The chaos has consistency.

February 7th: Call in the morning from the dental centre, after around four hours' sleep. They want to confirm some details. They're looking for my file. Second call just as I'm getting back to sleep. They've finally found my file. It may take a couple of weeks to get an appointment. Given that the oral surgeons were away over Christmas, there's a backlog. It may be a month before I can get an initial consultation from one. I ask if I can get a copy of the initial x-rays to see if I can get something done by going private. They can't do that because they are working on hard-copy X-rays and the main hospital has gone to computers. There's apparently nothing for it but to wait, and it may be a couple of months. Sorry.

*sigh* I'm getting sick of this.

On the other hand, the concert I went to on Sunday was great: Nacoa & Switch, Funk'n'SloCuts & The Kurnel MC with Minuit headlining. It started slow, with the live music only starting around 6pm or so, but built up quite nicely to the main event. Playing in an outside courtyard strikes me a difficult place to get the mix right for, though I guess the people at the venue are likely used to it by now.

Minuit live are definitely a different experience to their studio albums, but the magic was all there. Lots of energy, very tight performance musically, a few little playful changes to the content (a lyric that usually goes "and today's not a Sunday" was reversed, for example) that gave it less of the "set piece performance" feel you get from some bands. They did quite a bit of newer material as well as a few of the older songs, and as a result I'm quite looking forward to their new album being released.

Three hours of world class live music here in Christchurch, for the price of a twenty buck ticket. We're well blessed with local talent.

Quotables

isaacfreeman, cartoonist and Baha'i:

A non-Muslim cannot do any harm whatsoever to Islam by publishing a picture of Muhammad, no matter how insulting. In fact, there is nothing a non-Muslim can make that can harm Islam. Islam can only be harmed by Muslims, just as Christianity can only be harmed by Christians, and the Baha'i Faith by Baha'is. No number of bad cartoons drawn by a non-Muslim can ever match the damage caused by a single violent act committed by a Muslim. That's simply the responsibility you bear when you belong to a religion.

[More here.]

cavalorn, British writer:

To descend into the facile, the problem with a global village is that you then get a global brouhaha kicking off round the back of the global Asda because of what someone said, globally, about Our Becky being a slaaaag.

I don't know about anyone else, but I live on an island. I utterly reject the notion of mutual citizenry, and thus mutual acceptance of some sort of implicit social contract between myself and any other bugger on the globe. We are diverse sovereign nations bound by a delicate web of treaty and history, not the population of some new boundary-less ubernation floating on the celestial Internet like some vision of the New Jerusalem. If the cartoon debacle has proved anything, it's not that the Dutch are fascists or the Muslims are nutjobs or any other comfortable, erroneous generalisation; it's proved that the 'global village' is a fucking small-town nightmare.

[More here.]