Posts by Jolisa
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Lovely piece, Daniel, thank you.
It has some nice resonances with a piece by James McNaughton in the new Landfall, in which he attempts to refamiliarise himself with his Wellington childhood home by using Google Streetview... while actually in Wellington. (If anything it makes him more homesick for what he hoped to see instead).
And ditto the comments above on grief, and the Schroedinger's Cat-like feeling that your real life might still be happening somewhere else... and the weirdness of returning to an old place, vs starting new somewhere completely unfamiliar...
For me the oddest experience was returning to Christchurch, location of my student days and, one would have thought, brimming with memories. It was oddly blank and impervious to my attempts to connect. I felt like I was visiting somewhere I'd merely visited briefly, not somewhere I lived for five years and moved from adolescence to adulthood.
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Aaaaand.... just as this thread drops off the front page, Obama announces his Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor. The early chatter is that conservatives are nervous about her liberal race politics, but liberals might be nervous about where stands on abortion and equal marriage rights, given her Catholic background.
(NB nobody's quite sure how Catholic she is, but her appointment would make for 6 Catholics concurrently on the bench, which is pretty astonishing when you think about it. At the same time, the justices seem to be pretty good at keeping religion out of it, viz. Scalia who happily endorses the death penalty regardless of what the Pope says).
What is not in doubt is the awesomeness of her narrative, from poverty to Princeton, thanks to her widowed mum who worked two jobs to put her kids through top schools.
Meanwhile, the California Supreme Court upheld Prop 8 (while also upholding the marriages that happened in the interim). Dammit.
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Here we go again. Let us all teach our children to break Laws.
The man's a menace, but there's no call for this. Think of the children!
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Apparently not, according to this story,
Good god, what is that white-coated scientist doing to that crash test dummy in the ad on the bottom of that page??
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Excellent illumination of a very important point, Emma, thank you (and Deborah, for spelling it out upthread). Subtle button-pushing, willed or ignorant, often comes wrapped inside the politest of enquiries. Which can leave one with only a handful of options for response: rage or Vulcan dissociation, or some uncomfortable combination of both.
And yes, there is often an invisible bargepole in the middle of that phrase "Some of my best friends are..." While for others, it functions as a tentative rhetorical linking of hands, until they figure out its dodgy logic and move on to "How do you know I'm not" or "Speak for yourself, sunshine" and other useful rhetorical devices.
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Oh, happy Towel Day everyone.
OMG, serendipity! I had no idea. Excellent.
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Seriously, this has the smell of "yeah, we'll right onto that one, sir, working on it hard now..." about it.
Yep. And I imagine any actual blueprints are on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard"...
/Adams
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It's not the words that offend me, but the underlying sentiment.
Certainly a useful rhetorical step along the road to enlightenment for many people, albeit not a good place to stop and down tools?
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For the people who were there: was there a noticeable "swaying effect" on the clip-ons? If they can handle the marathon, surely they can handle a few thousand casual walkers?
And how perilous does that railing feel when you're walking next to it (it looks low in the pictures)?
Oh, and: does anyone know what form the 30-year plan for cycle/pedestrian access takes? Is it a takeover of current lanes (middle or outer?), or yet another clip-on, or an aerial path above the roadway like the Brooklyn Bridge, or suspended paths under the bridge, or what?
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In the meantime, and especially if the leisure foot-and-bike traffic is a larger constituency than the commuter foot-and-bike traffic, could we at least have something like this?
One of the clip-ons every weekend? Too much to ask?
Also, I'm thinking Fisherman's Wharf would be ripe for yet another incarnation, this time as a dinner destination for bridge-walkers.