Posts by Lucy Stewart
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I've been involved in a lot of demonstrations over the years - 3/4 of a million against the Iraq war for example - the '81 tour in NZ, .... one thing I'll say for US crowds - there's an awful lot of pent up hostility and anger, things can suddenly turn nasty in a way that I've never seen happen in NZ - we're so much more 'civilised', (mind you I wasn't in Auckland that last day in '81) - on the other hand I've been beaten by the NZ police but not by any US ones.
I heard some stuff about the student protests over fee hikes at Berkeley last January that sounded fairly hair-raising (via a colleague whose brother teaches there). Seems like there's sometimes quite a gap between what happens and what gets to the mainstream media - at least the NZ media.
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More on mummies and related museum creepiness: Face of 2500-year-old woman revealed
I think these reconstructions serve a very useful purpose in reminding us that these people were, basically, us. It's very easy to talk about past peoples as though they were aliens, rather than ancestors. (But that is not the best photo. I suspect a closeup would look rather better.)
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I didn't get any of those. Is this a Fulbright thing?
It's a Fulbright Gateway seminar, yeah - they seem eager to emphasise that Plagiarism Will Not Be Tolerated In America at every opportunity. In bold letters. On its own one-sentence Powerpoint screen. (I mean, I'm sure we learn other stuff, too.)
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(Lucy, when do you arrive hereabouts? NO need to bring a cardie, obvs).
Berkeley mid-August, for This-Is-America, Plagiarism-Is-Bad indoctrination, Boston a few days after that, heading in to Amherst in late August when the husband and cat make it over.
(And DO NOT MENTION packing of clothes. Or shoes. Or my inability to get down to a rational amount. It's a wee bit pathetic from someone who has to be forced to go clothes-shopping. Or, hang on, maybe it makes perfect sense; I'm trying to delay inevitable clothes-shopping. Either way, Air New Zealand's decision to suddenly remove half their baggage allowance is not being greeted with equaminity in my household.)
People who don't want to go and look at them don't have to.
You could kind of say this is true of mummies, but they tend to be sprung upon one in the middle of otherwise inoffensive museum exhibits. I'd be a lot less queasy about it if there was a mummy-viewing room and you could make a definite decision about going to look at the dead people.
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(Disclaimer: I love archaeology & archaeologists. A LOT of what real archaeologists do is, dig up dead humans (and other beings.) But, surely - and this is a trend in certain fields of archaeology - we can dig up/measure in every possible way/ and then, recover, with earth-)
Oh, totally - there is some amazing science that can only be done by looking at actual bodies. But, as you say, there is no need to then put them on display permanently (I'm excepting, e.g., people who have donated their bodies to medical research - it's the ones who never had a chance to give permission that make me feel uncomfortable.)
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That was a fascinating review, Jolisa - you have made me feel like I should actually read some of Dickinson's poetry before I show up there, not least because it now seems interesting.
museums here - and incresingly overseas - no longer have mokamokai on display. Overseas museums (not all, but a lot) are also returning Maori body parts - like the mummies stolen by that awful little shit Andreas Reisheck (cant check the name at o the moment.)
I loved most of the British Museum, monument to kleptomaniac colonialism that it is, but the mummies in the Egyptian display were awful. It felt so voyeuristic and horrible just to see them. They have so many artifacts, and such great displays - I don't see why they need to leave people's bodies on display, just because they have them, or they can. Surely it's time to let them go.
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At least you lot are reading the T&C. Because you never know what might happen if you don't.
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I'd guess a fair number of the Safari users are simply the same as many Windows/IE users; it's the default and it's not actually terrible (not that that affected pre-IE 7 use, anyhow...) My quite tech-savvy parents use it, just because it's there. My younger brother has installed and uses Firefox on the same computer. Hasn't moved them an inch. Habit is everything.
User stats by country are always just a little weird; fanfiction.net (don't judge me!) does quite a nice user stats breakdown and when I've checked occasionally my profile page gets a couple of hits a month from places like Oman. And I promise you, if they're arriving there searching for porn, their porn-google-fu is non-existent.
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My Dad's another for whom the treatment was worse than the disease (at least at the stage the cancer was detected).
Mine, too - and it was the new, advanced treatment.
There is actually a growing question as to whether we need to treat people for pre-cancerous tumours as often as we do; many would never have developed into full-blown cancer, and the stress and treatment are pretty heavy even if there were no symptoms or immediate danger. Then again, that's a tradeoff with the chance of missing one that kills someone - and most people don't want to take that chance.
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If you chose the more experienced candidate, congratulations. You've just chosen Dick Cheney over the incumbent President of the United States. :)
How about: all other things being equal, more experience is better, and when weighting factors it's got to weight pretty strongly - but not everyone will agree on how strongly, and all other things are rarely equal. I mean, I'd hate for you to think experience or lack thereof was the only thing people had against Key as PM. ;)