Posts by Emma Hart
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Fortunately for me, the knives in this case are just metaphorical. I say that because five Aucklanders and their families and friends are less fortunate than I -- five people including Austin Hemmings have died from real knife attacks in Auckland city since mid-July
Let us turn to Britain for a sensible solution to knife crime:
Accident and emergency doctors today call for the banning of long, sharp kitchen knives, arguing they account for at least half of all stabbings...
Knives "of less than 5cm [2ins] in length" or with blunt, round ends would meet culinary needs and be far less likely to result in fatalities.
This actually generated a visceral 'from my cold dead hand' response in me. But it makes a feck of a lot more sense than 'let's starve other people's children'.
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I'm going to print this out and show it to my son every time he complains about his high school.
I myself went to a namby-pamby liberal high school with vertical forms and peer support and no streaming or corporal punishment. I was going to be a pregnant failure.
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It's less paranoid than taking the view that there's a paedophile hiding around every corner and behind every bush, which seems to be where the media's trying to push things.
Indeed, this kind of pisses me off, because it does get to levels where people aren't letting their kids get any exercise. Of course you have to manage risk intelligently, but if you can do something as (theoretically) simple as providing your kids with a safe home environment, you've taken care of what is statistically the biggest risk.
I collected her at midnight last night
My mum and I had a standing agreement that if I ever needed her, I could phone and she would pick me up, from anywhere at any time, no questions asked. Saved me getting into actual trouble from being too worried about getting into 'trouble' with her. I did it once - rang her from a boyfriend's house after he hit me (the only time he ever hit me) and I fell over and smacked my face into a bed base. He felt shitter about the resulting bruising than I did, but as soon as he started apologising he sounded so much like my Dad I couldn't burn out of there fast enough.
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I've read it, Mike, what part of the spitting incoherent outrage that was my response would you like to hear?
In Hide's defense, the section that quotes him starts with 'asked for comment' and goes on to say that it's not something Clark needs heading into an election, but he also says
It's a big story... It's good that they have scholarships but you should not make it on the basis of one's sexuality, just like Chris Carter would be mortified if there was a scholarship that only straight people could apply for.
It's a complete non-story. The reporter may not have had the nous to remember the (very) recent decision on scholarships for women, but someone at the Listener should have.
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It's hard to gauge whether that has been/is happening to a greater extent now. My boys and their friends seem more comfortable with their emotions & expressing them, but I don't get to mix with many other young men, so i dunno whether it's just their own group?
Indeed, I find this very hard to judge. Not only have I got older, but I've also changed class. When people talk about how less masculine behaviour is so totally acceptable for men now, I can't help but wonder how often they deal with non-middle-class men. I can't imagine any of the guys I went to school with happily accepting one of their peers staying home to mind the kids while his partner went to work. Nor can I envisage them raising their sons to be more gentle and in touch with their feelings.
My son has good male role models and likes quiet nerdy activities. My brothers think he's a jessie and have tried several times to give him socket sets and stuff in the hope that this will tough him up a bit.
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Oh, the curls, not the gorgeous golden curls! I miss them so much.
And I note that despite your glowing testamonials re young Master Robert, he is unconscious in that photo (something that oddly doesn't diminish his resemblance to his father).
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am I the only one who read the above and thought of a Britney Spears song?
Until now, it was just you and Danielle. Until now.
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Could our politicians be sinking to the level of (gasp) Australian ones?
Heh, get back to me when we sack someone for stripping to his gruts and straddling a colleague's breasts at a party. Yes, that was the NSW Police minister.
We've a ways to go yet.
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Scuse me while I just make myself comfortable on Jolisa's couch here :)
Obviously memory is a fallible thing, and I shall try to answer these questions with as much honesty and as little super-imposed hindsight as I can.
I believe the main reason I didn't tell anyone was that it was over. It was done with and I had no wish to drag it all out again. That and, well, the unremarkableness of the event. I can imagine telling this story to my 'best friend' at the time and her getting to the end and saying 'so?'
Also I felt a real desire to not make the situation any worse. Least said and all that. I can't imagine what my mother would have said given her own history, but I genuinely didn't want to upset her.
How is it that a young man comes to think he owns a young woman, that he would rather kill her than think of anyone else touching her?
I have seen this mindset in operation, both in my father and the homicidally crazy girlfriend of one of my closest friends. It wasn't the case with Table though, he'd have shared me rather than given me up.
I believe his problem, being a lower-class bloke with a very limited paradigm of acceptable male behaviour, was that he just didn't know how to cope with what he was feeling. In a very real sense, violence was the most acceptable way for him to react to the situation. It was what was expected. If we want to stop this kind of thing happening then perhaps what we need is a new generation of sissy men for whom it is permissible to go to bed with a tub of ice-cream and cry when your girlfriend dumps you.
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Wow, Kerry, you just made me do that 'horrified gasp followed by relieved laughter' thing. And given I have bronchitis (thank you Haydn and Rob), the horrified gasp wasn't the best idea. But it's weird the stuff that runs through your head at moments like that.
People are often as adult as you treat them, basically.
Yeah. I mean, we're just starting on this parenting teenagers lark, but my theory is (ha, I know) that it's like dismantling the supporting framework for a tree as it grows. You don't want to take it down too soon or the tree gets flattened, and you don't want to leave it too late or its growth gets stunted.
As a child I was a completely different person from what I was at sixteen, with different tools and subject to different drives. I wasn't an adult, no, but much closer to an adult than to a child.