Posts by Emma Hart
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Can anyone possibly explain why the main-stream media keep on referring to Ross Taylor as a Samoan??
It's just one of those tags that media and game commentators depend on. They need to have A Fact to tell you about every single player. We used to play shot words with it. How long would it be before you were told
- Shane Bond was a policeman
- Jacob Oram was tall
- the Marshall twins were twins
- Chris Cairns was Lance Cairns's son
etc. All blindingly obvious, all frequently repeated
Irene van Dyck's nationality gets mentioned all the time. You shake the teapot really hard, you can probably make a storm, but I suspect if his Samoan heritage was never mentioned, people would get shitty about that too.
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I have, mere inches away from my hand, a CD on which Billy Bragg sings Blake's Jerusalem. It was BB who taught me the words and enabled me to join with ex-Timaru Boys High students in singing it drunkenly on New Year's Eves.
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I couldn't agree with David (Haywood) more. My boss and one of my co-workers are Canadian and we ended up having a big discussion last year about flags once I realised just how hideous the Red Ensign was.
Talking to them, the two British and four American women on staff, not ONE of them could pick the New Zealand flag out of a line-up. There were only two things they identified as 'kiwi': the little brown fuzzy fruit, and the Silver Fern. Show them a silver fern on a black background, they think New Zealand. Hardly a scientific survey, I know.
Watch us play England and in between the wincing, notice the Barmy Army is flying the George Cross more than the Union Jack. (Sorry, the Union Flag, assuming Dr Who is a reliable source of information.)
When my kids' school did Fake Olympics a couple of years back, all the kids wanted to be in either Japan or Canada - solely because they flags were distinctive and relatively easy to draw.
Yeah, I don't really give a monkey's one way or the other about the flag. But if I was overseas, going to a cricket game, and I wanted to mark my nationality, I'd choose the Fern. It's never looked like an emblem of surrender on the chest of an All Black. The helmet of a Black Cap, possibly. We'll all sit around debating the flag intellectually for decades more, but I think while we do it, the Fern will be taking over as New Zealand's unofficial flag.
And 'Why Does Love Do This to Me' as our unofficial national anthem.
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Metiria Turei is Maori and has much better and more thought out policies, IMHO.
I have a friend who switched over to the Maori roll after Georgina Beyer stood down in the Wairarapa. She now splits her vote, and I had thought that was what a lot of people on the Maori roll do, despite wandering reporters asking people at Ratana which one party they vote for. After examining every party's treaty policies at the last election, she party-voted Green.
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I went to a cricket game at the Cake Tin once, by train. I was awestruck by the ease and efficiency of Wellington public transport. Despite the fact that the Black Caps lost (shock horror etc) the queue for the train afterwards was good-natured and fun.
Man, I wish I was in Wellington right now. Mostly because my kids are in Christchurch and it's still bloody raining.
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How can anyone's Top Ten Bush Moments be missing can't find the door?
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Christianity, Islam, Scientologists, Mormons, Buddhists, etc, they're all equal and equally ridiculous to me. I have no problem with believers of the above expressing their views in whatever way floats their boat but no way do I respect those views. It just boils down to my invisible friend is better than your invisible friend.
See, this is like 'all politicians are corrupt', so then you stop discriminating between really corrupt ones, and not so corrupt ones. Buddhism is a non-theistic religion, David, so it would be hard for Buddhists to be saying "my invisible friend is better than your invisible friend". Likewise, religions like the Baha'i faith and some branches of paganism recognise the validity of all religious paths. To say that all religions claim to have a monopoly on truth is to be unfairly nice to the ones that do: it's NOT a precondition of religion. It is particularly strong in the Abrahamic religions, which is amusing considering how similar they are.
(I'm an atheist myself, I'm just really fascinated by religion as a sociological phenomenon.)
My attitudes to this kind of thing are, like Span's I think, based on how individual people actually behave, rather than which particular group they belong to.
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Is there a wii swing ball game?
There's a virtual surgery game, will that do?
Okay, so it's not related at all, but there's a virtual surgery game and that's just so cool.
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Heh, we invented this game where we all had invisible controllers that could administer an electric shock to a commentator every time they said something particularly stupid. If it had been real, we'd have killed Murray Mexted first game out.
The only person who annoyed me more was Martin Crowe commentating cricket.
And I'd love to see Andrew Mehrtens come back as a rugby commentator.
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The resident TV oracle says Prime are definitely bringing it back, they just broke for the holiday season.
I know they do that in the States, and so US programs often come with a mid-season cliff-hanger, I guess I just don't really grok why we're adopting it here when the networks have the whole series ready to go. Does TV in January really have to be bilge?