Hard News: Just shoot me
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What about all those New Zealand writers who make money from writing about their children eg Joanne Black, Michael Laws. When will these children get their revenge?
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When will these children get their revenge?
They can write their own books about their childhoods, can't they? I don't know, kids of today, no gumption.
Perhaps Jake could write a column called Living with writers for one of the quality tabloids.
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Here's the sole interview Jake has done (and the one everyone else is quoting) in The Daily Mail.
He certainly doesn't come off entirely sympathetically -- he was an arrogant little shit at the time of his ejection, it would seem -- but it really annoys me that his mother seems to want to load the blame for the "war of words" onto him. As if him having his say, after she's spent two decades writing about her children, is the actual problem.
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"I dunno. There's still something weirdly fishy about the intensity of the brouhaha.""
If he was a girl i'd still be appalled.If the father wrote the book he''d be under the same examination surely.
Teenage Stoners are pretty common over there. Ask Liam and Noel. Ask Sir Mick Jagger and young Harry Windsor and probaly half the ""city"" now they don't earn so much.
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In tangentially related news, this would have cheered me up at 17. Heck, it would cheer me up today.
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Kid dishonours parents and gets booted out of the house. Sounds fair to me. What's all the wailing about? Mum wrote a book?
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Kid dishonours parents and gets booted out of the house. Sounds fair to me. What's all the wailing about? Mum wrote a book?"""
That tough love theory eh....the Kurt Cobain experiment....I thought that didn't go so well.Tough love is an insult to the word love.
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In tangentially related news, this would have cheered me up at 17. Heck, it would cheer me up today.
Jolisa, my son's high school swing-shifts so kids can attend from 10 - 4 if that suits them better.
The comments thread accompanying that article was of course the usual work of comic genius.
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That is so civilised. Is it a regular old high school?
And ditto on the comments thread. What happened? Guardian comments used to be reliably, genuinely witty; now they're bollocks. I just don't feel about that, as my 3 year old is given to sighing when something puzzles him.
(Oh crap, ruined his life again by writing about him - five dollars in the therapy jar).
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The quotes from son Jake in that Guardian story suggest he is quite aware of his father's joint culpability:
Basically, my parents are very naive and got caught up in the whole US anti-drugs thing. There is a very big difference between smoking a spliff and being a drug addict. They are very naive people and slightly insane. They overreacted. They are very emotional people and I refuse to have anything to do with them."
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And ditto on the comments thread. What happened? Guardian comments used to be reliably, genuinely witty; now they're bollocks.
Oh yes, and predictable. They're more depressing because it's the Guardian. Although it does make me feel really good about PAS. We may have our dramas, but we seem to avoid the numbing set-piece nature of more than a few big-name discussion boards.
(Oh crap, ruined his life again by writing about him - five dollars in the therapy jar).
Just don't write about your 12 year old's pubic hair. You'll be sweet.
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Kid dishonours parents and gets booted out of the house. Sounds fair to me. What's all the wailing about? Mum wrote a book?
0/10
Disappointing. Better start earning your keep or they'll foreclose on your bridge.
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Pesky kids. It would have worked at teh kiwiblog..
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Just don't write about your 12 year old's pubic hair. You'll be sweet.
Public hair. Not.
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The woman in question just had a session on the BBC1's flagship morning show. She got rather a soft going I think, but then I guess that is the nature of the show
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But if I ever start to look like Julie Myerson, please, somebody send me a very, very stern email and tell me to stop. Should that fail, I guess you'll just have to shoot me.
Tough question I guess. So long as your family are consenting, there's little harm in it, and maybe a lot of good. Most of us are very interested in your experiences in a way that is not voyeuristic. They are usually presented packed full of useful information. That Leo is in some measure following your footsteps is a very sincere form of flattery and consent, I think. Tell him that "blunt screamers" is my phrase of the week, btw.
Personally, I'm not so brave. If I speak of personal experiences, I tend to leave names out. Some of the best points that I know I could make, I don't actually want to make on account of protecting the people involved. Not that any of it is really news, I just respect their privacy. And I never wanted to talk in detail publicly about the hell I went through at the birth of my son. I found talking about other things on PA very, very therapeutic at the time. If I wanted to yell at anyone, I went over to Kiwiblog. That snapped me out of it quick enough.
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OK, I'm going to ask this question yet again and (yet again) don't expect an answer: Do newspapers and publishers exercise any editorial judgement whatsoever? Or is 'privacy' a word that only has meaning when you've just been slapped with a large legal bill (and damages) and the threat of a law change?
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But if I ever start to look like Julie Myerson, please, somebody send me a very, very stern email and tell me to stop. Should that fail, I guess you'll just have to shoot me.
Oh no, Russell, I can do a lot worse than that -- point my eyeballs elsewhere. :)
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Jolisa, what you said, two sides of the story, prurient interest, witch hunts and so on.
This young man may have a mental illness, given the correlation between heavy cannabis use and the onset of symptoms of schizophrenia in vulnerable individuals. His distressing behaviour might contribute to it's lack of recognition as such.
But I think we all have an absolute right to privacy, if we so choose. And as parents we must use our best judgement. Would we write or speak in public the same way of spouses or best friends as we sometimes do of our children, or would it be seen as some sort of betrayal?
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(This after being forced to stop writing her anonymous newspaper column after her son [either Jake or his younger sibling] had to find out about it from his friends -- who she had told without telling him!)
I often enjoyed the anonymous Living With Teenagers column in the Saturday Guardian and was disappointed when I heard it was ending. Reading it, it never seemed 100% kosher - I was fairly confident that there was an element of exaggeration at play. The kids she portrayed seemed so... well, vicious - semi-criminal even. I remember thinking, 'no matter how antsy NZ teens can be, I'm sure they're not as bad as this column paints British teens to be'.
I remember the end of the Living With Teenagers column slightly differently to you. (Forgive me if I'm incorrect but) I think Jake found out from his schoolmates when they laughed at him for some risible and deeply personal remark his mother had made about his pubes or lack thereof (can't remember). Turned out his pals had all put two and two together and had been following the column, and Jake was almost the last to know. So the column was wrapped up.
I was disappointed when the column ended, because it was often amusing and wittily written. But when the real world intruded and it became obvious Jake was humiliated and betrayed by the secret scribblings of his mother, I realised that this wasn't just some imaginary sitcom thought up for my reading pleasure. Myerson has shown that she regards her right to write as far more important than the rights of her children to a decent quantum of privacy and dignity. The success of the book she wrote, springboarding from the interest in the defunct column, seems to have taught her that this modus operandi was the route to success. It's a pity she views trading the trust of her family for success as a price worth paying.
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Kid dishonours parents and gets booted out of the house. Sounds fair to me. What's all the wailing about? Mum wrote a book?
Grant: If I had a pair of narcissistic baby boomers turd-blossoms like that for parents, I'd being on something a damn sight stronger. Oh, I'd probably also have a remarkably unpleasant blog where their every action was given an unflattering spit-polish with the mystic Brasso of Teenage Self-Importance.
This wierd sort of self-feeding media firestorm appears to be the norm in the UK at the moment. Just ask Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand...
Well, I take your point as far as it goes. But I'd add that there was a serious question about why a fuck-wit like Ross had just received an 18 million pound contract from a public broadcaster that was in the process of laying off two or three thousand staff (after a similarly deep round of staff cuts two years before). And it's not as if Ross didn't have form for on-air outbursts that sounded like they'd come straight from a circle-jerk in a public school changing shed.
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I often enjoyed the anonymous Living With Teenagers column in the Saturday Guardian and was disappointed when I heard it was ending. Reading it, it never seemed 100% kosher - I was fairly confident that there was an element of exaggeration at play. The kids she portrayed seemed so... well, vicious - semi-criminal even. I remember thinking, 'no matter how antsy NZ teens can be, I'm sure they're not as bad as this column paints British teens to be'.
Since you've read the damn thing (and I've absolutely no interest), I'd appreciate your opinion Ethan. If this was on the news pages, and Myerson was making allegations of "vicious -- semi-criminal even" conduct against a third party, do you think her "exaggerations" would have made it to print?
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Apropos, comedy gold from The Daily Mash
The tradition of parent-child feuds in literary circles dates back to Chaucer, who dubbed his son Ian 'a nancie boye both faire and true, who taketh it up the ers for a groat or twoe'.
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This young man may have a mental illness, given the correlation between heavy cannabis use and the onset of symptoms of schizophrenia in vulnerable individuals.
Correlation is all it is. There was a very large Danish study recently showing that rates of Schizophrenia in using and non using cohorts are not significantly different when followed over time. What is true is that those users who go on to develop Schizophrenia tend to use most heavily, which is most likely an attempt at self medication. Schizophrenics smoke tobacco heavily too for similar reasons.
Yet despite all this the govt here in the UK just put cannabis back up to Class B despite the drop to Class C reducing the use of cannabis and the science increasingly showing no causal link between cannabis use and mental illness. For a party that came into power promising evidence based policies it is really depressing, though by this time not surprising.
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our contestant from Copenhagen wins the prize for best literary quotation of the evening!
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