Posts by Chris Waugh
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Hard News: Friday Music: The First Time, in reply to Andre,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bands_from_New_Zealand</q>
Doesn't seem to include The Lads, which I won't include as any kind of first because I attended the same church as them in my teenage years.
Nope, I think I would have to say Cliff Richard in the very late 80s or very early 90s in I think the Wellington Town Hall, or perhaps the Michael Fowler Centre, would be my first.
I would like to note that my taste in music has changed drastically since then.
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Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
No, it’s not completely banned,
Sorry, Graeme, but this aspect of your argument is really, really bugging me. Willie and JT were not silenced (as countless others have said already), and the two books you have cited are not even remotely banned. Not partially banned. Not incompletely banned. Not imperfectly banned. Simply not banned in any way, shape or form. Some booksellers decided to not sell them, but the authors and publishers are still free to sell them via the internet or mail order or markets or out of the boots of their cars or whatever. When a book is banned the government takes all remaining unsold copies off the shelves and out of the warehouses and pulps them and the book is only available through illegal underground/pirated editions or bought in a jurisdiction where it is not banned and smuggled into the country. To smuggle a copy of a banned book in to a country means running the risk of customs searching your luggage and confiscating the banned literature*. Internet searches for banned books are likely to see your browser mysteriously 404ed, perhaps even for your internet connection to go dead for a few minutes.
If I were to get up in front of my class and tell the students a version of events a few kilometres from where I sit in the spring and early summer of 1989, I would expect to be fired and deported, which would see me separated from my wife and daughter and them turfed out of our apartment. Anything I may write on the subject on the internet is likely to disappear behind the Great Firewall and may well see me invited out for a cup of tea with somebody who may or may not be a police officer but certainly has the power to cause unpleasant things to happen to me. Willie and JT (if we really must refer to them that way) were not silenced.
Right, now back to trying to catch up with this discussion (sorry if somebody's already made that point, I was just a bit too irked to go through the whole thread first) or perhaps wander off and get lunch...
*A customs officer once asked to see the CDs in my luggage and confirm that they were only music and did not contain anything illegal. I showed him my discman (this was some years ago), and he was cool with that. I sighed with relief when I was well out of earshot, because if he'd decided to check the book I had in the same bag he might have noticed it was by a China-born Nobel Prize winner in exile in Paris....
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The view from inside the hotel room, Beidaihe.
Checking out the view - damn, the neighbours are close.
Looking towards where Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang spend their summers...
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From the hotel balcony, in the old town of Beidaihe.
The houses jumble on the hillside.
The street is set up for summer tourists - as Beidaihe pretty much always has been, at least since the foreign concession era.
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And a few more...
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A few from this morning.
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Capture: Travels Without a Map, in reply to Bryan Gibson,
Chinatown, Melbourne.
At Christmas time.
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Ancient cave dwellings, Guyaju, July 2012.
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Stone lion opposite the museum, Wanping, August 2012.
Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (actually a pretty good museum, surprising as it may sound), opposite the lion, Wanping, August 2012.
Lugou/Marco Polo Bridge - I thought I'd attached it to my first post. Oh well.
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Stone lion, Lugou/Marco Polo Bridge, August 2012.
Shunzhimen, eastern entrance to Wanping Town, August 2012.
