Posts by HORansome
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Just browsed over to the Espresso Engineers' site, which doesn't seem to have been updated since 2003/4 if this page is any indication.
Anyway.
I only started drinking coffee when I started my first PhD, and I was drinking instant for about a year. It was only whilst visiting one of my best friends, who lives down in Wellington, that I got a taste for espresso (although I think my first black coffee was actually a ristretto), and I can blame the fine people at the People's Coffee for that.
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I must be one of the very few people who enjoyed "The Fountain" because, in the end, it's just a story about a man trying to cope with the death of his wife. The Conquistador storyline is her attempt, via fiction, to survive death and the SF storyline is his fiction he uses to cope with her death.
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I'm going to pull my head from out of my thesis for a moment and say that I'm really thankful that, in the last election, no one made any mileage out of the fact that both John Key's mother is Jewish and that John Key was part of the international banking fraternity. I mean, we have, as our Prime Minister, an exemplar of the kind of thing anti-semite conspiracy theorists would love to point to and go "See! See!"
More generally (I've been following the thread but trying not to engage with it; this thesis must be finished), the rhetoric we're seeing here, with each side blaming the other and all of them putting forward either the claim that "This is what happens when you talk this way" or "This is what they intended to happen all along!" really is a textbook example of Hoftstader's commentary on American politics (which Russell has already referred to). For example, this post over at Peter Cresswell's blog argues that the Left have it (angry, hate-filled rhetoric) coming because the Left position is simply immoral. When the debate starts to be phrased in such a way that there is nothing good the other side have to offer, then you have pathological politics. Exactly what you do to fix that, I don't know.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
To be fair, Rich, you haven't ended up as a dustman yet. The prophecy might still come true.
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Come come, there's no need to bring up that book by Henry Rider Haggard.
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Hard News: My Year in Culture, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Whilst I liked a lot of "This Is Not My Life," I felt the show really had no idea where it was going. I had hoped a second series might deliver the goods, so to speak (the premise was decent but the series was several episodes too long; it should have been six tight episodes rather than a meandering thirteen).
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Hegel only gets pulled out if the bomb ever drops. There's just no other appropriate time for that particular bit of the old thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to nzlemming,
Has anyone ever seen a joyous/non-sad ninja? They always seem so stern, so serious and not particularly happy about the world...
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Pynchon confuses everyone, including Pynchon.
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Hard News: The Wellington Cables, in reply to nzlemming,
Oh, for sure, some business as usual may well be conspiratorial (or conspiracy-lite) but quite a bit of the business as usual will be conspiracy-like but not, when parsed properly, actually conspiratorial.