Posts by Andre Alessi
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About a week ago, DougJ over at Balloon Juice posted a thread asking how the domestic American media would spin any result of the election as a "lesson" for Obama.
I for one am looking forward to the predictable Republican insanity that will occur over the next few days.
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As someone who spent close to a decade working in Auckland hospitality in one form or another, I never could quite see Metro's best restaurants edition as, well, quite what it said on the tin. It always seemed like restaurants were included because enough people had heard of them, while genuine gems were only occasionally picked up by the odd lucky/adventurous soul.
(On a slight tangent, I was once working in a tiny French cafe/bistro in Remuera that was featured in a 3 page article in Cuisine one month. The day after it hit the stands we had a line out the door-even though the article was about our fine evening dining, not the rather pedestrian cafe food during the day.)
Nevertheless, I like that Metro maintains a tradition of talking about our restaurants to such a degree each year and with such seriousness, and that people see the best restaurants edition as being something to talk about. There aren't many other non-sport related activities we as New Zealanders (and particularly as Aucklanders) can talk about with so little evident cultural cringe.
So while I may not agree with the specifics of the awards given most years, I'm happy that we have them to such an obsessive degree, and I usually manage to discover one or two unknown-to-me treasures each year, which is worth the cover price in and of itself.
But of course, I'll quite happily keep my Sigdi and Tadka quiet, thank you. I like not having to book ahead. :)
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It's a bit like Twilight isn't it? I find Stephanie Meyer barely literate and downright creepy, but I'm not a twelve year-old girl and I'm not supposed to get it.
Except that Justin Bieber doesn't try to convince twelve year old girls that abusive, one-sided relationships are romantic.
That would be Chris Brown.
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She can't be a superhero, she doesn't have a cape.
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I admit, I knew who Justin Bieber was, but the quality (or otherwise) of his music passes me by.
I did thoroughly enjoy the more surreal aspects of his stop here though. Tess Woolcock and Josh Gillman's Twitter feeds were a marvel of absurdist observation.
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They'll still increase the drinking age to 20, because that's the only recommendation that looks good on paper but has the fewest electoral repercussions.
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Actually, it was Primo Levi, which is why I was so hopelessly confused.
The short story is called "For A Good Purpose" and according to this blog post it's available in English versions of Six Days and Other Tales.
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I seem to have missed that one. Any chance that you recall the title, or what collection it's from?
No, I can't, and it's been bugging me all day that I can't. I read it in an European Studies paper at Vic Uni in 1995, along with short stories by Primo Levi and Umberto Eco, and I'm wondering if I can't remember because one of those two wrote it instead. It was definitely written in a style I associate more closely with Calvino though.
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Perhaps I should google it?
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Something might get viewed a million times in 24 hours if it's interesting enough for people to email and facebook it around. That's a hell of a lot of non-privacy.
You only need to look at what happened with Kate's party over the weekend to see the differences in scale at work here.
Full background here.