Posts by webweaver
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Emma - thank you so much for this.
It's encouraged me to make a donation on the Women's Refuge website - and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
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all us girls in the village would spend months practising maypole dances
Aspects of Te Gathering suddenly make more sense. :)
Ah Sacha, now I see you know too much, I shall have to hunt you down and silence you - and I was leader of the outer strings two years in a row, so you'd better watch out! :)
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I'm completely traumatised that my beloved Cadbury's is one of the bad guys.
I was born and brought up in the UK in Bournville, Birmingham - the original home of Cadbury's. The factory is still there, and still makes chocolate.
I went to George Cadbury Infant and Junior Schools; every Christmas the whole school would be invited to the factory cinema to watch a hand-picked movie; all us girls in the village would spend months practising maypole dances and we'd perform at the Maypole festival which was held once a year on the Cadbury's recreation ground; if the wind was blowing in the right direction you could smell the chocolate from my house; and the the whole of Bournville was (and still is) a conservation area (of which we were very proud) because George Cadbury did such a bang-up job of creating a model village for his workers at the turn of the century.
George Cadbury himself (as we all learned at school) was a Good Guy. A Quaker who built a factory on the outskirts of the big city and determined that the houses he would build for his workers would be a hundred times better than the dwellings most working-class people lived in at the time. Indoor loo, plumbing, hot water, semi-detached (not terraced), and each house had a garden with 5 fruit trees planted in it. Parks throughout the village, a village green, recreation grounds adjoining the factory so that the men and women who worked for him could keep fit, no pubs allowed within the village boundaries (to this day!)... quite amazing really.
George Cadbury must be turning in his grave at the thought of how far from his original enlightened ideals his products have strayed...
*sniff*
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What does Sky have that makes it worth the money?
For me it's MySky (how did I even survive before MySky??), the Living Channel (yes! I confess! I prolly watch more stuff on the LC than on any other), UKTV (some great British shows on there), the Documentary/History/NatGeo channels, The Box (for Law&Order), and the sports channels so I can watch tennis at odd hours of the night and the occasional game of rugby.
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Wow - that's pretty heartfelt.
Here's an interesting perspective from Paul Morley in the Guardian:
The untimely, shady death of Michael Jackson
You could take your pick as to which Jackson you want to remember, which version of the monster, or the genius, or the dissolving man behind the mask. He was everywhere, but now that death had returned his full transfixing powers as a spinning, gliding master of self-publicity, any truth about who he really was and what he'd been up to was shattered into a thousand glittering pieces. Once we stayed up late to watch the exciting premier of the Thriller video. Now we stayed up late to watch another form of extraordinary choreography intended to turn one fascinating, paranoid, fiendishly otherworldly entertainer into an immortal.
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It was immediately clear that the nature and timing of this end had been coming for such a long time. Even while the whole thing was disconcerting and in the middle of it all someone had actually died, it was also the most obvious thing in the world. Now that it had arrived, this punchline to all the scintillating music and living, seedy chaos, everyone knew their place, as if Jackson's final mortal act as extreme self-obsessed entertainment illusionist was to ensure that the news of his death was itself a kind of glittering if slightly tawdry spectacle.
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A few more thoughts:
1) Thanks for the Frankie Knuckles remix, Russell - it's gorgeous.
2) You are right, I do have a rosy view - I suppose I want to think the best of him - and his behaviour was certainly well outside "normal" in so many ways - but I just can't get past the fact that his completely unreal life - for almost his entire life - took him far away from reality and into a place that I don't think anyone could survive unscathed. Where that actually took him in terms of his relationships with children will always, I suppose, remain the subject of speculation.
3) Thanks also for the Iran/MJ mashup - very cool
4) What do you mean, 'They Don't Care About Us' is a horrible song? I think it's a great song! Damn! We're not going to agree on very much today, are we :) Personally I prefer the "Brazilian" version to the "Prison" version - but that's because I'm a Batucada drummer, so I'm ever-so-slightly biased...
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...oh, and if you absolutely can't live another second without the extremely wonderful mp3 of the remix of 'I Want You Back' by Konishi Yasuharu (linked to in the fourfour blog) - and you don't have QuickTime Pro, you can download it from this blog - together with a bunch of other remixes I'm currently in the process of investigating...
<smallvoice>How do I embed a YouTube video on here? My preview's showing all the code and I don't want to press "Go" in case it all comes out wrong. Is there a trick to it? Should you maybe have a "help" page on the site to answer potentially dumb questions like this one, Russell?</smallvoice>
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Thank you so much Danielle for the link to the post on fourfour. What a lovely piece of writing - I agreed with every word. In fact it (and the comments it has so far earned) inspired me to write a somewhat sentimental and rambling comment of my own.
I would never have predicted that Michael's death would affect me as much as it has done, or that I would feel so sad. I was never what you'd call an MJ fan, although I appreciated his music along with that of many other artists.
My feeling is that Michael never grew up emotionally. I think that was partly due to the abuse he suffered at the hands of his father, and the fact that he was a performer from the age of 5 and famous by the time he was 11 years old.
The poor guy never had a proper childhood, and consequently never had the opportunity to mature emotionally through moving naturally through the stages of childhood into adulthood. Perhaps he was attempting as a grown-up to recreate the childhood he never had - and as a re-created child, he related most easily to other children.
I don't believe he was a child molester, I think he related to children as a child himself, and this way of being (which is outside what most people consider to be "normal" behaviour) combined with his naiveté and lack of understanding of how others would perceive him led him to be targeted by various unscrupulous people looking to make a quick buck (or a great many bucks).
I'm saddened by the fact that so many people were so quick to judge, and that some seemed (and still seem) to take great delight in tearing him down from the giddy heights of superstardom which they themselves helped to create.
I think at the end of the day he was a lonely, misunderstood genius - clichéd though that view might be - and I'm unaccountably saddened by the fact that he's gone forever.
On a happier note, I'm sure his music&dance on CD and DVD will outlive us all, and that we'll all still rush onto the dancefloor and boogie on down like crazy people whenever Thriller comes on - even when we're all in our dotage.
Well I will, anyway - resplendent in my purple fedora and pushing my zimmer frame...
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About time.
"At all times I have been honest with my employers and at all times I have tried to do the right thing for everyone."
OK, so in light of what TVNZ bosses have said about who knew what and when, either Veitch or TVNZ are lying. Which is it? Or when Veitch uses the word "honest" does this include him telling a (very) small part of the truth but definitely nowhere near the whole truth? Enquiring minds would like to know.
Enquiring minds would also like to know how the man can possibly say that he's tried to do the right thing for everyone! Good grief! Tony - you did the right thing for YOU. No-one else.
Grrrrrrrr
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Neil said:
and Obama would do the same. I think the odds favour Obama but at present he's more likely to loose against McCain than she is and she's gone back to having the lead nationally.
As always, it depends on which polls you're looking at. Your link was to Rasmussen, which a) is only one polling company out of many and b) isn't particularly accurate at the moment. Try Real Clear Politics for a compilation of a whole bunch of pollsters' results in terms of head-to-head against McCain, and this page for preferred Democratic presidential nomination.
Obama's still ahead in both head-to-head against McCain and preferred nominee when you average out all the pollsters - although the gap between him and Clinton has certainly narrowed over the past couple of days.
He's also still ahead in the popular vote, by about half a million, and even with the Florida votes counted, he's still ahead. And of course he's ahead in the delegate count by over 100 delegates - a gap which Clinton can't possibly bridge without the help of the superdelegates.
Another really interesting one is the Intrade Political 'Securities', where Obama is running at 72.5% to win, against Clinton at 26.1%.
But whatever the numbers say, I can see them battling this out until the convention, trading wins and losses all the way down the line. And that is something I'm not too keen on, because I think they need to be attacking McCain, not each other...