Posts by JackElder
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To avoid embarassing myself, I'll write one about an ex-flatmate of mine. Not, I hasten to add, the ex-flatmate of mine who occasionally posts here.
Anyway, at one point (I believe his birthday) he went out with some friends and had a Big Good Time. This was concluded in the traditional manner, viz being dragged out of the bar unable to stand up and popped into a taxi. His mates only knew the suburb he lived in so the taxi driver drove him to the middle of the suburb and turfed him out. He managed to wander incoherently around for some time, pausing only to vomit over someone's fence hard enough to lose his brand-new glasses, then found what looked like the right house. But wait! His keys didn't work! Solution: knock hard! Now, this was around 3am or so. The actual inhabitant of the house - who was up and playing Civilisation - came to the door. My flatmate staggered in, saw the couch, and sank into oblivion. The bloke though "seems harmless enough", and went back to playing Civ. Around 8am my flatmate came to - the bloke was still playing Civ - apologised and walked home.
This is the same flatmate who, quite literally, shagged a hole in the wall. No, not in that way; he and his girlfriend were Having Fun in a variety of locations in the flat, and at one point the power of his awesome love-thrusts was such that he actually propelled her buttocks through a gib wall. At the time, he just told us that he'd been drunk and had tripped and head-butted the hole: he came clean at my wedding, when he figured it was too late and we'd all see the funny side. How right he was. Awesome bloke, and one of the best flatmates I ever had.
Oh, and just to make it fair, one about me. I once regained consciousness in the middle of a fairly mammoth drinking session to discover myself in the middle of someone's front garden in the North-East Valley in Dunedin, having an indecent act performed on me as I lay in a bed of petunias next to a main street. I managed to persuade the other participant that this was not a good idea (apart from the danger of arrest, I didn't fancy them) and we managed to call it off.
If you're reading this, and that was your garden: I am very, very sorry about your petunias.
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I personally felt very comforted by the idea and possible presence of lurkers. They're still part of the community, probably the biggest part.
I have several times had people I know socially come up to me and say "Hey, I've seen you posting on Public Address..." And I'm hardly a particularly prolific commentator. Lurkers are usually pretty engaged with the community.
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Friday afternoon total threadjack:
Made for $500. Presumably US. Of course, the director actually runs a post-production house, so unless you've got your own post-production house it'd cost a few bob more. Astonishing stuff though. And now they've given the bloke a budget of $30 million to make a full-length movie of it.
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he's the chair of the RB.
It was only a matter of time.
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Stephen Judd was on form as one of the most naturally sociable people I have ever met.
I got there at about 10:15pm, due to a clashing commitment. Certainly, by the time I got there, most people were very "naturally sociable". To the point where I'm fairly sure that many of you may not remember me... As people have said, it's good to put faces to names.
Kicking myself for not walking up to the person whose arm tattooes looked just like JackElder's gravatar.
That was either me, or there's a copyright problem.
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(However, I am slowly morphing into my gravatar - is this happening to anyone else?)
So it's a reverse Dorian Gray, then, eh?
Personally, my gravatar is three tattoo sessions behind the times. I should probably get around to updating it.
Yes to nametags. Not that I'll be attending the great blend, but I'll see Wellyboddies at the Thistle tonight.
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David - I hope you don't mind, but I mentally parsed the penultimate sentence of your third paragraph as:
...but I hope you can keep some perspective, and can realize that not all of us are the over-sexed scientists that you come across in your day job.
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Jack, if you have to disguise what you're doing, then you can't get mega-publicity for it, so mission accomplished, I would say.
Well, you'd only have to disguise it from the venue. You could still advertise via mailing lists, websites, etc. You'd probably end up preaching to the converted - but then that's pretty much what these guys do anyway, isn't it?
But also, if tip-offs are involved, then good. Fine. You just have a policy that says "we reserve the right to cancel events that promote misinformation contrary to our mission as an institution of higher wotsit", and then you can cancel when tipped off. The bridge club 40th anniversary do will probably still make a booking without fear.
I'd be astonished if Te Papa didn't already have such a policy in place. Or some similar weasel worded declaration involving "events beyond our control" etc. That's pretty standard for venue hire that I've used. The issue at stake would be that they chose not to invoke it when made aware of the possible controversy.
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I bet 99% of bookings are obviously innocuous corporate gigs, social functions, and the like, which would require minimal labour to approve.
How obvious is obvious? Just because an organisation has an innocuous name is no guarantee that it's not dodgy. Sure, you could probably take a guess that "9/11 Citizens for Truth" might be worth having a closer look at; but all they have to do is name themselves something dull like "Institute for the Study of Structural Integrity in Controlled/Uncontrolled Demolitions (ISSICUD)", and make the booking in that name. Or, say, the Smith Family Christmas party... a purely social gathering of the family and friends, which just happens to include a noted right-wing agitator (he's a close friend of the dad), and is an open invite to anyone who subscribes to their mySpace page... Basically, I think that it's pretty easy to game any vetting system that doesn't go into a level of detail sufficient to make the system itself uneconomic.
I'd be willing to bet that in the case of the museum in Australia, they don't have a staffmember checking the bona fides of every room booking; someone will have tipped them off. The fact that they took the booking in the first place, then booted them shortly before the actual gig implies that they found out fairly late in the piece.
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Well I solemnly promise to still be there.
Upright?