Posts by JackElder
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You've been to a lot of poorly run meetings, in that case.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the civil service!
Can anyone recommend any good atheist or non-religious karakia? Seems to be the sort of thing it might be useful to know.
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MC Squared does good beatboxing.
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Purely out of interest, how common is it to have your mortgage split into multiple tranches? Ours is in three fixed portions, plus a small floating overdraft. Each time one comes up, we re-fix for 3 years - so each year we have one portion coming up for renewal. Gives us a good bit of insulation against drastic changes in the rates, as any change can only affect 1/3 of your total monthly repayment.
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Can you claim it's been corked if it's a screw-top bottle? Just curious, really.
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It'd have to be Gogol Bordello's classic "Think Globally, F*** Locally".
Can't remember who it was, but I have a great respect for the cyclist who celebrated winning a stage of the Tour de France a few years ago in an unusual manner. He'd made a good break from the chasing bunch, so had time to sort it out - he sat up, pulled a baby's dummy from his back pocket, put it in his mouth, and mimed rocking a baby in his arms as he crossed the line. He was dedicating the win to his newborn son, you see.
And of course Jacques Anquetil was famous for keeping a comb in the back pocket of his jersey, and sitting up and combing his hair as he crossed the line to win a stage.
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Purely out of interest, did you write this before or after hearing about this?
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We did 7 years in the UK (Cambridge, not London), and quite frankly the main reason we moved back was having kids. We saw other friends of ours from Wellington move to the UK, hate it, do the obligatory brief tour of duty so they could say they'd done the OE and didn't look provincial, and then move home as fast as they could. These people were never going to stick overseas. We made a lot of friends over there, enjoyed our time, and would probably still be there. But having kids realigned our priorities; suddenly, being closer to the whanau was a big thing, as was them not growing up talking funny. Hence, move back to NZ. I've seen this echoed in a lot of my other friends, who tend to move back to NZ either just before or just after having kids. Quite frankly, the economic conditions didn't matter at all - I assumed I'd be able to get some kind of a job in short order, which turned out to be true. So I think I'm with Helen Clarke on the actual reason that a lot of expats move home.
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Am I the only one who suspects that Emma enjoyed writing this ... a little more than she should have?
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And Joanna - no worries. It's always odd re-meeting people from your own childhood, isn't it? For one thing, we're taller.
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The former Minister of Internal Affairs, and last great user of Parliament's billiard room?
No, the other one. No relation.
Seriously, when I was a student in the mid '90s, he had an unlisted number but I didn't. I used to get all his crank phone calls. And in one very odd twist of bad recordkeeping, one of my student loan bills was sent to his office in Parliament. I have no idea how it happened, but i do know he didn't pay it.