Posts by Joe Wylie
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No other city in the country has a public space equal to the botanic gardens.
Beg to differ on this. While the Christchurch b. gardens may, as a recent Sri Lankan migrant put it, resemble something from a beautiful dream, so does the Auckland Domain. Apart from that, very much enjoyed your post.
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As "balance, fairness and accuracy" in modern mediaspeak pretty much equates with "don't frighten the chooks", the marshmallows epithet seems well-deserved.
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If you like waterfowl - which I do - Christchurch is hard to beat. Present-day Brighton may be a shadow of it's Saturday-shopping heyday, but back then you'd never see a paradise duck within the city limits. Now they're colonising the green bits of Cranmer Square. Honk!
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LOL, come on Joe, this entire thread was a Godwin right from the start. So people can indulge their desire to say everything they ever thought about WW2 and the Nazis.
Right you are Ben, and I'll fess up to having been a touch beady-eyed during the course of things. Apart from the input of someone I don't take seriously anyway, it's been a pretty edifying thread overall.
Life's lottery has certainly dealt you a rough hand with your father-in-law. Horrible old bastards with massive chips on their shoulders weren't uncommon in Oz/NZ a few decades back, especially with a few drinks in them. Their usual refrain was around the theme of Anzac as a death cult, decrying the useless long-haired bastards who wouldn't fight the next war. Copping serious aggro from someone old enough to be your dad who didn't like the cut of your jib wasn't uncommon. By the mid-80s those who hadn't died of embitterment had largely mellowed out.
From what you've said about your father-in-law I'd got the impression that he wasn't exactly typical, but your last paragraph makes me wonder if he's part of a wider pattern. In my limited experience the aggressive blowhard war veteran tends to be someone who survived their service relatively unscathed. Those who suffered major physical damage or serious mistreatment tended to have a more sober outlook. In your case, how badly did the old guy suffer?
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I have some difficulty erasing the image of you guys all gathered around your map with little toy soldiers and whatnot
Yeah. There's a rather droning sense of ownership, as if the study of history has become and end in itself, rather than a possible path to understanding. And it is exclusively a guy thing. Several times in this thread I've been reminded of Helen Caldicott's anecdote about the kind of guys who'd approach her after a public meeting and tick her off for some tiny inaccuracy in her estimate of US cruise missile stocks. I have more time for the likes of Caldicott than I'll ever have for any self-important historical bean-counter.
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And isn't Platoon also shown in official defence circles too?
Not, presumably, when conducting joint exercises with the Singaporean military. The last I heard it was banned there. Overly sympathetic portrayal of communists. Doesn't take much to get the thumbs down in the real nanny state. They once banned The Thorn Birds for its depiction of unpriestly shenanigans.
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Mr. Calder's silence will prove his point. If he never posts here (or anywhere) again, it can be assumed that his bold saying of the unsayable has earned him a long ride into the countryside with the carpet-crawling agents of international jewry.
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Only White Man in the Hammersmith Palais.
Gawd I used to love this.Punk pretty much stopped being good when some shaven oafs decided it was white music.
Strength through oi.
Steve B - the old NB pier had slot machines up until the early 1960s:
I only went on the pier once, when I was pretty little. There were holes all over the place where you could look down at the sea. The place with slot machines was full of bodgies, I thought it must be a pub and didn't dare go inside, just looked in the door. What really seared into my memory was a kind of juke box playing a black and white movie - with a kind of bluish cast - of an Eddie Cochran-type rocker. Coolest thing I'd ever seen, a tantalising glimpse of an out of reach adult world.
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Re: feral girl-um, I'm sorry, we (siblings & self) used to toe-dig pipi and quickly bite off their tongues? But that was usual? Wasnt it?
Just that she used to laugh like the proverbial drain when she did it. Whenever you went to the beach she'd emerge from the sandhills, which gave the impression that she lived there.
Usual method of dealing with pipis for me, which I guess you'd find a bit wussy, was to leave them overnight in fresh water so they'd spit out their sand. Then into the mincer with onions, before making fritters with egg & flour. Toheroa met the same fate.
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I just can't see what people see in Christchurch, it just seems so, so... so?...
I think it's where Emma Hart lives. Also other worthies that modesty prevents me from naming. Of course it's also bogan city, but most days I can deal with that.
I remember it as a bright vibrant shopping area, where you could get Blue Lagoon ice-cream from a little parlour upstairs that had an unthinkable number of flavours - like, more than twenty.
Brighton is where I sometimes went on my holidays when I was growing up in the North Island. It was where my grandparents lived, and a mysterious "night man" visited during the hours of darkness because there was an outside dunny and no sewage. Also there was an albino sparrow that used to hang around, and a feral girl at the beach who'd dig up pipis and bite their tongues off just to gross you out.
There was a place opposite the old ramshackle pier that had actual blue and green ice creams, which even Wellington didn't have. Although Brighton's mostly a dismal dump these days it does have a great coffee rotisserie, a brilliant dentist, and what I'm assured is a pretty good skate bowl. Just thinking's right, let the earth renew itself and feel superior if you must, Chichi can take it. According to my long-departed grandma, back in her youth the streets were haunted by not only a local version of Springheeled Jack, there was also a Phosphorus Jack who glowed in the dark. Alongside that, a few boofheads playing at being vigilantes don't really rate.