Posts by B Jones
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He is still innocent until proven otherwise. No court is going to retry him, except that of public opinion. His freedom's not at stake at the public's hands, and he has every right still to defend himself in the court of public opinion. I wonder what this Sunday's paper will look like.
The police hold that info back before a trial so as not to prejudice it. If there's not going to be a trial (double jeopardy and all) then there's no reason to withhold that info.
He's got the right to challenge the release of the info under defamation law, but of course truth is a defence to defamation.
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Jack - agreed. Traffic free areas are completely different from busy streets. My mental picture of the area in the Chch case is more like the footpath alongside, say, Kent Terrace than the open space on the Wgtn waterfront.
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I heard on the radio this morning that Mason had the boys' baby sister with them as well. Given the attention-span-shredding abilities of the preschoolers I know, I certainly wouldn't feel confident in taking three out and giving two of them the extra mobility of bikes. And if the situation slipped out of my control, it would be my fault for biting off more than I can chew, not a four year old's fault for being a four year old.
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I _love_ little digs in CG movies where they've carefully faked camera artefacts on the film.
The thing I'm liking the most about CG movies at the moment is how it allows much cooler things to be done with the camera work than you could do with the real ones. Beowulf is an example of this - the characters all look so-so, too real to be fakes but not quite real enough to be real, but the camera work is loads of fun. Something about Kung Fu Panda made me think that too, can't remember what.
Then again, all this fakery makes you appreciate the virtuosity and real world trickery of films like Children of Men and Atonement, both of which have spectacular long continuous shots. There could well be hidden CGness in either, but it adds to the reality rather than pulls you into thinking "cool, that looks almost real".
Best budget effect I've seen recently - The Hunt for Gollum. Poor thing spends most of the film tied up in a sack.
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The guy you were crushing on at twelve is always going to have a special place in your heart.
Yup. Despite Westley objectively being a bit of a dickhead, I still have a bit of a thing for pirate shirts, black masks and English accents.
Trekkieness has always been a bit of a mystery to me, despite growing up completely immersed in most speculative pop-culture. Don't think I've ever watched a full episode of the original, TNG's appeal wore off pretty fast, and Enterprise gave me an attack of "ye canna change the laws of physics, even if it is exciting to rescue someone from an asteroid as if they were being held there by gravity as strong as Earth's". But from what I've heard I'd be prepared to give the new movie a go. Especially if they've solved the useless female character problem that even Tasha Yar couldn't obliterate in the face of the awful Deanna Troi.
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Graeme, if I wasn't a bit busy, I'd try and come up with a more contemporary military analogy for "drawing a long bow" ...
Needing an ICBM to get from premise to conclusion?
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He is a real lawyer, I've met him.
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brave Kiwi stalwarts continue to purchase the pork quesadilla
I first thought Morning Report were being a bit obtuse when they asked the virologist guy whether this was going to hit pork sales, but they were effectively giving him a straight line to explain how you don't catch the flu from cooked food. No doubt there are people who could do with that bit of info, with recent health panics being more to do with food-borne illness than contagious diseases. Misinformation thrives in a panic.
There are plenty of reasons to be cautious about the quesadillas, but swine flu isn't one of them.
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The scariest thing about The Stand (my favourite Stephen King book) is the bit near the start that describes how the disease spread from the guys at the service station, from person to person far faster than any quarantine or public information could keep up. Far more real and terrifying than the business with the weasels in the corn etc.
The second scariest thing is what the editors let the author get away with in reissuing the book with dates (but not social mores) updated 10 years and a whole pile of extraneous material that turns a battleship of a book into a lumbering oil tanker.
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Meanwhile there are many Pakeha who consider (erroneously) that the term is an insult and are therefore offended by it. I suspect that if it were discovered that caricature pakeha/palangi-shaped consumer goods were consumed across the Polynesia or other parts of the world there'd be a bit of a stink over it.