This is my apartment I have been living in for the last four months and which I will be living in until July 31st next year. I've been living with my French friend Fab and two American roommates we were randomly selected to live with. The apartment complex is huge with something like 15 buildings housing a few hundred people. It's only a 45 minute walk to campus from here, but thankfully it's right on a free LSU bus route meaning just a 15 minute ride on a packed bus. The apartment came fully furnished and with a washing machine, dryer, dishwasher, microwave, oven, fridge etc. There is also a basketball court, tennis court and sand volleyball arena along with a gym, pool, hot tub, and BBQ area. Pets are allowed, which sadly means you want to avoid grass areas. However, all in all it's a fairly nice place to live.
Living here also hasn't been without its dramas, particularly involving one roommate. First, food from the fridge would dissappear. Later on in the semester we would arrive home to find that our rooms looked like they had been searched through and some loose change had disappeared. Next, Fab's French credit card had mysteriously been used to buy €150 of pizza, Chinese food, and other takeaways which could be traced to being ordered from our roommate's cellphone and which we were told had been delivered to our apartment. Our suspicions confirmed, we called the police, who promptly did...nothing. Thankfully, this particular guy was evicted a week later for not paying rent, but not before threatening our other roommate Mo with a gun...
My first semester at LSU is quickly coming to a close. It has gone really fast and the work so far has been enjoyable but at times a bit overwhelming. The highlight so far was the final class of my biodiversity and macroecology course I talked about in an earlier post. The final class consisted of a 15 minute presentation by each student on a project related to the class content which they had been working on during the semester. So, on Wednesday morning we sat through four hours of twelve really high quality presentations on some diverse and interesting topics. Now I only have my final statistics exam early next week and the semester will be officially over!
I've embedded the presentation I gave in this blog post because it's some work I'm pretty proud of. I spent many hours slaving over the data and various data analysis programs to get the results that I did. My presentation was pretty well received by the rest of my class judging by the comments they gave me, I just hope my grade will reflect that too! Hopefully the main points of my research are able to be understood by those without an ecology background, or you can even just enjoy the great photographs! There's still a huge amount of further analysis that can be done on this and the many other kinds of data we collected during the field work for this project; it's exciting to think of what interesting patterns we may uncover. However, for now it's definitely interesting to find that restoration of native sand dunes is not largely altering their beetle assemblages, although we may still find evidence to dispute this.
Make sure you view it in full screen by clicking the icon on the bottom right of the powerpoint slides.
Teaching is over for the semester! Yesterday and today I gave my two classes their final exams for the semester, and now I feel like I have a huge weight off my shoulders, other than having to mark the exams of course...This was my first time teaching any sort of class, and somewhat surprisingly I really enjoyed it. The interaction with the students was great, most were really eager to learn, and most of all I felt like I did a pretty good job as a teacher. The students in both classes which I taught were a lot of fun, despite those in the 6:30 - 9:30 pm class on Wednesday always wanting to get out early! I hope they had fun in the lab and learnt a lot in the process, even if introduction biology can be brutally boring at times. Here are my class photos:
This is another great song with an excellent accompanying video. It's by a one man band, Tundra Lights, hailing from Georgia in the United States. They have many songs as good as this one and I've been listening to them quite heavily in recent weeks, but this one in particular.
Halloween is kind of a big deal here in the United States. Huge numbers of people dress up (not just children and university students) and the whole Halloween weekend is celebrated with trick-or-treating and rowdy parties. For my first Halloween in America I dressed as Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) from the movie Anchorman and roamed the streets with my friends interviewing other party-goers. Anchorman is a funny funny movie (see the clip below), and I was stoked to dress as Ron Burgundy using secondhand clothes from the thrift store for just $14! My mustache could have done with a bit of work though...
On the Friday night of Halloween weekend I went to the Carlotta Street party. This is an annual party on a street just on the northeast edge of campus. The police shut all the surrounding roads for the party and thousands of people turn up to check out all the crazy costumes, have a few drinks, and enjoy the live bands playing in the residents' front yards. The party had a really great atmosphere and I had a lot of fun, even if the turnout wasn't as high as normal due to the cold weather.
I'm Ron Burgundy?
On the Saturday, myself and six other guys traveled the 90 minutes down the highway to New Orleans to spend the Saturday night of Halloween weekend on the fabled Bourbon Street. For those who don't know, Bourbon Street is a long street in the heart of the city which is dedicated to only bars, restaurants, and souvenir shops, and is open 24 hours a day for 365 days a year. It lives up to its name, and you will see drunk people there at all times of the day. We had booked a hostel to stay in and when we arrived we found it was an old asylum for the mentally insane (quite appropriate for Halloween). Our dorm room smelled like a mixture of vomit and burnt diapers, so we quickly decided we would spend as little time there as possible. We quickly put on our costumes and headed out into the early evening. We had an excellent night touring many restaurants and bars on the street, meeting lots of fun people, and taking in the lively atmosphere: almost every bar has a live band playing, there are performers on the street, and most of the patrons are also putting on a performance themselves. The only downside of the night was Felix getting pick-pocketed (apparently a common occurrence on Bourbon Street). We arrived back to the hostel at 6am, desperately ready for our 3 hours sleep, before catching the bus back to Baton Rouge at 9:30am to catch up on our school work for the weekend. We're now into the serious part of the semester with around one month left until final exams, so it's time to knuckle down and get some good grades!
Guillermo, Ali, Immy, Mikel, Darko & Felix - my asylum dorm mates
A Kiwi, two Brits, a German, a Serb, and two Spaniards walk into a bar...
Panoramic view of Tiger Stadium/Death Valley (click to view a larger image)
I've now been to all four LSU Tigers (that's the LSU American Football team) home games so far this season at Tiger Stadium/Death Valley. The stadium is massive, seating 92,542 people, and it sells out for every single game. So far this season the LSU Tigers are undefeated, have destroyed almost every team they have played, and are ranked #1 in the entire country. People in Louisiana are extremely passionate about football, just like we are about rugby in New Zealand, and LSU has a proud tradition, having won the national championship three times, in 1958, 2003, and 2007. This year there is a real possibility that they could do it again. However, their next game is away from home against #2 ranked University of Alabama, which should be their biggest test so far this year. If they win then they should be on track to go to the championship game in late December.
The games I have been to so far have been a lot of fun. Before the game most people go "tailgating" which is basically just setting up a marquee and having a BBQ and a few beers. Campus is usually buzzing on game day with all the people who come to watch. The university has a huge marching band (must be around 200 people) who play before and during the game, and who lead the student section of the stadium in their LSU chants. Sadly, I'm yet to see a close game as we have won every one so far by around 30 or more points. Inside the stadium it can be very loud and the atmosphere is electric at times (almost as good as when watching an exciting run chase in cricket), but I'm sure that during a close game it will be at its best. I'm sure I will get to experience it at some point while I'm here as I intend to go to as many games as I can.
As for American football itself, I definitely enjoy the game. It's exciting, there's a lot of big hits, and a high level of skill involved also. However, I wish there weren't so many breaks during the game; a game which has only 60 minutes of actual playing time should not take over three hours to finish!
Below are a few pictures from the various games I've been to so far:
I've known about the band Hammock for about one year now and they've slowly grown into one of my favourite bands. This is a masterfully constructed video for their song Breathturn which tells a really sweet story. It's well worth the six minutes of your time to watch the whole thing. I'd recommend wearing quality headphones and giving the video your full attention...enjoy!
To complete my PhD at LSU I have to take a number of graduate level ecology-based courses. This is one of the main ways in which a PhD from an American university differs to one from a university in New Zealand where a PhD is almost entirely research based. Some of the courses I'll take while I'm here include classes in macroecology, community ecology, insect taxonomy, and statistics, along with a number of 'seminar' courses which consist of a weekly meeting to discuss papers, give presentations, or talk about chapters of a book.
This semester I have been taking three courses and teaching a class of my own. One course is called 'Biodiversity & Macroecology' which focuses on large-scale ecological patterns such as the latitudinal gradient in biodiversity (in general species richness declines with increasing latitude), species-area and species-time relationships (species richness tends to increase with area and geological time), spatial autocorrelation (variables being more closely related the closer they are together. This can confound ecological studies), and the use of phylogenetic trees (trees of species relatedness usually based on genetic analyses). We meet twice a week and discuss one or two papers on one of the above topics, and sometimes our instructor, Richard Stevens - a leading macroecologist, will give a lecture. The most fun part of this course is the project we get to work on. We have to use original data to conduct a (hopefully) publishable study on an aspect of biodiversity or macroecology. This is great for me as my old lecturer from Lincoln University (Hannah Buckley) has kindly allowed me to use data on sand dune communities I helped collect from all around New Zealand a couple of years ago. In using this data I plan to answer the following questions:
1. Is there a difference in beetle species richness between sand dunes with exotic and native vegetation?
2. Is there a difference in beetle species richness at different sections of the dune (fore, mid, and rear)?
3. Is there a latitudinal gradient in beetle species richness?
4. Is beetle species richness driven by habitat heterogeneity (i.e. the species richness of plant species)?
This is not an insignificant challenge and will definitely keep me very busy for the next two months!
The sand dunes we sampled at Mason Bay, Stewart Island
The second main course I am taking is called 'Statistical Techniques I', which is a pretty basic introduction to statistics which can be applied to ecology. I've done a course like this in my second year of university back in New Zealand, but it's good to get a bit of a refresher and I'm learning how to use a new statistical software program in the lab part of the course. Otherwise it's a fairly boring course as you would expect with statistics.
The third course was only for half a semester and has already finished. It was basically just a lecture course about how to teach university level courses to undergraduate students, and was useful preparation as this semester I have also begun teaching for the first time. I have to teach two three-hour introductory biology laboratories a week which involves a quick lecture on the topic of the lab and then leading the students through a series of experiments which they conduct, collect data from, and then analyse as their homework. I also have to write quizzes, grade all of my students' work and make sure I am well prepared and know the material for each class. This is more challenging than it sounds, as I haven't thought about most of the topics (photosynthesis, respiration, membrane permeability, enzyme kinetics etc) since my first year at university, so I'm learning myself at the same time.
In any case, I'm learning a lot and gaining a great variety of new skills during just my first semester studying at LSU!
I finally went for a small walk around campus and took a few photographs I thought I'd share along with some others I had taken previously:
Looking over the quad from the Middleton Library
Random mural on Allen Hall
Fountain in the quad
One of the old oak trees on campus, which are home to hundreds of squirrels
Statue of Mike the Tiger in front of his $2 million tiger enclosure
Looking across the small LSU lake at campus
Pete Maravich Assembly Center, home of the LSU basketball team
The weather is slowly getting colder here as autumn (fall as Americans call it) really starts to set in. Today I actually had to wear a sweatshirt for the first time.
More blog updates to come this weekend as it's mid-semester break and I have a small amount of free time!
This is some artwork I did for my old band Mammoth. It was originally intended to end up as a flyer for a show, but we never got around to playing it because we all left to go overseas. Members are now in Christchurch, London, Boston, and myself in Baton Rouge.
My sister also did some artwork for our EP, some of which ended up looking like this:
Inside the booklet featured two quotes which I find inspirational and served as a theme to some songs on the album:
"In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught." - Baba Dioum
"Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the Earth." - Henry David Thoreau
Last Sunday marked the day that I had been in Baton Rouge for one month. I figure that's enough time for me to form a pretty solid view on LSU and the city in general. So I'll update you briefly with what I've been up to and some of my more interesting experiences so far. I'll save some of the more exciting things for future blogs.
My time here started pretty badly. First, my pack with all my worldly belongings didn't arrive on my plane. Luckily it did turn up a couple of days later, much to my relief. Second, my first few nights were spent sleeping in a dormitory. This wouldn't have been so bad, except for the air conditioning being set to 'Antarctica', not having a sheet, pillow, or warm clothes, being so jet-lagged I couldn't sleep, and being charged about $70 a night for the privilege of staying there. Third, I went to visit the apartment I was meant to be living in on campus to see if I could move in early to get out of the dormitory. I was gutted to see the apartment was an absolute dive. There was no carpet anywhere, the rooms were only large enough for a single bed, there was massive air conditioning ducts in the bedrooms, roaches in the kitchen cupboards, and the bathroom and kitchen fittings were from the 60's or earlier. I had decided within two minutes that I was going to forfeit my $200 deposit and move somewhere else. Finally, the weather here is incredibly different from New Zealand. For the first few days, temperatures were peaking around 40 degrees centigrade, and the humidity was almost unbearable. All this, combined with the odd fit of homesickness, has made me ask myself "Is my decision to move to the United States the right one?". At this moment, I'm still looking for the answer.
Not everything since I arrived in Baton Rouge has been terrible however. In fact, the good things have probably outweighed the bad. I have already made many good friends, particularly with international students, including awesome people from the UK, France, Serbia, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, and Honduras. Alcohol is ridiculously cheap here (you can buy a 1.75L bottle of spirtis for US $10), so we have had many crazy parties by the pool, playing beer pong, watching football, and dancing all night at various student bars. The bars here are quite different from New Zealand: they usually have a $5 door charge, often have free drinks from 8-10pm, have up to four bars where you can buy drinks spread throughout the bar, allow underage students in (the drinking age here is 21, but that doesn't stop them), and close at 2pm. I've also been playing a lot of basketball, and am starting to get my old skills back, which is good considering I haven't played for around eight years. I've entered a team of international students into the intramural 3 on 3 competition for this fall semester, which will be fun. We should be fairly competitive as we have some good players who have played at a decent level before. I will keep you updated on the blog!
Cheap alcohol has lead to some good nights out so far...
The LSU campus is spectacular! It is rated as one of the most beautiful campuses in the United States and rightly so. The campus itself is huge; it would take over 30 minutes to walk from one side to the other. Nearly all of the buildings are really nice looking, and are a nice tan colour with beautiful red tiled roofs. There are lots of massive oak trees lining the streets with squirrels running around all over the place, birds singing, and insects chirping. On one edge of the university are three really nice and quite large lakes, which house turtles, fish, and various birds, and which people run around to keep fit (I haven't done it myself yet, but will soon). Mike the Tiger (the university's mascot) even has a $3 million habitat built for him. The sporting facilities are also unbelievable: I have mentioned the stadium previously, but there is also an athletics stadium, baseball stadium, soccer stadium, basketball stadium, and the list goes on....This is not to even mention the LSU recreation center which has five state of the art basketball courts, about 10 squash courts, a climbing wall, swimming pool, huge weights and fitness room, about five football fields, and over 15 tennis courts - I'm sure there's more to it, but haven't had a proper look around yet.
Looking across the parade grounds to the law school
My friend Darko from Serbia in front of Memorial Tower
As for Baton Rouge itself, the city seems to not be too bad, but I'm yet to have a real good look around yet. From what I've been told it is split into two areas - south Baton Rouge and north Baton Rouge. South Baton Rouge is where LSU is based and is considered to be the nice part of town and is relatively crime free. North Baton Rouge is apparently a different story. As one man put it when we saw a lady out jogging around the campus lakes, "You wouldn't see that in North Baton Rouge unless she had a couple of big dogs on a leash and was carrying a gun". That's a pretty scary thought, I don't think I will be spending too much time there. The city has a giant mall called "Mall of Louisiana" which is like 10 New Zealand malls all put in the same place, it's just ridiculous and you can buy everything you need there. The only problem is getting there. In Baton Rouge, public transport is pretty much nonexistent. LSU provides a fairly good bus service, but all these buses just travel within a small radius around campus. If you want to get anywhere else you need to drive, which is why I'm already looking at buying a car.
The Ol' Misty (Mississippi)
Now that I'm somewhat settled in and getting into a routine I hope that I'll be able to find the time to update the blog more often with stories of what cool stuff I've been up to. For example, my next few blogs will be about classes I'm taking (and teaching), my first LSU game day, my apartment, and my laboratory I'm working in.
I'll leave you with this song "Callin' Baton Rouge" played with a video which basically shows you what LSU and Baton Rouge are all about. Most people here seem to go a little crazy when they hear this. Enjoy!
I have arrived in the United States safe and sound, ready to begin graduate school at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, but it was an epic process to get here!
I had to be at Christchurch International Airport at 6:30 am on August 9th for my three hour flight to Sydney. My parents took me to the airport after I had about three hours sleep the night beforehand, and my good friends Geoff and Ollie also came to see me off (cheers guys!). It was a pretty sad feeling leaving Christchurch and my family and friends behind, but I will be back to visit, and I'm sure I will live there again one day.
Just about to walk into the departure lounge
In Sydney I had around three hours wait in the airport, and after a brief moment of panic where I thought I had lost my passport (it was in my pocket!), I was winging my way on a 13 hour flight to Los Angeles. The flight was good, but I only got around one hour of sleep. This I blame on the guy who I was sitting beside. We were sharing four seats between us and it turned out he was a really cool dude, so we had a few beers together, watched movies, and talked crap for most of the flight.
Arriving in Los Angeles after travelling back in time (it was now only 11:30 am, August 9th), I was extremely tired, but knew I needed to stay up to try get my internal clock adjusted to US time. I caught a shuttle to my youth hostel and went for a walk along Santa Monica beach and pier. A lot of people had told me that LA is overrated, dirty, and the traffic is awful. Well, I mostly disagree. Santa Monica especially was really nice, and there were impressive street performers every 30 metres as you walked through the outdoor shopping malls. That night I finally managed to get six hours sleep despite the snoring of my youth hostel roommates from Brazil.
Santa Monica pier on Sunday afternoon. You should have seen how crowded the beach was!
The next day I went on a tour of the city on the Rasta Bus with a few other tourists. We saw Malibu Beach, lots of movie stars' homes in Beverly Hills, Greystone Mansion, the Hollywood Sign in Griffith Park, the Walk of Fame, Rodeo Drive, and a few other things. It was a pretty good tour which took in most of the important things you would want to see in a day as a tourist in LA. That evening I went for a run along Venice Beach and then attempted to get some sleep before my 5 am shuttle to LAX. But I got around three hours sleep that night due to the amazing snoring concerto of two of my roommates mixed with the effects of jetlag.
Me and the Los Angeles Rasta Bus driver
The flights to Baton Rouge were relatively uneventful although I once again didn't sleep on them at all. I did have a change made to my flight at the last minute and so I flew directly to Dallas, Texas before Baton Rouge, instead of stopping in Phoenix, Arizona on the way. Because the airline did this they also decided it would be a good idea to give me $400 of airline vouchers. Bet you guys back in New Zealand wish that Jetstar had this level of customer service! I think I'll use these vouchers to visit New York during the Christmas holidays. Also, the Dallas airport is absolutely huge! As they say, everything is bigger in Texas...
More to come soon on my arrival in Baton Rouge and my first impressions of the city and LSU...
It's just under two weeks until I begin my big adventure in the United States, so it's awesome timing for the largest snowfall in Christchurch for 15 years.
I went to bed with the backyard looking like this:
And then we woke up to this:
Mum and Dad decided that after living on Clifton Hill for 28 years, it was finally time to snowboard down it! So we made a video to remember the occasion:
On Saturday night I went to a gig at The Kings Arms in Auckland. The band I went to see was JAKOB. These guys would be close to my favourite band on this planet ever since I bought their Cale : Drew album back in 2004.
This is a band which is always simply phenomenal to watch perform live. I've now been to seven Jakob shows, and all of them have been amazing. The best thing about the band is that it doesn't matter what songs they put into their set; they have hardly any weak songs and they all sound mindblowingly good live.
The setlist on Saturday night was no exception:
Malachite
Pneumonic
Magna Carta (New Song)
Convertor (New Song)
Nice Day For An Earthquake
Jimmy Hoffa
Harmonia (New Song)
Oran Mor
Ageena
Controle
The three new songs that will probably be on their upcoming album all sounded great. The support bands (Sora Shima and Popstrangers) were also really good and set the mood well for the Jakob set.
Here's a clip from the show I recorded with my digital camera:
I cannot recommend these guys highly enough...check them out!!
Browsing the internet the other day I found some amazing work one man and his father had completed over the past year. Nick Risinger quit his job and travelled around the globe taking extremely well-planned photos to piece together an entire picture of the Earth's night sky. The picture itself is 5 gigapixels in size (5,000 megapixels) and was stitched together from 37,440 individual photographs. It features ten of millions of stars, red clouds of glowing hydrogen, and is absolutely breathtaking. The fact that the stars seen in this photo are thought to be less than 0.001% of the total in our galaxy alone is beyond belief and really poses the question - in time, what amazing thing will we discover throughout the universe?
In August I will be moving to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, United States, to study for a PhD at Louisiana State University (LSU). This will take about 5-6 years to complete, and will include around two years of coursework, some teaching of undergraduate students, and a major component of research in the field of evolutionary ecology, which I'm excited and a little nervous about.
The research I will be conducting will be looking at the evolution of latitudinal gradients in plant-herbivore interactions between the Common reed (Phragmites australis) and its suite of insect herbivores. I'll be doing field work in both Phragmites native (Europe) and invasive (North America) home ranges. This is something I'm particularly excited about as it will provide me with a good opportunity to travel up North America's east coast and the west coast of North Africa and Europe.
Phragmites australis seed head
For those interested in a bit more detail on the project, the Phragmites genus consists of at least 27 haplotypes, basically a term for organisms which are genetically (and often morphologically) distinct, but are not recognised as separate species as they may still interbreed. There are up to 15 different haplotypes of Phragmites in North America, most of which are native, but at least one of which is an aggressively invasive species originally from Eurasia, which is slowly displacing native Phragmites haplotypes throughout the United States. Because the native and invasive haplotypes occur together in many places (especially along the east coast of the United States), this provides a unique study system with which to look at the effects of short term evolution (i.e. the separation into separate haplotypes of the Phragmites genus) on plant-herbivore interactions. By examining any differences in plant-herbivore interactions between haplotypes (such as herbivore diversity, density and abundance, and plant palatability and chemical defence levels) along an eastern North America transect and a similar North Africa/Europe transect, we can investigate just what factors contribute to particular haplotypes of Phragmites being successful invasive species. This is just one of several interesting research questions which I will be investigating during the course of my PhD research. Even more information on the project can be found here. All in all, I think this is actually the perfect PhD research project for me. It is based around studying evolutionary processes with a highly regarded advisor (Dr. Jim Cronin), includes amazing travel opportunities, expands on some skills I have already acquired, and will teach me a wide range of new skills for my future career.
Aside from the academic side of things, LSU seems like it is an amazing university to go to and has plenty to offer in the way of socialising and extracurricular activites. The main thing I'm excited about is watching College Football. LSU has one of the best college league american football teams in the whole country, and a stadium with a reputation that appears to even succeed their sparkling football history. The stadium is called Tiger Stadium, holds 92,400 people (sixteenth largest stadium in the world!), and is known by the nickname Death Valley. This is because it's known to be the loudest stadium around - the noise coming from the stadium on one occasion resulted in an earthquake being recorded at the LSU's geological sciences department.
While I'm overseas studying I'm pretty sure that there are going to be moments when I feel homesick. I'm not really looking forward to it, because let's face it, New Zealand is a pretty damn good place to live. I think the single best thing is the large amount of unspoilt wilderness. From almost anywhere in the country you can drive for less then two hours and find yourself on a deserted beach with golden sand, in a patch of native bush, or halfway up a snow-covered mountain. So, I put together a video of some of my favourite places in New Zealand to help remind me of home.
The footage was shot on various trips around the South Island of New Zealand with work, university, and my friends and family, and I edited the video in Windows Movie Maker (I thought this program was crap, but the Windows 7 version actually works quite well!)
The song is by my old band, Mammoth, and is called Two Weeks.
I love to play sport. I love to watch sport. I love to talk about sport. I think this stems from my competitive nature and the unpredictability and excitement live sport brings to the table. For instance, you can watch a movie and often know exactly how it's going to end. With sport, the unpredictable and unthinkable can (and do) regularly happen, and you can always see the best players surpassing records and achieving feats that have never been done before.
My favourite sport to play is hockey. For the last three years I've played for the mighty High School Old Boys Burnside (HSOB) club in Christchurch. It is a great club to play for. We have a great social vibe, with a clubrooms we regularly attend, and also play some decent hockey from time to time. Hopefully we can play good hockey more consistently and make an attempt at winning the Canterbury Premier League this year.
I've also played basketball, cricket, dodgeball, touch and volleyball over the years. While I'm in Baton Rogue I won't be able to play hockey as it's not very popular in the United States, especially in the southern states. I'm a bit gutted about that, as I'm enjoying it more than ever before and also playing to quite a high level (I represented Canterbury last year in the National Hockey League). I will most likely take up basketball again instead, although I will probably get totally dominated over there.
Me (with the ball) playing hockey for the Lincoln University Lions against Canterbury University in the Christchurch Earthquake charity game.
My favourite sport to watch is cricket.A lot of people (particularly girls, for some reason) think that cricket is the most boring sport in the world. This may be because you can play a test match for five entire days and still have a draw at the end of it. In reality, cricket is one of the most exciting sports. Once the rules and nuances of the game have been learned it is easy to appreciate how a match can have so many twists, turns, plots and subplots. My favourite form of cricket is the test match game. I do also enjoy ODIs and T20s, but the epic ebb and flow of a test match makes it just that much better.
So, anyone who knows me will know that I like music, especially when it's played LOUD.
I'd like to think that my music tastes have broadened in the last couple of years. From what was once a mainly narrow-minded heavy metal focus, I now enjoy numerous genres including post-rock, ambient, dub, electronica, indie, and various types of metal. However, my favourite type of music is one which can't be pigeonholed by a genre - New Zealand music. NZ music has a distinctive and unique feel about it, where you just know it has been crafted on the shaky isles.
I've played the drums for about eight years now, but never really put the time in to become really good at it, mainly due to my other interests. I played in three bands; Mammoth, Varraghor and Innard Splatter, playing gigs all over the country and making various recordings. The times I had with my friends in these bands were some of the best of my life so far. While I'm in the United States I plan to learn how to play the guitar so I can record some tunes of my own in the future.
Below I've decided to list some of my very favourite bands, including my favourite album by each band (click on their name to link to a myspace/bandcamp page to listen to their music).
