Posts by giovanni tiso
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plenty of punters used to ask for a "cup of chino".
Fantastic!
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also a Kiwi coffee cart in the heart of Soho that is doing a roaring trade, and pissing the Italian cafe owners off no end.
I might have banged on this subject here before, but I recall that a few years back they staged a world championship of coffee making in Trieste and I don't remember who won - except that he wasn't Italian, might have been a Swede - but anyhow a Kiwi came second. I was outraged we couldn't even manage to rig the competition.
And the availability of good coffee was a fabolous surprise when I joined y'all in 1997. My sweetheart had left NZ in 1990 and there was no such thing back then.
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I was going to leap to the fore and defend American food, but then realised that I was basing my love on a) Cajuns and Creoles (immigrant-based cuisine) and b) Tex-Mex and Cal-Mex (immigrant-based cuisine).
I'm Italian so, in a way, all your goof coffees are belong to us. Except not really, we hardly invented coffee, and what is known today as Italian cuisine too is certainly not the result of centuries of stubborn preservation of a purist tradition. We went from ruling the continent to becoming the doormat of Europe and the constant was always immigration, not just of people but also of recipes. So likewise defining what "American" cooking is will remain hard, and really the only test is whether you can eat well and find good ingredients to cook a range of different things. Based on my week-long experience in the US, I'd say yes, whereas for Scotland in the early nineties it would be a resounding no on both counts.
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__Big difference between not vehemently opposing and actively helping out - Friedman did the latter__
But that seems even weaker. Since when is it a sin to give policy advice to any country that isn't a liberal democracy?
Since always. And Friedman's remark that if Allende had been left in power a few years down the road the Chileans would have fared even worse than under Pinochet is despicable to say the least. The man wasn't deposed; he was murdered.
It seems difficult to fault Klein here: her argument is that Friedman and the Chicago school jumped at the opportunity to test their theories on a nation that could be turned into a blank slate precisely because democracy had been brutally suspended. Claiming that it was no sin really is no rebuttal - it was what it was, we can all judge for ourselves.
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As for its shittiness, is it really that bad?
The only one I had, in Lambton Quay a few months ago, was pretty awful, yes.
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You get decent coffee in Whangarei for chrissakes.
I've had perfectly good coffee in a ton of NZ towns way smaller than Whangarei. If you tell that it was a wasteland before SB, I'll take your word for it. Hopefully yours will stay open then.
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Sort of. Virgin oil lacks much of the nutritional goodness of extra virgin, and olive pomace oil is muck that actually no one should eat.
I assumed that the meaning was any extra virgin olive oil, you'd be mad to consume any other kind (and the difference in price among a budget pure olive oils and a budget extra virgin is risible - less than pure, you might as well use car oil).
My GP back home, who was both 30 years behind and ahead of his time, it seems, was a proponent of using dripping for deep frying, and he claimed that it was healthier. I forget his explanation now, but whenever I make apple pancakes or chiacchiere I follow the advice to the letter, on account of the fact that he was always right about everything else.
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Attacking Friedman for not vehemently opposing Pinochet's regime seems kinda weak to me
Big difference between not vehemently opposing and actively helping out - Friedman did the latter, no matter how careful he later became to combat the perception that he was working for Pinochet. He was invited to give lectures by an independent foundation (cue Tui ad slogan), and he had at least one private meeting with Pinochet when Allende's body was still warm. That would be enough for me, even if the Chicago school hadn't mantained ties for years with the regime. (Which it did.)
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What's the real reaon behind the hatred of Starbucks? ... What it's really about is old-fashioned coffee snobbism.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, though, right? I mean, so long as you're bothering to have a coffee, it ought to be good coffee. (the unimpeachable logic of the Lavazza slogan in the old country: Il caffè è un piacere / Se non è buono, che piacere è?)
But really, what's there to like about Starbucks? We are blessed with excellent local cafès and eateries; why choose to patronise a foreign-owned chain which is not good at making the only thing it ought to make well? I wouldn't call that hatred myself.
Besides, if it fails here will shall be spared the sinister phase two of the operation.
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No mention of Roger Douglas or Ruth Richardson?
I was honestly waiting for that - I wouldn't have dreamt of raising it myself. But she doesn't mention it in the book either, and one has to wonder if the fact that Lange got a second term was too hostile to her argument - there are questions about her intellectual honesty that the book begs a little too often.