Nate
: ?It's not the design of these Sunday-drive posts to simply be a litany of the worldwide march of Google Street View, but it does seem to turn out that way. This week I coincidentally started Keri Hulme's novel (and winner of the 1985 Booker Prize) The Bone People and discovered that GSV had finally reached the Antipodes, and I was thus able to get some sense of the novel's setting—and the town where the author lives—on the remote Westland coast of New Zealand's South Island. There I found this bit of local culture, an austere but well-labeled general store. The roadside forest outside town, meanwhile, is as ferny and wild-looking as one would hope and expect.?Nate
: ?Rugby fan that I am, I find it odd to think of American football teams performing their own versions of the Polynesian pregame haka (here in Oregon I think it was brought over by Hawaiian football recruits). Still, it's a step in the right direction—now they just need to ditch the pads, helmets, and forward passes.?The high school football team in Euless, TX (population 52,900) starts their games by performing the haka, a chanting dance used to intimidating effect by New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team. What’s odd/interesting about this is that the Maori chant was appropriated by the team’s contingent of Tongan players—whose parents moved to the town to work at DFW airport—and has led to a greater sense of acceptance of the Tongans into the larger community. How’s that for multiculturalism?
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