], I'm getting itchy again. Blackwork abstract is still where my head's at, and I reckon that the addition of pure red abstract is a very good thing indeed.

stuff about organised rides August 07, 2006  

Talk about chutzpah. I'd heard that the entries for the Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge were open, so I decided to download an entry form off the website. I typed the URL from memory - cyclechallenge.co.nz. Except that it isn't. The Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge website is at cyclechallenge.org.nz - the .co.nz is actually the Taranaki Cycle Challenge. Clearly someone in the Taranaki event's publicity team noticed that the Taupo mob had been a bit lax on domain registration, and leaped in boots and all. Wonder how the Taupo team feel about it. Still, best of luck to them - the Taranaki ride actually looks quite tempting.

Actually, let's look for a moment at NZ's big road cycling events. There's the Lake Taupo Cycle Challenge, the Taranaki Challenge, the Round the Mountain ride... These all have one thing in common: circumnavigation of volcanoes. Well, two things - they're all in the North Island - but it's quite an interesting pointer to the effects of our geological instability on our landscape. Two of these events circle the same (dormant) volcano: Taranaki (aka Mt Egmont), and the other circles the remains of one.

Actually, what's with the clash between the Round the Mountain ride and the Taranaki Cycle Challenge? They're only a few weeks apart, both start from New Plymouth, and seem to follow about the same course. I'm sensing some bad blood here or something. Do the organisers get together and have big fights in the street?

The Taupo ride is NZ's largest recreational cycling event. Last year, just under 12,000 riders took part. In comparison, Europe's largest recreational cycling event is actually the London to Brighton, which pulled in just under 27,000 last year. The question is, is climb up Hatepe Hill any easier than Ditchling Beacon?

sartoriality August 04, 2006  

Is it just me, or is it worrying when someone starts a conversation with the phrase "Now, I've been looking at aerial photographs of your house...."?

A decade ago, a small clothing company started up in Christchurch to sell clothes to the burgeoning mountainbiking market. In the intervening time, Ground Effect have grown up a great reputation for solid, hard-wearing clothes that look good and are reasonably priced. Their willingness to ship internationally, combined with the favorable exchange rate, means that they have a huge reputation in the UK (when we were last at Coed Y Brenin MTB park in Wales, literally half the riders we saw were wearing at least one piece of Ground Effect clothing). Back home here in NZ, they're the market leaders. In the last few years a few other local clothing companies have tried to get in on the market (notably Krank Dirt Wear, N-Zo, and (on the roadier side of things) Solo). But Ground Effect are still the gold standard for NZ cycling kit, in much the same way that Icebreaker are the original and best in the recent surge of high-performance merino clothing, despite late competition from Norsewear and Swanndri. I'd say that the vast majority of NZ cyclists own at least one piece of Ground Effect kit.

Which means that it's not too unlikely to, say, pull up next to another cyclist on your way in in the morning, and realise that you're wearing identical Ground Effect shorts and fleece.

I did what any sane person does when confronted with someone wearing the same outfit as them: hit him with my handbag and then cut him dead for the rest of the social occasion.

Item! Coldcut, Wellington Opera House, 29th September. Oh yes. Yes indeed.

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