Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Russell:
Just to add a name to your list of Kiwi "public intellectuals", I'd respectfully submit the name lRoy Parsons -- though I'm not sure if you'd count trade. :)
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Sorry for the thread-jack, but bitter-sweet news that Auckland booksellers Roger and Helen Parsons are selling the store they founded thirty-six years ago.
Bitter for obvious reasons; sweet because they’re at least not being forced into receivership, or driven out by one rent hike too far as so many independent bookstores have been in recent years.
I’m paying tribute to them in my PA Radio piece tomorrow (Radio Live, 7pm) where I say this:
I’m as bad as anyone at taking for granted things like decent bookstores — the small grace notes that made life more than mere endurance. So, I’ll take the chance to say thank you to Roger and Helen, and the rest of the remarkable clan.
Roy Parsons left New Zealand a better place than he found it, and his children will be able to say the same . That’s no small achievement, and one hell of a legacy to carry on.
Now, does any have a couple of hundred grand they could loan a brother? :)
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Hard News: Perverse Entertainment, in reply to Andre Alessi,
I read that as “You hate Christmas because you’re homosexual” and I was gearing myself up to agree with him. Everyone knows the gays hate seasonal interior decorating and drinking warm alcoholic drinks.
Heh... that's funny but seriously, how the hell do you rationally engage with someone who can't get his head around the idea that people who don't totally agree with his narrow, incoherent idea of ideological purity aren't Satanic Marxists.
Yes, I can be gay and vote for the National Party and regard Sarah Palin as an incompetent pathological liar and be friends with the evil Russell Brown and think stabbing a tagger is a very very bad thing. If that confuses and enrages Master Baiter, whatever.
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I discovered Redbaiter’s blog, TrueBlueNZ. I could comment there, but all I’d really be doing is trolling. And yet, it crowds with low-hanging fruit. Someone has to do some picking.
Please do, I gave up even trying to rationally engage with Master Baiter after crap like this:
Craig, nothing you say on Palin has any weight. You hate Christians because you’re homosexual. You’re free to say and think what ever you want of course, but don’t try and put across the idea that you’re some kind of white knight of objective commentary. You never have been and you never will be. You’re a left wing social liberal viewing politics and society through the prism of your homosexual experience, and your comments always come from that perspective. End of story.
I also should try and dig out his delightfully insane poo facial after DPF linked to my first PAR piece. Apparently it was "socialism" when Russell invited me to provide my labour in exchange for money -- which sounds a lot like the capitalistic free market at work to me, but what does a lefty faggot commie like me know? Also couldn't resist the every so slightly trollish observation that when Master Baiter started paying all my bills (and a generous per diem) he could start telling me who I should work for; otherwise he needed to stop being such a command-and-control Stalinist. :)
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Emma Hart,
We need another word for a “troll” who actually believes what they’re saying.
How about nixie – an undeliverable piece of mail nobody knows what to do with?
There’s one very simple way to avoid buying into a straw man argument, you know.
“What’s a Nubian?”
“Shut the fuck up.” -
Hard News: Media7: Doing it for the Kids, in reply to Sacha,
Most grown-ups are capable of distinguishing between content and process. The union’s complaint was aobut the process, wasn’t it?
And couched in the kind of language I expect from pissy teenagers who regard being ask to make an attempt to submit their course work on the due date as fascist oppression not a professional body. Ever so slightly ironic because I know plenty of teachers who've been on the receiving end of that kind of passive-aggressive "I'm the real victim here" nonsense from parents disinclined to take any ownership of their child's misconduct. That's not bullying, but it's a classic enabling and denial mechanism.
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Hard News: Media7: Doing it for the Kids, in reply to Russell Brown,
So I’m not inclined towards sympathy for her. I think she’s the worst Education minister in many years.
I never would have guessed that, Russell. :) But do you really think that NZEI PR was actually very helpful, as opposed to being (obviously) attention-grabbing? You know, the safety and wellbeing of children might just be marginally more important than a media slap-fight between the Minister and the union.
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
Just taking the thread even further off-topic for a second, apparently Nabakov once set an essay question in the exam for his Russian literature paper at Princeton: list the contents of Anna Karenina’s handbag. (This information is not given in the text.)
No it's not -- but anyone who'd bothered subject the set text to a close reading (a dying art, I know) should be able to must some pertinent observations about the symbolic and contextual importance of the small red bag Anna Karenin drops when she committs suicide (and bears to most of her squalid assignations)..
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Hard News: Limping Onwards, in reply to Megan Wegan,
Why on earth would one want that?
Well, I find it weirdly endearing that Murray Gell-Mann came up with the spelling of the commonly accepted name for the subatomic particle independently proposed by him and George Zweig in 1964 while browsing through James Joyce. He also had at least a passing knowledge of the Buddhist concept of the āryāṣṭāṅgamārga.
Not bad for a squint.
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Delicious irony watch. MIT (that’s the one in Cambridge, Massachusetts not Manukau) requires all those utilitarianly useful hard scientists to take (and pass) what’s known as HASS-D Requirement. That’s short for ‘Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Distribution’ because,
The Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS) Requirement is an indispensable part of every student’s undergraduate education that provides students with a broad understanding of human society, its traditions, and its institutions. The Requirement deepens students’ knowledge in a variety of cultural and disciplinary areas and encourages the development of sensibilities and skills vital to an effective and satisfying life as an individual, a professional, and a member of society.
To fulfill the HASS Requirement, each student must complete eight HASS subjects designated as counting towards the Requirement. Students are expected to complete at least one HASS subject each semester until the eight required subjects are complete. There are three components to the HASS Requirement: distribution, concentration, and HASS electives.
What the hell does a school that is hardly some soft option that hands out BA's for pot smoking and includes 79 Nobel laureates among its alumni and past and present faculty know about anything?
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