Posts by Tom Semmens
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I pee regularly on the tomatoes. Actually, I might not pee on the tomatoes, but the mere threat of peeing on the tomatoes keeps my ravenous flatmates away from my big, red, juicy, and precious summer fruits.
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Chardonnay can be called aromatic cooch.
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What everyone here needs is a back stage pass and a laser pointer. Then from the safety of being on the other side of the security guard you can select the annoying punters with your laser and do that threatening two finger gesture - you know the "I'm looking at you" one.
they have comfy seats and nice loos back there to. -
I like beer, much more than i like wine. Unlike wine, beer is free of the intolerably stupid snobbery that surrounds wine.
Until this mutherfucker idiot came along -
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/dining/07wine.html?_r=1
US$35 for a beer. The man is clearly insane, or an liberal American snob which amounts to the same thing in my beer book.
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$40 for two Becks??? Holy moley, clearly my notorious night spots are not as notorious as yours!
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Craig, if there is no more liquor around most people go home and go to bed. if they can nip down to the local 24x7 supermarket and get more, many will. More to the point, I didn't say shut the bars and clubs and pubs that for a variety of reasons my be open at 7am with people who haven't been to bed yet. Those bars charge high prices, and for most people their personal harm market self regulates in that case (i.e. they come down, run out of money, and go home).
Problem drinkers will go to all sorts of ingenious and devious length secure their supply. No amount of law or regulation will keep them from their bottles of rum hidden in the shed,or whatever.
Enforcement is absolutely part of the equation. No amount of tinkering with the law around age will a difference if the police and the liquor industry conspire to weakly enforce the drinking age. If you want police corruption, go look at all those big, "up market" provincial bars where the coppers show up at 11.30pm on a Saturday for free pizza and a good natter with their mate the publican before heading off again, without asking a single one of the patrons for ID...
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I have a true story about the price of liquor.
I was in a certain "notorious Auckland celebrity nightspot" when I got my first over $9 dollar beer.
I said to the barman, "Did you hear about the penguin that swam into the viaduct, climbed out of the harbour, and came down here and ordered a beer?"
"No" said he.
"Well, the Penguin ordered a beer, drank it thoughtfully, and then ordered a second. The barman, who could no longer contain himself, said "You know we don't get many penguins down here" to which the Penguin replied...
"At these prices, I'm not surprised".
The barman laughed politely and I thought it best to flee to a dark corner.
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Any binge issue has a supply side. A pretty straight forward solution to problem drinking would be to force liquor outlets like supermarkets and off licenses to close their liquor sections between 10pm and 10am.
If it were practical, I would like to see the liquor discounting banned.
Teens in particular are price sensitive. Go to a nightclub and you won't get much change from $10 for a standard 330ml beer. Someone on a limited income can't get very plastered at those prices, and since it is meant to be all about social drinking we should all agree that is a good thing. I would think that raising the age you can purchase alcohol in an off-license to something as high as 21 whilst allowing 18 year olds to continue to drink in restaurants, pubs and bars is something I think would make a difference in pursuit of our social drinking nirvana.
Of course, we have to actually WANT to change our drinking culture. And I am not sure that collectively, in our heart of hearts, we really want to abandon just yet our red-blooded Anglo-Saxon binge drinking culture for the effete ways of the continentals. I don't see much evidence myself of a desire to change the drinking culture here in NZ in any meaningful way. We were talking about this just the other week amongst ourselves, and when on the subject of civilised European drinking one of the girls piped up with the joke about why do the French plant trees in the Champs- Élysées? So the Germans can march in the shade, which everyone agreed was a jolly funny little joke. it also kinda illustrates the subconscious views a large number of us still hold.
Oh and anyone who thinks National's education changes are not simply a way for them to further their favoured two tier model of cherry picking elite schools that do well in testing splitting off from the second best for the second class state school rump has clearly never met Anne Tolley, a woman whose could be charitably described as somewhat intellectually limited.
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Imagining the purpose of professional sport is all about allowing the best athletes to win the competition indicates to me the you have failed to see the woods for the trees, or alternatively you actually believe the advertising bullshit that surrounds it.
Professional sport is a branch of the entertainment industry. Therefore it seems to me obvious the primary purpose of the whole exercise is entertainment - specifically, attractive for T.V. entertainment. And that includes the whole kit and kaboodle of lauding "important" statistics, talking heads arguing about (amongst other things) bonus points, the media fawning over underwear modelling first five eights, outrage at obscene transfer fees, which bad boy sports star has beaten up his girlfriend/random nightclub victim(s) and all the other terminally boring trivia built on the shoulders of the assorted genetic freak shows of the various pro sports competitions.
The idea that professional sport might (or even should) still just be about making sure the best team wins is frankly laughable. In fact (as anyone who observed the local media fallout from the All Black's quarter final loss in Cardiff in 2007 must surely agree) a "wrong" or "bad" result can actually be better for the owners of the product than the "right" team winning.
I'ts all about a package - product placement, soap opera, morality tale, Simpson's cartoon. Oh yes and a game of some sort usually occurs at some stage.
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Joanna - ewww and ewww and more ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!
Never engage with tweeny girls.I was foolish enough to take her at her word when her and three of her girlfriends were camping out in a tent at the back of the farm telling horror stories in the dark all Blair witch stylez and she said someone should sneak up up and frighten them...
My hearing is never going to fully recover from the shrieking that ensued when I jumped on their tent doing my Sasquatch impression.