Although the apparent need for a new New Zealand flag seems to have quietened for the moment, I think it is a good idea to examine our colonial vestiges.
In my brief encounter with New Zealand literature, the colonial past and wether or not we are living in "land that we cannot really call ours" has been explored. Yet, I still see a nation still deciding to complete the move away from that history. Thus, I deem the proposal of "deleting the Union Jack" from our supposedly conservative Prime Minister very ironic.
Doesn't all british-ensign-based flags including ours signify this vestigial connection to an empire that no longer exists/barely exists(if you count the British Overseas Territories)? Given our keeping left traffic directionality, and similarity to legal systems based on English common law(which in effect was exported by the same people who came up with it) amongst many other examples, is there a need to be ashamed of a minor one - the current flag?
Colonial vestiges
O week .....liquor.....and thoughts
Today I bought tickets for the Oweek events and strings of thoughts flew past me...
As far as I could remember, O week in Dunedin, New Zealand has been associated of drunken antisocial behavior according the media at least. Last week or so, in a publication a columnist wrote how this O week is not sponsored by alcohol brands in a tone almost resembling a 'sigh' - perhaps a sigh hoping what O week used to be like won't occur again. I wish them a good luck in their expectation of "saintly" O week not sponsored by alcohol companies. I am also dismayed at the cancellation of Toga Parade. Come on! Toga Parade may be messy but it honestly is not at all chaotic and/or deadly unlike thingyans(songkran) I have seen.
Talking about alcohol, I googled "Myanmar Beer" recently after tasting whatever crappy cheap beer was in the keggs at NZAPS camp last Sunday. Surprising, I found this on a blog :"Myanmar – Junta aside Beer Myanmar is such an excellent brew that the country deserves to be listed". I would have to agree with what is said on the blog about Myanmar Beer having tasted it and known that it's better-tasting than Tui or Speights or the shitty beer in the keggs though it along with the latter cannot measure up to Carlsberg or Stella's almost perfectness.
Acknowledgement:
http://beerasia.blogspot.com/
Different kinds of Hook - ups/ခ်စ္သူစုံတြဲအမ်ုဳိးမ်ဳိး
All hook-ups are fine. However I believe there should be some categories and subcategories of hook - ups according to nature of each hook up.
There are the conventional ones, which involve ONLY two partners making love. It doesn't matter if the partners are hetrosexual or LBGT. It remains conventional.
Hook - ups are to be deemed unconventional although still being perfectly acceptable when
(1) one or both partners are intersexed or undergoing gender reassignment
(2)one or both partners passes out during a mutually consensual hook -up (but NOT before a mutually consensual hook-up is clearly established)
(3)This is a difficult one to explain. Allow me to exemplify : person A hooks up with B who is making love with C. And C is also a partner of A as well as B at the same time. (Yes, it's also unconventionally complicated.)
Hope your hook -ups are mutually consensual and fun - whether conventional or unconventional.
ခ်စ္သူစုံတြဲအားလုံးသည္ မွားယြင္းၿခင္းမရွိ။ သုိ႕ေသာ္ ခ်စ္သူစုံတြဲမ်ားကုိ ေအာက္ပါ အတုိင္း ခြဲၿခားရန္ အဆုိျပဳလုိသည္။
ခ်စ္သူႏွစ္ဦးတည္းသာ စုံမက္ျခင္းသည္ သမာရုိးက်စုံတြဲမ်ုဳိး ျဖစ္ေလသည္။ ထုိသမီးရည္းစားျဖစ္သူ ႏွစ္ဦးမွာ လိင္တူသည္ျဖစ္ေစ၊ ဆန္႕က်င္ဖက္လိင္မ်ားျဖစ္ေစ သမာရုိးက်ျဖစ္ျခင္းကုိ မထိခုိက္ပါ။
သမာရုိးမဟုတ္ေသာ ရည္းစားမ်ားျဖစ္ရန္ ေအာက္ပါ အခ်က္တခု နွင့္ ကုိက္ညီရန္လုိသည္။ သမာရုိးက်မဟုတ္ျခင္းက လက္ခံဖြယ္ရွိျခင္းကုိ မပ်က္ျပယ္ေစပါ။
၁။ တစ္ဦး(သုိ႕)နွစ္ဦးလုံးသည္ လိင္အဂၤါနွစ္မ်ဳိးလုံးပါရွိျခင္း သုိ႕မဟုတ္ လိင္ေျပာင္းလဲျခင္းကုသမႈကုိခံယူေနျခင္း။
၂။ နွစ္သက္သူ(၂)ဦး အျပန္အလွန္သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ရရွိျပီး ဆက္ဆံမႈျပဳေနခုိက္ တစ္ဦး(သုိ႕)နွစ္ဦးလုံးသည္ (အရက္မူး၍)သတိမဲ့သြားျခင္း။ (သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ကုိရရွိျပီး ဆက္ဆံမႈမျပဳမီ ဤအခ်င္းအရာျဖစ္က အက်ဳံးမ၀င္။)
၃။ ဤအခ်က္မွာ ရွင္းျပရန္ခက္ခဲ၍ သာဓကျပရန္လုိ၏။ A သည္ B ၏ခ်စ္သူျဖစ္ရုံမက Cနွင့္လည္းတြဲေနျခင္း၊ ထုိနည္းတူ Bနွင့္Cတုိ႔မွာလည္း တျပဳိင္နက္ စုံတြဲျဖစ္ေနျခင္း။ (ထုိသုိ႕ ျဖစ္က သမာရုိးက်မဟုတ္သည့္အျပင္ ရႈပ္ေထြးလြန္းလွသည္။)
သမာရုိးက်ဟုတ္္္္သည္ျဖစ္ေစ မဟုတ္သည္ျဖစ္ေစ ခ်စ္သူစုံတဲြတုိင္း အျပန္အလွန္သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ရရွိျပီး ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္ႏုိိင္ပါေစ။
New flag for NZ
Prompted by a friend and disappointed by the John Key's proposal of what might be a new flag of New Zealand, I designed this.
The koru instead of the southern cross would make it different from the Australian flag. I don't see any problem with Union Jack being the canton on New Zealand's flag given we have used it for many years (since 1869 to be exact). Besides Australia, Fiji, and Tuvalu - which are all unambiguiously independent nations - still use blue ensign-based flag.
Of course, the other ensigns would need to be changed should a new flag is adopted.
Acknowledgements:
http://www.pl.net/pics/notices/koru.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ensign
Waitangi day, Flags, Identity, etc....
Flags.... ah a topic very dear to me. While a "new" flag is to fly besides the national flag on Waitangi day, on Thursday 4 February NZ herald ran this editorial Editorial: Flag change need not cause rancour , which prompted me to updating this blog.
True that NZ flag is not unique but I, while agreeing with the editor's title, would say big 'no' to removing the union jack from the flag. Being of Anglo - Burmese descent, the union jacks of blue, red, and white ensigns almost reflect me in a few ways. In short, it is a piece of Kiwi identity in the NZ flag I can eagerly share.
Have a look at a large number of these http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Flags_based_on_British_ensigns.
Turning to my Burmese side, flags used in Burma throughout time had never been a perfect match to my heart's desires and doubt if one would become so in the foreseeable future. A link again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Burma .
Finally out of irritations about many many things, I sometime wonder this. If I could get hold of a nicely - coloured distinctive flag , perhaps I could carve out a micronation of my own or more feasibly boost and advertise my outbursts of ego from time to time. How? - of course by flying a flag from the rooftop of my abode in "scarfieville" .
Views.... Opinions
A friend of mine on facebook claimed to be very opinionated. Having been "opinionated" to the point of having to manage the anxiety of seeing people who oppose what you think with equally strong ferver, I question the logicality of being "an open book". Many people I know of readily recognise my desire to be a more of a mysterious figure.
Even though shrouding in mystery is not recommended by anyone who "counseled" me, it is a stone that surely kills two birds at the same time. One: being mysterious makes u intriguing - a big plus for anyone who enjoy spotlight. Two: It cuts out arguments which inevitably follow once you let others know that you are opinionated and are not going change those no matter how close they are to you.