Posts by Danyl Mclauchlan
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Oh dear, there is a lot of self-righteous smuggery around cooking things the hard way, isn't there?
In my experience part of being 'a good cook' is learning when you can cut corners and when you can't. I now know that when I'm making pasta sauce using a can of whole peeled tomatoes is much cheaper and easier than peeling a bunch of fresh ones and the result is superior; I know I can use dried oregano but have to use fresh basil. I've found that the hummus you get at the supermarket is indistinguishable from the fresh made stuff and considerably cheaper unless you consume industrial quantities of the stuff, and so on.
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The Dim-Post's Goose Sworn in as New Opposition Leader is some classic Danyl.
Thanks. I was thinking about Leda and the Swan - for some reason - and somewhere along the way the swan became a goose, possibly inspired by the one that lived on an empty section on the way I walked to school that chased me all the way home one morning.
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Providing confidential information in confidence to a journalist is leaking.
Shades of grey, but I disagree. If a staffer in a Labour government gives a journalist confidential information for a story then yeah, that's leaking - but I can't remember this ever happening with people's individual records. Happy to be corrected on this point if someone can link to a prior incident.
But if a press sec does the rounds of the gallery during a story and tells people off the record, 'yeah, the guy attacking us on issue X is angry at the government because of confidential reason Y but the privacy act prevents us from saying so in public', then are they leaking?
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2. It's also been nice to hear balance from journalists. "Bennett did this, however, when Labour was in power their practice was to have ministerial staff leak the information instead of doing it openly." etc..
I can't think of a single instance where a Labour or National Minister has leaked private information about someone to the media. They leak confidential information all the time, but not targeted at individuals.
What DOES happen is that press secs and Ministers confide to journalists off the record about specific cases in order to infuence their coverage, but they that's very different from explicitly leaking the information and having it made publically available.
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And I sat through 'em in the vain hope Viggo would have a catastrophic wardrobe malfunction.
You've seen Eastern Promises, right?
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The convergence of comic-con and the film industry represents - to me - the huge flaw in current Hollywood film making: their products are all aimed at children, or adults with Peter-Pan complexes (nee geeks). I'm happy to watch movies about wizards and elves and robots and dragons every now and then - once or twice a year, say - but most of the time I want something a bit more grown up.
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I'm also a bit disturbed at the notion of a 'wordpress camp' - I set the Dim-Post up on wordpress because it seemed like a good content management system, I didn't realise I was joining a cult . . .
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Lance's complaints seem a bit trivial - and so is mine! I don't like it that in Public Address System you can't see who the author of the original post was; I guess if I was smart I'd be able to memorise that Russell Brown writes 'Hard News', Kieth Ng writes 'On Point' etc, but I have serious short and long term memory problems so that's not going to fly.
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Lindt is surprisingly cheap these days; I also rate the Trade Aid chocolate pretty highly and I always get a kick out of reading that it's '76%' free trade . . .
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Bright Star is basically dreadful - nice to look at though, with lots of gorgeous, static slow focus close-ups and beautiful landscapes in between the terrible dialog, constant voiceovers and endless, pointless scenes. That's four terrible films in a row for our Jane which is a bit of a worry.