Posts by Emma Hart
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These days, butter wouldn't melt in her mouth.
People say that, and yet, have you tried? Because it does. In my experience, eight year olds enjoy both the testing process, and the horrified look on Grandma's face.
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Then again, maybe even the sick and shat on still think it would have been worse elsewhere.
I have a friend in Vegas who was forced to file for bankruptcy because of the bills from two caesarians. Not too posh to push caesarians, but life-saving 'my husband is sixteen inches taller than me' ones. She wouldn't change a thing.
They can't really get their heads around the concept of socialised health care to start with, at all. And then, well, there's got to be some catch. I'm constantly astounded by the way the Greatest Nation on Earth can stick some pretty basic stuff in the too-hard basket.
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I think I'm out on a limb here because I don't read much fiction anyway, and I tend to evaluate everything on grace and economy of prose style, like you'd evaluate a columnist. And JKR doesn't have any of that for me.
I can still remember going back to reading for pleasure after finishing my Honours degree - Vic Lit and Renaissance Drama. Anything written after about 1920 was like reading on speed, it was so quick and light. Took about a year to get back any sense of perspective.
mostly I think that there are things in the same genre out there (I'm thinking of Diana Wynne Jones).
Diana Wynne Jones is precisely what I put my kids onto when they ran out of HP books, and the reason I could do that was because her publisher reissued all her books BECAUSE of the HP phenomenon. (I'd tried a couple of years earlier to find a copy of The Homeward Bounders for a friend.) Think of JKR as a gateway drug.
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Harry Potter books remind me of Dahl.
I was having that very conversation with (or 'at') my partner last night. The scenes with his aunt and uncle at the beginning of every book are very reminiscent of Dahl.
I like JKR's writing style, I have to admit, and I expected to loathe it. I was finally pressured into reading the first book by a teacher friend of mine, and loved it - as a kids' book. I read the first three to my children and have sort of missed not reading them the others. (Their choice, not mine, reading aloud was just too slow and they had to know what happened next RIGHT NOW.)
I really dislike talking about worthiness in children's lit. If they're involved and entertained, that's a good book. (Still loathe those colour fairy books: fortunately my daughter is more Captain Underpants.)
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Apparently DB teaches english & creative writing as well.
You're kidding me. The guy who wrote
On his hands and knees, the curator froze, turning his head slowly.
teaches creative writing?
Much profanity in front of my children there just was.
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For most of my adult life, I've worked for online companies in virtual offices. Turns out this seems to bring out the absolute worst of office politics - you don't even have to TRY to look someone in the face while you stab them in the back.
I work for online writing/role playing boards as an administrator and technical writer. My first job of this type was at a company called DayDreamer's Gate. (The page you get when you do that makes me smile every damn time.) It took about two years to work out that the boss was a sociopath. Charming, ruthless, needlessly cruel, stunned when people were upset by her actions.
She (and I'll call her "Pamela Hydrick" to avoid confusion) decided that we needed to have 'family friendly' boards, and therefore nobody would be allowed to write gay characters on them. During my vociferous protests, it came out that I was bisexual. She went apeshit, and I still have the 3000 words of abuse I got emailed. (Apparently I was having orgies on my front lawn AND I belonged to Greenpeace, which appeared to be the same thing.)
Eventually, either she sacked me or I quit, depending on who you ask. About two-thirds of the other staff came with me, and that led to the company I work for now, Bardic Web. Those of us who left have so far endured three and a half years of intellectual property theft, sock puppetry, and online stalking. OTOH, in that time we've got to watch her wonderful Christian business go under, and our den of sin flourish.
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I sat next to my wife during the 16 hours of the first labour and the 8 hours and caesarian of the second.
Ha. I did thirty-eight hours the first time round. So the second time, we knew how this thing went. Ended up being vastly unprepared because of all the things I left to do during the long boring labour.
The thirty-eight was vastly preferable to the one.
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Hadyn: I'm guessing he's gonna end up "BbbobbB" a la Blackadder. Seems to happen to all of us at some stage.
And there I was valiantly resisting any 'it's short for Kate' comments...
My daughter was a precipitate labour, I nearly had her in the corridor at Women's. She was born thirty minutes after we got out of the car. Afterwards, other midwives trooped in to say 'you're done already?' and 'hasn't she got a small head'. Never has the urge to punch someone in the face been so solidly combined with the inability to do so.
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aw, congratulations. Before you know it, he'll be whipping your arse at chess (a rite of passage for men, I'm told) and stealing Jen's cheese to make 'a puppy'.
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Who I can confirm was crap at absolutely everything he did...