Posts by Lucy Stewart
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a wooden stake, it's the only way I tell you
I say we nuke Tauranga from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
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That's a great cover. Two words.
Ooooh, yes. Can't wait to get my hard copy.
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How was that supposed to work? I'm asking because in the first episode of series seven, when the next president gets out of the car in soft focus and you're not supposed to be able to tell who it is, if you freeze the frame it's actually Santos. And Spencer was still alive and well back then.
I'm not actually sure. I just remember reading in news articles around the time that the writers had intended to let Vinick win, but decided after Spencer died that it would just be a bit too depressing. Of course, it's entirely possible they were making that up after the fact.
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We all love Obama.
Also see the Economist's version, where McCain is currently enjoying support from Sudan, Algeria, Iraq, the Congo, and, er, the South-East Asian Country Formerly Known As Burma. Macedonia clocks in at fifty/fifty. I guess McCain looks better from a war zone.
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I'm surprised that no-one else has mentioned that the character of Matthew Santos in the West Wing - the junior senator from an ethnic minority who makes a bid for president - is based, explicitly, on a then-little known US politician who'd just made a great speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention. Yes, Santos is based on Barack Obama.
What's even more frightening is that Vinick - the principled, maverick-ish Republican whom viewers were supposed to be reluctantly wooed into accepting as the next President in a final bipartisan fling for the show (a plan stymied by John Spencer's untimely passing) - also had a real-life basis. I guess the writers just didn't realise that the prospect of absolute power would corrupt said real-life basis *quite* so absolutely.
(Oh, and if Biden has a sudden heart attack on the eve of the election and/or McCain is offered Secretary of State, I call shenanigans.)
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I think the headline came from the bizarre NZ Herald rather than the AP.
The only other reference I could find to the headline was here and that linked back to guess where...
The article itself described the half-hour buy as "unusual", which *is* a fair judgement. But in this case, unusual /=/ bizarre. Note to the Herald subs: just because words are synonyms in your thesaurus does not mean they have exactly the same meaning. Really, it doesn't.
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Now, forty years later, this year's project is reading my way through Dickens. Can't believe how funny he is. I just ignore the bits that get in the way.
I developed a severe allergy to Dickens at the tender age of nine after there was a pre-Christmas sale of Dickens books at Whitcoulls and *every one* of my relatives decided that since Lucy liked to read all those big books, Martin Chuzzlewit would be the perfect gift!
And then I had to write thank-you notes.
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*cough* At least she left the fucking (and I mean fucking) Tudors alone. If I see one more novel about any sodding Boleyn girl or anyone else who got their ya-yas off in Tudor or Early Stuart England I'll be reviewing it with a can of lighter fluid and a match.
Sorry to disappoint - she did Charles II (although, to be fair, that's more Late Stuart than Early.) Not that I've read it; I love Heyer in general, but her pre-Regency stuff (there's a William the Conqueror one, shudder) leaves me cold.
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It's got a whole heap of flaws in terms of characterisation, the massive change in tone from book 1 to book 3, and that kind of stuff just isn't everyone's cup of tea. But it's still a giant in terms of its lasting popularity and influence.
I found it really fascinating to go through the "History of Middle Earth" series - which is basically a compilation of Tolkein's drafts - and see how much the damn thing changed from start to finish. (For instance: everyone who thinks that Arwen is a cipher and Aragorn/Eowyn should have been the way to go? That's totally what he was writing up until the very last drafts.)
But, of course, you have to have a very special sort of personality to enjoy reading the drafts in the first place. *g* I have a lot of sympathy for Terry Pratchett, who once commented that he takes great pleasure, after finishing a book, in crying "Eat shit, literary researchers of the future!" and deleting everything except the finished copy.
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Gio, I would indeed say that. I'd also mention the large error ratio. But in absence of information, and wanting a prediction, what other result would you pick?
But isn't the insistence on prediction sort of self-defeating? At that sort of level of undecideds (even at the current NZ levels mentioned in this thread) you're speculating without data, and that's not prediction, it's guess-work. At worst, it's highly misleading guesswork. I know polling tends to be more of an art than a science, but come *on*.