Posts by giovanni tiso
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Oh, and at last, a cultural reference that Giovanni doesn't get. That's a relief - he was showing everyone else up.
Of course it doesn't help to live in the land of the long wide acronym. And school seems to bring out the worst, for some reason. I'm a trustee at my school - ops, I mean, I'm on the BOT. Midway through the average meeting, after we've discussed our compliance to the NAGs dictated by the MoE and we've heard the latest results from the STAR test - which is called STAR even if you happen to SUCK - I begin to sob.
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That would be interesting. Anyone else?
I have no earthly idea what you guys are even talking about.
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Still: better than Jim Hopkins.
The least ambiguous insult I've heard in a while.
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Assonance is "getting the rhyme wrong", actually.
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Meanwhile, Philip Toledano asks what if American foreign policy had a gift shop?
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When a word gets spelt in polystirene it's the death knell, I tell you. Nobody will be using it in, oh, two weeks from now.
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What next? "Ansel Adams' greatest place-kicking tips"? "You too can tackle like Marti Friedlander!"
Heh.
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Whoa, hey, wait a minute. Giovanni was 'gravely insufficient' in English?
There was an add for chewing-gum on the telly in those days in which some girl said "it's good", and my (older) sister was shocked to realise I couldn't understand it. That was after two (nominal) years of English. A crash course it wasn't.
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Scuola Media Eugenio Colorni, 'bigiare'. They didn't see a lot of me in my middle year of intermediate school, and I have no clue to this day how I wasn't held back. My mother, who later got the inside goss, claims it was a hard-fought battle by my Italian teacher, whose arch-enemy on this occasion was the English teacher - one of the subjects in which I was "gravely insufficient" (you've got to love the phrasing) and deservedly so. Did I mention I was never there? Sometimes you can shine by being absent but school I guess isn't one of those times.
I wish I could remember what I did about the absence slips. I'm pretty sure we had them, and I think I'd remember forging them. Mystery.
One of my favourite trips was to piazza duomo, with a couple of friends - or not. One of the stops was always Luini's to buy the arch-delicious panzerotto, a sort of miniature calzone. To this day (I took my son on our last trip) the little shop has two parallel queues going out and across the pedestrian-only street, at all times of the day. I was in Milan there during the worst of the financial crash and I pontificated that the Luini family could probably take over Bear Stearns without much batting of eyelids.
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By the way on my plane to Auckland today were some fresh new MPs, so I did a bit more raving about this unnecessary Education Bill and the unjust law making process which denies us ordinary citizens our democratic rights to make submissions to a select committee.
You're our own one-woman select committee live submission. We should all pitch in and finance you to spend as much time as possible on the AKL-WLG-AKL route and at Thorndon New World.