Posts by dyan campbell
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Fantastic, people still have governesses.
Our dear Sarah is more of a literary device than an actual person, but yeah, plenty of people have governesses these days. Except they call them nannies, I believe.
Nope, a governess and a nanny are two entirely different things. A nanny attends to the physical needs of children and supervises their play - a governess is for much older children and is a teacher employed in a private capacity.
In a similar vein of confused social types, I see Palin described sometimes as "preppy" which is about a far from Palin's type as a person can get; Obama is a preppy. Palin doesn't seem educated at all, much less well educated.
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cannabis remains prohibited
When I was in Canada a couple of years ago I smelt it often enough just wandering around the streets that I assumed it was legal.
Apparently not, just not policed very aggressively a friend told me.
And so it has always been - I had dinner with my high school literature teacher once, a couple years after graduation, and he was trying to describe where a new addition to the school had been build. "Near the North entrance" he said - I drew a blank - "Where that housing development was planned but vetoed" - again, no idea where he meant "where you kids used to toke up before you came to class" to which I responded "Oh, I know where you mean".
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I might not agree with the core belief but going to church regularly does not = wacko.
Perhaps not, but you have to agree there is a strong correlation.
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right, where were we? A person who loves all life will search out a proper environment for the starfish, and then gently reintroduce them. Because there are starfish & starfish
I see sort of ecological and environmental sensibility as being important in three different ways: first the recognition that we are participants in an ecosystem rather than consumers of resources is clearly one of the most relevant we face these in these days of heightened environmental alarm.
Second, there is the spiritual aspect of respecting all other forms of life, even if you have to kill them. It's common among many cultures to apologise to the prey when hunting and thank it and its species for all it provides during the butchering. These beliefs are accompanied by a belief that taking this bounty for granted as a hunter or wasting resources in any way will cause shortages of resources in the long run. To me, raised as an atheist, this makes a whole lot more sense than most religions.
The third way this environmental/ecological sensibility is important is related to one's own mental health. The Buddhist point of view that this attitude of respect and compassion for all "sentient beings" is more important to the person observing the niceties as it is for the species one is wishing well is being backed up by what we are learning about mental health and our role in a wider society.
Buddhists - and more recently evolutionary biologists and neurologists - hold the view that being inured and indifferent to suffering of an insignificant species will engender an attitude of brutality when dealing with other larger species - including our own.
Plainly put, if you go around pulling the wings off flies, killing small animals and being sadistic and if this brings you pleasure, you will be less likely to be a happy or accepted member of your society.Buddhists, primitive cultures, evolutionary biologists and neurologists are all for killing whatever it is you wish to eat or wish to eliminate from your life, but they would all argue that an attitude of glee at causing the death or enjoyment of evidence of suffering will ultimately damage the person indulging in what they would deem emotionally misguided attitudes as much as it will harm the smaller members of their environment.
God, I'll never recover from writing essays, it's scars one's style. It made me hopeless writing for any magazine that wasn't a medical journal.
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On the issue of Mr Trotter and his ridiculous metaphor, followed by an even more ridiculous attack on The Hand Mirror, as Craig has already retold, I find it intriguing that he was called on his inappropriate rape analogy by David Farrar, by Russell Brown and commenters here, and by the ex-expat at THM, and which did he chose to attack? That's right, the ladies. No mention whatsoever of any men levelling criticism at him for the exact same thing, it's all about us "faux feminists" and our third wave attitude of entitlement
I wondered about this too. Either Chris Trotter has not read this discussion, or if he has read this, he has neither comprehended the two different criticisms nor correctly identified who is doing the criticising.
The criticism of Trotter's choice of phrase was made by men, and they expressed surprise at Trotter comparing the media frenzy over Winston Peters's refusal to answer questions to "a gang rape".
Far from believing rape victims are always women, I have met many men and boys who have been raped and sexually assaulted. The two women I know who have been raped have never talked to me about their experience, but I have spoken at length with the male victims I knew.
I didn't voice an objection to Chris Trotter's phrase, though I do understand why Russell Brown, David Farrar and the expat THM did. It was a really inaccurate interpretation of what was happening to Winston Peters.
The phrase to which I objected was about "Jenny Shipley spreading her legs..." and the problem I have with that phrase is that the sex act when performed by a woman is meant to describe a lack of power. Yet when a man is powerless, we use imagery that refers to his inability to perform the act; we say he is "impotent" or "dickless".
I pointed out that it speaks volumes about the sexual attitudes of the person who refers to exactly the same act to describe a woman as powerless or a man as powerful.
Do you think those descriptions back in the day of Blair bending over for Bush (with the implications of sodomy) are men-hating?
Well obviously these are intended to be homophobic, but as I stated above, my main objection to this sort of metaphor is that it's usually inaccurate.
If you know anything about sexual behaviour, you will realise that the fascination with anal sex is a more commonly held by heterosexual males than any other group in society - including homosexual males.
Anal sex is rarely of any interest to women, as they do not have a prostate gland to be stimulated by the act. Homosexual men do enjoy anal sex, but no more than heterosexual men; homosexual men are usually more enthusiastic about oral-genital sex.
If you talk to either the rent boys who service the customers or the clinicians who specialise in sexual health, they will tell you that the men most excited by anal sex are 1) straight, or passing and 2) married. My rent-boy friends told me that their customers were almost exclusively living as straight men (or they'd just cruise a club) and that straight men were more likely to want to be the receptive rather than the active partner in anal sex.
This is what I always think when anyone talks in terms of sexual imagery - and I am reminded of a line in a movie, uttered by a jaded teenager talking about the kind of guy with latent homosexual urges who is always joking about anal sex, being careful about dropping the soap in a communal shower and so on - and she points out, quite accurately, that "straight guys don't spend a lot of time thinking about naked wet guys".
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Perhaps you could do me the courtesy, and you too, Steve, of not telling me how to do my feminism.
And oerhaps you could do us all a favour and try and stick to the topic rather than turn this thread into another of your "Man Hating" trolls. But then you are so much more importrant than the rest of us aren't you?
I'm over it. In the words of our esteemed host "Goodbye!"Steve, if you read an analysis of loaded, inappropriately coarse metaphors as the work of "Man Hating" trolls then you reduce your role in this discussion to that of a blustering fool.
The use of metaphors that imply sexual compliance, sexual force, sexual preference all set out to denigrate far more than they set out to describe.
The coarse nature of this sort of metaphor is one objection, the misogyny another, the homophobia yet another - but the image can be reduced down to an (often unrelated to the original point) attempt to create an image that seeks to humiliate someone. It's an ad hominem argument reduced to the most puerile, sophmoric level. And it doesn't even make sense unless you consider man - woman sex as something a man does to a woman and a woman has done to her, and man - man sex as something vile and degrading. Both acts become shorthand for a childish personal attack disguised as a jokey argument.
All permutations of sexual innuendo used as insult are an insight into a person's attitude towards sexual behaviour. People are described as "dickless" or "impotent" is powerless - yet a woman who can still do it by "spreading her legs" and "just lying there" is also "powerless".
So is being able to perform the act synonymous with power or powerlessness? It depends on your point of view. Any man I've had sex with, I've always considered it something I was doing to him, but then I was raised like a boy and had very male attitudes.
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My only regret now is that I never had an Aunt or Uncle that let me throw Molotov cocktails (although my grandfather did make me a lethal crossbow when I was nine; the bolt of which would split a piece of 4x2 at about 10 metres).
We didn't make Molotov cocktails, but we loved playing with fire, explosives, flammable things. This was in the days before any minded if children set fire to themselves.
We would have battles at sea in a wheelbarrow filled with water, filling our old model ships and planes with cotton balls soaked in gasoline, and studding them with ladyfingers before setting fire to the lot.
We'd buy tins of bug spray or hairspray and shoot them into the incinerator (I grew up in the 1960s, when children burned the trash, far, far out of range from adult supervision). Flammable things in aerosol tins made amazing flamethrowers, though in hindsight this was probably not the smartest thing we did, along with winter (snowboot) and summer (skateboard) bumper skiing.
I remember always eating Kentucky fried chicken, in the old days when it was finger liking good
I met Colonel Harland Saunders at a charity thing in Canada, though much to my shock and disappointment, they served little egg and cucumber sandwiches, not fried chicken.
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My doctor told me you don't get diabetes from sugar. Yay !
[(http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2003/apr/21/usnews.food|Sugar industry threatens to scupper WHO | Society | The Guardian)]
Well, so the sugar lobby would would have you believe. And it's true, much in the same way guns don't kill people, alcohol doesn't cause liver disease and AIDS doesn't cause death... there are chains of events that implicate these things, and they are linked to the things that kill.
I love sugar probably more than all of you put together. I grew up in Canada, a country that celebrates Halloween, which meant if you dressed up as whatever you like - a mouse, a fairy, a ghost, a pirate, a tv - and knock on doors, you could have as much candy as you could drag home in a night. It used to last me until Christmas. I liked sugar so much I enjoyed the polio vaccine - the one that was delivered in the sugar cube. When our class made Innuit igloos out of sugar cubes and I ate most of the building materials. I still bake with plenty of sugar - though probably as I also use things with food value in baking, it buffers it a bit. Plus I try to keep our consumption down to about 10gm a day, as the WHO recommends.
The most alarming dose of sugar comes from soft drinks - some children consume 40% of their daily calories from soft drinks. Sugar may not cause diabetes, but it does cause obesity - and obesity, particularly central fat - certainly does cause diabetes. We used to call that type of diabetes "adult onset" but in the 1980s children started to get the disease - for the first time in human history - and now the children getting the now named "type 2 diabetes" are legion. Type 2 diabetes has been nicknamed "the new smallpox" because of the devastation it is causing.
Sugar takes the place of food that would otherwise contain some food value. This is relevant as most children in NZ are seriously deficient in one or more of a number of key nutrients . The obese are most likely to suffer from these defiencies - iron, calcium, vitamin D and obese mothers are more likely to have malnourished offspring (due to neural tube problems exacerbated by the mother's weight). Sugar plays a central role in these health problems.
Sugar is also implicated in inflammation (google C- reacitive protein, metabolic syndrome or adiponectin if you are a biochem geek) and is really, emphatically not a good food, unless you get your sugar from an apple or a carrot.
Much as I love it I try to regard sugar as a flavour enhancer than an actual food.
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I'm sorry but I'm not good with names, but the commentators are most of the fun.
This is so true - like the other night we heard one of the commentators say, excitedly "THIS IS LIKE A RACE BETWEEN A ZEBRA AND A GIRAFFE!!!!!" which of course it wasn't at all, but it provided us with hours of entertainment.... all night my husband Paul kept shouting things like "THIS IS LIKE A MUD FIGHT BETWEEN A MARSUPIAL AND A RODENT!!!!" or "THIS IS LIKE A BAKE-OFF BETWEEN A KEA AND A KAKAPO!!!!" which made the Olympics a bit more lively than they usually are.
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<quote>Eg see the Chinese basketballers. You can't tell me the average Chinese person is very tall, but sheer population size means there are far more people on the extremes of the bell curve than anywhere else.</qutoe>
It depends where in China you're talking - my Aunt's family (she was born in Vancouver herself) was from Canton and Aunt Valerie is 5'8" - over 5'9" when she was young (she's 75 or so) - that's very tall for that generation, but typical of the Chinese from her province.
But generally, yes, Chinese are quite small and that 16 year old kid who won gold looked 16 to me.