Posts by Tom Beard
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Certainly, the proposed law restricting liquor licences to premises of more than 150m sq is a blunt instrument that will probably produce some perverse results.
Very blunt indeed. 150 sq m is a pretty large floor space for a shop, and would catch all sorts of dairies and independent liquor outlets. Will we now no longer be able to grab a bottle of Riesling at Monty's superette or Wineseeker on our way to a BYO restaurant, but have to tramp off to a supermarket or biq liquor barn instead?
I'm probably part of the naive middle-class that you write of, and have indeed never lived next to the sort of hole-in-the-wall RTD vendor that you mention. But should these rules apply to central cities and main suburban centres as well as residential areas? Many people have tried to fight the trend away from small, local, independent shops towards chains of gargantuan big-box retailers, because it reduces diversity and forces more car use. Shouldn't that apply to liquor stores as well?
If I were cynical, I'd suggest that The Mill and Liquor King were behind this bill.
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Your post brought back a lot of memories, but not a lot of nostalgia. I lived in Chch from the ages of 7 to 20, and my parents were more interested in fossils and hills than beaches, so we spent many a summer trekking across the endless plains to places like Mt Pleasant. However, I think the reason that I feel little nostalgia for that landscape is the same as Bart's:
I have almost the exact opposite experience. When we moved to Texas it took me days to figure out why I felt so confused. My normally good sense of direction and place had abandoned me.
It was the complete lack of hills.
When I first moved to Wellington, I was thoroughly discombobulated by the topography (and even the topology) of the city. However, after 6 months I took a trip back to Chch and it already seemed like an alien landscape. So flat! Where are the hills? Such little buildings! I'd become so used to the (relative) compression and verticality of Wellington that the openness, flatness and sprawl of Christchurch rapidly became anathema.
I guess that's one of the reasons that the Hutt freaks me out so much: it reminds me of Christchurch.
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Joanna - ewww and ewww and more ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!
A very common reaction around our way, I think you'll find. But that's why we love her :-)
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Assonance is "getting the rhyme wrong", actually.
Thank you, Rita.
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emphasizes the similarities between or among things, though not losing sight of the differences
It's about looking for patterns among diversity, and seeing when things do the same thing but in different ways. Such as noting that despite their different size, weight and design, all these cars are essentially sports cars, but one achieves sportiness through aerodynamics, one through power, one through having go-faster stripes and a spoiler. That sort of thing.
So one might look at all the editorials and say that they might all still have the Herald's underlying right-wing agenda, but that the tone is wavering between full-blown support, concerns that they're going too far, and nervousness that they're risking a backlash through being too hasty. Perhaps.
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And the Ralston column is hackneyed, inconsistent, wrong on facts and one of the worst things he's ever written.
Quite an achievement! He'll be taking on Jane Black next.
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Oh and speaking of The Listener, was anyone else dumfounded by this week's cover, with headlines something like:
How to take great holiday snaps
(Plus! Dan Carter's favourite photos!)What next? "Ansel Adams' greatest place-kicking tips"? "You too can tackle like Marti Friedlander!"
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New CEOs always do this, it's part of their established playbook that there must be a sacrificial sacking early on, typically on a flimsy excuse. That shows the troops the new boss is not a soft touch.
Pour encourager les autres.
without mentioning his own pro-Labour bias.
I hardly think it's a state secret that Hard News (and PA in general) comes from a centre-left perspective. These are personal blogs, not publications with some pretence to a national (small "n") voice. In other, larger countries there are enough major dailies for each to come from a well-recognised and acknowledged political standpoint. Here, we're stuck with publications like the Herald, DomPost and (increasingly) the Listener that are Torygraphs in all but name, yet never state that explicitly. The preference is salted throughout their editorial, and disturbingly through their supposedly neutral reporting, in such a way that it is naturalised and presented as fact.
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But I found that as a fairly intelligent, academically lazy dissenter, I could rebel in other ways. Creating general havoc by protesting against teachers' actions was much more fun than wagging to watch American soaps.
My main achievement as a dissenter was to have hymns removed from senior assembly. I'd had enough of getting detentions for refusing to sing about God & Jesus in a supposedly secular state school, so I wrote a proto-Dawkinsian rant about the evils of religion for the school newspaper, which led to a referendum and the end of "God only Wise". The only problem was that we had to sing more rugby songs.
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Bunking off was what we in the comprehensive school called it.
Wagging was what the Grammar boys / characters from Enid Blyton & Biggles books did.
I think we called it Wagging at Christchurch Boys', but I was from London and watched a lot of Grange Hill, so I called it bunkin', innit.
Not that I actually did either. I skipped one PE class because I hated all that sporty macho stuff (I don't think we actually played "Bombardment!", but the general atmosphere was similar). Of course, physical activity is important, but I'd have thought that an hour of biking to & from school would have sufficed. Oh, but integrating
physical activity into one's everyday life obviously doesn't build character in the way that running around a muddy field with a bunch of sweaty oafs does.But I never skipped class. After all, it's pretty hard to pass schol if you're not there to take advantage of the teachers teaching. Yes, I was a nerd. Was.