Posts by Paul Campbell
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My standard line is: "shoes? funerals, trade shows and snow" (well weddings too) - I've had the one pair of dress shoes for over a decade and some ski boots
I've worn Birkenstocky-like things for 30 years, barefoot round the house - my feet smelled so foul as a kid, ditching shoes when I went to Uni was wonderfull
Living in Dunedin I occasionally get "aren't you cold?" to which the usual answer is something like "they're warm, look they're glowing a healthy bright red - my ears are cold ...."
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Hmm my (co-ed) high school lists Daniel Loader and David Bain but forgets Mother Goose .... while the evil single sex school I went to lists David Gray, (and the policeman he shot), a couple of PMs, Jonathan Lemalu, Colin McCahon, and a passel of All Blacks
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I think I attended the same boys high school - except it was in Dunedin and probably more evil - I escaped in the middle of 5th form to a coed school and was promptly placed in a class of 36 - 6 of which were boys .... total culture shock.
I too was sort of offered to skip 6th form ... but in a different sort of way - come the end of 6th form I was accredited and few of us were pulled aside and offered "would you like to sit bursary this year" ... rather than hang out for a month and do nothing.
We did - what a mistake! what were we thinking!
We knuckled under and worked together to crack this bursary thing - I'm pretty sure we all passed - everyone else who'd been accredited slagged off and went to the beach - still being 16 I couldn't just hare of to Uni - instead I went in to 7th form - and slagged off for an entire year, even occasionally went to the beach, sat bursary again and got a lower score in most subjects ....
Really I should have done a 'gap year' and lived in the world instead
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Thinking about it probably half of my kitchen accidents involving knives have involved stabbings (or dropping) rather than slicings, maybe that would make sense,whether one passes a law or not - why do kitchen knives need points? after all I have forks for when I need to stab things
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True - but Biden can do that, Palin can't (unless you need pork for Alaska ...)
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Yeah I know - but it's the VP's only real job until the big guy croaks - and they do get to resolve ties
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it was clear Palin hasn't got a clue. She is clearly unfit to be vice president of the United States.
Really any US VP candidate needs to run on 2 criteria:
- can they be president (ie they are really running to be president)
- can they chair the senateSo ideally any VP debate is the same as a presidential debate (plus maybe questions on Senate rules of procedure/etc)
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When they visit my friends from the US are aghast by crime in New Zealand, they look in the media and are horrified - "look at all this terrible stuff" they say, "why did you want to move back here?".
I have to explain that unlike where I used to live in the US our media covers ALL the violent crime here at once - in Oakland where I used to live, a city the size of Christchurch, there was a murder every 3 days, 100+ a year - most never even made the newspaper unless they were particularly horrific or involved someone famous.
We look in our media and do the same - say "how horrific" - yet the stats say that crime is going down - I guess the media expands the crime to fit the empty space.
Then again I can still look in the local paper and read the court news - growing up having your grand mother (and her friends) read your name in there was something of great shame - maybe the real problem is that we're just trying to turn everything into such a big deal (to fit the empty space ...)
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I have 2 kids, teenagers, including a 15 going on 20 yr old daughter.
First of all "I couldn't find a phone" has been replaced by "I forgot to charge it", probably for about the same levels of truthiness as before.
Secondly are they constantly texting each other? of course, how else would you run out of texts on your 2000 text plan before the end of the month (alternate excuse for above).
One of the main reasons why I moved back to NZ from the US was so that my kids could be teenagers here, maybe run a little wild, get a chance to screw up and take the consequences, but in relative safety - that guy you pick a fight with down town - probably doesn't have a gun, but he does have fists and might have a knife - knowing when to run away is an important life skill ....
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I'm glad you grabbed the street art - there's been a bunch of great banksy-like stencil work round town in the past few years (and then there's the banana-slugs which my daughter informs me are really giraffes)