Posts by Russell Brown
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Can I just say that I'm impressed that a discussion that could have gone throughly off the rails has not done so?
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Up Front: The Up-Front Guides: The…, in reply to BenWilson,
If they really did push on through regardless, and try to make some old homophobe marry them, then I’d expect it to end in tears all round.
Oath. I’ve seen clergy behave badly when they want to be doing it.
The Catholic priest who married two of my friends was terrible. Banged on about church dogma and even had a rant about the evils of same-sex marriage. I dread to think how someone like that would respond to being compelled to perform one. You'd have to be a glutton for punishment. And not in a sexy way.
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An Auckland volcanic eruption is basically everyone in the region GTFO, with, hopefully, a few weeks' notice. From Auckland Uni's geology department:
Shock waves from an eruption will break windows and flatten buildings, fiery fountains of lava will set structures and trees ablaze, and base surges - a ground-hugging, deadly mixture of steam and solid particles - will envelop everything within a 5km radius. All that on Day One.
The council's hazards page also predicts related earthquakes and tsunami. There's an 8% chance of an eruption taking place in anyone's (80 year) lifespan. Which sounds way too fucking likely for comfort.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Keir Leslie,
But I really do think that Sacha’s comments were basically trolling.
He wasn’t trolling at all. It was a mildly snarky stage-whisper, but your over-reaction disrupted the discussion more than anything else. Let’s move on.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Lilith __,
You seem to be talking about Auckland.
Burn!
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to James W,
When I was in Christchurch a few weeks ago, I heard a lot of mumblings about people wanting a covered stadium, but the Council had put the kibosh on it. Try going to the rugby in minus three degrees weather (as I did) and you soon understand why it’d be a great thing to have. Whether it’s worth the cost is another matter.
Given Christchurch's sporting heritage, I imagine a covered stadium would be very popular -- but as you say, who's going to pay for it?
The idea of a test-quality cricket ground on Hagley Park, a short walk from the CBD, also seems appealing -- especially given the new green space being opened up elsewhere in the plan. And it's not like the park hasn't been used for sport and recreation for decades.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Stephen Judd,
Convention centres are privatised town halls.
Word.
I'm still honestly not getting it. Wasn't the previous convention centre owned by the council and connected to the Town Hall? I can't see the virtue in rejecting meeting places. Anyway, the tourism people seem over the moon about it.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Stephen Judd,
- Fucking convention centres – why? WHY? Where does this mania for convention centres come from? At least lots of people like sport, even if I don’t, but convention centres serve a tiny proportion of people a small amount of the time and have pathetic spin offs in employing more low-paid hospo workers.
I'm going to disagree with you here. For all the bad press they've had in the past year, convention centres are infrastructure. If you want events to come to town you need places for them to come to. I can't imagine rebuilding the CBD without rooms, theatres and halls for hire.
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Hard News: Christchurch: Is "quite good"…, in reply to Stephen Judd,
The fundamental problem I reckon is that most of the things that make cities neat places to be arise organically over time. In fact, they kind of require controlled decay – old buildings become cheap, run-down, and then new things arise in them and they get repurposed. A wholly new central city can’t have a cheap rundown street like K Road or Cuba or Brunswick in it, it can’t have cheap apartments shoved into unlikely places, in fact it just can’t have cheap and cheerful anything.
The Christchurch example would be the old High Street with its cool bookshops. It's bloody hard to fit scruffy second-hand bookshops into a big, shiny plan.
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While we slept, the drafting committee voted unanimously to add marriage equality to the US Democratic Party platform.
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