Posts by Stephen Judd
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Eh, I am way too gloomy this evening.
Happy belated birthday!
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your workmates might nominate you to sing Der Hölle Rache
I sing it in the shower all the time, in my best falsetto. That's why we don't get mould on the ceiling - the spores are too scared to germinate. If the workmates want to risk it, well, they bring it on themselves.
it was utterly trivial compared with the experience of some families
Trivial? In the sense that Bob is fine, well sure. But it was a serious thing. Sure, you got off. But you cannot assess the rationality of your concern from the outcome, only from the prognosis beforehand.
Which reminds me.
Years ago my mate Blondie flatted with a bunch of young doctors. They had staggered stethoscopes hanging in the hall the way you might have flying ducks. One of the the young doctors was called Nick, and if we were drinking in the kitchen, we would chorus "Hi Doctor Nick!" a la the Simpsons.
One night we were sitting there and Dr Nick came in, headed straight for the beer, and did not respond to the customary greeting.
Dr Nick had been looking after a premature baby born so young its lungs were not making any surfactant; in other words, it couldn't breathe without help. And after a long, long time, with the best treatment and all the will in the world, it was obvious it would never breathe without help. The kid was in pain, too weak to live, and too strong to die. So, in the way that doctors and families sort these things out, that baby might have got a bit more morphine than appropriate. And a bit more than that. (I'm not saying anything, that's just an impression I might have picked up). And eventually, a lot more than a bit. And it died in its father's arms, hanging on to the last. So Dr Nick drank. I have no idea what the family did.
A year or two after that, my sister was mortally ill in a hospital in Jerusalem (she lived by the way), and we kept watch in the corridor outside the ICU. The families came and went, as one by one the patients died, but if they lasted more than a day or two, we would talk. A young fellow and I swapped pastries for breakfast one morning, and I learned that his son had been born with no liver. When the baby built up enough waste in the blood, he would die. The father was very composed, because when you believe it's all God's will, that's a comfort, apparently.
Nobody needs to go through that, or a tenth of that, or a hundredth part. May the smeary cake blot it all out.
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He's the voice of the angry, the unsettled, the paranoid and the distrusting... disenfranchising the legitimate concerns of many Kiwis
First up, I'm not sure it's a good thing if the angry and paranoid get a voice. My reading of history is that it doesn't usually work out to well if they do. And to the extent that people really are paranoid, I'm not counting their concerns as legitimate.
Second, the distrusting and unsettled deserve a better one. In decades of parliamentary life, what has that bastard ever done for them?
I understand the appeal of being conservative. As I get older and understand how unpredictable the outcome of planned changes are, I become more conservative myself. But to me Winston Peters exploits the worst instincts of people who want to preserve the good things about this country, always wanting to put the boot into people who allegedly are ruining it without a care for doing constructive things.
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Is there anyone on here who, in a strange and small way, will actually miss Winston once he’s gone in a few months time?
No. He's done as much harm to the NZ political discourse as anyone.
I mean, on the rare occasions when he has championed reasonable ideas, eg his superannuation savings proposals, people ran away simply because it was him proposing them.
I think of him as someone with rare talent who has not just squandered it but actively misused it.
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Bob - I saw that exhibition! And I did think of Tuffery's paintings when I was reading about Cook in Tahiti.
Anne Salmonds is profusely thanked in Nicholas Thomas' book and her work (__Between Worlds__) cited as a source.
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That book Discoveries (which I bought at the airport, not Cook, curses this is why I'm not a professional writer) which I mentioned has some of Tupaia's drawings in it. One of the things Nicholas Thomas stresses is that representational drawing was a complete novelty yet after watching Banks & co Tupaia took to it straight away.
One of the strengths of the book is that it draws on oral histories from Tahiti and Hawaii etc to try and get some perspective from the other side as it were.
Cook was bemused and discomfited as he discovered that the peoples of different islands knew each other's locations, were clearly related, and evidently could get around without a sextant or any other technological navigation aids.
dyan correct me, but Tupaia was an actual chief, whereas (O)mai wasn't - it was just that when he was in England that he was treated as such, and did nothing to discourage the idea.
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No, Tupaia and Omai were two different men, who shipped with Cook on his first and second voyages respectively. Tupaia died in Batavia en route home, but Omai made it back to Tahiti and died some time after.
I bought a very interesting book by Nicholas Thomas on Cook's voyages and his interactions with the people he met at the airport last week. It goes into some detail about the politics of Tahiti at the time and the possible motivations of Tupaia and Omai. It has a lot to say about Cook's encounters with Maori too (which Tupia brokered - there was enough mutual intelligibility between Tahitian and Maori for them to understand each other well).
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the sledding doctor who sued the city over a broken ankle -- what a dick! When Busylad careered off the local sledding slope face first into a thorn bush last winter, we didn't sue the city, we just slathered him with Savlon.
The thing is, in the crazy US environment, your insurance company will make you sue. Eg, my sister's mother in law slipped on a spill in the supermarket in California. Her insurance company insisted she sue the supermarket to recover, otherwise they would not cover her.
Since a hospital visit and followup treatment would run into the thousands of dollars in the US if you paid your self, I'm sure Dr So and So claimed on his insurance, and I'll bet that they told him to sue
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Oh, and the "hiding in plain sight" thing is bullshit. If Serbia weren't desperate to get into the EU he would be happily peddling quackery still. Lots of people knew where he was but there was no will to hand him over. (see 1, 2. "Hiding" is face-saving spin for "sheltered by influential people in the Serb establishment and large numbers of ordinary people who thought he was a great guy", and we ought not to repeat it.
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Metafilter, which I frequent, has a Bosniak member who posted a couple of harrowing accounts of being in Sarajevo here and here.
...in reality, I didn't win, Karadžić did. Around the time my parents were killed, he said of Sarajevo that soon one wouldn't count those killed, one would count those who survived. I suppose it was a wish of his, but as a wish it came true. Most of my school friends and neighbors and much of my family died or disappeared. Of my classmates in school, more than half died. Everyone I know has problems from the war still. In fifteen years I've never had a good night's sleep like I did in my little room in the house of my parents.