Posts by linger
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A recent This American Life radio documentary featured fracking in Pennsylvania.
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Hard News: Meanwhile in Epsom ..., in reply to Ian Dalziel,
I was going to say echognomics, after the soulless repeating of mantra spouted by ACT's spiritual leader – but that joke’s kinda already been done.
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the Higgs bosun
is somebody you can only find on a ship that has a warp drive.
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choices [could be] allocated exactly where they are most preferred, so National could win Finance, but Labour could take Education, Maori Affairs going to Maori Party and Greens getting Environmental portfolios. Close runs might end up with shared portfolios.
I rather like this suggestion.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Fooman,
Sure; but that feedback loop takes time to operate.
(For example, it won't be immediately obvious to credit rating agencies how much exposure any given Australian-owned bank has in Christchurch.) -
Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Fooman,
Regrettably, banks may have no problem at all, once a mortgage agreement has been signed – at least, up to the point where the mortgagee defaults – because the value of a mortgage to a bank is not the value of the property mortgaged, but rather the value of the income the bank can get from the loan. Until that point of default is reached, the bank still gets their money on a regular basis, and so has no reason to complain. (Short term “thinking”, I know.)
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On the theme of extinction, here’s an update of a classic haiku:
The same old pond’s there
still; but listen – hush! the sound
of no frog jumping(Doesn't get much applause in performance.
Could be worse, though: one early draft of this ended "all have croaked".) -
But how can we possibly take the piss from an empty vessel?
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Didn't quite track down the reference within 15 minutes, but here it is:
"Onward" by Caroline Williams (1987) -
popular New Zealand song
from a poem by W Chamberlain.
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I long wondered what was it that made 1911 a marvellous year
…Eh? It’s a real struggle getting to that reading of it.
The voice of the poem (“I”) is presumably Curnow, born in 1911, who watches children interacting with the exhibit.
“Not I” is therefore “some child” born at a later time;
indeed, perhaps born in some future,
unimaginable at the time of narration,
“marvellous year”.* * *
One of my favourite NZ paintings
(albeit for its dark humour more than for its technique)
is a piece in the VUW collection, “Onward”,
which shows a moa, lumbering on blindly, boldly going …
in all likelihood to its death in a swamp.
Which, of course, is a kind of posterity,
given where the bones on display were dug up from.