Posts by B Jones
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The odd report of anger management I've heard has made them sound like "how to get what you want by whining and manipulating rather than putting your fist through the wall". I hope that's not accurate.
I've also heard that there are two kinds of people with respect to anger and violence - those who use it to get control, and those for whom showing anger or violence is a sign of losing control. You'd need different solutions for either.
But what's winding me up most right now is Thoughtspur's suggestion that public service ads need to stop being party political ads in drag. Is he implying that the It's Not Ok ads are? Does he have any actual evidence or argument behind this particularly odd assertion?
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Just out of interest, what ads are out there with a clear focus on females with regard to behaviour or thought process?
Lots. Just sticking to public service ads, there are also a lot about health and parenting, exhorting women to breastfeed, get various checkups for the sake of your whanau, don't be afraid to talk to your kid's teacher, give your kids healthy food, ya de ya. They seem to be very firmly targeted at Maori and Pacific women - I'd be interested to see how well they go down with their target audience. There must be a "thanks for telling us how crap we are at all these things" factor.
A fair proportion of the mental health ads feature women, as do the anti-smoking ones. And the anti-binge drinking ones, as pointed out above. The earlier ones, with the drunk/sober doppelgangers, were a bit less victim-blaming.
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I get time-zones, I even get how they come about, but half-hour ones are bollocks... but half an hour, what's the point?
Try the Chatham Islands. They're 45 mins ahead of mainland NZ, which makes watching the news there a little weird.
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I noticed the banana flavour about a decade ago, in either DB Natural or Export, I forget which. The smell of yeast brewing is also sufficiently universally popular that people use baking bread to sell houses.
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I thought the deal with alcohol is that people (and other animals) were originally attracted to it because its smell is like that of ripe fruit. Other animals overeat fermenting fruit and get bombed on it. Certain strains of mice are bred to prefer alcohol, for experiments to do with alcoholism and so on - there are heaps of examples here.
It's a bit of a stretch to posit that alcohol-preferring mice talk themselves into liking it because they're planning on getting drunk.
Kids have super-sensitive tastes, as someone has already pointed out. I used to taste drops of the cask of Muller Thurgau in the fridge, and didn't like that much. But I loved the smell of the banda sheets we had printed out at school, and that's pure alcohol.
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I'm imagining a sunconscious peeking through the clouds.
The knife method tends to damage the somewhat inaccurately named non-stick variety of cookware. I do a greek orange syrup cake (thanks Annabel) that the top reliably falls off when you turn it out, unless it's thoroughly lined.
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I don't recall ever having actually wagged, mainly because I was convinced I'd be caught and Get Into Trouble, and school wasn't really that bad, by and large. I realised years later that being one of the Good Kids, the chances of getting into actual trouble were pretty low.
I did spend a bit of time not at school, though. Scheduling problems and small classes meant that I had an 8am start, and two consecutive study periods on Mondays, bordered on one side by Life Skills, the biggest waste of curriculum space ever, as far as I was concerned. I recall one time going home for lunch (not technically Allowed without a note and an at-home parent) with five other girls (definitely not Allowed) to eat a shipment of American junk food an exchange student friend had just received. The Deputy Principal drove past us all and waved pleasantly - we obviously had Good Kid Privilege in truckloads. Good Kid Privilege gets you teacherly concern when you act out, rather than punishment. At one point, a teacher sensed I was getting bored and started supplying me copies of the Salient, to give me a sense of what I had to look forward to at university.
I liked PAT tests. The neat coloured booklets (pink and red, or dark and light blue), the straightforward process. I remember one year the teacher read out everyone's scores to the class. I was really struck, back in 86 or so, how strong a gender divide there was in my class, especially at the top and bottom ends of the scale - the girls were miles ahead. I wonder what the nationwide results were showing.
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a chance for the Maori party to show their quality.
They should totally steal the ring of power and set up a new Dark Tower in Bowen House.
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The only thing stopping me from swapping my ANZ visa ($20 a year in fees) for a Kiwibank credit card ($0 a year in fees, but you have to use it lots) is the fact that I can remember the number on my visa card, making online purchasing that much faster and easier.
The weird thing was I transposed a couple of numbers once by accident, on a large travel purchase, and it still went through. The bank person was very quiet about how that all happened when I conscientiously rang up to find out why I hadn't been billed for several hundred Euro. Someone mustn't check their statements regularly.
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Backyards have been available for some time via aerial photo, from your local authority's website and the usual Google Maps features. The resolution's very low, but could probably spot a sunbather or two.