Tis the season......for Father Christmas fisticuffs, apparently. It seems to be a growing worldwide trend that any assemblage of more than a few Santas should end in an all-in brawl. The optimum number required, it seems, is about 30. First, from Wales...

THERE was no shortage of suspects matching the description when police were called to a fight in a small Welsh town.

More than 30 drunken men dressed as Father Christmas were slugging it out in the main street after the world’s biggest gathering of Santa Clauses ended in a mass brawl.

...and then, right here in New Zealand...

Police in Auckland had to deal with a group of drunken Santas last night.

A large group of people, dressed in Santa suits, began fighting in the Victoria Street car park in the central city.

About 30 of them, both men and women, were involved, and police said they were heavily intoxicated.

Come on people, think about the children!
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Blogger articleI've had a couple of requests from family and friends for the Dominion article on blogging that appeared in their weekend magazine section a couple of weeks back, but which never made it into their online edition. Well, here it is. The thought of scanning it in seemed like far too much effort, so I just took a digi-snap of it, which means it's a bit blurry and creased, but still readable. Ahh, dagnabbit, I'll just scan it in then...

Click the image for the much bigger and readable version.



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Give Me Centrism or Give Me Death!Spin magazine have made a list (a list! in a music magazine! surely not!) of their top 10 'most accurately rated' artists in rock history. Not over-rated, not under-rated, but which "...have the acceptable level of popularity, they have attained the critical acclaim their artistry merits, and no one is confused about their cultural significance."

Coming in at #4 is the Beatles...

The Beatles are generally seen as the single most important rock band of all time, because they wrote all the best songs. Since both of these facts are true, the Beatles are rated properly.

Also rating mentions are the Black Crowes, Tone Loc, and My Bloody Valentine (and yes, I was one of the 200000 who bought into the swirly guitars thing).

[via joe @ nzmusic]

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Sunset and Pies

So I finally got myself a new digital camera, after my old 0.5 megapixel, bought for $500 back in 1997, stopped working, and then, hilariously, got nicked. Here's my first sunset photo - a snap taken from my backyard just the other night. Prurdy.

But after a week of glorious weather, in which this sort of sunset action was de rigeur, a nasty southerly blew in on Sunday, scarpering plans the family had had for a big walk in the Tararuas. I took the boys down to the shops instead, and we stopped in at the bakery for two small savoury pies (the boys), and one big cheese and steak pie (me).


Mmmm, pies....

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Blog is four letter wordThe New Zealand Oxford Dictionary has beaten the Merriam-Webster Dictionary to the punch by including the word 'blog' in its newly revised edition. The MW Dictionary has just published their 'Words of the Year' for 2004, top of which is 'blog' (followed by incumbent, electoral, insurgent, hurricane, cicada, peloton, partisan, sovereignty, and my personal favourite: defenestration), but which won't actually make it into their printed Collegiate Dictionary until next year.

Blogs are so hot right now.

And the people behind them care. It was interesting to see that when Pete at interface-7 published his annual review of HTML and CSS validity compliance on his website, not one of the Netguide Web Award finalists had valid HTML, and very few had valid CSS. But now, a couple of weeks later, three of the five blog finalists have updated their HTML to be fully compliant. (And I would like to point out that the only reason that bizgirl's css is invalid is because of the stupid blogspot navbar thing at the top of the page, which has invalid styles embedded into it). Not one of the other sites in any other category has done likewise. Go the bloggers.

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