Hard News: Reasons to be cheerful
356 Responses
First ←Older Page 1 … 4 5 6 7 8 … 15 Newer→ Last
-
I, on the other hand, am doomed. I mean, not 'shot after a high speed car chase' doomed, but 'sitting hotly in standstill traffic on Great North Road for hours while wending my way to Oratia' doomed. Still, at least I'm prepared.
Magic! So you're iphoning it in? That's devotion. Post of the week, I'd say. Can Russell hop on his bike and bring you a nice cold one?
Having been to the grandparental refuge in question, there are far worse places to retreat too on a sunny Friday afternoon :)
Yep. Wish I was there.
And, speculating wildly in advance of the facts, but since when has purse-snatching been a capital crime in NZ?
-
i see dozens of mum-and-2-kids-on-a-bike everyday of the week in Tokyo. and occasionally dad-and-2-kids.
it's a normal way to get around.
otoh, adult carrying 2 kids on a bike is technically illegal but the cops never do anything about it because all the millions of families who rely on this practical form of transport would instigate a revolt. the city would become ungovernable. heh. -
Wouldn't happen in Welly.
We just get a street person trying to hold up the KFC with nunchaku, then the emo kids pile in and it fully kicks off...
-
Ah, Welly. A kinder, gentler class of nutters.
So is it high tide on the Cheviera this evening? I'd have just abandoned the car and gone off for a swim.
-
<italics> grandparental refuge at the end of Pt Chev Rd. Phew. <italics>
Good tide tonight too, go for swim until it clears. It was gorgeous last night.
-
Bugger, I even previewed that.
7pm tide
-
Great minds, Glenn!
-
Magic! So you're iphoning it in? That's devotion. Post of the week, I'd say. Can Russell hop on his bike and bring you a nice cold one?
That really *would* be post of the week! No, I'm afraid I was just getting all Nostradamus about my coming commute. It isn't that hard to predict the 'sitting hotly on Great North Road' part - that happens far too much as it is, even without the high speed chase and fatal shooting.
-
And, speculating wildly in advance of the facts, but since when has purse-snatching been a capital crime in NZ?
Still in advance of proven facts, but....
According to stuff or NZ herald, (sorry, I forget) the armed offenders squad was involved as early as New Lynn / Titirangi where it started.... so presumably the bag snatchee or witnesses saw a gun and called it in?
purse snatching is not a capital crime, but waving a gun at armed police is not advised....
-
Reason to be cheerful:
I'm off to In Bruges, which I'm really looking forward to. I've heard plenty of good stuff about it.
Incidently, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
The noms for Best Picture look pretty underwhelming. I've only seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button so far, and that was pretty meh. And no The Dark Knight for Best Picture! (Although it got a nod for Ledger, and for several tecnical areas.) I'd bet that it's better than at least two or three of those nominated. Will see.
But I want to end today's posting on positive note, so...umm, again -
-
stephen, how well laid out is Tokyo for biking? I base my fears on the very real fact that to go anywhere from my house requires riding on either the road or a footpath, rather than a dedicated cycle lane, for quite a lot of the trip. I love doing it myself, but it's only my life at risk, something I do regularly with relish. But putting my boy to the same risk? Brrrr.
I think I will eventually get one, just to try it, though. Even if it's just for fun cruises around a park. The neat thing about trailers is that they also double as highly capable prams, and as ... trailers...you can carry stuff in them.
Totally unconvinced about the safety of a child in a seat on my bike. One slip or crash and bang! We're talking broken bones and skin loss at the very least. There's a reason motorbikes don't have seat belts, but what other option is there for a child seat?
-
Re Obama, I got the following from my father, apparently a quote from Chris Rock: "Excellent black people have always been compensated for excellence. Always. The real equality is when we can have a black president as dumb as George Bush. That's when we're really equal. That's when the dream has come true."
I must admit, coming back to the US just in time for the inauguration, it really did feel like the end of a long national nightmare. It is not so much that I disagree with many of Bush's policies, but the ignorance and incompetence he and his team displayed in pursuit of their goals is simply breathtaking. They simply ignored evidence that was inconvenient, whether it was global warming, or going into Iraq without enough troops to get the job done quickly (However repugnant fighting an unnecessary war might be, fighting it badly is arguably a great deal more evil)
And to further cheer my day, we have this
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/01/22/steven-chu-addresses-the-national-labs/
marking the return of the United States to the reality-based world.
-
The real equality is when we can have a black president as dumb as George Bush.
Chris Rock has had some of the best quotes of the campaign, hasn't he?
-
And, speculating wildly in advance of the facts, but since when has purse-snatching been a capital crime in NZ?
RNZ News says the deceased was not the person being pursued by police.
The victim seems to have been shot either by the fugitive (who tried to hijack a westbound track after crashing) or in error, by police. Yikes.
It's bloody chaos around here at the moment. I made the mistake of popping out to the supermarket. 90 mins later ...
I did tweet from the midst of it.
-
Totally unconvinced about the safety of a child in a seat on my bike. One slip or crash and bang!
I think there's a big difference between a slow pootle on a flat street laid out according to Woonerf principles in the Netherlands and trying to get down Khyber Pass at rush hour.
-
The Herald is saying the motorway victim was shot by police.
But they're quoting the RNZ news report, and that didn't say the police did the shooting. I hope they haven't made a horrible cock-up there.
-
This sucks. I thought it was bad enough that I'll be having to pass through there soon but to hear that it might have been a totally innocent victim puts a real downer on it.
-
Ben, in Tokyo and environs, people use bikes to get around their local neighbourhood, between railway/subway station, home, shops, kindergarten, creche, friends houses, parks, etc. the terrain is essentially flat with a few exceptions. most people ride on the footpath. once again, technically illegal but there is more chance of getting stopped by a cop if you ride your bike on a busy arterial road than on a crowded footpath. i don't like riding on the footpath so i avoid it as much as possible. too much chance a pedestrian or another bike will just appear out of nowhere. crash. but if you do can out, most people ride quite slowly and there are only rarely serious injuries. one thing i always keep in mind when riding here is that most other people on bikes are morons and could do the dumbest thing at any time for no reason whatsoever. so you have to be very cautious and aware of potential dangers all the time. one interesting thing recently is that when i had my son on the back of my bike 8 or so years ago, he was just about the only one around wearing a helmet (i.e. less than 5%). now, maybe 50% of kids being carried have helmets. and the snazzy German child seat i bought was still quite rare. now they are everywhere. much better safety and comfort features than the cheap Japanese child seats.
most people only use their cars on the weekend here, so either walking or biking is the way to get around near home. also, when i started long-distance commuting on a bike twice a week in 2002, it was still a kind of "ignore him, he's a bit eccentric/mad" thing to do (just under 20km each way). now, it's seen as cool and there are heaps of books, mags, shops catering to the trend.
-
This sucks. I thought it was bad enough that I'll be having to pass through there soon but to hear that it might have been a totally innocent victim puts a realdowner on it.
It's a bit crazy out there at the moment. People who've been stuck on Meola Road appear to be trying to make up time by driving like maniacs through Pt Chev side streets. I thought a van that rounded a corner ahead of me was going to roll. I sounded my horn and shouted at the guy to slow the fuck down. A secondary tragedy with someone's kid hurt or killed would be really sickening.
Wow. Some Friday afternoon.
-
I'm off to see In Bruges, which I'm really looking forward to. I've heard plenty of good stuff about it.
It's wonderful, and surprisingly Pinter-esque too, in the best sense of the word, as well, as in parts, being oddly moving in its depction of the father-son dynamic of the two leads. Of course, it's also filthy and un-PC as all get out, and Bruges the village looks as gorgeous as Clemence Poesy. And the ending makes a lot of cosmic (and karmic) sense.
Incidently, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Well deserved too-in fact, I think if there's a flaw to it, it's that it packs too much in and sometimes betrays writer/director Martin McDonaugh's roots as a playwrite and theatrical director- quite a few of the early scenes could be transposed to the stage with little variation, and certainly McDonaugh the writer has more wit and flair than McDonaugh the director, who is nonetheless solid.
The noms for Best Picture look pretty underwhelming. I've only seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button so far, and that was pretty meh. And no The Dark Knight for Best Picture! (Although it got a nod for Ledger, and for several tecnical areas.) I'd bet that it's better than at least two or three of those nominated. Will see.
I wouldn't be surprised if Slumdog Millionare takes out the top award, and it's a film I've been wanting to see for some time, not least because I'm a fan of Danny Boyle: patchy as his post-Trainspotting filmography, he's proved himself an eclectic and talented genre filmmaker, seeming as comfortable in zombie horror pics (the superb 28 Days Later, which counts as the decade's most imanaginitive evocation of London outside of Children of Men and Eastern Promises) and "hard" sci-fi (Sunrise). The Beach and A Life Less Ordinary were dogs, though.
But overall, the Oscar lineup looks distinctly underwhelming, with some exceptions. And I can't get my head around the number of nominations Benjamin Button has received.
But I want to end today's posting on positive note, so...umm, again -
have one on me!
Why not? It's pushing 30 degrees here and the sun is blazing. I'll make it a Monteith's Summer Ale, thanks.
@Kyle Matthews:
That's not the traditional Democrat playbook at all.
Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson were all very focused on international issues. Johnson to the detriment of his domestic policy.
As was Clinton, who got in boots and all to the Middle East peace issue, as well as Kosovo, and who was involved in Ireland as well.
I'm sure ommitting Harry "Give 'Em Hell" Truman was an oversight in your list- after all, he was the guy behind NATO, the Marshall Plan, Korean War, etc.
Which only goes to add further creedence to your argument, of course :-)
Meanwhile, the great Paul Krugman's Ideas for Obama piece is worth a read. Krugman's become one of my go-to guys in recent times for all things economic.
-
Only just caught up with the White House robots.txt story.
To explain: robots.txt is a document that appears on a web server telling searching engines what parts of a website they may not index for searching by the public.
Click the link above to see the difference between robots.txt on the last day of the Bush presidency and the first of the Obama.
How totally, geekily awesome.
-
How totally, geekily awesome.
Yep, Paul had already pointed that out in a post titled Lolbama. Awesome, and I'm rooting for Lolbama as an early entry for word of the year...
-
I did tweet from the midst of it.
Are their many twerps about here?
It being Friday and all, some might be interested in a comp that Stephen Fry is having on his twitter.
L=50 in Roman. The best tweet containing exactly 50 Ls will win. All tweets to contain the tag #L and none to exceed 140 character limit SF
-
And then Ars Technica has to go and spoil the story:
While several bloggers hailed Obama the Robot Fighter for paring down the site's robots.txt file, which tells search engines and archival crawlers which pages to ignore, Declan McCullagh notes that the previous version was longer mostly because it (properly) prevented search queries within the site from popping up in search results.
But the author is pleased about this:
More substantively, though, I'm particularly pleased to see that Obama is hewing to his previous pledge to establish a comment period for "non-emergency" bills, requiring legislation to be posted online for five days between passage and signing. From the USA PATRIOT Act to bloated omnibus spending bills, we've become far too accustomed to wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am lawmaking that enacts statutes before it's possible for the representatives voting on them—let alone the population affected by them—to have so much as read the text, let alone digested or analyzed it, especially given that statutes routinely function by making small but important changes to other, highly complex statutes.
Far freakin' out. So Americans now get a whole five days to examine the text of "non emergency" legislation before it's passed. Some bits of democracy appear to be still coming ...
-
Also on Obama and geekiness, on text flow you can read the words of Obama's (unbelievably stirring) inaugruation address at the same speed he spoke it. It's the next best thing to hearing him reading it, and underlines the importance of timing when delivering a speech.
Post your response…
This topic is closed.