Posts by Craig Ranapia
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: Word of the Year 2014: #dirtypolitics, in reply to Sacha,
or you could tap whichever sympathetic donor paid for Slater’s QC.
Or I guess you could have duelling Kickstarter pages with Hager, and you know what? I think the commie pinko tool would win that one and keep winning it for as long as it would take.
-
Hard News: Word of the Year 2014: #dirtypolitics, in reply to Russell Brown,
Yes. That’s a deafening silence right there.
A defamation action would inevitably lead to a discovery process and that could/would get very, very messy.
To be fair, Russell, it's also entirely possible that someone calmed Mitchell down and reminded him of the rather sad case of David Lange who got rather litigious towards the end. If you're going to be spraying around defamation suits, it helps if your pockets are as a deep as Colin Craig's not a backbench MPs.
-
Sorry for forgetting to say this before, but could you take me out of the draw -- already have Russell's book, and four copies of yours (one for keeps and the rest for Christmas giving to the unworthy and ungrateful).
-
The best single piece of non-fiction I read this year was George Packer's New Yorker profile of Angela Merkel, 'The Quiet German' (December 1 issue if you don't have a ket to the new subscriber paywall) -- which is not only a great snapshot of a woman whose near-decade as the Chancellor of Germany, and how she got there, is definitely NOT politics as usual but a rather nicely understated counter to a lot of assumptions about what politics is that is more relevant to New Zealand than you might think.
Another pearler, if you're as interested in Germany as I am, is Mary Elise Sarotte's The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of The Berlin Wall. Pretty much what it says on the tin, and you're a fan of the ideas of historical inevitability or Western triumphalism give this a wide swerve. This is a scholarly but accessible assembly of the (sometime patchy) historical record, that tells a story of a series of small events that had vast consequences.
-
Hard News: Word of the Year 2014: #dirtypolitics, in reply to James Littlewood*,
Not entirely sure how the turducken came into it. But, say you like did one, would you bone, fillet and stuff it yourself, or get the butcher to do it?
Leave it to the professionals, say I. I wouldn’t fancy my chances of successfully deboning several birds without contributing a finger or two and a lot of human blood to the stuffing.
But the Faro turducken has nothing on on this culinary middle-finger of mouth-wateringly nauseating excess:
The true king of culinary absurdity comes from L’almanach des gourmands, an 1807 cookbook written by Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimond de la Reyniere, a man so outlandish he faked his own death to see who would attend his funeral. His creation was called the rôti sans pareil —the roast without equal— and it is everything that has made the half-dead art of engastration increasingly popular today: ambitious, ostentatious, and alluringly, inevitably delicious.
His recipe calls for a bustard stuffed with a turkey stuffed with a goose stuffed with a pheasant stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a duck stuffed with a guinea fowl stuffed with a teal stuffed with a woodcock stuffed with a partridge stuffed with a plover stuffed with a lapwing stuffed with a quail stuffed with a thrush stuffed with a lark stuffed with an ortolan bunting stuffed with a garden warbler stuffed with an olive stuffed with an anchovy stuffed with a single caper, with layers of Lucca chestnuts, force meat and bread stuffing between each bird, stewed in a hermetically sealed pot in a bath of onion, clove, carrots, chopped ham, celery, thyme, parsley, mignonette, salted pork fat, salt, pepper, coriander, garlic, and “other spices,” and slowly cooked over a fire for at least 24 hours.
For those not keeping track, that’s 20 layers, 17 of them birds, and a grand total of 18 creatures that had to die (assuming only one pig would be used to make the force meat, chopped ham, and salted pork fat) for the amusement of some turn-of-the-19th century dandies. And if that seems impossible, that’s because it is—today at least. Not because it’s scientifically impossible or there’s a lack of eager chefs in this world, but because many of the birds are now hard to find and kill.
History doesn’t record anyone cooking the damn thing, let alone eating it and living to tell, but it would make a great Christmas dinner from Hell… “I don’t care if you’re all vegans. Nobody is leaving the table until someone’s had a heat attack or passed on in their own vomit.”
-
Hard News: Word of the Year 2014: #dirtypolitics, in reply to Russell Brown,
While a turducken is delightful in theory, I suspect it would just be my grandfather's insistence on buying a Christmas ham the size of a small dog all over again.
-
Hard News: Word of the Year 2014: #dirtypolitics, in reply to Russell Brown,
The duck was in a jar.
Delicious duck in a stylish French jar I now keep pencils in. Jesus, having a Faro Fresh almost literally around the corner is going to be the death of me. Especially if I manage to convince David that re-mortgaging the house for a turducken is a good idea.
-
Speaker: Why churches should marry…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I suspect they were worried about defamation risk in re-publishing an allegation of child molestation. Not with any real grounds, of course, but that’s my guess.
And honestly, I'd give The Herald the benefit of the doubt there though, of course, paraphrases should be clearly labelled as such. In the end, it clearly conveyed the tenor of that tosspot's vileness without going over the edge into stuff that could have been seriously triggering to any GLBT victim of abuse -- and anyone with even a micron of common decency.
-
Speaker: Why churches should marry…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
[Removed because on a second look Ian's read of the story is spot on. Mine not so much.]
-
Speaker: Why churches should marry…, in reply to Sue,
My favourite was when it was ok to be gay as long as you never did anything, hate the sin love the sinner sort of rubbish
What I find particularly adorable is the whole "equality of civil marriage, which we don't doctrinally recognize anyway, is a vicious attack on religious freedom" foofy-tosh. It's not only circle jerk non-reasoning, but it's an argument I doubt these folks would reciprocate if I decided to go full metal Wicker Man in the backyard and burn someone to death to appease the spirits and help the roses along...