Posts by Moz
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Southerly: My Life As a Palm Tree, in reply to Hebe,
“don’t bleed on the carpet”. Should be the title of a Kiwi parenting manual.
I'm thinking illustrated in the syle of those "where did I come from" books. But yes, it would sell based purely on the title.
But these days it more likely to be "don't eat that" or "how many iPhones can a 10 year old break?".
I'm sorry, I'm still reading about the suppository of all wisdom over here in Oz, and laughing.
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One of my favourite memories of childhood must be just after I started school. We had a new house, and many days I'd come home from school,and my mother would have seen me walking up the street. So I'd open the door to be greeted by "don't bleed on the carpet".
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Southerly: My Life As a Palm Tree, in reply to Hilary Stace,
I recommend the little NZ movie Kiwi Flyer
It is quite good. But they picked the wrong hill, there are much better hills in Nelson for that. Some even have nice run-out areas at the bottom. Not the best one, that has a stop sign. But often, if you time it right, you can run the stop sign and go up the hill on the other side, missing any crossing cars. I imagine a number of adults have died of heart failure at that intersection.
We had a range of hills behind Richmond where I grew up, and I had unsupervised access to a 10 acre hobby farm complete with creek, trees and a small barn. We spent a lot of time making forts and stuff out of hay bales (back in the day of little hay bales that a child or two could move). One game that in retrospect seems insane was to make a "pool" out of haybales, fill it with loose hay, then jump into it. Often by hanging from the rafters of the barn and droppping four or so metres.
The exploratory habits didn't really go away for quite a while. I remember being mildly drunk in my early 20's after a gig at a pub and going off to the woodchip piles in Nelson to climb the gantries and jump off onto the chips. Do it right and you can drop more than 5m and land on a steep slope that promptly collapses giving you a nice slidy ride to the bottom. Or you can break a leg, or sprain an ankle, or open a methane bubble and fall into it to be buried. It's fun. P:ossibly less dangerous is the similar "sport" of scree running, which you laboriously ascend a mountain then run down the scree at great speed. Often completely not dying at all!
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At the complete other end of the spectrum, the "kiwi" brand (made in Thailand) cheap chinese cleavers are marvellous. I bought a small, lightweight one when I first got to Sydney (in 1999) for under $20, possibly under $10 and still use it several times a week. For all that it's cheap it holds an edge really well and is still going strong.
Recently we bought one of those late-night-TV "slicing dicing" gadgets that's basically a V-shaped blade and something to push veges into the blade. My food thing at the moment is roasted starchy vegetables, and being able to scrub potatoes and kumara, then slice them into 5mm thick bits quickly makes the whole process very quick and easy. Even though that thing can dice onion and garlic... don't. Between the non-sliced bit left at the end and the little bits left everywhere, it's just not worth it. But for bulk slicing of spuds and stuff it's great.
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For some reason the image that came to my mind when I saw David's selfie title was a man in socks. Ever since the olden days on the newsgroups I can't help but associate the two.
When I tried internet dating I discovered just how few photos of me I actually have. And finding someone to take more was more difficult than I expected (this was before selfies were widely accepted). It's a social custom that I don't have - I can't even say with any certainty that I'm too old, just that it's no me. My partner doesn't seem to post them either (AFAIK, I don't net-stalk anyone, let alone someone I live with).
Oooh, there is the security system though - I probably have hundreds of Moz-images if you count that.
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Notes & Queries: The Rejected Selfie, in reply to Kumara Republic,
"put trash in its place" graphic
... but all I see is a misplaced apostrophe.
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Southerly: Now I Am Permitted, in reply to Steve Barnes,
I would dispute this man's findings on 2 major points.
1. Sutton's answer was pertaining to existing building slabs,How do you know that - they've refused to release their data. For all I know, except for Brownlee's office, every measurement was made on a freshly poured slab. Or a Dunedin "student special" perched haphazardly on the side of a hill for the last 150 years. And that's a small part of the objection being raised.
authors displeasure stems from "professional self importance" and not really in the interests of home owners.
Well yes, random amateurs are coming in and overriding the judgement of members of his profession.
I read it as less about "but not qualified!" as about "where's your data, and how did you collect it". It appears that the munster is reluctant to release the data for the obvious reason that it's as shonky as some of the houses that it's being used to rate as acceptable.
To me, there's an existing "way to do this" and the munster is throwing that aside to get a result that better suits his interests. Getting the measurements properly would cost money, and the result of doing so would be even more expensive. The more he can get away with drive-by assessments the better for all concerned[1].
[1] all meaning "everyone the munster cares about".
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Up Front: An Open Letter to the Labour…, in reply to Stephen Judd,
I note that the Stuff article carefully says “there is speculation” and does not say who is doing the speculating.
“My colleague thought it would be funny if Labour put up a Claytons candidate”.
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Car ownership rates are more likely dominated by the lack of alternatives I think. My parents live near Nelson and it's only retirement that has allowed them to drop to a single car. In a regional city the choice is hourly buses that stop running at inconvenient times, or driving. Outside the cities, it's driving or ... driving.
Friends did the numbers in Melbourne a few years ago and it was cheaper to live in the CBD fringe without a car than out in suburbia. They also saved a lot of time by being able to give their high school age kids public transport passes and let them transport themselves. Which is a win for everyone. Owning a car in the CBD is an expensive hobby - in Sydney CBD renting a carpark alone can easily run over $100/wk or add the same to the cost of an apartment.
I live in Sydney, slowly being pushed further out in the "inner west" as rental prices keep rising. It really takes two professional incomes to buy a house near the inner city (say 20 minutes by train from the near side of the CBD), and even then you'd better be willing to really work at it (not owning a car or most other luxuries). You can buy an apartment on one income, but you'd be right on the edge of habitability.
Also, my experience of decentralisation was poor. I worked in Paramatta, 45 minutes by train from the CBD and roughly at the geographic centre of the city. But working there meant almost any meeting I had to go to required a 45 minute train trip with trains at 30-45 minute intervals during the day. With the 10 minute walk each end that's over 2.5 hours travel time per meeting compared to well under an hour if we were in the CBD. That and a couple of other factors (clients refusing to visit us, mostly) persuaded my boss to pay the extra to get an office in the CBD after all. You can't even "zone" it - put the IT companies all together and who are they going to use for clients? Cities get better non-linearly with size, which is why you always have one big one and a few much smaller ones. Can't fight that, especially in NZ where the competition is not Hamilton or Christchurch, it's Sydney and London.
Seeing a decent plan for Auckland put in place would be wonderful. And it really should be based on something like the Sydney ideal where they build mixed use towers on CBD railways stations (Chatswood, for example) rather than some sort of "oh noes, apartment blocks" longing for the day when Auckland had less than a hundred thousand people in it. Either that or a plan to kill off the extra inhabitants...
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Up Front: It's Complicated, in reply to BenWilson,
The intellectually disabled, for instance, or insane people, could possibly be considered unfit to clearly consent.
I think that's actually one of the stronger arguments against a single line. A lot of physically adult people with intellectual disabilities like sex and consent to it. Ditto people institutionalised with mental illnesses. So it might be appropriate to allow some of them to have sex, but only under what amounts to adult supervision (which, FWIW, is the current situation, modulo guardian squicking and effectiveness of supervision). Those same people should not be allowed firearms licenses, let alone the sort of untrammelled access to weaponry that your earlier comment implies.
But some of what we have is just bizarre and can only be explained by history. You can get a gun licence at 16 but have to be 17 for a car license, and 18 to buy alcohol? You can adopt at any age (birth mother decides) but you can't marry until you're 16 or sign a contract until you're 18? Who decides these things, and what sort of drugs do they have to take first?