Posts by Russell Brown
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I live in hope of one day seeing a piece about motorbikes soundtracked by the Manic Street Preachers' 'Motorcycle Emptiness', but I don't like my chances.
We'll bear it in mind ...
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And on the topic of a totally different bunch of crusaders, an opinion piece in the SMH lays the blame for the death toll in Victoria squarely at the feet of the green lobby, and its absolutist stance against "prescribed burning".
This idea has gained currency in the past few days, but from what I can make out it's not entirely accurate. There's certainly no detail in the column to back up such a strong claim.
It also appears that controlled burning, which clears ground material, would not have helped in this case.
And George Darroch points out that the Australian Greens have long been in favour of controlled burns as a for of forest management. The lobby against it has been more in the line of middle-class conservationists.
Both links are from the discussion under a wildly shrill the-greenies-dunnit post from Poneke.
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@Islander
Does your fellow man actually want to communicate with you in a creolised bastard form of English though?
English is a creolised bastard language, though. That is its history. And that's always been its strength.
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I'm not entirely convinced by the Fairey j'accuse.
There appear to be several cases of extremely poor form: the MC5 logo and the use of a living Cuban artist's work, for example.
But in places, the author simply gets carried away, claiming, for instance, that Fairey's skull-and-crossbones graphic is "an exact duplication" of the logo used by the Gestapo.
It simply isn't, as anyone could see by looking at it. And anyway, if it is, why not appropriate from the Gestapo and recontextualise the politics of the image?
Another group of the images are out of copyright. Perhaps it would have been better form to explicitly acknowledge their origins, but lots of artists don't.
Even in the case of the famous Obama image, Fairey's rendition was demonstrably iconic. The original photograph was just one of many thousands of photographs of a photogenic man. Its relative value was minimal. If AP does get the money it's after, it will be reaping value added by Fairey.
Also, arguing on the basis that "I’ve never seen any evidence indicating Fairey can draw at all" is irrelevant, speculative and pissy. Who cares?
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Note to National. Please stop listening to me.
Bah. The problem here is that the actual policy they spent all last year campaigning on is a mirage. With Maurice out of the way they now have to come up with something real. But dumping a scheme that did seem to work seems a bloody stupid way to go about it.
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Just to push things along a bit, who finds themselves compelled to use actual sentences with proper grammar and spelling when mobile texting?
The iPhone has helped me a lot in this ...
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A good point. I used to help people with public speaking a bit and my best advice was that you know you're doing well when you're saying what your thinking, not thinking what your saying...
Ahem. You're saying ...
In further pedantry, from NZPA via the Herald:
In a caravan parked on the property, with a power cord running to it from the house, 36 cannabis plants were growing in individual 20 litre buckets.
They were about 60m tall, healthy, "meticulously cared for" and developing buds, the court was told.
They're growin' 'em BIG in Tauranga!
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I'll never forget a teacher at intermediate school wasting about 3 hours of my life teaching me about apostrophes, by tearing up the work and making me write it again. She was actually totally wrong about apostrophes, but that wasn't going to stop her making her point about how important they are. Over, and over and over. Until the wrong way was totally drummed into my head.
I do recall having to correct teachers on this kind of thing. It rarely went down well. My Standard 4 teacher in Greymouth, an elderly chap who rejoiced in the name Ces Murley, noted "can be too clever for his own good" on my school report.
I had pointed out that "protein" was a further exception to the rule "When the sound is "E", I before E, except after C", after he told us that "seize" was the only one.
But Ces *did* teach us a lot of old-fashioned principles of grammar that I fear my big-city peers never got. I've always been grateful for that.
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why not invest in a brightly coloured plastic crate and keep SFW Asterix & Tintin at ground level and well away from the *ahem* grown-up picture books?
Supernanny!
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TracyMac, those HTML macron codes are wonderful - thank you for making my life considerably easier.
So. Geeky.
And yet, so good.
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