Dad Cruises Away

I took Dad to Auckland yesterday to board his cruise ship. He will be cruising the South Pacific for 10 days visiting New Caledonia and Vanuatu. I wonder what he'll think of that style of travelling. The 'Pacific Pearl' was relaunched in December after an upgrade. The photos on the P&O website make it look quite luxurious. It's an impressive size - more like a floating town than a hotel. I hope he has a wonderful time. Meanwhile I've got two assignments left to finish my first semester as a Victoria University student.

Learning about Censorship

This week I've been reading about censorship for my Information in Society paper. A lot of the week's reading has been about legislation and how censorship applies to libraries. However I sometimes get a bit sidetracked and follow links to interesting but not quite relevant topics. For example, today I found a timeline on the history of censorship for use by school students (in the Office of Film & Literature Classification website).

The fascinating fact (i.e. piece of trivia) I learned was this. When the film Ulysses was released in 1967 it was controversial, partly because of its sexual references but mostly because it contained one use of the word 'f**k'. So according to the website this is what happened when it reached New Zealand.

"The Chief Film Censor, screened it to two test audiences, one made up of church representatives (all men) and the other made up of married couples. While the first group recommended an R18 or Restricted to Film Societies classification, the second felt it could only be shown to segregated (split) audiences aged 18 years and over.
The Film Censor followed the second group's recommendation and men and women were separated during screenings. He stated that some of the dialogue in the film would cause embarrassment in 'mixed company'. In smaller theatres this meant a rope was put down the middle of the cinema. In larger theatres the aisle separated men and women, or one group sat upstairs and the other downstairs.
In 1972 the classification was changed to R18. Today the DVD of Ulysses is rated 'M: contains sex scenes'."

Attitudes have certainly changed since then. I wonder what affect this sort of publicity had on box office takings at the time.

Learning about Legislation

The Official Information Act, The Privacy Act and Intellectual Property Rights are not topics that I have thought about much in the past. But we've had some interesting readings and discussions in my university class. Apparently last week was Privacy Awareness Week (it's hard to keep up, there seems to be This Week and That Day for everything now). One of our tasks was to take a 'test', that's available to anyone online, to determine how aware of the risks of identity theft we are. If you're interested the link is below - it certainly raised some points for me to consider.
http://www.privacyawarenessweek.org/id_theft_tool/index.html

More Wild Wind

Today the wild wind was in Auckland when a tornado struck the suburb of Albany. What's happened to Windy Wellington? The wind news is all from northern regions at present. I found this report from a Euronews Channel on YouTube. It's in Spanish but the pictures tell the story clearly. Tornadoes like this are rare in New Zealand, only about 3 or 4 of this size every century according to the weather expert on TVNZ.