Mike Crowl's Random Notes

Moms, Boop, arm-wrestling and athlete's foot

2012-01-31T19:47:00.000+13:00

My son now has an American mother-in-law, and in due course, if he carries on the way he's gone so far, he'll soon be forgetting his New Zealand roots and saying and spelling her name, 'Mom' rather than 'Mum.'

Hopefully, when Christmas next comes round he'll have "gift ideas Mom" on his little list, otherwise he might be hearing from his Mom quick smart...! Nah, she's not that sort of mother-in-law....

We've missed hearing from him and his new wife since they moved to Minneapolis a few days after the wedding. They haven't been able to get broadband on in their apartment (flat to you Kiwis) even though it was supposed to be supplied by last Friday their time. [Why do we call a place to stay a flat? It's a very odd use of the word when you think about it.] And talking of flats the musical director of the show I wrote, Grimhilda! has also been having trouble getting broadband installed in his new flat (apartment to you Yankees), so he and I have been communicating via texts and mobile calls mostly. At least he answers his mobile. It always irritated me that my son - the one who's just got married - would never answer his mobile. It always switched to the 'leave a message' section within seconds. One of those quirks, I guess, of human nature.

Recently I've been getting a regular email from HitTail with updates telling me what words people are looking at on my blog. I often find these a little curious: usually they will be the same few words or phrases that have been popular since I began the blog, but every so often I get a list such as the one below where the words/phrases are from posts that have hardly achieved notoriety on my blog.

betty boop blogs
armwrestling my wife
common horse liniment

Betty Boop has only ever appeared once on my blog, as far as I can tell, and that was when I posted a video of one of the old Betty Boop cartoons and made some comments about it. It was hardly a spectacular post. [That's Betty being her usual coy self, in the picture on the right.]

The second phrase also turns up in only one post, intriguingly entitled: Arm-wrestling Feminist. This has been a more popular post, though perhaps not for the reasons you might expect from the title. I still love the line that was part of a paragraph I quoted from a World Council of Churches document: I came to a greater awareness of my gendered self when I lost to her in arm-wrestling. I stopped arm-wrestling with my wife in the presence of my kids. Coming to an awareness of one's gendered self via arm-wrestling strikes me as a strange way to realise who you are, gender-wise.

The last phrase connects up with a very popular phrase that leads people to my blog: athlete's hand (or foot). The horse liniment reference comes in a story told by Dale Ralph Davis about an enterprising salesman who found that while horse liniment was a good cure for what we now know as 'athlete's foot', it didn't sell well while it was being promoted as a cure for ringworm. The salesman invented the phrase, athlete's foot, and the horse liniment sold like a bomb. The liniment, by the way, which goes by the name of Absorbine, is still sold today, 118 years after it first appeared. I don't know that it's sold as a cure for athlete's foot, anymore, though the container in which it appears as a foot remedy for horses (under the name of Hooflex) looks remarkably like the one in which Gran's Remedy is sold here in New Zealand (as a cure for athlete's foot).

Wings almost clipped

2012-01-28T12:14:00.000+13:00

When it comes to service we tend to remember the times we've had cause to complain about something far more than the times we've been well-treated. So by way of amending that approach, I want to tell you about ClippingsConverter.com and Jim, who's the man behind it (he's a Brit working in the US). I'm not entirely sure of Jim's role, but I suspect he may be Clippings Converter.

Anyway, those of you who use Amazon Kindles will know that you can make notes as you're reading, or highlight passages, or do various other things. The 'My Clippings' file includes some other things which I don't use much, so I can't remember what they are offhand. I don't tend to use the features when I'm reading a novel, although occasionally a phrase or word will catch my eye, but when I'm reading non-fiction, I use the clippings feature a lot. It's the equivalent of scribbling in the margins or underlining in a 'real' book.

Bird with clipped wings by iglazer

I came across ClippingsConverter.com because I'd been trying to sync the clippings for a particular book (Hannah's Child, by Stanley Hauerwas) and for some reason - and this is the only time it's happened - the notes wouldn't sync to my computer, however much I tried. You can read the notes and highlights online at Amazon's Kindle pages, but normally I would read them in relation to my 'copy' of the book on my computer.

ClippingsConverter.com offers to upload your My Clippings file (once you've transferred it to your computer (in the My Kindle Content folder, a folder that arises automatically once you've got Kindle on your computer) and turn it into an Excel file or a Word file or even to send it to Evernote. (Since, for the first time ever, I've used up vast quantities of my monthly allowance on Evernote, I thought I'd forgo that option this time round.)

I went to ClippingsConverter, got the file, uploaded, and then found I had to register. No problem, except that from then on I couldn't get back into the system with my username and password. I asked for a resetting of the password and got the most horrendous and unmemorable password you've ever seen (certainly one that's hacker-fullproof, I'd think) but this wouldn't let me log in either.

I emailed the feedback section and Jim emailed me back, saying he was puzzled about why the password wouldn't work, as it worked at his end. Finally he offered to check out remotely what was happening on my computer when I tried to log on. Which meant he had to set up a 'meeting' online and ring me on my ordinary phone. At his expense.

The problem was very quickly solved: somewhere between my original registering and my subsequent attempts to log on, the username had been changed from what I'd put in to my email address - the username is similar. I don't think the system did it; I suspect in the confusion of going back and forth I may have gone for the email address instead of the username proper. And according to Jim, that should be acceptable. The system should take both.

He was grateful that working through my problem meant he'd found something that wasn't quite working according to Hoyle. So that was pleasing all round, as I guess he may have had other people with the same issue who've given up on the site. But what was most pleasing was that someone would take their time to deal personally with a problem. even if it meant a call from New York to Dunedin, New Zealand.

Good on yer, mate!

2nd round of Auditions for Grimhilda!

2012-01-26T19:45:00.000+13:00

Grimhilda! is a new musical for all the family to enjoy. It will be directed by Bert Nisbet, who is well-known in Dunedin theatrical circles as both an actor and director. The Musical Director is Jonathan Drummond, who has assisted on some of the recent Gilbert and Sullivan shows and has had experience as a conductor in a variety of areas. The show will run from the 27th April to the 6th May this year (there isn't a performance every night).

We have a nearly complete cast, but still have two outstanding roles to fill:

The Father - baritone. Requires an experienced actor/singer in the 25 to 35-age range. This part doesn't have a large amount of singing but the actor is on stage for a substantial part of the show.

The Parrot - a character part with no singing. A male actor of small to medium height is required.

We are also looking for one or two male chorus members. Age is not important.

The auditions will be held at 127 Glenpark Ave, Maryhill, Dunedin on Sat 4th Feb, 2012. Starting at 10.

Please contact me by leaving a comment here, or sending me an email (see my profile)

The First Grader & Room Service

2012-01-23T15:08:00.000+13:00

My wife and I went to see The First Grader today - we were the only people in the cinema. Admittedly it's a small cinema, seating no more than perhaps thirty. Still, it was a shame that no one else had the pleasure of watching this great little movie.

Most people will know that it's the story of the 84-year-old Kimani N'gan'ga Maruge, who took up the Kenyan Government's offer of 'free education for all' only to discover that it wasn't really intended for older people. Maruge has never had the opportunity to learn to read - and significantly, he has an important letter he wants to be able to read for himself - and so he goes along to school to find that he's joining the children in the primary school, much to the annoyance of the male teacher, who wants to throw him out. The headmistress, Jane Obinchu, lets herself be persuaded that Maruge can learn, and then finds herself facing criticism from all quarters. She's not the sort of person who gives in easily, and nor is Maruge, and between them they make a difference to the future of Kenyan education.

We learn, in a series of violent flashbacks, that Maruge had joined the Mau Mau as a young man in order to free his country, and spent nearly a decade in various jails. I'd forgotten about the Mau Mau, and my memory of them was that they were a villainous and murderous group who went round slaughtering white people in Kenya. Of course that was what we heard because we were getting the white people's picture; this was in the days when colonialism was still strong. The film gives us the chance to change our view of the Mau Mau.

Oliver Litondo is a wonderful Maruge, and English actress, Naomie Harris (better known for her role as the very strange Tia Dalma in two of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies) is excellent as the headmistress. This is a great movie - and empowering for old people too!

I watched another of the Marx Brothers movies yesterday: Room Service. The first half was familiar from some earlier viewing, but I'd never seen the rest. To be honest seeing the rest was no great joy; this is a piece of nonsense that could have starred anyone. The Marx Brothers contribution is very straight, with none of the usual setpieces, no musical interludes, and only some of the wisecracks that Groucho is known for. Most of it takes place in a single hotel room - it began life as a stage play - and it wastes the talents of a bunch of people: Lucille Ball and Ann Miller both appear, but any two Hollywood starlets could have done the roles; the women have very little to do that's outstanding. Frank Albertson is the young playwright from the hicks, and treated as a piece of furniture or a prop most of the time.

There are a couple of delightful bit players in it, neither of whom I can quite identify from the cast list. One, a tall, thin and gaunt-faced man plays the agent with the big cheque that will rescue Groucho and his cast from being thrown out on the street. He's a quiet centre in the midst of the chaos - for a time. And there's the man who's from the We Never Sleep collection agency: he's always a moment behind the eight ball, but hard to get rid of nevertheless.

A Day at the Races re-viewed

2012-01-20T15:14:00.000+13:00

I've just watched the Marx Brothers in A Day at the Races for the first time since I was a child/teenager, I'd think. I may have seen it again since then as some of the scenes seemed familiar - the thenk you that Groucho and his lady friend (Esther Muir, who did a lot of vamp-type roles) keep throwing at each other rang a distinct bell, as did the way in which the horse reacted to the baddie's voice during the big race. But I'd forgotten much of the rest of it.

Compared to A Night at the Opera it's a considerable step-up. For one thing, the direction and editing is much tighter and sharper, the cinematography much cleaner and clearer, and even the minor characters come across well - when they get a chance amongst the craziness. The musical numbers are a mixed bag - as they often were in these movies. Allan Jones does his best with a not-so-hot song, not helped by the Crinoline Chorus (one of whom never seems to be in the right place at the right time) and a totally irrelevant piece of ballet - though it has to be admitted Vivien Fay could spin in an extraordinary way. The black singers and dancers are an improvement, and the jiving that the young people do is fantastic. Those with their musical ears open will notice that at the beginning of the big race sequence at the end one of the tunes from A Night at the Opera turns up again: Cosi Cosa. Since we're told in the earlier movie that the phrase can mean anything, it seems entirely appropriate that it should get a second chance here.

Examination scene: Dumont in the chair,
Ruman & Ceeley with the brothers.

The film has several big set pieces, some of them no doubt survivors from the original touring version of the show. There's the increasingly frantic phone call between Groucho and the little-known Leonard Ceeley (he's Whitmore, one of the baddies). It must have been a tough call doing several takes of this scene. Or the scene in which poor old Margaret Dumont (who's also much better in this) is supposed to be examined by Groucho as Dr Hackenbush (a horse doctor) and by Sig Ruman (who's a real doctor). Chaos is built up from almost nothing, with Chico and Harpo getting in on the act, and an increasingly furious Whitmore standing there stammering and shouting. A horse arrives as the sprinkler system is set off.

Muir about to have her powder compact
blown up in her face

Or the scene mentioned before with Esther Muir - who's trying to seduce whom here? Nobody, of course, because in a Marx Brothers movie such a thing will never happen, in spite of Groucho's best intentions (and because the Hays Code was breathing down their necks at the time). Chico and Harpo wreck things three times over until Muir is given short shrift at the end: with a piece of wallpaper slapped on her rear end for good measure. Working with the Marx Brothers must have been accident-prone for the other actors - Ceeley goes for more than one slip, Muir is in constant danger of some flying object, and even Margaret Dumont stumbles across hazards.

Then there's the scene between Chico and Groucho - the equivalent of the contract tearing-up scene in Night at the Opera. Here Groucho is intending to put a bet on a horse, but Chico, needing cash in hand, manages to sell him a bundle of books - one by one at first, and then in a heap - each one supposedly given the code to the previous one. Like so much else in the movie it has lines that leap past before you realise they've quite surreal.

A friend said this film was his pick of the Marx movies: it looks as though he may have been right.

Re-viewing A Night at the Opera

2012-01-20T10:08:00.001+13:00

While we were wandering around the enormous Costco shop in Nampa, when we were in the States, I picked up a boxed set of Marx Brothers movies for some ridiculous price. (Also got The King's Speech which was great to see again - marvellous cast, beautifully filmed, and a literate script.)

I've been a fan of the Marx Brothers since I was a kid, but I must admit it's better to watch them with someone else who enjoys them than to watch them on your own. My just-married son was ideal for this: he'd roar his head off and of course that caused a natural spark of laughter from me, and then we'd set each other off. (We had this kind of moment while watching the supposed 'out-takes' for Monsters Inc when it first came out at the movies. Both of us were killing ourselves with laughter. It happened again with Up, when the little Japanese/American boy squishes along the side of the blimp, making a delightful rubbery noise.)

Anyway, back to the Marx Brothers. I watched Go West the other day, since it was one I hadn't seen before. It has its moments, some appalling over-acting, some dreadfully unfunny spots, a fairly incomprehensible plot, and a great climax that's reminiscent of Buster Keaton's movie with a train - The General. Apparently Keaton had some involvement in this movie too, which might explain the ending. But there are some brilliant Marxian moments.

Last night I watched A Night at the Opera, a movie I've seen two or three times before. The scene with everyone getting squashed into the tiny stateroom remains a classic, and funny to watch on your own, but the tearing up of the contract, bit by bit, seemed sluggish without someone else to laugh along beside you. Margaret Dumont, who supposedly never actually quite 'got' the Marx Brothers sense of humour, does one of her grande dame parts, and has a noticeable second of forgetting a line in an early scene. The climax is totally daft, with the brothers causing absolute chaos at the opera, but the scene that struck me most last night was the one onboard the ship when the people from a variety of nations are celebrating on deck, during which Harpo and Chico do their usual musical interludes.

Chico goes first. He's surrounded by a bunch of kids, and it's hard to believe the scene was ever rehearsed. Chico, of course, has played this particular kind of piano piece a thousand times, so rehearsal would hardly have been necessary for him. All the director had to do was put the camera in the right place (and leave it there), get the lighting right, and say Action. The kids watch Chico playing with amusement at first, then laugh spontaneously, and then with a huge joy. The joy increases when Harpo takes over - on the piano at this point (when he plays the harp a bit later it's more directed than in this section). He literally plays with his fists for a few seconds, which has the kids in fits, and then he bangs down the lid on one of his fingers and then on the other. The kids are besides themselves, particularly when both of his wrists go totally floppy and he has to flick his hands up to get the wrists to straighten again.

Nothing else in the film is quite like this. There are some moments where you suspect Groucho has thrown in an ad lib because either Chico has just given him a line that wasn't in the script or Harpo has done something totally off the wall, but otherwise the movie is more organised than some of their other films. And though some of their famous routines work well enough, like the one where they shift beds between two rooms to drive the detective insane, they've obviously been done umpteen times on stage, and have a somewhat overdone air about them.

Still, what a loss it would have been to comedy if the films had never been made, and all people had were memories of a strange group of brothers who made thousands of people laugh.

Deserving?

2012-01-18T12:17:00.002+13:00

Another report on child poverty based on research done on nearly 1300 Christchurch kids since 1977 tells us what: that if you're born poor you're likely to continue to be poor; if you're born in a better-off family you're likely to do well. Hardly a staggering revelation.

'Child poverty' is an emotive phrase and does its job pretty well, but what it somehow indicates is that the children are poor, rather than that the families they come from are poor. There's no point separating the children from the families. A more realistic phrase would be 'family poverty' but for some reason we don't want to go there.

And on top of that, we still have the general mentality that the poor, if they try hard enough, will pull themselves up. Some poor families do. But with the inequality between rich and poor increasing, it's the poor who have a long way to go to catch up with those on just the lowest rung of the rich ladder.

There's political talk of tackling inequality, but it's got an uphill battle against the political mentality that the wealthy deserve what they have, and deserve more of it. It's always seemed ironic to me that those who are already well off get more benefits just by being well off. Is your name well-known? You'll be first in the queue at the famous restaurant. Are you on the rich list? People will fall over themselves to give you more stuff. How does that make any sense?

From the time they're born many rich children live in incubators that keep them from knowing what goes on in the wider world. Their worldview is limited to the 'deserving' rich that they find themselves surrounded by. (Of course, as with everything, there are exceptions, and many rich children actually break out of this incubation and discover the rest of the world.) People tell them that they deserve what they get (the TV ads that insist that women should look good 'because you're worth it' is an offshoot of this idea) and of course they believe it.

Being told I deserve something (unless it's a good whack around the head) is something I've usually reacted against. We came into an unexpected inheritance a few years ago - a friend told me we deserved it. Why? Had we been particularly good in our behaviour? Had we done heaps of things for other people? (The answer is no in both cases.) On what basis could we possibly have deserved it? It was gift, and we were exceedingly grateful for it, but there was no way we deserved it.

The poor don't deserve what they get either - or don't get. Circumstances can easily drive someone into poverty; none of us are immune from it (including those rich people who've had startling falls from grace). Of course there are some who are in poverty because of their own behaviours; but the majority, the vast majority, are not.

So when I hear that ministers of Parliament are 'setting up a ministerial committee on poverty' I groan inwardly. Unless there's a major change of view about how things work in the world, I don't think it will do a thing. And that major change hasn't happened for a long time.

Bed

2012-01-17T18:53:00.003+13:00

I must admit when I first heard the phrase, log bed, I thought it had something to do with a place where you put logs, using the word bed as you might in flower bed. Nope, wrong again. (Story of my life. Has brief moment of self-pity.)

Log beds are, of course, beds made out of logs. Not big logs, mind you; little manageable ones, like those in the picture of the rustic bed on the right. Log beds don't have to be rustic; the wood can be honed to a less natural shape.

I've just been searching through my cuttings to see what other articles I had that mentioned beds in any way. Such is the nature of the search engine on Evernote that beds featured briefly in several items, such as a man who'd had a stroke struggling with words like bed or blanket, but being able to use words like postillion or tardigrades, or Peter Bregman writing about motivation and saying that if you want to go to the gym it's a good idea to leave your gym clothes by your bed so you get into them first thing in the morning.

But bed picked up and turned up as part of bedevil, and bedeutung, and stabbed, and described, and slubbed, and bedraggled, and grabbed, and the discovery that bed is one of the words you should avoid in tweets. It will get you nowhere.

Slubbed, incidentally, for those who don't know the word, means: of textiles; having a rough surface; "a sweater knitted of nubbly homespun yarns." Which introduces us to nubbly, which apparently means much the same as slubbed. Trust English to have more than one word for the same idea.

You could use the words slubbed and nubbly about the bunk beds in the photo, couldn't you. They have a rough surface, though they're not exactly made of textiles, I guess.

Well, enough rambling for one day. Onto to do the ironing.

Two books

2012-01-16T15:32:00.000+13:00

While travelling to and from the States in the first couple of weeks of this year I read two books (wasn't time to read more; plus, on the way over I had a cold and didn't feel like doing anything). One - I read this on Kindle - was Alan Jacobs' The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. The other was a book I picked up because it was going for under $5US in a bookshop at San Francisco airport. (Of course by the time they'd added on the tax - why don't they just include it like sane nations do? - the book was slightly over $5, which niggled my NZ equanimity a little!) This one was The Anthologist, by an author unknown to me: Nicholson Baker. This turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable book that I finished while waiting at the airport and on the flight home (including a patch at what was, by then, about 3 am NZ time).

This is listed as a novel, and it does tell a kind of story from the viewpoint of its narrator, a self-deprecating character called Paul Chowder, a sometime poet. Chowder's lady friend has recently left him because he just can't, or won't, get on with the introduction to his anthology of poems that rhyme. The suspense in the book hooks on these two facets: will he get his 40-page introduction done by the deadline? Will his lady-friend return?

But far more of the book hinges on Chowder's (or perhaps Baker's) views on poetry that rhymes, and how that's much closer to the human soul than free verse (even though he has such a writer's block that he can't write such poetry anymore). He also offers in the process his views on innumerable poets, giving snippets from their biographies, critiques of some of their poems, the connections between different poets and how that affected what they wrote, and much more that's related to the topic. It's a grab bag full of wit and some wisdom, some strong views and some snide ones, and numerous hilarious stories about all sorts of things, related and unrelated to the novel's 'story.' It's thoroughly enjoyable and quite unlike any novel I've read. The subject matter appealed to me, which helps (it's not long since I finished Stephen Fry's book on writing poetry, The Ode Less Travelled), but Baker is so engaging in this book, whether he's pretending to be Chowder or not, that I found it hard to put it down.

The author of the other book, Alan Jacobs, is someone I follow on Twitter (his Twitter name is @ayjay). The quotes he collects that appear on one of his blogs - More Than 95 Theses - are worth following alone, but he's also written several interesting books, including one of C S Lewis (The Narnian) that is a better biography and discussion of Lewis' works than any I've read.

His new book is a paean to the joys of reading, a discussion of whether reading is going downhill or on the rise (it's the latter), a discussion on whether it's necessary to follow slavishly through books like The 1001 Books You Must Read Before You died, or whether it's better to read on a Whim (and he explains that a Whim with a capital W is somewhat different to a whim without the capital). He shows that reading isn't limited to those books that are important, and that in spite of what such critics as Harold Bloom say, reading Harry Potter and the like (and even trashy novels) definitely has its place. He also talks about the fact that we have different views of the same book at different stages in our lives: what seems wonderful when we're young can be dry years later (he found Absalom, Absalom! a revelation when young, but difficult to enthuse about a couple of decades later) - or vice versa: a book that's impossible for us to read in our youth may open itself to us when we've lived longer.

He writes about abandoning books without guilt - this is something we find hard when young; it seems 'wrong' to have got so far through a book without finishing it. (I've begun to keep note of those books I've abandoned, with an explanation as to why I didn't persevere; perhaps this helps assuage the guilt!) And, as he says, abandoning a book at one period of your life doesn't mean you can't come back to it at another stage.

He has a wonderful section on annotating books - whether we should do it with page-turners, and why we should keep a pencil handy when reading more serious works, particularly non-fiction. His comments here reminded me of Billy Collins' poem, Marginalia. (Billy Collins gets a few lines in Baker's book too: a few derogatory lines, because Collins is so successful and Chowder isn't!). He discusses why we think we need to read faster. (A blogger wrote that Mark Driscoll, the masculinist pastor of Mars Hill Church, claims to read a book a day. Jacobs doesn't call that reading.) And he looks at the value of reading poetry: a poem is usually short, its measure can be grasped quickly, but it requires several readings to get to grips with it. This re-reading (and memorising too, if you can) is valuable for our overall reading.

Reading this book on Kindle meant I could highlight and make notes as I went along. I think I've highlighted and noted more on this book than on any other recent one, such was my enthusiasm for what Jacobs has to say. Of course, I believe deeply in reading anyway, so he doesn't have to convert me to anything, and much of what he says here is relatively familiar territory. It's useful to have it under one cover, as it were. Incidentally, he's a considerable fan of Kindle himself, and offers reasons as to why it's a valuable addition to our ways of reading.

Items of Interest

2012-01-15T13:29:00.000+13:00

Two articles on the same page of yesterday's Otago Daily Times caught my attention. One from the regular column giving some history on people buried in local cemeteries. This week it featured Otago Harbour's first pilot, the aptly named Richard Driver. He was one of the area's earliest European residents, although when he was a young man he almost didn't survive an attack by local Maori when he and several of his fellow crew-members stepped onto what is now known as Murdering Beach. Fortunately he was saved by Motoitoi, the daughter of Kahutia: she threw her father's cloak over Driver and soon after married him.
This is where my interest in the story rose: he had three daughters by Motoitoi, and, after she died, a son by his Maori housekeeper. That's four children. In 1849 he married a 17-year-old called Elizabeth Robertson. She bore him three more children, and then seven more who were all born dead. That's fourteen children in effect, with Elizabeth being pregnant ten times up to that point. Once they shifted from the area they lived in, she bore him eight more children. Thus she was pregnant eighteen times. He was the father, to all intents and purposes, of 22 children, beating J S Bach by one. (Though far more of Bach's children actually survived.)

He produced 15 living children - it's not surprising that the writer notes: their descendants today number many hundreds.

The second article begins: A baby's cries are tuned to trigger a uniquely fast response from adults, research has shown. Scientists compared volunteers' reaction times while listening to babies crying, the sounds of adults in distress, and birdsong. Right. We all respond quickly to birdsong. The study's leader noted that it is almost impossible to ignore crying babies on planes and the discomfort it arouses. Well, well, there's a finding for you.

So far this would have been all right - it's basically yet another study that tells us what we already know, but that's hardly uncommon. Innumerable studies are done to show us that what we know is what we know. However, the sentence that niggled me (because of the sheer lack of any scientific basis) was this: Evolution has decided that it is a good thing for us to look after our young, and there is something in the acoustic properties of babies' cries that evokes a very basic response that appears to be hardwired in ancient parts of our brains.

I don't think 'evolution' (which is a person or thing) has ever decided to do anything. Nor, from my understanding, do we have 'more ancient parts' in our brains. This is literary science, the kind that tells stories about research but doesn't actually base these stories on anything factual. It's metaphor, not science. Science is based on experiments that can be replicated not just once, but over and over. There is no experiment that can show evolution ever 'deciding' to do something. This is typical of the idea that pervades science: that evolution can be regarded as being responsible for anything and everything, without anyone actually showing this to be the case.

Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

Beat the Devil

2012-01-14T22:32:00.001+13:00

Continuing to use up the additional broadband we took on for this month, I began to watch Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood. Unfortunately it was all in Russian, without subtitles. Still, it looked good!

As an alternative I turned to Beat the Devil. The only thing I'd heard about this was the title - I had no idea it had such a fabulous cast and that, supposedly, it was rewritten as they went along. I'm always a bit suspicious of these sorts of stories - the script being handed to the cast as the scenes were being shot. Knowing something of just how difficult it is to pull a movie together in the first place, and then to keep it ticking, it always strikes me that such stories may be more than a little apocryphal. Still, when an authority like Roger Ebert quotes such stories, you have to wonder if they're not at least partially true.

Anyway, Beat the Devil has almost no story to speak of. It was based on a novel, but it seems that the connections between the novel and the film may be few. Having got a marvellous cast together, John Huston, the director, lets them rip. They almost don't need a script; they could probably have made the thing up as they went along. However, there is a semblance of a plot about uranium and Africa and colonialism and such. Truman Capote is credited with scriptwriting, but whether there really was a Capote script or not is moot.

Humphrey Bogart is the ostensible hero, but barely makes a showing in this department. He just plays Humphrey Bogart, pretty much as he always does, and gets away with it. He hardly breaks into a sweat (except when pushing a car uphill and then watching it run away by itself downhill.) He has two leading ladies, after a fashion: Jennifer Jones as an English woman who lets her imagination run wild to the extent that even the audience isn't quite sure when she's telling the truth or embroidering it. And Gina Lollobrigida who undercuts her glamour with quite a witty performance.

It's the quartet of rogues who make the movie what it is, however. Robert Morley leads the charge playing Robert Morley (who else did he ever play?) aka Mr Peterson; Peter Lorre plays a German called O'Hara, using his baby face to its fullest advantage; Marco Tulli plays the Italian of the four, munching his lines with great vigour; and Ivor Barnard plays what must be one of his scariest roles as a murderer who looks like a civil servant - until he opens his mouth and goes on with enthusiasm for Hitler and Mussolini's worthwhile ways.

Edward Underdown, as the stiff upper lip Englishman who turns out to be not quite such a posh gent as he claims, seems at first to be the only actor taking anything seriously, but by the end even he's chewing the scenery with gusto.

The camerawork by Freddie Francis is a delight, though the bright Italian sun seems to have flummoxed even his expertise in some scenes. Would it really have been intentional to have two of the actors' faces in the shadow while their stomachs reflected the sun? Probably not. And Huston directs the whole thing for laughs - not the laugh out loud kind, but the quiet amusement gained from seeing a bunch of artists thoroughly enjoying themselves.

Two Canadian dance movies

2012-01-13T07:42:00.000+13:00

Due to a bit of a hiccup with some overuse of the broadband this month, we wound up having to get some additional gigs to see us through. Of course, now we have an excess of gigs and are trying to use them up before their expiry date on the weekend. Consequently, last night, I checked out some movies I wouldn't normally have chased up and in a moment of serendipity came across the site of the National Film Board of Canada. (I'd started to look at the 1950 version of Cyrano de Bergerac, but it didn't grab me, and Hitchcock's Spellbound, which is supposed to be available online turned out to consist of only the first five minutes...with Asian subtitles plastered all over the picture. Likewise, Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, which I haven't seen for decades, isn't available outside the States, apparently.)

But I spent a glorious hour or so watching two shorter movies, both of them focused on dance. The first was Flamenco at 5.15 which features Susana and Antonio Robledo as they take a class of young Canadian ballet dancers and show them what is involved in dancing flamenco. Though it's supposed to be a single class, I suspect it's actually a compilation of several. Be that as it may, it's just a wonderful celebration of youth and vitality, and of the enthusiasm of the older couple as they impart all their longheld knowledge.

Antonio plays the piano - he began his career as a concert pianist and got 'sidetracked' - and gives lessons on the various ways clapping is used in the dance form. Susana works on the movement, and the sublime subtlety of expression that this particular form of movement can convey. The youngsters are a wonderful bunch - none of them looks any older than fifteen - and have picked up the rhythms and gestures and steps with skill and the sort of enthusiasm only youngsters have. Check out the boy with the mop of hair who breaks into a great grin several times during the documentary. He's a delight, and he gets the crowning moment of the movie to show off his work.

The second film is called Lodela. I almost gave it away in the first minute when the male dancer seemed to be doing contortions that were impossible, but fortunately stayed on. This is a sublime piece of filmmaking: it celebrates the human body in detail: hands, fingernails, eyes and eyebrows, nostrils, legs and arms, torsos, and the intricacy of bodies shifting around each other. Two dancers, one male and one female, appear in it. These are José Navas and Chi Long; Navas also choreographed much of the film. The filmmaker is Phillipe Baylaucq, and the film is described this way on the site: Inspired by the myths of the afterlife, this allegorical dance illuminates the soul's quest by exploring movement and the human body in new and astonishing ways. An evocation of the origins of the world. A hymn to the beauty of the human form. A celebration of movement. A metaphor for life and death. A film without words.

The afterlife aspect didn't particularly strike me as relevant in watching the movie, which has minimal 'story' - the man appears first seemingly striving to break through the large circle of light he inhabits. After some time the woman appears and they engage in delight and joy and desire and (briefly) aggression, and who knows what else. Eventually the man moves through the light and is seen no more, and the woman closes the piece. But that's the barest of descriptions. Constantly, as I watched it, the film seemed to be about the wonder of the body and how beautiful it is. If it achieves nothing else for the viewer, that's enough. You can throw in allegories and metaphors as you like. This is a wonderfully conceived piece of abstract dance that knows what it's doing without having to say it out loud.

The dancers are clothed in the briefest of garments, and there's a warning about there being nudity and sexuality in the film. But there's no offensiveness in the nudity (the woman has no upper garment, basically) and as for sexuality, this film is as pure as any great work of art that celebrates the fact of male and female. You won't find eroticism here, not in the usual sense anyway.

It's full of breathtaking moments, one of them occurring early in the piece when the man, seen crouching upside down on the light (the large circle of light plays its own part in the dance) suddenly extends to full length as though he's dropping downwards, held on only by the soles of his feet. You have to see it to understand what a creative idea it is, and you realise a moment later that you're watching him with the camera upside down, but when it happens you gasp. The man spends quite of a bit of his time at one point upside down, in one section dancing on a line while the woman is 'above' him dancing not completely in unison, but with her steps counterpointing his. Momentarily they will be out of sync with each other and then suddenly their feet synchronise on the line again. It's utter magic.

The magic is only broken once after this, when the screen fills with duplicate versions of the couple. For me this was the only shot in the film that disturbed the flow. Other than this, the dancers, the light and shadow, the music (itself often abstract, but always effective), the camerawork and the editing all combine to produce an extraordinary film. Catch up with it if you can.

Bit of a HitTail catchup

2012-01-12T06:51:00.000+13:00

I've been keeping a diary of my time away in Boise, and will be posting some items on the Travel Diary blog in the next few days. I'm obviously still on Boise time, since instead of sleeping through this morning from exhaustion after some thirty-six hours travelling (broken, but only in a sense, by stopping off at my daughter's place in Auckland for the day) I was wide awake at 4.30 am.

So I thought I might as well do something useful...like blogging! Firstly I've just checked out the HitTail top four search words for this week: as usual a pretty mixed bunch.

One item is the meaning or interpretation of Winnie the Pooh . I certainly have no authorative view on this: the only time I've mentioned it, I think, was in this post, and that's relating to a pseudo interpretation of Winnie's meaning from Frederick Crews' Postmodern Pooh. Pseudo and humorous, in fact. Looking back over the number of searches relating to this topic on my HitTail account, it seems that there must be some study being done on this topic in some US University at the moment. Perhaps some English professor has set the students a tongue-in-cheek task...? It sounds like something Alan Jacobs might do - I've just read his book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction - about which there'll be more in another post.

The Mousetrap script turns up as well. There have been any number of references to Agatha Christie's play, The Mousetrap, in this blog, as this list will attest, but most of these come from Aug/Sept last year, when I was acting in the play.

The third item is Aotearoa Circus NZ, (the correct name is Circus Aotearoa) which I wrote about back in March last year. Since then a commenter had been to see the Circus, and left me a rather negative note about it. Certainly the circus was a little threadbare - which I noted at the time - but wasn't lacking in talent. The person commenting seems to have had a bit of a rough time at this circus: certainly the troupe were rough and ready, in some respects, but I didn't see anyone in the audience the day I attended getting their hair pulled, as apparently happened to this person.

Last but not least we have Chrissy Johnson. In spite of not having written on this blog for nearly a fortnight, due to being in Boise, Idaho most of that time, here's our old friend - who usually appears under the name of Chrissy Popadics, turning up again. She's the wife of one of the (former?) football players in the Boise team, and I mentioned her again recently because of the new Boise connection my family now has - my new daughter-in-law comes from there.

My Goodness!

2011-12-29T19:31:00.000+13:00

Some time ago, I think, I started reading Tim Parks' novel Goodness. Apparently I didn't finish it; in fact I may not have got very far with it at all, as the only bit I remembered when I started reading it again a day or so ago, was the beginning.

Like other books by Parks it's subtle in its approach, with any number of twists and turns between the main characters - not in terms of plot but in terms of reactions to each other, and in the ways they hurt or are loving to each other. There's also Parks' wit and humour - not laugh-out-loud stuff, but wry and witty.

The story is told by George, an upwardly-mobile young man whose life and marriage comes to a major crunch point about half way through the novel - I won't tell you what that is, but I didn't expect it. We've already seen George's selfishness raging through the book - 'raging' might be a bit strong - outwardly he's a well-behaved Englishman; it's inside where all the raging is going on, and we're privy to it.

The climax of the book is superbly written, and suspenseful in a surprising way. And then there's the Epilogue, which takes the story off into another realm altogether. Parks takes your breath away with this one.

The book is essentially moral in tone; it's George's struggle with his own morality and with the faith of others and their sometimes insane optimism that makes it so readable. The Daily Mail described it as a 'one-sitting book' and that's just about it. The only reason I didn't read it in one sitting was because I was reading it late at night and was too tired to continue.

PS This cover isn't on my copy of the book and seems to indicate a book that isn't quite the one Parks has written, one that's much more severe in tone. The cover on my copy, published by Vintage, leaves much more to the imagination, but is still effective.

Abani on artists

2011-12-28T19:06:00.001+13:00

"Artists were essentially shamans or priests or seers in the old days and I think art is still the primary focus of looking for ways to deal with the questions of being human. I think you can do that while meditating in your room. OK, so I went to prison, I suffered, but I'm here drinking a three-dollar coffee checking my email on a fancy gadget. The problem is we're looking for something that doesn't exist. We're looking for authenticity. There is no such thing as authenticity. There is either good art or bad art. Art is never about its content. It's about its scaffolding."

Chris Abani

After-the-sleep-post-Christmas-Dinner Reflections

2011-12-25T19:10:00.002+13:00

It's late on Sunday afternoon. The hordes have gone home or to other Christmas functions with in-laws and the like. The house is both partly cleaned up and partly not. The wife is sleeping. The younger son is recording old Super 8 videos onto his external hard drive via our laptop. I have driven a guest home, almost on auto-pilot, and have had a snooze.

I enjoy leftover chicken (in an ordinary sandwich, with a bit of salt), of which there was plenty....until I dropped the very large plate (and much-loved plate) on the floor while trying to re-open the fridge. Broke one of the plate handles, and dropped the chicken (and some pork) all over. Not a good start to the after-the-sleep-post-Christmas-Dinner period.

In spite of there being a reasonable number of bodies here (16, including ourselves) we still have plenty of food left over. It's always the same. Worse, there's always a pile of sweet stuff leftover, quite apart from all the sweet stuff that arrives as presents for one reason or another. Any hopes we had of losing a bit of weight before going to our son's wedding in the States a week from today have been thoroughly undermined.

For many years, I used to get the latest Dick Francis thriller at Christmas. Those days have gone, and I miss having that sort of light but entertaining book to read in the after-the-sleep-post-Christmas-Dinner period. I've got plenty of books around the house, but that almost traditional aspect is something I miss. I dread to think what's on television - if the last few days are anything to go by - but I do have a DVD that a friend gave me, which I may watch. I'll see how much energy I've got.

SoundCloud stats

2011-12-24T12:53:00.001+13:00

As I've remarked before I'm one of those people who's always interested in the how the stats show up. In this particular instance, I'm thinking of the stats relating to SoundCloud, which I've just read is one of the top startups in Europe at the moment.

I just had a look at them to see what was being played and who was playing it. This month 51% of people listening to music I've put up have been from New Zealand, 12% from the United States, 7% from the UK, and, such being the nature of the Internet, 5% were each from Thailand and Belgium.

If I look only at this week, however, the stats reverse: Belgium and Thailand go up to 33% each, the UK and US vanish, Spain comes in for 16% along with NZ. Which presumably means there have been a lot fewer listenings this week than over the whole month.

And what have they been listening to? Over the whole month it's been the Grimhilda! instrumental selections scenes 1 and 2. This has had 8 plays. Scenes 5 & 6 have had 5 plays. The first piano selection has had 3 plays along with the scene 7 instrumental selections. And The Cowboy leans the Tarantella, a piano piece, has had just 2 plays.

During all the time I've had music on SoundCloud, however, the scene 1 and 2 Grimhilda! instrumental have had 32 plays all up, but The Cowboy comes in second at 21 plays. This is interesting: there are several piano pieces on SoundCloud, but none of these come within a cooee of that many plays. One of my favourite pieces, Ladies Preparing Silk, (it's also the one my kids like), has had only two plays since it was uploaded. (And they were probably both me checking that the upload worked....)

Rev Helene Mann

2011-12-22T09:18:00.000+13:00

Rev Helene Mann, who died unexpectedly two days ago in Dunedin Hospital, always announced herself, when she came into the shop I managed (OC Books), as 'your favourite customer'. And in many ways she was. From a purely retail point of view, she could be guaranteed to buy at least one book on each visit, but would more likely buy several. But it wasn't just her book-buying that made her visits interesting: it was her conversation. Invariably we would discuss something of interest: books, theology, Celtic Christianity (one of her favourite subjects and one she studied, and one she introduced me to), her enthusiasm for Pelagius, Anglicanism and a host of other subjects.

Like many of my customers, she became a friend. We'd meet on the street and talk, or meet at a conference and talk. It was never just a case of retailer and customer, but much more. She was one of the many people I missed when I left the shop, although we occasionally had a chance meeting afterwards, including just the other day when my wife and I met her in South Dunedin. She didn't look well (and hadn't done for some time), but was still bustling her way forward, trying to keep up with the many tasks she took on.

She was short, but made up for it in seemingly boundless energy, even when her health knocked her back. She was intellectually sharp, and though we crossed swords very occasionally, in general our relationship was one of humour and the enjoyment of catching up again. I will miss seeing her - as I'm sure hundreds of others will. May she rest in the peace of her Creator, and enjoy His company eternally.

PS - 14.1.12
Just been informed by Jim Mann, Helene's husband, that he read this post after his relatives in Wales informed him of it (!) Such is the nature of the Internet.

Two books

2011-12-21T19:40:00.001+13:00

Yesterday I finished Joy Cowley's book, Navigation: a memoir. Today it was Ruth Rendell's Kissing the Gunner's Daughter. I'd been reading the Cowley on and off for a couple of weeks; the Rendell I started yesterday and finished this afternoon, amongst other things that I've been doing. So just a few comments about that book first.

I haven't read a lot of Rendell's books, though I've listened to abridged versions of a couple of them on tape when we've been travelling. I read one called Going Wrong in 2008 and seem to remember it was rather odd, and another, which she wrote under the pseudonym, Barbara Vine, The Chimney Sweeper's Boy, which was absorbing but terribly gloomy (here are some comments I made about it at the time).

What struck me about Gunner's Daughter is the stylish writing, writing that expects the reader to keep up and to enjoy the prose; writing that's perceptive and occasionally witty, with characters who have plenty of life and variety. These elements on their own made it an enjoyable read, quite apart from the intricate plot. I kind of guessed what the trick was, but had to wait to the end to be sure and find out how it had been worked out.

It concerns a young girl who's the only survivor of a mass attack on a family in their own (somewhat palatial) home: three other members are shot and killed outright. Wexford is the inspector in charge of the case, (along with his faithful ally, Mike Burdon), so there is an ongoing background story relating to Wexford's own daughter as well. There is no immediate connection between the two parts of his life, but the two branches reflect each other considerably, it turns out. There are some wonderful red herrings, and a gradual uncovering of all manner of intriguing elements. I found it very readable.

Navigation isn't an autobiography, though there's plenty of autobiographical material in it. It's subtitled a memoir, and I guess this is how it works. It gives Cowley the chance to look at her life in a more topical way - she discusses her three husbands within the same part of the book, her children in another, her faith right towards the end, her adult fiction in a different section to her children's writing.

It begins a little too 'mystically' (for me) and occasionally wanders off into this vein at other points, but once I got past the first few pages I began to enjoy it thoroughly. I've extracted three sections on another blog: one on her method of bringing up children (not at all formally, and not at all PC); one on the bleakness of New Zealand adult fiction; and the third on the surprising literacy of New Zealanders. I could have easily quoted other sections as well.

Cowley appears to have packed an enormous amount into her life - innumerable trips abroad, vast numbers of books written, appearances at a host of conferences, ongoing engagement with the retreats she and her third husband hold, and of course, her family, with whom she's continually involved. I guess when anyone sits down to write about their life it seems more action-packed to a reader than to the person themselves; we don't tend to note down all the breathing spaces that we've also experienced.

UnOccupied

2011-12-20T17:11:00.002+13:00

Dunedin's Octagon has finally been vacated by the remaining members of the local Occupy movement.

According to the Otago Daily Times, one of the members, Kieran Trass, said it was unclear whether they would return, or what the next phase would entail. And he added, This is not a battle to be won in the media.

I'm not actually sure what he means by that...if it wasn't for the media, the movement wouldn't have had a fraction of the publicity they've had. In fact, the media have been their protector on a number of occasions, particularly overseas, where it has highlighted injustices done to the members of the movement.

But it was Mr Trass' last statement that puzzles me. He is reported to have said, I don't know why people seem to think we want to camp here, and why we want to be here for a long time.

That calls for a 'Huh?' - a very loud one, in fact.

We know why they wanted to camp in the Octagon, surely. They were 'occupying,' and were most aggrieved when the City Council threatened them with a trespass order. If it hadn't been that the police somehow aligned freedom of assembly with some alleged right to take over a public place, to the detriment not only of the place but also to the inconvenience of the local users of it, they would have been long gone.

As to why they wanted to be there for a long time, it has surely come from their own statements to this effect. It's been part of the Occupy movement's approach around the world: to occupy and stay.

Come on, Mr Trass - many of us agree with what you're protesting about. Don't treat us like idiots because you've finally decided, apparently of your own accord, to suddenly go home for Christmas.

Blog and Sudoku

2011-12-20T14:55:00.002+13:00

I just discovered this morning that comments on my Daily Writer blog haven't been getting through to me by email, so possibly a number of commenters have given up on me, thinking I'm too rude to respond. For some reason this particular blog, even though it's part of the Blogger family, doesn't act the same, and there are certain differences I can't quite get to grips with. It shouldn't be the fact that it's an older blog (dating from 2005), because the one I'm writing on now is even older (by a few months). Yet this blog has kept up with the various Blogger changes while the other one seems to be stuck in an earlier age.

On a less messy note, I wrote to the Otago Daily Times the other day because it has puzzled me for some time that the medium Sudoku puzzles published in their paper were often harder than the hard ones. They passed the email onto Doug Hendry from The Puzzle Company. He replied:

The series you [the Otago Daily Times newspaper] run is one where we actually tried to create more difference between the medium and hard puzzles.

We can make puzzles on quite a few different settings. The actual level of difficulty in each varies widely, and the biggest range seems to lie within the medium setting. As Mr Crowl pointed out, they can be as challenging – or actually harder – than a puzzle made on the hard setting.

One solution we came up with was to make more difference between the levels. We took the Easy and Medium settings down half a notch, and left the hard unchanged.

I’d be interested in getting Mr Crowl’s opinion on the attached puzzles.

I’ve put three medium and three hard from your current series on a layout, but not identified which is which. If he has the time and the inclination, I’d really appreciate it if he printed the sheet out and tried them, then emailed to say which ones he thinks are medium and which are hard.

This isn’t a test of his Sudoku ability, it’s a test of our puzzle making.

Well, firstly it was nice to get such an immediate response to a query, and one that was offering a solution as to why the puzzles varied. I tired all six of the puzzles and this was my reply to Doug:

1. fairly hard
2. hard (didn't finish it in fact, which is sometimes the case with Sudoku in the paper)
3. definitely the easiest.
4. fairly hard
5 hard
6 hard (again I didn't finish this one because I got stuck and couldn't move forward on it - might need more perseverance)

Doug replied:

I printed out the puzzles I sent you and gave them a go. Usually I can only solve Easy puzzles, and occasionally rise to the heights of Medium. Hard, never. [He says he's the company's crossword expert, while his wife is the Sudoku master.]

I managed to solve No1 (which was a Medium), but it took me 25 minutes. I got seven numbers in No2 (Hard), then gave up. I think I could have solved No3 (Medium) but went wrong somewhere after having filled in more than half.

It took me 10 minutes to get four boxes in No4 (Hard), then I gave up.

No5 (Medium) – I got stuck after taking 15 minutes to get half of it filled in.

I didn’t bother trying No6.

So, I was able to solve – with a real effort – one of the mediums, and might have got another. The three hard puzzles were totally beyond me.

You solved all three Mediums and one Hard.

This was only a test on three of each type, but you and I both found the Hard puzzles more difficult than the Medium, and you found the Mediums simpler than I did.

There will be occasions when a Medium puzzle at the upper end of its difficulty scale will be as hard – or maybe even harder – than a Hard puzzle which is at the bottom end of its range of difficulty.

So there you have it. An interesting exercise, and a gracious response on both occasions. How to do business, in other words!

The Sudoku in the picture is a finished example from this Dan Rice's site.

Shifting to Chrome

2011-12-19T21:16:00.000+13:00

Well, the shift to Google Chrome as my default browser seems to be going okay. Of course some things went missing with the change - not my bookmarks, which were happily imported from Firefox - though truth to tell, I hardly ever use the bookmarks now, as typing into the URL line usually brings up anything I want.

I did lose the add-ons I had - Chrome calls them extensions - and had to go and re-sort them: Evernote's clipper, for one, and RoboForm (which oddly turns up at the bottom of the screen rather than the top; some curious feature of Chrome, apparently). Zotero also went missing - it's part of Firefox's add-ons, but not Chrome's as far as I can tell. You can get Zotero as a stand-alone programme now, but I haven't yet figured out how to get stuff into the right folder in the stand-alone version: when you click on the little blue box that records the book item you're interested in, it just pops it in wherever it feels like it, and because of Zotero's set-up, you can't find which folder it's in, although of course you can actually find the item through their search box.

And just now I realised I didn't have the add-on that copied URLs to Twitter (or other social media). Chrome has an extension for this, so that wasn't too much of a problem.

The main reason I shifted was because Facebook was becoming very sticky on Firefox. (My geek son reckons Firefox has overloaded itself with all its upgrades). Anyway, on Chrome, Facebook is behaving itself very well, so that's a plus. Another plus is that there's no separate box for doing a Google search: the URL box and the search box are one and the same (this being Google's browser, naturally) so that's actually a gain. This was starting to happen on Firefox, but not quite so effectively.

So, at present, all good.

PS 20.12.2011 Only realised this morning that Evernote is not working in quite the same way it used to. Instead of clipping whatever it is that you want clipped directly to the Evernote database on your computer, it clips it now to your Evernote database online. It's only when you sync the two that the computer version updates. Before it was the other way round. Odd. On the plus side, the new look Evernote clipper is an improvement over the old one. And doesn't require as much fiddling around with each time.

And another thing: everything is being spellchecked all over again (like the word, spellchecked, for instance). Obviously Chrome doesn't import all the words I've collected over the last few years of Firefox usage.

Marian Year Celebration?

2011-12-19T12:39:00.000+13:00

In my last post I mentioned clearing out some stuff from one of our two attics. The box of photos has been sitting on the floor waiting an opportunity to be sorted further, and I've just had a go at it. Heaps of family photos - my children, in particular, but also photos of me with a number of other relatives. And various other memorabilia. I've had a bit of a throw-out, because there comes a time when some stuff just doesn't mean anything anymore.

There are a number of photos taken on a camera that was so small you could hide it in your hand. It produced equally small photographs (9cm by 6.5cm - or 3.5 inches by 2.5). Amongst these were about a dozen taken at some event in Logan Park (?) in Dunedin that was held - I'm guessing - in the 1950s. I think I have a dim memory of being at this, but that may be only that I've seen these photos of a number of occasions before. I've now thrown out a lot of these little photos because they weren't of a quality to make them interesting enough to keep: people's heads (or hats, rather) in the way of what was trying to be photographed, or the distance between the photographer (my mother, no doubt) and the subject being too vast to make what was photographed comprehensible.

But a couple of the photos had been blown up and I'm reproducing them here. As you can see, there's a huge statue of Mary - so it was definitely a Catholic occasion. I thought it had something to do with a visit from the Pope, but according to this site, only Pope John Paul II is the only Pope to have visited New Zealand, so it wasn't a papal visit. It might have been a Papal Nuncio (Envoy) vis. it, however, but I can't be sure about this.

My other thought that it was a 'Marian Year' - that would make it 1954, I presume Perhaps someone else can enlighten me?

Attics

2011-12-14T17:54:00.001+13:00

The worst thing about having an attic (or in our case, two of them) is that they're great places for putting stuff away 'for a rainy day', or 'until he/she has their own place', or 'we'd better keep that, it's got sentimental value' and so on.

We've got two attics because naturally there was one in the original house, and then, when we added on a second floor, a second attic was included - only part of the original one was removed.   Consequently we have a lot of room to store junk.

We've just been up in one of the attics looking for something that of course wasn't stored up there - where it is stored is another question.   And once you start looking through the boxes you find things you haven't seen for a while, and then you take stuff out to have a proper look at it, find treasures, and away goes the day.

Sometimes you can be brutal and finally dump some things that really don't have a place in your life any more. I've just got rid of half of a bag full of stuff I'd collected to do collages - I did do a couple several years ago, but that's about when the enthusiasm stopped.   Notice I said 'half a bag' - the rest will go back in the attic, no doubt, because it's not quite at the stage of needing to be thrown out. It could be useful.   But I did get rid of the bottletops and the fragments of material and a plastic bag so old it was disgustingly discoloured.

And then there was another box full of photographs: pure family history, with lots of photos of my kids when they were small, many more of my mother and me at various ages from babyhood to late teens (me, I mean, not my mother); photos of the Queen's visit in the early 1950s - she visited the Woollen Mills my mother worked at; photos of the Pope's visit (if it was him he doesn't actually appear in any of the photos!), photos of my aunts, uncles, grandparents, great-grandparents.   Some of these we've obviously got more than one copy of; some are unique.   There's a little Autograph book in which each page has a short quote and a signature from various friends of my mother.   I don't know any of these people, which is a pity, although given the dates it looks as though they were mostly written when she lived in Australia, where I was born.   [The book in the photo is similar, but not the same.]

And there's a game called Funword - it's Scrabble in disguise. It was used right up until some twenty years ago, and still has some scorecards with my (now deceased) English uncle's name on it, and that of his second wife (they visited at some point), my mother's and some of my kids - who must have been old enough to play at the time.

And finally, in tune with the season, there's a little Nativity scene set inside a box about two hands width wide, with two doors that open outwards. Inside there's the tiniest Nativity imaginable, and once upon a time there used to be a light in there too.....maybe we should put it in a place of honour beside our Nativity set that's standing in the window. For old time's sake.

Tui ad

2011-12-13T17:01:00.001+13:00

A Twitter user going by the name of @laurayankers has posted this picture on Twitter. It may be a little unclear here, but it says: Let's go camping in the Octagon this summer. I don't know where this Tui ad is situated but it's probable it's down in the University area somewhere.

Laura is from the UK and is flying back home in a few days. She calls herself a UK lass trying to stay sane in Dunedin whilst here on business.

Side effects

2011-12-12T16:37:00.001+13:00

Methadone, the treatment that's used at a Methadone detox rehab treatment center, has an alarming number of side effects. Why I comment on this is because when I watching a TV ad last night in which they discussed medication you could take for depression, you could read along the bottom of the screen - if you were quick enough - so many side effects that you'd actually think twice about taking the drug.

Of course, those lists of side effects are just what might happen in the worst of all possible worlds (although a person with depression doesn't really need to know any more about the worst of all possible worlds, they're often there already), and having taken two different kinds of medication for depression over the years (both of which worked, and neither of which appeared to give me any side-effects) I guess the cure is somewhat better than what might happen. They've got to warn you, after all. And then, like Russian roulette, you play the game.

Here's a list of the possible side-effects of Methadone:

drowsiness
weakness
headache
nausea
vomiting
constipation
loss of appetite
weight gain
stomach pain
dry mouth
sweating
flushing
difficulty urinating
swelling of the hands, arms, feet, and legs
mood changes
vision problems
difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep
decreased sexual desire or ability
missed menstrual periods

It certainly covers all the options: difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep? A bit like having your cake and eating it, isn't it?

Decoding the phrase

2011-12-11T20:42:00.001+13:00

I have no idea what the following phrase actually means: challenge coins custom so I'm not even going to try. Sometimes these odd phrases turn up in the work I do for a company online, and because of the nature of the job, it's not always easy to figure out quite what the 'employer' is getting at. Never mind, we know it's something to do with a challenge, with coins, and with custom.

You could do quite a bit with that, I'm sure....write a short poem, even.

It's a bit of a challenge
to write a poem on coins
that's according to custom,
by which I mean the challenge
of using some normal form
of poem, as is the custom;
but in this instance the challenge
may be with fake coins
which may involve Customs
and their challenge of you.

There we go; no more obscure than the original phrase. Not bad for a draft poem, though I'm sure it can be improved upon....

Reminding myself of some travel incidents

2011-12-11T20:13:00.001+13:00

When we arrived England in 2007, we were quite laden down with luggage: according to my diary at the time we were carrying: a lap-top in a case with umpteen cords for cellphones, lap-top, Ipod and so on; Celia’s handbag; her backpack; my backpack (full of books and such); and pulling two suitcases which between them weighed 40 kg.

We got the tube from Heathrow to Kentish Town where we were expecting to stay with a friend.   The tube is a great way to travel if you're not carrying a lap-top and accessories, two backpacks (with books and gear needed on the trip, and equivalent in size to Deuter backpacks - one on the right), a handbag (which, if I remember rightly, was probably stuffed full of anything we couldn't fit in anywhere else) and hauling two suitcases weighing 40 kg in total.   (When we go to the USA next month we won't be carrying anything like this amount of gear, thank goodness....I hope!)

Carrying or carting all that stuff on the tube is a major undertaking. The underground in London has very few lifts (or elevators - better start practicing my Americanisms now) and so everything has to be hauled up and down stairs - in some cases, lots of stairs.   Or up the escalator, which isn't built for putting large suitcases on.

And then, when we finally got to Kentish Town (after having to stand most of the way on the Tube as well, because it was easier than trying to fit everything around a seat), we managed to go several blocks out of our way. It was a bit like the night in Milan when I had my wallet pinched on their underground.   We were told by the station officials to go to the police at a station a couple of stops back, did that, were looked at as though we were idiot tourists (which we were) and then told to go to the main police station, which seemed to be in a street that none of the locals knew existed. Or else none of them were locals and they were only pretending they knew.

Fortunately, on that occasion we weren't carrying a lap-top and accessories, two backpacks (with books and gear needed on the trip), a handbag, and two suitcases weighing 40 kg in total. We were actually carrying even less than usual, because one of those nasty Milanese people had pinched my wallet - did I mention that?   I guess I'll have to forgive them somehow, but it's one of those things that rankles.

Anyway, this time while we're away, we'll both be carrying those under-the-clothing-bags with any valuables we need.   My wife won't let me do otherwise.   But I won't be carrying my 'man-bag' that I got in Italy (it's just visible in this picture of men in the Mediterranean sea) - I think it's been commandeered by someone else in the family.   I probably will be carrying the wallet I bought while I was overseas, even though it's beginning to show signs of wear.

One of the nice things about re-reading old 'diaries' is that you come across things you'd forgotten: like the fact that my wife lost her precious cellphone while we were visiting her parents' graves in Gresham in Norfolk. (I mention this only to point out that I'm not the only person who loses things while travelling - or even while staying at home.) We only found the phone because I tried ringing it after we discovered it was missing - thinking it was in the house somewhere - and was answered by a woman who lived in Gresham who'd picked it up and thought it must have belonged to someone local.   We collected it a few days later....

Pool or not

2011-12-09T16:55:00.001+13:00

At the beginning of next month we fly to Boise in Idaho. It will roughly the middle of winter. We're taking lots of thermal underwear on the assumption that it's going to be really cold, though it's hard to know just how cold that is. What the people over there think is cold, of course, may be closer to what we're used to here because we don't have temperature extremes. But I suspect it will be rather more than we're used to. We'll just have to wait and see.

It occurred to me that there aren't likely to be many swimming pools around in Boise (or Nampa, which is where we're actually going to be staying). With temperatures plummeting in the winter to minus figures, the idea of having a swimming pool is probably a bit nonsensical, and yet, in the summer, the temperatures climb to more than we ever have here. It's a bit like Alexandra, Central Otago, which in winter is like walking around in a fridge, in summer like being basted on an oven. So I suppose pools may not be as uncommon as I first thought. Whether they'd need heated pools (and consequently the services of a company like PoolSupplyUnlimited.com pool heat pumps it's hard to say. Certainly in the summer it might be ridiculous to be heating your pool, but in winter? Well, it would depend whether you planned on going out, (in a Finnish fashion) to swim in your pool in the middle of the snowy season. But if you were being Finnish, you'd expect your pool to be freezing cold anyway, so heating it wouldn't be an option. It's all too complicated for a small brain like mine.

(I don't know what's happening with this particular post, but I suspect it's going to look odd on the page. I can't seem to get it sorted.)

Pumped! (as in stoked!!)

2011-12-09T09:54:00.001+13:00

Just came across this:

Mars Mission Return-Fuel Production
Casey Chartier*, Mike Crowl, Greg Honda

Wow! what am I doing talking about a Mars Mission at an Industry Educational Showcase in the University of Connecticut/ Well, of course I'm not. It's some other young bloke who actually knows something about the subject. He's a chemical engineer, by the look of it, a senior, so this presentation is to show what he and his offsider have learnt over the last few years in the course of their studies.

All I was doing when I came across this was looking for some connection between Goulds pumps and my name. Nothing special; just one of those odd things.

Forgetting and remembering

2011-12-09T09:36:00.001+13:00

Back in 2007 I wrote a post about maternity clothes. I'd forgotten about it completely until I happened to pick up on it just now.

It was written while we were in England, but I have no idea what hotel it was that we were staying at, at the time. In fact, I can't remember the incident at all. We'd met a man from Edinburgh who had eight children - the oldest was 23 and was working with his father; the youngest was 17 months old. Furthermore one of his older daughters was expecting a child who would then have an aunt only a couple of years older than her. They'd make good companions - and have some difficulties explaining their relationship, I expect!

It's odd that this story means nothing to me; if I hadn't written it down, it would have gone completely from my head, in spite of the fact that according to some sources we're supposed to remember everything that's happened to us. I think these sources may be exaggerating. It's much more likely we forget as much as we remember, otherwise we'd go crazy. There are some people who are supposed to remember everything - there was a group of them on TV recently - but I think (as my wife noted) it's more likely they remember a great deal about certain subjects and very little about what most of us forget (like how many times we went to the loo yesterday, or the day before, for instance). Some things become so commonplace that the mind has no reason to remember them, and wisely gets rid of that excess stuff.

PS I've just checked with my wife: she can't remember this incident either.....!

A sneeze in a redhaired nostril

2011-12-08T09:37:00.001+13:00

Continuing on with my interest in odd words, or the odd combinations of ordinary words, I'm looking briefly today at trailer hitches before I go on to look at some of the ways Les Murray uses words in a poem called Flowering Eucalypt in Autumn.

Here are some of the single words and combinations of trailer hitching words: multi-fit receiver hitches, goosenecks, pintles, receiver mount combination ball, switch balls, folding ball gooseneck hitch, (or even better) underbed folding ball gooseneck hitch, universal fifth wheel base rails, adjustable eyes and enforcement collars.   The mind boggles - even more at a weld-on pocket anchor.   Just think of welding an anchor into your pocket, and you see what I mean. There's ample material here for a poem, I think!

So onto a real poem.   In Murray's poem he's doing what he often does, piling metaphor upon metaphor to try and show the enormity of a small or ordinary-seeming thing (as he does with some humour in Shower, one of my favourite poems.)

In this poem, the crimson blossoms are dropping to the ground:
....a napped rug
of eyelash drift, of blooms flared
like a sneeze in a redhaired nostril.

They're:
minute urns, pinch-sized rockets
knocked down by....
....the daily
parrot gang with green pocketknife wings.

....each flower comes
as a spray in its own turned vase,
a taut starburst, honeyed model
of the tree's fragrance crisping in your head.

Finally:
a tower of fabulous swish tatters,
a map hoisted upright, a crusted
riverbed with up-country show towns.

Quoting bits like this doesn't do justice to the poem, so it's worth reading it as a whole.   Nevertheless, a sneeze in a redhaired nostril certainly lingers in the mind....!

I mentioned the other day about the copyright issues relating to copying poems into blogs and onto the Net. It doesn't seem to be that big an issue, since any Les Murray poem I've gone looking for in order to provide a link to the full poem has been readily available online.   Perhaps the Net is the best thing to happen to poetry in all that art's history....?

Rhyme schemes - or not

2011-12-07T09:04:00.001+13:00

Though I'm now using another blog to write specifically about poetry (and to include poems I've written myself), I've always included posts about poems and poetry on this blog too, so I'll continue to do so.

I've been reading Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled recently, and this time going through it in detail. (I started to read it a few years back, after I saw it in a bookshop in England, but didn't go very far.)   In the section where he discusses rhyme, he uses that old system of detailing how the poem's lines rhyme by marking each line as a or b or c etc.   A common rhyme scheme, then, will be something like:
a
b
a
b.

There are, of course, many more complicated schemes than this.   I've been reading through Les Murray's collection The Vernacular Republic: Poems 1961-1983.   I've delved into it in the past, and am already familiar with some of the poems because they come from other collections that I have, but this time I'm working systematically through it (from the end to the beginning, just to be different) and am intrigued by Murray's oddball rhyming schemes. If 'schemes' is the correct word.

Murray's poems are a mix of the witty and humorous (Morse, which tells the story of a Morse Code operator who does surgery on a man by receiving instruction by Morse from a doctor miles away), or the ones in which he plays with sounds and rhymes almost overwhelmingly (The Mouthless Image of God in the Hunter Colo Mountains - a crazy title that seems to have little to do with the poem which begins with the idea of a youth getting dogs to bark in the night), or the ones that philosophise about Art (Satis Passo), or ones that use foreign words and arcane English words or made up words (phallocrypt, single-bulged, cols, Orogold) that seldom or never appear in ordinary speech.   His breadth of language is always extraordinary, in fact.

And then there are ones like The Smell of Coal Smoke which is a loosely biographical piece about his mother and grandfather.   In it he uses a common enough rhythm (though the lines are by no means always the same beat length) and mostly common language, and seems to be using a very common rhyme scheme:

aa
bb
cc
dd

This scheme comes a cropper in the second stanza where it goes to:

aaa
bb
c
a
c

The c rhyme happens to rhyme with the a rhyme in the first stanza....no doubt intentionally.

The third stanza has this scheme:

aa
bb
c
a
cc

Which appears to have nothing to do with the previous stanza, rhyme-wise. The fourth stanza works this way:

aa
bb
cc
ab

Finally, stanza five works like this:

aa (a partial rhyme of frisson and Cornishman)
b
c
b
d
c (another partial rhyme, this time of Brown and soon - Brown has appeared more than once before)
d

Hardly conventional, and certainly disruptive if you think that he's going to go in a smooth direction, rhyme-wise. It could be said that Murray doesn't know much about rhyme schemes. It's more likely he does know and likes to break the mould.   Or that he's conveying something psychological by disrupting the expected flow of the piece, giving us a sense of how the boy who's 'narrating' the poem feels.   It's the same with the length of the lines, which sometimes are quite short, and sometimes seem to run out of breath. You can read the whole poem here, and see what you think.

Riding boots and Haiku

2011-12-06T19:38:00.001+13:00

I used to use Google Desktop on my computer at work, where it was great for finding the countless files that my boss and his offsider produced. There were often several copies all exactly the same filed in different folders. When I got this Dell computer, however, it didn't seem to like Google Desktop, and my geek son told me that there was an in-built search engine anyway, kindly provided by Microsoft.

Well, there was.

Microsoft promises much -
Much disappointment
for the person word-searching.

I've just been reading a few of the haiku in the sample version on Amazon Kindle of Bicycle Haiku - hence the sudden bursting into miniature poetry (haiku are a bit like miniature horses, aren't they?) This book is a series of sketches and haiku done while the author was riding from San Francisco to New York in 1979. The author, Kevin Kelly, self-deprecatingly writes in the blurb: This book will not be a best-seller. It's a book of poetry, and you know what that means. It might appeal to anyone intrigued by pedaling across a continent, or loners fascinated by blue highways and other little-travelled roads, or sensitive souls really into haikus, or sketches. I can imagine a few odd ducks who collect self-published books that will be thrilled by this book. Personal friends of mine may be interested in this vanity publishing. For the rest -- that is for most normal people -- there is nothing of fashionable interest here.

However, Microsoft's in-built searcher now searches only when it feels like it, which, increasingly of late, has become less and less of the time. Microsoft Word promises to identify all my spelling mistakes, too, but this resource has also become very spasmodic: on some Word files it works, on others it refuses to do so.

Microsoft promises much.
But unconfident
spellers daily left at sea.

And the only reason I was trying to use my in-built search engine was to see if I had anything on riding - I'd already found the Bicycle Haiku reference on Evernote, but it didn't seem to go with English riding boots which is what I was more particular about finding. The riding boots in the picture, which are an example of the English variety, seem a little lost in the midst of their field. One is looking off to its right, trying to find its owner; the other is snuggled close to its twin, just in case it gets left behind. At least that's how it seems to me.

One boot surveys the landscape;
searching. The other
leans, hides inside itself.

HitTail catch-up II

2011-12-06T19:08:00.001+13:00

Last week HitTail's new email system announced that the following three items would be top of the pops if mentioned in my blog:

the mousetrap study guide
sequoia cunningham dunedin
people wear ties

This week the list is a little different, with ties dropping out and three other items coming in.

chrissy popadics
ralph davis musician
salesman in beijing
the mousetrap study guide
sequoia cunningham dunedin

Chrissy Popadics made a comeback on this blog just a month ago, when I mentioned she was now known by her married name of Johnson.   Nevertheless, people still keep looking for her under her maiden name.

I've never written about Ralph Davis the musician, as far as I'm aware, but I've certainly written about Ralph Davis the pastor and commentary writer.   He's one of my favourite commentary writers, and I have (or have lent out) all his books. Maybe I should have a lapel pin produced saying something like: I'm a fan of Ralph Davis. That would cover all bases, including any that related to Ralph Davis the musician, who may or may not be this guy.

The third of the new items on the list today is Salesman in Beijing, which I wrote about at the end of 2009. The book is by Arthur Miller, and details his trip to Beijing to produce a version of his play, Death of a Salesman.   I suspect people looking for a combination of the words salesman and Beijing are looking for something more in the retail line, however.

Poems on the Net

2011-12-04T19:50:00.001+13:00

I've been collecting poems for some time, initially writing them out by hand in the old days before computers, then typing them up and printing them out and putting them in a folder, and, most recently, copying them holus-bolus off the Net into a file on Evernote.

There are two issues I haven't entirely sorted out in my head with regard to copying poems. If it's for your own personal use, then you're not affecting the poet's livelihood anymore than you would if you read the poem on the Net, or in a library book. At least as far as I can see (with a poem it's difficult to copy only the ten percent allowed from books, for instance).

Gunter Eich

One of the issues is that if you copy a poem onto a blog like this one, there's officially a difficulty with copyright, because the poet doesn't gain anything financially from his or her work (though show me a poet who makes a living out of the craft and I'll be pleased to meet them). The other issue, however, is like the boot on the other foot. A huge number of poets barely have an audience of any sort, even in these days of the wide dissemination of all sorts of written material. To have your poem acknowledged by another writer (even if it is only a blog writer like me) is at least a way of getting a little more traction on your poem. There are so many billions of poems in the world (everyone in the world could have at least a dozen or more to call their own if we distributed them evenly), and for a poem to be seen beyond its tiny print run in a book, or its appearance on a poetry site such as The Writer's Almanac (which is a great place to come across interesting poems - and some that seem to me to be barely poems...but that's another issue) is an advantage to the poet rather than a disadvantage.

So with that second argument in mind, rather than the first, I'm including the following poem by Günter Eich in the blog. It was published this translation inAngina Days: Selected Poems (the translator was Michael Hofmann - you can find out more about his translating here).

I originally picked up this poem because I was looking for something that had the word trophies in it. This served the purpose admirably. The poem is called First of January.

Only a calendar would start the day by talking about a new year,
the walls know damn well this isn’t the start of anything new.
Outside, as ever, the clouds blow past, light as hair,
and the wind rattles the windows with the same hands.

March and April will come, and eventually
a day will fill you with its endless hours;
along with the sky and the blown clouds
it will fall into your hands and your house.

Sometimes you catch your face at night in a mirror
obscurely filled with aging—
a faded envelope with unbroken seal,
stuffed always with the same script.

Every day is new and a jubilee,
but pain is a long way off ,
and of the celestial trophies
the only one in your possession is the evening star.

Off to Idaho

2011-12-04T19:34:00.001+13:00

Calling wedding rings (as they're known in New Zealand) wedding bands is something my wife and I might have to bear in mind when we go to the States in January to attend my younger son's wedding.

We'd resigned ourselves to not being able to go, since, when we looked at our finances, we could see that the trip would wipe us out completely, and we'd come back home (if we could afford to come back home) with no resources whatsoever.   Pensioners don't build up their resources quite as quickly (if at all) as people who are earning wages/salaries.

And then, some of the people from our church got together with a plan: instead of giving my son and his fiancee wedding presents (he lives here at present but will be residing in the States after his wedding), they would see if they could raise enough to send us to the wedding - as a kind of 'large' present. And somehow they have.   (I'm not asking any questions about how it was all sorted; I'm just happy they've managed to do it!)

So we're off to Boise on the first of January, where apparently it's likely to be minus something degrees (!) outside. I dare say it's warmer inside, but we're going to take plenty of warm clothes anyway.   Can't afford to wind up as a snowman and woman stuck somewhere in Idaho!

Web hosting

2011-12-03T16:14:00.001+13:00

I haven't checked out the world of web hosting much in recent months; for a while, when I was working in my last job, and had some measure of involvement in whether we should set up a website (as opposed to the one our head office maintained which was, to be it politely, boring, even after it had had a makeover).

So it's quite useful to come across a site that offers you the chance to compare web hosts and their pricing, their time on the Net and their star rating, and also takes you a step further back and gives you an extensive FAQ as to what web hosting is all about, and explains in reasonable detail what it is you should be looking for when you decide you're finally going to set up your business - or your personal history/joys/woes and such - on the Net.

As always with these kinds of FAQs there is something that I've just never heard of before: a Cron job, for instance. Being a collector of interesting words, this one has gone on my current list!

There's also a news page where you can catch up with info that you may have missed - most likely have missed, in fact. I discovered here in an item dated the 1st December, that authorities have taken down 150 counterfeit sites. Perhaps I don't come across counterfeit sites very often because of the kind of things I do on the Net - but it's good to know someone is looking out for us poor little consumers...

This isn't the only news page on this site - there are two or three others, including one that focuses on items relating to search engines. It's good to find place like this, even if you come across them, as it were, by happenstance (another interesting word!)

The Poetry competition I missed out on

2011-12-01T19:19:00.001+13:00

I noticed a competition in the North and South magazine I brought home from my old workplace yesterday. It required you to write a poem in which every lined rhymed with all the others - the poem still had to make reasonable sense. However, it was the June 2011 edition of the magazine, so I guess someone has already won this particular competition. Not that it stopped me being 'inspired' by the idea.

I'm not a man who frequents bars;
Or thinks it cool to down large jars
Of beer; I've never ever tried cigars;
I don't get sweaty seeing big, fast cars,
And consequently have no scars
From crashing and then seeing stars.
What, you ask, do I live on Mars?
Not at all, I've watched the movie, Lars
And the Real Girl, grammar I can parse,
I know the name of the Curé of Ars,
(John Vianney), know that Fars
Is a province in Iran, formerly called Pars,
Can differentiate Picassos and Renoirs,
However, I've never finger-picked guitars
In bazaars frequented by Russian Czars.

Not knowing anything about thyroid imbalance

2011-12-01T14:23:00.001+13:00

My old friend, HitTail, has been taken over by a new group, and they're now planning on sending out either a daily or weekly email giving the weekly keyword suggestions which I'll then use in my blog.   I'm not sure what these are based on, but this week's email has as its suggestions:

the mousetrap study guide
sequoia cunningham dunedin
people wear ties

These are a slightly curious bunch: out of the three only the first brings up this blog on the first page of Google's search results. The other two don't show the Random Notes up at all.   If I put in skinny ties, however, I come up number three on the results (as does the image on the right).   If I put in Sequoia Cunningham (without Dunedin), however, the first result brings up a video called A Severely Exhausting eXercise which was co-directed by a young man I worked with in the play, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, back in 2008. Sequoia is also featured in it.   Thus the coincidences of the Internet.

I have written about all three items, (the Mousetrap one got its own post, almost entirely), but not to the extent that they'd seem to be items that would necessarily attract readers to my blog. It's almost as if I wrote about thyroid imbalance and suddenly people started flocking here. Don't think it's going to happen, but you never know.

Talking of which (thyroid imbalance, I mean) I've only ever come across one person who had some issue in this area, although I think it's not uncommon.   I worked with this lady in the three years before I retired, and she'd had issues with it (alleviated by medication) for many years.   But that's about the sum total of my knowledge of TI.

Still, if thyroid imbalance shows up next week in the HitTail stats, I'll be pleased...and surprised!

Missing

2011-11-30T08:46:00.001+13:00

Yet another report in the newspaper this morning about a missing military decoration. It was on display for some time in a museum that no longer exists.

We've had thefts from the National Museum, cunningly done over a period of time, and only coming to light in the last year or so. That was theft on a grand scale. This newest incident seems to be just carelessness on the part of those who should have been looking after the medal, a Victoria Cross which was awarded to Sergeant Donald Forrester Brown in World War I.

The whereabouts of medals and other military paraphenalia, such as military rings, no doubt, is supposed to be recorded on the National Museum's Cenotaph data base. But there's no record of it.

Which means it could be anywhere: in private hands, accruing value as the years pass - recent auction sales of such medals have reached anything between $227,500 and $1.4 million.

Stepping up

2011-11-29T20:29:00.001+13:00

I popped into Scribes secondhand bookshop the other day since I happened to having lunch with someone at a cafe just down the road, and was looking at the poetry books, just out of curiosity. I was tempted to get a Marge Piercy book of poems, but wasn't sure whether I'd be paying for lunch: it was a choice of one or the other. (As it happened the other person paid for lunch, but I didn't get back to the shop.)

I don't know that I've come across much of Piercy's writing, but it looked fairly accessible while being definitely good solid poetry. I'll have to track her down elsewhere sometime. I can't even remember the name of the book to note here.

What I do remember is that I was checking out some of the books on the upper shelves and in order to do so had to stand on one of those little metal stools that are somewhat akin to a Dalek. And about as stable. I didn't want to hang onto the shelves in case they collapsed on top of me, but I wasn't sure that the Dalek was going to give me much support either. A set of library step stools would have given me a greater sense of security, but I don't think there were any nearby.

This would have to be my only criticism of Scribes, which is otherwise one of my favourite shops. However, it's out of the way of my usual routes, so I don't often get there - regrettably.

There's enterprise for you!

2011-11-28T11:19:00.001+13:00

Matilda Helm, a seven year old self-confessed chatterboxfrom Southbridge Primary School in Canterbury, saw World Vision's East Africa Appeal on television last month and decided to help. In a delightfully down-to-earth comment she notes: "I saw kids just like me eating yuck food and dying and thought it was really unfair."

On the 2nd of November she undertook a rather unusual task: a sponsored vow of silence. Her aim was to raise funds for the children suffering from the famine - the first famine of the 21st century, as it happens.

She was permitted to stay quiet in class by her school principal after explaining in a letter that she was "... sending money to World Vision for East Africa because people there are dying right now".

By taping her mouth shut and writing questions and answers on a piece of paper, Matilda managed to get through the school day without breaking her vow. Some achievement for a seven-year-old!

She says it was hard to stay quiet. "I have lots of friends and they all tried to make me talk!" but she still managed to raise $400. $400 will feed a family of six in the famine area for around about four months.

Source: World Vision NZ

Blankets

2011-11-24T16:56:00.001+13:00

There's a great poem by Barbara Hamby called Ode to American English, in which she does a scatter-shot approach to the marvellous way in which English is expressed in the States.   It's very hard to quote from it because it has no stopping point, but here's a sample:

I miss the mongrel plentitude of American English, its fall-guy,
       rat-terrier, dog-pound neologisms, the bomb of it all,
the rushing River Jordan backwoods mutability of it, the low-rider,
       boom-box cruise of it, from New Joisey to Ha-wah-ya
with its sly dog, malasada-scarfing beach blanket lingo
       to the ubiquitous Valley Girl's like-like stuttering...

You can see the whole poem on the Writers' Almanac site.

This post is about blankets, specifically personalized baby blankets like those on the left, but let's also celebrate whatever we can find out of my digital cuttings that relates to the subject.   One of the writers I catch up with occasionally is Kim Fabricius, a somewhat anarchistic Christian pastor with a wicked sense of humour (and I mean 'wicked' in its current sense of outstanding, but also in the sense of very cheeky). He wrote a Good Friday sermon in 2008 which was posted on the Faith and Theology site this year.   (Fabricius doesn't seem to have a site of his own; most of his material that I've come across has appeared on F&T)

Fabricius is as hard as Hamby to quote briefly, so here's a decent chunk near the beginning of the sermon (in which our theme 'blanket' briefly appears):

This sermon doesn’t have three points, it’s got three words: Lose your faith! (I warned you I would be sacrilegious.) Yes, lose your faith. Lose your faith in God. For as the French mystic Simone Weil insisted, there is a kind of atheism that is purifying, cleansing us of idols. Lose your faith in the god that the cross exposes as a no-god, a sham god. Lose your faith in the god who is but the product of your projections, fantasies, wishes, and needs, a security blanket or good-luck charm god. Lose your faith in the god who is there to hold your hand, solve your problems, rescue you from your trials and tribulations, the deus ex machina, literally the “machine god”, wheeled out onto the stage in ancient Greek drama, introduced to the plot artificially to resolve its complications and secure a happy ending. Lose your faith in the god who confers upon you a privileged status that is safe and secure. Lose your faith in the god who promises you health, wealth, fulfilment, and success, who pulls rabbits out of hats. Lose your faith in the god with whom your conscience can be at ease with itself. Lose your faith in the god who, in Dennis Potter’s words, is the bandage, not the wound. Lose your faith in the god who always answers when you pray and comes when you call. Lose your faith in the god who is never hidden, absent, dead, entombed. For the “Father who art in heaven” – this week he is to be found in hell – with his Son.

Phew! Imagine hearing that piece of fire coming at you from a pulpit...!

Here's another radical person: Tamie Fields Harkin, an Episcopalian minister from Alaska.   She presented a list of things to do if your really wanted to attract young people to your church - and they don't include any of the usual bumpf that's regarded as youth ministry.   Her 19th point is:
19. Make some part of the church building accessible for people to pray in 24/7. Put some blankets there too, in case someone has nowhere else to go for the night.
Sounds like she was anticipating the Occupy movement, and the way in which some churches are suggesting they open their doors to those who'd be sleeping in tents on very cold nights.

Okay, I know this post is very loose in terms of how it's using it thematic material, but just go with the flow and enjoy the contrasts.

Here's an extract from an email one of the Presbyterian ministers wrote shortly after the devastating February earthquake in Christchuch, NZ:

I walked home from what remained of Knox [his church] yesterday afternoon surrounded by scenes of devastation far worse than on 4 September. Whilst visiting a parishioner I spoke with one of his neighbours, whose husband was at that time unaccounted for in the Pyne Gould Guinness building in town. I walked for a while with a barefoot young woman whose workplace in the city had collapsed, and who told me of seeing a woman giving birth on the footpath. Later I passed others heading on foot with blankets and little else for Hagley Park, and wondered how they fared when the rain began to fall a couple of hours after that. Dinner was sausages cooked on the outdoor barbeque; I've drained the leaking hot water cylinder upstairs into several large water containers so can probably manage with that, whatever food there is in the fridge and a bucket toilet for several days.

There's a sense of just getting on with things, of having to; but the quiet desperation is apparent. How do you start to deal with the enormity of the problem. Christchurch is still dealing with it, and has another major earthquake since this date.

Finally, an example of those church bulletin bloopers that appear in emails every so often:

This evening at 7 PM there will be a hymn singing in the park across from the Church. Bring a blanket and come prepared to sin.

Chocolate Cuttings

2011-11-23T15:14:00.001+13:00

Before the Internet came on the scene, I used to collect all sorts of cuttings from newspapers and magazines for use as idea starters for articles. I still collect these, but of course now they're collected digitally, (even when I first come across them in print), and I use Evernote for this a great deal. The advantage of digital collection compared to the old print approach is that the items can be searched.

For instance, I was trying to find some items related to chocolate, because I intended writing something about the gifts that available only at Shari's, where berries are covered in wonderful concoctions of white and dark chocolate (with one swizzled on the other) and almonds - see the example on the right.

One of the items that came up in my search under chocolate was this daft statement from a Facebook friend of mine (he used to live here in Dunedin with his family, and go to our church): French is just English spoken with a mouth full of chocolate.   It's the sort of statement he's prone to at times, but this particular one stuck out as saying something surreal and poetic.

Another item was about the artist, Viz Muniz, who hails from Sao Paulo, in Brazil. In the home page statement about him we're told that he has used dirt, diamonds, sugar, string, chocolate syrup and garbage to create bold, witty and often deceiving images drawn from the pages of photojournalism and art history. A slightly different approach to using chocolate, one might think.   You can see his work on his website, but the reason I originally kept the information was that he was involved in the making of a documentary called Waste Land, which was filmed on the world's largest rubbish dump where an eclectic band of “catadores”—self-designated pickers of recyclable materials - live. Muniz collaborated with these inspiring people as they recreated photographic images of themselves out of garbage. The documentary reveals both the dignity and despair of the catadores as they begin to re-imagine their lives.

A further item was a series of quotes on the addiction to acquiring money. John Cleese was quoted as saying: If I like chocolate it won't surprise you that I have a few chocolates in my fridge, but if you find out I've got sixteen warehouses full of chocolate,you'd think I was insane. Unfortunately I have no idea where this quote came from.

Finally there is an interesting blog post by Richard Beck, a sometimes provocative blogger I read all the time for a while, but haven't caught up with lately (mostly because he doesn't use Twitter!). In this post he discusses the Chocolate Jesus, an anatomically accurate depiction of Jesus hanging as though from the cross, but made entirely out of chocolate. It's a work by Cosimo Cavallaro. When originally exhibited, it upset a number of people, but Beck asks the question: why chocolate?   His answers are worth checking out. Cavallaro is a Canadian-born artist, not a little given to provocation himself. You can see the Chocolate Jesus on his website (the link is under his name above) along with a number of his other works.

Football, anyone?

2011-11-22T20:12:00.001+13:00

There's a site that offers all sorts of football invitations, in the States. I can't quite imagine why you'd need to invite people to football. There seems to be more than enough people go to the games as it is without inviting more.

But plainly the owners of this site don't think that way, and you can see all sorts of examples of invitations you could give out to friends, relatives, and the uninitiated - the unconverted, you might say.   (The idea has a sort of evangelical quality about it.)

Admittedly, the invitations don't have to be to an actual game, but to a party, or a barbeque with a football theme, or even to watch the football in the comfort of your home, surrounded by mates and beer.

American football is a neverending mystery to anyone outside the States; it seems as though there must be some logic to it, and some plan (the movies always give us that impression without actually telling us what they're doing) but at the end of the day, watching this game is like watching a couple of herds of elephants running at each other after bowing their tusks to the ground. And the injury rate is pretty much as high as it would be if elephants were playing.

Still rugby isn't different in terms of obscurities (more obscure than ever with all the changes that have been made) and the injury rate is just as high amongst the professionals - and they don't wear any of the protection that the Yanks cover themselves with.   Are we tougher? Nah, probably just think we are.

Greens and the elderly

2011-11-22T20:07:00.001+13:00

The political party debate last night on Channel 3 brought more Tweets to my Twitter page than any other subject has ever done. Even my son-in-law made some comments. It was all very invigorating, and it hasn't stopped. I don't think anyone made any more sense of anything as a result (not assisted by Paul Henry getting in on the act) but at least everyone was involved.

Tonight it seems the Greens are taking over Twitter, pushing their policy on child health/poverty in NZ. I think their concern for child health/poverty is admirable, but it's interesting that the only person with any concern - as far as I'm aware - for older people is Winston Peters. On the other parties' radar, the older and elderly don't even appear.

I've replied to the Greens tweets about child poverty with a couple of questions about whether they're concerned for older people. No tweets in response, at this stage.

Update on this:
Someone at the Greens has sent me a tweet: We sure are. Sue Kedgley did a report about it last year.

I've now downloaded the report and will have a look at it after Downton Abbey has finished....

Cutting tools

2011-11-22T19:40:00.001+13:00

As soon as you step outside your knowledge zone in terms of language use, you find that English has whole groups of words that mean nothing to you...at least in the context they're found in.

For instance, in the area of cutting tools, there are a whole range of words that aren't in the least bit familiar. They look like English, but they don't sit in my brain as meaning anything to me.   And these words are just group words - within these groups are even more words that are unfamiliar.

Broaches, indexable, chucking reamers, end mills, face mills are some examples. As I said, they're all obviously English words, because we can read them without trying to decipher the sounds, but that's as far as it goes - for me.   (Of course, the same things applies to someone who's never done anything musical: faced with words that are commonplace to musicians, they'll struggle to make sense of them.)

Under Broaches, we have keyway broach bushings. Under the next two headings we have words that are just extensions of the headings, but under 'end mills' [see photo on left for some examples] we have a whole pantheon of interesting tool titles: ball end mills, corner radius end mills, square end mills, to name just a few. Again the words are familiar, but in conjunction with each other don't mean anything - to me.

Under a heading for 'hand tools' we discover some more intriguing titles: arbor presses (this is an American site I'm looking at), gasket punches, spotters and punches, and more.   I'm sure they'd make wonderful words for a surreal sort of poem....in fact I may give it a try.   I attempted my first Villanelle the other day - that's a poetic form, and you find, if you check out poetic form names, that they're even more obscure than those for cutting tools, and include words that nobody uses in everyday language.

Apples with apples

2011-11-21T09:15:00.001+13:00

Okay, I have no professional training in stats. I have had an interest in them over the years, and have done some reading, and worked with stats for three years before I retired.   All still in a fairly non-academic way.

But it really irritates me when news reports use stats to make a case without comparing apples with apples.

Let me be clear. I suspect there is a considerable disparity between the rich and the poor in New Zealand, perhaps (and I use that word advisedly) more than in the past. But I don't have actual figures to prove this. And nor, it seems to me, does Lane Nichols in his article on Stuff.co. nz entitled Revealing the gap between NZ's rich and poor. He throws a number of 'stats' around, but do they make the case he's claiming? I'm not sure.

Firstly, anytime you quote the OECD stats, you need to remember that there are two issues with these: firstly, they're often out of date (Mr Nichols doesn't tell us what figures he's discussing here, it needs to be noted) because the OECD can be comparing stats from 2009 for one country with stats from 2002 for another country. This was something that concerned me greatly when I did stats work over the last three years.

Secondly, the OECD stats from one country will be based on the way that particular country collects them - which isn't necessarily the way another country collects them.   One of the issues we looked at constantly in my last job was suicide. The suicide stats are always some years behind, because they rely on coroners confirming that a person has actually committed suicide.   That's in New Zealand, and is probably the same in similar countries. In other countries suicides aren't necessarily recorded in the same way at all - in some countries suicides can bypass the stats easily.

This isn't to say that the OECD stats are inflated on one hand and deflated on another.   It just means that we have to be careful that we're comparing apples with apples, and unfortunately we're usually not.

Mr Nichols writes about a report from the NZ Stats: The report's 2004 data – the latest available – reveals the richest 10 per cent collectively possess $128 billion in wealth, with median individual wealth of $255,000. In contrast, the poorest 10 per cent collectively possess $17.2b, with median individual wealth of $3200. While the richest 1 per cent held 16.4 per cent of the country's net wealth, the poorest 50 per cent owned just 5.2 per cent.

Let's look at this a little. Firstly, the report is seven years old. We've had a recession since then, and considerable chaos in the world markets.    That's not to invalidate the report, it just needs to be borne in mine.

Secondly it would be interesting to know what the phrase 'median individual wealth' means, especially in relation to the poorest 10 per cent.   What wealth do these poor possess, exactly?   And since this is a median figure that presumably means some of them will possess/own nothing, while some will be comparitely well-off.   Meanwhile, what about the 80 percent (I'm not sure why 'per cent' is the form for Stuff, but I normally write percent as one word) in the middle?    What's their 'median individual wealth'?   We have no idea from this article, because it's making a case relating only to two groups, pitting extremes against each other. Furthermore it doesn't seem to quite tally up with the 99 percent slogan put out by the Occupy movement.

I'm not going to pick this article apart word by word.   One final comment about another statement: But the gap between rich and poor still ranked ninth worst in the developed world in 2008. Again we're not given any stats/information to back this up, and I'm a bit confused as to what 'ninth worst' actually means. In relation to what, or to whom?

Reports that use stats in this way are similar to those 'scientific breakthrough' articles that we often see. They throw around a bit of information, but not enough. 'Cure for cancer' is touted - until we read the fine print. The trouble is the fine print seldom appears in the news reports, as it doesn't in these stats reports.

Pinhoe Egg

2011-11-18T15:53:00.001+13:00

At 515 pages, The Pinhoe Egg is a long book, certainly by comparison with anything else I've read in Diana Wynne Jones' canon.   I work that out to around 118,000 words, which is getting into J K Rowling territory.

This is another in the Chrestomanci series, and although it was written quite late, in 2006, it picks up pretty much from the much first book in the series, Charmed Life, which was written way back in 1977.

I don't know whether it's because I've read quite a bit of Jones this year, or whether it's just that some of her books appeal more than others (I couldn't get past the first in the Dalemark series, for instance), but this one didn't grab me much at all. It seemed all over the place, and there was a point at which I began to think that she'd just had it published without much revision. The writing lacks her usual sharpness, and as the book goes on, becomes downright sloppy.   Pronouns often fail to connect to the character they're related to, and some characters, such as Joe and Marianne's father, are called one thing in some places and something else in others. He also goes from being pleasant to ugly: beginning as a man for whom peace is the be all and end all to being presented as consistently aggressive and rather stupid.

Jones' book often have a kind of viciousness lurking under the surface (Black Maria is a prime example, or the way in which the father is so summarily killed in the first Dalemark book and then left behind, as it were, by his widow), but in this book the viciousness is surprisingly nasty. It's not just the ongoing dispute between the Pinhoes and the Farleighs, but the fact of what they're prepared to do to each other (smallpox is just one curse they send). Furthermore there's the locking away of all the half-seen creatures for centuries by those who should know better, and the cruel treatment of Gammer by his own sons. In spite of Jones' explanations, these things seem to show village people with considerable suppressed hatred for each other.   I suppose it could be that their dark secrets result in them being more vicious, but it's not that clear - to me, anyway.

Chrestomanci and his tribe, of course, are all sun and light, reason and righteousness. They're almost saintly in their ability to be right about everything, and while that's okay - we certainly need some sun and light in this book - they also become a little unbelievable at times. Still they stand in the same vein as several of her major wizard characters: slightly unworldly, too good to be true, but able to fix everything.

I've read in some reviews that the baby griffin is regarded by readers as a delightful creature; sorry, I think he belongs in the same place as the detestable Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace.   Not only is he badly realised - we can never figure out exactly how big he's supposed to be: one minute able to be carried, the next whipping around on his own and causing chaos, the next like a toddler...it goes on.   And considering that he's what comes out of the egg, he doesn't actually play any particularly important role in the book's plot.

And that's another issue: Jones' plots are often very neat and well-constructed. This one seems all over the place. It doesn't help that there's no main character: we swing from Joe and Marianne early in the book to Cat (who was in the first book) and back again, never quite settling in anyone place for long.

Ah well, you can't win 'em all...!

Re-reading

2011-11-18T09:49:00.001+13:00

I remember reading quite some time back about a woman who decided not to buy or borrow any more new books until she'd read all the ones (the hundreds and hundreds of ones) she had in her house. That was her project for the coming year.   I don't know how she got on, but I suspect she found it difficult to resist the temptation of new books.

I've gone through a funny patch in regard to reading: I've been reading a lot of kids' books this year, especially since I retired, but I've also found it quite difficult to get on and read a number of the books I've borrowed from the library, especially the fiction titles. I've found it even harder to read some of the non-fiction ones I've picked up.   Must be a phase.

However, what I have done more of lately, is re-read books. As I wrote in my last post, I've just finished reading a Dale Ralph Davis book for the third time.   But this month I've re-read three other books: William O'Malley's More Daily Prayers for Busy People (I'd re-read his Daily Prayers for Busy People earlier in the year - both of these must be up to their third or fourth readings in each case); Grahame Greene's Our Man in Havana which was a delight, full of wit and satire; and Steve Turner's Imagine, which is about art and Christianity.

You'll note that only one of those is a fiction title, in spite of what I said in the paragraph before that. I also re-read Philip Yancey's Prayer earlier in the year, and in September, Monday the Rabbi Took Off, and, Tuesday the Rabbi Saw Red, both by Harry Kemelman.

Non-fiction books often need a couple of readings to get to grips with what the author is saying, or just to mull over again the points they're making. In fact, continual re-readings over a period of years probably wouldn't do any harm. And it's like catching up with an old friend over coffee and discovering what's been happening in the meantime.

Fiction titles - if you leave them for a few years (and in the case of the three novels mentioned here, it's been quite a lot of years) - often appear completely new: you've forgotten how the story goes, though you have a vague familiarity with some of the incidents, and you find new things that you don't remember at all. Plus you come at the story with a different life perspective.   Age has a few advantages...!

I find the same thing with watching a movie again: it's surprising how much you've forgotten or missed the first time around, and even though you think you know what's going to happen, there are always surprises.   One viewing is often insufficient for most movies (it's too much, of course, for a few!). I noticed with the New Zealand movie, The Insatiable Moon, that I enjoyed it a great deal more the second time around, for instance. You're no longer curious about where the story is going, and you can focus on other aspects of the movie.

Dale Ralph Davis

2011-11-18T08:53:00.001+13:00

I've just finished reading Dale Ralph Davis' book, The Wisdom and the Folly - an exposition of the Book of First Kings, for what must be the third time, I think (and it only came out in 2002).   I've got all of his set of commentaries on the history books in the Bible: they run through from Joshua to 2nd Chronicles.

What I like about his commentaries is that there a wonderful mix of real exposition and application, solid background, good storytelling that relates to the original texts, and humour.   Yes, humour - something most commentaries lack.

Davis is no lightweight - as one of the reviewers quoted on the back cover notes: The range of scholarship is extraordinary (is there any learned book or paper on First Kings that this writer has not winkled out?). And that's the thing. Davis can stand in the ring and box with the best of them. He never disagrees with another writer completely; in one footnote he will castigate the writer for ignoring the text itself and reconstructing it (he has a particular concern about those commentators who claim to be able to read which 'later Deuteronimist' added which verse or line, or rearragned the text), in another he will note that the same writer has made a valuable contribution to our understanding.   He will note that 'many writers' believe that such and such a biblical town was located here or there; Davis will have a good reason for saying that they're wrong...

You can have confidence in Davis, I believe. He's certainly done his homework.   But beyond this he's concerned to bring out the reason why the Biblical writer has written what he's written; why he's left out details that might be of interest; why he focuses on one action in the life of a king and not another. And overall Davis does this very well.

Furthermore, Davis has a wonderful fund of relevant stories: he retells incidents from the American Civil War and from both the World Wars, stories relating to baseball and other sports, and anecdotes from the lives of great preachers and saints. What's the relevance?   The war stories reflect the foolish behaviour of the kings and their warfare in First Kings, and reinforce the message; the sports stories reflect the management, intution, and craftiness of coaches and players and connect that to the way the kings and prophets and others behave in the Scriptural text; the anecdotes remind us that God doesn't change and his saints both need to remember this, and be reminded of it.

I'd love to quote something of Davis' humour, but it's difficult to pick out a line without providing the context in which the (punch)line works. His wit and self-effacing humour pervade the books.

If you've found other commentaries tedious, or obscure, or heavygoing, try out Davis.

Medical help - or not

2011-11-17T14:35:00.001+13:00

A few weeks back we were listening to one of the young missionaries from our church who's home on leave from Papua New Guinea.

If ever you felt you had a reason to criticise the medical help we get in New Zealand, try living in a place like PNG. Some of the stories this doctor had to tell were scary to say the least, and the medical problems are compounded by cultural ones.   The witch doctors may not be so thick on the ground - at least where this person works - but they're still in existence and can have a profound influence on the life of a person; can bring about the death of that person, in fact.

But beyond that are the distances involved in a place like PNG, and the lack of doctors or nurses - or equipment. Here we have the Rescue Helicopter flying overhead several times a day.   There they might have one plane available, and the injured person still has to get to a medical centre (which isn't anything like you or I might imagine).

It's very much a hand-to-mouth existence, medically-speaking, for these staff, some of whom have been trained in hospitals where everything required is on tap. In PNG they have to work out ways to deal with medical issues without the equipment or medication that would help. It calls for considerable initiative, and tactics of the number 8 wire kind, such as reading up on how to deal with snake bites (of which there are many kinds) while travelling in the plane to save someone's life, and then hoping that you understood the approach to take.

I've just been to the doctor's this morning - a mere bus ride away (I would have walked, in fact, if I'd felt a bit less queasy).   Waiting time: ten minutes at the outside (and I got the appointment for 10.30 just by ringing up at 8.30).   It's not always that easy, but it's certainly infinitely more satisfactory than what Papua New Guineans put up with.   Furthermore, I came home with medication which will probably sort the problem out, and it only required a hop, step and a jump along the road to get to the chemist's.   My lab tests will be done in a day - compared even to the UK where you could wait up to two weeks.

There may be a lot of things to grizzle about in NZ, but the medical service, overall, isn't one of them.

Photo courtesy of PACOM

Grimhilda! and HitTail

2011-11-17T12:26:00.001+13:00

I've had a long involvement with HitTail, and have always found their approach to SEO and keywords both intriguing and useful. I haven't written a blog post about them for a while, but have been keeping an eye on my account with them.

Anyway, just checking with them today has been interesting in relation to the musical I've written - Grimhilda!. I thought I'd check out the searches for the musical, and was pleasantly surprised at the number of searches there had been. So I online publicity machine is having some effect, somehow (not just with this blog, but with Twitter and Facebook).

In the last week there have been searches using the following keywords:

grimhilda cast stageworks
grimhilda musical score
grimhilda musical score mrs mapp
grimhildadunedin (in twice in a row)
mikecrowlgrimhilda (I'm not sure that putting all these in one long word is the best approach, but it must have worked, because they found the blog).
mike crowl and stageworks
grimhilda stageworks.

There may have been a bit of an upsurge because some members of the cast have been announced (on Sunday night) and I guess some of the aforesaid cast members may be trying to see what more they can find out about the show, which is fair enough.

The key word, Grimhilda, on its own, has had 30 hits, which puts it in the top forty search words (still some way behind athletes hands, zirka circus and mike crowl). grimhilda stageworks is the next phrase, but it's quite a way down the list, with only 4 hits (not surprising, given its more focused approach); grimhilda dunedin has 3. The other words shown above are all below the threshold.

You might not find these things fascinating, but they bring out the stats-man in me (not the statesman, please note).

Brash and Spong?

2011-11-14T14:31:00.001+13:00

From Toby Manhire's blog on things political in the NZ Listener:

Asked about his religious convictions, Brash said he is a fan of Bishop John Spong. Who he? Why, a liberal, progressive American Christian. And what sort of things does he promulgate? Here he is, from his personal site, on capitalism:

A socially-sensitive, community-oriented capitalism that refuses to allow too much wealth to accumulate in the hands of the super rich and too little opportunity provided to break the bondage of the chronically poor is, I believe, the best economic system for stability. At this moment in America, the gap between the rich and the poor is dangerously wide.

Have we got the right guy, Don, because – never mind.

Hmm.....well Don, if Spong's your cup of tea, good luck to you. You can have him.

The ODT Big Night In

2011-11-13T18:54:00.001+13:00

The Otago Daily Times' Big Night In concert took place last night in the Forsyth Barr Stadium here in Dunedin.   It must have cost the ODT an arm and a leg - several legs, in fact - and they certainly didn't stint on the costs. In fact they're talking of having one every year.

It had a great cast of NZ national and local singers: big names, and up-and-coming names.   And a huge crowd turned out, with many seats filled, and the playing area in the centre packed with families.   Kids had a ball: they were free to come and go in safety, and danced and ran and jumped and did all sorts of other normal kid things.

We had seats in the West stand, directly opposite the stage, which meant that any performers on the stage looked like ants, some in white suits (the ensemble of singers) and some in black suits (the male singers) and some in various coloured clothes (the female singers and dancers).   I can't believe how far away the stage seemed to be. Pity those up in the very top of either the West stand or the South stand. They would have felt miles away from anything.

Fortunately there was a large screen above the stage area which showed things in relative close-up.   We got a reasonable idea of what was going on on stage from this.

However, we had a much worse idea of what was being sung - or even spoken.   For some reason the amplication in the stadium just didn't cut it. It was loud certainly, but it was blurred, somehow.   Unless you knew the song being sung, it was hard to figure out any words, and regrettably, all the marvellous orchestrations (we knew they were marvellous because we could see that aspect on the screen) went by the board because there was so little detail coming across in the sound system.   It was a bit like being partially deaf: everything kind of rolled into one blodge.   I know there were lots of high notes, because obviously all the singers felt this was the only they'd really get across to the audience in a place of this size, but other notes just dribbled away.

It didn't help, of course, that people in the audience treated the whole concert side of things as an occasion to talk happily to their neighbours, or to point out people they knew, or a host of other things. The buzz from the audience was continual, and none of the performers got complete quiet from the crowd.   I guess this isn't surprising in this kind of a setting, and perhaps the performers didn't expect anything else, but for me they eventually became a kind of wallpaper to the whole affair.

Two young singers came on early in the programme: Sequoia Cunningham and Kawiti Watford.   I've heard the latter in the Town Hall and he filled the place easily.   Here he sang Figaro's aria from The Marriage of Figaro.   It sounded as though he knew what he was doing, but there was little clarity because of the sound system. Terence Dennis, who was obviously playing his heart out on the piano - because we could see his fingers zipping around the keys - could only be heard when Watford wasn't singing.

Sequoia Cunningham sounded great, but her accompanist on the piano was almost inaudible too. However, she has a big future ahead of her - that I could tell from her singing of Schubert's Ave Maria.

There were all sorts of other artists: a friend of mine on trombone in the orchestra (and some other familiar Dunedin faces there too); a bunch of dancers who did a lot of rolling around on the floor, but seldom got completely in to the picture on the screen; an ensemble of singers (with another friend of mine in it); bagpipers, Highland dancers, the Glee group (with the daughter of friends in it), the children's choir (with two kids I know in it) the Mayor and the Publishers of the ODT and Malcolm Farry, who worked hard to get the Stadium off the ground. Lots of talent. What a pity it just all seemed so far away and blurry....

Rhyme or not to rhyme

2011-11-11T12:30:00.001+13:00

The following paragraph (pg 163) comes from Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled, a marvellous book looking at the technical aspects of poetry, which Fry infiltrates and invigorates with his daft and witty sense of humour. At this point he's just spent quite some time discussing rhyme, and by dint of using the terrible disastrous William McGonagall poem on the disaster on the Tay Bridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins' Wreck of the Deutschland (Hopkins is obviously a poet he admires a good deal), Hardy's 'The Convergence of the Twain' (on the sinking of the Titanic) and Tennyson's superb (if all too familiar) 'Charge of the Light Brigade' has shown how difficult it is to use good rhyme in a poem intended to commemorate a disaster.

It may strike you as trivial or even unsettling to discuss rhyming options in such detail. I know exactly how you feel and we should address this: we must be honest about the undoubted embarrassment attendant upon the whole business of rhyming. Whatever we may feel about rhymed poetry [Fry enjoys it when it's done well] it is somehow shaming to talk about our search for rhyming words. It is so banal, so mechanistic, so vulgar to catch oneself chanting 'ace, race, chase, space, face, case, grace, base, brace, dace, lace...' when surely a proper poet should be thinking high pure thoughts, nailing objective correlatives, pondering metaphysical insights, observing delicate nuances in nature and the human heart, sifting gold from grit in the swift-running waters of language and soliciting the Muse on the upper slopes of Parnassus. Well, yes. But a rhyme is a rhyme and won't come unless searched for. Wordsworth and Shakespeare, Milton and Yeats, Auden and Chaucer have all been there before us, screwing up their faces as they recite words that only share that sound, that chime, that rhyme. To search for a rhyme is no more demeaning than to search for a harmony at the piano by flattening this note or that and no more vulgar than mixing paints on a palette before applying them to the canvas. It is one of the things we do.

This paragraph resonates with me, of course, because much of my time in the last year has been spent finding that elusive note or chord for the musical I've been writing - Grimhilda! - and trying to find rhymes that make sense, fit and don't take the verse off in a direction that has nothing to do with the plot.

Downton Abbey

2011-11-09T14:11:00.002+13:00

Much and all as I enjoy Downton Abbey - we're about half way through the second series here - I have to say that last night's episode just about took the cake for draining the last bit of sentimentality from the situations.   Mr Bates and Anna were reunited - in a manner of speaking - and had a little love scene out in the half-dark of one of the many yards at Downton, but much more over the top was the ongoing on/off relationship of Lady Mary and her cousin Matthew Crawley.

Mary, who's wonderfully played by Michelle Dockery (I love the way she brings out the sardonic in her lines, in that deep mezzo voice) is constantly torn between deciding to marry Matthew or marry some other bloke (we know this other bloke is no good, but Mary, who also knows this, hasn't yet been able to get past that problem).   At first she was having to marry Matthew in order to keep Downton in the family. Then when she fell in love with him, he'd fallen out of love with her - or given up on her out of frustration; I can't remember now. Anyway, he's not only gone and got himself a fiancee (who's so wispy that she looks as though she'll float away before the series finishes) he's also over in France fighting the Bosch (along with William, the rather doughty young footman who's proposed to Daisy, the rather dopey young kitchenmaid - she's accepted, but not really - it's fearfully complicated).

So of course Matthew and William go missing in France. Mary, who's practically the last to hear this piece of news, nearly faints at the prospect of him possibly being dead, but trouper that she is, she goes ahead and sings (with the sister she's invariably at odds with accompanying her, which gives her the chance to offer yet another sardonic remark) to the soldiers who are recuperating in the Abbey and causing their own havoc.

Right in the middle of the song, of course, who should turn up but Matthew and William.   And Matthew manages to join in the song (with a rather dubious voice - was he dubbed?), and Mary is beside herself, but not for nothing has she been trained in the art of stoicism, and she manages somehow to contain herself. Just.

Meanwhile, the increasingly nasty Thomas (we felt marginally sorry for him early in the second series, but it didn't last long) and O'Brien - who caused her own bit of havoc in the last episode of the first series, but seems to have had a bit of a change of heart - are conniving in their usual fashion, and dropping hints of nastiness to come.   But the curious thing is that O'Brien doesn't seem quite to know her own mind any more. Having Thomas repeatedly saying: You've changed your tune doesn't help. It just points up the degree to which O'Brien seems to be heading for good one minute and heading for disaster the next.   And boy, can she put a damper on things. If there's any chance of offering the put-down, she'll take it.   Why is she such an enjoyable character, you have to wonder?   Keeps us on our toes, I suppose.

I think Downton Abbey is tosh, some to the time, but the assembled cast is so capable, and so artful, that we skip over the tosh and just enjoy the way they delineate these characters.   All thirty or forty of them...

Sign and prophecy and Occupy

2011-11-09T08:36:00.000+13:00

Protest is a form of prophecy, even when the protesters may have no religious or spiritual leanings. It's a speaking to the society about some aspect of the community that is offensive.

In the light of the Occupy protestings/prophecyings around the globe, and particularly in regard to the local one in Dunedin which for some reason has survived the trespass order set by the Mayor and Council (because the police, for some reason, have not enforced it) I found the following paragraph of interest.

A sit-in or march is not instrumental but it is significant. Even when no immediate change in the social order can be measured, even when persons and organizations have not yet been moved to take a different position, the efficacy of the deed is first of all its efficacy as sign. Since we are not the lord of history there will be times when the only thing we can do is to speak and the only word we can speak is the word clothed in a deed, a word which can command attention from no one and which can coerce no one. But even in this situation the word must be spoken in the deed in confidence that it is the Lord of history and His Holy Spirit, not our eloquence or artistic creativity, which will make of our sign a message.

John Howard Yoder
The Original Revolution

Some rambling thoughts about incomes

2011-11-07T10:49:00.000+13:00

In a tweet sent out yesterday, Steven Croft, self-described as the Bishop of Sheffield and a writer, said the following:

Every person is of equal value before God. So there is something wrong in a world where a boss is paid 300x more than some employees.

Now to me there's a bit of a concern here as to what Bishop Croft is saying. Certainly we are all equal before God when it comes to being created humans, responsible for what we do with our lives and all equally responsible for our sins. But I don't think God regards our situation in life to be necessarily equal. Some of us are given power, some are not. Some are given fame, some are not. Some are given obscurity, some skills, some gifts, some a seeming lack of gifts.   God may have set out things that each and every human being should have had the ability to make an enormous difference in the world, but it doesn't appear to have been the case in the actual world we live in.   That may be a result of the Fall (not the Autumn, US readers, but the theological Fall), and if it is, it's something we have to live with. (Things may be altogether different in that regard in the New World to come.)

That's the first point about this tweet. The second is 'there is something wrong in a world' etc. Steven, we know there is something wrong, but it hardly just consists of somebody being paid an enormous amount of money compared to other people.    There are innumerable inequalities in this area: in the last century film stars have invariably been paid extraordinary amounts by comparison with the extras in the same movies. This is because their talent is highly regarded.   We may think they're overpaid, but I haven't yet seen anyone setting up tents and protesting about the money film stars receive.

In other areas of the arts, we find top musicians highly paid for the talents and for the gifts they offer to the public.   The man who moves the piano on the night of the concert is important, but he doesn't get paid an equivalent amount, and wouldn't expect to.

Some top painters, sculpters and others are well paid. Those who supply their materials are not.   I think Steven Croft seems to be promoting a kind of evening out of income with an issue that's only partly related to it.

And then there are footballers, rugby players who get extraordinary amounts of money, often, it seems, for a small amount of actual work. But are we to decide that the linesmen, the referees should also be paid in the same way? Unlikely.

I don't disagree that we're all appalled at the arrogance of bankers and those in the high-flying money-transacting fields. But it began because somebody felt it was right to pay these people for their expertise. It's got well and truly out of hand, and I don't disagree that from my perspective they're exceedingly overpaid. (But then I think many film stars are exceedingly overpaid, too.)

But even that isn't the issue. The issue is that having begun by rewarding good work in the financial field it has become a race to see who can be paid most. In the interim, those being paid these fantastic amounts have done what many people who come into a great deal of money do: expect more money, and thumb their noses at those who have no means to expect more money - those who are paid '300x' times less than the one at the top.   And in thumbing their noses they also begin to do illegal things, wrongful things, sinful things - and not just under the cover, but out in the open where everyone can see.   This is their arrogance, and this is as much what people hate about them as the fact that they get a great deal more money than the average worker.

This hate has turned to protest.   But the protest is more about the kind of 'Old Boys' Network' that seems to encourage the greed and arrogance, and helps out those who have got themselves into financial straits with other people's money, never their own, rather than about the fact that some people get far more money for what they do than others.

One of the difficulties at the other end of the scale is that if you have no talents, no experience, no skills, you have nothing in particular to offer to an employer except your body and what it might do for that employer.   Consequently your employer is entitled to pay the 'minimum wage' because he or she is not getting any great value for money when they employ such people.   For me, this is perhaps a bigger issue than trying to rationalise why talented people get large amounts of money.   How can the employing world help those who start off with nothing in the way of employable skills gain them?   We used to have a strong apprentice system; before that there were guilds that took on young people and trained them. (Now, too often, we train the young people separately from the employment situation and then expect them to find a niche for themselves in the world.)   But apprenticeships are few and far between; many employers can't fund them and the Government, in this country at least, seems to think the apprenticeship system isn't worth putting money into.

I could go on and on. Essentially what I'm trying to say is that Bishop Croft is being too simplistic (perhaps Twitter encourages that). Even the protesters out in their tents are being simplistic (they're focusing mostly on one aspect of the problem).   I suspect finding ways of lifting those at the bottom of the employment pile up and out of their catch 22 situation is more important than getting angry at those at the top.   Their day of reckoning will come - and has been seen to, more than once.

Photo by Images of Money from Flickr.com

Interesting use of horse liniment

2011-11-07T09:39:00.001+13:00

Here's an interesting paragraph from Dale Ralph Davis' book, The Wisdom and the Folly (pgs 142/3). He's talking about disguising apostasy as something genuine, and brings in this anecdotal material to back up his comments...

Whether apostasy stinks depends on how it's pitched. In the 1930s, a horse liniment named Absorbine was plummeting in sales. An advertising man named Obie Winters had the liniment lab-tested, and they found that it would work on ringworm of the foot. With a stroke of genius, however, Winters conjuered a whole new name for such ringworm - athlete's foot. There is such a difference in the way the malady is marketed. Who would want to admit having ringworm even if there was a cure? But "athlete's foot?" One would almost be disappointed if one didn't suffer from it periodically! It carries such positive associations.

Davis is a great writer, scholarly, but without laying on the footnotes too heavily (though there are footnotes and in them he often takes other scholars to task). He's now the Pastor at Woodland Presbyterian Church in Hattiesburg, MS, and at the end of the introduction on the opening page of their website, he writes: Now I must warn you. This church is full of sinners. Everyone who comes here is one. You'll need to remember that if you associate with us – or you may be unnecessarily disappointed.

Mrs Chrissy Johnson

2011-11-04T18:46:00.001+13:00

I find it hard to believe that a post I wrote back in 2007, partly on the city of Boise in Idaho (where the young lady one of my sons is due to marry in January comes from, as it happens, though I didn't know that at the time); partly on a blogger called Raed who vanished off the Net for a few days and caused a global query, Where is Raed?; and partly on a previously unknown young lady called Chrissy Popadics, is still being picked up when people put the search term 'chrissy popadics' into Google.   Even today, my post comes up fourth on the Google search results.

Now something I hadn't realised at the time is that the marriage of Chrissy Popadics and the football star, Ian Johnson is inter-racial and that apparently caused some strife, with a number of threatening letters being received by Johnson after he proposed to Popadics on television at the end of a game.   Johnson is only partly black as it turns out, although if it's anything like New Zealand, if you're partly black, you may as well be fully black. Maori in New Zealand, however much actual Maori blood they have, are still Maori.   It's one of those oddities of life.

The news on Chrissy Popadics, these days, seems pretty minimal, which might explain why that one post of mine keeps getting high into the search results. Google has only just changed the way search results appear: the most recent get precedence; the oldest go down the list.   Which means that Mrs Johnson has possibly had her great moment of fame, and is living happily in obscurity once again.

Azaleas and Blossom

2011-11-02T12:35:00.000+13:00

Two photos of shrubs from our garden, and two of trees out in full blossom a couple of streets away. The first two were taken yesterday, when it was quite overcast. The other two this morning, after rain.