Posts by Amy Gale
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I forgot to make a resolution. So, next year I will resolve to make a proper resolution in future. In 2010, I will actually make a proper resolution.
-
Q: What do you get when you cross Nigella's suggested pomegranate pav topping with the NZ-compulsory kiwifruit?
A: Trad holiday colors! Without even trying! Woohoo!
I love pomegranates in any case, but they really do turn out to be particularly good as a counterpoint to pavlova. Plus, gram-for-gram, probably a better (northern hemisphere) bargain than passionfruit. If you can even get passionfruit. Which I can't.
Is also fun watching adults struggle with those linguistic subtleties we had to battle as children. That's right, guys, mince is made of meat but mincemeat is made of raisins[*]. A mince pie is what you eat at 4am after some beer. A christmas mince pie is what you eat at 4pm after some sherry. Hic.
(Why hasn't this come up before now? Because I think they are nasty and only make them when specifically requested.)
[*] Although sometimes also suet, which is technically meat[* *].
[* *] Although sometimes "vegetarian suet" - and where are a vegetable's kidneys, anyway? -
Craig: yes it was.
(odd memory from the 90s: whatsisname and I scanned the ad and put it online one time - maybe to show the kids on talk.bizarre? I forget - and when my mother and I lunched at the Shiny New Internet Cafe near Kirks I bought some time and showed it to her, and we giggled, and then the time ran out and the picture was stuck on the screen)
-
the idea of investing in NZs future by ensuring our brightest graduates aren't mortgaged up to the eyeballs is abhorrent to the very people who railed against the American type user pays system when it is brought in.
I totally railed. Marched on Parliament. Chanted "Lockwood is a wanker". Etc.
I am not, however, mortgaged to the eyeballs, thanks to my lovely lovely endowment-backed grad experience. I do think NZ has settled on the best bang for its buck in this matter - spend our small country education dollar on a solid education for lots of people, then send those that want it away to get elite further education at elite places on, where possible, someone else's dime.
As for not coming back, it's not as simple as a lot of NZ-based commentators seem to think. For example: if you're off getting edumicated overseas, you have a much higher probability of getting mixed up with someone who is a) from overseas and b) also undergoing edumication. So you have the standard academic two-body problem (which the NZ market isn't big enough to absorb in general), plus two conflicting sets of national ties. No amount of loyalty or economic fiddling is going to fix that.
There are probably as many reasons for not coming back as there are people away, but a lot of them are similarly intractable. We can't move NZ closer to other countries to make collaboration easier. We can't, as richard points out, have US-type resources in NZ-proportioned amounts and still have them be any use.
Maybe some people want to increase the NZ population to US levels and more rigorously stratify opportunities into the elite and the crap. If that happened, though, why would anyone want to come back at all?
-
> I've seen claims made either way on this issue, and I still can't really
> get to the bottom of it. There has not, so far as I'm aware, been a
> statistical study in New Zealand, so all the evidence is anecdotal.I'm appalled at the thought that nobody is keeping track of the numbers. How are they supposed to judge the effects of social policy, or to determine how many refuges to build, for example?
I guess if there are no existing studies it would make a nice honors project for someone in criminology / women's studies / sociology / whatever. No need to thank me, just put my name at the top of the acknowledgments. No, you can't put me after your old gran who paid your way through university. Sorry, them's the breaks.
-
Pretty bad Herald article, though, isn't it? The main paragraph reads
> Women's refuges say the demand for their services has been since
> Sunday's defeat. "We've heard from police there has been an
> increase in domestic violence and they're our biggest source of
> referrals," said Catherine Delore, spokeswoman for the National
> Collective of Independent Women's Refuges.1) has been WHAT?
2) have they only "heard from police" that there has been an increase in domestic violence, or have they actually had an increase in calls/admissions?
While it certainly seems _plausible_ that there _could_ be an increase in domestic violence, this article seems to be based on reporting at about the level of "I heard this thingy one time". Why can't they give numbers? Maybe with a measure of statistical significance?
-
> BTW, does anyone under 35 understand the
> Selwyn Toogood reference ;)It's probably a litmus test for under-35s who pulled sickies.
(guilty)
-
There's nothing wrong with setting foot in a Starbucks. They have bathrooms and A/C. (Anyone who has lived through an NYC summer can attest to the wonders of the latter. And the former, for that matter.)
Now, buying/consuming something from a Starbucks is a whole 'nother story...
-
> 100% cotton! Cool patterns! Cheap!
> (And probably: sweatshops! Sigh.)IKEA tries hard to avoid sweatshop labour, so you're probably ok there. On the other hand, there was recently a stink about construction of a store near Nanjing destroying a number of ancient tombs.
Why does this always have to be so hard? Is there really no market for a store where everything is guaranteed to be made by well-treated workers under environmentally sustainable conditions, so that people can just shop for what they need without having to read every label in sight and worry about what they're not being told?
-
They have a sultan - maybe that's why people think they're in the middle east?
Just went through my childhood stamp collection earlier this year - I remember getting my first Brunei stamp and finding out where that was. Sadly must acknowledge that this meant asking my mum and dad, not hauling myself off to the library like a good little autodidact.
Do many children collect stamps now? Perhaps learning about other cultures by having internet friends from them is the closest present-day equivalent? And having mostly American friends in your WoW guild is the equivalent of having mostly NZ stamps in your collection?
(We went on a school camp in Wainuiomata too! It rained, and some people got food poisoning, and I melted a bit of Kirsten W's suitcase by spilling Dimp on it. Sorry, Kirsten.)