Posts by Julie Fairey
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I'm a bit late to this party.
On the issue of Mr Trotter and his ridiculous metaphor, followed by an even more ridiculous attack on__ The Hand Mirror__, as Craig has already retold, I find it intriguing that he was called on his inappropriate rape analogy by David Farrar, by Russell Brown and commenters here, and by the ex-expat at THM, and which did he chose to attack? That's right, the ladies. No mention whatsoever of any men levelling criticism at him for the exact same thing, it's all about us "faux feminists" and our third wave attitude of entitlement. To which I would have liked to restrict myself to responding "whatever" and rolling my eyes, but instead I wasted a fair amount of this afternoon's limited spare time to rebutt him. I'm not sure it was worth it...
Thanks to whoever mentioned that Voltaire quote (sorry it is over the page now), I love that!
And to the rest of the PA Women's XV (surely more than XV these days?) I send gratitude for your contributions to this thread, as wanky as that sounds, cos it was nice to read your thoughts tonight, and you, and our male allies, made me feel significantly less grumpy.
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Way up thread Matthew Hooton reckoned there was a lot of support at Wednesday's Drinking Liberally in Auckland for the embattled former Foreign Affairs Minister, and I wondered what he was smoking.
Paul L will back me up on this, he was there too - the guest speaker, a certain Laila Harre, who I understand may be familiar to Mr Hooton, from the verbal thrashings she gives him most Mondays, talked about the union movement . She only mentioned Winston in passing at the beginning of her talk (that I can recall), when she said that she thought that she and Mr Hooton could agree that Winston should go. I think there were some supportive laughs from the crowd.
Otherwise I don't think he got much of a mention, so I'm not sure what all this support from the crowd was. There were 80 people there, and I talked to probably about 20 over the course of the night and don't remember anyone raising Winston in conversation, although I'm sure Mr Hooton's liberal friend might have had a different experience. But there wasn't any Wiii-in-ston Peeee-ters, Obama style, that's for sure.
On Mr Trotter's odious and unnecessary comparison, the ex-expat has taken him to task, and I'm glad to see he has managed to disappoint a lot of readers here too. I am starting to smell a bit of a "getting noticed" intention, given the fight he picked with Idiot Savant earlier in the week. Ah well, I guess time will tell whether he intends to go on in this vein, because he does have a lot of good points to make, if he could just leave the gratuitous and offensive rape analogies to Whaleoil et al.
Danielle you rock!
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Dylan, what Sacha said, about our previous rather lengthy discussion. If the original claims were exaggerated does that make it ok? Did Veitch not have an opportunity to put his side of the story at the media conference he did (remember that, the one with the "no excuses except to say"?) or perhaps in the appalling Holmes interview in the HoS (which a number of people, including myself, blogged about the terribleness of at the time)?
Yes it will be interesting to see what happens between now and the trial. What I'm seeing so far is evidence that rather reinforces a lot of the discussions had in that so far from trivial thread Sacha linked - particularly the stuff about violence of the kind alleged not just springing fully formed from the head of Veitch (did you catch it Craig?)
And yes I am grumpy tonight.
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Good luck Emma with your new blog-venture.
(And I managed to get the "none taken" response from Mr Slack within about two minutes of striking up a conversation with him at the first Drinking Liberally, when he was the guest speaker. I think he's still talking to me...)
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Oh the cupcakes were amazing! How many types were there Josh? I can't remember, just that there were all these different flavours, each one delectable. The Mr was in a cool suit and the Ms was in a beautiful grey dress, and the best man had buckles up his legs. There was just this wonderful feeling of happiness in the room. It was grand.
Ahem.
See, wedding mad I am!
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Like Danielle I found the opening ceremony quite startling and dazzling. My partner was in another room and I called out to him "they are opening up the floor of the stadium," to which he responded "they just stole that off the Romans." Which was all well and good until a f*cking PLANET came up and turned into a lantern, and had all these people running around it and wow!
Although I did think there might have been some unintentional symbolism in the children carrying the Chinese flag towards the flagpole, then having it taken off them by some rather precise soldiers who took it the rest of the way...
Anna McM shares her thoughts on the hypocritical criticism of China's human rights record here.
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I identify with a lot of the sentiments expressed in David's post, and the comments, or at least I did. In the process of planning my own wedding I discovered that I actually love the damn things, and now, over three years later, I still find myself ocassionally walking into a place and thinking "hmm, this would be a good place for a wedding, you could put the cake over there..."
Josh's civil union party was fantastic, I really really loved it. Although I was so hideously, secretly, ill with morning sickness that I threw up in a garden by where we parked the car. If I can have a good time whilst trying to hold my stomach contents in then that really is an excellent wedding-type thingy indeed.
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My deep condolences too pkiwi, and thank you for sharing and reminding us all that not all birth stories end up with a happy bouncing one year old.
Earlier this year I had the misfortune to experience the inside of an ICU (North Shore, as a visitor) and now that I have that mental furniture I find any mention of an ICU (let alone an NICU) tugs on the tear ducts. The staff do their best, but they can't always win.
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Thanks for writing this David, congrats to you and Jen for making it through the first year, and happy birthday to the Incredible Bob!
Like dc_red we had a great experience, at Waitakere Hospital also, earlier this year, and it's amazing what a difference the atmosphere there made to our general peace of mind. We had a lot of troubles with feeding too, although we were able to get sufficient formula into Wriggly to avoid health problems for him (not so for me and my incredibly painful boobs!)
It strikes me that the way we treat fathers around birth is kind of weird. We have so much focus these days on encouraging men to be engaged in the lives of their children, and yet when they first arrive there is such a focus on the mother's experience that dads feel forgotten, and often superfluous. We had the good fortune (in an odd way) to have an elective caesar before morning tea time, and that meant Wriggly's father didn't have to be parted from us until 8pm that night. From my point of view I found it quite terrifying to be left alone with this little baby overnight (although of course there was heaps of medical support). If Wriggly had arrived in the evening or overnight it definitely would have sucked to have his Dad turfed out so quickly.
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Good luck Keith, I hope you see you pop up somewhere else soon, getting paid well for the good work that you do!