Posts by Stephen Judd
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At the end of the day it is just young people with too much money and not enough sense. The best way to stop boy racers then is to hit them in the pocket - with compulsory third party insurance which is so high for modified vehicles driven by teens that they can't afford it.
Hear, hear.
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I'm pretty sure I've encountered retarded slugs that have greater cognisance of the word "consequences".
Well, duh. Of course. If you had any appreciation of consequences you wouldn't be racing unsafe and often illegal vehicles in unsafe and unsafe and often illegal conditions for fun.
Personally, I think being made to spend every Saturday night handcuffed to stocks in the hospital emergency department would be a more appropriate punishment that having your car crushed...
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There are just 10 sorts of people---those who read binary and those who don't.
I have that t-shirt.
There have been quite a few puzzled looks from people who are just a little bit too nervous to ask.
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Oh yeah, I bought some cheap-as Wordsworth Edition paperbacks.
I am now ploughing through The Newgate Calendar , which is a bunch of 18th century true crime stories, as circulated in the pamphlets of the time. It should be compulsory reading for the hang'em high brigade. Death was the penalty for almost everything under the Bloody Code, but viciousness of crime was no better, and maybe worse than what we see today.
The whole thing is in loving detail and wrapped in sanctimonious prose (obviously the reader is only interested for moral instruction, yeah right). $2 new from Real Groovy Wellington.
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it might make for a pretty boring discussion if no-one is allowed to have an opinion.
Sure, but equally, in the event that you trespass on my limited but deep zone of expertise, I reserve the right to mock you mercilessly.
Everyone's allowed an opinion, but not all opinions are equally grounded in knowledge, and I don't think it's a great sin to point that out.
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Memorising RGB codes
What? Memorise? What's to memorise? One sees a value for red, green, and blue, and it is a simple mental operation to take the three hexadecimal values and convert to a colour.
One of my workmates was a bit crook a few weeks ago and sent around a message reading "At home sick with #b3770099 coloured bile."
I thought it was a bit dodgy having 4 hex numbers in there, until someone pointed out that the last one was the alpha channel indicating transparency...
... now that's geeky.
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I read Jorge Sandoval's book Surviving Pinochet over the holidays. (The author is a Chilean refugee, tortured by the Pinochet regime as a young man, and now a Wellingtonian and prominent in the cycling world).
I found it affecting and irritating in equal measure. There are aspects of Sandoval's personality which I do not find simpatico. On the other hand, these stories need to be told, I approve in principle of warty self-portraits, and there is no doubt that his is a story of great determination in overcoming a series of setbacks that would have thwarted many other people. Certainly a bloke who uses his experience in a Chilean prison camp to help counsel prisoners at Rimutaka is someone with considerable strength of character.
When I visited Dad in Hamilton I reclaimed my copies of Volumes 2 and 3 of Larry Gonick's incredible Cartoon History of the Universe . These books comprise a marvellous and insightful illustrated precis of world history. Lots of good gags too (eg, in the chapters on the rise of Islam, the prophet is always just out of frame...)
I holed up with a Portuguese dictionary to read Abreu's O Barracau do Mestre Waldemar, which is about the early days of capoeira angola in Bahia. Not exactly gripping stuff for the lay reader but you know, it's good to tax the brain when it has spare capacity.
At Scorpio Books in Christchurch, which must be one of the top 5 bookshops in the country, I bought Nicolas Ostler's A Biography of Latin . It had just a little bit more Latin in it than I'm capable of unaided, but it was a jolly good read anyway and perfectly accessible for the non-Latinist.
On the video front, I got the Fred Dagg DVD set for Christmas, which I am greatly enjoying. It strikes me now that either he captured a certain kind of New Zealand male speech absolutely perfectly, or that we have all used him as a model, but perhaps it's both.
That'll be the phone.
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Before I was born, my mum and dad lived in New Mexico for a bit - Dad was lecturing at the university in Las Cruces. One of the things that precipitated their return after about a year was my mother suffering from the sense of being a foreigner. (And New Mexico and New Zealand are vastly, hugely different). It can take a lot of mental effort to be foreign.
Born and bred in Hamilton as I am, I couldn't wait to get away from it, and at some level I always assumed that I might well end up emigrating. So it came to me as a surprise, a shame almost, to realise whenever I travelled overseas that it was a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. And the biggest reason is, I don't want to be a foreigner, or at least, the pleasure of strangeness and the freedom of action you have abroad doesn't compensate me for the lack of roots.
(There is a whole genre of Irish music - emigration songs. Here in the ex-colonies, where we think of ourselves as a desirable destination, we don't think about homesickness much.)
On the whole, I would rather sit here and complain, and in my own small way attempt to improve the place, than seek abroad for satisfaction. I can imagine living overseas for a few months, or even a couple of years, to really get to know somewhere, but I can't imagine never coming home, or home being other than New Zealand. The 15 year old me is deeply disappointed in the 39 year old me for coming to that conclusion.
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No, I have no idea what that would look like either.
Sacha, somewhat like this, I expect:
Evocative image. (SFW)
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Apropos the lycra - I'm afraid I tend to tune out any comment which features rude remarks about lycra-wearing cyclists.
Most cyclists I see are the commuting-from-A-to-B kind, and they don't generally wear lycra. They wear their work clothes, or a t-shirt and shorts.
If it comes to that, Jack Elder should be popping in any moment to tell you that he is a responsible lycra-clad citizen...
People for whom evil lycra-clad cyclists are typical are people who are not paying attention. Your aggro, rule-breaking lycra-wearing cyclist is no more typical of cyclists than the aggro, inattentive SUV driver is of motorists. I don't think anyone, cyclist or motorist, (lots of us are both, of course), can have a productive discussion if these reductive stereotypes are all we have to offer.