This is a rather wandering piece…

In the 1950s there used to be a recording artist called Ronnie Ronalde (the emphasis was on the second syllable). Ronnie’s gift to the world was the ability to whistle, (and yodel, I've just discovered) not just like your man in the street (never heard a woman whistling in the street); Ronnie could do all sorts of bird calls, and he had a considerable range and a great deal of flexibility. He was very popular on the 4ZB Request session which played every Sunday around lunchtime, so I guess he was pretty popular generally.
For some reason I was reminded of Ronnie this morning. Also in the 1950s cinemas used to show ‘shorts’ – short films on all sorts of topics which appeared before the Intermission. Some of these must have been years old when we saw them, and some of them were extremely cheaply made. One I recall with some sort of strange horror presented a band, which had a man who whistled with them. At one point the man whistled the tune for what seemed like a very long time. He was presented full on, with no variation, and no cutting away to anyone else in the band. A man whistling is not a pretty sight, even though the sound may be okay. For a start he can’t really smile, so the face presents a permanent pucker. This guy didn’t move either, so as a figure in a film he was what you would call, static. And it wasn’t actually that easy to tell that he was whistling. Anyone could have been doing it.
How times have changed. Filmmaking is often frantic. Some films know how to put dancing across – Shall We Dance, for instance – but others, such as Moulin Rouge, are a nightmare of cutting. In the big dance sequences in that film there was so much chop cutting that the dancers could have been dancing or standing still. It wouldn’t have made any difference: the editor was doing all the dancing.
Peter Jackson’s movies are made up of thousands of shots – for better or worse. As David Bordwell was commenting in a book I was reading a couple of days ago, The Way Hollywood Tells It, Jackson sometimes cuts in such a way that you often don’t see the actors’ acted reaction to what’s going on, only Jackson’s version of it - which, in fact, may have been filmed at a different time and place. In Brian Sibley’s book on Peter Jackson, we’re told that an emotional scene between Frodo and Sam was actually filmed in two places, a year apart. The shots showing Frodo speaking were shot a year in advance of the shots showing Sam speaking, though you wouldn’t know it on the screen.
Bordwell says the Hong Kong action films, for all their frenetic behaviour, do actually have scenes in which characters can be seen on screen together, which gives the actors a chance to react in their own way, rather than as the director cuts it.

A little more arty stuff

It's an arts day today. A friend sent me a link to an article that was published in the Telegraph by Michael Henderson on Schubert. It's a bit gushy, but Henderson is obviously a Schubert devotee. I'm not, though I must say I love some of his music. Some of it, as I've said previously, 'rabbits' on a bit - to me. Nevertheless, as I said to my friends, any composer who can write The Trout Quintet, can be forgiven any less than perfect music that he might have written.

You can listen to some samples from the Quintet by clicking on this link at Amazon.com

Promote Yourself! Now!

I’ve talked about the late Lindsay Crooks before in this blog. Apart from being an artist of high calibre, he also thoroughly enjoyed surfing. At this funeral it was a surprise, I think, to the arty people, to find that the church also contained a large number of (ageing) surfies.
But something else was special about Lindsay. He was one of the few artists I know who had marketing ability. I guess Grahame Sydney is another; certainly his work is available in many reproductions and books, but Lindsay seemed to do it with a certain ease. We first met when he walked into my shop one day saying he’d met my wife up at the Health Centre and she’d suggested coming to see me. What he was doing was hiring out his unsold paintings at a very reasonable price for three months at a time. It provided Lindsay with an audience for the works, and the hirer with a certain thrill in ‘owning’ something special for a time, and the opportunity to have a change of picture regularly. All, as I said, for a very reasonable price. In fact the price was ridiculous, but the value of it was that it made Lindsay known. We would never have come across him personally in any other way. As it was, after that we would look out for his work, or go and see it in galleries – eventually we even bought a piece, something unheard of for us.
Artists aren’t, in general, good at self-promotion. Like builders and carpenters and other tradesmen who work for themselves, they won’t to get on with the job. Selling your skills and products is another ‘job’ altogether and many tradesmen and artists don’t have that ability. We have some other friends, husband and wife Wally Crossman and Rosalie Gillies, who are excellent artists. But neither of them is good at promotion, and it’s only in the last few years that they’ve had the recognition they deserve because others have promoted them.
I’ve come across a site that seeks to rectify this issue for artists. It focuses on fine art marketing, and is presented in the form of a blog (like this one). One post offers the following suggestions as kind of marketing resolutions for 2007:

Do read an inspiring book from a great direct marketer. Find out what kind of results other people get from good marketing and sales tactics, and get excited about the subject.
Don’t read books about "brand marketing" if you’re a solo or small business. Brand management is for the big guys.
Do make a note of just one or two new marketing activities you will put into action in the first quarter of 2007.
Don’t spend your money on printed promotional material unless you know exactly where it’s needed (for example, at a trade show)
Do sign up for our free mini-course at the top of this page, if you haven’t
already.

I think this is a great site offering good ideas, and links to other good ideasDisclosure statement

Lewis: quiet - and atheism

C S Lewis writes that the way not to hear from God goes along these lines:

Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. If you must read books, select them very carefully. But you’d be safer to stick to the papers. You’ll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or a snobbish appeal.

From Christian Reflections, pages 168-9 (Eerdmans edition).

You’ll note that television isn’t mentioned here, but it’s possibly because it didn’t feature large on Lewis’ horizon. Nevertheless, it deserves a place – even a place of honour – in this list of great distractions.

I recently came across the Atheists/Atheism section on About.com by accident. The rather arrogant-looking guide to this site, Austin Cline, (I would regard him as arrogant-looking even if he wasn’t running this part of About.com), has an article – one of several – on C S Lewis, in which he asks if Lewis’ theological arguments are any good. At the end of his article, which is designed to show that Lewis wasn’t all he’s cracked up to be, and that he’s only popular with believers, not with anyone else, he says:

Even one of Lewis’ most sympathetic biographers, A.N. Wilson, writes that Lewis "has become in the quarter-century since he died something very like a saint in the minds of conservative-minded believers." At the same time, though, you won’t find professional theologians and sophisticated apologists citing C.S. Lewis or relying on his arguments in their own efforts.
Theology builds upon the insights and accomplishments of those who have come before, but Lewis doesn’t even appear to function as a minor plank in anyone’s platform. This combination of general popularity and professional dismissal is very curious — either the average believer knows something which the professionals have missed, or Lewis isn’t the apologist he is popularly believed to be.

That Cline could regard Wilson as a ‘sympathetic’ biographer is peculiar, since Wilson does all he can in his book to cut away the so-called hagiography, and to make Lewis ‘just’ a man.

Equally, Cline’s point that professional theologians and apologists don’t cite Lewis means nothing. Lewis never claimed to be a theologian; he wrote for the man in the street, trying to clarify theology and bring it into ordinary language. His task was never to produce theology, something he would have regarded as absurd, I suspect. Anyway, apologists don’t invent theology either. They aim to explain the theology that already exists.

It's interesting that all the articles I noted on Cline's section of About.com are defensive: arguments against what Christians say about atheists ('brights,' remember?). There's no atheism on its own, per se. Isn't this just a little curious?

One Man's Faith Journey

James Robertson, from our church, has been cycling through NZ from top to bottom (he’s in the middle of the South Island at present, I think), to raise awareness and funds for Tear Fund. Good on yer, James! James is a great guy, and even though he’s used to cycling long distances (a cycle ride from Dunedin city over the top road to the end of the Peninsula and back again is quite normal for him) this long trip is something out of the bag.
I have to have been wrong, but twice on the radio last night, when I was at work, I heard something in relation to Tear Fund which seemed rather odd. It sounded as though they had given a prize for a couple to go and see a work they were supporting in somewhere (I never managed to catch where) to check out the water project that was going on. And then…the couple were going onto Bali for a couple of days in a luxury hotel! Seemed a bit of irony going on here. Maybe I’ve got it all wrong – I can’t see anything about it on Tear Fund’s site. I hope so.

Campolo/Kendrick Tour

I'm most disappointed to discover that Tony Campolo and Graham Kendrick won’t be coming to Dunedin on their NZ tour. They’re going to Invercargill, but not Dunedin? How can such things be?
I’ve admired Campolo for years: his wit, his storytelling, his utter energy, his enthusiasm for God and his ability to communicate it to others, his intelligence and theology, and his willingness to step out into areas that many Christian speakers avoid - such as homosexuality – and give his honest opinions on the subject. Which usually aren’t the same as many other Christians. (He’d probably disagree with the latest Presbyterian approach to dealing with gay ministers, for example; maybe he wouldn’t!)
He’s a bit scary: he puts your own Christianity in the spotlight and makes you question where you’re at – but that’s okay. We need people with what-might-be-called a modern prophetic gift in the wider church. (Far preferable to those who have a ‘prophetic gift’ that’s always proclaiming doom and gloom for the world in general. Sure there were OT prophets like that, but they mixed it with some hope!) Campolo’s prophetic gifting is to focus on issues within the Body and expect some changes to come. He never says, ‘Thus saith the Lord’, but he might often be doing so, in fact.
Yes, I’d probably like to see Graham Kendrick too, although I’m not sure that he’s written anything startling in the music scene for quite some time. He certainly pioneered a bit of a move in the Christian music scene: some of his early songs were outstanding and very popular with congregations. But some of them are also quite awful – the one called, (I think) God of the Poor, is very earnest, and the words themselves make sense, and deal with good issues, and the tune is not too bad, but somehow it never seems to come off, to me, as a whole. Then again, it doesn’t help to have heard Kendrick himself singing it: he has one of those melancholy voices that don’t record well. (Although, if it comes to that, melancholy seems the ‘in’ thing for Christian singers, especially worship leaders. Don’t you hate that catch-in-the-throat thing they all do? And the kind of sobbing feel they use when they’re ‘talking’ to God in a live worship recording? Where’s the joy?)

Douglas Lilburn

I know Douglas Lilburn is supposed to be one of the greatest composers New Zealand has produced, but for the life of me I can’t enjoy his music. Almost without exception it seems to have nothing I can call a melody, or even a melodic line. Okay this might not be considered any big deal, except that he seems to rely on little rhythmic phrases or small movements repeated again and again, and in the end there’s nothing you can hang your hat on.
His early music almost gets melodic, and then it’s as if he eschewed (word of the day) the idea of melody and decided as time went on he’d go for nothing that struck anyone in the nature of a melody. Now there are plenty of composers who can’t be considered melodic in the first instance, but none of them seem quite to throw melody out the window, the way Lilburn does. By the time he’s in the middle of his career he’s writing stuff that floats around the piano but doesn’t seem to have any beginning, middle or end, and in his later works he’s even tossed that stuff aside and gone for electronic music – which of course makes him very modern and therefore the darling of all those who chase modernism as an idol to be adored at all costs. Even their musical commonsense.
I struggle to like his music, as I mostly struggle to like Colin McCahon’s paintings. I hear the crowd saying both are very good, but I struggle to hear or see it. More on this anon, no doubt!
Just remembered that I have performed Sings Harry with a singer, Brent Read, in the last few years, and yes, there is some music there, but.....
What am I trying to say about it? That it's an exception to my criticism above. Maybe. It certainly has a melancholic quality, but it's also fairly early in his canon.
You can hear some of his music by clicking here.

Me and Trade Me

My wife and I went to Christchurch on Friday, partly to give her a bit of a holiday away from the house (even though she’s been on holiday for three weeks, we’d had to stay at home because I’m working evenings at present); partly to see my daughter and her partner, and her toddler, who’s just begun to walk; and, as an added inventive, partly to dip in and out of various secondhand bookshops and op shops and such on the way to find some books to sell on Trade Me.
We didn’t come back exactly loaded up with books, but there are certainly enough there to keep me going for a few weeks. And it’ll give me a chance to list some new stock as opposed to the items I’ve listed several times before.
Trade Me is surely one of NZ’s phenomena. What other institution in the country (apart from the government, perhaps) can you mention in conversation and everyone else will have had some experience of it? If they haven’t bought on Trade Me themselves, they’ll know someone who has – and they ‘got this great bargain’ – and the details will come pouring out.
My daughter regularly sells on Trade Me and is quite canny with it. She doesn’t appear to be a businesswoman, but when it comes to that sort of business, she’s very shrewd. And within the wider family I think everyone has bought something – everyone! That’s quite extraordinary, when you think about it.
This isn’t an advertisement for Trade Me – or for my involvement on it – as some of these posts quite unabashedly are. But if you’re interested in checking out what I’m selling, just click here!

Searching less far and wide

I just spent a quarter of an hour unpacking a piece of gobbledegook advertising language that appeared in a job advertisement. "Including reporting (standard and non standard) and provider/public liaison, and audit and compliance activities" was just one of the job requirements. Put simply, does it mean: telling the boss what you’re doing if he inquires, being able to speak to the customers in real English, making sure the petty cash hasn’t been filched, and coming to work on time? I think it might.
I won’t be going for this job, somehow; if I can’t make sense of how they talk in the advertisement, how will I understand them in reality? Would I have to translate everything everybody said, or would they talk in plain English?
I came across a phrase today: Vertically Searching for Meaning. This is a whole new concept to me, and again it’s taken me a bit of translating to get my head around it.
Basically, a Vertical Search is a more specific search than something like a general search, such as Google does. Google searches far and wide from its index of recorded webpages, and though it’s superb at what it does, it can also give a lot of irrelevant information. This is neither the fault of Google nor the searcher.
Vertical search engines, however, search a database that contains information related to a specific topic. It’s like the Encyclopaedia Britannica as opposed to a map index to your local city and its environs – though of course the comparison isn’t exact. Vertical searches, therefore, are of much more use to people wanting a particular focus. Thus there are search engines for doctors, job seekers, real estate – and others: I guess some of the ones I’ve talked about in the last few weeks would come into this category. Roughly.
Of course advertisers are interested in these vertical search databases, because it allows them to focus their advertising in a much more specific way. While Google’s adsense ads for the most part align themselves to the topic in hand – for the most part – ads on these databases know exactly what’s of interest and that makes all the difference.
Well, there, now that I’ve explained it to myself, I’m much happier!
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Wonderful sustained visual comedy

Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

Since I first discovered Wallace and Gromit, I’ve been a great fan. I love the detail in their movies, detail which repays constant revisits, and I love the humour which is not only dry and English, but is often subtle, and almost missed.
This full-length feature has all these qualities in abundance, and it has a neat plot which is complicated enough without being complex. But I think what made it so appealing was its laugh-out-loud quality. There were moments while watching this when my wife and I were barely unable to stop laughing because of the sheer silliness and invention in the humour. (Normally my wife has a habit of going to sleep during animated movies, evenin the cinema.) The climax of the film is an absolute delight, and what’s more it’s full of references to recent movies, notably Peter Jackson’s King Kong.
In spite of its animated approach, this is comedy for adults far more than for children. The many jokes, the obvious and the not-so-obvious, will mostly float over the heads of young ones. They’re intended for people with a bit of life experience, and with a residue of background material to compare the humour against. (Keep an eye out for what's behind the vicar, and 'her ladyship' in the church scene.)
Even though there is dialogue in this movie, it’s the silent comedy aspect of it that’s most effective. We couldn’t do without the wonderful comic vocals of Peter Sallis, Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter, but far more of the humour is located in Gromit’s silent facial expressions and his ability to bring home the bacon when all else fails. It reminds me of Buster Keaton’s movies. They had dialogue, but it was only there to move the plot along. The greatest moments are purely visual, as they are in this film, and all the more effective for it.

Something that’s always interested me.

Most of us will have applied various ointments to various parts of our bodies at various times in our lives. The applying is fine, and we expect the ointment to do the trick because it’s been applied to the unhealthy area. But what about the ointment that we have on the hand that isn’t unhealthy, the one that's done the applying? Okay we may wash it off, but for a short time at least, that ointment presumably is going to work on a hand or finger that’s already okay. Isn’t it a bit scary thinking about what it might be doing? Might that finger or hand be even more healthy than normal?

Being Civil

I’ve had a lot to do with recruitment firms over the last few months, since I left my last job. I’ve found that unless you stay on their case, they don’t stay on yours. One reason I got for this, is that they’ve got new people coming in all the time that they have to deal with. A flabby excuse, I say. What’s the point of taking you onto their books if they’re not going to do their best for you?
Anyway, I’ve complained about them enough online already in other places. Maybe some of my complaints are unjustified, maybe not. Maybe I’m just a complainer by nature – which is probably why I write a lot.
The sort of work I’m looking for, pretty much, is general office work. I’m good with figures, data, computers, admin – all those sorts of things. Pity I wasn’t a civil engineer, because there’s a recruitment company in the States who, (I quote), don’t ‘churn’ "through old resumes; we focus on dialing hot prospects and building relationships……CSI makes every effort to customize the search to fit your needs." They sound like my kind of people. They sound proactive. They sound as though they wouldn’t put you on the back burner and expect you to keep bursting into flames to get noticed.
So, if you’re looking for Civil Engineer Jobs or are out to recruit a Civil Engineer (no point coming to me, I’m not civil enough), CSI are your people. They give me confidence – and when you’re out of work that’s something you soon lack!
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The dude has talent...!

Just to prove there's never a new idea under the sun, I discovered today that the idea of Jackson directing Potter has already been mooted - as I should have known it would be. I don't know if the site is still accessible - I had to use Google's cache approach to pick it up, but seems on Petition Spot, back in 2005, someone started a petition to get Jackson to direct the next Potter movie.
Peter Jackson really needs to direct harry potter and the order of the pheonix, harry potter and the half blood prince, and harry potter 7. hopefully you all saw the wonders with what he did with lord of the rings the dude has talent. maybe if he directs Harry potter might actually win the oscars. please sign my petition you'll be helping a awesome book become an awesome movie. plus all of the other directors ruin the books!!!!!!! stick to the books u stupid directors!!!!!
I love the comment: 'the dude has talent'.
And here's a comment on the petition:
Peter Jackson has a great talent that not manydirectors have. He manages to extract the mostcritical points from a book and display itmagnificently on the movies. This can be seen fromthe LOTR trilogy. He also manages to add manyinteresting pieces of the plot that were not foundin the book and adds life to the movie. King Kongwas another great movie. Also, I hope IanMcKellen can be cast as Dumbledore as the currentDumbledore is too aggressive.
Yeah! Go McKellan!

Baldwin St

Baldwin St may be popular with tourists, but it’s not so popular with the people who live in it. Does that make sense?
You know, of course, what Baldwin St is famous for, because you read your Guinness Book of Records, or the Lonely Planet guide to New Zealand. It’s the steepest street in the world, isn’t it!
I remember having an email conversation with someone about this one time, because he claimed that there was a street in San Francisco that was steeper, and set out some mathematical stuff that I didn’t in the least understand, to prove it. Well, whether it is, or whether it isn’t, it’s regarded as being, and that’s enough for me. (Actually I’ve just noticed in the paper this morning that there was a battle over this issue in 2003, and we won!)
However, steepness draws loonies, and with there being up to 20,000 students in the city during the Varsity year, it’s not surprising there gain some additional loonies. (We actually have enough of our own without importing any, by the way.)
In 2001 one loony student ‘drove’ his girlfriend down the street in a wheelie bin (a rubbish bin on wheels) and killed her when they crashed. And just the other day several loonies in a car (littered with booze bottles and such) careened down the street at an estimated 150 kph and crashed into the Hospice at the bottom.
These are the sorts of things that make the street unpopular with those who live there: they hate the drongos who see the street as a challenge to their (inept) driving skills.
Quite honestly, it’s not a street I’d care to live in. I once worked as a survey interviewer, and got Baldwin St on my list. It ain’t fun to climb, I can tell you.

Moving right along...!

The need for self storage is huge these days, with half the world’s population seemingly constantly on the move – and I’m definitely not talking about refugees.
What did people do in the past? Probably what our kids still do: leave all their gear with Mum and Dad. It’s just as well we’ve got a large house. At one time we had all the furniture and most of the belongings of my son and daughter-in-law packed into the room I’m typing this in, packed to the gunnels, in fact. And we also had various other items belonging to the other children, stuff they’d left (and in some cases forgotten about) and stuff they intended to pick up…some time.
Here in Dunedin we’ve got several storage facilities. The old Roslyn Mills, where my mother worked for many years, has now been partly turned into a self storage facility. And it’s amazing how much you can pack into a small space. I remember helping shift someone who’d had most of their stuff in storage. We walked down this alleyway of what was rather like a prison without any little windows in the doors to see the prisoners, arrived at what appeared to be a pokey little ‘room’, and found that it contained, quite happily, a houseful of goods. When we have our furniture stacked around the room, we don’t realise how little the space is that it would take up if we packed it all on top of itself. Not so convenient for the average householder of course, but it would leave quite a bit of floor space free. (To put up a large table-tennis table, as we have.)
Moving.bz (haven’t seen one of those suffixes before) is a great site to figure out in advance where you’re going to put all your gear. And what’s more it has some very good advice on the whole process of moving.
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More news on Peter Jackson

If he directs the Harry Potter series he’s going to insist on them being filmed in NZ. "Not only is Weta Workshops extremely capable, but we have the scenery. Some of the scenery in previous Potter movies has been all CGI. Here we can make a complete reversal of this process, and use real scenery!"
There’s been some concern about him having to drag a large cast all the way to NZ to film the last two movies in the series. One agent particularly mentioned that Dame Maggie Smith is now quite elderly, and prefers not to travel far to make movies. "If she could shoot the film in her own living room, she’d be happy!"
Jackson is not fazed by this. "We could get Andy Serkis to do the part, and then use CGI to turn him into Maggie Smith! It’s quite simple. She could do the vocal part of the role. We’d probably need to do a moderate amount of filming of her, to get the movements right, but these could probably be done in her living room, in fact!"

Trust and faith - dealing with them

In chapter five of Philip Yancey’s book, Reaching for the Invisible God, he quotes Jean-Pierre de Caussade, an 18th century spiritual director: "A living faith is nothing else than a steadfast pursuit of God through all that disguises, disfigures, demolishes and seeks, so to speak, to abolish him."

Yancey adds, "In theory, if not in practice, I take everything without exception as God’s action in the sense of asking what I can learn from it and praying for God to redeem it by improving me. I take nothing as God’s action in the sense of judging God’s character, for I have learned to accept my puny status as a creature – which includes a limited point of view that obscure unseen forces in the present as well as a future known only to God. The sceptic may insist this unfairly lets God off the hook, but perhaps that’s what faith is: trusting God’s goodness despite any apparent evidence against it. as a soldier trusts his general’s orders; better, as a child trusts her loving parents."

One doesn’t have to be a sceptic to think about letting God off the hook: I’ve done it plenty of times myself. But in the end you either have to come back to the point Yancey talks about, or go down the plughole. I’d prefer not to do the latter.

Getting well away from it all

I’m not the world’s greatest traveller, and nor have I ever thought much about staying in popular resorts in a large vacation home close to the beach where the sea spray can be felt from the front door on a breezy morning. (Waxing lyrical here!) Well, part of the reason is that I’ve never had the cash to do this, and part of the reason is that I don’t like moving far from home! My wife, on the other hand, would go anywhere at the drop of a hat – and sometimes I’ve been swept up and taken as a result, to some place I wouldn’t have thought of going. We even decked out our Toyota TownAce once with its own temporary curtains and slept in it in places we felt like stopping at.
But I must say that reading the Gebhart Properties page on the Net is very enticing! And slightly different to sleeping in a TownAce. These are exclusive resort locations in the Hawaiian Islands. The houses have spacious living areas, custom furnishings, and specially commissioned artwork.
One of condominiums sleeps 6 and offers a mere 2,576 square feet of living space with private elevator access, gourmet kitchen, and outstanding views of Anaeho'omalu Bay and Kileaua. Private elevator access….I love it! 2,576 square feet: I’d just about be able to fit into that!
Another comfortably sleeps up to 8 people and features full-sized kitchens and expansive lanais (a verandah or roofed patio), two master suites and a private wading pool. Your own wading pool seems a little superfluous when you’re that close to the beach, but am I complaining?
You can check these out under this link: Maui Vacation Rental. After the kind of miserable winter we’ve had, and the almost equally miserable summer Maui seems worth making the effort for. It might break the bank, but what the heck? I’m unemployed anyway!
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New Peter Jackson Movies?

News has reached us today that Peter Jackson, the renowned director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and the second remake of King Kong, has a couple of ideas in the pipeline for his next productions after he completes his new version of The Dam Busters.
"I’ve been intrigued by the Harry Potter series, and the way different directors have viewed the original books and produced quite different perspectives. I’ve proposed that the last two books in the series be made back to back (those kids aren’t getting any younger, you know) and I’d like to direct them. Of course, Fran and Phillipa and I would write the scripts, as usual."
But this isn’t the only idea Mr Jackson has up his sleeve. The famous operatic Ring Cycle by Richard Wagner is also in his sights. "These aren’t as well known as Tolkien’s trilogy, of course, so we’d have a bit more leeway to play around with the story. Probably Howard Shore, whose music has such a Wagnerian quality anyway, would be called in to do some rewriting of the original score."
The four operas in the Cycle: Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried and Gotterdamerung – translated as The Rhinegold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried and The Twilight of the Gods – are just the sort of epic drama that Mr Jackson has so admirably put on the screen in his previous masterpieces.
"There’s plenty of room for CGI, and maybe even a bit of splatter," he said jokingly, referring to his earlier movies, Braindead and Bad Taste. "No one has ever managed to stage the Ride of the Valkyries effectively. I believe we can make it one of the most hair-raising scenes in movie history. And the descent into the Rhine, and the forging of the Sword. It’s just waiting to be captured on screen!"
Mr Jackson feels certain Andy Serkis would have a part to play in the movies. "He’s done so well at conveying the essential character of Gollum and Kong, that we couldn’t possibly leave him out. He’d make a great Fafner, the brother who turns into a dragon."
Already Mr Jackson’s agents are at work dealing with the rights to these works. Mr Jackson is confident, given his status in the movie world, that gaining the rights will be no big deal.

More Musos

A friend commented that she 'Missed Mozart and Schubert, and Faure in the earlier blog. Well, it wasn't an intentional miss.

I enjoy all three of these composers (though sometimes find Schubert has a bit of a tendency to rabbit on in his piano works). I've struggled to be able to play one particular piece by Faure for many years. It not only has three against two - it was the first piece, I think, in which I encountered this difficulty, and the pencil notes from my teacher are still on the page - but it also has a stinker of a chromatic run at speed, and I'm blowed if I can figure out the sequence of it.

And Faure's Requiem is a favourite of mine, too (in complete contrast to another favourite Requiem, by Verdi, which is one of the all time great Requiems). I got to know it before I went overseas, and then heard that a local choral group was presenting it, in London. (I think my uncle may have encouraged me to go.) It was a dismal performance - but then, it seemed to me that the amateur strata in England was considerably below the skill level of the amateur strata in NZ.

I'm a sucker for coupons!

You might have seen, when shopping on Amazon.com, a note about entering your coupon number here. I’d always thought this was some special deal I wasn’t privy to. However, I’ve discovered today that these coupons are readily available, and not only for Amazon. They’re part of a system of online coupons (rather like the ones you find on the back of your supermarket till tape), and they apply to a wide range of items. Of course, books was what I checked out first. At present Amazon is offering coupons not only on text books, ($15 off $150) but also – rather oddly, considering I always think of Amazon as a bookshop primarily, on kitchen and household items. Once I’d got the bug I started checking out other things: for instance BestBuy are offering 2 DVDs for $20 (remember I’m quoting everything in US dollars here, for once). These aren’t your old hat DVDs that no one can shift of the shelf either: King Kong is there and a range of other recent titles.
Oh, dear, CouponChief is another site to bookmark. That makes about 300 ‘favourites’ so far! LOL
Disclosure statement

Blogged out...almost

In my current search for some money-making projects on the Net, I signed up with yet another blog crowd last night: Blogit. I'll give them a trial month to see how they go in terms of being moneymakers; have a suspicion it'll cost me as much as I'll gain. Quite apart from the effort of writing posts to up to four blogs a day (that's four at different sites, not all on Blogit!) By the way, unless you want to pay for the privilege of seeing what I'm writing on Blogit, I'm afraid it's going to be off-limits.

The writing isn't difficult; it's the keeping up with everything. Some smaller things will have to drop away, things that make so little money a time that they aren't worth bothering with longterm. And then today I received a reject for every single review I'd done on a particular site! Not specific enough. That's vague, isn't it? This from a site that has no account for each individual involved, so you have no idea where your material has gone. Nor does it show what you've made - or in my case, haven't made. Well, they can keep their US$1.50 a review (it was $2.00 when I first looked - they must have seen me coming!)

Dropping the Mail

Ever wondered about those places in movies where the hero picks up his mail in what doesn’t seem to be a post office? Or when he sends it off care of some obscure address that obviously isn’t his own? I’ve never had the opportunity to use a mail drop service, and until today didn’t even realise there were such things in New Zealand. I only came across the NZ addresses when I was checking out a US-based service that’s a directory of mail forwarding, mailboxes and remailing services. For once I could be a person with a reason to post a parcel to a NZ address that isn’t my own, and know where to find such a place. Equally, of course, I could post it to Bulgaria, Liechtenstein, Colombia, or the Seychelles, or dozens of addresses in the States. (The problem then would be to go and pick the mysterious parcel up, but that’s another issue.)
So what is a maildrop service? It’s a secure address, recognised by the postal service, where you can rent a box and effectively use it as postal address. Sometimes it’s an office that will either hold your mail, or forward it on elsewhere. (Convenient if you’re being hounded by someone and you don’t want them to know where the secret map has been stored. You know the kind of thing.) Of course you don’t have to be a man/woman on the run: you can be an ordinary person who just doesn’t happen to have a proper mailbox at the moment, or is away from home a lot, or has a nosy neighbour who insists on checking out your letterbox before you get home.
If only so many of the villains in movies used this system: how much more difficult they’d make it for the heroes! LOL

Disclosure statement

aka Alfred

The Internet use of the Indian word, Avatar is rather odd. It’s been used in its current meaning for years, apparently: as far back as 1985 according to one source. But it’s appearance on Internet forums, such as myLot, is probably more recent.
For those who haven’t come across an avatar in this style, it now usually appears in the form of a picture to the side of a post (a blog post, or forum post, rather than one on the side of the road!) and is intended to convey something of the character of the person writing – this is necessary in view of the fact that in most forums anonymity is the norm, with people’s real names hidden behind user names.
MyLot’s avatars can be one of your own pictures, and for me that’s preferable to some odd cartoon, or computer-produced job. On the other hand, on another forum where I sometimes write, Paypost, you can choose your own avatar from a fairly limited selection available. The closest picture to my way of presenting myself online was Alfred, the butler to Bruce Wayne, aka Batman. Since I tend to write what might be classed as ‘stuffy’ posts, ones that try to bring some sense to posts that consist of nothing but the ‘I hate politicians’ type of nonsense, Alfred isn’t too bad an avatar. But maybe I should fool everyone and go for Bruce Wayne instead…

Thomas Merton

If you find God with great ease...perhaps it is not God that you have found.

Thomas Merton, quoted in chapter two of Reaching for the Invisible God, by Philip Yancey.

I've begun to read Yancey's book again, after having felt for some time that it wasn't his best. In fact, it's as good as most of his work; I probably wasn't in the right place to read it last time. And the fact that it's greatly about 'doubt' is very helpful to me at present, when I'm struggling with this very issue.

Links to the left of me, links to the right of me

I can’t say the Optics Planet site is the tidiest site I’ve ever visited, nor is it the most pleasantly laid out. It’s aim is to get on with the job and sell. It’s like one of the old-fashioned stores - gun shops and fishing shops still tend to go for this style - where all the stock is on display and all crammed together in as little space as possible. Fishing rods sprout like supergrass, and tackle swarms; leggings hang like dried seaweed, and there are cases and cases of flies (and sometimes a few flies with legs as well). Gunshops are a bit tidier, on average, but they usually sport enough guns to give you nightmares, and bulletsbulletsbullets and shellsshellsshells.
Optics Planet is the same: its opening page has more words per screen than anything I’ve seen in a while, and though there are pictures, they’re almost nudged off the page by more words. Practically every word is clickable – so thick on the ground are the links that you’re likely to click on Butler Creek and end up in Coronado. (Butler Creek, for those need to know these things, deal with rifle scope covers, slings, binocular straps etc – Coronado is into things telescopic.)
Optics Planet also sells atn scopes– go on, check them out! It’s a site that’ll keep you occupied all day…!
Disclosure statement

Some more on Comments

I don’t get many comments on my site, and of course they don’t appear unless you click on them. A few are relevant to the post they’re attached to; most appear suspiciously irrelevant.
Here’s one that seems like a compliment…with a sting in its tail.
"You really have some interesting stuff on your site. keep at it.xenical."
This one seems to warp off into some other space/time continuum:
"Perspectives on Crisis Vary As Worshipers Refill PewsLA PLACE, La., Sept. 11 -- Willie B. Jones couldn't contain his excitement. Standing with his wife, Loretta, at New Home Ministries, Jones was attending his first church service since Hurricane Katrina swept ...I like your blog! Hey, if you're interested in health and healthy kid snacks recipe, you might like to visit my healthy kid snacks recipe - it's all about healthy kid snacks recipe. Thanks!"
And this one is over-the-top complimentary – and has a slight brain-stop in the middle:
"Another great blog man! What a 4 you are! I couldn't derive half the fantastic ideas that you come up with.My stepping stones garden site is off topic but still noteworthy. Why aren't you in advertising or better yet a "think tank". Can you teach this kind of creative thinking? Is it something you were born with? Keep the fabulous ideas comming! [sic]"
As does this one…
"Hi, I was just blog surfing and found you! If you are interested, go see my best vitamins related site. It isnt anything special but you may still find something of interest."
And I got a whole series of this kind. Apparently private road construction is very important!
"Chinese bloggers poor, students: surveyA survey of Chinese bloggers published by Sohu.com and the Tsinghua University has found that Chinese bloggers are either poor, or students.Find out how you can buy and sell anything, like things related to private road construction on interest free credit and pay back whenever you want! Exchange FREE ads on any topic, like private road construction!"

Ian McKellan

There was Ian McKellen's playful quip during Christopher Lee's first day of filming in the Isengard gardens. In a scene later dropped from the film, Gandalf spots a couple of orcs scuttling amongst the trees. 'Orcs?' Gandalf was to have asked in astonishment. 'Servants of the Enemy in Isengard?' To which Saruman replied, 'Not his servants - mine,' a first indication that Saruman the White was not all that he seemed.

On one take, Ian revised the line to, 'Orcs? - And so far from Auckland!'

From chapter nine of Peter Jackson: A Film-Maker's Journey, by Brian Sibley.

Sullivan's Dam

It’s something like 13 or 14 years since we last went to Sullivan’s Dam (near my home town of Dunedin). I can remember that my younger son was under ten years old, and he’s now 23. As dams go, it’s nothing to write home about, being more of a small lake towards the top of Mount Cargill, with a run-off going off somewhere that we couldn’t see. But it’s surrounded by bush, there’s a pleasant track around the perimeter of the dam, and now there’s also a choice of three walks up the hill. (I discover, from Wikipedia, that it's actually what's known as a defunct dam, as is the nearby Ross Creek Reservoir.)
My wife and I opted for the shortest walk, the ten minute one, although the climb upwards felt rather longer than that. It’s been laid out with wooden ‘steps’ – steps in the sense that some of them are a metre long at least, and others are quite short. Then there are wooden squares filled with largish stones, and in some cases just plain old forest floor.
Fortunately we continued on until we got to Calvert Dell (at least I think it was Calvert, but I’m a blogger, not a reporter) and that made the trip worth doing. You reached what seemed to be a bit of a peak with the sign naming the place, and thought you were there, but more steps led down. It turned out the Dell was below where the sign was, and delightful. A lovely thin waterfall down a sheer rock above three metres high, covered in moss and ferns. At the bottom a small pool leading off to yet another little mountain stream. There was something magic about it. When I say it reminded me of something in a movie, I don’t mean to undermine the beauty of the place. It’s just that movies often capture the beauty of something like this better than I can convey in words.
On the way up the hill we were adopted by a fantail, which flickered and flittered in the branches just above our heads, obviously quite comfortable with human company. It showed its tail off frequently, as if it had nothing better to do, or, being Sunday, it thought pursuing more worksome tasks could be left for another 24 hours.

Web hosts, past and present

Cheap website sites come and go in New Zealand, and of course the same thing applies overseas. We began life on the Net with a tiny company called earthlight.co.nz which was run from a shoebox in those days (a small room under a restaurant which was called, in those days, Ruby in the Dust. Like most current restaurants/bars it’s changed its name at least once since then). earthlight had a competitor called es.co.nz (could you get a domain name much smaller than that?) which was run by a Dutchman, as I recall. earthlight and es combined or ate each other up or something, and we had an es address for some time until it, in turn, got eaten up by ihug. earthlight still exists, but the American/New Zealand family that made it have gone their separate ways. In the early days we could call them up if we ran out of time on our account, and they’d fix it over the phone. We’d then go into the shoebox and pay in hard cash the next day.

At a later point the shop I worked in had a hyper.net.nz address. hyper.net.nz was run from a bedroom – in fact, a bedroom in the flat my son was living in at the time, which is how I got to hear about it. hyper.net.nz eventually got eaten up by orcon, but again in the early days we had real hands-on support. If I had a problem, the host himself would drop everything, zip around to the shop (all of two minutes travel) and fix it on the spot.

Ah, the joys of really little hosts.

What brings all this to mind is a site I came across for cheap ecommerce hosting where you will find ‘web hosting provider companies that offer great services with budget & affordable prices, as well as Daily & Weekly expiring domain name lists that have traffic." And the prices, compared even to the best of NZ prices are pretty good: $6.95US a month and similar. That equates, at the moment, in NZ dollars to about ten dollars a month. Even with the best of companies in NZ I don’t think anyone’s quite got it down that far.

Back in the earthlight days we use to pay by the hour, believe it or not. It was a dollar an hour, if I recall. It didn’t take long to use the hour up either. The very first time we tried to go on the Net we couldn’t even get on for an hour, which was frustrating, to say the least.

I’m intrigued by the expired domain names. I guess someone has set up in great enthusiasm, and then life has gone off somewhere else, and they’ve followed, and that’s been that; one forgotten domain name. But then perhaps some people’s enthusiasms are stronger than their endurance. Here are some (sadly) forgotten domain names. Don’t they inspire?

knowyourcocktails.com
galleryofgreats.com
redveterinaria.com
flirtnet24.com

Could I really make use of any of these, especially the first and the last (although both might draw more people to my blog than my current title does!) And there were some rather more explicit ones listed as well, which might no doubt draw the crowds but might disappoint the same crowds when they arrived! LOL

Steven Johnson

The Apprentice may not be the smartest show in the history of television, but it nonetheless forces you to think while you watch it, to work through the social logic of the universe it creates on screen. And compared with The Price is Right or Webster, it’s an intellectual masterpiece.

Steven Johnson, in Everything Bad is Good for You, page 99 of the Riverhead hardcover edition.

I guess my mindset about movies is that I feel like film is a dead medium. With theatre you’ve got accidents that can happen, performances that can change. But film is a recording. So what I try to do is infuse my screenplays with enough information that upon repeated viewings you can have a different experience. Rather than the movie going linearly to one thing, and at the end telling you what the movie’s about – I try to create a conversation with the audience. I guess that’s what I’m trying to do – have a conversation with each individual member of the audience.

Charlie Kaufman, who wrote the screenplays for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, quoted in Steven Johnson’s book, page 164.

More on Boise

Some time ago, when the Iraqi war first started, there was a briefly famous blog, called, if I remember rightly, Where is Raed? Now, rather oddly, that phrase became a kind of catch-cry around the Net when Raed himself disappeared for a few days, after having reported on life in the midst of all the bombing and fighting of the first days of the war. (Remember, those were the days when we thought it might be over in a couple of weeks.)

I can remember myself feeling some emotion about the fate of this guy, as did thousands of other bloggers around the world. Well, Raed resurfaced as good as new, and is still going strong. Raed still gives some interesting insights into life in Baghdad, as he always has done.

Which leads me in a very roundabout way to my next point. Boise again. What, that unpronounceable spot?

Yup. Boise got in the news recently for a similar reason that Raed did. Well, sort of.
Someone called Chrissy Popadics has found Internet fame not because of who she is so much as because of who she’s affianced to. (Always wanted to use that word!) Her man is the Boise State Union’s star running back Ian Johnson (of the Bronco football team). His team had a stunning win the other day, with the result that Johnson became an Internet star; that is, searches for him rose a mere 1401%. Johnson proposed to the previously unheard of Chrissy Popadics, a cheerleader for the team, at the end of the game, and the rest is history. Chrissy Popadics suddenly became a face and a name across the known world. In fact, she may have outdistanced her fiancé in the search engines.

Life in Boise is obviously never dull. In fact it’s so un-dull that people are moving there by the truckload. You wanna buy a house in that unpronounceable place? Better get in quick, because it’s a sellers’ market, and you’ll be lucky to find anything under half a million, so Boise Real Estate tells us. The picture to the side is a half a million dollar (that’s US dollars) house.

Disclosure statement

Boise - in Idaho, you know?

Boise – heck I don’t even know how to pronounce the name. There seems to be an awful lot of dispute about it, especially by outsiders. (Of which I am one.)

Boise, in Idaho, ya know? Anyway, some pronounce it boy-zee, and some boy-see. I would have took one look at it and been very Gallic and pronounced it bwahzz, but plainly I’m in the minority there.

What do I want to pronounce it for anyway? Well, it’s good to go through life saying words the way they was meant to be said, ain’t it? And who wants to be like those guys in the Bible who missed out on a few more years on the planet by getting Shibboleth wrong (or was it Shibbolet?)

In one blog I came across, there seems to be a further option to the pronunciation: Boyz. As we’re told here: "I told him I was headed to Boise City, being careful to pronounce Boise as "Boyz" as I was instructed by the manager at the KOA we stayed at previously. He gives me directions in between puffs on his cigarette. I thank him for taking the time to stop."

So there we go: four options so far. Any more on the horizon? The interesting thing about the boy-see, boy-zee thing is that we have a friend, originally from South Africa, who delights in calling her seven boys collectively by the name boys-ee. Totally irrelevant piece of information, but I thought I’d fit it in somewhere.

Teens, suicide, and safe driving

I stood outside my house with two of my neighbours the other day discussing the tragedy of teens committing suicide. Apparently there was an Internet ‘pact’ made by about twenty local teenagers to commit suicide on Christmas Day. Horrific. Thank God it didn’t go ahead, for whatever reason, but one of my neighbours was going to a tangi for one teenager who did commit suicide at Christmas. And talked about another who’d killed herself because of text message bullying. The girl who’d done the most bullying had turned up at the tangi for that girl, which my neighbour thought was actually brave…but then had killed herself a few days later.

It’s unbelievable. The other neighbour and I felt it was that these kids don’t have a sense of the reality of death, that once you’re gone, you’re gone. I remember years ago a boy hanged himself because he’d had an argument with his father. Hanged himself! Why would you go and do that to spite someone? There’s some strange evil process at work in all this. I feel that it’s more than just kids deciding this is the thing to do. Behind it, I sense, there’s a supernatural factor that’s inciting this kind of unreasonable behaviour.

And then there are kids who kill themselves on the road. You can kind of understand this better: kids have far less judgement in cars than more experienced drivers. They have a sense of being bullet-proof, and time and again they’ve proved their not. I noted that there was a site in the States where they have a number of tips for teenage drivers. Getting the teenagers to pay attention is, of course, the issue.

The site was brought to my attention by a car insurance company who offer a cheap car insurance quote. They offer the ability to shop for car insurance – a kind of brokerage service online. They also have a list of interesting question and answer topics: Can auto insurance save the environment, for instance, which is ‘reprinted’ from an article in the Charleston Gazette dated 28th December, 2006. Worth a look.

Now here’s a challenge. This was one of seven tips for doing better with writing in this new year. It comes from the EzineArticles newsletter.

"Start with your biggest goal and then chunk it down. Example: If your biggest goal is to produce 1,200 articles this year (100 per month, every month), work it out backwards as to how many per week, per day and per hour you'll need to produce to meet your goals. Are there other ways to meet your goals than to produce them all yourself personally?"

100 per month? 3 a day? What sort of quality are we talking about here? Okay, I can write several blog pieces a day if I want, and maybe an article or two, but 3 decent pieces a day is quite something. Although with being able to write at will on the Net these days, I suppose three relatively interesting pieces isn’t beyond the realms of possibility. Maybe it’s looking at it from a ‘biggest goal’ point of view that’s the problem. Three pieces in three different blogs a day isn’t impossible at all. On the other hand, if I was thinking in terms of three articles to be published in the normal mainstream magazines, I’d be struggling to get this together, as, I think, would any writer.

Sam Hunt

I don’t read Sam Hunt very often, and sometimes I find his ballad style not to my taste, but these are two quotations I jotted down ages ago which still appeal.

I tell him, child, look
these questions that you ask
have answers no man knows –
man writes many a book
just like he wears a mask.
Yet still the night sky flows.

From Song for Tom by Sam Hunt.

Storm is coming in that crazed rustle of leaves, the frenzied laughter of the seagulls skidding spread-eagled on the light. Like ice setting, the light sets hard.

From Plea before Storm, by Sam Hunt

Whether it's the weather or what

In the paper this morning there’s a report about a number of well-known New Zealanders called themselves the NZ Climate Science Coalition saying that they want the Government to set up a Royal Commission investigating the reality of climate change, that is, whether there really is global warming, or whether the information we’ve been getting is ‘incomplete, inaccurate and biased.’

Strong words. They say that the data from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) released this week actually bears against the idea of global warming, rather than giving support to it.

I must say that I find the whole concept of global warming a matter of concern, more than global warming itself. There are too many sensible scientists saying things that disprove global warming – in opposition, of course, to a large number who say global warming is a reality. After the Millennium bug, and the fizzer that bird flu has been, it’s hard to know whether we’re being driven by some agenda that wants to keep us in a permanent state of ‘the sky is falling’. As I remember reading somewhere, it’s only a few decades since scientists were concerned that the earth was cooling.

Whatever the case, no doubt those who have their investments in safe things like gold and silver will come sailing through. Gold investing is still regarded as one of the world’s ways of keeping afloat through thick and thin, through global warming and global cooling, through bird flu and SARS and everything else that we’ve been battered over the head with recently.

Maybe it’s time to invest in gold!

On holiday - sort of

Because it was such a great day, and because my wife is on holiday and rather fed up about us not being able to go away, (I'm working in the evenings) we went for a ride down the Harbour (the Otago Harbour, that is, for those who don't I know I live in Dunedin, New Zealand). Lovely and hot for the first time in ages, with just the gentlest of breezes. We drove up into Roseneath, that sort of bump that sticks out into the Harbour at one point, and found what at first appeared to be a tiny children's playground (a tiny playground that is, not one for tiny children). Further down there was a seat overlooking the Bay and the bush and the houses. Just perfect. We sat and read and semi-slumbered, and answered a rather odd text from my son before deciding we needed a change.

Drove into Port Chalmers, which was mostly closed because of the holidays and then on down to Carey's Bay, which is about a kilometre further on. The Carey's Bay hotel has been much renovated and improved, and boasts three original Hoteres in the bar area, and a Lindsay Crooks in the smaller room off the side. Hotere, of course, is one of NZ's top painters (though I
can’t say he's a favourite of mine), and his work is extremely valuable. He lived at Carey's Bay for many years - and fought the proposal to bring a smelter to Aramoana, just down the road.

Lindsay Crooks was personally known to my wife and I. A gentle, friendly real bloke of a painter, who was just as happy surfing. His paintings are all over Dunedin, and we have one ourselves, along with a host of postcard sized reproductions. Lindsay died a couple of years ago from a terrible brain tumour. He was only in his forties.

We had a cappuccino each in the hotel, and asked if we could perhaps have a sandwich as well. The sandwich, when it arrived, turned out to be a wonderful mix, on a plate, of two fresh slices of bread, bits of ham, and a great salad covered in oil. Delicious! A real bonus, since we'd been expecting the usual white bread with a slice of ham and a bit of tomato. We think the cook went a bit mad, because it wasn't quite the time of day to get a sandwich apparently.

Bookkeeping for small businesses

Late last year I started using MYOB for keeping track of payments and receipts in the small home business I’m doing. (When I say, ‘small’, by the way, I mean small.) I’ve had some accounting experience, more on the bookkeeping level, so I found my way around it fairly well, although there some moments when I could have done with someone sitting at my elbow telling me what to do next. They have an efficient email help service, but to keep that up month after month would have cost me more than the (very small) business was worth at this point.
One of the small business ideas I had, and have temporarily put on the shelf, was to do bookkeeping for clients who find this a pain in the course of the ordinary work, or who just don’t have enough time at the end of the day. Someone else has had the same idea, and is obviously doing a good job with people like those I was thinking of, people who’d prefer to get on with the hands-on tasks rather than the paper chase ones. This guy does small business accounting using QuickBooks rather than MYOB, and has a number of tips on his site to help people using it - and his rates are pretty good. It’s given me an idea of how much I could charge, if ever I pick that idea up again from the corner I’ve stowed it in!

Disclosure statement

Henry James II

Mrs Touchett might do a great deal of good, but she never pleased. This way of her own, of which she was so fond, was not intrinsically offensive - it was just unmistakably distinguished from the ways of others. The edges of her conduct were so very clear-cut that for susceptible persons it sometimes had a knife-like effect.

From Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, chapter three.

More on money

A few posts back I talked about a site in the UK I’d come across that was a kind of broker in the credit card field. It’s the sort of thing we don’t appear to have, as yet, in New Zealand.
Now I find there’s a kind of broker site for loans. I guess this might be a more common situation (online brokerage for loans, that is) but if it is, I haven’t come across it. Then again, I haven’t been looking for loans lately either! The only kind of thing I’m aware of in this field are those who broker mortgages, and they’ve been around for a while.
What seems good about this site is that they’re not blatantly looking to ‘sell’ loans to the reader. They have some very helpful articles on what sorts of loan are best for you, and what loans not to go for. I’m fortunate in that I haven’t had to borrow money for some time (apart from the never-ending mortgage – something that would have been finished years ago if we hadn’t added an extra storey on top, or built in an aluminium window at the front of the lounge, or paid off one of essential motor vehicles) but I guess there are plenty of other people who find the idea of a loan something to consider.
What I hate are those companies that advertise on tv that they’ll give you a personal loan no matter what your circumstances; they seem to be happy to lend to people who are already in financial straits, or who can’t get loans anywhere else (usually for the obvious reason that they can’t afford to pay them back) or who have a poor credit rating and so on. You wonder what sort of thing a company like this holds over the poor person’s head at the end of the day.
And then there are the companies that will cover all your other loans; just one payment a month instead of several. Yeah, but how much is that payment, and how much is the interest. I’m not even going to check it out because my suspicion is that it’s high.
I note that the site, loanwize.co.uk, has an article on avoiding using student loans. This is something I tried to get my children to think about before they dived into them. I succeeded greatly with the youngest of them (after the others found themselves in the student loan trap) but eventually even he succumbed to it. But I must give him his credit, he’s paying it back as soon as he earns again – at least that’s what he’s told me!
Disclosure statement

More on Dawkins...and some Bryson

I find Richard Dawkins’ enthusiasm for Evolution to be overwhelmingly evangelistic. He admits he’s a bit of an evangelist, but more in a negative way, trying to draw people away from mainstream religion into ‘belief’ in there not being any sort of supernatural world, or any God.
But Evolution seems to me to be full of holes. Okay, if I quote the difficulty of the eye, we’ll have scientists coming forward and telling us that the eye isn’t perfect in the way it’s formed, so therefore it couldn’t have had a designer. I could counter with the (rather weak, I admit) argument that perhaps these same scientists haven’t yet discovered why the eye has those apparent faults in its design.
I like what Bill Bryson says in his book, A Short History of Nearly Everything (pg 255 in the hardback edition): "We have a paradoxical situation. Proteins can’t exist without DNA and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume, then, that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so: wow."
The same argument, it seems to me, relates to the whole sexual function of 99% of creatures on the planet. If, in the very earliest of times, the smallest unit of life split happily in two and kept on doing so, then why was there ever some mutation that caused one of these units to require another unit in order for a third unit to arise? (And anyway, doesn’t mutation give you the idea of something irregular in a regular system, rather than the other way around?)
At what point did two identical creatures (for want of a better description) mutate to the degree that one couldn’t do without the other? Even more extraordinary, surely, is that eventually one formed a penis and the other a vagina, and from then on they needed each other. Doesn’t this strike you as a belief system that requires more faith than one that requires you to believe in a God?
As Paul Davies writes – he’s quoted by Bill Bryson on the same page of the book – ‘If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?’ I don’t think Evolution has ever answered this question. Instead, it by passes it with the idea that things happened over a very long time.

Keeping track of those employees...what a job!

Having not long started a new job, albeit part-time, and working now with at least 30-40 other employees, (I’m not sure how many there are as they come and go on some as yet-undiscovered-roster system), I can imagine the nightmare the boss has in trying to organise these people: their days on, days off, special leave (such as bereavement, as I had to have the week after I started!), their holidays, their bonuses, you name it.
At the moment the boss seems to do this all on multiple pieces of paper. Poor her!
I came across this excellent site where you can buy employee review software to do this sort of thing for you. Loved the video, which didn’t assume you were the world’s slowest reader. It allowed you enough time to read, and then got straight on with the next screen. There’s nothing worse than a video that takes forever. (Especially ones that don’t have words at all!)

More disclosure and some comments

You’ll have noted the rather large disclosure statement a couple of posts back. I’ve been advised this is necessary in view of the fact that some of the posts on this site are related to products that have links to the relevant sites. I’d have stuck it off on a separate page somewhere but I haven’t quite got round to figuring how to do that…

It's been great to have received a couple of comments on one of my posts recently: the Gareth Farr one, to be precise. Really appreciate those. Some people do read this blog...so there!

That destructive ANZ man...!

Disclosure policy
Something that really bugs me about the latest ANZ credit card ads is this. We see a guy – and he looks like a really nice guy - happily chopping up credit cards with shears, in a shredder, with a chain saw, and even burning them with a blow torch. And the reason he’s doing this? So he can tell you that you can get rid of your old credit card by swapping it over to ANZ’s card and saving yourself a lot of interest in the process.
For six months.
But if, as I do, I already have an ANZ credit card, do you think I can get that same sort of low interest figure. Don’t be silly. If I asked for that, I’d find that same nice man chasing me down the bank corridors with his shears, chain saw or blow torch.
If I complained that such a policy is unfair, I’d probably wind up in the shredder.
I see that people in the UK can go to a site for credit card advice, that is, they can find out where to get the best deal on credit cards, rather like a mortgage broker. I don’t suppose it’ll be long before we have something similar here in NZ. They also offer news about changes and such in credit cards, something that you don’t really hear about here, where the only ‘news’ you get is advertising news, and that ain’t likely to be too objective!
I think I’ll include their site in my favourites section under ‘financial’ and keep an eye on things. It might be surprising what I’ll learn!

Richard Dawkins

"Being atheist is a bit like being gay."

From an interview with Giles Hattersley, first published in the Sunday Times in relation to Dawkins' new book, The God Delusion.

Actually I suspect being atheist is worse than being gay, because there are probably far fewer atheists, in truth, than there are gays.

And here he is on the use of 'bright' as a word to use instead of 'atheist'.

"A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word "gay". I used to mourn the loss of gay in (what I still think of as) its true sense. But on the bright side (wait for it) gay has inspired a new imitator, which is the climax of this article. Gay is succinct, uplifting, positive: an "up" word, where homosexual is a down word, and queer, faggot and pooftah are insults. Those of us who subscribe to no religion; those of us whose view of the universe is natural rather than supernatural; those of us who rejoice in the real and scorn the false comfort of the unreal, we need a word of our own, a word like "gay". You can say "I am an atheist" but at best it sounds stuffy (like "I am a homosexual") and at worst it inflames prejudice (like "I am a homosexual").

Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell, of Sacramento, California, have set out to coin a new word, a new "gay". Like gay, it should be a noun hijacked from an adjective, with its original meaning changed but not too much. Like gay, it should be catchy: a potentially prolific meme. Like gay, it should be positive, warm, cheerful, bright.

Bright? Yes, bright. Bright is the word, the new noun. I am a bright. You are a bright. She is a bright. We are the brights. Isn't it about time you came out as a bright? Is he a bright? I can't imagine falling for a woman who was not a bright."

From an article originally published in The Guardian.