Posts by Sam F
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More from the Herald...
It appears that ACT have a new weapon in the electoral battle for hearts and minds.
All hope is lost.
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a citizen journalist captures the bigotry and knuckle-dragging stupidity of punters at a Sarah Palin campaign rally
I can't bring myself to click on that video, and the sad thing is I don't really need to. We've been living through the results of such people's voting decisions for at least eight years now.
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It's very easy to demolish a building of a style that's current unfashionable. It's usually stuff that's between 30 and 60 years old - it's not new enough to still be valuable, but not old enough to be considered worth preserving on historical grounds.
Decades later the regret, the "what were they thinking" comes.
And after 150 years of this, you end up with Auckland.
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Another option for cheapskates and masochists: I have heard the the term "chainring tattoo" used to refer to a particular kind of cycling injury, where little dots of scar tissue are left after your leg impacts the chainwheel teeth. Sometimes embedded grease or oil make a trail of permanent black points for the perfect tattoo effect. Also called the "rookie mark" by the meanspirited.
Anyhow, carry on.
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My dad's side of the family weren't big on heirloom items. Most of the pretty stuff has been farmed off to other uncles and aunts, leaving my dad with all the bits and pieces that Grandad and Grandma used to basically live as peasant farmers in Glen Eden for fifty years. Rakes, hoes, axes, saws, sledgehammers, mallets and crowbars, metal tins of 'motor essence', acetylene torches and hurricane lamps, spanners, wrenches, the Elastrator tool (don't ask), various car-repair items - in short, it's a living museum of a more self-sufficient age. Pretty much everything there has only survived because it's still useful now.
Other than that, I particularly treasure a chess set that Grandad taught me the game with, and a wooden wheelbarrow he gave me when I was three - made with an old pram wheel for the front, and my name and address painstakingly painted on a metal plate on the back.
From my mum's side, the standout item is unquestionably a Kodak Brownie 8mm box film camera, late-fifties or early sixties vintage with a clockwork drive and a fold-up rangefinder. Common as anything and not particularly valuable, but we have silent film transferred to VHS and DVD which tells the story of the family's trip from the UK to NZ by boat in the mid-sixties, including the only footage I will ever see of my eldest aunt, Helen (she died before reaching her teens). The clockwork camera is in fine shape - every so often I take it down and give it a couple of twists, just so I can hear and feel the clicking shutter and think about what's passed through that lens over the years. Love it.
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The first half of this year sucked for me, and it's all the media's fault. Between oil price shocks, financial collapses and stock-market disaster, I found this a pretty depressing time to be entering the working world. Had I graduated and started working at the end of last year as planned, things might have been a bit different, but as it ended up I was leaving university to enter an economy that was definitely on the turn downward, and I knew it.
Thus in April and May I was experiencing a level of non-specific anxiety and dread which almost had me off to the doctor. I'm not quite in that territory now, but it's still tough to make it through the morning business report without that anxiety gradually bubbling up through my consciousness. I think consuming less and better-quality media is a sensible idea.
The macro picture: apart from the few individual decisions left to us - working harder, saving more, and other hitherto-unfashionable ideas - the overall direction of things is largely out of our hands, and general anxiety can only make our lives less pleasant. The summer of global economic collapse needn't be all that unpleasant anyway, at least not if we imitate George and build up our cooking and agriculture skills early on.
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Sorry, who?
Too right. Wacky but decorous, that's the Scandinavian way.
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I'd say the argument over espresso equipment vs. daily spend on coffee is pretty much a textbook proof of the Vimes' Boots argument.
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Re: potentially being "beaten up" for an unusual name in NZ. A delightful insight into the mentality of some.
Oddly, I never experienced this at my alma mater. Bullies would generally mutilate unusual names repeatly and in humiliating ways until the victim was infuriated into taking action, and then they'd beat them up. We had a "first punch = aggressor" policy, which was generally applied regardless of situation, context or provocation between fighting students. It did lower the overall level of fisticuffs, which was the intent and a decent result overall, but it didn't take long for the usual suspects to ascertain that you could double your measure of mean-spirited 'fun' by first goading someone into throwing a weak fist and then laying down a thumping.
This was the best part of ten years ago, and I have no doubt that steps have been taken; but I suspect that, like other unlovely but tenacious lifeforms, bullying will find a way.
Sorry for the interlude, folks - as you were.
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Summer uniform for seniors at my alma mater was (hmm, possibly still is) black shoes, light blue long socks, navy blue walkshorts and a light blue shirt with monogram to match the socks.
A few guys tried to make this a bit cooler by replacing the standard shorts with slighly longer blue Dickies shorts at twice the price. It didn't work. We basically looked like an army of very young bus drivers.