Posts by Rob Hosking
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Unfortunately experience tells me that the battery life and strength of construction of a toy are directly proportional to the annoyingness of the noise it produces.
Yeah, but even then, (and since we know from another thread running at the moment the high number of Elvis Costello fans here) Accidents Will Happen.
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Craig wrote:
Well, I've got a rather pleasant niche in the family ecology -- the Big Gay Eccentric Cardigan-Wearing 'Uncle' who says 'no' a lot,
My brother and his partner have a less fierce but occasionally problematic possie in our family: they're the playful big uncles who, when they give neices and nephews back, often accompany it with a gift of a Very Loud Toy.
Just because they know retaliation isn't possible.
Che wrote:
i expect all this exuberance will wear off by the time i a parent myself.
Oh, they remove exuberance from the parents in the delivery suite. It goes out with the afterbirth.
Although I understand in these more culturally diverse times they will hand it back so's you can plant a tree on top of it or something.
But its dead, believe me.
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Briefly...
It's been a love/hate relationship.
Well, more a 'I bet that's interesting'/'why the f*** am I wasting my time on this sh*t*?' relationship.
And you know, this is something which has never happened in any other part of my life, ever.
Ahem.
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probably depends on the sort of muck, but I was told, years ago, by someone who worked in a second hand record store, that the best thing was just ordinary soap, a bit of warm water, and a soft cloth or - if you're daring - brush.
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Mind you, I'm impressed that they know the correct plural of "nunchak".
You know, that was the part that really impressed me about that story as well.
Didn't take the rest of it seriously: had a mental picture of Hong Kong Phooey and that was about it.
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Just a wee note on the theme of media and blogging etc...didn't catch the time, or who is talking, but there's a piece on Kathryn Ryan's Nine to Noon addressing this issue later this morning.
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This conflict with difficulty makes us acquainted with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial
Burke is my favourite political philosopher, (although he wouldn't like being called that) but I hadn't noticed this Presbyterian strand in his thought before.
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Hoo, wee, ...where to start? Ok, Ta for the hon mensh, Russell. I'd like to say I started blogging for the sort of strategic reasons you mention but it was nothing so well thought-out: I had a sick wife and a sick daughter and at the time blogging was my social life and also way of keeping in touch with things going on politically.
As they improved my blogging got more into non-political areas. I can get all that stuff at work...
On Jane Clifton's column - and Vernon Small's similar piece a week earlier - they’ve both prompted quite a few earnest discussions over the coffee.
Vernon's piece was also from the perspective of the Press Gallery chair and dealing with applications for accreditation from all sorts of publications.
As an aside, I think it would be helpful if a discussion about blogging and journalism didn’t always descend into a slagging match about journalists or bloggers people dislike. It doesn’t really illuminate the issues at all.
So, keeping to the issues a bit:
The parallel I draw is with the rise of pamphleteering in 18th Century London. A lot of it was quite scurrilous - it matches the worst of the blogs. Incredibly bitterly partisan. But gradually things settled down.
People got to 'pick their own experts', to use Che's great phrase.
There never really has been a gatekeeper deciding who can and cannot be a journalist. The main skills are an ability to write well, an ability to ferret out information, and to organize that information.
Getting the information has become a lot easier. The biggest change since I joined the press gallery in 1997 is the colossal amount of information now available online to anyone with a computer but which then was the semi-exclusive domain of MPs, political journalists, lobbyists etc.
And I don’t just mean press releases. I mean real information, reports of government depts, state owned companies, etc. Even the bloody Budget bilaterals are posted on the Treasury's web site within a few weeks of the Budget. It’s all there if you want to find it.
That means the other skills will become more important.
I’m kind of an optimist on this stuff (medium term, anyway. Short term its pretty chaotic). Giovanni's points are well made: readers/audiences are not blank slates. They have minds (and, yes, prejudices) of their own.
Democracy, for all its messiness, is a great educator. A few years back the Economist made the point that in western democracies, the average citizen now has the kind of basic policy knowledge about, say, changes in interest rates, which would have been only understood by the elite 100 years ago.
Rob Muldoon was wrong. People do know a deficit if they fall over one.I see blogs - the best of them, anyway - as being part of this whole educative process which is, or at least should, be part and parcel of democracy.
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One year my class was in the school hall.The school buses were packed to the hilt too, and seemed to break down regularly. Fortunately we were still allowed to play Bulrush (the no holds barred version) while we waited for one to come back empty.
It's pretty damn obvious what was going on here. Kill off a few of the weaker ones to slim down the numbers.
It's no coincidence, I'm sure, that bulrush was banned when the birth rate began to fall. They also started putting padding in playgrounds, and ripping out jungle gyms.It's all going to the pack. Left footers and grief counsellors everywhere.
The encouraging sign though is the recent news about the rising birth rate. The return of bulrush can't be far off. School milk, in all its green tepid horror, must also be due for a comeback.
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The next year I was taught by Miss Miniskirts-long-legs...
Has anyone had the experience, years later, of looking at their old school class photos and thinking, Actually, that woman who taught me in new entrants was a bit of all right?
This is a hypothetical question.
Because it could, you know, happen.
Hypothetically.