Posts by Kyle Matthews
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The strap missed my hand and went on to slap loudly and firmly on the teacher's bare leg leaving the most startling red welt.
Lol. Kudos, even if it was accidental.
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Ran across this on snopes.com:
While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75-year old Texas rancher whose hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to Sarah Palin and her bid to be a heartbeat away from being President. The old rancher said, "Well, ya know, Palin is a post turtle." Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a post turtle was. The old rancher said, "When you're driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that's a post turtle .You know she didn't get up there by herself, she doesn't belong up there, she doesn't know what to do while she is up there, and you just wonder what kind of dumb ass put her up there to begin with."
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I'm far from convinced, not least because last time National promised to do something like increasing police numbers we ended up losing dedicated traffic cops.
National signed off on this, but it wasn't just National's idea. It came from within the police, as follows the international trend of having traffic policed by the same people that police other infringements and crimes in society. NZ was really out of whack with international best-practice.
The claim that losing dedicated traffic cops has affected NZ's policing of traffic adversely is weak. You could equally argue that taking police of criminal investigative duties and putting them on street beats (something a lot of crime nuts would be in favour of) reduces dedicated criminal investigation, in favour of general policing. It's a "so what?" point - it's not dedicated officers that matter, it's the number of people doing the work and the amount of time that they put into it that matters.
With the move from the old traffic service to having a merger, the number of officers enforcing traffic offenses quadrupled. I believe the actual person hours also increased quite substantially as well.
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I just don't believe many people step back to evaluate their feelings against empirical evidence.
Difficult when you're an ape and your best achievements in life are the opposable thumb and using twigs as a tool to eat bugs.
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My 18 yr old, 7th form son has just been stood down from Feilding High School for defiance for not getting his hair cut.
It's criminal that schools still think they can get away with that sort of shit.
If you haven't already, try www.youthlaw.co.nz, they might be able to help you write some stern letters to try and get the school back on the path of 'worrying about things that actually matter'.
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Or do I not understand the etymology of the word "change??
I think 'change' currently means 'not Bush/completely fucking incompetent'. Whether McCain Palin will be that, is another question.
For the minor creators, if they cannot survive on what they make now, what would suddenly change in 30 years' time to make a work a viable income stream?
For a lot of visual artists, they do indeed struggle early in their career, and then near the end of their life their work, including their earlier work, is now very valuable. I presume you can make a similar argument for writers - once you 'make it', your copyright over your complete body of work becomes more valuable as a lot more people will buy your earlier works, and your upcoming ones.
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Except that not all collecting societies necessarily benefit the creator. Case in point: CCL collect on behalf of all NZ writers whether they hold an authorisation or not, because there is legislation that says they can. Do they then hand out to a writer her due royalties, based on the number of tmes their work has been copied? Do they, fuck! They pick a "representative selection" of writers on their list and divvy what's left after their expenses have been taken out. They declined to make known what their criteria for selection were.
I don't know what CLL do with the information and money once they get it, but part of my job involves collecting this information in regular surveys. It's very comprehensive, and CLL know exactly what we copy, who published it, and who wrote it. We would copy a decent six figure sum of copyrighted pages every year.
If they're not doing a half decent job of returning that to authors/publishers, then I'll take half as much time next time we get surveyed :)
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I love ice hockey mask designs. I found a database a while ago and spent ages browsing
Ice hockey is quite unusual in that goalies (not skaters) can paint pretty much what they want on their masks. I can't think of another sport where one player has almost no rules about their appearance, whereas all the other players do.
A few years ago there was a big controversy with skaters playing with tinted/mirrored visors. Some goalies kicked up a fuss that they were disadvantaged because they couldn't see the players eyes, and the tinted and mirrored visors were banned.
Meanwhile the complaining goalie has a helmet painted with death or some lord of the rings or burning flames design.
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Thank you for pointing that out, I wanted to scream at the radio.
That's just attacking the medium. I wanted to scream at America: polling, voters etc.
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This is more fun than an after-school get together in Flaxmere…
Is this a chain I see before me?