Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
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Yes, the weakest student voice emanates from those students who must volunteer to speak it.
It was always darkly amusing watching naive young students who had voted for VSM suddenly faced with the consequences of their actions. "Hang on, where have all the student services gone? Why does everything suddenly suck?" It was like an inadvertent lesson in the benefits of unionism.
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Awww, thanks Danielle! The sad thing is, it was almost all true.
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This reminds me of something I wrote ages and ages ago, back in a different internet era ...
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Can't see how you can lay all the dumbosity on AGS.
LOL. I can, but there may be subjective, personal-history reasons for that ...
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Incestuous bunch, those self-consciously 'elite-school' teachers.
Just to clarify, Kelston Boys may have a good rugby team, but it's not regarded as an "elite school". (sorry if this offends any Kelston Old Boys)
When compound adjectives attack! Just to clarify the clarification: I wasn't referring so much to the schools themselves as the teachers, and pointing out the fact that they all had Grammar connections. Is all.
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I think we can grade Auckland Grammar and Kelston principals John Morris and Steve Watt F for epic fail.
Couldn't agree more Craig. There's also a certain irony in all this that Mr Johnny Morris is in fact an Old Boy AND ex-teacher from Kelston Boys.
And Steve Watt used to teach at Grammar. Incestuous bunch, those self-consciously 'elite-school' teachers.
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Islander and Jeremy: It appears to be going through one of its apparently semi-regular meltdowns, but The New Zealand Electronic Text Centre has some of Elsdon Best's work. Not, unfortunately, Maori Religion & Mythology but a few of his minor ones on related subjects.
The two parts of Maori Religion and Mythology are still in print through Te Papa Press. I can definitely confirm that the Text Centre plans to digitize further Best texts in the future; it's good to know that there's a demand out there for them.
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But we have a government at the moment not for all New Zealanders, but of, and for, a particulary vengeful and spiteful minded "middle New Zealand" ...
Is the proportion of National MPs who attended (what are now) state-integrated schools wildly out of whack? By my count, 11 out of the 58 either attended or taught at religiously demonimated schools, which is a little under 20%. The Nat caucus also includes a former head girl of Corran School and former head boy of Auckland Grammar. The number is, I guess, not surprising considering the demographic that the Party traditionally draws its MPs from, but it's certainly not representative of the population at large.
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My festival began and ended this weekend. I started out with North Face, which was wretched -- a dumbed-down, Teutonic Touching the Void that cops out badly in its depictions of pre-War Nazi identity. It also pivoted around one of the more ludicrous examples of Mary-Sue-ism I've seen lately. The Joe-Simpson-narrated TV doco The Beckoning Silence is a much better dramatisation of the same events.
Second up, I had Paper Soldier -- the cosmonauts in Kazakhstan movie. A couple of guys behind me were audibly upset after the film ended -- 'Not a lot of space in that movie, not a lot' -- but it was pretty damn good. It was kind of an absurdist, Catch-22 take on the psychological toll of idealism -- a challenging, technically brilliant brew of rain, mud, Chekhov, Tarkovsky, and the occasional rocket.
Third was Examined Life, which was neither more nor less than you might expect from a bunch of academic philosophers haranguing an admiring film-maker. I followed this up with the cheerfully bonkers Mock Up on Mu, which was fun -- postmodern collage with a more-or-less serious point to make about the subversion of utopian thinking since the '60s in the interests of 'security'.
Now I have to hunt down Cleo from 5 to 7 and wait for Moon to come out on general release.
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I hate harping on about Metafilter, but another rather nice feature it has goes like this. Members have profile pages, and when you create your profile, there is a large list of "social" sites (Librarything, LastFM, Linkedin, whatever) and you can add all the ones that you belong to if you want.
I just wanted to back up Stephen on this point. The Mefi profile page and its social bookmarking capability is one of the most quietly elegant pieces of community weblog design I can think of.