Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Hum... you'd think CNN would have learned from the last two electoral cycles that it's better to get it right than get it right now. Both the NYTimes and Washington Post are being very cautious about projecting anything off exit polls and/or reports of 1-3% of precincts.
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Russell:
Fair ping, to paraphrase Albert Francis Gore there was no need on my part to get snippy. :)
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Russell:
With all due respect, you'd think New Zealand is one country where the media has learned to take polls with a grain of salt, and a whole bottle of tequila. Apparently not, and you'd think CNN would learn from experience.
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Alastair:
*sigh* Thanks for the thoughtful rebuttal, but I think I'll leave RB to decide what's permissable discourse around here and respectfully suggest you stick the 'tude in the first available orifice.
Actually, you do have a small point and one I was about to make before you started frothy: Protectionism doesn't neatly split along party lines in the US - and it doesn't here either. I stand by my observation that it was an interesting local angle on the US mid-terms I've not seened addressed here. Then again, I'll be damned if I have any idea where either the Republicans or the Democrats stand on any substantitive policy issue (let alone one as relevant to New Zealand as trade - as opposed to your pastor buying crystal meth and humping rent boys, while your congressman sends lewd IMs to adolescent staffers is bad, m'kay?
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OK, I'm going to give a big brickbat to local media for not asking the most obvious, and relevant, question: Would a Democrat controlled Congress actually be more or less protectionist? From my read, if the Republicans get their clocks cleaned it's going to be socially moderate, economically liberal Reps in the Northeast and Southwest who are going to get shafted. OTOH, it's going to be protectionist US unions,agricultural lobbyists and corporates looking for payback from Perlosi and Harry Reid.
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Still, looking for the upside of every downgrade in human intelligence, am I the only person who finds paranoid parents and neo-puritan politicians a delicious gumbo of ironies, nitwit nostalgia and flat out hypocrisy? Unless things have changed dramatically since I was on the fringes of Wellywood politics, the bar in Parliament still has the most heavily subsidised alcohol this stide of the Vic student union, and I still go to parties where you'll hear half-cut baby boomer wax lyrical about how vile yoof are nowadays but it was different when they were whoring, sassing their elders, drinking illegally, listening to horrid music and treating their bodies like the soil around Paritutu.
And I think that's the real problem - like every other moral panic, the problem's always THEM never us, isn't it?
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But now I think of it, if you're looking for funerial Barber, you could do a lot worse than his setting for soprano of extracts from James Agee's prose poem t__Knoxville: Summer 1915.
The last section is heartbreaking, and both text and music are deceptively simple.
By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble; and in the hour of their taking away.
After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.
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"Adigio in G Minor" Abaloine (sp)
Think Platoon and Gallipoli and if you listen really carefully one scene in rollerball!
I think you mean Samuel Barber's 'Adagio for Strings' which was used to rather sinister/sentimental effect in David Lynch's 'The Elephant Man' but which is something of a cliche of classical misierbalisme. If my memory serves, it replaced the traditional 'Land of Hope and Glory'/'Jersualem' duo as the climax to the Last Night of the Proms in 2001 for rather obvious reasons.
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You see, it is shows about public service which are what people want to watch.
Not so sure, Conor. In the end, I think it's much more visceral: In dice, tidy 44 minute packages the inexplicable, complex and mysterious -- death, pain, justice - becomes a tidy moral universe where the good end well, the bad get what's coming to them and things make sense. They're morality plays in a universe where we're not quite as cynical and ironic as we like to pretend.
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Oddly enough, I've left instructions that I'm not going to have a funeral and anyone who wants to organise an orgy of insincerity (as opposed to trashing my house in a cataclysmic drunken bloat) I respectfully decline to attend. If I have to have a funeral, I'd really love to force the morbuid monsters to croak through Monty Python's splendid parody of 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' --
All things dull and ugly,
All creatures short and squat,
All things rude and nasty,
The Lord God made the lot.Each little snake that poisons,
Each little wasp that stings,
He made their brutish venom.
He made their horrid wings.All things sick and cancerous,
All evil great and small,
All things foul and dangerous,
The Lord God made them all.Each nasty little hornet,
Each beastly little squid--
Who made the spikey urchin?
Who made the sharks? He did!All things scabbed and ulcerous,
All pox both great and small,
Putrid, foul and gangrenous,
The Lord God made them all.Amen.
If that doesn't drive everyone from the room in search of a drink, then that's just the crowning failure.