Posts by JackElder
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We're in Ohariu (renamed at this election, natch). We got pamphlets from Labour, Nats, Greens, and ACT. The ACT one included a prepaid reply envelope. So based on past elections, the EFA didn't particularly affect the amount of political cruft coming through my mailbox.
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I'm going to paint my bedroom black!
We bought our first house off a single mother with a teenage son. She'd repainted the interior to make it look nicer and drive up the sale price. This strategy might have worked if she hadn't got her son to do the actual painting, with the carrot being that he could redecorate his room as he liked. The end result was very interesting, both in terms of relative skill level of the paint job (low) and the result. 80% of the house was, as you would expect, off-white. Except the teenager's bedroom.
No, his bedroom had deep, deep purple walls, a forest green carpet, and banana yellow ceiling. And flashing strings of LED lights nailed to the walls.
This did not increase the value of the property.
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Damn, pipped to the quote...
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I believe that the phrase is, "A conservative is a liberal who has just been robbed."
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Got trick or treated once this year. One of the neighbours kids, who did pretty well out of being the only patron. We used to get trick or treated a fair bit when we were in the UK - we were on a council estate and the local kids just did the rounds, asking for sweets (or, in the case of the teenagers, cash - they got sweets).
First time I was ever trick or treated was back when I was a student, living in the only student flat on a fairly upmarket street. For some reason, I'd been having a shower and answered the door with just a towel around my waist to see two preschoolers proferring bags, shepherded by two Kelburn matrons with increasing looks of worry/disgust as they took in this dripping wet, half-naked, hairy, tattooed/pierced hippy. The kids didn't bat an eyelid, and ended up with fistfuls of sweeties as a result, after which their mothers hustled them away at speed. Great days, great days.
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Like watching the West Wing, but without the bloody soundtrack.
I'm surprised that no-one else has mentioned that the character of Matthew Santos in the West Wing - the junior senator from an ethnic minority who makes a bid for president - is based, explicitly, on a then-little known US politician who'd just made a great speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. Yes, Santos is based on Barack Obama.
So very much like The West Wing, then. Any chance they'll revive it, you reckon?
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Drivers who don't do up their seat belts until 30 seconds after they've started driving. Why? Why? Why? Are you in such a rush that you can't take the basic safety precaution when it's, you know, safe to do so, rather than when you're in control of a ton of moving metal? The contortions required to put a seat belt on are better performed when the car is halted, rather than as it drifts towards the intersection at 30kph. This one does make me foam at the mouth, actually.
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As to the same name issues: suck it up. When I was a student, my namesake was the Minister of Police. He had an unlisted phone number. I didn't. I got a lot of annoyed/abusive phone calls as a consequence.
But there was the highly amusing time that my student loan statement - via some stuff-up that I know nothing about other than the aftermath - was sent to him, instead of me. The bastard didn't pay it. It bounced around Parliament for a while and finally ended up with my dad (a civil servant) with "Do you know anything about this?" scrawled on the front. True story.
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My favourite live cross was on the Daily Show, when they crossed over to Aasif Mandvi reporting live from Liberty City. You could never do that in a studio.
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Dude, don't be hating on cephalopods. That squid died for your sins.