Posts by daleaway
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The one I think back to, which I can't reproduce in New Zealand alas, is a supper of cold reindeer sandwich and a pancake with lingonberry jam. Made over a campfire somewhere along a salmon river in Lapland, in the course of a magical summer on the road in Scandinavia.
Picking the lingonberries was the fun bit; they look like yellow raspberries growing on a strawberry plant in the marshland. But I confess we bought the reindeer fillets from the local general store, same as the locals did!
You could damned near cut steaks off the local mossies though, so it wasn't all fun and games. Big green Arctic things. Ugh.
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Aah, but don't people/nations choose their institutions according to their character? Institutions don't grow from bare ground.
And didn't nations derive from alliances of tribes (at the time of which we speak), and tribes derive from family groupings?
How deep do you want to go? I've a hunch that DNA's going to end up responsible for more history than we think at present.
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Yay! Power to PAS!
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Really enjoyed the transcript. Thank you.
For some reason it made me remember Joan Didion's "Where I was From" in which she contemplates why California is the way it is. Settled by people who were not used to staying put and solving problems, but whose solution was always to cut and run, cut and run, moving further west each time. At last a statefull of such people all washed up on the Pacific coast when they had no further west to run. There they continued to behave the only way they knew how.
Not a parallel with Roman history,of course, but they both made me contemplate the way resource use depends on the human attributes and values of the people who are in control of the resources. When expansion/resource extraction hits its straps, societies based on one set of attributes can fail, whereas another type of person/society can adapt, reinvent, or compromise.
How adaptable were the Romans? One memorable aspect of Terry Jones' The Barbarians was his emphasis on the extent to which Romans annexed not only other countries' resources but their technological brainpower, not being the most original of thinkers themselves. Seems to me whatever they imported from others, their chief export was the Roman admin model (aka "Law and order"), along the lines of "when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
It's tempting to think there's some hope for New Zealand, then, us being settled by self-starters who really struggled to get here because they wanted to manage things better than in their country of origin. Fingers crossed.
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"If the director needs a night scene then out comes the Ruru."
Darn right. They learned their craft at the knee of masters.
The lovely Mr Daleaway and I have been amusing ourselves for years identifying Bird Noise Cliches in BBC drama productions.Daytime semi-rural summer scenes: Invisible Brit pigeon. Peru, peru.
All nighttime scenes: invisible generic owl, hu hu hu hooo. (Plus one standard fox cough.)
Stately homes garden scenes: invisible peacocks, screech.
Midsomer Norton type crime mysteries, when suspense is needed: crows, croak.They make less use of seagulls than you might expect.
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That lion question intrigued me.
I could see no reason why he didn't learn about lions at Mum's knee, as we all did. With the reinforcement of toy building blocks and such reading material as would have been around throughout New Zealand at the time, including newspaper and magazine cartoons.
But after a bit of research I found that (a) circuses have been visiting New Zealand since the 1850s, mostly from Australia but there was a Japanese circus that came in the 1870s, (b) it was not unusual for circuses to leave old large animals behind (sold or donated) rather than put them through another sea voyage. So he may even have been able to see a real lion.
As well, (c) the lion features quite nicely on Queen Victoria's coat of arms which was fairly widely seen during her reign. Also on her coat of arms was the unicorn, which I have known about since I was two, and am still waiting to see my first one. But I'd know one the minute I clapped eyes on it.
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So THAT's the reason LOTR is crap....!
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All literary "competitions" are to an extent artificial. It's like making a contest of breastfeeding, or gargling.
People take what they need from fiction, and some don't need it at all.
And the idea that you can only write about things whose pre-ticked boxes you already fit is just plain bizarre. A gentle reminder that fiction means made up. It's all baloney, however nicely sliced.
Anyway Gaiman's erstwhile stablemate Terry Pratchett writes bloody wonderful female characters and nobody's smacked his keyboard for that..
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I've done it. Got some nesting hereabouts and we love listening to them.
Got woodpigeons too, but the tui patrols drive them off our berry trees. Tui are the gangland thugs of the bird world, and it's ALL their patch, according to them.
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It's a playwright's working rule that if a gun appears in Act I, it will have caused mayhem by Act III. Easy availability of guns leads to more gun crime. New Zealand has needed a rethink on this issue for a long time.
A forensics guy of my acquaintance told me they love cases involving Molotov Cocktails, because they are so easy to trace back to the perpetrator. I won't tell you what he told me about why this is so, but it was quite heartening.