Posts by Tom Beard
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Is anyone really indigenous, apart from Africans?
Yes. For example, Maori are all descendents from Polynesian settlers, yet "Maori" as a culture is indigenous because it has evolved here as a uniique response to the land and the generations of history that have passed since then.
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looking at the way television fails to provide for commercially-unattractive older viewers
Maaaaat-loooooocckkk!
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The Villa/West Ham uniform story reminds me of a much more parochial story. Christchurch Boys' High School didn't have their own rugby uniform, so they took Christ's College's black-and-white hooped strip and dyed it blue. Hence the black & blue uniform, which was not inappropriate given the culture at that school.
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Many thanks, Graeme, for clarifying the hierarchy. The legalese is pretty opaque to some of us ("injuring with intent to wound" vs "wounding with intent to injure"?), and I was trying to find out for myself what the wording of the charge actually meant.
Google has some interesting results:
"reckless disregard causing injury"
-> about 200 results
"reckless disregard causing injury" -veitch
-> no results
It's interesting how every media outlet seems to have reproduced one report verbatim, and that it doesn't match the actual wording of the charge. Without your list, I would have concluded that the charge had been invented solely for cases of veitching.
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The thing that gets me is the juxtaposition of these two pieces:
"Despite what may have been said, I never shied away from anything that happened that night over three years ago."
"That wasn't me, and will never be me again."
Hmm, doesn't "That wasn't me" sound a teeny bit like shying away? This would perhaps be a revealing slip if he had said the two things during an unscripted interview, but in a prepared media statement it's really a glaring demonstration of just how little he and his minders understand concepts such as remorse and responsibility.
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Glad someone mentioned Sapphire and Steel. That one went beyond scary into weirdly, unidentifiably troubling.
It's a kind of existential horror, where the very nature of existence unravels in inexplicably malevolent ways. Plus, the editing is superb and visceral: despite the shoddy effects, something as simple as a door bursting open a split second before a character was due to open it can be enough to make you jump out of your seat.
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Another unsettling film I saw recently (it was on the telly a couple of weeks ago) was Children of Men. Not exactly a classic horror film, but set in a world of horrors.
Definitely unsettling. Some of it was filmed behind Shoreditch tube station, which was close to where I lived, and it was uncanny how they managed to make it seem slightly less dystopian than in real life.
I see all of your zombie/splatter/exorcist moves and raise you Sapphire and Steel.
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Dude, that's Tom.
I'm afraid to say that I have yet to find a monocle that suits me.
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All this reminds me of growing up in Chch in the 80s, and a couple of weird bookshops: one in the Square with a libertarian bent and ZAP connections, and a fundamentalist Christian one on (I think) Manchester St. Both had their own special subgenres of insane literature (Ayn Rand in the first and creationism in the other), but there was a common thread between the two: the impending one-world socialist government, of which the UN is just the first manifestation.Through combinations of mind-control fantasies, apocalyptic Book of Revelation lunacy ("bar codes are the mark of the beast!") and sub-Dan Brown (and sub-sub-sub-Eco) Masonic/Rosicrucian/Templars conspiracy paranoia they managed to weave together the same two otherwise disparate extremes of wingnuttery. To see this sort of thing on a "proper" news network, rather than in dingy bookshops run by shuffling recluses, is beyond belief.
Oh, and given Beck's fascination with fasces on the Mercury dime, I hope he hasn't seen this list of this very common symbol's appearances in the US. OMG, Lincoln was a secret Fascist! It's knowledge, bro.
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Actually, there are hundreds. Halo, Quake, World of Warcarft ... all played with a Net.