Posts by giovanni tiso
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Heh - priceless. He's added to my RSS feed.
"That which doesn't kill you almost kills you" - I love this guy.
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Hmmm, great story Emma but by all that's holy makes me glad I had three sons who were not into that sort of thing
Crossbows?
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But is an Italian civil union the same as a NZ one? (Say for a heterosexual couple.) Can you get married in Italy without having any religious ceremony? If you have a religious ceremony do you still have to sign something official (from the state)?
Sorry, I was in fact making a bad joke. We don't have civil unions in Italy, for the simple fact that as a country we've decided that the civil rights movement was a mistake, feminism was a mistake, hell, the Renaissance was probably a mistake too, so we're trying to pedal back into the Middle Ages as fast as possible. And our only moral authority is the Pope, and the Pope doesn't believe in the gays, although you should check out his shoes and especially his secretary (Cary Grant? Are you sure, Your Holiness?), and he's reintroducing the mass in Latin with the priest not facing the congregation, perhaps in homage to the late Miles Davis. It's a mess, I tell you.
But we do have civil marriages, until they take those away. As far as signing a state document when you get married in church, I honestly don't know the answer to that.
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If we'd had it to hand, that wouldn't necessarily have meant choosing to use it.
Yes, and it compels me to ask: did you not have heroin in New Zealand? It was pretty prevalent back home and I couldn't think of anything more destructive - perhaps P is it, I really don't know, but boy, it would take some topping.
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Oh dear. One should always ring one's parents, from the first available phone, early in the evening. This buys you hours of drinking out at the Richard Pearse monument or establishes your presence at one house when you're at another. Saves you having to talk to them when they ring, too, when you're munted.
My mum wasn't born yesterday, nor she ever pretended to have been :-)
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also why I put "can" into italics, "can" don't mean "will".
Yes, but surely if you know your child has a cellphone that means an expectation that they will contact you or that you will be able to contact them. I wonder how kids deal with that these days.
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The upside is that they can be in constant contact with their parents too.
That's a downside, surely? 'Sorry, mum, I couldn't get to a phone' was my absolute favourite line between the ages of 15 and 18.
My partner and I have this theory that human beings are designed so that by the time you're parenting teenagers you can no longer remember what it's like to be a teenager.
At this point I have an extremely vivid memory of what it was like to be the particular teenager that I was; a teenager is a whole nother thing.
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in some parts of the world a NZ civil union isn't recognised as anything
In Italy they enjoy exactly the same recognition as Italian civil unions. Which is to say, none at all.
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Pressed "reply" too quickly. The mayoralties have their own symbols (generally a coat of arms), which sometimes isn't the same as the city's itself, although it often incorporates it (as in the case of the lily of Florence). But then the promotional material issued by the city always has the iconic symbol in it, not the coat of arms.
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Giovanni: I know the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, and Bull etc are iconic images for those cities, but all I could see when searching around for things with an official imprimatur were bland-looking coats of arms that didn't feature those images.
No, the symbols I have described are strongly associated with the relevant cities (much more than their coats of arms, etc.) and are used in all sorts of promotional material or to signify where a sports team, group or product is from. You'll find for instance Milan's serpent, Venice's lion or Verona's ladder on coffee machines in bars around New Zealand.