Posts by JackElder
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Isabel Hitchings,
I always thought it was a bit dodgy that they were allowed into state schools and given a captive audience.
I was astonished when I first went to a secondary school assembly in NZ. I'd spent most of my high school education overseas, at an openly Catholic international school in Japan (run by actual Catholic monks) - but since most of the pupils weren't actually Catholic, the amount of day-to-day religion forced on us was minimal. So I was absolutely gobsmacked at my first school assembly at Wellington College (1992, for those keeping track), when we ended up - at a state school - singing multiple hymns. I had more religion in my first fortnight at that school than I did in the previous 4 years.
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Hard News: One man’s Meat Puppets is…, in reply to Kebabette,
Add in The Wiggles
I've seen the Wiggles live. Twice. They give a good show. Seriously.
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I used to put this on towards the end of parties, to winnow out the wheat from the chaff:
Tended to instigate a strong visceral response, either positive or negative.
My own musical education was somewhat influenced by growing up in various places where availability of new music was sketchy, and often only via various UK chart programs. Which explains my deep and abiding fondness for this piece of acid beauty:
A thing very much perfectly of its time.
And I can well remember sitting in an incredibly dodgy flat in Mt Vic in the mid 90s, taping the BBC World Service's new music program onto cassette, and having my mind completely blown by Underworld's incredible mmm skyscraper i love you:
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Andre - that's fascinating. I would have thought that a preconception of guilt based on a defendant's appearance would be precisely the sort of thing to cause a juror to be removed? I'm astonished that it wasn't in this case.
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I've already nailed my colours to the mast as regards my support for the accused.
So I'll just quote a list of questions that Annette Sykes is suggesting that the media ask:
Official Information Act requests should be posed by media:
a) How much was paid to Crown law to give advice on search warrants asked for monthly for period 2006 to 2007 in this case?
b) How much was paid to SIS, STG and other surveillance units administrators during the period of 2006 to 2007 and during the prosecution of the accused arrested n the Urewera trial since 15 October 2007? ( Underst...and surveillance continued for some time of some accused)
c) How much was paid to Crown Law to prosecute the case in its many facets; bail applications in Rotorua, Palmerston North, Wellington, Tauranga, Auckland and elsewhere?
d) What was the cost of the police operations during the course of the surveillance , termination programme and during the course of the trial?
e) Is this cost ( which excluded costs of legal aid and costs of court staff and judiciary) more than some of the Treaty Settlements negotiated in the period by small iwi and hapu who have had their lands confiscated? ( Comparitive analysis)
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Which is actually true of real world Mandarin as it is spoken in the here and now.
Yeah - I learned Mandarin at uni in NZ, which meant that I basically learned really carefully pronounced putonghua. Basically, the Chinese equivalent of Received Pronunciation. Actually getting people to understand me in Beijing was incredibly difficult until I got the hang of the local accent.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Russell Brown,
I always thought it was Cantonese, which I gather is much better for swearing and cussing.
No, it's Mandarin. My Mandarin is pretty rusty these days, but much of what they're saying is pretty intelligible. There are a few points where you can tell that someone's hoping that if they say it as fast as possible it'll sound OK, but mostly it's basic Mandarin spoken with a somewhat odd accent.
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to elsketcho,
Perhaps if cyclists were to contribute some form of license fee, and this revenue were to be channeled directly towards the creation of dedicated cycleways, the problems could be alleviated
I'd just like to say that I was running a book inside my head on how long it would take someone to make this sort of comment; I was betting it'd be on the first page, so the fact that it took 38 comments for this to come out is a comparative victory for sanity.
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I'm going to get in early and say that "baubles" is going to make a comeback, cf Winston factor.
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ISTR that there were some problems in a major UK supermarket chain after an American management takeover. The new management required checkout operators - as was their standard practice - to make small talk with the customers while they processed their orders. "How's your day going?", "What about this weather then", etc. Nothing major. They then found that this caused problems, as a lot of the customers assumed that the checkout operators were hitting on them. Well, she's talking to me rather than making the traditional surly grunts, she must be after me, etc.
Cultural differences, innit.