Posts by Jolisa
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I am trying to picture the thought process behind the phrase, as originally intended. Seriously. Was the mental image meant to be a single dapper Chinese person cycling through, say, 1930s Wellington, which may well have been rather eye-catching for those around them? Or was it meant to evoke a Chinese person in China, just one of a critical mass-style group spinning through the streets? How do (or did) we derive the "flash" bit from the rest of it? Is the comical effect of the expression due to the supposed incongruity of the image, like minstrels in evening dress? In any event, it's clearly meant to be said by a non-Chinese person to a non-Chinese person, which is I think part of what Hilary was getting at with her question; it posits an in-group and an out-group, and assumes only the in-group is listening.
(I was trying to think of synonymous but more innocent phrases, and am rather shocked to discover that one that came to mind also turns out to have a potentially racist inflection. Go figure.)
But do you want to know one group, in my experience, who will try and blag free drinks and take advantage of them?
Yep. You know who used to turn up in droves to the free monthly drinkies at the NZ Embassy in Tokyo?
New Zealanders. Shameless.
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Like Jack above, I was very, very disappointed to discover that this post was not about cute fluffy doggies. With bikes.
But luckily, I can fix that.
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Mate, I was on The Pixies
Pixie dust, perhaps?
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Thanks for the Ballard link, Philip. It led me tangentially to this lovely reminiscence by Ballard's daughter, Bea: My Dad, the Perfect Mum. Hankies at the ready!
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Another cool thing about The Wire, noted by many other people not just me:
Apart from the opening and closing credits, most or all of the music is diegetic, i.e. it arises organically from inside the scene, as opposed to the usual painted-on exegetic score that tells you how and when to have a (heavily orchestrated) emotional experience about what's onscreen.
In other words, this is a show that trusts the viewer to decide what's going on, and what it means. And it rewards that attentiveness a thousandfold.
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Dyan, ta for the great recipe! The boy is a cucumber fanatic but he has already adapted the recipe for his more hated vegetables, and has added it to his repertoire of funny-bits, along with chapter-and-verse of Calvin and Hobbes, and whole undigested chunks of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which we have been listening to in the car :-)
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Islander, what Danielle (and everyone else) said. It is epic, not in the fatuous movie-trailer sense, but in the "oh my god that's Hector being dragged by his heels around the walls of Troy and now where is Cassandra when we need her" sense. But also, it shows Hector and Andromache arguing over the groceries, which makes it all the more gutting in the end. Not to mention the close-up on baby Astyanax.
I promise you won't regret the Wire. It's a "crime series" in the same way that A Midsummer Night's Dream is a rom-com, or Othello is a divorce drama.
I adored it for the language it puts into our ears. Not the stylised, formalised back-and-forth of faux-gritty screenplay cliches. And not a simplistic mimesis of what's out there. But an absolutely heightened and distilled version of the many complex dialects of one small corner of one country, "high" to "low" to foreign and everything in between. In that sense, as well as the unbelievably complex interweaving of the characters' Richter-scale arcs, it is utterly Shakespearean.
And yes, five series, each focusing on a different facet of society, illuminating life from a different angle. It's prismatic. Each one will break your heart along a fault-line you didn't even know you had.
Plus: funny as hell.
Also: Team Omar.
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I love that this thread is still trundling along - nay, rollicking along! - via close-reading and re-remembering of the classics.
Must go and re-read Tom Sawyer myself. I loved it when I read it at about 10, and know an 8 year old who probably would too.
We just lapped up Rasmus and the Vagabond by Astrid Lindgren. What a fantastic wee book - another runaway boy, but from an orphanage, in a Swedish summer, in the company of a benevolent tramp (or is he?). I was sold on it from the first two sentences:
Rasmus was sitting in his regular notch in the linden tree, thinking about things that shouldn't be allowed to exist. Potatoes were at the top of the list.
.. which drew a roar of laughter from my potato-phobe. Major props to Gerry Bothmer for the excellent translation, and Eric Palmquist for the sweetly redolent illustrations.
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webweaver, I'm envious - the town of your youth sounds idyllic! Did it actually smell of chocolate as well? That would be perfect.
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Ooh, Mikaere, I envy you that room. Over here you'd instal bug-screens all round and call it a "screened-in porch," and sleep out on it every night it's warm enough.
[ETA the open-air children's bunk rooms at Colin McCahon's house in French Bay sound a lot like what you're talking about, BenW!]
And I envy you all that Auckland summer.
Over here, we're enjoying our first week of steady above-zero temperatures, a bit of a shock after the last two enormous snowstorms. The crocuses (croci?) are coming up, the witch-hazel is a-dazzle, the tulips and daffs are starting to poke through the ground, and the earth has finally thawed enough that we can plant the first round of peas -- and bury the first trophy-mouse of the season. He's a very thoughtful cat, waiting till the thaw.
Nice to hit single-digits again; I've acclimatised enough that it actually feels like T-shirt weather when it's 8 C or higher. The boys even campaigned to set up the sprinkler so they could run through it... mark my words, next week it'll be back to the regulation one more month of winter, and then we'll finally get the grudging proper spring. But I'm loving this brief burst of warmth.