Posts by Simon Grigg
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You need more forward planning. I always make sure I have enough booze at home to last at least 2 days.
And then those friends turn up..y'know...the ones who come bringing chocolate but stay for frigging hours having just one more....
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Chris has kind of answered this above, but I think it depends on the zoning more than what's there.
When we first ran a club in High Street we had no problems with noise. There was virtually nothing in the way of residential in the inner city unless you went up to Brooklyn / Courtville on the hill.
Three years after we opened the first Hight St apts were sold, so we we went door to door and handed out VIP cards and talked. Universally we were told they'd moved into the area knowing what it was, and some, including architect Nigel Cook, said they thrived on the buzz and noise from the street.
A year or so later we had our first noise complaint.
It came from a caretaker in Queen Street on a roof and Auckland city tried to enforce a series of notices on us and a shutdown. We added all sorts of noise dampening but they came at us again and again. They were not even sure it was us, but we became their target. Our noise checks showed that the traffic in Q St had more volume.
Eventually we were able to, for want of a better word, win by getting our lawyer to point out that the relevant word in the act was "reasonable", and the city had no other applicable law or by-law. It was, we said, backed by letters from people like Nigel, reasonable for us to open a nightclub in High Street and that it was unreasonable for someone to move into the CBD and expect to have have the sort of quiet enjoyment they might have in the burbs. The council backed off.
I know the law has changed, but the word reasonable seems to be missing from the council focus here (indeed, in many things, it's a word missing from the ACC vocabulary).
To me, it's perfectly reasonable, regardless of the latter day council zoning, to expect the King's Arms to make a noise, given it's history and location. And it's ludicrously unreasonable to try and stomp on that given that history and location.
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Seems others are taking swipes at Ms. Palin.
And they're now turning on him as a result. The right eats itself.
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CBS poll gives BHO a big healthcare bounce.
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but the actual response last week was frequently hysterical, with people seriously using words like "indoctrination and "communism".
Yep, demented. There is a mountain of difference between some strongly stated unease, and the sort of inane verbiage that seems to spout from folks like this elected GOP official:
“As far as I am concerned, this is not civics education - it gives the appearance of creating a cult of personality. This is something you’d expect to see in North Korea or in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” Russell said.
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but:
Yes, I find the antics on the left often just as unsettling as those on the right, but as I said on my blog a few days back, they tend to exist mostly on the fringe (no excuse made for Rep. Ford though, how bloody stupid, what a ridiculous waste of public money), whereas the nuttiness on the right tends to exist from pretty close to the centre and then balloons on the way out into something increasingly, for want of a better word, demented.
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Those Beatles things were both, uhhh, fab.
The '64 clip underlines just how far Epstein was happy to let them go to be loved by one and all.
How things change. Could you really imagine Roger telling Shayne that there was this Sunday night variety show on TV2 and all they had to do was....
I guess that's why Ray Wolfe was invented
I thought "Bugger!"
Anyway we could have a whip around for some accelerant to have another go at the tent...I'm in
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I might remind people that if you take issue with James, I'd prefer you attacked his argument, rather him personally.
Not one to say he said, he said, but it's worth pointing out that James has on more than one occasion attacked one or two of us personally as a lead in to his arguments, whether well formed or not (and I'd take issue with that..he largely recites rather than argues, and couples those recitations with offensive slurs and generalisations targeted against people like, y'know, women in politics. They tend to upset me).
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Obama is simultaneously a fascist and a communist
The bizarre mindset of the right in the US was neatly summed up by the GOPs choice to rebut Obama:
But the most "surprising" aspect to the choice of Boustany is the fact that he is a Birther!
So he subscribes to that odd, utterly irrational conspiracy (nothing in this whole circus is nuttier than the birther stuff, just fucking insane twaddle), but in DC this GOP Congressman is the one chosen to rebut this massive policy speech by the nation's President.
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I like how when James comes on and makes his standard post, Russell always comes in with some helpful links and facts to point out how he's talking out his butt.
And then you wait for James to come back with some sort of linked and smart rebutt, but he never does. He's like some sort of meme reciting machine who can't deal with any challenge to the program.
Why, thankyou for the advice James.
ANSWER et al get their knickers all in a bunch about a few meatheads on the night shift at Abu Graib doing some stupid stuff to some prisoners, during which no one was injured for which the soldiers were punished