Posts by B Jones
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
The one decent legacy of the Code of Social Responsibility era was very cheap Pills. Still needed an expensive doctor's consult every year or so, but the medication came down a lot. The govt now funds 5-year long term Jadelle. I'm not sure what extra free contraception they could do, in such a way that would be effective.
-
This quote from the Beneficiary Advisory Service sums it up for me:
Parents should never be forced to leave their children in care when they are not comfortable with the carers.
It's a recipe for disaster. I hate to do a Mrs Lovejoy but this is going to hurt children. The ones whose carers have no choice but to go back to work and find someone, anyone, to look after them. Might be their 25 year old boyfriend who's never looked after kids, might be the neighbour who has four of her own and could do with the under the table income, might be their 14 year old eldest. It's not going to be the shiny local childcare centre with a mile long waiting list and 100% qualified teachers charging more than half the minimum wage. Chances are, if someone did have reasonable options for getting back to work they'd take them. Leaving the ones who don't.
There but for the luck of the draw go we all.
-
There's work underway on just that issue.
-
Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Steve Parks,
Fair enough, you hadn't gotten to that bit when I started responding. But it's quite possible we won't hear from the man himself, only his lawyers, In NZ, defendants don't have to take the stand and very often don't - that's how the legal presumption of innocence works. It's the job of the defence lawyers to tear down the witnesses for the prosecution, which is where the time-honoured "nuts or sluts" thing comes in.
I don't know if they have that rule in Sweden, but I did read that rape trials aren't open there so we may not get the blow by blow trial reporting we're used to.
-
Hard News: Book review: 'Wikileaks:…, in reply to Steve Parks,
But we haven’t really heard his version of events yet,
You mean apart from the bit where his lawyers alleged the complainants were in the pay of the CIA?
-
Speaker: Medical Journal, Chapter V, in reply to jessica scott,
Theoretically reversible. There was a couple on one of those telly shows a while back where a man into his second marriage changed his mind and tried to have the snip reversed, only to find that the scarring from the first time round made it impossible. The end of the show suggested that the couple later had a baby somehow - I'm not sure if that meant the doctors could retrieve the little swimmers from upstream, as it were, or someone else contributed.
-
I'm still recovering from the mild testosterone overdose (in case anyone wasn't sure this was a Bloke Show, we had wall to wall Lynx ads to remind us), but I enjoyed it. Definitely channelling American Gods, but I hope Odin's a bit better behaved. Wonder if Loki's going to show up?
Outside of American Gods, I can't think of another pop culture appearance of the Norse pantheon off the top of my head. Percy Whatsit and the Olympians (which is surprisingly likable) on the other hand - we never seem to get sick of the Greek lot.
I think Terry Pratchett's Four Horsemen showed up a couple of years prior, in Sourcery, to the Pratchett/Gaiman versions in Good Omens. I like the second versions better, though, with Pollution taking over where Pestilence left off.
There was a Ghostbusters (the cartoon) episode entitled Ragnarok and Roll, which screened in NZ around 1989. IIRC they poached the magic words from LOTR. Nothing is ever lost on the internet:
-
I think I patronised Starbucks once before I thought "you want me to pay how much to drink that scorching mess out of a paper cup and wait how long? And then someone I know told me that friends don't let friends drink at Starbucks* and that was that.
My dad has a whiz-bang machine, but was nonetheless impressed by the coffee we made in a stovetop espresso on holiday. And polite about the saucepan coffee I made before we found the stovetop number. Still better than instant.
*except for their chai latte apparently.
-
Muse: The High Aesthetic Line, in reply to Megan Wegan,
I was always Leia
In my case, that was simply how it went when you had straight brown plaits at age 6, and played with boys. I had only the vaguest idea who she actually was (that had to wait until we saw Return of the Jedi and got a VCR for the older two), but being a princess is usually an easy sell to your average 6 year old girl.
-
Lois McMaster Bujold writes very enjoyable sf and fantasy crossover that could almost in places work as YA. No talking squids, but lots of fun speculative technology used to highlight interesting themes. We meet her most famous protagonist Miles Vorkosigan at age 17 in The Warrior's Apprentice , and get to see some of the fun aspects of being young and obviously disabled in a hyper macho militaristic society. A few things here and there that I wouldn't care to explain to an eight year old in a lot of the books, but great for teenagers. Miles' mother Cordelia is an awesome character too, but her story is too adult to count as YA.
Like Connie Willis, Bujold's won piles of awards but doesn't have the sales of the big popular hacks. Easier to find in libraries than bookstores in NZ.