This is not going to be an article about fucking party frocks or designer suits. When it comes to the Academy Awards the most painful moments in a night of guaranteed painful moments are those seen on the red carpet before the ceremony begins. Hearing mincing girlie men and wannabe actress bimbos ask banally superficial questions of the nominated about their apparel is almost as nauseating as the endless retrospective deconstruction of who wore what that is played out across various media for weeks after the awards.

There is a class of New Zealanders who work and still struggle to make ends meet. People out there – in supermarkets, in restaurants and in sales - who make just $12.75 an hour. That’s $510 a week before tax to pay for everything – housing, food and clothing. It all has to come out of the money made from that $12.75. Jared Phillips, Unite’s organizer for the Waikato/Bay of Plenty area calls these people New Zealand’s working poor.

Once upon a time, there was an Editor of Nexus who loved cigarettes. He’d have dreams at night about how amazing they were and how sexy they made him look. Sometimes, in his darkest of nightmares, he had no cigarettes. Then something changed. Having smoked for 8 years, the day came when the Editor of Nexus decided to quit.

I can really identify with the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu.  Perhaps not when it comes to the fact of living with your mum until you are 57, but the luckless with the ladies, hard drinking bachelor lifestyle he enjoyed is one that rings a few bells.  Legend has it that Ozu and his long time co-writer Kogo Noda crafted their immensely detailed screenplays during all night benders, measuring their progress in terms of the amount of empty Sake bottles scattered about the place.

Slime rises. It creeps and crawls, slithering through cracks you cannot see in the light. It feasts on the very fabric of our society, steadily gnawing away at our most sacred morals. However, this slime is neither mould, nor liquid, nor three day old vomit, it is human just like you and I.

You couldn’t help but shake your bootie. The final night of Orientation went out in a relaxed haze of dub music with Kingshifta, Knights of the Dub Table, Cornerstone Roots and Concord Dawn. Now admittedly, I have just had to ask my colleagues in the Nexus office how you would define each of the bands that performed at the WSU Project on Friday night. Is Concord Dawn just a guy with a couple of records and a turntable? Does Cornerstone Roots build on the reggae tradition and what do you call a band that uses trumpets and a computer?

“Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best they should not. The real war will never get in the books,” – Walt Whitman. Path to Destruction In 1973, America had begun pulling her troops out of Vietnam. After many long years of fighting, the Americans had begun to smell defeat – The North Vietnamese would rather die on their feet then live on their knees meaning that defeating and ruling the Communists would be impossible.

Is ‘Boy’s Day Out’ actually just a giant homo-fest? Cannot Predict Now