Posts by Stephen Judd
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Incidentally, my Wikipedia article on dolphin pastries was rejected. Something about "cetacean kneaded."
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Dunno about MORE important -- but I can tell you why it IS important. Communal fun and spectacle is a part of civic life. It is part of what makes a city a city instead of a mere agglomeration of buildings and people.
In mind it is too soon to cast this as carnival vs anything without more information about how much money is going elsewhere.
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Yeah, I guess casting it as rugby vs samba is counter-productive -- in fact although I personally am firmly in the samba camp, I'd hope there's some demographic overlap there.
I found the DomPost article very frustrating. Why did the carnival organisers want more? What does the council typically spend on large events? What's the big picture here?
Tell you what, "where do you stand on the Cuba St Carnival" is going to be a litmus test question for mayoral candidates as far as I'm concerned.
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(Just to wade further into the dangerous and polluted waters of physical anthropology, there are plenty of red-headed Jews. Cue British Israel loons, Khazar convert "Ashkenazim aren't really Jews at all" conspiracy theories, and hand-wringing discussions of Fagin. And in the neighbourhood I grew up in there were definitely red-headed Maori kids... someone tell the pre-Maori Celtic NZ loons, oops they already know.)
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"Darkies" is a word that belongs in verbatim quotes of Stephen Foster lyrics, and nowhere else.
But, much as it pains me to say it, I'm with Rosemary McLeod here. Laidlaw's vocabulary is less offensive but his sentiments are arguably worse: Haden was commenting on a phenomenon based in race prejudice (which he omitted to criticise, true) but Laidlaw is advocating it. Unless there is some careful language about culture vs race in there that McLeod has omitted, I wouldn't let him off the hook.
Apropos the hug-a-ginga thing -- publicity stunt reinforces the stigmatisation it ostensibly rejects, duh. Radio idiots revealed to be idiots, duh. DOG BITES MAN.
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I'd like to know whether the increasing popularity of shows that deconstruct the news and the tropes of "authoritative" television, like the Daily Show, have any impact on the way news shows are now being produced, or they way they are received by audiences.
Personally I'm at point where if I see or hear something reported as news, my default assumption is that it probably didn't happen that way.
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Condolences and man-hugs, David.
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Heh. A friend of mine has a marvellous story of how he escaped from a certain provincial boarding school one weekend and made it down to Wellington to see MC Hammer, coming back in the early morning just in time to appear as if nothing had happened. It was a tight operation involving covert ticket ordering, buses, trains and bread delivery trucks.
The reason I tell you this is that on hearing this a 26 year old mutual friend expressed astonishment that a schoolboy could plan this before the internet -- surely this was impossible! I had to explain to him about these devices called pub-a-lick tell-a-fones.
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During the 1951 waterfront lockout, it was an imprisonable offense to possess or distribute literature in support of the watersiders. It can now be revealed that one source of this literature was a press in my grandparents' house on New Windsor Road and one distributor was my Dad, aged 12 years, on his bicycle. Only recently did I realise what a risk the whole family was taking in support of their political beliefs.
Up until a few months ago, I would have said WWW FTW! Just set up a website!
However, the DIA filter makes me far less confident.
Make of that what you will.
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Possibly some of the fine writing whose discovery Gio attributed to me with such undeserved praise can be found at Poemas del Rio Wang Random example post, or Language Hat, or Three Quarks Daily. And of course there's Gio's own blog, which you should immediately read all the back numbers of.
Have you gone and read all the back numbers of Bat Bean Beam? Excellent.
I have started to suspect recently that one reason I am finding local magazine and newspaper writing so grating is not that they have become worse, but that I am now regularly reading much better things.
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What I find the very best thing about the internet is how I can get started on virtually any topic of interest. It's true that online resources are inferior to well-stocked libraries, and that generally you end up with a very shallow grasp of whatever you're trying to find out about. But I certainly am making more strange food, playing more strange music, reading more strange books, and constructing more strange devices than I ever would have without online resources making the first steps easier.
That's nice for me, but it's just amazing in Bangladesh.
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