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2013
Jan 4, 2013 7:16:13 GMT 10
Post by angra on Jan 4, 2013 7:16:13 GMT 10
Welcome to 2013, the year of the Black Snake, Water Snake or Black Water Snake. And we are off to the same old start. Piers thinks Labor lefties are communists and we have The Worst Government In The World. Brendan O'Neill thinks people who complain about bullying are all sissies. Nick Cater has a mind-orgasm over everything 'left' he hates and despises, after Christmas dinner, and we should all encourage smoking as it saves money. And little Timmeh - struggling as always to keep up with his big brothers, breathlessly declares that the left supports paedophilia! "The Guardian sticks up for kiddy fiddlers" But he obviously hasn't had even a cursory glance at the original article, which does nothing of the sort. It is an historical and scientific survey of the definition of paedophilia; I am afraid the understanding of which is way beyond the cohort of little Timmeh's NAPLAN score. Go back to your Barbies and action men Tim!
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2013
Jan 4, 2013 8:34:24 GMT 10
Post by angra on Jan 4, 2013 8:34:24 GMT 10
More on this year according to the Chinese horoscope. Doesn't start 'till February though.
"Snake is a birth place of Male Metal. Male Metal will become mature when the Autumn comes. If there are Chicken and Cow in the birth chart, then Male Metal will become very active during the Fall season. Since Fire and Metal are opposite elements, people's fortune may start to change direction after Summer.
Snake is a no-limb animal with fork-like tongue. Although, Snake uses its tongue to smell, people don't like the spitting tongue which is associated with mouth action, possibly argumentation. Therefore, the Snake has the potential to hurt people relationship, especially, when Tiger and Monkey are around. "
Yep. It's an election year.
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2013
Jan 4, 2013 9:59:42 GMT 10
Post by angra on Jan 4, 2013 9:59:42 GMT 10
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2013
Jan 4, 2013 10:10:54 GMT 10
Post by angra on Jan 4, 2013 10:10:54 GMT 10
Sorry for "spitting tongue...associated with mouth action" as quoted above. Although I am sure some may appreciate it.
Bill Clinton for one.
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2013
Jan 4, 2013 19:27:33 GMT 10
Post by angra on Jan 4, 2013 19:27:33 GMT 10
Pathetic attempts at trying to appeal to Australians.
1. MacDonalds inclusion of beetroot into their 'hambugger'. As if this means anything.
Actually it's had the reverse effect. My friends tell me (I've never soiled myself by visiting a MacDonalds), that the locals laugh their heads off at the beetroot.
The yanks think they've got something Aussie to market - beetroot. Yeah.
Bring on the new battle of Brisbane.
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2013
Jan 6, 2013 20:40:06 GMT 10
Post by angra on Jan 6, 2013 20:40:06 GMT 10
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2013
Jan 7, 2013 8:54:04 GMT 10
Post by angra on Jan 7, 2013 8:54:04 GMT 10
Headline of the year so far.
From today's SMH.
"Centipede bites sleeping man on head
8:03am A sleeping tourist has been bitten on the forehead by a centipede on Fraser Island. "
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2013
Jan 7, 2013 12:28:09 GMT 10
Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Jan 7, 2013 12:28:09 GMT 10
Jared diamond definitely writes well. But he has been accused of straying way outside his area of expertise.
I heard an interview with an anthropologist that suggested that if he wasn't such an engaging writer he wouldn't get away with it. But, then, that might just be sour grapes.
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2013
Jan 7, 2013 12:28:42 GMT 10
Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Jan 7, 2013 12:28:42 GMT 10
"Centipede bites sleeping man on head"
Braaaaains ...
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2013
Jan 8, 2013 7:36:59 GMT 10
Post by jack on Jan 8, 2013 7:36:59 GMT 10
"But he has been accused of straying way outside his area of expertise."
The internets would be awfully quiet if people kept within their areas of expertise.
Anyway it's not easy to pin down just what Jared Diamond's 'area' actually is. The word 'multidisciplinary' keeps coming up in relation to his work, and his books keep selling, so he seems to have pulled it off.
Some of his themes have been staples of anthropology over the last century or so. We of western culture are pretty cool, but there's all these bits of other cultures that I like and think we ought to emulate as well.
Such as "good ways to bring up children, look after old people," etc. Because, you know, we're "increasingly out of kilter with the natural world," "in an environmentally unfriendly world," etc. etc. etc.
So, old people ought to be given some purpose and respect, children ought to be allowed to 'self-regulate', and we all ought to just chill out, think outside the box and, like, not be so smug and stuff.
Because there's, like, all sorts of unforeseen consequences that I, Jared Diamond, can help us to foresee with the benefit of 20/20 multidisciplinary hindsight.
Oh well, that's all a bit facetious. I actually do enjoy JD's work and approach to the topics he deals with. He won't get everything right, but after all who ever does?
"Personally I think this is exploitative and sensational..."
I think you're right at least with regard to his treatment of the clan war in New Guinea. If you're going to publish an account of that kind of stuff in the New Yorker, at least try to fictionalise the main details.
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2013
Jan 8, 2013 7:58:34 GMT 10
Post by angra on Jan 8, 2013 7:58:34 GMT 10
There is a long history of anthropologists 'making stuff up' to suit their career goals. Just look at Margaret Mead. I have met a few guys that worked with JD. They weren't impressed. His account of family murder of widows in New Britain has little supporting evidence, and his story of pay-back murder in the western highlands of PNG has been shown to be 'mysterious' to say the least. The alleged perpetrators have sued him. languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4113
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2013
Jan 13, 2013 19:35:50 GMT 10
Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Jan 13, 2013 19:35:50 GMT 10
Oh, wow. I've been skimming through the haul of emails released by UWA/Lewandowsky in response to an FOI requests(s) You can get to the link from here: www.desmogblog.com/2012/12/06/freedom-information-laws-used-climate-sceptics-rifle-through-scientists-daily-emailsThere are about 280 pages of emails (printed and re-scanned). Given the painstaking redaction of third-party names and checking of legal requirements, I think could actually believe that the request took 100 hours to respond to - and that would just be lewandowsky's time alone. A lot of people were involved in that FOI response. That's a week's work there just compiling all the pages and blanking out email addresses. Some of the correspondence is breathtaking. All of the incoming emails are written in the senders' very best grown-up voice, but some of them also contain some astonishing direct accusations of dishonesty and fraud (along with the to-be-expected calls for "action" again lewandowsky and a general sliming of the university - I'm sure the chancellor was heartbroken to hear that some random person on the internet didn't think much of UWA's reputation because of that one paper). Some of them see fit to copy/paste entire threads from bolta et al. Some of them stray toward political nutjobbery (did they really think that the VC's office is interested in reading about how hitler was really left wing? Sheesh). Lewandowsky comes across as being a bit defensive in his exchanges with UWA but I don't really blame him. FOI has been used fairly viciously against researchers of the wrong sort in the US. Judging by what I've read so far (I'm about 1/2 way through), the FOI'ers are going to be disappointed - it appears that lewandowsky is better than, well, me at keeping his personal thoughts out of emails. I guess there wasn't any real chance that anyone was going to find something incriminating there - the paper that they've all gone after might have been daft (I tend to think so myself), but it hardly required an axis of evil to produce it. But I don't think evidence of actual wrongdoing was ever what the FOI'ers were after. I do agree that the point of these things seems to be to find some dirty laundry or something to quote out of context. I think lewandowsky was wise to release the emails himself - the story's gone very quiet since. If the rest of the collection is like the first half, there's absolutely nothing worth quoting, unless you think defiance on lewandowsky's part is a crime (some probably do) I guess this gives people with a lot of free time a way to attack academics whose work they don't like. Two random thoughts: (1) I wonder how the people who attacked the slacktivism of the "kony 2012" thing feel about this sort of thing, and (2) Is this process at all like those "punishments" that a certain bloggist likes to complain about?
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2013
Jan 14, 2013 9:03:37 GMT 10
Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Jan 14, 2013 9:03:37 GMT 10
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2013
Jan 14, 2013 9:49:29 GMT 10
Post by Matthew Of Canberra on Jan 14, 2013 9:49:29 GMT 10
A thought ...
Now, I realise that I've never produced or directed any mega-blockbuster movies, and I sincerely expect that nobody in hollywood cares a toot what I think, but ...
Les Mis ... with a white bread, crowd-pleaser all-star cast. What WERE they thinking? Were they just taking no investment chances at all, or something?
An epic story about poverty, class and politically-constructed hell on earth, staffed entirely by safe-bet, conservative, hollywood establishment seat-fillers and sold with saturation-level all-channels marketing. Does anyone else see the irony?
I'm sure the music will be lovely, and the sets and costumes will be very expensive and the coaching will be first-rate. But I think I'll give it a miss - I can't ignore that much cynicism for that long, and I'd hate myself for going along with it.
I'm still trying to decide whether to see zero dark thirty. It looks brilliant, from the shorts ... but it's built on (at least) one very fundamental lie with real implications. They might as well make a hard-hitting film about all the WMD they found in iraq, or that time that a small band of americans snuck deep into nazi germany and killed the entire german high command in a daring attack on a cinema ... oh, hang on (yeah, really cool quentin, americans are awesome ... but you don't get to feel all nationalistic and proud about things THAT DIDN'T HAPPEN)
Just for good measure, I see that tom cruise has some sort of action-superman-tough-guy movie out. I'm sorry ... but I just can't take him seriously as a rambo. It's too ridiculous to contemplate now.
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2013
Jan 14, 2013 11:27:41 GMT 10
Post by angra on Jan 14, 2013 11:27:41 GMT 10
MoC - spot on. I saw Le Mis in London on a sweltering evening (around 35 degrees in the non-aircon theatre) in the '90s and sat through around 45 hours of it. To make it worse, it seems the Poms haven't discovered deodorant.
It had some good songs, but a rather confused story-line (it took me a while to realise that it was not about the French Revolution of 1789) but overall worked well in the theatre.
Hugh is worth watching. He's one of the great Oz movie talents of the last 10 years. And he can sing.
But for the rest, I'm waiting for The Life of Pi and Mr Pip for my movie jollies. Maybe The Hobbit part 1. (But couldn't Peter have saved as all a lot of time and effort and made just ONE film to sit through?) Also The Master - just because it takes the P. out of Scientology which is about the crassist clap-trap ever invented. Which takes us back to the supreme non-acting-entity - Tom Cruise.
He should go on one for the rest of his life. To paraphrase I think Dorothy Parker, he goes through the complete alphabet of acting skills, from A to B.
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