Inkhorn – a small container made of horn or a similar material, formerly used to hold ink for writing; affectedly or ostentatiously learned; pedantic.
Postie pat on back awards launched
07/08/2012Rural Women New Zealand is launching a Postman pat-on-the-back Award to celebrate the great service rural posties deliver.
“There are some heart-warming stories out there about posties who go above and beyond to make sure the mail gets through,” says RWNZ national president, Liz Evans.
“We’ve heard of posties who find the right home for mail addressed only with first names, who telephone first before delivering large parcels or who leave sweet treats in letterboxes.”
And in a crisis the rural delivery contractors can be a lifeline. During floods, when bridges have been washed away, rural posties have been known to deliver supplies by boat to people whose road access is cut off.
Entries should be emailed to enquiries@ruralwomen.org.nz, The 10 best will be published on Rural Women’s Facebook page, the winner will get a prize package and the winning postie will get a gift too.
North Otago is the only place in the country which denotes rural mail runs with a letter. Where anywhere else your address might be 2 R.D. Heriot or 5 R.D. Te Anau, here it will be a number then C,D, H, K or O before the R.D., for example 3 C R.D. or 5 K R.D. The letter is more important than the number but is often missed out so our posties are called on to make educated guesses about where mail is supposed to go and they rarely get it wrong.
We haven’t had to ask our current rural mail contractor to go the extra mile for us, though we’re very happy with the service we get.
But the one we had about 20 years ago was very good at deciphering cryptic of vague addresses. He once delivered a postcard to us that had our first names only with the address a farm near Windsor.
Debt hangover will linger
07/08/2012Reserve Bank governor Alan Bollard says New Zealand’s debt hangover will linger:
In a speech to the Employers and Manufacturers Association in Auckland, Dr Bollard said governments, firms, farmers and households across many parts of the advanced world took on large amounts of debt in the last couple of decades. He noted that rapid increases in indebtedness have often foreshadowed a difficult period for the economy.
Fortunately, New Zealand avoided the sort of costly systemic financial crisis that a growing number of other countries faced, and while government debt had increased substantially it remained low by international standards.
“But it is fair to note that we have suspected for a long time that New Zealand’s private and external debts were too high to be sustained,”Dr Bollard said.
The accumulation of debt owed by individual firms and households, and borrowers disappointed that incomes and asset prices have not gone on rising as they expected are “clearly playing some role in the low rates of growth New Zealand has seen in productivity and GDP,” Dr Bollard said.
New Zealand households are finally saving more than we’re spending, but not by much. The need to earn before we spend is acknowledged but the debt grew over years and it will take years for it to shrink.
“We have a very highly indebted rural sector, no question, particularly our dairy sector,” Wills said in reaction to Reserve Bank figures which show agricultural debt has taken a sharp upturn in the first half of this year, sitting at the end of June at $48.3 billion.
The figures are particularly concerning because a new Farm Price Index developed by the Reserve Bank and the Real Estate Institute of NZ shows that farm prices have declined by 24.8 per cent from their peak in October 2008, while agricultural debt increased by 12.7 per cent over the same period (see chart).
A combination of high debt and falling land values could put pressure on farm balance sheets and is a particular concern because farm incomes have been falling due to lower commodity prices and the stubbornly high New Zealand dollar. . .
Wills said not all of the debt being taken on was bad, because some of it was being used to increase production by converting grazing land to dairying, which produced higher returns. But overall debt levels were too high.
“We now have higher rural debt levels than when the worldwide credit crunch hit in 2008, which is pretty concerning because we should have all got the message that we are carrying too much debt,” he said.
The last couple of seasons have been once-in-a-generation ones for almost all farming sectors. Only the very optimistic were expecting those high prices to continue and projected prices for the coming season could prove the pessimists right.
Dr Bollard’s speech is here.
Phantom vs Fonterra
07/08/2012In a confidential submission on Fonterra’s application for clearance to buy NZ Dairies, the rival called on the Commerce Commission to “investigate the fairness of the sale process” which it says put “significant pressure” on suppliers to accept the Fonterra proposal. The unnamed bidder claimed to have trumped Fonterra’s undisclosed winning bid.
“The receivers may have elected for other reasons not to pursue the offer, but the perception that the Fonterra offer was the best is not correct, and we request that this be corrected,” the submission said.
“The Fonterra offer was clearly not the best offer on the table, but the receiver chose not to pursue other options and yet Fonterra claim not to have pursued the acquisition. This process should be investigated,” it said. . .
The unnamed rival was told its bid was unsuccessful as it needed Overseas Investment Office approval, the submission said.
The submission referred to an international equity investor whose chief executive and main shareholding are New Zealanders who are “extremely keen and interested to invest in NZ.”
The bidding company was “formed to invest in and operate dairy farming and dairy processing assets.”
The investors have primarily been in energy and recently showed an interest in pastoral farming and dairy production, the submission said.
The bidder “has for the past three years been researching the NZ dairy industry and is very interested to invest,” it said.
Fonterra’s offer was welcomed by most of NZ Dairies’ suppliers as a lifeline, not least because its offer included payment for milk supplied last season for which farmers hadn’t received payment.
Fonterra is running the plant on behalf of the receivers now. Even those suppliers who weren’t entirely enthusiastic about joining the co-operative will almost certainly prefer the devil they know than a phantom which would have to wend its way through the Overseas Investment Office approval process with no guarantee of success.
August 7 in history
07/08/2012322 BC Battle of Crannon between Athens and Macedon.
936 Coronation of King Otto I of Germany.
1420 Construction of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore began in Florence.
1427 The Visconti of Milan’s fleet was destroyed by the Venetians on the Po River.
1461 The Ming Dynasty military general Cao Qin staged a coup against the Tianshun Emperor.
1606 The first documented performance of Macbeth, at the Great Hall at Hampton Court.
1679 The brigantine Le Griffon, commissioned by René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, was towed to the south-eastern end of the Niagara River, to become the first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes.
1714 The Battle of Gangut: the first important victory of the Russian Navy.
1782 George Washington ordered the creation of the Badge of Military Merit to honour soldiers wounded in battle. (later renamed Purple Heart).
1794 U.S. President George Washington invoked the Militia Law of 1792 to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania.
1819 Simón Bolívar triumphed over Spain in the Battle of Boyacá.
1876 Mata Hari, Dutch spy, was born (d. 1917).
1879 The opening of the Poor Man’s Palace in Manchester.
1890 Anna Månsdotter became the last woman in Sweden to be executed, for the 1889 Yngsjö murder.
1908 The first train to travel the length of the North Island main trunk line, the ‘Parliament Special’ left Wellington.
1926 Stan Freberg, American voice comedian, was born.
1927 The Peace Bridge opened between Fort Erie, Ontario and Buffalo, New York.
1930 The last lynching in the Northern United States, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, were killed.
1933 The Simele massacre: The Iraqi Government slaughtersed over 3,000 Assyrians in the village of Sumail.
1936 Joy Cowley, New Zealand author, was born.
1942 B.J. Thomas, American singer, was born.
1942 The Battle of Guadalcanal began – United States Marines initiated the first American offensive of the war with landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi.
1944 IBM dedicated the first program-controlled calculator, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (known best as the Harvard Mark I).
1947 Thor Heyerdahl’s balsa wood raft the Kon-Tiki, smashed into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands after a 101-day, 7,000 kilometres (4,300 mi) journey across the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to prove that pre-historic peoples could have travelled from South America.
1948 Greg Chappell, Australian cricketer and coach, was born.
1955 Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, the precursor to Sony, sold its first transistor radios in Japan.
1958 Bruce Dickinson, English singer (Iron Maiden), was born.
1959 – Explorer 6 launched from the Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral.
1960 Jacquie O’Sullivan, British singer (Bananarama), was born.
1960 Côte d’Ivoire became independent.
1964 John Birmingham, Australian author, was born.
1964 U.S. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving US President Lyndon B. Johnson broad war powers to deal with North Vietnamese attacks on American forces.
1965 The first party between Ken Kesey‘s Merry Pranksters and motorcycle gang the Hells Angels introducing psychedelics to the gang world and forever linking the hippie movement to the Hell’s Angels.
1966 Race riots in Lansing, Michigan.
1974 Philippe Petit performed a high wire act between the twin towers of the World Trade Centere 1,368 feet (417 m) in the air.
1978 U.S. President Jimmy Carter declared a federal emergency at Love Canal.
1979 Several tornadoes struck the city of Woodstock, Ontario, Canada and the surrounding communities.
1981 The Washington Starceased all operations after 128 years of publication.
1985 Takao Doi, Mamoru Mohri and Chiaki Mukai were chosen to be Japan’s first astronauts.
1988 Rioting in New York City’s Tompkins Square Park.
1998 The United States embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi killed approximately 212 people.
1997 – Beatrice Faumuina won athletics world championship gold.
1999 Second Chechen War began.
2008 Georgia launched a military offensive against South Ossetia to counter the alleged Russian invasion, starting the South Ossetia War.
Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia