Posts by B Jones
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Michael Stevens and Samuel Scott:
>Along with an embrace of quackery, sorry, i mean 'alternative' medicine.
What is the context for a claim like that? What medicines? Homeopathy? Osteopathy? Acupuncture?
The Greens opposed joining with Australia in regulating dietary supplements, because herbs etc are "valuable tools in maintaining health", but pharmaceutical drugs are dangerous and bad. Like vaccines.
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The point of being articulate is to persuade and communicate, not show off special knowledge of wanky educated dialect. The latter is the verbal equivalent of puffing up your chest bigger than the other primate's. Which also wins arguments and conveys privilege, but it's less sporting.
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I've been informed that being persistent and hopeless or persistent and shouting are also techniques that work well with bureaucracy. The thing is to make it more bother for officials to not sort out your problems.
To a point. Being articulate helps you explain your problem in terms of something a bureaucrat can do something about. I suppose there are several gradations of problems - member of the public needs the rules explained; member of the public needs the rules correctly applied; member of the public needs an exception to the rules to be made; member of the public needs the rules changed because they result in a perverse outcome for multiple people.* I'd say most inquiries to call centres, government departments and the like fall into the first category, and in a lot of cases, a member of the public assumes the final category when it's really the first. But if you are in the latter categories, it takes persistence and articulation to get past your junior bureaucrat or helpdesk or call centre worker's assumption that your issue is different from the other 80% they deal with.
*Seeing as we're doing footnotes, some people call government departments mainly because they want a chat. It's a public service, after all.
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You read books of a hundred or two years ago, and it's clear that the authors, or at least some of their characters, assume that red-haired people had fierce tempers. Anti-red prejudice is at least as old as Anne Shirley.
Even further back, I can't remember whether it's Agamemnon or Menelaus that Homer describes as red-haired. It's not just a Celtic thing.
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unlike, say, Christian Cullen, who could hold his own in conversation with Wittgenstein
Sure, as long as Wittgenstein started the conversation with "So, what's it like to be ridden hard in a harness"
You couldn't think of a question that could be answered "neigh"?
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Interesting interview between Stephen King and Lost writers here. They're mutual fans, and there are lots of allusions in Lost to King's work.
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Yamis, I think there's a reasonable argument that Lost was about the characters more than the whole polar bear/time travel thing. Otherwise why would you spend half of every episode for the first three seasons explaining what the characters were up to in their personal lives before they landed on the island? Admittedly when you set out to do both character development and plot, you should do both well. But I'd rather see Sawyer and Juliet's reunion done well (and it was lovely) than have the Dharma stuff satisfyingly wrapped up.
What bad guy from season 2? Ben? He seemed integral to the story - if he was grafted on at the last minute I didn't see the seams.
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The polar bears were escapees of Dharma experiments, I thought. Explained by the the big cages and fish biscuits on hydra island. One showed up fossilised in Tunisia to be found by Charlotte - this is the exit point for people who mess with the Orchid station and move the island - Locke and Ben both went there.
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Patchy though it was, I think Lost can still claim to be the big speculative fiction series of the 00s in the same way that The X Files was the big speculative series of the 90s. And much as I love Scully and Mulder, I don't think I even bothered to watch the series finale. That was definitely a case of the authors not having a clue, and biting off more series mythology than they could comfortably wrap up.
As an aside, Mulder in the second X Files movie bore a striking resemblance to post-rescue "we have to go back, Kate" Jack, scraggly beard, failed relationship and all.
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I had heard that they'd had the finale firmly in mind when they wrote the initial episodes - my theory is that mid series they went on a few diversions. That makes sense to me - the whole backstory/redemption thing was integral to the series, probably more so than the pregnant women/hatch/nuclear bomb/mercenaries things. And the finale focused on that backstory.
I've been rewatching and found the first season very difficult to get through once the initial setup was in place (Christian and the coffin, the whispers, the smoke monster, the cave). The characters spend the whole series misunderstanding each other and getting into silly conflicts - Michael vs Jin, Michael vs Locke, Sawyer vs everyone, Jack vs Locke, Charlie vs Locke etc etc. I can see why, but I wanted to smack nearly all of them by the end of season 1.