Posts by st ephen
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Hot dang, Deborah, you write like the enlightenment personified.
This was post #666 - I'm sure there's a Dan Brown novel in that...
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And the question of whether churches should pay taxes or not is different from the question of whether there should be a concept of "civil marriage" distinct from the existing rituals such as "Catholic marriage", with the State only recognising the former.
Seems very sensible to have an all-inclusive, merged CU/civil marriage, and let the sky-fairy-folk do their own thing until such time as either:
a) Tess converts everyone to Catholicism, at which time "civil marriage" is abolished and replaced with "Catholic marriage", or
b) Giovanni and his pike have finished their work. -
Lapsed Catholics are the best.
Maybe, though I think lapsed Catholics provide ample evidence to justify slapping a big red R18 sticker on every church door. Never mind the pedophile priests and sadistic nuns - that's some heavy shit they're dumping on the vulnerable minds of children every week.
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We weren't married when we bought our house, and hadn't been together for three years. Our lawyer's eyes briefly lit up with dollar signs, thinking of all the clauses and sub-clauses he could draft up. He was a bit put out when we said "write down that we want the Matrimonial Properties Act to apply to us as from today, and we'll sign that". But he couldn't think why it wouldn't work.
When CU's came along we though we'd have one of those (kind of like moving into the ghetto in solidarity), but it hasn't turned out to be any higher a priority than marriage was. And as far as legal protection goes, didn't the Relationships (Statutory References) Act deal with the "next of kin" issue?
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In the date rape case, a defense lawyer might want to exclude all or most women under 40..
I believe studies indicate that it's the other way round - female jurors tend to have less sympathy toward the female victim, so it's the prosecution who want to challenge them.
The only time I got onto a jury, the lawyers used up their 12 challenges within the first 14 people, and were then stuck with the rest of us. Maybe that's why the deadbeat ratio was so high (although it would've taken a pretty switched-on lawyer to notice that one of us was convinced he could determine guilt through the reading of auras).
(Q for the lawyers out there - are jurors supposed to dob in fellow jurors who are clearly not up to the task? Or is it just a given that the "peers" potentially sitting in judgement on you will have "life experiences" that cover the full spectrum from fact to fantasy?) -
Well the report I heard on the radio seemed to be making a big deal about the skyrocketing Asian population of Auckland Grammar, which is perhaps the real reason they want to draft in the offspring of Old Boys (as in Good Ol' Boys I guess). Something similar happened with academically-selective Sydney Boys High School, to the extent that they had to withdraw their rugby team from the big private schools' competition (they were the only state school involved) after a few too many 100 point thrashings. Cue much wailing from the Old Boys, who weren't mollified by their alma mater's new-found success at badminton and table tennis...
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I just don’t get all this hostility toward the Nanny State. I’ve watched several variations of the always-popular Nanny programmes on TV. In each case, the sensible nanny rocks up to a house with a couple of delinquent, out-of-control brats and gets them to sort their shit out so they can bring their children up properly. End result is a house full of model citizens. What's not to like?
All this hate for Nannies and love for Boot Camps suggests to me some kind of fetish…
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Love this idea that anyone who rides a bike on the road has to accept that these days roads are dangerous places full of vehicles in a hurry to get places, and since cyclists are the ones who will come off worst if something goes wrong, they must shoulder most of the responsibility blah blah blah.
Different story with our happy drunk friend Lisa from the ALAC ad, apparently... ;-)
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Whoops. things=thighs. Bit Freudian there, sorry. Mind you, the point is the same.
Heh heh. "Point". He said "Point". heh heh.
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There's a dynamic that happens between partners where one tends toward a more rational, logical, dispassionate way of approaching things and the other tends to respond more emotionally and intuitively to events. Often-times the engineer from Mars and the artist from Venus get along just fine, but when they clash, it can infuriate the Venusian to see the Martian maintaining their cool (and therefore dignity - misplaced value judgement aside), while they themselves are a sobbing, bawling mess. Goading and/or physical attacks are then a way to provoke a response that evens things up a little.
At least, that's what my girlfriend told me in one of her calmer, more rational moments. :-) For my part, I quite enjoyed learning to stop being infuriatingly smug, and instead unleash a Tourette-like string of abuse. I could sound fairly convincing too - at least until I ran out of vocab and started dropping things like "money-funster".