Posts by B Jones
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I understood the going rate was three times what you were on. There used to be a flourishing private sector in Wellington providing comms consulting to govt departments, until the departments found out that in-house was cheaper.
If that doesn't work out you could use your skillz to produce lovely "Will write press releases for food" signs printed in 2 colours on 250g Harvest Recycled Silk.
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Pony Expresso? Is that when people meet and exchange information at a café?
I predict a rapid phasing out of Communications Advisers and a correspondingly rapid increase in Information Transmission Specialists, Stakeholder Liaison and Consultation Facilitators. They're nothing if not clever with words.
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The tory boys can't deal with women at the best of times, but one with a savage wit really gets up their noses. Besides, she was a proxy target for the PM.
Tory boys? I'd start with Mike Moore. He doesn't seem to have gotten over her role the 93 leadership coup judging by his 2007 description of Tizard as Helen Clark's "consort", scare quotes included.
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Meanwhile, any thoughts on the first fictional FPOTUS? My bet's on the one in Carl Sagan's Contact, in the year 2000 (the distant future). She got swapped out for a photoshopped Bill Clinton in the movie, though.
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I don't pretend to understand the culture, but a blanket ban on abortion, as per Family First policy, wouldn't seem to tally with the relatively abortion rate of PI women.
I assume there's meant to be a "high" in there?
It's entirely understandable. In conservative cultures where there's a social stigma attached to premarital sex and unmarried parenthood, abortion allows women in those groups to transgress and get away with it. A high abortion rate means not so much that the group with that rate thinks it's ok, but that the group thinks that the alternatives are significantly worse, on a personal level. They might well still believe on a societal level that sinners should suffer the consequences.
Personal decisions can often become a voice of mutiny against a broader moral consensus.
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The phrase "dead cat bounce" lingers very unspokenly behind that post.
My former cat used to fling himself at a window that was only occasionally open as a useful cat-thoroughfare. While sometimes I'd make it in time to open it and watch him scramble through, occasionally you'd hear a thump and all you'd see would be few stray cat-hairs stuck to the glass.
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People do realise that the opposition has a Research Unit as well, that performs essentially the same function, right?
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No wayz! Reserve placed.
There was a ginga elf in Rivendell. She moonlighted as a policy analyst.
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O is simple because it's a kids' series. It still seared my imagination when I was ten, and I still have vivid mental images of the black sun over O as Susan recovers from Jimmy Jaspers' yellow smoke, the bloodcat, the Mirror Cliffs and all that. Its messages about the corruption of the Ferris cult, the importance of a balance between good and evil, and the mutually assured destruction of the machine-things aren't quite His Dark Materials, but they're still a cut above Narnia. If I were an influential NZ director/producer specialising in fantasy epics, I'd be in quiet negotiations with Maurice Gee over the rights for that one.
I've never been able to get into Dickens. Too many weird minor characters with names like Chuzzlewit. The TV adaptation of Bleak House was great, though.
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'The Stand', for example, is now three to four hundred pages longer than the original version.
And much the worse for it. It's his best book, and the extra material adds little compared to the pace it takes away. And "updating" it to 1990 makes a whole lot of it seem less believable that it was set in 1980 - Stuart's depressed East Texas and Frannie's mother's OMG you're Pregnant and Not Married in particular.
The whole experience put me off director's cuts entirely. I'm a massive LOTR fangirl and even I think of some those additions detract from the films.