Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Legal Beagle: On Gell-Mann Amnesia; or…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But as a measure of how distanced this boy is from social norms then assaulting a woman is less normal than assaulting a man (and I agree that shouldn’t be the case).
I take your point, although the cynical thought occurs that this is only true when men assault women whom society does not consider them to have some degree of 'ownership' over.
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Legal Beagle: On Gell-Mann Amnesia; or…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
That’s another problem with some (although this time, not all) of the reporting. I understand the hospital stay lasted 15 hours, not 15 days.
Ah, OK, I'd only seen the 15 days reported. Still, an overnight hospital stay is not a small thing.
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Legal Beagle: On Gell-Mann Amnesia; or…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
The second is that the attack was on a woman, so not a test of strength between immature male animals but something much more horrible.
...because it would have been materially less horrible if he'd hit a male police officer and continued to hit him after he was unconscious, putting the officer in hospital for two weeks?
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Polity: Hekia's waynebrave, in reply to Carol Stewart,
Me too! Although I made the mistake of taking the grammatical option rather than the conversational option, which meant that although I had a working knowledge of the subjunctive I was pretty rubbish at communicating with people.
I then went on to do 6th form Music by correspondence, for the same reason (the decile 1 school didn’t have the resources to offer it to me). And it was excellent.I took seventh-form Latin via correspondence - our school only offered it through fifth form. It wasn't perfect - I struggled somewhat with the lack of direct feedback - but it worked, and I can only imagine online options would improve it. But you don't need an entire new provider for that.
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Hard News: Stories: Home, in reply to BenWilson,
Probably, and not entirely senseless on that account, since they may compete for similar food sources. Or perhaps their young do.
Killing stuff for fun is far more prevalent a hobby in nature than the average nature documentary wants you to think about.
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Hard News: Stories: Home, in reply to BenWilson,
Not so cute to note that their numbers roughly halve before maturity, and I never see dead ducklings around - presumably they are being hoovered up by cats.
Not necessarily - ducks are pretty terrible parents. Seagulls also like a tasty duckling meal (I have a vivid childhood memory of seeing this in action on Somes Island.) Cats are probably getting some of them, though.Then again, if we're talking mallards, not much loss; they're introduced and are hybridising out some native species.
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Hard News: Stories: Home, in reply to B Jones,
The birds in Wellington! I’ve always lived near the edge of the bush, and I remember as a kid seeing a tui was something special. Then a while back I was surprised to see one in central Wellington. Now the damn things constantly divebomb one another in my back garden and take baths in the neighbour’s blocked gutter. They’re ubiquitous, and kereru are common enough, but last week we had a kaka land on our deck. I’d never seen one before I visited Kapiti Island ten years ago, now you can hear them most days rarking in the skies above the western suburbs.
We went for a walk along the top of Tinakori Hill (Te Ahumairangi Hill, now) a few weeks ago at dusk, and had kaka circling over us most of the way home. I walked down the same hill to town yesterday and heard them talking to each other in the trees. And the tui are bloody everywhere. It really is a most incredible change.
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Hard News: Stories: Home, in reply to TracyMac,
Places like Hawaii feel very “homelike” to me, for the same reason. And the cultural mix.
When I was in the States I found the big West Coast cities more like NZ than anywhere else - San Francisco + north have similar weather, similar vegetation (lots of Monterey pines and even pohutukawa, imported for their colour), more similar cultural environment, similar urban environments, easier access to some home treats (proper ginger beer, that sort of thing.) And they were on the right ocean. It wasn't home, but it was...something closer, especially when I hadn't actually been home for years.
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I moved back to Wellington two months ago, after eleven years, near enough, first in Christchurch and then in the US. I couldn't get out of home fast enough when it came time to go to university - not for any bad reasons, just because I was eager to stretch my wings and try (semi)-independent adult life. Then I went overseas for a holiday with my family and came back desperate to get out of NZ for my postgrad studies - there was a whole wide world out there I could be visiting! So we packed up and left for the US.
Like some other people in this thread, living overseas intensified my sense of New Zealand as home. The Christchurch quakes happened in the six months after we'd left the city, which felt like a weird severing of our ties to our life in NZ - Christchurch was where we'd met and gotten married, as well as my wife's city of birth, and in an important way it wasn't there anymore, it had crumbled behind us. After a couple of years we were talking about maybe staying in the US longer-term. But the longer we stayed the more and more we missed NZ - didn't help that we only had the time and money to make one visit home in five years.
We came back to Wellington not knowing whether we'd be staying there, at least at first, and I realised while we were waiting to find out that I really wanted to stay. I'd been worried after all that time that I'd get sick of the place after a few weeks, maybe sick of living in NZ again, that it'd seem too small and too isolated and too much like trying to fit myself back into a space I'd outgrown. But, especially after Christchurch, it seemed like such an impossible gift to be living somewhere I knew the streets, where things were as I remembered them, somewhere I could talk to friends and family without having to calculate time zones and who was on Daylight Saving and who wasn't - or see them in person, even!
It helps in some ways - though it makes me sad in others - that my parents have so comprehensively redecorated their house since I lived there that almost every room looks entirely different. It's not the place I grew up in anymore, and if they sell it in the next few years - as they're talking about doing - I think I'll be OK with that. Wellington is going to be home again, but it's going to be a home I'm making.
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Access: How many agencies does it take…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Solar PV with no batteries and no grid tie would be fairly useless (except for special purposes), not least because you generally want lights on during the hours of darkness.
I went to a fascinating talk last week in Lower Hutt (run by Cafe Scientifique) which was all about solar/wind power, particularly the system they've set up on Somes Island for the DOC people there. It's a combination of a wind turbine, solar panels, batteries, and I believe some natural gas (for a stove, that sort of thing). Apparently it works really well because the wind in Wellington Harbour tends to rise around sunset, which is when the solar cuts out, and they can reliably switch to turbine generation for night stuff - otherwise they'd need more batteries.
The thing I also remember from the talk is that they've found for more remote Pacific islands switching from diesel generation to solar/wind can be a problem because the regular diesel deliveries are also how other stuff is delivered (presumably it's otherwise uneconomic to ship the other stuff without the diesel) - taking away those boat runs can cause more problems than generating their own power solves.