Category: new zealand
Te Reo With Mnemonics: Head Words
Beard – paihau
A man with a really long beard keep talking and talking, so a woman grabs it, stuffs it into his mouth and says “Shut your pie hole!”
Chin – kauae
A man with an enormous chin keeps tapping on a woman’s shoulder. She turns around and says “Go away!”
Ear – taringa
A woman is wearing massive hooped earrings, when a car drives past, throwing up a chunk of tar onto her. On her ears are tar rings.
Eye – karu
A car opens up its headlights and instead of lights there are eyes there.
Face – kanohi
A man in a canoe paddles down a river, but the canoe gets stuck on the giant stone face of a moai in the current.
Forehead – rae
A man is praying on his knees when a ray of light bursts through the clouds and strikes his forehead.
Hair – makawe
A man with incredible hair sits on a chair, as part of a contest. A woman walks up to him with a pen and clipboard and asks if she can mark his hair. “Mark away,” he replies.
Head – mātenga
At K-Mart, two disembodied heads get into an argument. The heads are exhibiting mart anger.
Lip – ngutu
A trendy-looking woman stretches out her lip and plays it like a banjo. To a nearby journalist, she says “It’s the thing to do!”
Mouth – māngai
An artist sits at a desk, practising how to draw mouths in the Japanese manga style.
Neck – kakī
A solider dressed in khaki has a neck that stretches high into the air.
Nose – ihu
A man walks up to a busker and, out of his nose, deposits a number of coins into the busker’s hat. Then he says “He who pays the piper calls the tune.”
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The above is an excerpt from the upcoming Learn Maori Vocabulary With Mnemonics, by Jeff Ngatai, due to be published by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2017/18.
Election is Not the Same As Selection!
You’ve got the power to choose who will rule the country after September 23rd – we’re all waiting on your input! Your vote will help elect a Prime Minister and ruling party. You will have a range of choices of both electorate and party candidates – some voters will have over 25 options. That’s democracy, right? The people choose, right? Not really.
The tricky thing is that your input regarding the selection of the candidates is not asked for. The process that led to either Bill English or Andrew Little becoming one of your only two choices for Prime Minister is not under your influence, not even in the slightest.
As Richard Goode of Not A Party pointed out in a recent address, New Zealand has had either a National Party Prime Minister or a Labour Party Prime Minister for the past 80 years.
And you don’t get to select either of those. You get to vote for one list of people that you have zero input into, or another list of people that you have zero input into.
So what your vote amounts to, as an elector, is little more than a ceremonial acknowledgement of the completion of a process that started a long time before election day. Like the Queen cutting a ribbon to open a new library, it’s merely a show for the cameras.
The process that matters – where the political power is – is the process that puts a person into the position of leading their party in the first place. And the Establishment will have seen to it, as it does every other time, that both the National leader and the Labour leader are their puppets.
So it doesn’t matter if you vote for the left wing or the right wing of the shitbird – the leaders of both wings have been selected by the people who really have all the power in society, and it isn’t you.
That’s why Andrew Little and Bill English are indistinguishable when it comes to several major social issues. On the issue of cannabis law reform, Little is no less conservative than English, constantly harping on about brain damage, and the Labour Party policy webpage makes no mention of cannabis law reform whatsoever (although funding a motion-capture studio in Dunedin was important enough to mention).
In the end, we shouldn’t expect Little and English to be distinguishable. What the rulers of this country want is to frighten the markets as little as possible, and that means reducing democracy to a sham election between two candidates pre-selected for their total absence of any capacity for novel thought.
Ultimately, the people who benefit from the status quo have far too much invested in it to allow it to be upset by plebs like you!
Not even voting for a third party is possible. Watching the Green Party mortgage their soul at ever-increasing rates of interest over the past 18 years taught us one thing: a maverick third party can only win power in our system to the degree that it makes itself indistinguishable from those who already have it.
That the country will be led by someone who sees you as a unit of livestock to be milked for productivity and taxes is a given. It might appear that the only reasonable course of action was to refuse to vote and to work on building a parallel society away from the gaze of psychopaths beholden to international banking or ideological interests.
Te Reo With Mnemonics: Travel Words
Boat – waka
Sailing through the ocean, impossibly managing to stay afloat, is a boat made of wicker.
Car – motokā
A woman drives out of a garage in a car. Then a man asks his son where the car is. The son replies “Ma took it.”
Bicycle – paihikara
A woman rides a bicycle past a line of noisy picketers.
Plane – manurere
An aeroplane crashes into a gigantic pile of horse manure.
Motorcycle – motopāika
A knight rides a motorcycle as if it was a jousting horse, only instead of a lance he has a pike. He is the motor piker.
drive – taraiwa
A man drives his car at different speeds along a road. Then he comes to a woman holding a bunch of ice-creams. “Try one,” she says.
arrive – whakaeke
A man walks through an arrivals hall at an airport. People keep offering him eggs. When he gets to the front of the queue, he knocks one egg away and says “Fuck eggs!”
depart – haere atu
A king and his retinue walk into a cannabis cafe. They get so high that they float off the ground, departing from the Earth entirely. They have departed because they are the high retinue.
Welcome – pōwhiri
A ferry full of very poor looking people arrives at a wharf. It is the poor ferry. The passengers disembark under a large “Welcome” sign.
Goodbye (to one going) – haere rā
A lion leaves its pride and climbs halfway up a mountain. Then it turns back and, to say goodbye, lets out a roar from up there. It is a higher roar.
Travel – haerere
A man is showing a slideshow of travel photos from all around the world. In them, the man appears to be very hairy.
Adventure – mātātoa
A backpacker climbs up through a bizarrely constructed building, and it looks adventurous. As they pass a dangerous-looking chunk of porcelain, the guide in front of him says “Mind the toilet”.
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The above is an excerpt from the upcoming Learn Maori Vocabulary With Mnemonics, by Jeff Ngatai, due to be published by VJM Publishing in the summer of 2017/18.