Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 1: Beach…, in reply to Raymond A Francis,
Its funny, no strange, that people feel free to say and do things to red heads that would be quite unpardonable about people of any other colour
Which pretty much proves that no-one really believes that irascible bloodnut stereotype. If they did they'd be extra cautious about winding them up.
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Hard News: Behaving badly at the bottom…, in reply to FletcherB,
Last time I got hauled in there was a fellow prospective juror in a beige safari suit, with a pale yellow toupee fashioned from the kind of material that you used to see in those 1970s fibre optic lamps. He was very intense and keen, and the defense seemed rather taken with him. Not so with me, though I had to to endure a dismal couple of hours of fluffing about until my deliverance.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
The Spanish Empire tells us that even if you produce lots of gold (and/or silver) yourself (for a variation of “produce” meaning “steal and enslave people to dig up for you”), your economy is still fucked. Although, to be fair, that could also have been the massive inbreeding among the leadership.
According to Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding:
"O Caribbee! O Barbaree!
O shores of South Amerikee!
O, never go there: if the truth be told,
You'll get more kicks than Spanish gold.'"Like Huck Finn, Lindsay's 1918 Australian kidlit "classic" has its offensive passages, notably:
So I'll tell you what I'll do
You unmitigated Jew,
As a trifling satisfaction,
Why, I'll beat you black and blueAn expurgated version has long been available, and was presumably the one with which the unhappy Jewish grandfather who wrote an aggrieved letter to the Sydney Morning Herald a few years back was familiar. Unfortunately the copy he bought for his American relatives contained the offending text, leaving them rather underwhelmed with the glories of Australian childrens' lit.
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Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 1: Beach…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
the truly noisome carrion
call of the charnel channel
Carrion Screaming - like Dr. Who only worse than Dr. Who. -
Hard News: Holiday Open Thread 2:…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I believe before Baycorp gets involved the world bank gives you money on the basis that you restructure your whole economy and welfare system and your people riot in the streets.
And you don’t get the money until you can prove that it’s a proper riot in the streets. A few bored kids biffing bottles won’t cut it. iirc, some public shit has to get set on fire.
I heard of someone who lasted for one mission with Baycorp. The bad debtors set a pair of white English bull terriers onto him, the kind with squinty eyes and horrible genitals. The realisation that there had to be a better way of earning a living came to him as the larger of the pair was hanging as dead weight with its jaws attached to his bum.
That was a couple of decades ago. Presumably Baycorp are rather more hardened up these days.
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Hard News: Behaving badly at the bottom…, in reply to ,
I watched television last night for the first time in ages. What struck me most was that the creativity in the advertising has crapped out.
Dumb is cyclical. Just because it happens to be big at the moment doesn’t mean that any old tosser can be an agency creative. It takes a special tosser. As any meatworks manager will confirm, a good Judas sheep is worth its weight in Veuve Clicquot.
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Hard News: Behaving badly at the bottom…, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
If John Key resigns then a whole lot of reporters would have to cut short their holidays and crawl back to work. But this isn’t really that important.
It’d be even more important if Labour had won the 2008 election, and Clark were still PM. Unless I’ve somehow missed it, Key isn’t on record as having expressed a political interest in finding the defendants as guilty as possible.
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Hard News: Behaving badly at the bottom…, in reply to HORansome,
Come come, there’s no need to bring up that book by Henry Rider Haggard.
Some believe that Haggard's novel, with its depiction of the struggle against the despotic 2000-year-old Queen Ayesha, was a thinly veiled attack on the political stasis of the late Victorian era (Dear Ghod, when is she ever going to die?). If Clark had won a fourth term it just might have gained a bit of renewed traction . . .
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Keith Locke, three years ago, being naively optimistic:
"Reportedly, any court cases resulting from the terrorism raids may take until 2009 to be resolved. In the wake of costly Crown mistakes made during the Zaoui case which lengthened the proceedings considerably, it would be wise for the Prime Minister to refrain from any further comments that could taint the legal proceedings."
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According to those worthies at Environment Canterbury, whose authority is untainted by anything so grubby as having been democratically elected, "The earthquakes being felt in Christchurch today are still part of the normal aftershock sequence from September’s magnitude 7.1 earthquake."
So, rest relatively easy folks. Except, according to Earthquake Commission (EQC) chief executive Ian Simpson, they’re a whole new quake swarm. Does the EQC know something that Environment Canterbury doesn’t? Not necessarily. As the Press dutifully reports:
"That means that people whose property was damaged by the quakes will have three months to lodge their claim and there is no need to rush home to check if they are away,” Mr Simpson said.
What they don’t mention is that any claims for damage – and there’s been rather a lot – will have to be lodged from scratch. Think of your excess, and don’t even dream of tacking them on to any claims you might have made for those unrelated earlier quakes.