Posts by giovanni tiso
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Goff would have been a lot smarter to actually attack the cheapness of such empty words as "nannystate", "politically correct" and " social engineering."
He didn't use number one and three, at least not in the published version that Russell linked to. Does anybody know if he did in the delivery?
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Dear lord. I understand the bind that Labour finds itself into, but that was an awful speech.
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Send the man some coffee!
An even more affordable option would be to }buy his latest book. Just to kill the time that separates us from the release of Mr. Hawyood's, you understand.
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I'd lower the threshold (say 4%) and abolish the stupid electorate rule whereby the threshold magically disappears for your party. Rodney gets to bring Rodney and nobody else, ditto Anderton, and that way we also get rid of those silly shenanigans like Wellington central for Prebble back in the day when Bolger told National voters not to vote for the National candidate.
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(Italy comes to mind, though Giovanni would know 10 times as much as I do - I think we discussed this some months ago and he said that it was stable in terms of not having frequent elections, but the makeup of the government frequently shifted as parties ended up in or out of governance agreements, I studied it a little in 1993 but not since)
We had the same parties, they just bickered internally and forced endless early elections in the hope to gain more power within the ruling coalition. But Italy is not a good comparison, we had a very strong Communist Party and if it ever looked like they had whiff of winning an election, bombs would start going off. So it was Tories all the way! I trust nobody is going to shoot down a plane if it looks like Labour has a chance of turning the tables in two years.
Although if the referendum question is asked artfully enough, who knows?
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always trotting off to high school reunions
His/hers, or somebody else's?
There are a bunch of people out there who over the years have tried to make me join all sorts of high school former pupils groups and forcibly include me in their mailing lists - darn Internet. Luckily, living a whole world away saves me from coming up with excuses or (more likely) pointed suggestions for alternative places where to insert the invite.
Yay for Emma postage.
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Does he tend to say yes or no based on an evaluation of the person asking? Or is it fairly automatic, anyone who wants a free one can have it?
I don't know the workings quite so intimately, but I think asking if you didn't need to would be frowned upon.
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There are regular customers who simply never pay for their coffee - it removes the unpleasantness of having to go begging for it. Or somebody could walk into a bar and ask "is there a paid-for coffee?" and the barista will say yes or no.
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I really think it's less about not knowing what they're missing and more just an ingrained cultural disinterest in coffee, in the sense of the urban national identity we've elevated our coffee cult(ure) to.
This is the part where I tell you all (again! "On the Internet nobody can punch you on the side of the head") about the Neapolitan custom of sometimes paying for an extra coffee when you have yours so that somebody who might not be able to afford later that day will be able to have one free not just on the house, but on the community as it were. Just to highlight that over there (and it's a place that has been gripped for centuries by the most dreadful poverty, not what you'd call espresso-sipping elites), the "tazzulella 'e cafè" is regarded as a basic human right.
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Perhaps the solution to London coffee is simply to take your own machine.
A friend of mine got kicked out of a cafe in France by asking to be allowed to make his own coffee. He was still going to pay, but the machine was the regular Gaggia kind and he just couldn't stand to see it be abused one more time. The owners didn't take it as constructive criticism.