Posts by Lucy Stewart
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Karl Urban is strapping on a stethoscope to play Leonard "Bones" McCoy, the Starship's Enterprise's medical officer, in J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek" feature for Paramount.
Okay, that I _can get excited over (although I'm still disappointed the very brief James Kyson Lee-as-Sulu rumours didn't pan out.)
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With regards to the poor quality of refreshments on Air NZ flights (about which I could not agree more) I was astonished to hear an American friend heading for Antarctica wax lyrical about her Auckland-Christchurch flight and how much better the museli bar and coffee she had were than anything she'd had on an American airline. I can only conclude that we really don't know how lucky we are.
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Here is another story I heard: The four year old daughter of a female of my acquaintance got up and left the room after the All Black's lost. When her Mum went to see where she was, she was in her room with all her All Black figurines lined up, and she was knocking them over one by one.
In my student flat that morning, there were three people watching the game: me, the female Indian international student, and the cat (also a girl). The guys were giving a bad name to twenty-something uni students by staying in bed and getting up only to look at us funny and complain about the noise. And then they laughed at us when the final whistle blew. I find their lack of true New Zealand masculinity very depressing.
...Well, not really. It means I can make a good claim to being the man of the house.
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One night only a few months ago, checking to see that all was well upstairs, I heard a little voice chatting away from a darkened room. Peeking through the crack in the door I could see Busyboy hunched over a book, holding his dim night-light up to the page and tracing the words with all the focus of a man breaking the Enigma Code.
This reminds me somewhat of my younger brother, who (unlike your boy) was an extremely reluctant reader - Footrot Flats was the real key to his literacy. Those cartoons taught him everything from what life might have been like for our dad growing up on a farm to where babies come from. For ages, it was the only thing he'd read.
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WTF is up with this one?
What does an elephant have to do with anything?
It's the symbol of the Republican party. The Democrats have a donkey. One can't help feeling that both PR teams were off their game that day.
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I should probably also note that while I'm the right age to have watched it as a kid, I didn't, or I don't remember more than thirty seconds of it. I went because the trailer looked cool and stuff blew up. And, lo, the stuff blew up, but the non-explosive bits also held my interest.
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As the presumed target audience of this movie (about the right age to have nostalgia for the cartoon, unreservedly geeky) I couldn't disagree more with this review. I liked Transformers because it didn't try to be more than what it was: a movie about giant alien toy robots. Perhaps I'm easily pleased, but I thought the humour was funny and on-target, the script was well-paced, and the action scenes weren't too long (I hate to stereotype my sex, but...girl, okay? People shooting each other for long periods bores me silly, in print or on screen.) I thought the minor characters and plotlines added to the movie. No, it wasn't deep and meaningful, but it was a very good popcorn flick. I'd even go see it again.
And, honestly, what's wrong with a bit of topicality? The dig at Dubya was simple humour, but it was only about ten seconds of a two hour plus film, which is all it needed to be. The willingness of High Command to plot and torture...that's not trying to make a point, is acknowledging reality. That is what the American military and high command has admitted to doing or being prepared to do. I'm all for escapism, but given that escapism is often commentary on the real world, there is nothing wrong with acknowledging the faults of the real world. The difference, of course, is that in the real world there are no giant robots to make everything right, and the Secretary of Defence would have a lot more bodyguards.( Frankly, I'm just surprised that Homeland Security weren't in charge of the evil government conspiracy; TV sci-fi (Jericho, Heroes) certainly has them pinned as the villains du jour.)
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• Read this after tonight's final of Supernatural (TV2); season two has already finished in the US and season three has a guest-star from – OMG! – cylon babe Tricia Helfer.
Actually, the Tricia Helfer ep, Roadkill, occurs in the second half of season two. She was pretty good in it, despite a script with a "twist" that any good horror/sci-fi/fantasy viewer could pick up about five minutes in. I like Supernatural, but no one ever said it was an awfully smart programme.
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I'll chip in, although my experiences are clearly the exception here: I'm twenty, and I moved down to Christchurch just over two years ago for uni. I've never felt threatened in the centre city, I've never been to a party that got out of control, all my binge drinking experiences (not the majority of my alcohol consumption by any means) have been strictly among small groups with no violence involved, and the closest thing I've seen to what's being described is a party over the road from my flat getting a bit noisy. And the only real trouble that threatened was my drunk flatmates' plan to charge up a huge capacitor they'd got from uni, toss it across the road, and see what happened when someone picked it up. (Luckily the police arrived and everyone dispersed, sans violence, before they could put that plan into action. Electrical engineers are scary people.)
Admittedly, I am a dull and boring person who tries to avoid going into the centre city to party at all costs, but when I've been there...I just feel like I must be living in a completely different city to the one being described. I don't think I've ever even seen a skinhead.
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I have an Indian flatmate who is of Bengali descent. She spent all yesterday proclaiming loudly that she was Bangladeshi, really, since all her grandparents came from there, and no one else was to say a word otherwise. She was also gleefully anticipating riots in the streets of Pakistan.
These South Asian types really take their cricket seriously.