Posts by Robyn Gallagher
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oh just saw they later refined polygamy to mean a man with more than one wife.
Indeed polygamy is a marriage with more than one spouse of any sex. What this survey refers to is polygyny (a man with multiple wives). The other option is polyandry (a woman with multiple husbands).
Polygyny might seem fairly innocuous (albeit a little weird) but when you have a society where it's common, then this alters the ratio of single men to single women. You end up with all these single men who can't find themselves a wife, and this in turn leads to other social problems.
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My mum has friends whose children went to my school, but no one I was actually friends with (or sometimes even in my year). So over the last 15 years, Mum has kept me up to date with all these people I barely remember, if at all.
The worst situation was when one of these ladies popped over, leading to a conversation like this.
Lady: Hello, Robyn! I'm Anna's mum! She went to school with you!
Me: Um...?
Lady: She was friends with Belinda, Claire and those girls.
Me: Oh, I think Claire was in one of my classes in the sixth form? -
Talk of a referendum on MMP is interesting. Just last night I saw the 1996 documentary "Someone Else's Country", which looks at the economic policies of the Lange/Palmer/Moore Labour government and the Bolger National government (and concludes there wasn't much difference between them).
The film ends with the MMP referendums (first one to see if the voting system should be changed, second one to pick the system to change to).
When it looked like MMP was going to be the favourite, there was suddenly Peter Shiftcliffe's Coalition for Better Government started a pro-FPP campaign with scare-mongering ads. There'll be more MPs which will cost the taxpayer $$$! It will fuck up the future for your children!!! Parliament will decent into chaos!!!
If this is the fucked-up chaotic future, I like it.
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That Avis ad in turn reminds me of the awful sexist Hertz ad from the '80s. It used "To know him is to love him", but with "To know Hertz is to love Hertz" and ghastly soft-focus footage of female counter staff pouting at the camera. The implication was, dear businessman, that the Hertz ladies would look after you.
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I saw "Whero's New Net" when it was in Wellington recently. It's a brilliant play and I recommend it to anyone. Before I saw it, I was expecting something terribly earnest, but it turned out to be rather cool, sexy and mysterious. And it made me think.
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From today's Five-Minute Quiz in the Dom Post:
Q10. Who or what are Whale Oil Beef Hooked, No Right Turn and Public Address?
Answer: Two are blogs, the other is _________.
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One attitude I notice in a lot of people in their 20s and 30s is the idea that having kids is the end of everything.
I heard a rep from one of those fancy baby stroller companies talking about their new range of strollers made with a graffiti-style fabric. He said something to the effect that a lot of people think that having a baby means giving up your lifestyle for the baby, but that these graffiti buggies showed that you could make the baby fit in with your lifestyle. Ha! Take that, baby!
The one thing I've noticed with my friends who have kids is there's a lot of moaning going on about how hard it is. Well, yeah.
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I want to see love poetry of merchant bankers. Specifically young merchant bankers of the 1980s.
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On one hand, it's rare and valuable that we can even have these arguments here.
It's lead me to conclude that farmers markets ain't nothin' but trouble, and will stick to buying my breads and vegetables from the supermarket.
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Oh dear. To maybe help soothe things, I know Morgan and he is not a sexist pig who wants to tell you how to run your ovaries. I wonder if the tone of some of those shiftful comments by other commenters has rubbed off on people's readings of Morgan's comments, making it seem like he's a dickface too.
I'm 34, I ain't got no babies and no one's ever asked me why not or suggested I hurry up before my eggs are scrambled. Yet I'm aware of the limits of human biology. I know somethings are not possible, no matter how much we'd like them to be. And if someone - male or female - says that a woman's fertility decreases with age, I don't take this as a personal attack.
And here's something to consider - while a 50-year-old man can get a woman pregnant, how many women of a fertile age (say, 18 to 35) would want to have a baby with some old geezer?