Posts by Jolisa
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Scrapheap Challenge looks fantastic, thanks for the tip. While back in NZ in May, we also got our hands on a DVD of "Let's Get Inventin'" made by an Auckland outfit, Television Spaceman, which is pretty nifty.
Kerry, islander, Steven, so true and so beautifully written (and Steven, your own particular twist on hands-on thinking particularly appreciated). Much as I miss the big city, I can't imagine now how we managed without a garden to call our own, and earth in which to dig. Remind me to revisit Swallows and Amazons and how it led to the digging of a gold mine in our very own back yard.
And islander, by all means post your story about Uncle Bill and the dumprats! We'd love to read it. If it's very long and wonderful we can post it in the Speaker section - it's been a while since you graced us with your presence there :-)
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Ooh yes, Under the Mountain. Loved the TV series, and was fortunate to talk to someone involved with the new film, which will likely be just as good. Great recommendation.
On the question of suing and froing, I quite agree (although I haven't made a careful study) that that's how it works here - insurance companies driving the suits to cover their costs, not to mention their asses. I still don't like it. It ruins things for the rest of us.
Overlawyered.com is an excellent eye-opener on the subject. (Funnily enough, he linked to me back in the day, when the cost of liability insurance drove my favourite birth centre out of business). (And while I'm at it, check out this extremely silly copyright infringement lawsuit).
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Oh, and Carol, lucky you, having the run of the dump. Have you read Wallace Stegner's gorgeous short piece about the town dump of his childhood? There's a downloadable transcription here, although I can't guarantee its accuracy; you can also find it in various anthologies, including Stegner's own Wolf Willow.
Here's how it begins:
The town dump of Whitemud, Saskatchewan, could only have been a few years old when I knew it, for the village was born in 1913 and I left there in 1919. But I remember the dump better than I remember most things in that town, better than I remember most of the people. I spent more time with it, for one thing; it has more poetry and excitement in it than people did...
He catalogues the glorious mess of objects in the dump and their personal connections to the people of the town, including himself; also the bounty he discovered there and the mischief he and his friends got up to with their finds, even though they were forbidden "on pain of cholera or worse" from going there. "The dump was our poetry and our history. We took it home with us by the wagonload, bringing back into town the things the town had used and thrown away." I wish I could quote the whole thing, it's so beautiful and funny and melancholy, and the descriptions of the various objects are sublime.
Anyway, here's how it ends:
Occasionally something we really valued with a passion was snatched from us in horror and returned at once. That happened to the mounted head of a white mountain goat, somebody's trophy from old times and the far Rocky Mountains, that I brought home one day in transports of delight. My mother took one look and discovered that his beard was full of moths.
I remember that goat; I regret him yet. Poetry is seldom useful, but always memorable. I think I learned more from the town dump than I learned from school: more about people, more about how life is lived, not elsewhere but here, not in other times but now. If I were a sociologist anxious to study in detail the life of any community, I would go very early to its refuse piles. For a community may be as well judged by what it throws away—what it has to throw away and what it chooses to—as by any other evidence. For whole civilizations we have sometimes no more of the poetry and little more of the history than this.
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Thanks for the tips re Wilbur Robinson (no relation to Heath?) and Psst and Bridge to Terabithia. I'll check them out, although I might save the latter for a couple of years. Very sensitive plant, is Busylad, guaranteed to cry at minute 75 ("dark night of the soul/all is lost!") of even the most benign movie. I'm slowly indoctrinating him into the art of literary criticism so he can at least have a bracing intellectual frame for the stories that upset him so.
Yes to the trolleys out of scrap wood and pram wheels! You can buy kits these days, but it's not quite the same, is it? And yes to the empty sections and the edge of suburbia and abandoned quarries! Construction sites were always incredibly attractive, too. Nothing like clambering through the wooden skeleton of a house in progress. Yeah, it's dangerous, but that's what tetanus shots are for.
I think fear of litigation is a huge part of what's going on in Greenwich. Note the aside in the NY Times article about the sledding doctor who sued the city over a broken ankle -- what a dick! When Busylad careered off the local sledding slope face first into a thorn bush last winter, we didn't sue the city, we just slathered him with Savlon. For a day or two he looked like he'd gone five rounds with a rabid panther, but he healed up without a trace of a scar, and with a new and healthy respect for thorn bushes.
It's amazingly catching, though, this lawsuit-shyness. Last night we noticed a well-dressed young lady cutting through our back yard. It would be nice if she introduced herself, but more worrying was the thought that she might injure herself while vaulting the spiked wrought iron fence, in which case we might be liable... not a happy thought. And we can't get a trampoline, because it would send our homeowners' insurance through the roof...
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Just trying to parse the different elements of the argument here, so I can see if I agree, disagree, or feel entirely indifferent about it.
So the Miller test replaces "I know it when I see it" with "We know it when we see it," leading to the inevitable "What do you mean 'we,' kemosabe?" Which is obviously problematic, especially for minority sexual practices. And yet, what do we propose to replace it with? As Richard points out, a centralised censor just ain't gonna fly, in this country anyway.
And OK, so any given interest-based web community doesn't map onto any single identifiable physical location, and may in fact have entirely different community standards from any other randomly selected geographical community. Almost by definition, it's a subcultural utopia. So... any given interest-based web community should not be subject to the laws of any other community than itself? Or what?
And the writer of these texts, which themselves are not what you'd call the idea poster child for freedom of expression, has a sort of an excuse perhaps maybe (and don't we all) -- except for the bit where she has sold access to these stories and has thus crossed some line from expression to commerce? Is/isn't that what she's being punished for, as much as for the content?
Also, I'm trying to understand the nature of the "damage" Emma mentions in her last paragraph. I'm not being thick, I just feel the need for more exposition on this subject. If somebody took down some stories about child rape and murder from the very same web that my children are (for better or for worse) beginning to use, forgive me if I don't exactly feel "damaged."
Yes yes, I know, consenting adults in private, it's all walled off by rules of access and layers of protective verbiage and big flashing signs saying "don't look," etc etc. Hey, I'm not a book burner (or a server burner). I agree wholeheartedly about the idiocy of the facebook/youtube breastfeeding photo ban debacle (and if we want to talk about damage, we could round up a whole bunch of incredibly dodgy stories on the subject and related topics).
But I still just don't feel especially threatened by the outcome of this particular story. Why? And should I?
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There is no discussion thread that cannot be improved by the addition of a little Tom Lehrer... NB some images & lyrics mildly NSFW, unless you happen to work at the chief censor's office.
Isn't part of the pleasure of shared smut that it be illicit, private, forbidden, naughty? Certainly that's how it worked for the Victorians. If big government wasn't coming after you, and you weren't having to constantly move the printing presses and hide your product behind virtual red velvet curtains, would it still be fun?
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Well, to be clear I did demand and get a $50 pw increase
Uh, that's per week, not per word, right?
But the deeper story, as I said, is what's happened to freelance pay rates in general in the last 15 years, while largely foreign print media owners have pocketed the returns.
Someone should write that story (hello, Critic?). The word rates are appalling, and they're falling. It's not a lot better in the US, my other freelance playground, unless you luck into the glossy magazines (hello, Oprah?).
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Late to the party, but I'm with Amy, Rich, and Che on this.
i am however willing to state my surprise at the herald running a stupid story about a cheap photo.
Particularly when that same newspaper, along with most in New Zealand, frequently relies on stock photos to illustrate local stories on generic topics.
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Good on you for keeping the fee steady, at least!
I mean in raw dollar-and-cents terms, at least.
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That Critic article was fascinating - thanks for the link, guys.
Though I do usually scan the books section to see if Jolisa has anything in it.
Thanks, Deborah! I do the same, looking for my favourites. I should have one in the week after next, I hope (a delayed review of Emily Perkins' new novel), and then Kapka Kassabova's memoir a few weeks after that.
Interestingly, the long book reviews now seem to be about 20% shorter than they used to be. I don't know if readers have noticed the change, but I miss those extra words (and not, or not just, because I was paid for some of them!). I guess the page size or ad space changed?
Meanwhile, I wonder what happened to Chris Knox's DVD reviews?
And yes, bravo to Matt and Fiona for their artful TV and film reviews in 50 words or less. I think even non-TV-watching readers get their best value out of those pages, on a laugh-per-word basis :-)
BTW, it's an indication of what's happened to freelance pay rates that my fee in 1993 was about the same as my fee at the beginning of 2008.
Russell, ouch. Good on you for keeping the fee steady, at least!