Posts by Lilith __
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Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
above a horizon near you from 8.36pm (ish)
tomorrow night – Tuesday Dec 21.Ian -- moonrise varies with location quite a lot:
"Some times of moon rise in New Zealand are:
N. Is. Auckland 8.35pm, Hastings 8.35pm, New Plymouth 8.45pm, Wellington 8.49pm.
S. Is. Nelson 8.56pm, Christchurch 9.07pm, Dunedin 9.25pm, Invercargill 9.36pm."
(quoted from here )Unfortunately for most of us the eclipse will be in totality by the time the moon rises so it will be dim and may be difficult to spot, especially as the sky won't be fully dark by then.
But it is very groovy to have a lunar eclipse on the shortest night of the year!
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Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
No more scarily-muted decor, no more perspex PCs and credit-card video phones! No more tiny electric cars that never do what you tell them. No more mysterious vans! No more Ron-the-interfering-neighbour with his hedge clippers. No more interchangeable photos of kids with dogs. No more manically-smiling Tandi Wright. No more sweetly brave Miriama McDowell! No more Tania Nolan with the scary hair, no more Charles Mesure with the sexy running....
Bereft!
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Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Oh no! I really liked it too. Bother.
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Islander -- I like the thought of a ghost bird singing throatily at dawn.
and Joe, thanks for that, I'm glad to hear that Park's account of her life in Sydney resonates with someone who knows the area intimately.
Thanks for the conversation, both of you. And thanks everybody here on PAS for being so interesting and clever this year. Here's to another great year of discussion and sharing in 2011. And perhaps we will have a Great Blend to call our own, down here in Shakytown. I'll see you there. Happy Christmas everybody.
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Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Joe, I love that you didn't bother disputing her ghost story but you fact-checked the view from her window. :-)
I think her memoirs are likely an honest account of what she believed to be the case. Eyewitness accounts can be highly divergent, and not necessarily because anyone is intentionally telling a tall story. -
Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Islander,
Oh Islander, I am sorry to hear of your loss. I have 5 siblings, and the thought of losing any of them is unimaginable.
For anyone who doesn’t know Ruth Park’s story, there are some details here in the SMH. That article might whet your appetite for Fence Around the Cuckoo and Fishing in the Styx, if you haven’t already read them. Park seems to have always shunned easy options in her life and in consequence many remarkable things happened to her, both remarkably good and remarkably bad! She seems to have seen so many peculiar people and places and situations, and imagined many more…I found both those books jaw-dropping. What temerity she and D’Arcy had, to decide to both write fulltime and raise a large family. They endured many setbacks and horrific poverty without complaint, and simply kept going.
One of the anecdotes in Fishing in the Styx that lingers in my mind is when they move into a large and tumbledown house and D’Arcy selects a room for his study which Ruth and the children believe is haunted – they’ve all seen the ghost walking around in the room. However D’Arcy seems happy in there and oblivious to anything uncanny, so they decide not to mention it; in the Niland-Park household, a mere haunting is mundane!
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Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Islander,
Oh yes, I've read that as The Frost and the Fire - such a vivid story of the Otago gold rush, fascinating. My all-time fave of hers is Swords and Crowns and Rings. And her 2 vols of autobiography are pretty much unsurpassed, in my reading experience anyway! I'm glad to hear she's still in print.
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Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Islander,
Not a celebration, but there was another death yesterday - Ruth Park
Oh NO! Ruth Park is one of my writing heroines!
A pity she's not more widely read in NZ, I think she suffered from being an "Australian" author when the books promoted in NZ are mostly from the UK and US.
I hope her books will stay in print.
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Hard News: We are all twatcocks now…, in reply to Tom Beard,
On reflection, that should be “ambipudendal”: the “r” crept in by analogy to “ambidextrous”, but it really doesn’t belong in pudenda. So to speak.
On the contrary, ambipudendral has a nicely hermaphroditic ring. So to speak.
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It has eluded well-meaning but foul-mouthed PC liberals for decades
ambipudendral insult
Gold! :-) Now let's see how twatcock does at large in the community...