Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: The perils of political confidence, in reply to Russell Brown,
And the response has been to double down by pretending that he's some poor citizen -- a parent! of children! -- cruelly bugged by the evil media, rather than a political leader doing a media stunt.
He kissed a toad, confident that something of his shininess would rub off on the critter. Now he's trying to blame the media for the resulting warts.
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Legal Beagle: The New Zealand Election Tax, in reply to BenWilson,
I can read LISP but I can’t write it.
That LISP, of the fully parenthesized syntax. If I recall correctly, it's an acronym derived from Lost In Stupid Parentheses.
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Hard News: The perils of political confidence, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
...I'm half crazy an offers th' votes to you...
(it won't be a stylish marriage!)Dat dam computer again . . .
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@N_BenWilson_Z has also won a bottle of premium New Zealand-made schnapps for this "tweet":
Key mourns the passing of Ol' Dirty Bastard (13 Nov RIP). Banks responds "We haven't got him yet" #teapottapes #zumwohl #votenz
Congratulations.
Ol' Dirty Bastard, Ol' Dirty Bastard
Flyin', flyin' high
He's just a-waitin'
Bastard's just a-waitin'
Waitin' for somethin' down below to die . . . -
Hard News: The perils of political confidence, in reply to Hilary Stace,
They should get Geoffrey Palmer to give his personal/legal opinion on teapotgate.
In less than 100,000 words, without copious citations and footnotes?
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Hard News: Some things just don't let…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Doug Hood . . . took so many bands and
budding sound men under his wing and gave them a chance to fly.... . . and if he'd happened along a few centuries earlier he just might've given a vital boost to those thirteenth century decadent birds incapable of flight. Because if anyone could have done it . . .
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Hard News: Walking upright again, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
sewer rage is never pretty
rats….
From the alligator patrol episode of Thomas Pynchon’s V:
They were entering Fairing’s Parish, named after a priest who’d lived topside years ago. During the Depression of the ’30’s, in an hour of apocalyptic well-being, he had decided that the rats were going to take over after New York died . . . This being the case, Father Fairing thought it best for the rats to be given a head start – which meant conversion to the Roman Church. One night early in Roosevelt’s first term, he climbed downstairs through the nearest manhole, bringing a Baltimore Catechism, his breviary and, for reasons nobody found out, a copy of Knight’s Modern Seamanship. . . Before long he would be spiritual leader of the inheritors of the earth. He considered it small enough sacrifice on their part to provide three of their own per day for physical sustenance, in return for the spiritual nourishment he was giving them.
Accordingly, he built himself a small shelter on one bank of the sewer. His cassock for a bed, his breviary for a pillow. Each morning he’d make a small fire from driftwood collected and set out to dry the night before. Nearby was a depression in the concrete which sat beneath a downspout, for rainwater. Here he drank and washed. After a breakfast of roast rat (“The livers,” he wrote, “are particularly succulent”) he set about his first task: learning to communicate with the rats. Presumably he succeeded. . . .
The journal ends here. It is still preserved in an inaccessible region of the Vatican library, and in the minds of the few old-timers in the New York Sewer Department who got to see it when it was discovered. It lay on top of a brick, stone and stick cairn large enough to cover a human corpse, assembled in a stretch of 36-inch pipe near a frontier of the Parish. Next to it lay the breviary. There was no trace of the catechism or Knight’s Modern Seamanship.
“Maybe,” said Zeitsuss’s predecessor Manfred Katz after reading the journal, “maybe they are studying the best way to leave a sinking ship.”
The stories, by the time Profane heard them, were pretty much apocryphal and more fantasy than the record itself warranted. At no point in the twenty or so years the legend had been handed on did it occur to anyone to question the old priest’s sanity. It is this way with sewer stories. They just are. Truth or falsity don’t apply. -
Hard News: We interrupt this broadcast ..., in reply to Kracklite,
And a very good night to you too Sir.
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Actually, I really hope it doesn’t come to that. Are you hoping that it does? If so, that seems petty of you.
Of course course I don't, silly.
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Hard News: We interrupt this broadcast ..., in reply to Kracklite,
“Not as bad as” has always been a weak argument.
Weak!
O give us a fondle of that jailbait political muscle tone!While I'd rank Dalziel and Cosgrove somewhat ahead of Dyson and Burns in dealing with the grubby issues that Keir's raised, I'm hardly going to let my contempt for Mallard & Jones prevent me from engaging with those in the party who are prepared to put themselves on the line. No-one's demanding that anyone toe some kind of party line as a condition of engagement.
Should your world be similarly rocked, I can only wish that your idealism translates into engagement rather quicker than inevitably. Because you'll bloody need it, along with all the political help you can muster.