Posts by Lucy Stewart
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that's one aspect of the show I don't much like, and am glad that McCloud doesn't play it up in true reality porn fashion.
That was one of the reasons I started to watch it originally - that they didn't do the whole "OMG disaster has struck, come back after the ad break to find out what happens next!". Instead it's more "oh, bollocks. How are you going to fix it?". It's all so civilised.
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While it's a pretty subjective label, I've not noticed any gargantuan McMansions in the episodes I've seen.
There was one that was a bit McMansion-y a couple of weeks ago and he was pretty scathing about it (the Brighton one). Some of the houses are quite small, two or three bedrooms, and a lot of them, as Craig says, are very eco-efficient; I would also say most of the people shown are couples with kids looking to build a long-term family home. They're far more interested in showing unusual building techniques or houses than just big places.
As a case in point, this is one of my favourite episodes ever -- not least because it was great fun watching McCloud having a panic attack over a project diametrically opposed to his own view of how a build should work.
That was gold. Watching him watch people try to manage their own projects is always value for money, too (especially when they turn out to be surprisingly competent.)
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the traditions would have been coded only for those who were meant to know, to the rest they were just fantastical stories easily dismissed by the great unwashed.
Right. Secret traditions handed down from the ancients. That's not implausible at *all*.
the proto-polynesian language of asian origins suggest some evidence of pre euro asian contact
It's very well-established that the Polynesian islands were settled in a radiation out from South-East Asia, if that's what you're getting at - but there's no evidence of post-radiation contact.
The thing is - all of this is based on "ifs" and "maybes" and stuff which is, basically, liberally interpreted from oral tradition (and try checking out how many Maori oral traditions can be traced back to the Bible, for instance) or just made up, hung together with the things we genuinely don't know (e.g. how and when precisely the kumara did cross the ocean) and pretty much ignores the bulk of evidence. It's a nice piece of imaginative interpretation but as history it's useless, on a par with Gareth Menzies' giant sloths in Fiordland.
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I saw a thingish-looking thing on the lawn
I will treasure this description.
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Our Kev is also engaging, revealing he speaks conversational Italian, falling off camp stools and happily revealing his vertigo when climbing inside the dome of the Duomo in Florence (a city everyone should see before they die). He is genuinely little boy enthusiastic about it all, nothing forced or stagy at all.
If it turns up in NZ wack it on the TiVo for posterity.
One of the best bits about Grand Designs is when they go to Foreign Places and Kevin can always hold a conversation (or at least make a game go) of the local language. His unbridled enthusiasm for the German and Scandinavian modes of building (efficient. Really efficient) is also a joy to behold.
Grand Designs is actually the only TV programme I refuse to miss. My partner pretends not to like it, but somehow always manages to be in the room when it's on. I think he watches it to complain about how much money people are spending on taps, though.
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and which specific waitaha thing would that be ?
The Celtic "real indigenous people" thing, which, as Joe pointed out, follows in a fine tradition of white people mucking with indigenous history to suit their own crackpot theories.
Brailsford's research is not taken seriously by any actual historians, and believe me, these include people who are quite happy to point out failings in Ngai Tahu's version of history. The question of to what extent what we know about pre-European Maori history is accurate is fascinating and has attracted a lot of scholarship, it's just unfortunate it's attracted other things.
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But what about those pesky bulls?
I think Mythbusters squashed that fairly effectively (and hilariously).
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and yeah it's brailsfords original research into ngai tahu claims which showed them up for waitaha usurpers.
The waitaha thing is bollocks, and that's being polite; Joe described it aptly. From a historical perspective, it's fascinating to see how the story got legs, but it's not true in any sense of having actually happened, any more than the whole "the Maori killed all the Moriori and ate them so it's OK we took over" thing we used to get.
Moreover, two wrongs don't make a right. God knows Ngai Tahu have done some dodgy stuff (the whole Aoraki myth, which is now enshrined in law, is *highly dubious* as an actual traditional story) but that doesn't mean that they deserve to get screwed over.
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Magna Carta was an agreement between the Anglo-French ruling elite which didn't include the conquered Anglo-Saxons.
Sure, if you subscribe to the whole Ivanhoe Norman-Yoke-Conquered-Saxons theory of medieval England, which is...somewhat divorced from the reality. For starters, you're assuming the existence of France as a country and French as an identity in the twelfth century.
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"Pure" Maori culture died on the 6th October 1769. The rest has been the story of New Zealand.
Show me where the definition of "culture" involves "purity". No culture is "pure", if by that you mean untouched by outside influence; but Maori culture is damn well extant, and vibrantly so.
. Drafted with an explicit recognition of the ongoing relationship? Not so much.
Surely a document which defines stuff like governance is inherently about an ongoing relationship? And, if nothing else, it's what we've got. Te Tiriti, and the keeping - or mostly not keeping - of it, have defined our history. Trying to just put it down and move on pretty much ignores how the history of New Zealand has played out, how a lot of people feel about it, and how far we still have to go.