Posts by Damian Christie
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@Stephen - ahh, if only we could swap our teenagers with traditional French teenagers, we'd be fine. Quick, to the Tardis! :)
@Tessa - It's a fine line I admit, but if statistics show pissed women are more likely to end up becoming victims of whatever, isn't it, from a health prevention kinda standpoint, to have a message along the lines of "hey, watch yourself when you go out, don't get too pissed, you could end up in a bad situation (even though it's not your fault as such)"?
Or should we just put all that ALAC money into ads that say "Hey, don't rape drunk women, it's not cool." Because I don't know that rapists respond that well to social advertising.
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Bad English aside, if that were true, France would be a complete wasteland; clearly it isn't, so there's more to it than simply the age of availability.
Ross has dealt with this pretty well, however I'd just had the same discussion with <namedrop>Rodney Hide</namedrop> in the Koru lounge, who believes we should have no drinking age "like the French". Obviously they do have a drinking age, 16 sort of, but even that isn't working for them, as explained in this piece from the NY Times:
Binge drinking in France? Don't French children grow up sipping wine alongside their parents, learning the virtues of moderation?
In an effort to crack down on binge drinking among French teenagers, the government last week proposed raising the legal age for buying alcohol to 18 from 16. It also wants to ban...all-you-can-drink "open bar" evenings at French high schools.
France's laissez-faire approach has been tested by what the Health Ministry says is a 50 percent increase, over the last four years, in hospitalizations of children under 15 for drunkenness.
France already has some of the world's toughest restrictions on the marketing of alcohol; ads are banned entirely on television and print ads are not allowed to show people drinking wine, beer or liquor.
So it's hardly a laissez faire paradise anyway, (but don't those high school drinking binges sound fun!), but the cliche that it's all good with the yoof in Paris just ain't true.
And on Afghanistan, they might have 0.0 reported drinking, but I've bought beer there, seen teens driving out to the lakes and getting pissed away from the cops, and shared a bottle of vodka on a cold winters night with the locals.
Oh, and they do an awful lot of heroin...
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@mattgeeknz
I agree that the report is very easy to read. From the report, the WHO study is hardly conclusive:
"while extending times of sale can redistribute the times when many alcohol-related incidents occur, such extensions generally do not reduce rates of violent incidents and often lead to an overall increase in consumption and problems."
And if you look at the overseas examples, at least two of them involve extending the drinking hours by an hour in what in my experience is the time for peak trouble, i.e from 1am tp 2am and midnight to 1am (p185).
There is no example overseas comparable with the proposed shift from say, 6am close, to 4am close. As I said, again from my experience, the most problematic people are already passed out or at A&E by 4am.
So in that regard I don't think the proposal is backed up by the evidence, here or overseas. I don't think Sir Geoffrey (not sure about your wife) has stepped foot in a bar after 4am for some time to see what's really going on.
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Bad, bad music and really hammered people just hanging on to the last vestiges of an ordinary night.
Nice line. I had some great times when I was doing that every single weekend, but at a certain point in the night/next day it definitely becomes (or always was, but I only just noticed), soulless, and largely a competition as to who can stay up the longest, or avoiding the unpleasantness that will follow when one gives up - the comedowns, hangovers... work.
When I'm out these days I can often see a fork in the road at a certain point - a moment of clarity in the midst of all the intoxicants. If I'm smart, I will take that as my cue to leave, and have NEVER regretted leaving 'early' (i.e. 3,4,5am...), if I'm not, I will end up surrounding by gurning P-heads at Supper Club. Something I almost always do regret.
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@Cecelia - it's fine, if you feel it's stereotyped, that's how you feel. I'm happy for you not to like it - I just wanted to recommend it to people because I really did!
Land of the Long White Cloud I really liked too, it was lovely. A lot easier to avoid criticisms of being stereotypical or unnatural when you're making a documentary of course ;)
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138 characters, just sayin
I don't geddit...
Colm Toibin had a good comment on this the other day, on radio: he sees these books everyone else is reading and immediately wants to read George Eliot or something no one is reading.
I said as much the other day. If I'm reading what everyone else is reading, how will I know I'm edgy?
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I guess your workmate stopped reading a couple of pages before the end.
I know what you're trying to do, and thanks. But it's okay, I've read Kafka. I'm cool was bleak endings to bleak books.
Although maybe it was my workmate who was being more clever than I give her credit for, altering my expectations. Like when my friend told me it was Hosanna who was going to win NZ's Next Top Model, but it wasn't, and I was like, OMG... except with Cormack McCarthy's post-apocalyptic dystopia.
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I'm not a jealous thread-keeper, feel free to let this wander to discussions of The Wire, Murikami, Fforde, what have you...
@Cecilia - maybe the generational thing does explain it. I dare say if Boy was set in modern day, the conversation would be much different, and probably full of swearing. As I said, for some reason in the 80s we all knew swear words, but very rarely used them.
I wonder whether the two sides of the insult might in fact be "egg" and "spoon". Both popular terms of derision in the 80s...
And #TheWire. I feel where you're at. Finished it late last year, very tempted to start again at the start. Although it wasn't until I finished the last episode I realised I wasn't in fact "catching up" with a series that was about to start a new season anytime soon, and that it had started, and ended, before I'd ever heard of it... It is brilliant. Significant characters that "get got" without so much as a second thought, the least condescending narrative and dialogue I have ever heard.
Ironically, it's quite easy to find threads from people in Baltimore saying how stereotyped the characters and unrealistic the dialogue are :)
I've just picked up Cormack McCarthy's 'The Road', putting me in probably the same place vis-a-vis other people as you are with the Wire. It's bleak. And my workmate kinda ruined it by saying <SPOILER>: "And you keep hoping something will get better and it never does."
And how many people (including my Aunt, who has always been my inspiration for good literature, introducing me to the likes of Vonnegut and Pynchon when I was a teenager) are going to tell me I *must read* 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'. I'm sure its addictively good, like Dunkin Donuts and Steven King, but a little piece of me will surely die...
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You are forgetting about Black Sheep and Second Hand Wedding
I haven't seen the latter, but don't know anyone who raved about it - in fact just yesterday a couple of friends were saying just the opposite. Black Sheep wasn't exactly funny either. Nor was it the abortion Kombi Nation was, for instance, but I don't think you could hold it up as a decisive retort to my hypothesis.
@Cecilia - Like @recordari, I didn't see stereotypes, certainly not such that they grated. The kids' dialogue seemed particularly natural to me, but then again I wasn't a Maori kid living on the East Coast in the 80s. I find, for instance, the characters of Jethro and Munter in Outrageous Fortune far more unconvincingly stereotypical - although I still really enjoy that show.
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Not disagreeing (although mayyyyybe with your definition of Jackson's oeuvre as 'comedy' even though it is quite funny), but aside from those examples, the fact that we had a couple of good comedies back in the 80s, quarter of a century ago, doesn't exactly salvage everything that's come since. The past decade has been particularly bad.