Posts by James Butler
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Hard News: The witless on the pitiless, in reply to Russell Brown,
So I’m not sure you can go as far as telling people they can’t spell their own language.
It's far from uncommon in English around here...
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to David Hood,
I do have to note that deliberate parasitic worm infection has shown a lot of promise in clinical trials of the treatment of Chron’s and Ulcerative Colitis (Inflammatory Bowel Diseases). And with the choice of your immune system eating your digestive tract, or have worms coexist in it, I think most people would say “give me the worms” (admittedly, these are more benign varieties than Guinea worms).
This Crohn's sufferer would rather have neither, thank you very much, at least while the drugs continue to do an adequate job. Perhaps ask me again in 10 years though, when the treatment has matured, and the spectre of bowel cancer is looming a bit closer.
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I first started feeling old the year I realised that most school leavers would have been born after Labyrinth.
That was a long time ago.
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to Gareth Ward,
Or this?
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Hard News: For the kids, if nothing else, in reply to Bart Janssen,
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Busytown: What was lost, in reply to Islander,
There is evidence, according to my midwife sisters, that hormones produced by fear (adrenalin for one) definitely affect in-womb babes.
Indeed.
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Busytown: What was lost, in reply to Jacqui Dunn,
Perhaps he had taken it in on a level we as adults have hardened ourselves against. Your fear soaked in by your tiny, open-to-all-influences baby?
I'm a bit reluctant to trace personality traits to events from childhood, especially that early - people react to events in such varied ways, I think it's a stretch to see any causality in most cases. On balance I don't think our family was any more "scared" in the long run by 9/11 than by any of the other terrible things that happen every day.
Having said that, my own worldview is certainly influenced by the hardships (Rogernomics, mostly) my parents endured as I was growing up - but more in terms of my opinions and beliefs than my personality. I'm a pretty happy-go-lucky guy really :-)
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Just went into the lunchroom, where the office TV is, and had the dubious pleasure of seeing Rudolph Giuliani on Fox defending “intensive interrogation techniques” by associating them with the intel leading to the strike – sans any evidence that they played any part at all. Made my feijoa taste as bitter as gall.
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What a lovely post.
That morning we were asleep on my parent's living room floor in Wellington - two teenagers, still a bit shellshocked by parenthood, with our 3-month-old son (must have been something in the water, by the looks of all the comments upthread); my wife got up early to feed him, and turned on the TV to see the news.
To be honest I can't at present remember what we've told Asher about what has been the defining moment of international relations for almost his entire life. He's an anxious child as it is, and finds flying (or even seeing or hearing a plane or helicopter) pretty trying sometimes. I guess it's one of our jobs as parents to lower the burdens of life as slowly as possible onto the shoulders of our children, while trying to ensure that they're bearing most of the weight by the time we're no longer able to hold it for them.
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Hard News: Any excuse for a party, in reply to Idiot Savant,
fools thinking peasantry is romantic
[me not mentioning LARP :-)]