Posts by Stephen Judd
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the section of it involved in transport planning
Honestly, I feel very sorry for the transport people. They have to figure out solutions that piss everyone off the least.
Suppose you are trying to make it safe for people from Onehunga/Royal Oak etc to bike into town (or at least to Newmarket). I don't see any alternative corridors to Manukau Road, and I also predict that any attempts to limit people's ability to park on the side, or to partition off a continuous cycle lane, will provoke howls of outrage from the motorists.
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Lucy: I don't want to give you the impression that I approve of cycling on the footpath. I'm just noting that to me it seems to be becoming policy.
That's why we see these stupid "cycleways" that are actually footpaths with a strip of paint down the middle, with pedestrians roaming all over them, safe for nobody. Recent planning for roads in Auckland and Wellington seems to assume that they are only for cars, and everyone else will just have to share whatever surface area is left. Example.
At bottom we have a chicken and egg problem. Roads are safe for cyclists and pedestrians when there are lots of them; cyclists and pedestrians tend to avoid unsafe roads.
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I stick to the footpaths, and will just take the fines, if any cop can catch me, for most of it.
Ben, a few years ago a community constable came to lecture my daughter's primary school on road safety and actually told them to ride on the footpath (wise advice for a child around Cornwall Park School, sadly). I have also noticed councils building/marking cycleways that debouch onto footpaths where the road has no shoulder, with the clear implication that you are to ride on the footpath.
When I was a boy in the 70s, cops would make you get off your bike or ride on the road if they caught you.
I don't know what the road code says these days, but riding on the footpath seems to be turning into policy. Roads are only for cars, you know.
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Totally unconvinced about the safety of a child in a seat on my bike. One slip or crash and bang!
I think there's a big difference between a slow pootle on a flat street laid out according to Woonerf principles in the Netherlands and trying to get down Khyber Pass at rush hour.
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I wish I could remember properly how they continued to discuss whether it was ok to flout your organisation's IT policy if you were the one who wrote it, and whether men should bet paid more than women, and how to avoid their flatmate. I haven't felt so old, wise, and smug by comparison in a long time.
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Apropos Lincoln: I was on the Mt Vic bus yesterday afternoon, and there were two very loud young men in the back seat behind me.
"Lincoln was gay you know."
"No way."
"Yeah, he fucked men bro."
"How do you know?"
"It's knowledge , bro." -
Perhaps some of us Wellington-based PA regulars could organise a less formal get-together?
Yes please. Some sort of Lesser Blend.
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I still do mental double takes when Germans talk about their famous philosopher Kant, which sounds exactly like
When I was first asked (by a francophone German) "Do you like crêpes?" my first response was wondering why anyone would like crap.
All ads are a form of social engineering, for heaven's sake.
What kind of communist are you? Social engineering belongs in the hands of private enterprise! If people don't want to be beaten by their domestic partners, let them pay for their own television advertisements.
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Pwned.
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John: no worries. It's the rest of the site which is increasingly scary...
You're quite right - Jewish law on sexual relations in marriage is framed in terms of the husband's conjugal duties to the wife. Failure to provide them to her is grounds for divorce.
(I have a book which claims that Turkish Muslims used to have to promise to keep their wives supplied with coffee, which strikes me as potentially relevant to modern marriage vows in Wellington...)
I didn't get a proper education in this department, and am no authority, but basically the Talmud is a collection of sometimes quite disparate opinions, stories, anecdotes and weird fragments from a bunch of 4th century rabbis, presented side by side - but they don't constitute the law in themselves, there are literally volumes of (often contradictory) commentary authored over centuries that do that. Kind of like English common law, there's plenty of change and contradiction even though there's a nominal adherence to precedent. In other words, in the event that you can locate a Jewish ass-driver in this day and age, and he fails to satisfy his wife on a monthly schedule, I doubt very much whether the passage you quoted really literally applies.
Back on topic - my late mother, who was a staunch feminist, used to have a 70s poster that said "Where is it written that women have to..." followed by a long list of classic unpleasant stereotype female tasks. My dad would ask where it was written that husbands have to bury the dead cats. And it's true. The price you pay for being slack in cleaning the toilet is dead animal disposal.