Posts by Chris Waugh
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Hard News: So long, and thanks for all…, in reply to Sacha,
I’d also like to see the next Labour leader firmly punish anyone like Shane Jones who slags his party’s natural coalition partner
I think that's what Campbell was getting at here:
One way the new leader has to signal a break with Labour’s dithering recent past will be reflected in how it engages with the Greens in general and Russel Norman in particular.
Well, yes. And Mana and the Maori Party, too. In fact, I would quite like to see those four parties sitting down for a few cups of tea next election season, they seem to bring a lot of potential complementarity. But yes, Labour certainly needs to ditch some of its old attitudes to the other three.
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Oh, a little fiddling wit B&W, film grain, etc, and this photo is almost rescued. She also likes rabbits, and said, "Xiǎo bái tù nǐhǎo!" (hello little white rabbit!) then "Xiǎo tùzi byebye!" (byebye little rabbit!) (yes, her Chinese is way better than her English, but that's ok, she is in China and she is only 2). ETA: Forgot to say that it's a good thing she likes rabbits, having been born in a rabbit year.
All up it's a really cool market, but the outdoor areas at the northern end are constantly changing. One huge space where we used to go for toiletries and other mostly bathroom items (actually, 1st picture above), books, toys, and sometimes socks had been cleared out with a row of stalls selling carved rocks along the road but the rest empty. Disappointing, because although we found the stuff we usually buy shifted over to the other outdoor space, I didn't see the huge piles of 2nd hand machinery. I hope they come back, because they're really fascinating.
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Buddhist releasing life. Buy some critters to release into the wild so you can earn some good karma.
And as it turns out, those are all the not entirely crap photos. Was that the kind of market you wished you could've visited instead of your chaperoned tour of the Forbidden City, Russell?
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More birds.
Checking out the squirrel, which she insisted on calling dàishǔ (袋鼠 = kangaroo. Squirrel is 松鼠/sōngshǔ) (oops, must remember to attach the photo).
She loves birds, but a bigger kid started encroaching on her space.
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I don't know how these guys get their stuff, but they're great for stocking up in toilet paper, tissues, toiletries, detergent, crayons, shopping bags, perfume, deodorant.... Much of it left overs from various promotions, but the rest, well, I can think of some possibilities....
Bird cages.
And a pigeon shop that also sells chickens, geese, pheasants, and a really fluffy rabbit. Stationery next door, should you need to write about the birds, but from memory all the traditional Chinese stuff, so better practice writing with a brush.
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Hard News: Friday Music: Just Kids, in reply to BlairMacca,
Or Darkness on the edge of town.
Yes, that one too, though I heard it later.
Born in the USA
One of the world's most commonly misinterpreted songs, surely?
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Hard News: Friday Music: Just Kids, in reply to George Darroch,
I never did get Springsteen.
Me too, until a colleague (incidentally, also from New Jersey) sat me down and made me listen to Nebraska. Turns out the image I had of Springsteen was way different from the reality.
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Capture: Upside Down, Inside Out, in reply to Nora Leggs,
Ouch. Glad I'm not in that car. But.... one Chinese word for train is 火车/huǒchē, literally character-for-word "fire vehicle". An appropriate name for your cosy car?
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Hard News: So long, and thanks for all…, in reply to Hebe,
They were not and are still not unless they are the self-selected dominant partner.
The media, too, seem to still be thinking in FPP terms of National and Labour being the obvious, natural major parties.
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Hard News: So long, and thanks for all…, in reply to Gary Young,
I wonder if anyone can actually explain what they mean by it.
Dunno about Bart, but I can. Any kind of nationalism worries me, and the Greens seem to have a bit too much of that in their economic policies for my taste, but the biggest problem I have with them is China. I remember Frog Blog or commenters on Frog Blog back in 2008 describing China as "scraping the bottom of the barrel" in human rights terms. Pointing out that my wife is not required to cover herself from head to toe and be accompanied by me, her brother or her father when she goes out, that my wife has equal access to healthcare and education as her brother, and that she does not need my permission to get a job felt like a major waste of time and perfectly fine pixels. The Greens seem to have very fixed ideas of what China is, and the way they describe the country I've lived in for damn near 14 years now bears very little resemblance to what I observe around me.
Sure, not exactly a key element of Greens policy, and not the "loony" that seems to be more generally associated with the Greens, but that is a big issue for me personally, and that is the "loony" that makes it very hard for me to imagine myself voting for them.
