Posts by Mikaere Curtis
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Do you buy anything Japanese? Do you have children?
The old I-don't-have-kids card only works if said kids are brought up to lead a life of ignorant (and/or wilful) consumerism, as opposed to making choices that promote sustainability.
And if we follow the "<insert community> are way worse than us" approach then we have an out for just about any initiative e.g. carbon emissions reduction
If you can justify engaging in a practice that pushes a species to the brink of extinction, fine, but it's bit rich to characterise others as being "self-righteous" if they point out the logical conclusion of your actions.
Anyway, 'tis the season to be BBQin'.
As a member of that ever-decreasing minority - old-school woodfired BBQ fanatic - I'll readily admit to a certain leeriness towards poultry, but that recipe for butterflied chicken looks so yummy that I'm minded to give it a go.
My current favourite is butterfly leg of lamb over charcoal, which also works well over gas. You can buy butterflied legs from the butcher's or you can use a sharp knife to bone out a leg.
The main problem with lamb, IMO, is that some like it well done, some (like me) like it rare and others like it in between. If you bone the leg yourself, you can ensure that some parts of the butterfly is thicker than others so you can get a naturally occuring gradient of cookedness.
I prefer dry rubs (chili powder, garlic, rosemary, salt) to oil marinades because lamb fat tends to flame and oil only makes it worse.
Hard to say how long to cook it (45mins?) - too many variables (meat thickness, ambient temperature, BBQ temperature), but if you are doing it over charcoal then I suggest whacking some kind of lid of the top so that the smoke from the coals infuse into the lamb.
Delicious !
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Mmmmm Tuna
How would "Mmmmm Orange Roughy" sound ?
'Cos if you are eating Pacific Bluefin, then you are voting them off the planet - one mouthful at a time.
Checkout the Forest & Bird guide and you'll see Pacific Bluefin are right down at the bottom with the poor Orange Roughies. Yellowfin isn't much better, but does anyone know if we can buy Skipjack tuna here ? It seems to be a much better option.
I'm all for eating animals, just not mining them into oblivion.
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I've given up on file sharing, since they seem to detect it and throttle it. Silly them, since it was my only reason to have a high cap in the first place. So I dropped the cap, and pay them bugger all now.
I ditched ihug for that very reason after 9 years of loyalty. I was paying for 60 gig download and they were throttling it in the name of "prioritising web browsing traffic". Which they weren't, they were killing my entire connection if I was doing any torrent downloads, and my browsing was slower than dialup.
My ambition of downloading the entire contents of legaltorrents.com in tatters, I ditched them in favour of Clear. Unlike ihug, they don't have a business model based on bait-and-switch, and charge me for what I use in 10 gig increments.
Which is probably why I won't get that new Vodafone phone "line" - I'll likely need to sign up to ihug to get DSL, which, in the Morningside, is reasonably performant*.
* if one can commit idiomicide, surely one can expound a not-yet-word ?
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I'm sure Annette King was speaking in good faith when she said that the Electoral Finance Bill would be amended to remove what amounts to a new ban on advocating through a megaphone. I don't think the select committee majority really meant to do this -- as Graeme Edgeler pointed out in comments here yesterday, it would rule out meet-the-candidates meetings, and Metiria Turei says it was actually intended to cover those irritating car-mounted loudhailers.
Keith Locke said the same thing as Metiria at a Green Party meeting that I attended last night.
My thoughts are that even this half-pai version will deliver a more equitable campaign than the opaque free-for-all spendup we had in 2005. It would be so nice if the Greens could conduct a campaign that wasn't ambushed at the last minute (__Seeds of Distrust__ in 2002, Brethrens in 2005).
This bill has been a fiasco from the start, and I hope Metiria and Russel (who I understand are working together on it) are able to continue moderating it into something both workable and sensible.
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And when did the Police resort to "bullying tactics" over the weekend?
IMO, it was towards the end of the TV3 footage where they start pushing the protesters back, the bit where the guy was trying to tie his shoelaces. I consider pushing people around to be bullying (technically, it's assault), maybe you don't.
The only bullying tactics on display were from leftists.
Yeah, it seemed that at times the whole point of the protest was to have a go at the police who were present, rather register a protest towards the labour party. I wasn't impressed at all by some of the behaviour, although I thought the Guantanamo street theatre looked cool.
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The guy trying to put his shoe on? Yeah, they could have let him put his shoe on, but even that got a bit farcical when the other guy leaned over him and started falling on him: it was a sort of like a game of protester Twister. He could equally have walked 5 metres and put his shoe on there though ...
From my internet-only perspective it looked like the cops were reasserting authority (which, from my experience, is a high-involvement issue for them) after being harangued for quite some time over the arrest of that guy who "confronted" Richards.
That whole twister thing seemed to work for the protesters - the police lost impetus (you could see what appears to be the senior officer give the order to let up) and the protesters regrouped. Perhaps that was what the police were after.
But like I said, I don't think I'd have been that calm if I'd had people screaming and swearing at me and calling me fascist scum for the past two hours ...
Yeah, when I go to protests I don't abuse the police if they are simply doing their jobs (which the ones in the TV3 footage appear to be doing mostly). Still, it comes with the territory, and I would like to think (perhaps wishfully) that part of the training includes the ability to deal with confrontational protest situations without resorting to bullying tactics.
Hmmm. With that sort of tortured logic I can understand why so many of the arrested think they are innocent
Tom, are you conflating simple association with conspiracy ? Here's a thought experiment: Let's assume there really is a Tuhoe Revolutionary Army. They want to recruit from people that have no particular reason to liberate Tuhoe from the clutches of British Imperialism, as demonstrated by the specific environmental/animal rights activist agenda of many of the non-Tuhoe arrestees.
Surely, the sensible recruitment method would be for the TRL to cast a wide net and then recruit from those that already fit the pro-revolutionary mould. Which is to say that many (if not all) of the non-Tuhoe activists could arguably be not at all interested in TRL objectives, but rather the kaupapa of the wananga (as advertised, not necessarily as delivered). Therefore the notion of particpation = alliance is, IMO, the only thing the police have with which to progress a prosecution under the TSA.
And I agree with Craig. It's time the Left turned of the pop-corn maker...
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No, we're not. We're attempting to figure out the alliance between them and Tame Iti's crowd, an alliance which certainly baffles me.
Participation is not the same as an alliance. It certainly appears to me that there were some wananga being held in Tuhoe with a kaupapa of bushcraft, survival skills and possibly some firearms use/training (perhaps for hunting purposes, who knows ?).
Clearly, any participants thought they would gain something out of attending, even if they weren't given a full programme of what to expect.
So, some members of Tuhoe held a wananga and some non-Tuhoe activists attended. Where's the alliance ?
I spoke with Keith Locke over the weekend and he said he tried to get some trousers to Rongomai Bailey (he was arrested in his camo pants), and the list of bullshit and runaround he got from the prison service agrees with Margaret B's assertion about the hassles the Urewera 17 have been facing.
That being said, I watched TV3s footage and thought the police were generally restrained, although towards the end of the footage they started pushing people around for no apparent reason. Not that I think anyone needed to be arrested, apart from megaphone-guy (even the dude on the roof of the police van could have been warned instead of arrested).
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And the eventual outcome will be an Iranian backed Government enforcing Sharia Law (and cancelling all those sweetheart Oil Contracts the US put in place before leaving).
This is probably a best-case scenario. Although Iran's leadership is crap, the populace aren't - after all, only 1% can be bothered to attend Friday Prayers.
A Persian guy I work with spent a couple of months in Iran earlier this year. Ordinary Iranians, in private (for obvious reasons), reject Islamofacism, so I'm optimistic that positive social change is inevitable, albeit fraught with obstacles.
One day they might even give the Black Ferns a run for their money.
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To be honest, I don't believe that NOS would have had any impact on his driving ability, as he wouldn't have been likely to have had nos while driving - and as mentioned, it is such a short term high that it wouldn't hav elasted long enough.
I call bullshit on that one.
Most likely he inhaled it from a soda bottle, which you can do one handed while driving. An once the hit comes on, you just have lose track of what you are doing long enough to hit something (like a bridge abutment).
I'm certain I heard it on National Radio, but I can't find it on the interweb anywhere...
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I suspect Anderton may have been referring to that young guy who Darwined himself by taking NOS whilst driving in Nelson a couple of years back. He hit the Bridge St bridge, the car flipped and he drowned in the Maitai.