Posts by Deborah
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Shooting possums is not a very effective means of pest control
You just wait until the pine trees are in blossom, and possums come from miles around at night to feast on them, and you go out there with a big torch, or a 4WD with luverly big headlights, and pop them off.
Professional possum hunters do it all the time, as a means of pest control. Conservation minded folk employ them to do it, if they don't do the shooting themselves.
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People keep on talking about what intelligence police had with respect to Molenaar's arsenal. Looks to me that they may well have had very good intelligence about him, so they went around to his place at a time when they knew he was out walking his dog (his daily habit, apparently), or would be just on the point of returning from his daily walk, when he wouldn't have immediate access to his guns.
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Our eldest got up the day after her second birthday and said, "No Mummy. No nappies today. Today I wear purple knickers."
Right then. Purple knickers it was. Fortunately we had some in the drawer, waiting for the right moment.
Not so good with our younger daughters, but that's classic twin behaviour. But it all happened, in their own sweet time, in the summer after their second birthday (they are winter babies).
And, I want one of those scooters.
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I think it would be fine if people came dressed as their avatars.
Sorry. Can't come - I've just given my cat suit away to the Sallies.
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While only 27% of respondents averred a "firm belief in God" and only 8% said the Bible was to be taken literally, the results also say that more than half of New Zealanders believe in life after death, and nearly as many in Heaven.
Hmmm... it would be interesting to be able to probe this a little more deeply, to find out whether people really believe in life after death and heaven and all that schemozzle, or they would just like to believe in those things, because they are comforting. In my cynical moments, I think that many "believers" really believe in the god of pretty things more than any thing else.
Although that is of course undercut by this.
Just over a third believe there to be a Hell.
But maybe they believe in Hell, FOR OTHER PEOPLE!
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See what I did there? Brought it all back to the main topic. Class.
Thanks for that, Giovanni.
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We are comparatively liberal on matters of "morality" -- which were defined in the survey as exclusively relating to sex (talk about letting Christian conservatives set your frame!).
Regarding that religion survey - many years ago, I got a part-time job while I was studying, working for Phil Gendal on the ISSP survey. The questions are set by an international panel, so that you can get cross country comparisons. The NZ people on the panel would have had some input into the questions, but no necessarily been able to influence them. The ISSP has a rolling cycle of topics, so that over time, you can trace trends. I wonder if linking 'morality' exclusively to sexuality is because people's attitudes to sexual matters are a good proxy for other moral positions? Maybe it's easier to measure whether a society is becoming more or less liberal, or moving in a particular direction, using attitudes to sexual morality as a proxy.
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Thanks for the link to Stephanie Mill's post on The Hand Mirror, Russell. The story she has to tell about the French compensation package for nuclear testing in the South Pacific is quite amazing.
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40.
40 is middle-aged. You have five years to go.
Disclosure: I'm 43.
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several of my old friends have taken to scanning fading photographs filled with people who look like us, only much thinner.
And with more hair?
There are many things that I like about being a woman of a certain age, but my changing dimensions are not among them. Sigh.