Posts by Robyn Gallagher
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Ok, so these are some of the things that The People Who Have Had A Gutsful will expect National to fix if they get elected:
- petrol prices
- food prices (especially cheese)
- leaky homes
- taggers
- truckers road usage fees
- crime in South Auckland
- ineffectual policeIt should be easy to fix all these problems because they've obviously only happened because Labour has been spending too much money on government department work training sessions at luxury resorts, the dole and the war on drugs.
So National can pass a few acts in their first month in government and sort this out, and then every thing will be sweet! :D
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The last time National were in government was 1999, and back then, the NZ Government website looked like this; now it looks like this.
Back then, the internet was still pretty niche. National hasn't been in government when the internet has been an ordinary part of people's lives; when the content of website - not that there is a website - is the most important thing.
So it's all very well for National to criticise some government department for - gasp - spending money on a website, but how would things otherwise be different under National? Would they prefer that things aren't promoted? That people just, you know, find out about stuff?
Or is National still feeling a bit anti-internet after that dastardly hacker stole their emails?
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Here's a song dedicated to all the truck drivers with big trucks:
Courtesy of the brilliant early '90s Australian comedy show Fast Forward.
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Dick = Cowan
Gimelstob is a pantomime character. "Look at me!!! I'm being sexist!!! I don't like women!!! Look at me!!" He's just doing it to get attention. Ignore him and he'll stop.
But Cowan didn't get up to his bullshit antics for attention. He needs to learn to drink and to control his violence. Regardless of how good or how needed he is at rugby, he's still part of our society and needs to stop being a dick.
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(how do you measure the socio-economic status of Mechanics Bay, where no one lives?)
I would consider Mechanics Bay to be the triangle of land between Beach Road, The Strand and the harbour, and there are heaps of new apartments and townhouses there.
Yeah.
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I've worked on polling booths in general elections and also the 1995 referendum on not reducing the numbers of firefighters.
While general elections brought in hundreds of people, the firefighters referendum managed to only inspired a trickle of people to give up part of their Saturday and come along to the local primary school hall.
I've never been impressed with those CIRs, mainly because the wording tends to be really emotive. I never got the point of the referendum wanting parliament to be reduced to 99 politicians - why is more than 99 a bad thing? Do we really want our local MP to have more work to do and less time to dedicate to our electorate?
CIRs may be opinion polls at public expense, but without the accuracy that professional polling companies strive to achieve!
P.S. Loving the Hanky Panky soundtrack!
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I love the quote from the Canterbury police district commander in that Stuff article, particularly this bit:
We endeavour to minimise any difficulties to the public
All that is needed now is some facilitation of disability sensitivity awareness training to further help minimise any difficulties to persons with physical needs.
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Because people will say (cf: the Star Times on Sunday): "Thanks. Pretty good job. Next please!"
Ya, I've heard a lot of people say stuff to the effect that Labour's done a good job in government, but it's only fair that that they step aside and let National have their turn now.
After all, sharing is good.
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There were three options for subtitles:
1. English
2. English for the hearing impaired.
3. Off.
At the time I thought it very strange that hearing impaired had different subtitles than the rest of us, but I guess other sound effects would be included.Technically, #1 is subtitles and #2 is captions. Captions are subtitles with sound effects, music and other non-verbal descriptions.
I worked as a captioner for four years. It's a total TV/pop culture/media/grammar nerd job.
There are all sorts of things to take into consideration - do you describe the music by name (what if the viewer was deaf from birth and wouldn't recognise it?) or do you describe the type of music ("jaunty music plays")?
And modern technology brings news captioning challenges - how do you convey a a totally gay cellphone SMS message tone?
And then there's audio description - that's verbal descriptions of visual action for blind viewers and done in creative language that matches the tone of the film. Sony are making the effort and doing lots of AD, so if you get a Sony DVD, check out the menu options - it's quite an experience.
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2. Civil Unions. A same sex couple saying that they feel that they are now full NZers like everyone else.
That's preaching to the converted.
What you'd need is the parents of a gay couple, who actually might not have been all that thrilled when their son/daughter first came out, talking about how wonderful it was to attend the civil union, how nice to was to have family and friends together and celebrating the formalising of the relationship.