Posts by Jake Pollock
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Hard News: I'm not a "f***ing cyclist".…, in reply to Sacha,
That would be a charitable reading, Sacha. A less charitable assessment would be that they’re twatcocks.
ETA: Of course, it could be both.
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Hard News: I'm not a "f***ing cyclist".…, in reply to Bryan Dods,
If bikes are on the road with other users it could only be of benefit to all if they had to pass a certain level of competence before they went out to tangle with the steel monsters.
I think that would almost certainly make things much, much worse. Have a listen to what David Haywood said about compulsory helmet laws and their effect of increasing the number of cycling accidents. The primary reason is that the laws mean that fewer people cycle, and therefore drivers are less accustomed to looking for cyclists, which means more accidents. The discussion below the Public Address post (starts here) is illuminating, and the argument is convincing. Several people have mentioned the principle in this thread as well.
My point is that requiring certification and training to ride a bike would inevitably, and probably dramatically, lower the number of cyclists. Aside from all the people who can’t be bothered, there will also be many who simply can’t afford either the cost of certification or the time it would take to do it, and will thus be denied an otherwise extremely cheap form of transport. And fewer cyclists will mean more accidents, and a greater sense of entitlement amongst the driving population.
It’s simply a bad idea if your actual goal is to reduce the number of cycling accidents, rather than make a patent imbalance towards drivers even worse. We should also bear in mind that this most recent road death was caused by driver error (opening your car door without looking is driver error) and has nothing to do with ear buds, running red lights, or riding two abreast. As the original post says, we’re talking about the death of an actual person, who died in actual and preventable circumstances that were in no way her fault. Not a f**cking cyclist.
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Of everything in New Zealand, some days I miss the Broadcasting Standards Authority the most.
Give it time. After three or four years the crazy and mendacious media will seem quite normal, and you'll finding yourself asking your friends to bring jars of vegemite back from their research trips to London whilst seriously considering that $15.99 a month subscription to Willow TV.
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This explains everything.
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In terms of British ethnicity, these are the options one gets to choose from when applying to UCL:
White
Irish Traveller
Black or Black British – Caribbean
Black or Black British – African
Other Black background
Mixed – White and Asian
Asian or Asian British – Indian
Asian or Asian British – Pakistani
Asian or Asian British – Bangladeshi
Chinese
Other Asian background
Mixed – White and Black Caribbean
Mixed – White and Black African
Other Mixed background
Other Ethnic background
Information refusedIt's the empire, on a form.
ETA: If this powerpoint presentation is anything to go by, Canadians are in fact having exactly the same debate.
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Your wish is my command, but I thought Loretta and Hayden got back together last series and it's nothing new that she'd a fan of eating out. :0)
Yeah, catching up from quite a long distance. The auntie sent the tapes by ground, so we're only in the middle of season three.
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(I don't know about anyone else, but Shane Cortese seems to spend half his screen-time this series with his head between Antonia Prebble's legs.)
I don't have anything to add to this discussion, but Craig could you please hold back on references to the current season of Outrageous Fortune? There are those of us who are still catching up, due to a delay in the shipping of VHS tapes from an auntie in New Zealand.
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I won't feel properly at home here until I have a few more over-full bookshelves, and we don't even have half of one full yet.
Although I'm with you on the sentiment, having been in the US (and shipped a lot of books back because I knew someone who had a container going from Pittsburgh to Auckland) I look at my bookshelf and think 'I love you, but I don't know how I'm going to move you.' See also: Home-brewing kit.
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It should also be remembered that reading and writing are not the same, and that where we think of people as 'literate' or 'illiterate,' we use categories that mask more than the reveal about past reading practices. It is perfectly possible to be a competent reader and not be comfortable signing your own name, and the fact that we group both skills in the category of 'literacy' says more about the twentieth century public education system than nineteenth century readers (though possibly not writers).
Which is to say nothing of those who could partake in the written word without being able to read it very well -- reading out loud in groups, for instance, or asking people to read letters for you, was much more commonly practiced in the past than in the present, although the shift to silent, private reading seems to have taken place in the Victorian era.
How brilliant to find an archive that can be made to say so much about a group of readers that we would scarcely imagine existed. Any chance we'll see this for sale in the U.S.?
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I wouldn't think so Sacha. The original quake was so weak most Wellingtonians wouldn't even wake up for it.
Speaking of images though, last week the NYT featured photos of the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake that almost have dimensions of religious iconography to them.