Posts by JackElder
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Muse: Linky Love, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Team Emo Boy or Team Monobrow?
Surely the choice is simple?
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I can confirm that Wellington was heaving with foreign tourists over the weekend - the waterfront has been incredible for the last few weeks. And it's pretty much solid campervans all around the bays at the moment. I'll be interested to see how much the campervan population drops off in the next couple of days.
Anecdotally, I was chatting to my tattooist on Friday, and he said that they've done really well out of the RWC. Lot of tourists taking permanent souvenirs home.
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Ha ha ha! Victory!
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ETA: Perhaps I should make that more tight: Western Evangelical Atheists.
...which you're defining as being, atheists who are preoccupied with Christianity. So, basically, what you're saying is that "Atheists who are preoccupied with Christianity, are preoccupied with Christianity"? I'd agree with that.
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Back in '99, my partner (now wife) and I were living in the UK, in student accomodation. It was one of those residence hall affairs where you have individual rooms but a communal TV room, laundry, and (since this was the UK) bar. The RWC was a great way to find all the other Antipodeans in the place, by virtue of seeing who turned up to watch the ABs games. Good fun.
But my best moments with the RWC have been this year, and from my kids.
My 7yo is supporting Australia. We have no particular connection with Australia, but she loves the Crocodile Hunter and Bindi the Jungle Girl, and so she's supporting Australia. When she announced this in class, the rest of her room booed her. She was pretty down about this, but it didn't deter her; and so for the school day where you went in the colors of your favorite team, she was determined to go with an Australian flag. I'd bought her an Oz supporters t-shirt, but she wanted a flag as well. I felt that I had to support the bloody-minded "sod you I'll support who I like" individualism she was showing against peer pressure, so I ended up spending twenty minutes the night before carefully cutting stars out of white duct tape to convert a small NZ flag we already had into an Australian one. She duly took it to school, represented her adopted team, and emerged defiant and triumphant. She literally wailed and screamed when she found out that Ireland had beaten Australia.
At the other pole, I was at the library with my 4yo the other week. "Look Daddy!" she called, pointing behind me, "Wales!" I turned around, expecting to see a humorous cartoon whale or similar (the ambiguity doesn't work well in text). But no: she'd spotted a Welsh flag. And a Georgian one. And Romanian. And, especially, Argentina! Her preschool is pretty cosmopolitan, and the teachers had used the RWC as a chance to teach the kids about various national flags. So now, any time we go past an Argentinian flag, my 4yo daughter goes off like a fizzbomb. There's a lot of bunting around. Any trip through town at the moment is likely to have her spotting at least five. I think she's particularly into the Argentinian flag because it has a sun on it, and because one of her good friends is Argentinian.
So I don't know about the actual sporting side of it, but there's a lot of character being built and knowledge being imparted just by virtue of having it here.
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Pfft... I used to work with an American called Roger Wank Dogfelcher III. I didn't have the heart to tell him.
Slightly more seriously, I did actually used to work with someone with the last name "Fuchs". I'd kind of assumed that it was pronounced 'fyookes', but it turned out to be, well, 'fucks'. Sort of thing that's funny the first time you hear it, then becomes a non-issue (like giggling the first time you see Cockfosters on a tube map).
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As regards sex education... when I was a young lad, my mother worked for Family Planning (I well remember the Christmas parties, each family with their 2.2 children), so we ended up having a lot of literature left around the house. I recall "Where did I come from?" and "What's happening to me?" (dealing with, respectively, sex and puberty). When my own daughter started making comments about "sexing" as a result of playground gossip at school, I went out and hit the Children's Bookshop in Kilbirnie for appropriate literature... and was gratified to find out that "Where did I come from?" is still in print (in fact, it was about the only book on the subject the shop had at the time). So I followed in my parents' footsteps pretty exactly. Reading the book again, this time with a reasonable knowledge of the mechanisms in question, I'm interested to note how well the "sex is fun" aspect is covered.
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OnPoint: Transcription of new Rick Perry…, in reply to Keith Ng,
The official NZ flag, no. The ABs silver fern, probably will.
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How’s this for an interesting take on a classic?
Thunderskank vs Russo covering Massive Attack’s Teardrop – turns it from a stripped back, heartfelt slug of raw emotion into a gigantic slide of beats. Download via rcrdlbl, or watch on youtube:
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A lot of the "breastfeeding worked fine for us, I'm sure if people just gave it a proper try they'd find it worked for them" rhetoric does start to sound a bit like "you should take up running, it worked wonders for me and thus will work fine for everyone."
