Posts by 81stcolumn
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Along the theme of employment for Winston I must confess I originally reached for 101 uses for a dead cat. However upon reflection I feel this does little to dignify the original cats. Instead I proposed a special Art installation set up in a small room (a broom cupboard will do) at Te Papa. Every 3 years or so the door will open a light will go on and a voice will boom "beware the immigrant peril". Going on the 8,000+ plus who went for NZ First this should prove quite popular.
At another tangent -
The Leader
I wanna be the leader
I wanna be the leader
Can I be the leader?
Can I? I can?
Promise? Promise?
Yippee I'm the leader
I'm the leaderOK what shall we do?
Roger McGough
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I was really okay with voting after someone assured me that that I wouldn't turn into a little orange person.
More seriously I had a student ask me how he should vote and I was able to say - " think carefully and vote according to your beliefs". I guess that's something you get to say in a functioning (albeit imperfect democracy).
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I actually voted yesterday (not sure where I would end up today) and AUT was quite busy then. I like the no campaigning rule and I like voting here; I always felt guilty when voting in the UK. I was always a bit peeved that the Welsh Assembly never quite got its act together and voting in Wales seemed almost wasteful. The only redeeming feature of the UK system used to be that kids got the day off on polling day, don't s'pose they do that now.
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From my own experience -
Its…..complicated
Perspective one.
Some years ago now I acted as a chaperone/driver for a lesbian pool team. The team was largely constituted by those who had “retired” from the Greenham Common protest (I was quite young then). At least one of the team was bi and for all but one member of the team this wasn’t a problem. Pool matches were interesting and the team finished mid table for the two years it ran. To my recollection we only had to leave one pub in a hurry. Needless to say everyone deduced that I had to be gay.
There was always something slightly fatalistic and destructive to be seen in the relationships within the team. It took me a while to realise that most of those relationships would have been functional and a lot happier “on another planet” so as to speak. What became clear was despite all the support and love to be shared it only took a couple of bigots to really f**k things up. It was explained to me at the time as the terror of not knowing who you were going to meet- friend or foe. Despite the norm being that life would be okay with most people at worst being cordial or bemused, you could never be sure if you were going to meet a real shithead. Therefore outside of one or two notable spaces you always had to have your guard up. As a psychologist I now understand this issue rather better. I couldn’t say if this is still the case 20 odd years later.
Perspective two.
I have always described myself as sexually ambivalent. It would be unreasonable to suggest that I am bi as I have never had a homosexual relationship. As I have pointed out elsewhere I tend to attract gay admirers with embarrassing ease (perhaps a little less so now I’m older) and have always taken it as a great compliment. It is worth pointing out that I am not that good looking either. I can empathise with the idea of falling for or being infatuated with people rather than genders. Indeed I don’t tend to appraise men or women in a gender typical manner. I used to fall for faces and voices. Why did I never take advantage of my other side ? I think it came down to a complete failure to have a useful relationship with other males at any level. Conversing with women is easy with blokes it is just impossible. I have often wondered whether other “ambivalent” males have the same problem.
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Batman.......or the Lone Ranger ?
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Having now read a large portion of Findings paper I'm afraid to say its presumptuous rubbish. The paper should as has rightly been argued here been about multiple perspectives on the same joke and the social/entertainment worth of these perspectives. What we end up with is a weak historical "these jokes were funny but these jokes aren't argument". I was particularly disappointed by the dull witted post-feminist swipe in the Vicky Pollard analysis where it is was pointed out -
" It is interesting to see that in the transition from Wayne and Waynetta Slob and Paul and Pauline Calf to Vicky Pollard, that the male figure has been removed."
Finding offers no further interpretation and begs for the usual conspiracy dog whistle as a result.
Lazy thinking by, a lazy intellect provides food for lazy media. Which in turn precipatates predictable un-funny results.
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Four heads good, five heads bad?
Four heads goo five heads better !
(apologies to George Orwell)
Baaaaaa..
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In regards to.....
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Sorry guys just can't get this out of my head......
I'll start a social networking site where people with mental pain in their lives can sell that pain to sadomasochists who are looking for ways to totally take it to a new level, though the use of the brain as an erogenous zone.
The crossing of a masochistic editor with a sadistic typesetter.
Please add and extra space after that full stop..... (speaks) No
How about a half space........ (shouts) NO !
A little extra space......... (whispers) Noooooo.......
(Repeat until funny, sexy, other....)
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If you are at all curious it should be 80 is there really another column ?