Avaunt

I read that. Great characterisation, in my opinion.

Just reflecting on the Gravitas and beauty in Ms Amanpour's face. Humans are interesting things. Also, I burn with envy for that hair ! I had hair like that once.

. . . well, you probably would have called it correctly there, but then the guys protesting the stay at home order . . . stick with me here . . . are they not primarily doing so because they think the Governor is unconstitutionally impinging on their ability to protest, and to assemble to make their protest in public?. The sane ones in the group I mean.

It isn't as if they have no genuinely concerned and principled people in their number, or that their point is totally without merit. Silly in a pandemic, but not entirely without merit in a Constitutional Republic. Us Democratic Monarchies have Her Majesty to keep our Governments in check, the Republics after all only have their people watching. And it is an all or nothing thing, a Constitution. ( In my friendly-outsider opinion, anyway. )

Maybe, if they were thinking clearly, they would welcome the people who are protesting for some other reason?. In fact, there are too many intemperate people in both groups so actually *shit show commences* , but in an _ideal_ America the first lot would be like "That is what we are talking about !".

And they might even be a sort of check on the protest developing into a riot?.  It is a brave type of person who bends down and picks up a rock when a couple of hundred legendary-insane type blokes are watching, armed with rifles.

Hi, hope you are well mate. All that walking will be good for your long term health !.  Unless you walk into a nest of the zombie horde of course.

I must admit to be astonished at the disjointed and inept British Governmental response right from word go. It is frightening that the home of the people who invented science, have had their officials lead such a shambolic approach to a completely cut-and-dried problem. You either turn the full force of scientific planning on a pandemic, or you may as well just all hold hands and sing while you dance in circles. 

People here are thinking that because we have had no "wild" cases for a week, that the problem has disappeared. So few are still using masks, from what I have seen in the very few times I have been outside. Maybe less than ten percent. There were sympathy protests in the main centers for solidarity with our Cousins Johnathan, and one of our very serious scientists said they expect it is possible that people who have been entirely asymptomatic will have spread the virus to others in the crowd.

In other news, they have quite stupidly allowed Film crews of dozens of individuals to travel here from the USA, just to film stupid bloody TV programs for the idiot box. They have claimed it is safe because of "testing" which we have seen is actually like trusting a paper bag as a condom. In a lifetime of being irritated by the idiots that run the place, I don't think I have been so angry. I would happily strangle to death every single one of the clowns who have decided this was a good idea. For nothing more than the profit of OTHER PEOPLE, (because none of these film companies pay tax here, and none of them are a net benefit to the country, this has been proven again and again) they have broken all the good work the rest of us sacrificed a month of our lives for.

The Horn of Shambariman ! Peter Goodfellow has a web page. http://petergoodfellow.com/  Where to my surprise he has the paintings he did for the "The War of the Worlds" album. He made some classic covers for British Sci Fi .

Well, it has gone from really bad to _nascent fascist takeover of the process of the law_ overnight. 

This is the same shit but worse, as we have seen before. There are literally people from both sides of the issue whose literal plan is "riot, don't allow a peaceful resolution".

Sickeningly, it has given tRump a new lease of life in the up-coming election.

This is all getting too terrible to keep watching.

Is it really too much to ask a police force that they stop killing people they have got held at gunpoint?.

I read that particular copy of The Snow Queen.  I can't say I ever gave much credit to book covers. That was the only one of the dozen that I had ever owned the same cover of, though I have seen Jewel of Tharn in that cover often, it has been in a secondhand books shop I frequent, for at least 20 years that I can remember.

Give us an example of something you think represents the best that can be expected of covers. Like so. Peter Goodfellow.

Here is me late to a party again, but . . . Hahahaha The Manhattan Projects hahahaha many funny insider jokes that I got !. I have only read the first two so far. I will be very surprised if the author misses the obvious "Hungarians are really Martians, here under cover to investigate us" joke that genuine Manhattan project scientists made at the time.

I really enjoyed this outlandish ( groan ) comic-book.

Yeah, that made me laugh telling the Nurses they are heroes but just six months ago they were on strike here because they didn't want the hospitals to be allowed ( by the State ) to give them 20 hour shifts four times a week.

The hospitals were doing that because it was more profitable for them, no other reason.

Where is the modern-day Kipling when he is called for?.

We ain't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Tommy, fall be'ind,"
But it's " Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's " Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind.

On 5/11/2020 at 3:56 AM, dogpoet said:

 

I'm starting a couple of Phillip Jose Farmer novels about Opar this evening instead. Clearly post modern pastiches of Edgar Rice Burroughs are more my level than Italian epics...

Wow. I really loved Hadons epic. The tournament games were such a mental image, and they cry out to be filmed with modern CGI. And the people who made their living rafting logs . . . the whole thing. Pretty progressive writing for a boy from 1930s Indiana.

Have you read the World of Tiers novels?. For a long time my gold standard for Sci Fi, I may have said before  that my sisters boyfriend gave me the first one to read when I was about 11 years old.   Charlie in the Chocolate Factory ----> Maker of Universes.

I memorised the first chapter  of Maker of Universes once, when I used to catch a bus and a ferry to work. I was doing it as an experiment, to see how quickly I could get the whole book off pat, after an argument/discussion with my mate about just how hard or easy learning the Iliad would have been for the ancient poem-tellers. 

That was around the time I started memorising poems, and I got up to about 65 poems, most of which I can still spit out with a bit of thinking before I start. We are not talking whole "books by Pope" though I do have some of his shorter ones.

OH MY GOODNESS !

Two cute puppies !. What a good looking bloke Max is.

Dog is Hound Dog. I recognise them ears and feets.

Pookas have a natural affinity to plumbing, I have read this in the story-books.  ( Checks to see if memory is playing tricks. Indeed, it was the Kelpie I was thinking on, sure. I am getting on in years, and my mind wanders )

I approve of this. Remind him constantly that he had a big-brother that really set the grade high, and he must make at least as good an effort at Dog as Guzzy did at Cat.

Hahaha. I just spelt Guzzy's name with an English spelling and thought " . . . that can not be correct" and went and checked back.

On 5/6/2020 at 4:52 PM, Christian said:

 

The death toll isn’t that bad, and it was nothing as bad as predicted. The economy needs to reopen now, because the virus is being brought under control, and it wasn’t as bad as some predicted.

 

AHA. I had to read that again, because I knew perfectly well that you are not callous. For some reason my initial read made me think you were saying that off your own bat, and I did that "Wut? Hold up !" thing.

The thing about Trump is he relies on people having short memories. Once the first threat of this virus is put behind the Nation ( and I mean any Nation there, we are getting a backlash against our Government here now. ), its people are like "That wasn't so bad". And they will be receptive to all the nonsense he comes out with.

And if it isn't their own experience of loss, which on average it will not be, people have proven before to devalue some very serious things that have happened . . . to other people.

When the food-shortages kick in later this month, we are going to see a lot of big bellies asking why business is not as usual.

It is almost redundant me clicking on that link, because my brain is providing me with the whole thing including the goober faces Trump pulls as he whines. If it wasn't the fact that he is destroying so much, he would be well worth the entrance fee.

I was talking online to an American guy, not the most stupid or the furthest right wing'ed  chap . . . and he literally told me "Of course it was _Easy_  for New Zealand to deal with this virus . . . it would be impossible for America to stop work like you did".

Not impossible, son, just difficult. It is going to cost us at least as much money as the virus would have cost if we just let it free . . . but, and stop me if you had actually worked this one out yourself, we won't have 30 or 40 thousand deaths which is an extra "cost" for society, and we won't lose a couple of hundred highly trained and literally irreplaceable Drs and nurses.

If I was in charge of the Nation, one thing I would pass legislation on is not one medical person who owed even a cent of their student loan would be allowed to leave the country until two years after the virus has a vaccine rolled out. It is perfectly obvious that the UK and the USA are going to need more nurses, and hundreds of Kiwis work there now. They are going to get  offers to go work there once things start again. In fact I bet they take all of the  first year nurses, in 2011 60% of that years nursing graduates immediately left to the UK and USA. Which is fine, part of the Global environment etc, but we have loaned out seven billion dollars of public money to students, they can get their new employer to pay it back for them, or no exit visa. New Zealand can't be subsidising the UK and US health services.

https://jfootankleres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13047-018-0285-y

Wait a minute !  Are you guys not habitually barefoot at home?.  WTF ?. DO you wear shoes inside?.

New Zealanders would never wear shoes inside their house.

Yeah, I imagine we have some of the most comprehensive and restrictive building codes in the world. I have often been told that by John Foreigners I have known, and it is always a matter of complaint from right wingers here.

This really funny guy moved to NZ from exactly California, from Catalina Island in fact. And he was the security guard at a marina I used to visit, and me being me I used to talk with him a LOT. He had such an expressive face, such a wonderful good-nature, one of the nicest men I have ever met, and funny? I mean he could have made a stone laugh, and he was QUICK with it, so funny and witty. Eddie Murphy level funny.

And he was a pretty left wing guy for an American. So it used to be shocking sometimes when he would react to things just like planning permissions he had encountered here. Rules, and here they are almost uniformly about protecting the environment from potential damage. Even though he was super laid back, and about as green in his behaviour as you would want a blow-in to be, he used to break out in fits of laughter and ask why you had to make sure the water that ran off a concrete path that you were making, was contained, and things like that. Or rules about where you can park, etc.

"Well, dear friend, you know how you chose to come live here with us because of how unspoilt it seemed to you ? . . . "

Also. Trump wants his followers to inject themselves with bleach. If only we didn't have to be good guys . . . we could add our voices of encouragement !.

Yeah, well, I certainly doubt if any of these NZ hidey-holes are actually holes, like the picture you have in the USA of someone going underground. It would be unlikely in the extreme to pass muster on the local council plans for one thing. It might not be something people highlight when selling the idea to foreign nut-jobs, but you are not allowed to entirely lock your property off to access here. And you don't get permission to build a house that can't be saved from a fire by the fire-department.

If you have a locking gate, part of the planning permission is that the fire department get access. People in the cities might get away with a locking gate but it can't be in a fence that is more than 9 feet high. However, in rural areas, you are required to allow reasonable access to your property for the vehicles of the fire-department, police, council and some others. Part of getting planning permission for fences is arranging access to keys, or a security service that will respond with keys.

And I doubt anyone is allowed to build under the ground, like dig down and make a bunker. It would be highly unlikely.

In every instance that I heard of, where people have set up these sort of remote bolt-holes, they have road access, they have above ground buildings, they have reticulated electricity and the "bunker" aspect is nothing more than being able to pull down metal shutters, and provide themself with  some generated electricity for a limited amount of time.

A guy on Great Barrier for example, built in an isolated bay, without road access, no neighbours and he owned a quite large valley from the ridge-lines to the sea shore . . . and made his own power from wind, but when he tried to get permission to generate 240 volt mains hydro-electicity from his own creek with a properly constructed dam, they said "Nope" of course, because you are not allowed to interfere with water courses AT ALL, without a hugely important reason and millions of dollars of remediation. You do have a right after extremely expensive environmental impact reports, to divert 10% of the water right up until the council declares a drought, at which point "NOPE" you don't got that right.

That clown Kim Dotcom had what he called a bunker, but it really was just a big semi-self-sufficient house. The other clown Thiel has not even built on the land he brought in Wanaka, though he did install a "panic room" in the bedroom-level of the large house he owns in the town.

Bunker is being used for the sake of the image, the hyperbole. You just wouldn't get planning permission.

I have the glorious hardback of Mallory , the one where its intro is by Stephanie Lynn Budin.

And I can confirm from recent reading that the whole lot of the Round Table were dicks in Mallorys' record. Quite surprising how much graphic raping they got up to too.

The stories I read as a boy must have been artistically abridged.

Do we ever go back to sitting in a theater ?.

If so, I will watch Valhalla .

I honestly think he wants an election. How can it fail but to serve his purposes now?.

a. He wins with an increased majority.   Far and away the likeliest occurrence, most people go for status quo in these things, his crowd are always going to vote for him anyway, and he is totally over-mastering the opposition with "message". He is obviously going to get a pass mark for all the crona damage "The Chinese did it to us, it was the Governors of the individual states that were to blame, tRump stopped the boarders perfectly, he stood up to those Europeans" etc. None of it being true is not the point with tRump, as we have seen time and again.

b. He loses a close thing. He issues blanket pardons to himself and every member of his family. He goes back to his being rich jag. He spends the rest of his life telling people the deep state stole the election off him. He is elevated to the deciding voice in Republican politics for the rest of his life. His enterprises benefit from the absolutely insane level of devotion and influence seeking this results in.

c. He loses in a much more comprehensive way. He gets even more devotion and influence, not less. He doesn't need more than ten percent of their population to worship him, there is an upper limit to how many people any hotel chain can accommodate, and golf courses have a very small number of possible players on them even if you flood-light them.

Why would he want to stay in the job?. Civic feeling?

If he doesn't has a post office, how can he still have an election when the obvious coming second and then third wave of infections makes it too damaging to have physical voting?.

The US connection between business and government . . . problematic in the extreme.

Yeah, the oil thing . . . just four days ago there was  notice of a huge potential field only a kilometer down off our South Island. Talk about redundant. /doh !

Well, Americas economy has more wriggle room than New Zealands. For one thing, you guys are able to just shrug your shoulders and let private charities act to prevent people dying of starvation in the street, us Socialists can't quite work around to doing that.

We are going to have to carry a LOT of people on the dole for a couple of years. 5.6% of our GDP for the last 35 years has been International tourism. Indirectly that sector accounts for 7.5% of our employment. The knock-on effect is going to be game changing.

Almost as many people as live here, visited last year. The food that they buy alone accounts for the profit margin of every business in the hospitality industry. And so consequently the profitability of the wholesalers, the primary food producers, the distribution network . . .

In fact there are entire towns whose livelihood is entirely tourism, not only won't the locals have incomes now, the supermarkets will close because far more than half of their customers were tourists, it won't be viable to drive the goods into the township any more.

What was a boon to us, our long narrow land with sea and mountains spread over 2000 Kms, is going to be super problematic for the many people living in small towns, because there isn't going to be  a return on investment for their supermarkets etc.

4 hours ago, Christian said:

Also, with the protests, don’t miss the chubby woman dressed in an American flag one-piece holding a sign that reads, “Social Distancing = Communism!”.

 

A one piece bathing suit ?   Really?.  

Those Communists ! super cunning !. They are sneaking their communal ways into the  popular acceptance by piggy-backing on the plague !  Is this another one of those "truth is stranger than fiction" things I have heard about?.

The stock market isn't rebounding because of some secret action by Them . It is rebounding because the human race isn't going out of business, we will buy much the same essentials next year as we did last year, and the companies that will make that stuff  are getting the investment of capital because we will buy the stuff. At present things are going badly because production is curbed, but eventually a  new status quo will be struck and life will continue.

In exactly the same way, airlines and the like are losing stock value. It isn't planned, it is natural. There is capital, and it will seek profit, and even if you tried to plan something else, it will happen the way it is happening, just like water will fill to a certain level.