Posts by Ben Thomas
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I wasted six years of Wednesdays on that show. ( Lost debuted in the dark ages between owning a VHS and MySky, so keeping up meant cancelling a lot of stuff for my entire late 20s).
[WARNING: Litany of complaints follows]
1. The redemption/purgatory/flash-sideways storyline had nothing to do with the preceding five/six seasons. Sure, the choices they made, the lives they lived etc were important to their moral status in their afterlives, but the fact of the afterlife is completely extraneous to the magical island (ie the island didn't make purgatory; the castaways' souls did. They all met up there just because it was the most important time of their lives - for other souls, purgatory would presumably be full of their friends from university, or war buddies).
It would make just as much sense for the Wire's final season to wrap up with Bunk and McNulty having a beer in Cop Heaven with Stringer Bell. It's not contradictory to what's happened before - it is however completely superfluous and tacked on.2. Cuse and Lindoff have apparently (as part of the damping down strategy) been saying that Lost is story about characters and relationships, not ultimately about the mythology. I would have posited this was incorrect. The Corrections is a story about characters and relationships. Crime and Punishment is, too. Lost is a story about castaways on a magic island. If the characters were the main point, it would have been set entirely in the sideways world, and there would be no polar bears.
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The major calamity was me getting stuck with four $6 drink tokens after the guest bar closed early.
I was left with $12, and most of my friends with between $10-$20, after abandoning the 45 minute queues. That would add up - across 5000 people - to a pretty nice windfall for the promoters. On the other hand, the 3Ds were still worth it, even with the unadvertised surcharge.
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Because Durville Island doesn't belong to New Zealand anymore.
D'Urville Island is part of New Zealand, and belongs to New Zealanders. As part of an agreement in principle for the settlement of their historic Treaty claims, two locations on D'Urville Island will be vested in Tainui Taranaki iwi - subject to certain conditions including retaining current public access. Tainui Taranaki's fellow New Zealanders won't notice any difference, in other words.
The island will be subject to an "overlay classification" - which means that the the Department of Conservation will take into account principles agreed between the Minister of Conservation and the iwi in regard to its management of D'Urville's environment. More info here (excuse the clumsy link): http://nz01.terabyte.co.nz/ots/livearticle.asp?ArtID=-170484814#cultural
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Just to get in before more blog conspiracies swirl - soon after I left NBR, the management did "cleanse" all my previous op-ed pieces from the site and its archives, without consulting me or asking if I wanted copies.
So, you know, if anyone printed out these now valuable collectors' items at the time, you could probably sell them for huge profit on Trade Me. But only to my mum.
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So, Ben, do you get to retrospectively 'cleanse' the NBR's website and archives of material under your byline that doesn't now 'make sense'
Just to get in before more blog conspiracies swirl - soon after I left NBR, the management did "cleanse" all my previous op-ed pieces from the site and its archives, without consulting me or asking if I wanted copies. Their site, their rules, I guess.
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George: I think that's about right. If Trotter sees Bowalley Road as a cheaply hosted site for his writing, and not part of a larger shared consciousness of the blogosphere, there's nothing in the terms of use that says he's wrong.
I don't want the thread to get bogged down in this, and I really am more curious than argumentative about this, so I'll just finish here - what should he have done as the proper protocol ?
- Added a note in place of the original post?
- Sent a copy of the original to National Archives for safe keeping?
- Committed his mea culpa to print?
- Emailed all PA readers so they would know?
- Sought out TV3 and One News so that no-one would miss the momentous news that someone, somewhere had deleted a post off Blogger? -
Trotter has defended the coup a number of times in the past. I don't think he's trying to re-write that history at all.
I understand the point about the platform. I just don't understand what significance attaches to his decision to pull a piece he was unhappy with. Unless what concerns readers most is the moral status of the bloggers themselves, more than the content of what they write.
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And Trotter? I'm astonished. Quietly deleting your own posts when they don't suit your present argument doesn't work in the age of the Google cache, and advancing a rationale after you've been caught doing it doesn't help.
I don't quite get the outrage about this from various quarters. Trotter wrote a piece that made sense to him at the time, that he later thought better of, and he decided to take it off the page where resides the writing that does reflect his views.
Not everyone sees a blog as a diary, or real-time Ulysses-style representation of their synaptic processes. It's hardly "censorship" deciding as a writer what you want to represent your body of written work. Most writers don't display their drafts, notebooks etc - why should something on a blog be treated differently?
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As far as sports writing, the jock/nerd division is maybe a false dichotomy - it may seem truer in New Zealand because while we have no shortage of slightly munter sports reporters, we don't have a great tradition of long-form sports writing in this country. Peter Malcouronne is one striking and honourable exception - his feature length work in Metro and North & South on everything from high school rugby matches to sports star profiles was exemplary stuff in the genre.
Witness any of David Foster Wallace's writing on tennis, for examples of cerebral sports writing, or David Remnick on boxing etc.
(As an aside, it seems to me that cricket writing has always been more of an exercise in critical exegesis than objective reporting - like sport's Ulysses, or something, but in a good way.) -
(Sigh) Journalists HAVE written about this. That's how you know about it.
Fuck you're awesome, Danyl.