Posts by Joe Wylie
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. . . when performing cunning linguisitcs, letting the tongue write the letters of the alphabet....
What, no actual sentences? "Dear Sir/Madam . . ."
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I'm one of those filthy landlubbers. All I know of matters nautical I learned from stuff like this:
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That voiceover at the end of the tourism video is... oddly threatening.
The geri pranksters version has a kindler 'n gentler tone. Also the song has been de-funked, without the Leon Russell-ish Mad Dogs & Englishmen-era piano:
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The party scenes resemble those in This is New Zealand -- down to the presence of an exotic dancer. Perhaps it's even the same NFU crew?
Did they have more than one crew back then?
It's civil service cinema verite, from the time when Ian "God Boy" Cross was running the Film Unit. Cross became NFU supremo after holding PR positions with the police and military. In a radio interview from around 1976 it was put to him that the Unit's productions lacked "relevance*" to contemporary NZ. Cross rejected the claim, citing the example of a recently completed project for the police that had featured actual real-life policemen (no mention of police women). You couldn't, he suggested, get much more relevant than that.
*Relevant was something of a mid-70s buzzword.
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I take my hat off to anyone that can get far enough through one of GG's articles to spot plagiarism. My eyes usually glaze over when I see his evil eyes.
That glare is just to disguise Garth's own glaze. Old curmudgeon trick.
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Hamlet, but no helmet. -
I watched a court case during Auckland's cook-street market heydays . He, the tripped out hairy dude, had been charged with reading taro-cards, in public. His lawyer was Colin Amery. Colin had the case shifted to the high court. The charges were subsequently dropped, I understood.
What a great story Steven. Interestingly enough, Colin Amery also claimed psychic powers, and made a pretty accurate and detailed prediction of the allocation of seats in the 1978 election. Although the feat gave him a certain amount of media cred, particularly with NZ Truth, he was never able to repeat it.
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Now the gnomes are doing it.
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Giovanni:
Actually, I've seen plenty of 'psychics' do their thing for free, or for a modest expense reimbursment. Many of them appear to be in it for the attention and validation, and I suspect may genuinely be convinced of being gifted. I wouldn't judge the whole category on the few who do it to turn a buck.
IMHE 'psychics' - people who provide information which they couldn't have obtained by any readily explicable means - are real enough. Whatever 'gift' they possess, though, doesn't seem to provide anything particularly useful, such as tsunami prediction, winning racehorses or, despite the best efforts of TVNZ's hype machine, crime solving.
Those I've encountered have been, apart from some rather superficial affectations, very ordinary people. When they do 'see' or sense something genuine, they usually misinterpret its significance. While I wish there was some objective method of investigating how such 'powers' work, as there appears to be little immediate benefit from harnessing these things, the debate over whether or not they exist doesn't strike me as important.
From stories I've heard from old people, and from the somewhat paranoid behaviour of a couple of older 'practitioners' I met years ago, there appear to have once been laws in force to protect people from their own supposed folly in seeking the services of 'fortune tellers'. Does anyone know if these were repealed, or have they simply fallen into disuse?
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One of the more bizarre figments of the Christchurch Civic Creche case was the supposed victims' accounts of ritual abuse sessions with 'asian tourists' during their outings with Peter Ellis. While the preposterous nature of the stories should have rung alarm bells, the nonsense was accepted with little challenge in the mood of legally channeled hysteria that characterised the trials.
I have no idea whether this is connected with whatever underlies the so-called "sighting" in Auckland, but Lucy has a point. Simply mentioning that there's a dark side to the national psyche which may be very much alive is hardly some form of collective slander against human decency.