insomnia

i've had a bit of a blogging drought this week as it's taken a while to recover from the weekend. i did a trip to wellington and palmerston north, to present a workshop to the muslim community on various issues around legal responsibilities of nz muslims. it's a project funded with support from the american embassy, and the workshop was really well received. we will be taking it to christchurch and dunedin soon, as well as delivering again in auckland.

i really don't know how people manage with jobs that require extensive travel. i find it pretty exhausting. left home around 8am saturday morning, and got back close to 11pm on sunday night, and found it took me a couple of days to recover. my insomnia probably doesn't help, because i woke up around 3am sunday morning and found i couldn't get to sleep. so i ended up watching "the joneses".

now i'm not a fan of demi moore and even less so of david duchovny, but i ended up liking this film - except for the crappy ending. it's one of those films that works best if you don't know what it's about, so i'm not going to say too much about it, other than you should watch it if you get a chance. i think it has some interesting messages about consumerism.

i've been thinking to write something about #teapottapes, but it's been written about so extensively that there's really not much left to say. i find it interesting that no-one has brought up the whole john tamihere/ian wishart thing, or that incident where a journalist deliberately left a microphone recording at the 2008 annual congress of the labour, at a session where the media had been asked to leave. the former wouldn't be a breach of the law i guess, because one party was aware of the taping (being mr wishart) but i wonder about the second. it was a room full of people who had no idea they were being taped, and who trusted the fact that this was a session that wouldn't be reported on.

no questions about privacy or ethics raised in those instances. in any case, it's interesting to watch developments on this. i think the person who has really played it pretty well is bryce johns. he created the initial interest, refused to publish thereby creating even more interest and the inevitable questioning of key. by the time sunday comes around and even if he doesn't publish the transcript, there is certainly going to be huge interest in the HoS and a pretty likely spike in sales. he has certainly served his shareholders well; let's hope the readers get something out of it as well.