Life as a Hobbit

For American Memorial Day I sat with New Zealand's version of of the memorializing holiday, A NZAC Day. There is a specificity to the holiday, although I see the creep of appliance sales and furniture discounts down here, too. The day officially commemorates the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps by putting cheap red crepe poppies on every conceivable thing.  If I asked you to tell me which was the Great War and which was the World War would you be able to tell me? I gave you a big hint and put them in chronological order.  Great=1st, World=2nd. The Great War.  How great?  The only great association I have with ANZAC is homophonic, a tiny venue in Toronto, Canada: The Tranzac.  Sometime around 2009 I watched Richard Laviolette and the Oil Slicks play there (check out my favorite Funeral Song ).  The accordionist’s instrument strap broke during their first song and an audience member leapt up to kneel at her feet through the rest of the set, holding ...

Tradies - The traditional hands-on trades, physical professions like construction (builders), plumbing, electricians (sparkies). They are notorious for being fearless (aka reckless) drivers and will want to pass you if you are driving like a timid tourist (it me!) on twisty NZ rds and through residential areas. There seems to be a rhetoric of respect towards tradies as being the quintessential common man. Maybe this is something that happens everywhere to a certain degree, but farmers are held in a similar esteem. It gives me an uneasy feeling, probably the way respect for the common man rings so untrue in my experience filtered through American political rhetoric. It feels like a trick. Is it a trick? It is almost certainly a trick. Bogan - via Ozzie slang. An Antipodean redneck, lowclass, a yahoo. Think 4-wheelers, hunting, and according to my Colorado-come-Kiwi roommate’s associations metalheads. It seems like it used to be thrown around as a purely derogatory term, and no...

Tekapo is a little town in Mackenzie County which is named after that folk hero sheep rustler I wrote about in my Kentucky blog, who stole hundreds of sheep with the help of his trusty dog Friday.  The people of Tekapo erected a monument in 1968 in honor of the sheepdog beside the lake, in homage to the hard working animals who made alpine sheep farming possible.   T he brass plaque attached to the statue ends with "Beannachdan air na cu caorach" which apparently means “Blessings on the sheep dog.”        Tekapo is the east lake, Pukaki lies to the west, sister alpine lakes. Both are bounded by moraines, a scoop made in the earth with a natural dam of rock and debris etched out by a glacier sometime around 12,000 years ago. Pretty young, geologically speaking.   Lake Tekapo is 120 meters deep, twice the depth of Lake Michigan. The town boasts a Dark Sky designation (residential and commercial restrictions on outdoor lighting, streetlig...