Posts by Tom Beard
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Preferably all at once, Tom?
Don't be silly, Megan! One would spill one's Martini.
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Bingo! And Prebble is not just wrong, he's raving, drooling out of his tiny mind wrong ...
"New Zealand has [the ] second-lowest government spending in OECD"
That's a very uncharitable conclusion, Russell! Prebble obvious had some other OECD in mind, one consisting exclusively of such well-known countries as Friedmania, Randistan and Rogerland.
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if you spliced the DNA of McVicar and Peter Williams you still wouldn't come up with a decent half-wit.
I groaned when the interviewees were announced: how could it not have been a trainwreck? You might as well have expected a cat and a dog to have a reasoned, open-minded and courteous discussion.
Williams just sounded batty by the end.
I tend far more towards the Howard League end of the spectrum on those issues, but he achieved the impossible: made McVicar seem almost, y'know, sensible by comparison.
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the pirate bay
Ah: I had to admit that I didn't know of that site until now. For a moment I thought that you were confusing the Kings of Leon with Kings of Convenience.
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Onehunga weed.
And the memories come flooding back ... that probably explains a lot about why I like shoues, and don't like grass. It was everywhere in ChCh in the 80s.
Ok, I may be romanticising my childhood slightly.
I think that's the nub of it. So much of the nostalgia for the "great kiwi summer" isn't so much about any change of climate or of culture, but the simple fact that we're not kids any more. Of course we had great long expanses of mucking around doing nothing: we had long summer holidays, whereas these days we're like, y'know, working. And a couple of months seemed like a loooong time when we were eight. Ice creams were a treat, and now we can buy ten every lunchtime if we wanted.
I'm quite happy not to spend all my time looking to the simple pleasure of the past with L&P-tinted spectacles, but to enjoy the complex pleasures of adulthood, such as Martinis, sex, bespoke suits, coffee, dancing until dawn and wearing really, really elegant shoes.
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music and computers. Mainly it's about how the two have combined to seriously alter how I listen to music
The two have always combined for me, since most of the music I listen to was created on, with or in some cases by computers.
In fact I listen to more music now than I did even five years ago.
I'm afraid to say I don't listen as much as I used to. That's because
(a) I now work in a job that relies on writing and talking to people, rather than coding, so listening via headphones at work is difficult or inappropriate.
(b) My phone has mp3 capability, but when I'm out walking in public I like to be aware of what's around me rather than shut off in my own world.
(c) Most of what little time at home is spent either asleep, hungover, concentrating on webby stuff, watching what little there is to see on TV these days, or making my own music.
So I'd have to say that most of the music I hear on a day-to-day basis is either live music or background music at whatever cafe or bar I happen to be in. Of course, when that happens to be the Hawthorn Lounge, that's not a bad thing at all.
I don't listen to albums.
And there's another thing: one reason I don't listen to much music at home is that I've rarely got time to listen to a whole album, and much of what I listen to is conceived as albums rather than individual tracks, or has been sequenced as a continuous mix. Apart from the annoyingly abrupt beginnings and ends that would result from chopping them up and combining them into a playlist, one would also lose much of the sense and flow. Some pieces were even composed specifically for the CD format: Brian Eno had been waiting for years to compose and record "Thursday Afternoon", but he had to wait until the advent of CDs made a continuous 72-minute track possible.
I still have an issue with buying singles. While it is easier and I know I like it because I've heard it on the radio or the internet, what about those buried gems that are never released by the record companies? It is only from the crappiest of bands where my favourite song from an album also happens to be the main single release.
I agree with that, and even more to the point: often my favourite pieces are the ones that not only weren't picked up by record companies, but that I myself didn't like or understand upon first listen. It's only by being "forced" to listen them as part of an album that I came to appreciate them.
those crazy Scandinavians
Sorry, who?
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By the way she did a post about how high your heels should be based on your height
My ex-stepdaughter is 6'2", and while most of the time she wears sensible flats, on special occasions she'll wear 4" heels. The results are spectacular to say the least.
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Well, like, duh!
Assuming that anyone other than a Zambesi mannequin would actually wear such an ensemble, of course.
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with a straight face
You're making a big assumption.
But while a pair of Loake brogues will look the business (in many senses) when paired with a pinstriped Zegna suit, they would be somewhat out of place when worn with an open-necked black muslin shirt untucked beneath a three-piece acid-washed denim suit.
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I believe that Tom may be what we used to call a 'dandy'! Capital.
I am merely what we used to, in more enlightened times, call a 'gentleman'. It is only in these troubled times, when we are overrun by besneakered oafs, that a chap with a modicum of dress sense comes to be called a 'dandy'.
On the other hand, you could do worse than join the Confederation of Anarcho-Dandyists (or CAD for short).