Posts by Lea Barker
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Hard News: Any excuse for a party, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Craig might particularly like this exchange from PBS Newshour on Friday night between the host and two regular pundits:
JEFFREY BROWN: But what is it about royalty, and particularly British royalty, that grabs so many people, so many Americans?
JEFFREY BROWN: Didn't we throw them off...
DAVID BROOKS: Well, yes. That was a mistake, maybe.
(LAUGHTER)
JEFFREY BROWN: OK.
DAVID BROOKS: No. I mean, there are a couple of things.
First of all, this is a wedding of really good-looking, really rich people with great real estate. And so people tend to like those things.
(LAUGHTER)
MARK SHIELDS: Donald Trump's next nuptials.
DAVID BROOKS: Yes. No, he wouldn't have had a gown that nice.
(LAUGHTER)
The full transcript is here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/jan-june11/shieldsbrooks_04-29.html. New Zealand even gets a mention in respect of President Obama's birth certificate.
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Up Front: Where You From?, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Thanks, Ian. It was indeed Clifford Green. It was her son who used to meet potential tenants and let the flats when I lived there in the early 70s.
And thanks for the link to the Canterbury Heritage site. My great grandfather, Enoch Barker, was the first Government Gardener hired by the provincial government to create the Botanic Gardens and Hagley Park. His wife supposedly named New Brighton, where he moved to run a plant nursery. He drowned in the Avon after slipping off a log he used for a footbridge. Family legend has it that he was in his cups. I don't know if it's in the part of the Provincial Chambers that's still standing, but his portrait used to hang there.
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Sorry this is a bit off the theme, but if any of you were living in Chch in the 70s, do you remember the name of the landlord who owned scores of rundown houses that he split into flats and rented out to students? His last name is synonymous with a particular shade of puke green paint, which he bought in bulk from a paint factory that closed down. The interior of his flats were always painted in Xxxxxx green.
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Just to let you know... The 9pm news on my local SF Bay Area ABC affiliate is reporting that they called a pharmacy in Santa Cruz (just down the peninsula but on the coast) and were told there's been a run on iodine tablets. That was then followed by a totally un-reassuring weather reporter explaining what the jet stream is and what it does. And how long it might or might not take for radioactive particles to get here.
Now, to be sure, Santa Cruz actually suffered some damage from Friday's tsunami--about 20 small boats were smacked about or sunk by "the toilet bowl effect" of 2-foot waves entering the small bay.
But I'm predicting the nuclear panic will spread, however unlikely it is that we will actually get much radioactivity here in California. Does anyone know if much was carried here after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings?
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I’ll be musing on how to do high-lactose melodramas well, and whether I’m just too hard on local drama.
Sigh! Local drama! I live in an audience area of 7 million people (the San Francisco Bay Area) and there is NO LOCAL DRAMA on television. I suspect that is the case in every metro area in the US unless it's the locale of some network drama. (CSI Miami, for example.)
So, by all means be hard on local drama, but remember you're blessed to have it.
As for high-lactose melodrama... do you mean "high-lacrimose"ten-tissue weepies?
My favourite television viewing these days are all K-Dramas, especially the nightly series' that usually revolve around a poor but decent-hearted couple with grown children who marry into rich families dominated by bitchy, ambitious women. Ah, the lachrymosity!
They're produced by the Korean Broadcasting Service and remind me of the early days of TVNZ drama, such as Close to Home. Perhaps there should be a TVNZ-World like KBS-America.
Maybe A-Dramas could become all the rage.
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The stories about le pipi remind me of a train trip I once took across America's Midwest. A fellow passenger recounted to me how he lives up in the mountains that are the origin of the Potomac River, which flows through Washington DC. I always felt he left out a bit of the story by just saying that he could stand astride the Potomac, especially given his views on politicians and the federal government.
(Which is a neither-here-nor-there comment on a post that lionizes an otterly fabulous person.)
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Re the Anderton comment on CTV and the Whaleoil edit. If they'd just looked at the second Anderton segment, at 5:28, they'd have found the REAL reason:
CTV's "Picture of the Week" is a "reminder that spring is just around the corner" and shows the corner of a brick building with a spring lurking behind it! Spring--tension--tectonics, get it?
On the question of telecomms, did Twitter overload at any point? When the FIFA World Cup was being played, here in the Bay Area, I would often get that Twitter graphic showing lots of twitter-birds with strings in their beaks holding up a giant whale.
I saw on one website that Vodaphone was asking people to stop uploading photos and video of the damage because it was overloading the network.
This morning's print Oakland Tribune shows a picture of rubble surrounding a "damaged telephone booth" but apart from a few dings on the metal exterior, it doesn't look too damaged to me. Perhaps they've mistaken the fern pattern glazing for cracks. Great of Telecom to offer free calling from phone booths. It wouldn't matter if anyone did that here--there AREN'T any phone booths!
The online Trib story, which doesn't have that photo, is here:
http://www.insidebayarea.com/ci_15998643Paiapoi? Where TF is Paiapoi!
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Very enlightening post for such an iDinosaur as myself. I'm so Olde Media, I didn't learn of the earthquake until after 5pm Pacific Time on the bus on my way home from work, when I finally got to read my email. A friend in DC told me about it. Old klutz that I am, I went to the Reuters mobile website, and it didn't even occur to me to look at Twitter.
Today I've been looking at the NZH photos and I'm just gobsmacked by the damage to the roads and railway lines. The damage to brick buildings and facades isn't so surprising but, that said, it must have been terrifying to live through.
The "state of emergency" made it to the CBS network evening news, but no mention was made of NZ turning down help from the US forces based in Hawaii.
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Roller derby is used in the States to promote painkillers and.... Cheerios. (Not those little red sossies we Kiwis know as cheerios, but breakfast cereal.)
Here's the link:
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=966071433027 -
"In the same way, I found working retail in my youth very helpful -- social interaction with dozens of complete strangers every day, but social interaction with parameters very clearly defined in advance(they're here to buy stuff; I'm here to sell it to them)."
You hit the nail on the head there, Josh. I'd go even further to say that there has to be an actual physical barrier between other people and me for me to be comfortable. I'd be a terribly chatty bridge toll taker, I should think, sitting in my little hut full of self-importance and bonhomie.
And "Did I mention that pre-employment psych tests are something else I loathe?"... Russell, I totally agree with you. And this was even more egregious because there are several positions coming vacant where I work, and they're trying to juggle people around instead of advertising the positions and getting the best candidate. Using a daft psych test to do it is absurd.