Posts by Joe Wylie
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So - as long as it remains cheaper to get a kilowatt-hour from a wallsocket than it does from a slave, we're safe from slavery?
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I could see no reason why he didn't learn about lions at Mum's knee, as we all did.
Father Servant, a French priest who accompanied Bishop Pompallier to NZ in 1838 and later practised as a missionary in the Hokianga, describes a "whistling serpent" cult started by an enterprising local Maori in order to cut himself a slice of the missionary racket.
The guy was something of a ventriloquist, and would lurk in the environs of Sevant's mission after dark, making spooky whistling sounds. Apparently he had a bit of success with stealing away Servant's converts to his own operation.
So where did the idea of serpents come from in snake-free NZ? According to Servant, it had to be the Bible.
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All politics aside, if your ongoing income relies upon computer equipment then you'd better be taking that particular area of risk seriously regardless of whether or not the police want to take your stuff away. Hard disks fail. Off-site backups are a wonderful thing when you need them, and a relatively cheap insurance policy when you don't.
Excellent. I'll save that tip to a 5.25" floppy and stash it where the filth will never find it.
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. . . public pantlessness is demeaning.
It is. Especially in wildlife-deficient NZ, where there are no handy groin-squirrels to preserve your modesty:
http://members.fortunecity.com/chippy3/episodes/e35.html -
. . . had their house raided with dogs and all their computer equipment seized.
Creepily reminiscent of the 1951 waterfront strike legislation that allowed the police to seize printing presses, and restricted their ownership until the rise of the photocopier made a mockery of such laws.
If your computer's seized, held for an extended period, and contains material vital to your livelihood, what grounds do you have for redress under the anti-terror laws?
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Even the woman who wrote The Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed has me head for the exit when she gets on her soapbox.
Heh.
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I'm really, really sorry for saying "Ouroborosian".
Please don't be - it's one of the things that makes the interwebs special. You hardly ever get six-syllabled words in the MSM.
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I'm not sure I want to live in a world where Doris Lessing wins the Nobel Lit prize. Those moralising sci-fi things are dreadful
I'd cut Lessing a lot of slack for The Temptation of Jack Orkney & Other Stories, but LeGuin does do that sort of sci-fi thing heaps better.
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I was really astonished with how well Margaret Atwood seemed to write a male in Oryx and Crake when she does such powerful evocative female characters - so acutally I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. Talent is talent.
Likewise Annie Proulx and, when she's on form, Ursula LeGuin. Talent, yes - though I tend to think of it as real creative imagination.
What should matter isn't that the creator fits into the 'correct' box of ethnicity, gender or sexuality; but that they bring to the table all the insight, empathy and pure skill they can.
I'd suggest that those who'd raise such quibbles haven't even begun to appreciate the value of imagination, let alone exercise it.
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. . . you can probably find someone who'll prescribe you Vicodin or Oxycontin, which are both very effective and, especially in the case of Oxycontin, extremely addictve.
Long-term, heroin has to be better than Oxycontin - just compare Iggy Pop with Rush Limbaugh.
http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=12866&IBLOCK_ID=35