Posts by JLM
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Busytown: “Glory! Glory! There’s the salt!”, in reply to Jolisa,
Thank you so much Jolisa. I love how everyone has different treasures to remember. I think this might be the Elizabeth Knox link you meant. The other one went to Carl Stead's blog, and he hasn't mentioned MM yet.
http://www.elizabethknox.com/archives/2012/07/24/margaret-mahy-hero/
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Muse: OPEN HOUSE: Margaret Mahy, The…, in reply to Danielle,
“The little man could only stare. He hadn’t dreamed of the BIGNESS of the sea. He hadn’t dreamed of the blueness of it. He hadn’t thought it would roll like kettledrums, and swish itself on to the beach. He opened his mouth, and the drift and the dream of it, the fume and the foam of it never left him again.”
Mine too. We have a battered old library copy in our house (not stolen, Danielle, but I would have) that has the original intense collage illustrations - so much more in keeping than the later edition.
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Seeing as there isn't the queue I thought there would be, I'll share my tiny memory of working at the Christchurch School Library Services over one university summer - I think it must have been 69/70. It wasn't till I'd been there a few days and saw the display of picture books with the same name as my courteous and business-like boss, that I found out that she was a new "hot" picture-book writer, and it wasn't from her.
She was a lovely person and a lovely boss. The snippet I remember most clearly is her anxiety when one of her daughters threw a sickie and took herself home from school to be home alone. The worries of working parents don't change much.
The thing that has delighted me most is how everyone on twitter and facebook etc remembers different books and words. One of my friends said "she'll have an escort of 17 kings and 42 elephants", and I didn't even know which book she meant.
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Thank you Craig. I have memories, a couple of direct contacts, so many more of words and delight, but I would rather let others start. As my daughter said when she heard , "I think my childhood just died a little bit too."
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Hard News: Strange days for journalism, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
You know how it's illegal for New Zealanders to make atomic bombs? Maybe Aussie should have a similar law banning its nationals from owning media empires.
I'm certain I saw a documentary decades ago about an Australian mining magnate and his daughter entitled something like "Only a little nuclear bomb" which referred to the fact that they wanted to use such a device instead of standard explosives in their mining operations. They had a poster on their wall saying "Environmentalists, let them freeze in the dark". Does that ring a bell for anyone?
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Hard News: Media7 will soon be Media3, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Still, it only diminishes a little the gathering gloom around the demise of TVNZ7. I was part of a panel at the uni last night (with David Beatson, Claire Curran, Mark Servian and Bomber Bradbury), facing an overflowing lecture theatre full of citizens enraged at the decision to let the channel die,
At the mirror meeting in Dunedin a sound engineer stood up and said the vital thing was to make sure the TVNZ7 "space", "bandwidth" "airwaves" (sorry, the technical term escapes me for the moment) is set aside for a public channel, or else, he said, it would take a lot more than it costs currently to get it running again. So don't let it get sold with the rest of TVNZ!
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Hope I can post this here for Dundin people, but everyone knows there's a Save TVNZ7 meeting in the Colqhoun theatre 1st floor Dunedin Hospital at 6pm tonight, right? Do pass it on, I haven't seen it well advertised
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Hard News: Reading the Numbers, in reply to Steve Barnes,
What gets me about the way tv broadcasting has gone in this country is the way poor people are being excluded from what the rest of the world is watching. Beneficiaries are berated for having Sky satellite dishes on their roof, but if they don't have Sky they have less and less to watch and talk about with others. It's socially divisive, like the digital divide over again.
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Hard News: #JohnDotBanks and all, in reply to Russell Brown,
I looked up what I wrote at the time, and it could have been different had the Greens achieved one more seat – they were 1426 votes short.
And one of them was mine, to my endless shame...
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Southerly: Bricks and Mortar, in reply to David Haywood,
The cabbage tree was blocking the house from being removed. It nearly killed me (psychologically) to cut it down.
Turns out that I'd rather have a house than a cabbage tree...
Cabbage trees always seem to resprout, so come back in another 10 years...