Posts by Jeremy Andrew
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And the fantasy - Tolkein of course, and Donaldson, but definitely Guy Gavriel Kay as well.
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Books I've made sure sure kids (5 & 7) have had access to so far:
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Where The Wild Things Are
Asterix (where else will they learn latin?)
Dr Suess (through three cheese trees three free fleas flew...)Books/Authors/series I will make sure they have access to over the next few years (without actually telling them to read them - no better way to put a kid off a book then telling them its a classic):
Willard Price's 'adventure' series
Jules Verne
Isaac Asimov
Arthur C Clarke
Maurice Gee (is Under The Mountain available on DVD?)
The Bridge to Terebitha (please don't let the movie suck)
Charlotte's Web
Robert Heinlein (the YA ones, save Stranger in a Strange Land til later)
Ones for when they're more older:
Neal Stephenson - Diamond Age, Snow Crash, esp Cryptonomicon
William Gibson
Stephen King
Ronald Hugh Morrieson
How has noone mentioned Terry Pratchett yet? For shame!
Sherri S Tepper
Ursula Le Guin
Robert Heinlein
Iain (M) Banks - Wasp Factory, Culture series, The Crow Road etc etc, probably the Whisky non-fic one too, but I haven't read it yet, Maybe RB has?so many years, so many books, so many good times, so many late nights with unputdownable novels...As soon as I hit post I'll think of a half dozen more that I'm ashamed not to have recalled instantly.
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1. I have occasion to work with plod. IMHO the culture shift started after the Scott Watson case. Has anyone else noticed how professional the investigations have been in recent years? This is one of those situations where they recognised the problem and have been quietly addressing it. To rake over the coals now would be counter productive.
Is this where an NZ version of Life On Mars would come in handy? Compare and contrast current police culture & procedures with those of the early 80s.
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what can be done to limit these dicks?
The same thing that is done in normal polite society to limit these dicks. If some gormless bigots butts into a conversation with rabid idiocies, they are either shunned, or informed that their opinion/interjection is not on/unwanted/just plain wrongheaded.
Of course, in normal not-so-polite society they might get a mouthful of fist.
Also of course, most people have a relatively well-developed sense of what is appropriate in normal converstion, and wouldn't dream of switching into frothing nutter mode during a water-cooler goss session. Such a sense having been trained into them over the years by parental and peer feedback. Circling back to my inital point - polite peer feedback, and shunning. -
My Grandmother became afflicted with a more or less permanent phone voice as a result of the years she spent working as a telephone operator back in the days when the calls were connected by moving plugs around the switchboard. I had always wondered why she sounded so much posher than the rest of the family.
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Ben - snap, phone voice mockery.
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Trying to claim that those who speak 'differently' is an affectation is itself an affectation imho.
If the people who speak differently are purposely speaking differently from how they usually speak, its an affectation. If they normally speak that way it ain't.
However, if the broadcaster doing the hiring specifically hires people who speak in a specific manner, or with a particular accent, then that's not an affectation, but (in this day & age) elitism &/or some form of bigotry. And also an incitement to affectation.
On the other hand, I, like most people, have a 'telephone voice' which I don't notice til my children mock me. Its not unreasonable for people to be expected to use their best diction when speaking to the nation, and the (not so) unspoken rule of the time was that the BBC received pronunciation was the benchmark for good diction.
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I dunno, 3200 is a lot more futuristic than 2000. 2K is more a retro flashback kind of vibe now.
I'm just ever so grateful to NZ post that they very kindly made my code 3210, otherwise I'd never remember it. Now if only they'd change the 3 to a 90...
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Tze Ming, I've just realised, one of our registered users proudly displays his residence as "Hamilton - City of the Future".
Does that mean you'll have to fight him for Roskill honour? My money would, of course, be on you.
I'm trying to work out whether my Ham-town street-cred would go up or down if Tze Ming gave me the Roskill bash. Probably the bonus points for being pasted by an asian chick would be cancelled out by the shame of being beaten up by a JAFA...
Nah, I'm happy to update my location - how does "Hamilton - the future was so last week" sound?
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The 'rights of parents to smack kids' is not a basic human right. It's just something that's been allowed in society.
It does pay to recall that all of the basic human rights have been formulated and agreed by consensus. The term implies something integral to the human being, but its just a list that people have decided on. Not that its a bad list, or a bad idea, but over the majority of human history there have been more people with one or more of those basic rights denied than with them all intact. In many cases denied by people who would agree with the lists of rights, but not necessarily the definition of human.
Even now, arguably the best time to be alive in terms of the odds of having a long and happy life, there are still many hungry, homeless and/or opressed people in the world.End of downer..