Posts by Jolisa
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Islander, welcome aboard! Four under five... shudder. And yet the ultimate rewards must be great. If you survive long enough to enjoy them, like your Mum!
Interesting point about increasing social savvy as you work your way down the family tree. I also wonder how birth order interacts with inherent temperamental differences. Like, if you're an introvert-type (deriving your energy more from solitude than from socialising), are you more likely to be a jovial introvert than the stamp-collecting kind if you've got several older siblings to buffer you in social situations? Or, do oldest-kid introverts more quickly develop a handy , chatty, hermit-crab shell to carry around with them, on account of being primarily answerable to mild-mannered but extra-verbal adults, rather than rough and tumble brothers and sisters? I dunno. Would be interesting to hear other thoughts on this.
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Oh yes. Or rickets, as was rumoured about certain Dunedin flats and their catmeat-and-potatoes diets.
Maybe this should be linked to the Straitjacket Fits/risk aversion thread?? Causal link between willingness to live in utter squalor and penury as a youth, and eventual success as artist/entrepreneur/top civil servant/dilettante/whatever....? It worked for me.
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Awwww... made me cry! And that was just the bit with the milk bottle!
(Oh and obviously the cat goes up in the lift first and then sends it back down for the kiwi. Hours of impassioned debate -- and waiting up to watch it to be absolutely sure because there were no instant replays, videos, or youtube -- finally settled this one for me.)
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Piping up to agree with Anne M, whose sensible comment got rather swamped by all you firecracker-happy bad boys, chucking double-happies under flowerpots with snails to see what would happen...
I think Anne's right, especially since the Latest Scientific Research (TM) tends to suggest that the teenage brain is still radically underdeveloped in crucial areas, like empathy, and keeping a curb on addictive tendencies, and thinking ahead. See also smoking, suicide rates, gaming marathons, dropping concrete blocks off motorway bridges, youth group cultism, etc.
Which is not to diss the teenage brain in wholesale fashion. I happen to think that the megalomania, passion, and global all-or-nothing thinking common to that age can be the heart of a truly powerful activism. Or at least the beginnings of some powerful, lifelong fandom. (Do we need a thread on "gigs and protests that changed my life", or would that brand the whole site with a scarlet F for fogey?).
For my part, I'd advocate a Euro aproach to introducing kids to the pleasures of alcohol -- drink the good stuff, at home, around the dinner table or in ritual contexts, so you have a sense of epicurean ease about the whole thing, rather than it being a forbidden excess. But that relies on the parents having a similar approach to the stuff, and if they grew up with yard-glasses and crates and casks, then good luck.
BTW, couldn't agree more about fireworks and wintertime. We've just gone back to standard time here, and I would have loved to crack some fireworks off for Halloween, when it got dark at 5pm. Alas, they are only sold around 4th of July, which is, duh, the middle of summer.
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No danger of death-by-crossposting though, eh?
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As an expat with fantasies of returning one day, can I put in a plug for open2view.com ? Best real estate perving this side of nyhabitat.com. And a useful way of keeping tabs on curious and disturbing trends in haute bourgeois home decoration...
Ditto on Newsroom.co.nz before all the good stuff disappeared behind the paywall. It was enormously useful in organizing activism from overseas, and then suddenly it wasn't.
Could do better: if only there were a decent place to buy NZ books and music online for shipment overseas. Ben's totally right that Whitcoulls punted on this one.
Y'know, this whole System is reminding me of the good old days of soc.culture.nz, with Brian Harmer and his WYSIWIG news...