Hard News: The Interesting Party
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Ah, but we have one of those in nz - in Napier. I kid you not.
[ [http://duck.hbwinecountryduck.com/] ]
Doesn't quite have the sass of the Cuban one!
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Bugger. Why didn't that link work?
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Kerry,
'Beware the Music" warning for Kerry's site.
I've found it works if paste the url but not if type it in. Assume you did originally have the | character and the link text so there is some text to actually click on.
On a Preview you may be able to click on the link to check.
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What link text? I just copied the url - should I have put "|" after it and just made something up or copied any old text from the page?
Far out, sorry to be so thick - I've made it work before, it's just eluding me. And as for getting a youtube vid to embed - double duh! I wanted Annie Lennox & Al Green singing "Put a little love in your heart" as my new year's day song offering....christ, I'll never be a nerd. Distinct disadvantage round here.
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Kerry,
Actually the issue in the original is that it had a space between the brackets, I just did a practice run and it didn't work with the extra space e.g. [ and no space [ works, [ with a space here [ doesn't.
Link text is what comes up as underlined in the post - it you don't include it you get the url as originally done
so for example:
http://duck.hbwinecountryduck.com/ was done as
[ [http://duck.hbwinecountryduck.com/] ]Duck Duck was done with link text of Duck Duck as per
[ [http://duck.hbwinecountryduck.com/|Duck Duck] ]
both go to same website, just display on this post differently.From memory Russell said that to embed video just use the url (assume he meant without the square brackets) and the system would handle it.
I don't quite qualify as a nerd either - please don't tell and I might be able to stay.
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Apologies for my headache-inducing previous post.
Please Russell please delete it and we could perhaps pretend the only post I made here was to inform Kerry that there was a space between the two brackets at each end of the link and that's why link didn't work. Two brackets together work, bracket space bracket doesn't.
Note to self - leave these things to those that know.
Regards,
Heather -
Thanks, Heather. I got what you meant. no probs. That means you must be at least one more rung up the nerd ladder than me!
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Thanks for that clear instruction Heather. I have been trying to work out how to do links but I haven't the right neuron connections (or patience) to get it right.
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Thanks Heather. I'm a munter at the best of times on this blog. Hence I haven't visited for weeks n weeks. But I shall refer to your 'Link Breakdown for Beginners' here from now on. HNY!
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Sigh... And let us hope Fran O'Sullivan is trying to use up her stupid quota early this year, with this little gem:
Now the issue of Key's own leanings have been raised by those that say National is copping out because the Prime Minister - whose late mother was an Austrian Jew - is more sympathetic to Israel's position.
National's fellow travellers have already complained of bigotry after a Herald "letter to the editor" writer made the linkage between Key's Jewishness and the Government's new stance.
It is a nonsense to allege bigotry in this instance.
And with a name like O'Sullivan, I'm sure Fran wouldn't take exception to any suggestion that she wouldn't report any allegations of financial irregularities on the part of the Vatican Bank because of her (presumed) "Catholicness" or APN's Irish proprietor.
Now, it seems a no-brainer to me that being critical of the conduct of the government of Israel is not, ipso facto, proof of anti-Semitism. (Though I sure do believe there are plenty of anti-Semities who try and efface their bigotry as "anti-Zionism".) But sorry Fran, if anyone is going to insinuate that Key's position is motivated by his ethnicity I'm going to reply "If it quacks like a bigot, and waddles like a bigot, it's probably a bigot."
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But sorry Fran, if anyone is going to insinuate that Key's position is motivated by his ethnicity I'm going to reply "If it quacks like a bigot, and waddles like a bigot, it's probably a bigot."
I think that's what she was trying to say, really. But Fran was one of a number of columnists who would have been better to just have a rest over the holiday, rather than turn out gibberish like this ...
So it was this Christmas as my 83-year old mother - a farmer's daughter - talked of the impact of the Great Depression in New Zealand. The "swaggies" turning up on her family's doorstep for food and shelter. The incredible devastation then wrought by World War II which left many New Zealand men of her generation emotionally scarred but left those women "manning" the home front with enormous survival skills that many of today's Gen X and Gen Y - who are focused on "having it all" at an early age - lack.
The frontiers my parents' generation faced are different from today. But the frontier mentality that led my forbears to be proudly self-reliant and adamantly against government dependence endures, with a capacity to take delight in life's simple pleasures instead of being captive to a consumerist affluenza with all its attendant dissatisfactions.
Far better to reserve our dissatisfactions for what really matters and can be used as a motivator to change things for the better.
With that in mind I have boiled down my top 10 story wish-list for 2009 to just one issue: How to ensure that New Zealand - a young country that many of us love - draws once again on that frontier mentality which spurred our forbears to make the radical reforms that will be necessary to secure both us and our children a strong future in a changing world. Given the extent to which so many Kiwis have been glued to the State's welfare teat, this won't be easy.
But change we must.
Eh?
Of course, in the real world, rather than Bizarro New Zealand, New Zealanders had actually "pioneered" such craven nods to welfarism as old age pensions and land reform since the 1890s, and then responded to the privations of the Depression by electing the first Labour government, on its promise of a dramatic expansion of the welfare state, in 1935.
But ... whatever.
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Eh?
What? What? What?
My mother is eighty, and a farmer's daughter. I do not recognise Planet Fran. It's true I cannot churn butter, work a mangle, or clean shot out of a rabbit (actually I can do that, I just refuse to), but then I strongly suspect neither can she.
Fuckit, I'm going back to playing Wii bowling.
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I also admire Samuel Beckett, Dennis Potter and Tom Stoppard -- two playwrights
Did you write "two playwrights" to account for the fact that Tom Stoppard is a fraud?
(Although he did have one sincere moment in his life. At the opening of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a woman asked him what the play was about and he replied, "It's about to make me very rich".)
(Then again, it's an anecdote he tells himself, so it's probably apocriphal.)
Happy New Year, everybody. This was going to be the holiday when I finally visited Auckland, but our youngest was sick so we had to come back early and bypass the fair city. It's like there's a force field that keeps me away from the place.
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Do you really think Stoppard's a fraud Giovanni? The first play of his I watched, at the Mercury Theatre a hundred years ago, was Jumpers and I came away confused - a condition not new to me then or now. Then I read Professional Foul and loved it - so read them all and found that I even liked Jumpers - although don't ask me why, now.
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Do you really think Stoppard's a fraud Giovanni?
Another way of putting it is that he's Pinter and (especially) Beckett's Cliff's Notes. Maybe even Ionesco's. Nothing wrong with that, of course, imitation being the sincerest form of plagiar... er, flattery. But it was others who did the hard work. In my, as always, 'H' opinion.
(Never could quite work out what the H stood for.)
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I think that's what she was trying to say, really.
Possibly was, but as so often happen with O'Sullivan a substantive (if debatable) column turned on the proverbial dime into Weirdsville. I don't know if Fran was paying attention during the election campaign but both Key and Clark were rather candid about their utter lack of religious beliefs and nobody cared. I like that.
Did you write "two playwrights" to account for the fact that Tom Stoppard is a fraud?
Put it down to incompetent proof-reading on my part, and leave it at that. I notice that Wellington Circa Theatre is following Pinter's Betrayal with the New Zealand premiere of Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll. That, and the Coast of Utopia are more intellectually and politically sophisticated than anything Pinter's done for decades, IMNSHO.
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Thanks Giovanni - I bow to your H opinion.
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I think that's what she was trying to say, really.
Possibly was, but as so often happen with O'Sullivan a substantive (if debatable) column turned on the proverbial dime into Weirdsville. I don't know if Fran was paying attention during the election campaign but both Key and Clark were rather candid about their utter lack of religious beliefs and nobody cared. I like that.
A close relative is Jewish, and being curious, I asked if John Key was considered Jewish. The answer is that he's considered a 'technical' Jew, in that his mother is Jewish, but he's not Jewish as he doesn't follow the Jewish culture i.e. he eats bacon, he doesn't celebrate High Holidays, and he certainly hasn't turned up to the synagoge.
It's kinda like being a 'technical' catholic. Without the dreadful baggae that most Catholic's carry.
In that light, John Key is, much as I dislike the man, really, just John Key. Not 'Jewish' in any respect. And in that light it's completely absurd to make an equivalence between his 'technical' Jewishness and any stance he may or may not have regarding the current crisis in the Middle East.
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Aw stuff all this heavy talk, who wants to bet there's plenty of British bookies cracking open the champers with this news:
Matt Smith has been named as the actor who will take over from David Tennant in Doctor Who - making him the youngest actor to take on the role.
At 26, Smith is three years younger than Peter Davison when he signed up to play the fifth Doctor in 1981.
And if you're saying Matt who? (obvious pun intended -- sorry), you're not the only one. A short but impressive list of theatre credits, and relatively thin on TV he's an interesting choice -- and if this is typical of where new head writer/executive producer Steven Moffat is going -- if only we weren't waiting sixteen months or so to see him in action.
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I've still got to watch all of Tennant's series. He's an excellent Doctor. They're replaying his first series on Prime on Thursdays, so I can watch the ones I missed. I haven't seen his second series at all.
The new guy doesn't look right for the part - but then I thought that about Tennant.
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I noticed the Fran mindburp but in the interests of seasonal goodwill didn't even discuss it with family. It's a triumph of confused black-and-white thinking, exemplified by this gem:
the frontier mentality that led my forbears to be proudly self-reliant and adamantly against government dependence
Why must proud self-reliance accompany opposition to government dependence? I know my own grandparents easily managed to hold one of those positions without the other, and you'd expect if the welfare state had been widely unpopular it would have been turfed out by a subsequent government. Pah.
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. . . you'd expect if the welfare state had been widely unpopular it would have been turfed out by a subsequent government.
Permissive society? Me generation? Remember those? No? Fran's pontificating is firmly in the tradition of a long line of forgettable journalistic monuments to harrumphing pomposity.
While Ayn Rand may never have achieved anything greater than cult status as a young person's author, she did manage to close the gap between mundburp and manifesto. For Fran, it's always a bridge too far.
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The new guy doesn't look right for the part - but then I thought that about Tennant.
But what's the right look for a character who's nine hundred and change? Put Peter O'Toole on a rocket powered skateboard, and pray your insurance carrier won't notice? :)
And I'll miss Tennant too -- a little bit of "I've just had six triple espressos and a fistful of diet pills" manic stuff went a very long way, but he could dial it back when it really counted. But I'm rather encouraged that Moffat and executive producer Piers Wenger didn't go the obvious route and cast a 'name' -- and with the turn over behind the camera, I bet the pressure was ferocious. While it's tempting, star casting can be as much of a curse as a blessing. Much as I liked Peter Davison, it took a long time to see him without picturing All Creatures Great and Small's work-shy fop Tristan Farnon with a stick of celery in his lapel.
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Craig, good to see you survived the never-ending nosebleed.
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Craig, good to see you survived the never-ending nosebleed.
My dignity didn't -- nobody can keep that with a wad of toilet paper jammed up their nostril. Still, if that's my biggest problem (the Christmas migraine and never ending heat rash got lost in the post, for which I'm eternally thankful) can't complain. Much. :)
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