Posts by ChrisW
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If a Dutch person is in say, the US and they are asked which ethnic group they belong to, do they say "I'm European" or do they say "I'm Dutch".
Caucasian?
And would that provide any reliable information? Wikipedia shows well that can of worms, wriggling especially vigorously on the discussion/talk pages. There I found the answer to a question that's puzzled me, how that daft term came into use seemingly without regard to the peoples of the Caucasus mountains and vicinity. Unsourced quote -
the word caucasian originated from Caucasia, A small island off the coast of Oklahoma.
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I went googling a few days ago too and found this reference from early 1970s
to Shakespeare's inferred intent from his Warwickshire origins that golden lads = dandelions in flower and chimney-sweepers = dandelion heads in seed, from the close resemblance of their shape to the brush used. But also found the point that in Shakespeare's day chimney-sweepers were non-golden boys who climbed inside chimneys, the special chimney-sweeping brush came 200 years later. So chimney-sweeper = dandelion seed-head must be associated with Warwickshire after Shakespeare, not as ancient 'dialect'.My bet - that a 19th century Warwickshire teacher parochially keen on Shakespeare noticed the uncanny connections of the new chimney-sweeping technology to the local meaning of golden lads, and pointed out the multi-layered retrospective pun in Cymbeline to his/her students - and a slang chimney-sweepers term for dandelion seed-heads spread through the community, a slower shorter-range spread than that from the 1960s Disney writers of Mary Poppins referencing Shakespeare, or as it might be via the interweb these days.
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Absofuckinawesomethingorotherlutely!
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The NZ Herald article on the new McCredie, Paul et al. paper contains noteworthy numerical detail not included in the Stuff and TVNZ items - that of the 287 women initially given treatment of curative intent, 3 died of cancer, whereas 8 of the 127 women (initially) in Green's 'monitoring only' group died of cancer.
So at face value the numbers imply a 6 times higher death rate and 7 extra deaths because of Green's experiment, i.e. 8 relative to the 1 death that would have been expected had deaths in the experimental monitoring group been proportional to those in the conventionally treated group. But the numbers being small and experimental irregularities being such, these mortality figures are perhaps not "statistically significant".
Charlotte Paul in one of her interviews last year clearly stated they had made something like a firm determination of the number of extra deaths attributable to the experiment, it was markedly less than the figures like 30 commonly attributed to it, but held back from specifying it on the basis that their paper was still in review and unpublished. I guess the non-specification of this figure is as a result of peer review - but instead the 10 times higher rate of invasive cancer is presumably definitive.
FWIW, I think Kim Hill did a good job of interviewing Linda Bryder, who seemed to be thorough and credible, and crucially in the follow-up the week after to test that credibility in interviewing Charlotte Paul, allowing a clear conclusion that Bryder got it very wrong. Along with the academic efforts, the net result seems to be that Bryder’s book and its analysis of what happened has pretty well sunk without trace.
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Bittersweet indeed, thanks again David for the lovely tributes to your grandfather and grandmother. Congratulations and condolences to your family on the achievement and the loss.
The golden lad your grandfather's loss is so great, I fear without the golden girl's close support with soup and dress sense he will struggle to recover his muse enough to work on volume 2 of the autobiography, the early NZ years.
Thanks too to you and Jolisa for the Shakespeare quote that leads me into Cymbeline and other gems. You must be among the more literate of teachers of thermodynamics.
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Oh, there is a great Gilbert Mair book out for those interested, entitled "Gilbert Mair, Te Kooti's nemesis" by Ron Crosby.
And i really must finish Judith Binney's "Redemption Song, A life of Te Kooti", but it's quite heavy going. That seems to be the way with history book occasionally.
Judith Binney's 5-page version of Te Kooti's life is available on the DNZB site. But Redemption Songs seems to flow well if not rollick along if you know the places and names - the story connects with just about everywhere and everyone through a great band of country across the central North Island, a wonderful book, very much worth the effort.
To my mind the key is to bookmark the maps and use them frequently, to help follow the narrative and keep it grounded. Strange choice of title though - what's he got to do with Bob Marley? And the uninitiated wouldn't immediately think "ah, a historical novel about Te Kooti and so forth" when coming across Maurice Shadbolt's 'Season of the Jew'.
Mair as Te Kooti's nemesis? Only in that degraded modern American version of the word - Te Kooti always eluded Mair.
For historical fail - suggest Captain Reginald Biggs, commander of the militia and Resident Magistrate in Poverty Bay (constitutional niceties were rather blurred in July 1868), in deciding that Te Kooti's group of 300 men women and children had to be apprehended by force when they returned to the mainland from imprisonment/exile in the Chathams. This despite their having served more than twice their informal 12-month sentence (a manifestly unjust one in the case of Te Kooti at least who was never Hauhau), and despite Te Kooti's credible statement known to the officials that he wished them to be left alone to make their way in peace to settle in the interior.
So after the initial small-scale battles, Biggs, his family, and 60 others Maori and Pakeha were killed at Matawhero and nearby, and then hundreds more killed mostly Maori by Maori over three years and a quarter of the North Island. Truly epic fail, still echoing ...
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No doubt because so many cultures have their basis in agri-culture on floodplains - they tend to be fertile, well watered, easily culturivated. And then along comes a big flood. Then a bigger one. After that it doesn't take much imagination to imagine a still bigger one, a legend is born.
On the micro scale, my family has such a legend - great-great-grandparents and first few of their children were flooded out in the big flood of the Waipaoa River in 1876, the baby sleeping in a flax basket = authentic wahakura floated away, but was retrievedunharmed if not still asleep by a young Maori woman who could swim whereas the parents could not. All then made their way to high ground (just happening to go by the name of Roseland Hotel) by boat, no doubt with pairs of pigs, dogs, rats etc aboard, but obviously the unicorns were drowned. So not a suitable basis for a religion.
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Perhaps "egg" is the ultimate in insulting someone's lack of maturity.
If it was Shakespeare that wrote it, then "egg" must have been the pen-ultimate insult, thus implying it really was the "chicken" that came first as the ultimate insult.
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Waipiro Bay
a truly amazing place. only been there twice for a couple of days each. won't ever forget it though. hope to go back again a few times too...Indeed amazing - but a significantly different coast, different environment, different iwi from that the focus of 'Boy'.
Still, one of the great factoids sort-of on-topic - downtown Waipiro Bay was the site of Robert Kerridge's first picture theatre, cinema if you like.
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When did people forget how to say the plural of "woman"?
It's a particularly NZ accent problem, I think. Hence the preference for sheilas or ladies -- obvious plurals.
I wondered about that. But then a good half of my (second year film) students used to write "woman" for the plural.
Timing - a little before the NZ Woman's Weekly was at the peak of its readership. And I suggest there was a causal relationship (rather than a casual one) in the initiation of this trend.