Posts by Tom Beard
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BTW - has anyone else ever considered that the term "banker" might be rhyming slang?
Apologies to any er... bankers out there.
"Merchant banker" is indeed part of modern rhyming slang.
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Condominia is a valid (albeit a bit pompous) alternative to condominiums.
Where do we draw the line between pompous and acceptable? I was actually quite impressed when I heard "condominia" this morning, and I use "stadia" myself.
Are we going to start labelling people as "pompous" if they refer to criteria and phenomena rather than criterions and phenomenoms? Or indices and vertices rather than indexes and vertexes? Or is it pompous to use such words at all?
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Just down the road from you and JK, I was at Christchurch Boys', former alma mater of ... Don Brash!
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Speaking about geeky discussions and perfectly cromulant words, did you see the latest Simpsons episode where "Intellectual Homer" is killed by "Serious Homer", but not before writing out "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" in his own blood. That's got to be the ultimate in geek humour.
But there are two words I just have to put in a (ahem) word for: calenture and ultracrepidate. They both sound great; there are stories contained within them, and the latter is something I do all the time.
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I can't argue with that.
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Thanks, I was trying to remember the timing. I knew that the court decision came before Orewa, but I'm not sure whether Labour had already decided not to let Maori "have their day in court" by the time of Orewa. It does sound like Orewa capitalised on and then inflamed a "mainstream" reaction that made Labour afraid of being seen as "soft on maori".
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we should have a measure of care for the people living around Eden Park because, they're like y'know, humans and all...
Yep, but there are a whole lot of humans who live quite happily in noisier, shadier environments than Eden Park could ever be, and who don't feel like spoiling the fun for everyone else.
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While some refer to the Orewa speech as the most divisive thing to happen to NZ race relations in some time, I'd suggest that that would actually be the Foreshore and Seabed Act.
Might Labour's response to the F&S issue have been different if they hadn't been spooked by Orewa and its reaction? In other words, did the Orewa speech set up an enivornment in which the shameful aspects of the F&S legislation became politically expedient or even necessary?
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Spoken like a true architect :)
Ha! :-) Actually, I'm not an architect, just someone who loves cities to be compact and lively. I didn't mean to say "stuff the costs and that pesky gravity business, just build it anyway" - just that I'm not in a position to judge the pros and cons of whether it would work. It would be a pity to build it out in the burbs, but given the costs, timeframes and lack of suitable CBD locations, I guess we're stuck with Eden Park.
Now we just need to go ahead and get it done. Maybe we should offer the members of the residents' association some places in a nice quiet retirement home somewhere?
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For what it's worth, some church out in the Kapiti Bible Belt rated all the parties from "moral" to "immoral", based on the conscience votes of their MPs. That's only one dimension of political beliefs, of course, but it's the one most likely to be open to conscience voting.
Just for a laugh, I combined the "immorality index" of the parties with the party vote at each booth in Wellington at last year's election. Then I graphed the results and mapped them to show the "moral" geography. Doing the same for the "individualist to collectivist" spectrum is left as an exercise for the reader.