Posts by Joe Wylie
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Corn on cob for one cent.
Fresh kaimoana one minute walk the other way. Had so much it put me off for years.Ah, nostalgia.
That much fish & chips (spreads arms wide} for 25c.
And as the bigger kids used to sing, when I were a young 'un:In a shoemaker's shop
You could buy a brand new cock
And a pair of tits
For twelve and six -
. . . or a cathedral (points for anyone who knows the only place that didn't first qualify on population - the answer was required general knowledge when I was in primary school)
Nelson. What do I win?
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the last recent skeletal remains of which come from Trotters Gorge . . .
Trotter, eh? That's just the sort of thing he'd do to piss off the Greens.
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. . . a one velodrome town.
That's been something of a perception since, well, since pre-velodrome days.
"In character he was cold, hard, stern, and autocratic, and - what was a big defect in Maori eyes - was not a good speaker. There was restraint about his speech which precluded any possibility of oratory. It was as though the coldness of the man affected his delivery, so that he chilled his hearers. He spoke with a strong Wanganui accent also, clipping the ends of his words, in a manner considered highly barbarous on this coast."
Te Rangihiwinui, also known as Taitoko and later as Te Keepa, or Major Kemp, described in Te Hekenga: Early Days in Horowhenua. Rod McDonald & E. O'Donnell, 1928.
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I read the NZ herald poll yesterday and the week before that where something like 75% called him the voice-of-reason or something like that.
Herald polls are simply a bucket provided for those shut-ins who must vomit up their ineffectuality ("Look at that, mate! And I never even had frozen peas!") While the vast majority of NZers have lives, there's a certain morbid fascination in peeking into the bucket.
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But we lack abundant wildlife and must settle for pizza.
Thanks to 1080 there's not the same abundance of roadkill. And now that hubcaps are made of plastic there's a lack of handy roasting dishes.
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When I first lived in Big O, I heard kakapo. (So did others, including an Acclimitisation Soc. officer.) They boomed late at night. in a good year
Wow. That's the kind of tale that puts the wondrous shivers up & down one's spine.
There were whekau round here - we know they were way noisier than ruru-
You've met people who remember? I've heard tales of great-grandparents who told how their forebears witnessed/heard the "laughing owl". Despite its supposedly unnerving cry it seems to have been regarded with a special fondness. A bit like the rather more fortunate Australian barking owl. Also known as the 'screaming woman owl', thanks to the female's blood-curdling seasonal cry, which occasionally triggers emergency service callouts.
BTW, at new year 2002 in Sydney, barely ten minutes from the north end of the harbour bridge, a couple of tawny frogmouths set up their booming in a backyard tree just before midnight, and kept it up for nearly an hour. Glorious stuff.
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You see, that's why I dislike the idea of a ranked list - and did my humble best to disrail it.
That has to be a pun, right? Im which case, I'll vote for the whooping weka. Tim Flannery once said that he'd happily trade all of Kiri Te Kanawa's catalogue just to hear the dawn chorus as it was in this land's birdland pre-extinction heyday.
Wonder if the weka's raucous heralding of nightfall was joined by any others?. The marvellous adzebill, for example.
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I reckon it's only a matter of time until Laws has a Jimmy Swaggart / Jimmy Baker day of reckoning. Someone should go through his rubbish. I bet it's a goldmine of credibility destroying tidbits.
Um - isn't that what this thread is largely about? It's not as if he provides the world with anything much else to feed its morbid fascination with the grotesque.
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When I asked my school's rep why he was more conservative than me, he said "That's because you're a baby boomer!"
The little germ, already fluent in the jargon of marketing.