Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: Popular Paranoiac Politics, in reply to Matthew Littlewood,
I don’t know what it was about Christchurch in the early 80s . . .
It was the centre of the universe.
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Hard News: Popular Paranoiac Politics, in reply to giovanni tiso,
People don’t get Blues Brothers references no more. It’s a sad commentary on these troubled times we live in.
Especially since Leonard Cohen, and some members of his current band, have appropriated The Look.
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Hard News: Popular Paranoiac Politics, in reply to HORansome,
“New Zealand’s Next Dictator” will start in the new TV season . . .
At last a chance for all those who were considered for Dancing With the Stars, but were rejected because they couldn’t dance.
According to Paul Goldsmith’s hagiography, Brash cut a pretty mean rug in his younger days. Somehow, though, he doesn't seem a natural goose-stepper.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Neil Morrison,
Having Obama as president and Assange a rather strange self-promoter is a division of labour in complete agreement with their skills, intelligence and morals.
I recall much the same faith in the natural order being expressed by a commenter at Kiwiblog around five years back, only the anointed one then was Dubya, with an uppity Noam Chomsky as his antichrist. While Chomsky was damned in that instance in rather more scatological terms than are the norm here at PAS, it seems a symptom of a kind of creeping gentility when Assange's main crime is to be "rather strange".
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Keir Leslie,
. . . it is what the actual Britons I know read it as.
Cos if they don't, they're neither actual nor proper.
Dashed handy method for those occasions where one is unable to find some blighter's credentials in one's well-thumbed copy of Burke's Peerage and Gentry. -
Speaker: Dancing with Dingoes, Part II, in reply to recordari,
I know it’s unseemly to laugh at one’s own jokes . . .
Ah well, only because it's Friday . . .
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Speaker: Dancing with Dingoes, Part II, in reply to recordari,
We won the Pav! Hooray for us!
Damn! If only Her Ditziness the Parkeress had been informed of that before she took the plunge and had her upper cranium replaced with a steamed pudding.
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Hard News: Wikileaks: The Cable Guys, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
. . . make the currently existing system function the way it’s supposed to.
Which would be attempting to re-establish the kind of openness promised by the freedom of information legislation that most Western democracies put in place in the 1970s?
In retrospect the hopes for a promised new era of government transparency and accountability might seem rather utopian. The privatisations of the ensuing decades meant that governments could weasel out of the commitments they'd once paid lip service to by invoking commercial confidentiality.
. . . don’t you think it is pertinent that Sarah Ferguson’s ex is open to the idea that a bit of corruption is ok?
As an example of how things might be done in a situation of unfettered commercial confidentiality, it's very pertinent.
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Speaker: Dancing with Dingoes, Part II, in reply to Islander,
-as do the eucalypts (Murray Ball has an excellent novel about them.)
Although Murray Ball is reputedly still on deck, he’s chiefly remembered for a comic strip largely narrated by a mute dog, about a crumbling tenement where the inhabitants slowly perish from something like an advanced form of tinea. I know it’s an easily made typo, but this is surely the guy you meant.
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Mrs Jolley rushed at the oven, to bake a cake, although it was not a day of celebration, but she liked to bake, a pink cake for choice, with non-parelles, and something written on it. With the Mothers' Union and the Ladies' Guild, with the Fellowships, Senior and Junior, pink was always popular, and what is popular is safe.
Mrs Jolley sang and baked. She loved to sing the pinker hymns. She would even sing those of which she did not know the words. She sang and baked. And saw pink. She loved the Jesus Christ of long pink face and languid curls, in words and windows. All was right then. All the homes and kiddies saved. All was sanctified by cake.
Patrick White, Riders in the Chariot