Jan 26, 20081
Colour Chooser Tool for Website Design
This is quite a handy tool if you are designing a page or doing some graphic work. It allows you to check out a range of colours.
Dec 23, 20070
No Possible Soundz Vol. 3 - New Release!
Just finished an update of the 6 Dimension Soundz website. Included in the update are mp3’s you can download for the upcoming New Years release of No Possible Soundz Vol. 3. A cracking collection of the finest Finland has to offer, this album rocks the socks off crocks of jocks!
Also Mandalvandalz popular Poison Machine has been re-released, so if you missed out, now you can grab a copy.
Also up are mp3s from Sci Forest’s classic Fetish Box, as well as crunchy Finland psyke ninjas Puoskari from the Open the Forest release.
Enjoy!
Sep 8, 20079
Mixi vs. Facebook
Facebook vs. Mixi
Having used the Japanese social networking site mixi.jp for a number of years now, and recently (3 months ago?) started using facebook, I thought I would post my thoughts on the two. I imagine most of the western readers of this site will be familiar with facebook, but less so with its oriental counterpart.
The mixi experience is quite different from the facebook experience. It is a nice orange for starters. Overall the focus of the mixi site is more on communicating about ones life than with facebook. Most people who use mixi keep a diary, and it functions as a kind of blogging system for a lot of users. Commenting is common for most posters, so in a way it combines the best of sites like blogger or wordpress with a social networking platform. on the other hand, features such as galleries in facebook seem much more ‘added on’ and not part of the base design.
Facebook’s design isn’t great, it is stolid, something we would expect a middle manager somewhere, anywhere to give the green light on. Functional and reasonably easy to navigate around, facebook is effective enough at connecting people. This for me has been the thing that entices me with facebook, finding friends from high school and further back in time. Living here in Japan one doesn’t, for example, run into Damien from primary school at the supermarket as one might back in ones home country so it is quite a special feeling to browse through other peoples contact lists and to suddenly have a name that one hasn’t thought about in a very long time pop out.
To give you some idea of mixi usage, mid week there was a TV programme which featured a minor Japanese celebrity, a rakugo performer, whose “job” was to learn how to rap “8 Mile” style. Rap and African American culture is big in Japan so there are a lot of rap groups, most of which aren’t quite as full on as their counterparts across the pacific. However the producers of the show did a great job in finding a pretty hardcore group in Nerima Ward of Tokyo.
The celebrity spent time with them and picked up some of their lingo. As well as learning to use ‘dis’ (as in disrespect), he also picked up the phrase ‘man’ as in ‘whats up man?’ This did the rounds in a lot of workplaces the next day, and was also written about on a lot of people’s diaries on mixi. Over 6000 people wrote about it which is a pretty large number for a reference from a TV programme.
Mixi, as well as having gallery options, has also recently added a video uploader much akin to youtube. Compared with facebook, features such as galleries in mixi seem much less ‘added on’ and more part of the base design. Another feature which i like with mixi is the ‘ashiato’ or footprints feature. This enables one to see who has looked at your page, and to then trace the connections back to them. Narcissistically, it also records the number of visitors to ones page.
In terms of system architecture, mixi was written in Perl, and facebook is in php. I am not sure if this is the cause, but mixi is noticeably faster than facebook. Network speed could be a factor - we all know how much better Japan’s network infrastructure is.
Facebook seems more public, whilst mixi is more private - I think this reflects the two cultures in that Japanese people in general are much more concerned about their privacy, about what is public, and what is private. Mixi also seems more keyboard based whereas Facebook, with its vampires and its bar, pokes and walls (third party applications which allow you to interact with other people) seems to be more mouse based.
Mixi has communities whereas Facebook has networks. On Mixi, one can belong to multiple communities - if you are interested in Mandrake Linux you can join that community, and there are some very obscure communities such as people running Apple OS 7 and below. I myself run the tenkasu community (tenkasu is the rice bubble like by product of making tempura) which has over 40 members - believe it or not.
The Facebook networks are limited to places, workplaces and schools as far as I have been able to work out. Also, as far as I know, one cannot create networks, only suggest them, which isn’t terribly useful if one lives in a country the size of Japan, but fine if you live in Tampa, Florida.
I also used myspace for about 2 days. Myspace was great in that i was able to find a lot of the musicians i was into when i was at university, but i just found the site too slow, the interface badly thought out and the overall design too unattractive to spend much time with it.
Overall I think mixi is a much more successful site than facebook, although the language barrier that exists between Japan and the west means that its popularity will never spread beyond the shores of the land of the rising sun. Perhaps it doesn’t need to.
Aug 16, 20071
Kiwi Pumpkin Bumpkins!
Having a look around for ideas for dinner and stumbled upon nzkabocha.com. Kabocha is the Japanese word for pumpkin, and this looks to be a site promoting the beauty and opulence of the Aotearoan ball of gold. Ok, I wish them luck with their marketing, but is this something that we really want to add to kiwifruit and sheep as the image of New Zealand?
Don’t get me wrong - I have nothing against pumpkin (nor for that matter kiwi fruit, especially if they have been soaked in gin for at least 6 months). But sheep! Odorous animals with IQ’s lower than the average South African front row. People of the world! New Zealand is not famous for sheep! England is famous for sheep!
I hope Lloyd Jones wins the Booker Prize with his wonderful Mr. Pip. That would be one small step in rescuing New Zealand from the evils of the Demeterian tryad!
Jul 23, 20072
Kendrick Smithyman Online
I was browsing around for something else, when I came across a wonderful site with the collected works of Kendrick Smithyman. He was a New Zealand poet who passed away in 1995. I always enjoyed his work, particularly the steadiness of his voice. There is something haunting about his work in the way that it invokes an era of New Zealand history.
Quite an amazing effort to render his poetry into an online format, especially considering the works are mostly still under copyright. Still I am sure that he would have liked knowing that anyone in the world with an internet connection was able to browse his writing.
Here is my favourite poem by him:
All grid co-ordinates on this sheet are in terms of
false origins
Today when I was leaving you were gone
to the Library, hunting. So I couldn’t say
what I wanted to say. No matter.
At nine I phoned about the mice and rats
which infest us, and departmental cats.
Are they procurable or not? No matter.
On the wall in front of my table are four
map sheets of Hokianga. One weakly faded,
the main part of a research scheme gone
mainly own the drain. Even when bought
it did not tell the truth (if truth I sought)
about that district. Some roads were gone
already, some were petered out to tracks,
some only projected. I quibble. It was truth
I pressed after to the blazing four
dusty points of the local compass, ground
by ground hunting for Mahimai and found
how legend bred him still, not one but four,
five or more versions of his Life and Times
in their ways different but yet held true for some
around those parts. They’ve not roads, mere tracks
in scrub or scruffy bush, beaten, halfway lost,
uncertain where they go, or stay. What cost
to follow them? What gains? Tracks are just tracks.
Or legends of them, getting nowhere much;
otherwise, fictions of any parish’s mild dreams
mounted towards a future where times
would not work out of joint. Those sad dreams ailed
materially, the vision in them failed,
Sailed off like so much junk caught up in Time’s
hard-driving westerlies or blustering tides,
dumped among mangroves, slumped like driftwood on water
frontages. “The tourist will find much
To interest him, from …†From here to there,
hunting or haunted. Finding, found out where
roads disappear or don’t amount to much.
Like schemes which I may think of, truth to tell.
No matter – no, that isn’t true. Dusty, bitter
our ways work out, crudely move like tides,
nonetheless turn; comes turnabout in flow
and ebb, they matter. Down at the Head glow
*
TO GIVE GRID REFERENCES ON THIS SHEET
[SCAN]
Now I know where I stand, where I stood.
Within limits. All grid coordinates on this sheet are
true only in terms of false origin.
*
Leave the highway just past a store
almost opposite this shortcut through the gorge.
You want to bear west beyond the store,
back of the district high school. As you go
you raise an abandoned church (which is here)
with a small marae. Shortly, the river.
Follow its bank for a bit, until
a farmer’s yard, between the cowbail and pigpens.
So drive slowly. You’ll need to.
The map says the road ends there. Not true.
You are now right under a stone face.
See the quarry sign? Drive
into the quarry, keeping to the hill side
(because of a fall on the other hand to the river).
You skirt a shoulder. Look for an unformed road
lifting suddenly, steep. But get over the crest,
you’re on top of packed sand.
Carry on to the Head. You cross
the old tramway which used to go up to
the Harbour, remains of the one time main road
to gumfields (south of the river and this next
river) out from the edge of the Forest. It went on
down the coast, then climbed inland on the line
Of a Maori trail. Of course, the map doesn’t
say anything about that. Maps can
tell you about what is supposedly present.
They know little about what’s past and only
so much about outcomes. They work within
tacit limits. They’re not good at predicting.
If everything is anywhere in flux
Perhaps we may not read the same map twice.
*
A DEFENCE OF RYME
Nor must we thinke, viewing the superficiall figure of a
region in a Mappe that wee know strait the fashion and
place as it is. Or reading an Historie (which is but a Mappe
of men, and dooth no otherwise acquaint us with the true
Substance of Circumstances, than a superficiall Card dooth
the Seaman with a Coast neuer seene, which alwayes
prooues other to the eye than the imagaination forecast it)
that presently wee know all the world, and can distinctly
iudge of times, men and manners, iust as they were.
Samuel Daniel
*
Out on A 61 for Ripon
Left at Ripley on B 6165
to Patley Bridge
Patley Bridge through Grassington
on B 6265, to connect
B 6160, through Kettlewell, Starbotton
and Buckden
Turn left at Buckden and follow
Lanstrothdale Chase to Hawes
(not numbered)
Hawes-Bainbridge on A 684, cross to
Askrigg and on (no number) to
Castle Bolton
Have lunch there?
Castle Bolton, over Redmire Moor to Reeth
Reeth into Arkengarthdale
Turn right beyond Langthwaite over
Scargill High Moor to meet A 66
Right again to B 6277, there left to
Barnard Castle
Allow time to see castle, medieval bridge and
inn where Dickens wrote Nicholas Nickleby
(so the Treasures book says) and esp.
Bowes Museum (if open??)
From Barnard Castle backtrack on B 6277
Watch for turn off (unnumbered) to
Egglestone Abbey
(Have tea there or in town?)
Then follow River Tees to get back to
A 66 for Greta Bridge (isn’t that Dotheboys
Hall?)
Carry on A66 to Scotch Corner, down A 1
to turn off on A 59 through Knaresborough
NOTE: Roman road beyond Oughtershaw on way
to Hawes and site of fort at Bainbridge
From Greta Bridge A 66 follows a Roman
road (no name)
*
I speak loosely because thinking
not of a map’s ineptitude but of
some shiftless nature which is prior.
Maps merely feign to represent the case.
Shiftless? A shifty case, more like,
unsure in its election as well as
in its origin, oin its ground
of being as well as in its becoming –
neither works any way too well
for this instance. Are we not assuming
that what one has here to purport
to use as an example will survive
scrutiny? Somehow, has survived?
You follow me: I talk of what we have
and have not, of a sandhill lake
which comes and goes. Or maybe, came and went
since when I was last probing there
forestry men and engineers intent
on reform were then debating
how best to right an aberrant nature.
Their maps could not properly cope
with it. It was offence to natural
justice, natural right, and law.
It came and went. Worse, it was essential
when not existent. Boundaries
tentatively it had, often flouted.
It had? Check my legal fiction.
Rather, they had. Sometimes three lakes flaunted
themselves, sometimes two, or only
one, or none. Not only sands were on the move,
the lake dissolved, moved, reappeared,
will dwindle, again quicken. In remove
a presence, in presence a fact
substantial, insubstantial form
no less? This play with arid words,
dry as lake beds where cloudy midges swarm
until extinguished, the dunes made
to conform to rational order and
rabid, but useful, their surgent pines
established turn to increase wayward sand.
Something we know lost, gained by that.
Then how, best right aberrant nature?
Terms of reference not precise,
you guess, we may not read the same map twice.
*
REFERENCE
[SCAN]
with some other things about Main Electric Transmission lines,
Distribution lines, Conventional spacing, Wooden poles and Actual
positions
Pylons No
I am leaving out all signs for them, you understand? Also,
anything to do with telephones, tramways and the distinctions of
Principal from Smaller stations.
Keys to bush, trees, plantations, scrub, scattered scrub, hedge
or short row of trees, fence (prominent), swamp, mangrove, drain,
sand, shingle, cliffs & terraces, stop bank, rocks, building,
church, cemetery, windmill, radio mast, additional clues for
trigonometrical stations with permanent signals, spot heights in
feet above mean sea level, sketch contours at 100´ intervals, and
bits about post and telegraph services. Outside the limits of the
code are two other notes, how to recognise a pa, and rock
outcrops with large boulders.
Given all that you should be able to operate
Within or without prescribed or designated limits.
You may yet have to go to the wall.
How was I ever able to find my way there?
*
HOW TO GET BACK BY MAGNETIC BEARINGS
True North, now, that is one thing.
This another, how to get back
(whenever that was magnetically drawn
to harbour. Instruct me, all I ask,
instruct me how – this plus, or lack
as minus, evidently apply — to unmask
a not altogether dissembling
map? True, is true of false origin.
TO CONVERT A TO CONVERT A
MAGNETIC BEARING GRID BEARING TO A
TO A GRID BEARING MAGNETIC BEARING
ADD G–M ANGLE SUBTRACT G–M ANGLE
TO OBTAIN G–M ANGLE
add the Annual Magnetic Change
multiplied by the number of years
since 1965 to the G–M angle for 1965
1° = 60′
Annual Magnetic Change + 3´
G–M Angle for 1965 16°30´ for
the Central Grid Line of this sheet
You may not read the same map
twice. On such least point we may agree
without implying more. Or may we? Add or subtract,
something’s still to be read as before
contemptuous of cartography
as of art or art’s surrogates, its sniffling poor
relations which I ape, thumb at lip
lacking bearing, puerile seen-through act
so you say. As you say.
*
SYMBOLS
I cannot see our land clearly.
It comes and goes because covered with symbols.
Isn’t this the symptom of a psychotic state?
Take England now. In England I was given
to hold in my hand a necessary guide to
SYMBOLS USED ON THE MAPS, to hold as I was driven.
‘O take fast hold’ – that’s Sidney, in CS 32.
Eleven different sections of symbols on one sheet,
twenty of them in one section. Here’s from
another:
Castle or house with interesting interior
Abbey, priory or other ecclesiastical
Building (usually in ruins)
Parish church
Castle or house in ruins
Archaeological monument
Garden (usually attached to private house)
Botanical gardens
Zoolological gardens
but no Interesting church. Interesting churches are
in Symbols Used on Town Plans, another section.
Another section, of another life.
Here I am told how to find a Frontier post
I shall go down to the river which may be
demented. I shall go on hoping to cross over.
Perhaps this is a frontier. We have crossed
frontiers before this.
Here is a sheet of paper. Write on it for me.
Go on, write on it. Why do you write No.?
What number do you mean?
*
LEGEND
I
this landscape landfall.
II
A map so new you wouldn’t read about
it, a loop road which hadn’t been built
in hill country Tokomaru Bay.
Way forward proved the way back.
Like a one track mind it pressed as far,
died under a mount, a none too significant
mound. So have we all, well truly spent.
Well, there was the mount. On its round
emphatic the bull, who rose to design.
His neck arched, the masculine pouch,
his weapon cooling, out to prove
that way forward is the way back
III
Where maps may need a change in legend for
IV
this masculine landfall/`landscape
and seascape. Together, your un-
certainty in seeing, grit and spray
confronting or bedevilled, those dun
sands drove at berm and cliffs while away
in their distance sea leagues with
the land’s league collogued were one,
classically distant. Could you well say
how far in space or time you were astray
from plainjane rivermouth, that plebeian
rivermouth beyond the quarry,
beyond the mundane?
On the wall
fronting me I pinned, years ago, a wry
black toro from a Spanish bottle
to further esemplastic
legend’s proclivity
for becoming and there would do as well
as anywhere, near Mahimai’s burial
place. As chance worked, it’s not very
far from the beach where (December
’69, was it?) the skyline
crests learned how to break with their severe
old puritan habit, its condign
bearing, stood – preliterate,
hieratic – risen clear
above confusion the young bulls in line,
preternaurally clear. They define
and redefine what you perhaps swear
is land that cannot wear myth’s host
plausibly, an unlikely stock.
Surveyors missed them running out the coast
but legend needs. We are what dreams shock
briefly to become; this you heard
long since. Then where, at cost,
shall we amazed be forced to press the rock
channel deep, final, face him who will lock
and batten on us? Fictive, will most
prove fact? Way forward is way back
baffling to wayward plan or chart,
a maze the end and origin, track
not made good though trick you got by heart
sorely. I speak of the Minotaur
kruptos , that animates each crafty art?
All pay him tribute, kill him off, and start
to run his course again shiftless, bleak
V
as fallen masculine scape tumbled
Headlong. Sprawls, fold on fold. Heaves,
scarred hide. Promise still rides.
South and east they have fire by night
in their skies. Here, to the north a mast,
a television repeater station catches
signals. What sign/signal/symbol for
the Muse? Perhaps
VI
on a hilltop a crossbred Jersey sire.
His progeny champ below, mouse-coloured
in their rat run. He bellows, hefts clods.
They caper excited, I am shit-scared
clinging then to one strand of No. 8
fencing wire the guard rail of a swing
bridge over a creek. Just discovered
that several planks ahead are missing.
The bulls come gathering either end and
as well as my pack there’s all the camera gear.
He bellows and buttocks. They collect, they dance.
We are offered, in season. In season
VII
are taken, being promised. As/Was
Mahimai and probably Rutherford
(if that was his name) who disappeared
in a cloud of bullshit, who said he spent
ten years of himself back of Tokomaru.
That was the first season I went looking
for Maihimai and Rutherford, sidetracked
into hunting after graveyards’ wooden
headboards, their iconography lost style.
About them maps are reticent.
I swung between: a family burial ground,
And the Wesleyans’ plot. With those boards
which we cannot read and the grave of
their millenarian teacher, Heke’s tohunga
Papahurihia. The vates? They deny
VIII
but we need more to the legend, and for
*
A QUESTION OF SCALE
That, given. Also false origin
is given as base from which we work, almost capable
until outmoded.
To bring it to scale. I was driven
or drove headlong, taking whatever a telltale dial
on an outmoded
dashboard said was nearly true of Then
and There, the literal. Metaphor too, and parable
long since outmoded.
March - April 77
Editor’s note
Reading the Maps an Academic Exercise : first published in Islands 24 (1978), 131; also In Stories About Wooden Keyboards and Selected Poems; KS’ note in Stories reads: ‘Mahimai is John Marmon, also known as Tiaki, the first and most notorious white settler in the Hokianga, who figures in various memoirs including his own. John Rutherford—which is almost certainly not his real name—was the once celebrated tattoed white man whose account of living with Maoris appeared in The New Zealanders (1830). I regard it as the first sustained piece of fiction about this country’; Daniel: Samuel Daniel (1562-1619), English poet and prose writer, author of Defence of Rhyme (1602); sandhill lake: see ‘Tomarata’; Tokomaru Bay: situated on East Coast of North Island, north of Gisborne; minotaur: in Greek myth, a monster, half man and half bull, offspring of Pasiphae and a bull; lived in the labyrinth, slain by Theseus; The Book of the Road>describes a specific journey in Yorkshire undertaken by KS in 1969
Jul 11, 20073
Ours not to wonder why…
Some interesting Japan related websites and then some! Enjoy;)
- License plates (Akita).
- Hand soap.
- Rubbers.
- Animal typography.
- Japanese warning signs.
- Stone walls.
a nod and a handshake to the big E.
Feb 4, 20072
Blizzardboy New Design
If you are reading this blog with a browser then you probably have noticed that the look of the site has changed a bit. If you read this blog through RSS then you might want to pop up a browser and have a look.
I updated the software - wordpress - that powers the blog to the current version - 2.1. The upgrade was really easy, all I had to do was to ftp the new files on to the server. It took about half an hour to get the files up and then about 20 seconds to run the install script. Have to hand it to the people who put together wordpress. They sure have things set up smoothly.
That done I thought it was time to update the look of the site. Apologies if things look strange, but I promise that I wont changes things once I get everything tidied up. Well at least for a couple of months. In my experience changing a web sites design is quite a dangerous thing to do, there are a number of sites I have stopped viewing as much, gaijinpot and the press being a couple of examples. Of course there aren’t that many people who read this blog, so I am not so worried about that.
The previous blog template was a slight modification on the Pink October Wordpress theme kindly put together by Derek Punsalan at 5ThirtyOne.com. I put that one up as Bitshifter pointed out the comments weren’t working properly, and even though Upstairsforthinking liked the triangles it never really felt like “me” so hence we have a new skin. (btw comments have been tested this time, and they seem to be working! they haven’t been tested on windows though).
I wanted to go for a more traditional blog look with a number of posts on the main page, rather than one full post and then excerpts from another five. I think if people drop by occasionally then it is easier for them to read through the posts. I still have to fix up the link blog, and a few other little things.
Hope you like it!
Feb 2, 20074
Rent My Flat in Feodosia website redesign up
About a week ago we released the updated Rentmyflatinfeodosia.com website on the world. The website is a very simple site, introducing a rental apartment in the Crimean city of Feodosia.
Feodosia is in the Crimea which is a part of the Ukraine. I must say that when I started working on the site I knew nothing about the area. Of the Ukraine, my image was of heavily moustached ex-Soviet weight lifting women (I may be confusing Bulgaria there though) and the Chernobyl tragedy.
Regarding the Crimea my image was of a playground for Russian intelligentsia and nobility on the Black Sea and the exchange of poems between the lawnpoet Tennyson who wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade, and Rudyard Kipling’s Baxteresque response The Last of the Light Brigade.
As I found out while working on the site, the region has a very long and fascinating history. Feodosia, where the apartment is located, was founded back in the 6th century B.C. under the name of Theodosia, by Greek settlers from Miletus. This settlement was destroyed by the Huns in the 4th century AD and then again by the Mongols in the 1230’s. Around this time it was controlled by the Venetians and then by the rival doge state of Genoa. At this point it was known as Caffa.
In 1475 the city was seized by the Turks and renamed Kefe. As part of the Ottoman empire Kefe became one of the most important Turkish ports on the Black Sea. Turkish control lasted until 1783 when the expanding Russian empire conquered the Crimea. The city was renamed Feodosiya in 1802 - a Slavic interpretation of the ancient Greek name.
The city remained part of Russia until World War II when it was twice captured by Nazi Germany forces. In 1954 it came under the administrative control of the Ukrainian SSR along with the rest of Crimea.
Today Feodosia is a popular resort town on the Black Sea. Highlights include museums to the painter Ivan Aivazovsky, the poet, painter and philosopher Maximillian Voloshin, as well as the Soviet Social Realism writer Alexander Green. Feodosia is also close to the town of Koktebel - location of the largest nudist beach in the former Soviet Union!
I met the owner of the apartment when we were staying in Istanbul. He was asking around for who knew about search engine optimisation for his website. We had a bit of spare time so I said sure, I know a bit about that. Did a bit of tinkering around and he was quite happy with that. He got the top position on google for the keyword Feodosia.
I didn’t like the design he had for the site. So it was quite enjoyable to work on the redesign. He has very good content - the most important thing for search engines, but the design was somewhat lacking. I wanted to make a very simple site, that was fast to load and easy to navigate. It didn’t need any funky web 2.0 bells and whistles as it is an information site. Besides, creating some sort of interactive web system would have created more work for him than was really necessary.
For the design I incorporated a lot of the principles expounded by Information Architects. I am sure the site is not as nice as Information Architects, but the ideas they expressed were very helpful. For the image galleries I used the javascript css image gallery thumbnail script solution from dynamic drive. This allowed me to keep away from using flash - I think using flash is one of the biggest mistakes a person can make when designing a web site. Flash does have its uses - Eyezmaze being a great example, but for ordinary websites it is overkill, making sites sluggish and frustrating as well as being incomprehensible to screen readers and almost as bad for search engines.
All in all a very rewarding experience. Check out the Rent my flat in Feodosia website. Some images are not safe for work (NSFW) - thanks largely to that nudist beach near Koktebel. I haven’t been able to check the site on Internet Explorer so any feedback about that, or feedback about the site in general would be greatly appreciated.
Jan 17, 20071
Cricket Tsukuba
Despite being introduced late in the nineteenth century by the British in Yokohama, cricket has never been a big thing in Japan. Baseball has always been more popular - probably as a result of the lower cerebral threshold required to play and watch the game.
I know the Japan Cricket Association (日本語）has been doing an excellent job to develop the game throughout Japan, but I didn’t realise it had spread as far as my little neck of the woods. So I was quite happy to discover that Tsukuba has a cricket team. There is a quite a large international population in the area so it isn’t that surprising.
They have a website up - you can check out the Tsukuba Cricket page here. A quick look at the wicket and it suggests plenty of bounce and movement off the seam early on, with prodigious spin by days four and five - depending on the amount of tape on the tennis ball.
Who knows - if any kiwis out there make double figures in a couple of games they should be a shoe-in for a prestigious place in the much vaunted Black Caps top order.