Posts by tussock
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The day they first mentioned the conditioning program my old man reminded me again about some ancient South African team that toured here after extensive "conditioning". Incredibly fit and fast and utterly useless they were, pulling all sorts of leg muscles all tour, too fit by far to play rugby. Far too smart to do that these days, of course, all the AB's pulled leg muscles were a total coincidence.
But as for the loss, they didn't want to take any risks with their young backline and no 1st five, thinking the French had a good chance to snaffle any mistakes and run away with it, so they ran it back to the more experienced fowards all 2nd half and waited for the French to stuff up for them.
As we know, the French team did not oblige; they quickly caught on to the lack of variation and set a flat, tight defence. As Frank Bunce said on the TV after, a chip, a kick to the wing, passing it to the wing, there was all sorts on other than a drop goal, but they didn't dare risk losing face, so they lost the game instead.
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Kyle, Greens that compromise on principles internationally have been decimated at the polls every time. Green voters are voting against the middle-of-the-road crap, and those that are OK with it already have Helen, John, Peter, and Winston to tag onto.
The Green vote is largely from people who don't vote at all if there's no principled party to vote for. At least, that's the way it is internationally, and one might suggest the dissolution of the Alliance showed much the same for their voters.
A lot of people stay home if their party doesn't act like it's expected to. See also Labour and tax cuts, they'll have to be quite tricky with that.
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I thought Campbell did OK, considering he's trying out a little more "in their face" style at the moment to shake up some of his guests. I suspect Winston would eat him alive, but he's making the small-fry front up fairly well.
Mostly, Brown already had widespread, uncontested news coverage, and it's great to see someone with a major audience contest it, even if it could have been done better with hindsight. He was shown to be lacking in basic understanding of our immigration laws and current population demographics, which is a good start.
Someone should really do a proper analysis of the data.
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We want to turn as many New Zealanders as possible on to fast broadband.
Isn't it interesting how companies say "possible" when they mean "profitable". I mean, I get it, I just also get that my house wouldn't have phone, power, or water without governments who thought those things were important enough not to leave to profit motives.
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Ah gardening.
Y'all know compost helps hold water in the soil, right? Also regular hoeing or good ground cover. Windbreaks too. Good free soil to help young plants quickly grow tap roots.
If you want more winter variety, you can keep your excess with preserves or a big freezer. Not really a cheap option, other than just pitting or boxing things, but quite satisfying to go the whole year even in part. There's also some pretty good winter veg, of course, yams and so on, mostly much stronger taste than summer stuff.
Oh, and always have something growing if you can, green compost over winter if nothing else. Anything deep-rooted and drought tolerant through the summer dry. Bare soil loses fertility and grows weeds.
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I figured the widespread official distrust of HIV treatments in Africa came down to political pragmatism.
Until quite recently most of the governments couldn't afford the treatments regardless of their efficacy, and the people were deeply suspicious of foreign medical intervention when the early mass vaccination programs had quickened the spread HIV and other blood-borne diseases in many African nations. So the politicians played up the local mistrust.
It probably didn't help that they could only get international funding for public education programs if they didn't tell people about condoms. Bush has tied up huge amounts of unrelated funding since 2000 with his fundamentalist "abstinence only" programs.Of course, encouraging public ignorance for short-term political gain has had some terrible run on effects.
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I wonder what happened around 1500 to make people drop swive and take up fuck as the preferred slang. Swive being a crudely poetic description of the action, fuck being a derivative of animal husbandry terminology.
It seems rather like the whole of society stopped talking about having sex, and started talking about making babies. Tough times, mind; I suppose people got the idea the only way to beat the incessant wars, famines, and plagues was to out-breed them.
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Oh, right, Iraq was the other thread here. I blame tabbed browsing.
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Re: Iraq.
Everyone has read Misery, right? That nice lady trying to get that poor author man back on his feet. Not a complete metaphor of course, as she didn't run him off the road in the first place.Re: Recent NZ pols history.
Muldoon becomes Peters.
Lange becomes Locke (and Douglass becomes everyone else).
The dude no one remembers is forgotten.
Bolger becomes English.
Shipley becomes, well, I wouldn't like to defame anyone.
Clark becomes Clark. -
Danielle, my parents tell the same stories of swimming weather in southland in the 40's. Hotter summers and colder winters goes the story.
By my own recollections of the 80's, it's just so damn cold in the winter that a 20 degree sunny day in the mid summer feels like you're cooking, and makes the 10 degree waters feel rather refreshing.
Mild hypothermia being quite a normal response to a summer swim. Blue lips, uncontrollable shivering, and an unshakable grin. Ah, Southland.