Posts by Jolisa
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So one for #1 and two for #2? (Just clarifying, because I initially read that as a granular jellybean for #2, and presumably a liquefied jellybean for the other).
Our exchange rate was set very unscientifically. Because he has two favourite colours now, that was the minimum coinage. And for the big jobs, he held up all five fingers and said "That's how much." I suspect the favourable exchange rate correlated pretty tightly with the alacrity with which somebody was down with the program.
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It's a Swiss design, albeit made in China. So it probably is Oriental Bay!
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Is it Oriental Bay? I thought it looked like it, but wasn't sure enough to say so.
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That song has been one of the most persistent earworms of my life, too. It's scary how much I've mentally sung it this week.
Back at you. When you're sleeping, I'm mentally singing it, and when you wake up, I can finally get to sleep. Your shift now!
that ditty makes my toes curl
I'm still amazed that there were tigers roaming les rues de 19thC Paris. Homicidal orangutans, yes. But nocturnal tigers, that's wack.
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"Mass viral swoon" = T-shirt quality.
And all of this commentary is the mass viral smelling salts as we straighten our skirts and pick ourselves up off the floor.
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Me bawling at the clip: OK? Or not OK (TM)?
I'm OK, you're OK. Now pass the hankie.
Sacha, totally on the nose. Raw is right. It's like the photographic negative of that dream of discovering you're naked in front of a crowd. And we all shared the dream that was being performed by someone else for us to partake of (like the clients in Elizabeth Knox's Dreamhunter books); like in a dream, we got to be a sort of oceanic consciousness, inhabiting both the audience and the singer.
I'd wager that most of the people who forwarded the clip to their friends and their mum felt uniquely moved to do so, not part of some larger hegemonic imperative. At least, I did. It shouldn't have come as a shock that umpty-million other people had the same individual impulse, but it did.
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I think that one of the reasons the performance was just so attractive was the way she spoke back to Simon Cowell
She's roughly his age-mate -- in another world, they'd have been at school together -- which is another part of the surreal time-travelling appeal of the encounter, I think. Susan looks like what a 48 year old used to look like, whereas Simon looks like Rupert Everett's latest face-lift squared, with teenage teeth.
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There's a funny sort of chiasmus produced by reading (and discussing) the Veitch and Boyle stories together. Public "beautiful person" reveals ugly private side; private "ugly" person reveals beautiful talent.
Agreed that the Susan Boyle effect relies on (and reinforces) stereotypes as much as it confounds them... I do like George's colonial analogy, and Sacha's link to able-ist assumptions also works.
And yet, there also something so wildly old-fashioned about her. She sort of vaults over the walls of the whole panoptic-TV-reality-circus of global-simultaneity and back to a time when the bards of a tribe were prized not primarily for their physical beauty but for their uncanny musical talent.
A mythical golden age, to be sure (and probably not one characterised by showstopping musical numbers about plucky French gamines), but still: Vera Lynn? Kate Smith?
Also, I'm thinking "local hero" for some reason.
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PS same weekly pays its reviewers sub-norm, going by what Graham wrote. Apparently, reviews require less "work" than features.
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Islander, yes! Me too. A major NZ weekly, which used to promptly and courteously remind its freelancers to invoice as soon as the piece appeared in print, has now stopped doing so; as a consequence, timely payment seems to have slipped off the agenda as well.
Like Sam I assumed this was a week by week mistake, but after a while it starts to look like a Cunning Plan TM. Fend off the writers and hold onto your money for an extra week and it all helps with the bottom line. I haven't been nickle-and-dimed over the word-count like Graham yet but will keep an eye on it.
(Mind you, the same and worse is true over here - one media conglomerate that writes me cheques filed for bankruptcy not long ago. The money is still coming - slowly - but I'm not sure how, and for how long!)