Posts by Lucy Stewart
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I just said he found wood sensuous...and then...
As someone said upthread, PAS is basically guaranteed to be full of Grand Designs fans. Don't worry, it was out of your control.
The Mother of all Thread-Jacks ...
Or lumber-jacks? ;)
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1990, it took eight weeks for student allowances to be processed, during which period one was apparently living on lovely chewy oxygen.
Oh, don't worry, Studylink are still bastards. Before they closed the on-site UC branch, the manager had a hobby of making people cry about just this sort of conundrum. And if you've ever tried making a sober engineer cry in public, you'll appreciate just how much bastardry is involved in this.
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Has Grand Designs done Cobb & Log constructions with load bearing walls?
I know they've done thatching and a fair bit of heritage work.There was one a few weeks ago with a log cabin of Finnish design - this one.
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I reckon "Ecowood" - fast growing, carbon fixing and renewable thrice within your lifetime!
Don't we already have an ad on TV featuring a grumpy British man won over by the eco-friendliness of wood?
(Which makes you wonder: why are they showing it *here*?)
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Does anyone remember the episode where they got a home made in a German factory that was so clean I felt dirty just watching it, and just three efficient Germans turned up on time, on the appointed day, with all the right paper work and plans and they set to work immediately weithout so much as a cup of tea and a think?
That was glooooorious, and I believe the beginning of McCloud's passionate love-affair with German building.
Oh and seeing how the Brits build things on the Living Channel - largely unreinforced brick and mortar held up largely by gravity - I pray they never have an earthquake over about 5 on the Richter scale.
Veeeeery unlikely, given their geological location. It's the main reason Europe was such a good place for urban civilisation; in general a sad lack of exciting natural disasters, bar the odd volcano in the Mediterranean. They just have floods.
(Speaking of, I'm much enjoying that flood miniseries thingy that was on TV 2 last night. Basically, if it involves a natural disaster destroying a major city, I'll watch it, and it's fascinating to see how much better the British do it than the Americans - people act in a logical fashion! There is dwelling on the human cost! Civil Defense people exist and have actual plans and ideas on what to do! It's lovely.)
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surely someone like velikovsky cant have been completely of his rocker and neither is brailsford.
Velikovsky was just wrong. That is not in question. His proposals are physically impossible and scientifically ludicrous - we're not talking improbable but possible, we're talking divine intervention levels of impossible. We're talking violating the laws of the conservation of angular momentum impossible. It's the sort of comparative mythology that makes historians and scientists cry. It certainly makes me want to cry.
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I'd rather watch a show that gave some tips on how to build a really sustainable house at a low cost
Also check out the episodes about the couple building the rammed-earth-and-tyre house in Brittany, or the Revisited ep last week about the ones renovating an old farm shed in Italy. They were both very, very budget.
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(Edit: there was some cross-posting going on)
The distrust of hearsay as evidence in criminal prosecutions is well-founded, and that's only dealing with the very recent past. How far magnified is the effect of decades, or centuries, and countless recitations?
There's a school of thought which says you can't trust any myths as history, because of precisely this. I think it's a bit overdone, but correlation is the only way to be certain. It's also interesting to look at how much of what we consider history is myth, driven by the need for narrative and for stories to fit traditional patterns. It's quite frighteningly more than you'd expect.
i dont quite know what to make of creator deities cos i dont find it that hard a stretch to think that some knowledge was too sacred even to pass on to common polynesians let alone nosy pakeha so it did get lost.
It's certainly possible, but then you get into the question of, if the knowledge was that sacred and restricted, how much it can be considered to be traditional as in having impacted the wider culture at all. Sort of, if an idea falls in the wood and there's no-one there to hear it, does it exist? :P
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dismiss the myths/traditions as though they didnt/don't hold natural truths encoded for easy transmission across generations, the secret translations of which weren't meant for everyone and wonder what happens when the story tellers die without ever having passed them on and the true meaning gets lost.
I'm not saying that myths/traditions weren't used to pass on useful information. I'm saying that asserting that they are evidence for the existence of Waitaha as Brailsford imagines them, aside from any other actual evidence, is just an assertion. Myth changes. Tradition changes. Just look at how flood stories and a creator-deity were absorbed into Maori tradition in the nineteenth century, though they're absent in other Polynesian myths; syncretism at its finest.
Oral traditions as history are tricky. Sometimes they're borne out; sometimes they're not. But they're not a static method of information transmission, or a direct representation of history, even "secret" history. Sometimes they're just stories; cultural truths, rather than historical ones.
Check out G S Kirk's "The Nature of Myth" for myth theory, or Margaret Orbell and David Simmons for analysis of Maori traditions as history. Sir Peter Buck's not bad either, though a bit dated. My notes refer to someone called "Sorrenson" as a easier read than Orbell or Simmons, but I can't find the full reference.
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the other option is your culture dies out hopefully quietly and with dignity but i doubt it.
How....generous.