Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
dyan, precocious sounds like an understatement. I was feeling bitter that I didn't get a longer chat with you a the Great Blend, but now I'm beginning to feel relieved. The tachycardia I experienced from intellectual overload whilst talking to Sacha might have proved fatal ;-)
I think I realized pretty early in life that people thinking I was really clever wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and pretty much deliberately foiled everyone's plans to make some kind of scholar out of me. Not that it helped, I got all the bumouts of the supposedly gifted, with none of the acclaim. But I did get to do what I wanted most of the time, and that was worth a lot to me, and still is.
If I was to brag of academic achievement, it would be for being the first person to ever pass a stage 3 politics paper at Auckland without doing the coursework. Apparently it had not happened before. No one who had ever been clever enough to pass when they started with a 30% disadvantage, had also been stupid enough to not just hand in 500 words of some rubbish, considering their system was 'plussage' (meaning you get the better mark of the coursework vs the exam). The most bizarre twist in this is that apparently there was another B Wilson in the class, who did hand in some coursework, but never turned up for the exam. This put the professor in a bind, because it was possible that it was all a big mistake and one of us was a slacker and the other a scholar. He could have grilled us about it, but this is NZ, so he just asked my Mum instead, who crushed my only chance of an A+ with some brutal honesty. Instead of honor, I got infamy. I think I prefer infamy, since I still can't believe that my exam was that good.
Where did you go to school that you could get away with 50% truancy? Metro?
-
The protocol with CraigSlaps(tm) is not to take them personally, unless he specifically tells you to.
I agree with him in this case though, I can't even get interested in Tiger Woods enough to get bitter on what is none of my business anyway. Seems to me like the kind of thing that would happen to someone who got paid so much for doing something so silly as golf.
-
Much longer than my first marriage, which is rather a tragic story, in a rather dusty file.
Yeah, so hard to talk honestly about romantic failure. I still don't have the courage.
-
I need a walk to deal with that, Jackie. Very good.
-
it is within the realms of possibility
Not only possibility, but the actual curriculum too, and I have no problem with that, as I said. But seriously, I don't think that a subject called "English" should be largely confined to "what the long since dead said". Latin, maybe. Living language is interactive, and we use it, we don't just pore over it. There is more of it being created now than there ever was, used to express a great many things that the oldies never even dreamed of. So relevance is never irrelevant - I would prefer education not to be oxymoronic.
-
Mikaere (no offence Mr Curtis)
-
Still hurts to remember the actual game though.
Like it was just yesterday. A twisting pain in my gut, which is ironically what most of the NZ team were feeling before the game, apparently.
-
It's jusy way too preachy and totally clunky.
Not to mention that it fucks up the franchise.
-
I once made eye contact with Tiger Woods. I thought for a minute there was a connection, he had a nice smile. Then I realized I was just standing in his shot line, and if I didn't move, security would do it for me.
-
I've no expectations that the storytelling in going to be anything less than risible.
I'm going to keep an open mind, avoid the spoilers and any other mediation, suspend my disbelief and just enjoy it. It's like being a child again, without the long queue to get a ticket.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 809 810 811 812 813 … 1066 Older→ First