Posts by Tom Beard
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to Emma Hart,
The concept of "middle age" seems to be getting a bit slippery.
I think it's connected as much to life stage as to age. "Middle age" is only partly about wrinkles, beer bellies and receding hairlines: it's more about mortgages, adolescent children, wedding anniversaries and climbing the corporate ladder. Life paths these days are (for many) a lot less predictable and linear, with forking paths, loops and diversions.
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I've been trying to avoid leaping into the more complex issues raised by the Boganette post, but here goes.
I once read a fair bit of poststructuralist feminism (and lived!), and I remember much critique of the supposed Enlightenment reinforcement of binaries such as masculine/feminine, culture/nature and mind/body. The feminist movement aimed to subvert and break down such binaries, and one way to do that was to celebrate the "embodied" nature of ourselves rather than dismissing the profane body in favour of pure reason and disembodied spirituality. For women to be comfortable with their bodies, whatever their shape and size, as well as reclaiming their sexuality and sensuality.
Yet there's an element among the "slut-shamers" that seems to loathe bodies. They're not only uncomfortable with their own bodies, but uncomfortable with other women who are comfortable with theirs. Sex can be okay, but only when it's in the context of "intimacy", and not when tainted by such shallow, dirty things as physical attraction. They talk about women being "sexualised", as if people (or at least 99% of us) were not inherently sexual: we can't be sexualised, only desexualised to varying degrees.
Sure, it's not okay to leer, grope or rudely comment upon other people's bodies (unless invited). It's not okay to enforce particular ideals of body type upon others. But there's nothing wrong with being comfortable with your own sexual attractiveness, or discreetly and politely appreciating the physical characteristics of others. If you'd be happier in loose and unrevealing clothing: fine. If you're happy rocking the cleavage, tattoos and purple shorts: also fine.
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Up Front: Say When, in reply to ,
How old is to old to be hitting turps in public
When you're too old to drink except via IV drip.
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Remeber that 40 is "XL" in Roman numerals. So do as I did and throw an Extra Large party!
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
That too. Though that might be the analogy for selling RNZ.
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Muse: Linky Love, in reply to giovanni tiso,
I've often been puzzled by anglicised/americanised editions that localise the spelling - as if one couldn't deal with the few differences.
I've been having a different but related problem: if one's writing is set in a deliberately unspecified country, how does one deal with spelling and vocabulary differences? And vernacular is even more difficult.
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Not necessarily. You could be mortgage free, but with a smaller house.
A better analogy might be selling off your downstairs flat that you're currently renting out to some nice tenants who pay a handsome rent. You'd reduce your mortgage, but lose more in rental income, and the new owners might decide to convert it into something loathsome like a P lab or childcare centre.
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if you’re an editorial writer for the Herald, you might consider John Key’s case for asset sales to be “powerful”. Despite the fact that he HASN’T MADE A CASE YET
Well, obviously his argument is so powerful it's not necessary to talk about it.
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Hard News: Because it's about time we…, in reply to Stuff n Things,
I'm liking Midnight Espresso even more now that it has moved to Cuba St.
Do you mean Espressoholic? Yes, I'm starting to like it more now, especially since they do a bacon buttie with hollandaise & homemade hash browns. The owners really seem to love what they do, and it really shows.
It was one of mainstays in the early 90s, both in the original Willis St location and in Courtenay Place. I got a lot of writing done, and discovered a lot of (to me at the time) new music: Sven Vath and Gary Clail in particular. I don't think you'd ever catch Starbucks playing German techno or industrial dub :-)
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Beyond the coffee-specific snarkiness of the article, there's a sense in which it fits into a typical neo-con trope: if you object to globalisation and corporatised homogenisation, then you're an elitist.
Self-consciously cool middle-class liberals might sneer at shopping malls, SUVs, McMansions, disposable Chinese-made fashion, reality TV and Starbucks, but real people lap them up. The market has decided, and if you object that these things might not be in the best long-term interest of the planet or local communities, then you're not only ignorant of economic realities, you're a snobbish macchiato socialist. A "senior equity analyst" just can't get his head around a place where we prefer to spend our time and money with businesses that aren't publicly listed.