One of New Zealand's greatest-ever exports of experimental music, The Dead C. have built a huge catalog of challenging "rock" music over the last 25 years that offers massively dosed psychedelic excess, improvised all-night flights, blistering free noise and deconstruction of blazing garage punk for adventurous listeners. They've cheekily called themselves "The AMM of punk rock" and it's not far from the truth. Their high-water mark -- the double-LP Harsh 70s Reality -- has reached twentieth anniversary status and has just been reissued on vinyl by legendary US imprint Siltbreeze, restoring a few cuts that didn't make it to the late 1990s CD re-release and offering this fearless free music to a new generation of fans. [more inside]
posted by porn in the woods on Oct 23, 2012 - 24 comments

I've been greatly enjoying the NZ MetService weather blog for a while now. There are posts about cloud formations, weather pioneers, forecasting, and all kinds of other weather geekery. It does have an NZ slant in places but everyone has weather, and the technical information included is fascinating whatever your location. [more inside]
posted by shelleycat on Mar 16, 2011 - 6 comments

Description of Incident: POLICE SAVE DOLPHIN
posted by rodgerd on Mar 13, 2011 - 38 comments

New Zealand Police announced this afternoon that they believe that all 29 miners missing at Pike River are now presumed dead. After several days of raised and dashed hopes, a second explosion at the coal mine has devasted hopes that the miners could possibly be alive.
posted by chairish on Nov 23, 2010 - 88 comments

Legends from New Zealand held that there was a large predator bird, known as pouakai, that was big enough to carry human beings off to its nest or den. Some people associated stories of Pouakai with the giant flightless Moa, extinct in 1773. Others thought it might be another extinct giant bird on the South Island, Haast's Eagle (Harpagornis moorei). The eagle, locally known as Te Hokioi, has been extinct for 500 years, overlapping with the early settlers by some 200 years. There was some speculation that the giant eagle was a scavenger due to partially protected nasal openings, which are benefit to protect nasal cavities when digging into carcasses, analogous to features found on accipitrid vultures. Recent studies have provide there is proof that the Haast's Eagle was a fearsome predator, with talons like tigers and the ability to dive on prey at 80 kilometers per hour (50 mph). [more inside]
posted by filthy light thief on Sep 16, 2009 - 22 comments

The organisers of New Zealand hacking convention Kiwicon have created some PR the only way they know how, l33t h4x0ring. Using a XSS bug in NZ's largest newspaper the NZ Herald they created a fake URL that injected javascript to rewrite an article there. The URL got passed around and soon ended up with genuine media coverage in NZ Herald's biggest competitor Stuff. An earlier effort on the NZ Computerworld site was quickly fixed and got no media coverage.
posted by sycophant on Aug 28, 2007 - 14 comments

The New Zealand Net Awards have announced their finalists. Picked by a panel of people including Web saavy magazine editors, personal Web site operators, and tech-radio deejays, the NZ awards seem much more even handed, open, and real than the Webbies (albeit only for NZ sites...) And, as far as I can tell, they're doing it on almost no budget. Pretty impressive. Why doesn't this community start something like it?
posted by benbrown on Sep 3, 2001 - 20 comments