Posts by Will de Cleene
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I was thinking just a couple of nights ago that it was a shame there was not an evening tipple that might make me feel nice and warm and relaxed after dinner without the implications for personal health involved in few single malts.
We'll always have Clayton's.
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Every day was Budget Day with Muldoon in charge. It started with Fitzgerald v. Muldoon, when Piggy announced the repeal of the Labour Super Fund in the media (similar to announcing immigration policy on Breakfast TV).
It continued all the way through, with ever more desperate and unilateral thinking; Wage Freeze! Price Freeze! 66 percent tax rate! The scariest part for me wasn't the Budgets. I was still too young to be directly affected by it all. The morning after Muldoon announced the snap election was the one that I'll never forget:
One morning in 1984, my stepmother woke me with the news that parliament had been dissolved. Never being a morning person even then, I wondered what it had been dissolved in and why my stepmother was so happy at the news that the place where my father worked had been liquidated. They must have used a hell of an acid bath, or maybe an American warship had lost its load in Wellington's harbour.
The grin became less malevolent as she went to say that the old man was to be in government shortly. He had lived. I found out the details in drips and drabs later that week. The only part of parliament that had been bombed the other night had been Muldoon.
I swear I got my first grey hair that day. Not Parliamentary jargon's first victim I bet.
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Hard News: The Voyage of a Lifetime, in reply to Kumara Republic,
which is a direct response to the NZBR's takeover of, oops, merger with the NZ Institute
Yeah, I was a bit disappointed to see the NZ Initiative is just a front for the Centre for Independent Studies in Oz.
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The uni capping mags at the time were pretty racy too.
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Up Front: Towards a Sex-Positive Utopia, in reply to Tom Beard,
There's a common argument that says something like "Pre-pubescent girls have no pubic hair, so removing it from an adult woman makes her look like a child. Ergo, the result is, at best, to treat women like children, and at worst, a form of paedophilia."
Totally agree, Tom. As Sopranos guy once noted, Brazilians make women look like girl scouts. But maybe I'm biased. I grew up on 70's porn, when guys had beards and women had bushes. They seemed to be enjoying the sex a lot more than half the stuff that comes out now too.
The pre-pubescent look is part of the larger marketing strategy of selling fear, in this case the fear of death. Bald vages are no different from shaving, facelifts, hair dye, and make-up. Paying through the nose for expensive fountain of youth products in a futile attempt to keep entropy at bay.
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It is a wonderfully complex matter, involving geanologies, natural forces, and both natural & enforced respect. Supernatural? Nope.
This is part of what fascinates me about Maori folklore; the similarities between the culture's animist spirit and the "sum over histories" of quantum physics. I'd had loved to have been in the audience of the Feynman lectures at Auckland University in 1979 at the precise moment he drew a koru.
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NORML was fortunate to have Roger Brooking speak to our AGM. Onya putting him on Media 7. Flying Blind is a real eye opener.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to JackElder,
I had more religion in my first fortnight at that school than I did in the previous 4 years.
There was a scandal before the PNGHS Prizegiving in 1987. The girls had decided to sing John Lennon's Imagine for the event. The Jesus Freaks raised a big stink about the line "Imagine there's no heaven." A trite replacement word was to be substituted for heaven.
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Hard News: One man’s Meat Puppets is…, in reply to JacksonP,
Excellent. I suspect it would be a hit. With the PA massive at the very least.
Seconded. Ska Back Benches theme while they're at it plz?
Didn't someone on PA request a Tomorrow People remix, like, ages ago? That would also be excellent.</bleg>
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Hard News: One man’s Meat Puppets is…, in reply to Danielle,
Ska version of the Coro Street theme.
Ta, Danielle. It goes to show how much bad music is improved by ska/ reggae/ dub treatment. Take, for example, this Mission Impossible theme used to soundtrack a Krypton Factor-esque obstacle course for a squirrel:
Unfortunately, not everything is improved by ska/ reggae/ dub: