Posts by Hilary Stace
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Please don't tell me that is a quote from Te Papa
Pliny the Elder died in the eruption, and Pliny the younger (a boy at the time?) wrote about it, according to my recollection of one of the panels at the Te Papa exhibition.
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The Pompeii exhibition at Te Papa at the moment has a great 3D video about how the volcano (which hadn't erupted for centuries) wiped the place out in a few hours. 35 km plume that collapsed over the landscape - called Plinian after a young eye witness. The map of the region looked much like Taranaki with a single benign mountain.
As a good Wellingtonian I expect the big earthquake any minute. Always have an escape route close, and don't like being high up in a building or underground (or in traffic tunnels). Have torches (the wind ups) and radios around the house. Have stored food and water in the garage. However, that assumes we are at home when it happens and can access it. Have done some first aid courses but not very good at it (faint at blood). Not really worried about dying, but don't like the idea of being injured and trapped. That all sounds very neurotic!
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Is that anywhere near Pembroke, Mass? I know a hospitable New Zealander near there who has a real NZ bloke's shed full of NZ rugby and other memorabilia. He's also a professional baker.
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Chris - thanks to alerting me to that out of date link. Must update it.
Heather - thanks for links.
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There seemed to be a lot of ice skating/dancing going on which was amazing to watch. Impossibly immaculate and smiley people without cuts or bruises whizzed, glided and leapt about and were tossed around in the air by their partners all at a million miles an hour on narrow metal blades on slippery ice. Meanwhile the narrators criticized them to bits. Sometimes they fell on the hard ice but never seemed injured, and kept smiling through the humiliation.
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Craig: there were hardly any groups in NZ not espousing some aspect of eugenics in the early decades of last century. Plunket was founded on eugenic principles of breeding good little soldiers for the empire. There were eugenists who wanted to breed out and those who wanted to breed better. The scariest were those who linked moral depravity, intellectual impairment, and mental illness, like some of those behind that committee of inquiry that Russell linked to, and who set up a eugenics board to keep a register of such individuals (and the institutions to lock away undesirable groups, that took decades to close).
The main groups who opposed eugenics as far as I could find in my research were mental health survivors or those with family members with impairments, such as Peter and Janet Fraser, and various other socialists and social justice activists.
There are many politicians these days calling for limits on breeding for some groups, some closely aligned with the ACT party. That's eugenic.
And if you really want to look at eugenics today what about things like pre-implantation genetic technology, or amniocentesis (can be seen as breeding out undesirable ie disabled people)? I'm sure people developing these technologies do not see themselves as eugenic, but being helpful to parents, just as Marie Stopes et al did decades ago.
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By the way, for PAS regulars, this explains why Giovanni was a bit argumentative last week and then went silent.
[Sorry to out you, Giovanni, but past and future survivors might appreciate it]
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Fabians were first active in New Zealand over 100 years ago and many of the founders of the Labour Party were sympathisers. 1890s Liberal MP William Pember Reeves was keen and named his son Fabian (not the entertainer). Fabian Society founders, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, visited NZ in the 1890s. Janet Fraser, wife of Peter, was described admiringly by one of her socialist friends: 'she had a Beatrice Webb mind'.
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Graeme, I meant editorials of the major dailies around election time. In 1987 they were supportive of Labour, not surprisingly, but very rarely since.
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What about factoring in all the free advertising in the media in the quota? Like that fishing guy who took John Key out fishing on prime time television just before the election and raved about him - almost advertorial.
I heard that once upon a time print news used to count up column inches of mentions of political parties and try and allocate roughly a balance (although it didn't matter whether it was positive or negative comment, and I have rarely read an editorial sympathetic to the left).