Posts by JackElder
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Pulp Fiction, actually.
Slightly more seriously: I don't have a problem with my name being mangled during transliteration to another language/orthography. English does this to other languages, I don't see why we shouldn't take our lumps with the rest of them.
And I honestly don't know what I'd do if I had a chance to come up with a meaningful name in another language. How do you want to present yourself (honne, as you point out) to other people? It's like picking a domain name but more serious.
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I'd have picked something like "Strong Gentle Man" in kanji.
Really? I'd have gone with "bad motherfucker", myself.
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If I read the Wellington earthquake maps correctly some years ago, Te Papa is built on the area at highest risk for liquefaction.
The maps are available at http://www.gw.govt.nz/Earthquake-hazard-maps/ if anyone's curious. The humdinger is the combined map - the take-home from that is that in a big earthquake, you can realistically expect the Ngauranga Gorge to be closed by falling debris.
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And yet no annoying busybody ever comes up to me and tells me to remove my 'cancer wagon' from the road, as they do to my outside-smoking mother.
Dude, you're just not hanging around with the right kind of pro-cycling activitists. I've heard attitudes way more virulent than this expressed about cars.
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horrifying conditions in which the largely foreign seasonal workers are kept in the agricultural industry
Sorry, confused here - are you talking about Italy, or NZ's agricultural sector - most notably our wine industry?
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I don't get the antipathy towards crocs. They're just jandals without the toestrap.
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And when I were a lad, people had to go all the way to London to have the experience of being off their 'eads on the Tube.
Tim: Where are you?
Mike: Err, Sheffield.
Tim: What are you doing in Sheffield?
Mike: Fell asleep on the tube.
Tim: The tube doesn't go to Sheffield, Mike.
Mike: Yeah, I know. I must have changed at King's Cross.
-Spaced - audio-out-of-synch version at youtube here -
I have also overtly expressed parental guidance on the odd occasion, mostly involving the placing of children in life threatening situations.
This aspect interests me, because it's one of the situations where I find that even quite diffident people can express highly forthright opinions to total strangers. I see this a moderate amount, as I have two young children. When we're out at a playground, I often find other parents (or random passersby) dropping veiled hints or commenting openly that I should be more involved. Sometimes this is based on a mistaken assessment of my kids' capabilities, sometimes it's based on a belief that I should be actively pushing/extending them. Without kids, I could do a variety of stupid, dangerous, or unproductive things in public, and no-one would bat an eyelid; with kids, as soon as I leave my 3yo in the car for 30 seconds while I run into a dairy to get milk, I get the guy ahead of me in the queue making loud and pointed comments to his companion about how it's terrible to leave children unattended in cars.
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Q: How do you get 50 drunken Canadians out of a swimming pool?
A: "Excuse me, could everyone get out of the pool, please? Thanks."I attended a Canada Day event in central London a few years ago, in the company of several of Saskatchewan's finest. It was a big street party near Covent Garden; all the Canadian bars had set up stalls outside, all the non-Canadian bars had hastily bought a few cases of Molsons and had slapped up a maple leaf poster or two. The street was totally, utterly full of drunken expats, complete with the stereotypes (group of 5 topless lads each with a letter of "YUKON" painted on their chests, etc). Arriving, we saw the heaving, drunken mob, and were slightly intimidated. Then we spotted another mate of ours on the other side of the street. Hell, we'd have to cross over through the drunken mob. And lo, it was as easy as saying "Scuse me.. pardon me..." - no matter how drunk people were, they politely stepped aside. I was astonished. Throughout the entire day, and some fairly epic drinking by the capacity crowd, I saw precisely one punch thrown - by a bloke with a Sarf Landahn accent. I don't care if they're all passive-aggressive, it's much neater than being aggressive-aggressive.
That said, one of my mates came from a smallish town near Saskatoon. He had longish hair, and once mentioned that he had to avoid a lot of the bars in his home town, because many people thought he looked First Nations, and he didn't need drunks picking fights with him. So there's clearly a bit bubbling under the surface, as well.