Posts by James Butler
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Hard News: Auckland, so much enormity to…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Further to the entertainment thing, I gather there have been urgent requests for more live acts for the later stages of the tournament -- presumably for Captain Cook Wharf -- and the Music Industry Commission has been busy trying to fulfill them.
Mean Girls, please please please. Cleanse the wharf with blood and spilled Heineken.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Carol Stewart,
Since when did Labour stand for naked self interest? In the last election, I seem to remember that National's schtick was that tax cuts would put more money in your pocket.
There's the problem right there - it worked. And with Labour so bereft of ideas and vision at the moment, "well it worked for them!" might just be a tempting strategy.
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OnPoint: Transcription of new Rick Perry…, in reply to Keith Ng,
Ha. I'm pretty sure the NZ flag doesn't work.
OTOH, an Iranian flag almost certainly would.
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to Emma Hart,
Books about sex tend to not actually be about sex. They’re about puberty or reproduction. Not the same thing.
Yep. Took us a while to work that out.
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Up Front: It's Not Sex, and It's Not Education, in reply to BenWilson,
Tell me this is about Wal’s relationship with Cheeky Hobson?
Gawd I forgot about that altogether. I though it was about the “bitches box”, and Cecil the ram.
Don't forget Cooch's "cousin" Kathy.
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We taught our son about sex by reading him the book "Where Did I Come From?" when he was about 8, which has required us to add some amendments since; although the tone and illustrations are pretty good, it is a relentlessly heterosexual, reproductive sex-oriented (and old) book. One effect of this was brought to our attention a year or so later when we tried to explain (in fairly broad terms) my vasectomy to him - he sat listening, seeming to understand the concept, until he interrupted with a puzzled question: "But if you don't want another baby, why would you have sex?"
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to BenWilson,
As I recall that puts us at the top for proportion of nationals overseas.
Talking out of a hole in my hat here, but I would be surprised if any number of small Pacific nations with significant expat populations in, er, New Zealand weren't ahead of us.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Lilith __,
I wonder if you could train a tree to be a house
Our wisteria is doing its best to make a sunroom of our deck, so there's a start.
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Busytown: Sons for the Return Home, in reply to Danielle,
I wasn't away from NZ long enough to have this problem, but I know my husband does in reverse, having been gone nearly a decade. He will visit his hometown in the USA and every year or two it's mutated irrevocably. People don't live where they used to, or they died, or that thing everyone did - no one does that thing any more.
Shit, I get that on my visits back to Wellington.
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Hard News: Everybody's News, in reply to Andre Alessi,
He made a comment about Americans “deserving everything they got.”
That attitude shook me and, I suppose, made me aware of a genuine undercurrent of anti-Americanism I’d never noticed before in some parts of New Zealand culture.
In 2002 I spent a few months as a Lay Clerk at Saint Paul's Cathedral in Wellington. While I was there, the dean - an american guy who had been in New Zealand only a couple of years - had to resign, because of abuse and threats directed at him and his family. I remember him saying that as the public face of a religious organization he expected to have to deal with a certain amount of shit, but his children were being taunted at school, and he was receiving threats in the mail, and he didn't feel they could remain in the country.
I think it shook a lot of people to think that an Anglican cathedral could harbour that kind of vitriol; of course those who are regularly involved in church politics wouldn't be surprised at all.