Posts by Rob Hosking
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WH
You bastard but I mean it lovingly.
I'm currently stuffed up with bronchitis and Chase me Ladies has cheered me up and nearly killed me at the same time. Laughing until the coughing causes a seizure.
My favourite so far is the one about travelling on British Airways.
Don't forget to take some cigarette butts in your hand luggage. Leave them lying around the plane, it really pisses them off. They can’t work out why their nerdish smoke detectors aren’t working.... One day I’m going to sneak on board with a jar of bees. Hopefully they'll swarm up to Business Class and sting everyone to buggery. It will be the last thing they're expecting.
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I extract the salient fact from this story, which is that a guy who'll do that for a friend isn’t going to have sex with me.
Hmm. Maybe not the right conclusion. Mr Catfish sounds a remarkable teenager who was able to put looking after a mate ahead of hormones. Not unheard of, but still admirable.
And it sounds as though you handled yourself pretty well too. Getting a crossbow pointed at you has to be a real brown trouser job.
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teaches me how to use a butterfly knife andplay Strip Poleconomy (not at the same time).
Damn Damn DAMN.
'Cos I think it could be a really intriguing combo.
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Legbreak: I suspect its from the '68 tour. (opening match: Marlborough won, the only provincial side to do so on that tour)
As for disappointments and the Ranfurly Shield: Counties (my home region team) has had a singularly ill-starred history.
Was winning the NPC or whatever it was called in the mid-70s. North Auckland won the Shield and Counties was due to play them. There was some rule which said a holder could decline to make a game a Shield game and North Auckland invoked the rule.
Next season they lost it to Auckland: Counties played Auckland and led for most of the game; but lost at the end. The score was something like 12-9.
A few years later when Canterbury won the Shield Counties was playing them the next game: it was a draw, 13-13 from memory. That was the start of Canterbury's long run until Auckland took it off them in '85.
But its been all downhill, pretty much, for Counties since then.
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Hmmm...Jake, Hobbes was a tad more authoritarian than that... from memory, you can use his approach, with the necessary changes for 20th century conditions in Russia, to justify a Stalin.
I think Popper lumped him in with a line of bossy-boots running from Plato through to Marx...
Mind you, we do have it on reasonably good authority that he was fond of his dram.
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The political studies tutor who introduced me to Oakeshott (and Burke) used to marvel/lament that the best writers on political philosophy as writers were on the conservative side.
I didn't know her own politics except she was quite a passionate feminist, so its fair to say she wasn't one of life's natural conservatives. But she possessed a breadth of understanding of politics which saw beyond petty ideological categorisation and tribalism. Its all too rare, that sort of thing.
Coincidentally, I was reading over some Oakeshott earlier in the week. (and, inspired by a recent exchange here about Burke, went and got Conor Cruise O'Brien's book on Burke out of the Welly library).
Also have a quote from the man himself on the wall of my gallery office: 'I think the need to know the news every day is a nervous disorder.'
You won't find this in any of his writings. It was a comment to a former top student of his who went down to visit Oakeshott at his home somewhere in the south of England. Oakeshott asked him what he intended to do, now he'd graduated with a very good degree.
The young chap replied he intended to be a journalist. Oakeshott gazed silently out at the English Channel for a very long time, and finally said 'Oh dear' before making his comment.
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The team scores, you leap to your feet, open your throat and punch the air. But there is no sound.
I'll leave someone else to formulate the "tree falls in the forest" joke.Perhaps something about the sound of one hand clapping would be even more apt.
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Sofie,
It sort of reads like a Sam Hunt poem (but I see, googling it, that its not)
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That is exactly what goes through my head every time someone mentions Kraftwerk.
Snap.
(For anyone who is baffled: check here)
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Makes you wonder what 'bad' things they associate with 'Kiwi' for them to assume that it's an insult.
You mean, apart from being a blind chook with a big arse?