Posts by linger
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Hard News: Review: Lana Del Rey, 'Born…, in reply to Yamis,
I’m also stuck on the ball tickling line. I encourage such use of words.
eh, whatever tickles your balls. different strokes, as they say...
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Si un la chez loin de livre, in reply to Islander,
That’s a relief (apart from the whole "how did this happen?" thing) – I was thinking it was my fault I couldn’t make sense of it! (After 20 years of accumulated rust my French is admittedly fairly merde-y).
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Hard News: Finally, the Teapot Tape?, in reply to Greg Dawson,
Wasn't an implication I was trying to make; but yes.
Comment reformulated to remove any last hint of that. -
Hard News: Finally, the Teapot Tape?, in reply to merc,
in Key’s case, such reckless inattention to personal danger is at least preferable to his reckless inattention to democracy, governmental responsibility and everything else about his job that doesn’t get polled or photo-opped.
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Hard News: Finally, the Teapot Tape?, in reply to merc,
is that a recording device in your manbag or...?
meanwhile, MSM gaze rests firmly on pressing concerns of whose cock-up whom... -
Hard News: Finally, the Teapot Tape?, in reply to Islander,
The cock-ups were simply rampant. Here’s what I think were the most, uh, prominent, in sequence.
(1) Key holding a media event from which he then excluded the press.
Muppet move.(2) A freelancer leaving a microphone behind as he was hurried out the door – can we assume, for the sake of argument, that that was accidental?
(3) Key overreacting wildly to the existence of said recording, and calling in the police. Again, muppet move, and not an endearing muppet either.
(4) Newspapers failing to state clearly enough that the main reason they weren’t going to publish the tape was because it wasn’t really that interesting. (Yeah, playing up a possible story is business as usual for the MSM, but it doesn’t serve the public at all well.)
(5) Media and opposition alike letting themselves be distracted away from more important (if less sensationalised) topics.
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There’s a cigar burned every minute.
Or to put it another way: in this case, cock-up seems far more likely than conspiracy theory. -
Hard News: Finally, the Teapot Tape?, in reply to alobar,
But that would imply that putting "Key" and "principle" in the same sentence could have some kind of validity.
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Hard News: The Mega Conspiracy, in reply to Sacha,
Peripheral, but I’m struck by how this US usage [ “curb” ] has replaced the previously common “kerb” in a few published articles in NZ lately.
Both spellings are standard in British and NZ English, but they are used for different purposes: kerb is the (literally) concrete noun, and curb is the verb. The Wellington corpus [of 1986 NZE] has just 3 tokens of curb (all verbs) and 5 of kerb (all nouns); that’s not enough evidence to conclusively state that variation in NZE was impossible in 1986, but does suggest that, if variation was possible within either of those functions, it wasn’t widespread.
However, I can see how variation in "NZE" might easily arise, (i) through functional confusion, when the noun is being used within a verb phrase such as jump the kerb, and (ii) as a result of news subediting being subcontracted to Australia, which has a higher tendency to use (some) “American” spelling variants. -
Junior Upchuck Manual
truly (as Dorothy Parker almost put it),
not a book to be tossed lightly aside,
but hurled with great force