Posts by daleaway

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  • Hard News: Spin Spun,

    In my experience the OIA request can be fulfilled promptly by ministry staff, but the Minister's office sits on it till the last possible minute and decides what amongst the material provided is too "sensitive" to be released.

    Then the public service gets the blame for the delay. Journos are none the wiser.

    Since Jul 2007 • 198 posts Report

  • Hard News: Grateful for 'Rain',

    Ta Kracklite.

    To my shame, I completely forgot the needs of the alcoholic... room to kneel in front of a loo should be added to your list!

    Actually I have a relative whose fortune is being made laying and resurfacing marble in commercial buildings. He tells me those clients are usually good for a double fee - once when he advises the architect against specifying polished marble-floored foyers (and is told he is an aesthetic illiterate), and the second six months after installation when a wet winter and a few broken limbs see him called back in to rough up the marble so people can actually stand on it. Tee hee.

    So if developers want to impress, tell them to save money on the marble flooring and put it into bigger loos, and more of them. This is where architects should be taking their machismo out for a trot - confronting developers, not passing the buck to the hapless consumer.

    Another pet design hate, while my soapbox is out and dusted, are homes where the master bedroom is miles from the kitchen, or up in a tower or similar eyrie. Staircases with no handrail or banisters, for example. Do these people never get sick and require meals in bed? Do they never want to retire early with a cup of cocoa? The NZ version of the California bungalow may be much maligned, but it doesn't make this basic mistake.

    It's not so much that I am startled that anyone should want to live the way these modern houses dictate, but my astonishment is that their creators seem incapable of envisaging that other people may have different requirements, ages and abilities. Empathy 101, anyone?

    You may not be able to set curricula, but you can set essay and assignment topics!

    Since Jul 2007 • 198 posts Report

  • Island Life: What's the frequency, Helen?,

    I know who stole my Compleet Molesworth in 1963, and I would have a fatwa out on her now had she not married a real dud and been forced to live in a city which I shall not name out of delicacy, so I reckon fatwa has been executed by karma.

    Incidentally, a former husband of mine was at prep school in the UK and his school reports really did have a category for Raffia Work. No prizes, though.

    Since Jul 2007 • 198 posts Report

  • Hard News: Grateful for 'Rain',

    To this peasant, postmodern started when critics could no longer think of anything original to say, but still wanted to hear the sound of their own voice, so began (mis)quoting others and calling it irony.

    Kracklite, pet, could I crave a boon?

    We tried for a year to buy a new house in our desired area, and dismissed a series of expensive pretentious boxes with no kitchen, just a nasty shelf at the back of the sitting room. An ironic pomo kitchen, I suppose. A kitchen in which one opens packets of deli salads and reheats microwaved meals. We eventually bought a 1960s house because it (a) had a proper kitchen in which one could make jam, and grow basil on the windowsill, and nurture people, and (b) nobody gives a stuff what you do to a 1960s house, so we're doing lots of it. Why must we all live like bachelors?

    As an earlier commentator here hinted, so many uncomfortable factors in modern architecture are introduced by unmarried males. Especially those for whom cooking family meals is a concept as foreign and as unfashionable as having a vege garden or a disability. I am not sure how you go about putting an old head on young shoulders, but surely it is part of a teacher's job description to try.

    What I would like to see is all schools of architecture to purchase a wheelchair - just the one, or the little buggers would hold races - and make it compulsory for each budding architect to spend a week in it as part of their training. Their eyes would be opened to so many of the difficulties their ilk have placed in the way of the older and not so athletic, and I reckon urban design would be revolutionised. Seriously.

    I'd also like to see those young blokes compulsorily dressed in skirts and heels, carrying some shopping and a handbag, and going into a ladies' loo to change their tights. (I'll spare them struggling also with a toddler or stroller. I am merciful.) The result would be twice as many ladies' loos everywhere, and they would all be twice the size, have the sanitary towel disposal unit behind the loo or as a built-in fitting, not as an afterthought jutting across the door, and have a shelf and a hook behind the door for hanging your handbag on instead of having to put it on the floor. So there.

    At the moment I am on crutches, and public loos are a menace. Nowhere to put the damned sticks once I'm in there, even if I can get through the narrow doors with them. And don't get me started on tiled and marbled floors. It's a wonder half the country is not on ACC.

    You sound like a chap with finer feelings. Thank you for anything you can do.

    Since Jul 2007 • 198 posts Report

  • Hard News: Castoffs of Waiheke,

    Clive James may know plenty about making enemies (and gloating), but he knew sod all about book publishing when he wrote this.

    Anticipating what any book's print run should be is neither an art nor a science, it's at best an informed guess, and normally, little more than a punt.

    With booksellers being less and less inclined to carry backlist, and publishers wanting their money out within a few months to put into their next venture, it's a miracle that every book does not end up on remainder tables. Remainders are normal, not a mark of shame.

    I agree that old baches full of old books are a great joy. Provided it's not one of those His and Hers bookcases neatly divided into Westerns/Sci-fi and Thrills and Swoons!

    Since Jul 2007 • 198 posts Report

  • Hard News: About a Cat,

    Some smart cats roll in dirt to clog their bells.
    Check the state of your belled cat's apparatus, Peter...

    Since Jul 2007 • 198 posts Report

  • Hard News: About a Cat,

    Since Jul 2007 • 198 posts Report

  • Cracker: Welcome Home?,

    I've had a large sea/city view for the last 30 years and seen New Year's fireworks in NZ only in the last ten or so. Apart from the (very) odd yahoo in earlier years. In the last couple of years it has become more widespread but is by no means the norm.

    On the other hand, I recall being in a country village near Amsterdam for New Year's Eve 1970, and seeing the rockets light up the wintry sky at midnight from many villages all around - thinking, this would never work in New Zealand as the villages are too far apart.

    New Year's Eve in New Zealand was "traditionally" celebrated with a few drinks at home with family and friends, unless you were in Queenstown or for some reason, Gisborne, where people gathered in the streets. Later, Mt Maunganui. Street celebrations were a very late starter in other centres - nothing major till the 1980s. By that time somebody had convinced us we had to be loud and obnoxious to be enjoying ourselves...

    Since Jul 2007 • 198 posts Report

  • Busytown: I Sold My Soul to Santa,

    A couple of centuries ago, mincemeat did indeed have minced meat in it, along with the suet, spices and some dried fruit. Gradually the meat quantities got smaller and the fruit got larger and mincemeat jumped courses and took its present form.

    As for vegetable suet, haven't you ever had to cut off the fatty deposits round kidney beans?

    Since Jul 2007 • 198 posts Report

  • Hard News: The Daily Embarrassment,

    Haven't honours always been for sale?
    Aren't they an adult version of Santa Claus, bringing gifts to the boys and girls who have been good?
    And doesn't the size of the gift depend on how many mince pies you've left out for Santa? (And which of his elves you've greased up to?)

    Read the Herald online and buy the DomPost from its Auckland outlets. You might miss a few funerals, but litle else of significance. The DomPost still allows itself a few bag-of-hammers moments, however... notably when the subject of abortion is raised. Some of its frequent letter writers are still fighting the CS&A Act thirty years on - and the DomPost is still regularly publishing their similarly formatted letters. And ex-editor Karl Du Fresne still shoehorns the topic into his Curmudgeon column every full moon.

    It's now 20 years since the NZ Ministry for the Environment started trying to raise awareness of Climate Change facts. On a shoestring. With the budget of the BRT, the Tasman Institute, and various other business groups that fund anti-climate change propaganda in this part of the world, MFE might have made a lot more progress to the point where average readers could readily dismiss deniers as self-interested dipsticks. At least the Murdoch papers are no longer making publication of "balanced" viewpoints mandatory, since Rupert had a Road to Damascus conversion. Or something.

    Since Jul 2007 • 198 posts Report

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