When in Rome

I've never read any of Ngaio Marsh's murder mysteries before, though I think I began one many years ago and abandoned it before I'd read more than a few pages. Can't remember why, but think it was because it seemed at the time a bit dry.

However, the other day I picked up When in Rome for a couple of dollars, and found it to be very good and an enjoyable read. It was published in 1970, so it's a bit dated - in fact I suspect it was a bit dated when it was written. (The word 'gay' appears frequently with its older meaning, for instance, but there are other indications that Marsh was already writing in a style that was on its way out.) Nevertheless, the Sun is said to have written: The finest writer in English of the pure, classical puzzle whodunnit, at the time, as the cover tells us.

What is noticeable about it is the excellent style. Even if you didn't think much of the mystery side of it (and it's not bad) the stylish writing has to impress. None of your rubbishy adjective-less, adverb-less modern approach to writing, with no descriptions of scene or place beyond a few overused words. That was what really struck me about the Mary Higgins Clark I read recently: how impoverished the language was. For example, someone's chair was 'comfortable' - what does that tell us? Nothing about the chair or the person. Characters were 'dressed up' by the author only in the sense that she told us that so and so changed into something that you would expect the character to change into for whatever it was he or she was doing. Marsh, on the other hand, seldom tells us about clothing unless it's important to what's going on.

The story has two angles to it: Inspector Alleyn (Marsh's regular hero/detective) is in Rome at the behest of Interpol to deal with a drug-smuggling ring. He 'happens upon' a tour party that's slightly unusual and gets himself involved - and is on hand to deal with two murders as a result. The characters are a stock group, but they have subtlety within that - for instance the lovers not only have twenty years in age separating them, they spend a good deal more time irritated with each other than might be the norm.

Marsh wrote in the days when writers wrote and audiences enjoyed their writing. Along with Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and Dorothy L. Sayers, Marsh was classed as one of the four original "Queens of Crime"—female British crime writers who dominated the crime fiction genre in the Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s. She published 32 detective novels in all, between 1934 and 1982.

Dropped a stone!

Turns out that the scales I used to weigh myself last night don't work well on carpet. Don't ask me, I only report on what I'm told.

So when they were shifted to a hard surface, I suddenly dropped a stone in weight: went from 13 stone (82 kilos) to 12 (76 kilos), which is much more normal for me in recent years. Phew! I still need to get some weight off below the stomach, where it seems all to have sunk to, but losing something from 12 stone is easier on the system than losing a lot from 13 stone.

Be good if I could get down to 11 (just under 70 kilos). That would be much closer to my old weight. Will keep you informed (if you're really interested, that is!)

Natural Skin Care

I've decided to do some natural skin care, a euphemism for... going on a diet.

My concert is a month away, today, and on Sunday night my wife suggested that if I wanted to get into my suit then maybe I should lose a bit of weight before then. Helpfully, she and my younger son, who's living with us at present, are both doing it as well. We're doing a home-based version of Weight Watchers. My wife has all the booklets from previous stints with this company, so I'm afraid they're not getting any further income from us at this time.

The first day was agony. I had a carrot with me, chopped up into short slices, and must have eaten then constantly, particularly in the afternoon. I didn't just have a carrot, of course; my lunch was fine, and as good as anything I'd normally take - in fact probably a lot better, because for the first time in many years my wife made it for me.

I got to the end of the day and had run out of points, which was distressing.

However, the second day was quite different. It was as if my brain had reconciled itself to the fact that I was on a diet, and things were a lot calmer. I'd taken more carrot slices with me to supplement the lunch, but in fact hardly ate any of them. And today was better still.

So I might make it to the 12th of next month without totally fainting away from hunger.

PS I just checked my weight on my daughter's scales. Admittedly I've just eaten tea, so it's not a good time to weigh in, but I'm up to 13 stone, the heaviest I've ever been. When we were in England a couple of years ago, I was down below 12 stone after a time on Weight Watchers, but the two months at the beginning of this year, when I wasn't able to walk any distance comfortably (because of the catheter I was wearing due to prostate problems), really set me back, and I haven't managed to get the weight down since. And it's noticeable: only a couple of pairs of my trousers actually fit comfortably. Crikey!

Thinks he's the last suck of the mango!

I'm always interested in stuff to do with language, and how we use it, so was pleased when a friend sent me a link to a blog post in the Guardian called The Idiotic Joys of Idiom. The writer is Jag Bhalla who is apparently an amateur idiomologist and author of I'm Not Hanging Noodles on your Ears, a collection of over 1,000 idioms from 10 languages, published by National Geographic Books. Did you know there was such a thing as an idiomologist? My spellchecker certainly doesn't.

Anyway, the post lists a number of various curious sayings, pointing out that making idiomatic phrases is by no means limited to the English, but is common to all languages. In the recent posts in which I briefly discussed David Tammet's Embracing the Wide Sky, I didn't mention his discussion about the peculiarities in language being common everywhere; think of something odd you say in English, and there will be equal odd things said in other languages. Language is far more amazing than we think, not just because almost everyone learns it with relative ease, but because the sheer brainpower required to do it is inbuilt. Evolutionists claim of course we developed language for various reasons (one of them being because our brains got bigger, which seems a bit of pseudo-science, if you ask me), but however it 'developed' it's quite phenomenal when you sit down and consider its complexity.

Back to Mr Bhalla. Here are some of the non-English idioms he quotes:
To seize the moon by the teeth: attempt the impossible (French).
To reheat cabbage: to rekindle an old flame (Italian).
When the crayfish sings in the mountain: never (Russian).
Cleaner than a frog's armpit: to be poor, broke (Spanish).
To think one is the last suck of the mango: to be conceited (South American Spanish).

I'm considering using some of these in my own conversations. 'That Brian, he thinks he's the last suck of the mango!' It almost works without needing translation. And somewhere, I'm sure, there's an idiom about womens shoes, but a quick search on the Net failed to bring anything likely up.

As an adjunct to the post, there's a quiz in which genuine idioms are included with pseud ones. Quite honestly, it's hard to tell the difference. Check it out and have a good laugh! And don't forget to look at the comments section below the blog post itself. There are some superb and hilarious examples of both English and foreign idioms.

Network

After many years, I finally caught up with the movie, Network. I'd always heard it was worth seeing, but missed it first time around, and had never seen it anywhere since. The good old Warehouse was selling a few copies off in a sale yesterday, so I grabbed it.

If you don't like talkie movies, it's not the movie for you. This one is dialogue-packed (as opposed to action-packed), and the dialogue is great. (You can pick up a load of the lines on IMDB's quotes page for this movie, but one I liked that isn't there is: Inflexible? He's not only inflexible, he's intractable and adamantine. That may not be quite exact, but it's pretty close. Nobody uses 'adamantine' in real life, but it's wonderful in the context.)

It's a bit long, but then we've gotten so used to movies that are short and sharp in style, if not in actual length, that we can sometimes struggle with a movie that takes its time to say all it wants to say. For me the ending was a bit underdone; but perhaps the actual ending wasn't the climax; it's possible the real climax was when Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) and Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall) not only talk with absolute coolness about the need to kill Howard Beale (Peter Finch), the mad prophet of the network, but decide to have it done the next night, and to use their nasty (and contracted to the Network) terrorist group to do it, and to do it live on television.

It's an horrifically satirical film, though it's not often laugh-out-loud funny. Many of the lines have time-bombs in them, and you have to listen closely for the honesty and scurrilousness they contain in about equal measure.

The cast is uniformly superb - though given the script they're working with, that's hardly surprising. Good actors will always rise to an excellent script. And the smaller parts are played with as much authority as the big: Ned Beatty doesn't turn up until late in the movie, but gets to give an extraordinary monologue on how the world is really run (as a business, of course). And an actress who is entirely unknown to me, Beatrice Straight, has little more than one big scene, and is so strong in it she almost wipes the much better known actor, William Holden, out of the picture. Apparently Straight received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her brief performance, which lasts all of five minutes, in a two hour movie.

Finch, Holden and Dunaway, along with Duvall, carry the movie, sweeping through the scenes with huge impact. Holden, if anything, looks too old for the part he plays, though he was only 58 at the time, (by my calculations. 58 is middle-aged these days, but back in 1976 it was old.). He's playing a middle-aged man, someone who has an infatuation with a younger woman in a kind of male menopause moment. The fault may be less Holden's, who does the part with huge integrity, than Paddy Chayefsky's. Chayefsky, the writer, pushes the Holden and Dunaway characters together in a slightly forced way. I don't think it quite works, and we never really believe that Holden is infatuated with Dunaway, partly because there's a long gap between their first fling and their getting together on a more permanent basis.

Finch is an isolated character. Although he's best friends with Holden, they don't have many scenes to establish this, and about a third of the way through the movie, Finch's scenes are almost all on his own, as he rants at the world via the television. We lose track of what's really going on in his head. But Finch is superb, for all that. He's given several long speeches throughout the movie, and each one is played for all it's worth, with great variety of tone, and pace. The curious thing is that by the end of the movie we're beginning to wonder if he too isn't playing the crowd for all it's worth, rather than continuing to speak honestly.

Chayefsky doesn't explain everyone's motives; he lets their ambiguity be, so that we have to think about what's going on behind the characters' eyes.

The high point of the movie - the kind of climax of the first act, as it were - is when Beale first rages at the television world, and insists viewers should lean out their windows and shout, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!". It's an extraordinary scene, and could have come across just as comedy. It is funny, but not because of people sticking their heads out windows, or standing on balconies, shouting. It's funny and sad at the same time, because here are people who, as Beale says, are living their lives through the false world of television, and yet, because of television, are shouting that they're not going to take it anymore. It reverberates in all sorts of ways.

Roger Ebert has two different reviews of this movie, one from the movie's original release date, when he finds some faults with it, and one from 2000, by which time it's become a classic of its time. And James Berardinelli, (whom, I discovered the other day, one of my good friends thinks is 'bland' - at least I think that was the word he used) wrote a review in 1998 - okay it's not bland, but I'll concede it's not particularly inspiring either(!)

More on the ambiguous law...

More on the ambiguous anti-smacking 'law.'

Jim Evans is emeritus professor of law at Auckland University.
John Roughan is a good political commentator, but he is not right about section 59 of the Crimes Act 1961. The law it lays down is far from clear. Since much confusion exists about the section, let me try to clarify its effect as briefly as possible. ..This is not clear legislation. In creating this law, Parliament abandoned its constitutional responsibility to say with clarity just which conduct is criminal. The section results from a political fudge. Whatever other views one takes about the topic of smacking, that much at least ought to be kept clear.
READ FULL ARTICLE

Grant Illingworth QC, Barrister - Specialises in public law and civil litigation, and has been in practice for over 30 years
There are three reasons for concluding that the amendment was an inappropriate response to the problem. The first is that the amendment is an extremely poor piece of legal drafting in that it is calculated to create confusion rather than clarity. The second is that it criminalizes behaviour which should not be classified as a criminal offence. The third is that it fails to provide adequate protection for those whom it was designed to help.
READ MORE

Thanks for the Family First ezine for the above; just one more example of NZ Parliamentarians making bad law.

Twitter by percentage

The graphic above comes from the Information is Beautiful site, which incidentally is a blog in which things are done visually. Basically statistical information, of the more intriguing kind, is turned into graphs - or graphs are sourced from elsewhere. Well worth a look.

I first came across the Twitter graph via the Flickr.com site, though I don't think that I came across it directly there. Wherever it was I found it, I took a note of the URL, and that was that.

The graph is interesting, and confirms what's generally thought about Twitter. 20% of the accounts are dead - people tweeted once or twice and that was that. An enormous 50% - those in the green study - only tweet occasionally.

Only 5% have more than a 100 followers - I currently have 43, most of whom I don't actually follow myself - and there are 5% loud mouths, people who do virtually all the talking on Twitter. The other 20% isn't specified, so I can only assume it's the sort of category I come into: fairly busy (two or more tweets a day) but not exactly hugely visible.

By the way, if you want to see how little people understand graphs or maths, check out some of the comments in the Flickr.com link; it's pretty scary.

Ambiguous

Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in NZ?

Without even knowing the context, would you see this question as ambiguous? Unlikely.

Yet according to the NZ Herald, both John Key, the Prime Minister, and Phil Goff, the Opposition Leader, find this straightforward piece of English to be ambiguous. I think rather that it's their behaviour that's ambiguous. Only last year the National Party was supporting the collection of signatures to get the referendum off the ground. And prior to that, "47 of the 48 National MPs opposed to the bill."

And if we want to talk about ambiguous, back in June Sean Plunket interviewed Sue Bradford, the MP who was so keen to see the Bill go through in the first place. After some very confusing answers to questions from Sean Plunket on National Radio on Thursday, Sue Bradford finally admitted that it was true that any smack for the purpose of correction - no matter how light and inconsequential - was in fact a criminal offence. This came as a surprise to Mr Plunket, who, like many other journalists, had been assured since the beginning that no one was being made a criminal if they smacked their child lightly on the bum.

Methinks it's the MPs who are 'ambiguous' - they've shifted ground considerably over this matter. Perhaps it's because they don't want New Zealand to lose face: going back on its 'word', not doing something that that most enlightened of countries, Sweden, does do, or getting themselves in schtuck with the United Nations and its proclamations as to how everyone should run their family.

Cam Calder said he was voting "no" on the literal wording of the referendum, rather than because he thought the current law was not working. Ambiguous?

Nikki Kay: "My worry is that many people I talk to see a 'yes' vote as a vote to reduce family violence and a 'no' vote as a vote to stop the Government interfering and telling them how to bring up their kids. I believe in reducing family violence and Government interference in people's lives." Ambiguous?

Labour's Rajen Prasad - who headed the Families Commission when the law change went through in 2007 - said he could not vote either way with comfort, so he planned to spoil his ballot paper. Ambiguous?

Crikey, what's wrong with these people? No wonder they don't know what they're up to.

Betty Boop on Boing Boing

I've heard of the blog, Boing Boing, before, but never really investigated it. It's certainly quirky, and seems to be full of odd things that you wouldn't find elsewhere.

I watched a video yesterday of a very early sound cartoon with Betty Boop as the 'star' - it's full of details and takes careful watching to see everything that's going on. Betty herself has a rather peculiar style of walking, and in this cartoon she meets up with the Old Man of the Mountain, who, in the comments, gets credited with being something to do with hashish. And yes, he also seems to have invented moonwalking decades before Michael Jackson came up with it.

I think the version below is the same as the one of Boing, Boing - if not, you can always click on this link
and catch up with the comments as well.



The video also stars Cab Calloway and his black (African-American) band, who sing some very odd stuff on the soundtrack.

Cities in NZ

While searching out some information on Northland, NZ, today, I found that the idea of what constitutes a 'city' in New Zealand is very loose. Some places seem to be self-proclamed cities, and others were cities, but became something else when there was a reformation of the districts.

However, New Zealanders confusion about what constitutes a city is nothing compared to what some overseas sites think are cities in the country.

Wikimedia Commons has a page named Category: Cities in New Zealand.
In this list we find the villages of Akaroa, Bluff and Port Chalmers, and the towns of Lyttelton and Mosgiel. The latter two are at the very least outer suburbs of bigger cities (Christchurch and Dunedin) and the former three have similar status.

On another site, Big Daddy Data, the Bay of Plenty is listed as a city. Considering that the Bay of Plenty is a conglomeration of little settlements, mostly independent of each other, this is peculiar.

A site called C2: Cities of New Zealand includes Queenstown as a city, but it appears to be written by a couple of bods with limited understanding of the area. Queenstown may be on the way to being a city, but I'm not sure that it's quite got there yet. The site also claims that Dunedin has 'Lousy weather much of the time.' Obviously a limited understanding. It also manages to include Blenheim, Greymouth and Hokitika as cities. Rather suspect information here.

A last example is a site called Mongabay.com, which helpfully gives the estimates of various cities throughout the country as at 2005. These have obviously been worked out by some computer somewhere that doesn't know how to round off figures. It also hasn't been programmed to eliminate places that are under a certain population figure. This one includes the cities of Dannevirke, Gore, Huntly, Kaitaia, Matamata, Waiheke Island (?) and more. Enough said. Don't believe everything you find on the Net.

Grandpa nap

At last I feel completely justified in having the occasional grandpa nap....!

Nap Time: According to a Pew Research Center Social & Demographic Trends survey, on a typical day, a third of the adults (34%) in the United States take a nap. When respondents were asked if they had taken a nap in the past 24 hours, more men than women report that they had (34% vs. 31%). This gender gap occurs mostly among older adults. More than four-in-ten (41%) men ages 50 and older say they had napped compared with just 28 percent of women of the same age. Below the age of 50, men and women are about equal (35% vs. 34%). Click here to view the report. [PewResearch.org]

It's interesting to see that men over 50 tend to nap more than women of the same age...of course, it could be that we men have worked so much harder all our lives!

That tribal stuff

I'm not entirely convinced by Seth Godin's theories on tribes, but obviously plenty of other (tribal) people are. However, I keep reading Seth's blog, because quite often he has something very good to say (and occasionally says something that makes you go, Duh?). Anyway, here's a short video on the tribes idea, which Seth pronounces to be very good in part because it uses motion graphics. He claims he won't read past the first page of a pdf any more; videos like this are the way of the future for him....




The video's by Paul Durbin, by the way. He obviously has some resources many of us who are still making pdfs don't have...!

However, it's interesting that the video leads to a pdf that's available here free. I wonder if it's a pdf that will make Mr Godin read past the first page - maybe, since the second page is written by him!

Susan Blackmore

The application of natural selection to culture has been called 'memetics'. This is the theory that, like living things, ideas - or 'memes' - naturally vary and that (generally) the 'fittest' ideas survive and are replicated across generations.

Richard Dawkins first introduced the word in The Selfish Gene (1976) to discuss evolutionary principles in explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples melodies, catch-phrases, and beliefs (notably religious beliefs), clothing/fashion, and the technology of building arches.

But like a good deal of Dawkins' thinking, 'memes' is not actually science, but philosophy. Dawkins likes to promote evolution as the total answer to everything, and in the process has come up with this piece of philosophical nonsense that, while it might explain something we already know (ideas catch on), isn't actually science in any sense.

Regrettably, he has a number of disciples who plainly believe that 'memes' actually mean something. Susan Blackmore appears to be a prime example.

In the 31st July edition of New Scientist, (that most evolutionary-minded of all magazines) she has written an extraordinary piece in which she proclaims the following 'scientific' thinking:

What do I mean by "third replicator"? The first replicator was the gene - the basis of biological evolution. The second was memes - the basis of cultural evolution. I believe that what we are now seeing, in a vast technological explosion, is the birth of a third evolutionary process. We are Earth's Pandoran species, yet we are blissfully oblivious to what we have let out of the box.

Along with Dawkins, she thinks that genes have a mind of their own, and that memes (which didn't exist until Dawkins dreamt them up) have a similar ability to hop from human to human and do their own thing.

What does the following actually mean? This might sound apocalyptic, but it is how the world looks when we realise that Darwin's principle of evolution by natural selection need not apply just to biology. Given some kind of copying machinery that makes lots of slightly different copies of the same information, and given that only a few of those copies survive to be copied again, an evolutionary process must occur and design will appear out of destruction. You might call it "design by death" since clever designs thrive because of the many failures that don't.

She then goes waffling on about humans being 'lumbering robots' (Dawkins said so, so it must be right) that genes have built to carry them around, propagate them and protect them. Her article is a fanciful piece of stuff that is basically being made up as it goes along. It's pure speculation given some respectability by being published in a well-known magazine, one that often does have some real science in it.

The third replicator, of course, is technology, specifically the Internet, where apparently, according to Bradshaw, "We should also expect design to appear spontaneously, and it does. Much of the content on the web is now designed automatically by machines rather than people."

Oh, dear.

Alison Silva

Looking some more at the brain, and creativity.

I came across this video about the artist, Alison Silva, in which we learn that she has a strange clotting up of blood vessels in her brain, and her concerns that if/when she has an operation to deal with this, she will lose her ability to be creative.

Since the clotting made its appearance, her art has taken a different tone and colouring.


Watch CBS Videos Online

Thanks to Jurgen Wolff for alerting me to this video. (But why oh why do news reporters talk in such a condescending way?)

Beautiful Tree

The following appears in the latest Maxim Institute newsletter. I thought it was interesting for the way in which it talks about how education is regarded as being so important in the developing world, that people will set up their own schools if the Government system isn't working.

The Beautiful Tree is written by James Tooley, and it tells of the success of private schools in the developing world—slum schools in places like Nigeria, which the poor run for themselves. Paid for by scrimping and saving, making the best out of substandard facilities, these schools bring education to those who are so often written off, or the subjects of patronising, top-down do-goodery. Tooley tells story after story of teachers and schools with a deep commitment to their children, doing exceptional work. In Ghana, Kenya, India and China—the places Tooley's book stems from—private education confounds stereotypes. In many of these places, government schools are failing. They are too remote, too bureaucratic or too out of touch to do their basic work of educating children. In contrast, community schools are built on the backs of sacrifice and solidarity, filling the educational gap for the sake of the children they are committed to. Tooley quotes a teacher from Ghana: "This is an offering job ... you sacrifice yourself for the children."

Education is about more than bureaucrats writing a curriculum, or finding ways to pass exams. In the words of "Sajid-Sir," headmaster of a community school in Hyderabad, "There are three corners of the triangle—parents, teachers, and students, and this triangle must not be a scalene triangle, it must be an equilateral triangle." The stories in The Beautiful Tree are a reminder to us in New Zealand, that schools exist for the children and families they serve—as outgrowths and flowerings of local community, pride and involvement. It is about helping children to grow, to stand independent and connected in their communities. In a nation with a plethora of schools, used to arguing over who should pay for education, this must still be our vision. Education, whether in Kenya, China or New Zealand, is about growing good people—this is the task our teachers, students and parents are called to.

Here's a video from the author in which he talks about his book:

More on David Tammet

Just a little more on David Tammet and some thoughts on his ideas on creativity and autism. He quotes a professor of psychiatry called Michael Fitzgerald at one point. Fitzgerald, who has an autistic child, has a theory that such creative geniuses as Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and Mendel 'may all have found their genius through autism.'

This idea comes from the point that autistic people appear to have less inhibitors between certain sections of the brain, inhibitors that appear more regularly in people who aren't geniuses. This lack of 'inhibition' gives the brain synapses in autistic people the means to make connections that would otherwise be forestalled. This would tend to suggest that most creative people have less inhibition between the sections of their brains, but I suspect that this isn't a case proven as yet. Perhaps what might be closer to the truth is the point that people in general are on a continuum from very dull brained people (for whatever reason) to ones whose brains perform fantastically - and creatively.

People are on continuums in all sorts of spheres: look at men and women in terms of their innate masculinity or femininity: the spectrum is enormous from men who are so male that any hint of emotion or softness seems unlikely, to men at the other extreme who are all softness and have almost feminine characteristics. The same applies to women, who range from females who seem to be almost masculine in their outlook on life and their body language to women who are the epitome of softness. These are very loose generalisations, of course.

Perhaps autism isn't quite the illness we've thought, but something closer to a kind of extreme ability to use the brain that most of us don't have. But then, autistic people, like 'ordinary' people range over a wide spectrum too.

Language

It's Maori Language Week, but apart from a couple of brief stints looking at the 'Greetings' section I haven't done very much. Mostly lack of time either at work or at home. (Yes, still sorting out the renovations!) However, there are plenty of ways you can work at Maori online, including the episodes of Toku Reo, from the television programme that's on every night on Maori Television

Here's the theme for this year, just for the record: "Te Reo i te Hapori - Māori Language in the Community."

On the other hand I have been reading Daniel Tammet's book, Embracing the Wider Sky, which talks a good deal about learning languages. Tammet is autistic, with Asperger's syndrome, but makes a very good case for his form of autism, in particular, being far less of a disorder than a bonus.

He's been inventing his own language since he was a child, and can learn enough of a language to speak it - within a week (!). He has a particular fondness for Icelandic languages.

On the maths side he has a theory that we are all born with mathematical ability, but because this isn't something we use as a matter of course - unlike language, which we all learn without thinking about it as children - few of us become as at ease with numbers as he is.

It's a fascinating book, and I'll probably be talking about it more in the next few posts.

Renovation v Learning

I was going to follow up my first foray into distance learning with a second course that, while still officially classed as distance learning, actually required me to attend a week's block course, and then do three essays over a period of three months. Sounds pretty straightforward, huh? I'm sure it is, but I decided to hold fire, as there seemed to be some other things looming on the horizon. The looming turned out to be kitchen renovations which have taken up my wife's energy hugely, and mine just a little less.

However, I haven't given up on the learning: my boss handed me next year's classes the other day, and there are some different options which I'd like to look into. It rather depends on what else happens around here, but I'd like to keep on with this stuff.

Of course, I could always go for an online degree at an overseas university, like Capella. Now that would be interesting. Whereas Otago has a relatively narrow range of courses available online (though they are courses that interest me) Capella appears to go all out over a wide range of subjects: World Religions, Chemistry, Organizational Theory are just three of the possibilities, and are ones you can sample. You can even enroll in a free online seminar, to see if it's up your alley.

Wow, I'm getting all excited here. (Though I haven't checked the cost out yet!)

The photo isn't of our renovation, but something similar. It was taken by Maree Reveley of Canterbury, New Zealand. Note the pink batts everywhere!

Jacobs on mystery writers

I found the following four tweets from author Alan Jacobs on Twitter today. They were all sent around the same time, so obviously he's been doing a bit of reading up to this point.

I've been reading a bunch of classic mysteries this summer. Verdicts forthcoming.

Preliminary verdict one: Dorothy Sayers can be very, very good and embarrassingly bad, sometimes within the space of three pages.

Preliminary verdict 2: Josephine Tey might well have been the greatest mystery writer of them all had she lived longer.

Preliminary verdict 3: Rex Stout is amazing. Why have I never read these books before? There are so many they must be uneven, but . . . wow.

I've never read Rex Stout either, but have heard he's well worth reading. Josephine Tey's books are very good: murder mysteries, but done in style, and without any sense of stereotypical writing. (One murder takes place very late in the book.) Hitchcock made a movie out of one of the Tey books, but it was quite unrecognisable: the detective who was one of the main characters in the book barely appeared in the movie.

Dorothy Sayers' murder mysteries can be quite elliptical; sometimes the story gets confusing, and sometimes it's so complicated that the reader is left hanging in mid-air. But she's brilliant, all the same.

Pros and Cons

Having had another 12 hours or so to think about the latest Harry Potter movie, I thought I'd write a few more notes, mostly for my own benefit.
These will just come as I think of them....sorry it's not a bit more ordered.

Pros: superb technical proficiency. Just one example: the camera shot starts in the train with a group of characters, pulls back outside the train, sweeps along as the train moves past, and catches up with another group of characters further down the train. Of course, it would have been much easier to have done it as two separate shots, but there's a kind of exuberance about this approach.

Cons: No Dursleys. This film begins with the deatheaters do nasty things to London.
Cons: No Voldemort - at least not in his current guise. He turns up (via two very good young actors) as Tom Riddle, in two memory sequences. This film can in no way stand on its own: there are too many characters you're just expected to know, and too many things you're expected to remember from earlier episodes. And characters who don't appear that you're expected to know about as well. Okay, it's all a matter of how much screen-time we've got, but...

Cons: lots of loose ends. London being under attack is shown initially and then forgotten about. And how does it relate to Hogswart and what's going on there? And why is the countryside outside the train so bare?
Why do the deatheaters attack the Wand shop, and who are they dragging out and what do they do with them?
The Horcrux business arrives quite late in the proceedings, and then, after all the effort to get one of them (with Dumbledore nearly dying in the process) it turns out to be a fake. Okay, this is in the book, but it's treated in a very off-hand way here.

Pros: the usual superb mise-en-scene, wonderful sets and design, but....everything is so gray. Harry says right at the end something along the lines of 'I never appreciated how beautiful this place was.' But he's looking at a very gray version of it. It's been a lot more beautiful in the other movies. Admittedly the grays are beautiful in themselves - the early shot of the London office people looking out at the storm is full of wonderfully toned-down colourings. So that's sort of a con and pro in one.

More loose ends: the Weasleys house goes up in flames - we hear no more about this, and no one seems particularly worried. Hagrid's house goes up in flames: is he inside? I'm not sure if we find out in this movie, as I can't remember him being in that late scene where everyone is raising their wands in the air in tribute to Dumbledore.

Con: everyone who knows the books will know that Dumbedore dies at the end of this episode. But curiously there's a lot more emotional feeling in the death of Cedric Diggory in The Goblet of Fire than there is here in the death of Dumbledore. Certainly there's a wonderful piece of elegaic writing in the music score at this point, but somehow it doesn't affect you emotionally. Odd.
When I read in the book about Dumbledore's death, it was shock - this couldn't happen! And you waited in vain in the last book for him to appear safe and sound. So it's a bit of a puzzle that it's nowhere near so affecting here. Perhaps it's because most viewers will know what happens to Dumbledore, and it's difficult for the filmmakers to overcome that. It would be interesting to know what people who hadn't read the book thought about this point (assuming they weren't totally confused by the movie anyway!)
are
I said yesterday the film seemed slow. Thinking back again, there are still some very exciting sections: the search in the cave for the horcrux, for example, or the attack on the Weasley's house. And the Quidditch match is superbly done. Think back to the way Quidditch was done in the first movie to compare how much more technically superior this section is. But there's no explanation as to why Ron should be playing Quidditch after all these years, when he's never shown the slightest interest in doing so before, and why Harry isn't playing. (I'm sure there's a good reason in the book, but for some reason the filmmakers have chosen not to tell us.)

Pro: Luna Lovegood. Evanna Lynch has made this character utterly her own. Whatever you thought Luna should look like has been thoroughly overtaken by this actress' interpretation. It's a delight. (Emma Watson, as Hermione, on the other hand, is still 'wrong' in my mind. My impression of Hermione, from the books, was always that she wasn't particularly attractive; it was her intelligence that marked her out. In fact, my original picture of her was of someone not especially slim. Watson's beauty in the film versions makes it hard to understand why she's so interested in Ron, who's not only lazy and unintelligent, but a bit of a slob. And in this film he barely gives her a moment's notice.)

Con: the stuff about the necklace that's supposed to curse Dumbledore and ends up cursing the messenger instead. That's all handled a bit oddly in the movie; it makes Rowling's consistently clever plotting seem clunky. (Maybe it was a bit of that famous Nintendo jewellery I'm always on about...?)

Obviously it's time to go back and read the book and figure out some of these peculiar loose ends and untidy plottings that are in the movie. Thank goodness for the books, which leave far more room for our imaginations than the movies, for all these superb visual reconstructions, do.

Latest Harry Potter - spoilers

After seeing Notes on a Scandal the other night, I checked out what James Berardinelli had to say about it, he being one of the reviewers I find gives good straight reviews of movies. (Roger Ebert didn't review the movie, apparently.) James thinks it's a great movie except that it has a flaw in the third act - I can only think this is the bit where the Cate Blanchett character discovers the diary with all the negative information about her. It's possibly a bit improbable, and it's certainly not well-signaled as to why she should find the diary. Nevertheless, like some moments in Hitchcock, the director gets away with it.

We went and saw the latest Harry Potter tonight. Don't read this if you don't want to know what it's like. I suspect it's going to go down in my book as the one I've least enjoyed. I couldn't particularly remember the story, except the ending of course (which no Potter fan could forget), and the stuff about the horcruxes. And I certainly don't remember the relationships side of things being so much to the fore. Rowling is cleverer than that, I suspect. Here we're treated to relationship problems almost continually, as though everything hinged around them. Perhaps on the page they didn't take your attention so readily; here it's all a bit soap-opera, which is a great pity, because there are much more important things at stake here than the ups and downs of teenage relationships. (And talking of teenagers: the two main boys in particular have turned into hulking twenty-somethings; both of them look as though they've been to the gym - their shoulders are too big somehow, for teenage boys.)

Ginny Weasley proves herself to be a strong character, which is good, but Neville Longbottom, who is the one of the cruxes of the whole saga, barely gets a look in. He's seen a few times, and speaks in about one scene. Lavender, the girl who plagues Ron Weasley, gets an awful lot of screentime, even though she's a minor character, and we barely get a glimpse of some of the other longstanding people: Wormtail, Crabbe and Goyle, Remus Lupin, and Molly Weasley. Jim Broadbent, on the other hand, turns in a fine performance as Slughorn.

It's interesting that the director, David Yates, regards The Prisoner of Azkaban as the best HP movie so far: it still stands out to me as the one with the most style and flair. And that's the problem with this one: I found it slow (as though the director was pacing everything for some electric moment that never quite comes) and the climax is muffed, somehow. Maybe it's the fact that the books became increasingly complex; yet some of the other films have managed to pack a huge amount in without overloading the works. Here you keep wondering when something significant is going to happen. Let's hope Yates, who's directing the last two episodes, will pull things together in those.

The film was preceded by two or three trailers for other fantasy films. Such is the power of CGI now that we accept everything on screen as being real enough, and more, we believe that anything is possible. When anything is possible, then it takes a good deal to make us excited by what we see. It isn't necessary to have lots of explosions and cameras racing all over: even in a film filled with special effects shots, it's the actors who carry it, who grab our emotions. The idea that actors wouldn't be needed in movies (as was briefly mooted a couple of decades back) went the way of the dodo very quickly. People don't just go to see special effects; if they're not integral to the story, then we lose interest quickly.

And there's a difficulty in the fact that the special effects have to be very good now: there was a scene in one of the trailers (I think it was for GI Joe) where the Eiffel Tower came crashing down. It was too much altogether and didn't seem to work (apart from acting as a spoiler to a scene from the movie). On the other hand, there's a moment early on in The Half-Blood Prince where a London bridge that my wife and I walked over only a couple of years ago is ripped apart by the Deatheaters; this is extraordinarily well done and scarily believable. The Half-Blood Prince is certainly full of such moments.

Tim Keller

I'm re-reading Tim Keller's The Reason for God, and here he talks about his Manhattan-based Church of the Redeemer, which has a congregation of some 6,000...

Redeemer's basic doctrines - the deity of Christ, the infallibility of the Bible, the necessity of spiritual rebirth through faith in Christ's atoning death - are in unity with the orthodox, supernatural beliefs of the evangelical and Pentecostal churches of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the US South and Midwest. These beliefs often put us in conflict with views and practices of many people in the city. At the same time, we have been delighted to embrace many other aspects of urban, pluralistic culture. We emphasize the arts, value racial diversity, stress the importance of working for justice in the city for all its inhabitants, and communicate in the language and with the sensibility of our city-centre culture. Most of all we stress the grace of a Saviour who ate with people the establishment called 'sinners' and loved those who opposed him. All of these things are very important to Manhattan residents.

Some years ago a man from a southern US state visited Redeemer. He had heard that though we held to orthodox Christian doctrine, we had grown large in the midst of a sceptical, secular city. He expected to find that we were attracting people with avant-garde music, video monitors and clips, dramatic sketches, exceptionally hip settings, and other kinds of eye-catching spectacle. To his surprise he found a simple and traditional service that, on the surface, seemed identical to those in his more conservative part of the world. Yet he could also see that the audience contained many people who wouldn't have ever attended the churches he knew. After the service he met me and then said, 'This is a complete mystery to me. Where are the dancing bears? Where are the gimmicks? Why are these people here?"
I directed him to some 'downtown art-types' who had been coming to Redeemer for some time. They suggested that he look beneath the surface. One person said that the difference between Redeemer and other churches was profound, and lay in 'irony, charity, and humility.'

quotes from pages 42/3.

So where's Brent Stavig, you say? Why would you ask that in a post about Tim Keller and the remarkable Presbyterian Church of the Redeemer in Manhattan? Particularly since Stavig isn't in Manhattan, and hasn't even been in New York City for some time - last I heard, back in 2007, he was living in Seattle. Anyway, he's now managed to appear, in his turn, in this post.

Taking music toooo seriously

One of my Facebook friends (yes, I do have a couple) pointed me to a blog post on arts versus sports, by Bill Harley. It's a tongue-in-cheek look at why more people go to sports events than to artistic ones, and makes some good points, though I'm not sure I can agree entirely with the following:
[athletes] are not trying to make the audience feel anything (and the arts is about the communication of feeling and ideas). All they’re trying to do is succeed. And we watch and feel ourselves. While the game (or agon in the Classical sense – from which we get the agony of defeat!) doesn’t matter – the striving is real. We sense their tension and anticipation and despair and joy. And we feel it, too. And all those other people feeling a similar thing encourage it in us. We are, after all, a group animal. Suddenly, we care.

I think that while the athletes may not be trying to make us feel anything, they'd be very disappointed if we didn't feel emotion. The big difference, (well, one big difference) between the arts and sports is that at sports it's the expected norm for the audience to let it all hang out. Sports arenas are very relaxed. You can chat and joke, you can shout and scream, you can insult and abuse and praise (and the players will ignore you anyway). The thing is, there's no need for politeness. With the arts, politeness is the norm - at least these days. When did you last go to a concert of some ancient or modern piece and shout your enthusiasm during the concert? When did you last make ribald jokes about the players? When did you get up and abuse the players or the composer for the appalling piece of trash they'd produced?

Bet you've never done it. Yet, in the past, audiences were nowhere near so polite. They would talk during concerts and operas, and the upper class went more to be seen than to listen. There's a description in The Count of Monte Cristo, as I recall, in which the attendance at an opera consists mostly of interplay between the members of the audience. The performers barely get a look in.

And audiences would cheerfully boo something they disliked or stamp their feet; in fact, if they disliked it enough, they'd have a go at the players: throwing things was just one form of abuse. In the early 20th century, various composers suffered the insults of the audience: Stravinsky (whom we now revere) being just one such.

There's been a great divorce between the way we behave at concerts now, and the way audiences used to. In fact, people get frowned on for clapping between movements of a concerto or symphony, even though their enthusiasm for the playing may have caused them to do so. We force audiences to hold back now, rather than thoroughly enjoy.

Harley says: I’m not saying this never happens in arts – it’s what performers are always working towards – when a group of musicians reach some kind of communion that raises their performance to another level, or an acting troupe presents something in a way they’ve never quite done before, the audience senses and is deeply moved. But it’s harder to reach it, and there’s a critical aspect of our minds that must be dealt with and overcome.

I don't think it's harder to reach it; it's just that we're really not allowed to show our real emotions when we're attending a concert. It happens at the movies far more readily, funnily enough; I've often been reduced to tears during a movie, and sometimes during a play. We get the chance at both the movies and plays to laugh - quite heartily at times. Occasionally a piece of music will cause us to laugh; but we're still fairly polite about it, as though we know the composer didn't really intend us to feel good humoured about what he'd written. Hoffnung broke through the politeness barrier, as did Anna Russell and Victor Borge. All three of these artists took music seriously, but knew it didn't have to be taken seriously.

I don't recommend a return to the old days where audiences treated musicians with a kind of contempt. I like to be able to hear the music clearly if I've paid the usual exorbitant amount to go in the first place; but equally I'd like to be able to feel more relaxed at concerts, along the lines of the way I can be relaxed at a sports event. Okay, I promise not to throw beer cans, I won't shout loud swear words, I won't have an argument with my neighbour (not that these are things I typically indulge in at sports), but it would be good to be able to get up and walk around, go for something to eat if I get a little bored, wave to someone I know. I can't see it happening in my lifetime, but it's not that long ago in the lifetime of the human race that people did just such things at concerts or operas. So maybe there's hope.

Bucolics - Maurice Manning

Just came across the poetry of Maurice Manning:

you're a workhorse Boss like me
you work the pump I work
the bucket fair enough
we're tough as leather Boss
tough as nails we go
together don't we the way
nip goes with tuck we grin
we bear it Boss O does
that ever cross your mind

"XXVIII" from Bucolics

that bare branch that branch made black
by the rain the silver raindrop
hanging from the black branch
Boss I like that black branch
I like that shiny raindrop Boss
tell me if I’m wrong but it makes
me think you’re looking right
at me now isn’t that a lark for me
to think you look that way
upside down like a tree frog
Boss I’m not surprised at all
I wouldn’t doubt it for
a minute you’re always up
to something I’ll say one thing
you’re all right all right you are
even when you’re hanging Boss

(The number on this one wasn't listed).

Publishers Weekly wrote: "In his third collection, Yale Younger Poets prize-winner Manning goes for a new twist on the traditional genre of pastoral poetry: he praises nature, but also engages in a postmodern conversation with a version of a higher power, which he calls 'Boss.' In 78 rolling, untitled, unpunctuated poems, which mostly keep to an iambic beat, Manning's curious, grateful and mischievous speaker spars with his unanswering deity, alternately singing praise ('...Boss a horse beside/ a tree it makes me happy'), reeling in doubt ('...if I/ could find the little ladder Boss/ that's leaning straight against the sky/ how many rungs would I have to climb'), teasing ('...you just/ can't get above your raising Boss') and railing against the silence that answer his outcries ('...Boss you hold/ me down you hold me back/ you push against me O/ I hope you're happy now'). The poems do get repetitive — Manning establishes his strategies at the outset and then uses them again and again — but the insistent rhythm is born of real enthusiasm."

[PS: you'll note that in spite of my proposal to include the Top Ten HitTail words/phrases in my next ten posts, there's no mention of Mike Crowl - that's because I'm already 'mentioned' in the title of the blog. Duh!]

God-journals

I've been writing 'God' journals for years - exercise books in which I write the ups and downs of my spiritual life, prayers, cries from the heart, joys, agonies....all the usual stuff that's well known to the average saint. (I used to write a regular 'ordinary' journal as well, but that's kind of got superseded by blogging, where a good deal of what would have gone in the journals in the past has now got out into the public arena.)

Anyway, I glanced back into my previous God-journal this morning, and found it was about the day I had my prostate operation. And thought it might be interesting to go back and look at the journey as it was written up over four or five months from around October 2008 to March 2009. I'm not planning on publishing it online (at least, not as it is) but it's good to see what sort of thing I went through, how I felt about it, and whether my fears and hopes proved to be as extreme as they seemed at the time.

In the opening passage, which was written the day after the doctor at the hospital did a rectal exam and pronounced the dreaded word, cancer, with immodest frequency, is a series of woes and cries. God probably gets thoroughly sick of these, but since He's the epitome of patience, he puts up with them.

Perhaps He can look on them and regard them as being of as little concern (in eternity terms) as a bit of athlete's foot or hand or fingers. We have to struggle rather more to gain perspective.

The picture is of Thérèse of Lisieux, also known as The Little Flower, and the relevance is that she wrote a great deal about her spiritual life (until she died at the age of 24), and, even though she was canonized as a saint within a very few years, she discussed her dark nights, her depressions, her difficulties with faith. Probably a good companion to have on The Way - she was hugely popular in the Catholic scene when I was a child.

It's checking out HitTail time again!

It's worth going back to HitTail on a regular basis to see whether the things people search for and find on your blog vary much over time. I haven't looked for a while, but anyone who's read this blog consistently over the last year or two (the multitudes who have...) will probably find that this latest list isn't much different to previous ones. People plainly keep on looking for the same things, which is a bit unnerving for anyone wanting to be original. Not only does athletes hand (sans apostrophe) have twice as many hits as the next item, but athletes fingers and athlete hand also both get in the top ten (as nine and ten, respectively). [The hand in the picture is a genuine athlete's hand. So I'm told.] 

My own name, Mike Crowl, is second, the great divorce notes and Brent Stavig come next; James Berardinelli, the film critic, is still going strong in 5th place, followed by our mysterious old friend, Nintendo jewellery (with jewellery spelt the correct way, you'll notice). Karl Maugham, the artist, with everyone spelling his name incorrectly - as I did for years - comes next. (It's Maughan.) And eighth, we have our old favourite, shrinking shirts. 

It seems that the last time I checked this was late last year: as I say, things haven't altered much. Here's the latest list compared to the previous one: 

athletes hand...........................athletes hand 

Mike Crowl.............................Mike Crowl 

the great divorce notes...........James Berardinelli 

Brent Stavig............................Brent Stavig 

James Berardinelli.................the Great Divorce notes 

Nintendo jewellery.................shrinking shirts 

Karl Maugham......................Nintendo jewellery 

shrinking shirts......................Karl Maugham 

athletes fingers.......................athletes fingers 

athlete hand...........................Chrissy Popadacs 

James has slipped a couple of notches, Brent has maintained his place. Karl has snuck up a place, and shrinking shirts have dropped two places. C S Lewis' book has risen, and so has Nintendo Jewellery. Interestingly, Chrissy Popadics has slipped off the radar completely - but she's still in 13th place on the top 100. 

You may not be excited with what people look for on the favourite search engine directory, but I'm always intrigued. As I've no doubt mentioned before: if I wrote about nothing but these ten topics (or the variations within them) I'd probably get people checking out my site galore. But do I want to? I should no doubt be inventive, and find ways in which to drop one of these names/phrases into each post. I'm not sure that it would help me climb to the top of the Google tree, but it would be an interesting exercise. Perhaps I should give it a try over the next ten posts, just for the fun of it (and add Chrissy Popadics - pictured at left being squashed by her then future husband - in for good measure!)

A PS to the last

I see that the folic acid campaign has been on the go for some twenty years, promoted by disability groups like spina bifida.

I have a bit of a concern about such campaigns. Something that requires everybody to change because a small group is affected may not always be the best approach to a solution. Yes, altering buildings so that they're accessible by disabled people, or making new ones wheelchair accessible and so on, are overall good ideas. They benefit large numbers of people in the community, and not just the disabled.

But making everybody eat something that will only have an effect on a small number seems a somewhat lopsided way of solving the problem of pregnant women not getting enough folic acid. If there is a serious problem for all pregnant women, then fine. But if we look at how many women get pregnant as against how many how many have children with a folic-acid-preventable disease, then forcing folic acid on all pregnant women may not actually be the way to go.

I don't have the answer. I just don't think the answer Australia has come up with is ideal.

Folic Acid

It was with some relief that I heard on the news tonight that Prime Minister John Key has decided against the inclusion of folic acid in all our bread. Apparently we were supposed to follow Australia - if this is an example of being more closely-allied to our neighbours, then perhaps we should rethink our connections.

Folic acid, sometimes called folate, is a B vitamin (B9) found mostly in leafy green vegetables like kale and spinach, orange juice, and enriched grains. Surely that's what we should be encouraging young mothers to eat, rather than taking yet another chemicalized version of real food.

Well, Mr Key said No, and good on him. Folic acid is widely regarded as being of benefit to babies in the womb, which is why pregnant mothers are encouraged to take it in doses. It has some preventive aspect in regard to serious neural tube defects (such as the incomplete development of the brain and spinal cord).

But there are three things that puzzle me: if it's so effective, how come billions of babies have survived without additional doses of it for millennia? And if it's geared towards babies via their mothers, why on earth do the rest of us, particularly males, need to have it in our bread? And if pregnant mothers were going to eat it via bread, how much extra bread would they need to consume in order to get the 'large' doses required?

TV One (I think that was what we were watching) claimed the medical and scientific community was up in arms against Mr Key's change of mind. Or his determination of mind, rather. Well, the scientific and medical community was represented by a single geneticist, who seemed to have a bee in her bonnet about the whole thing. She didn't answer any of the questions I've raised above.

The use of folic acid in this way was perhaps considered as a kind of cheap insurance for the wellbeing of feotuses. But in fact it was an extremely expensive kind of measure - and once again, Joe Public and his wife would have wound up paying for it every time they purchased bread, which is already expensive enough.

The geneticist, by the way, recommended buying bread from Australia in order to get the folic acid. Dear me.

Notes on a Scandal

Just watched Notes on a Scandal, with Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Bill Nighy, and Andrew Simpson. Superb cast, oddball story; very intense, and rich in character detail. Both Dench and Blanchett get plenty of room to draw their characters to the max, the former showing her constant conniving on her face often without saying a word, the latter playing a woman who's foolish, and surprisingly naive. Not only does she have an affair with a 15-year-old pupil (scarily played by Simpson, who was only 17 or 18 when the film was made), but she fails to see how Dench's character is in no way a friend, but only gives the appearance of a friend. Many actresses could have made the character a total fool; Blanchett manages to convince us that this woman's behaviour is possible, and believable.

Dench has often been scary - as M for instance - but this must be Dench at her most subtly vicious. Even her Lady Macbeth from the late 70s isn't a patch on this. And she's allowed herself to be quite ugly, and almost nondescript. The sort of little old(er) lady you'd see pulling along her shopping cart in the supermarket.

In the story Dench is a near-to-retirement teacher who befriends the new art teacher (played by Blanchett) at a large comprehensive school. We gradually learn that Dench has designs for more than friendship and when she discovers Blanchett is having an affair with the pupil, she tells Blanchett that she knows about it, but that she'll keep it secret. Of course, it's a secret she can use against Blanchett in due course, when the latter doesn't play her game. Dench's character narrates a good deal of the story - she writes everything in her diary - and her cyncism about other people, and her sheer callousness (even about Blanchett's Downs Syndrome son) is overwhelming.

Not the most attractive group of characters, but absorbing all the same.

Plumbing the depths

We're having a fun day here at home: the third day in a row that both my wife and I have been sick, she with a particularly nasty flu, and me with a cold that seemed to want to turn into a flu but hasn't quite managed it. Between coughing and spluttering, and eyes watering, and getting back into bed to keep warm because we were both so weary from doing almost nothing, it's not been the most exciting three days of our lives.
Except that today the plumbers arrived. One was there to fix the problem we had a week or so ago when the hot water tap in the kitchen literally broke off while my wife and a friend were sorting out the renovations. The other (and his very young apprentice) were there to replace the hot water tank which had decided to start leaking on us.
We're going to be paupers by the time this kitchen is renovated.
The first plumber has been under the house a good deal of the time sorting out the old pipes. The other plumber (and his very young apprentice) have removed the old tank, put in the new one, gone to a funeral and hopefully will come back before the end of the day to give us some hot water. And then there were also a couple of blokes from the City Council repairing the cold water inlet from the mains - an ancient washer had given up the ghost. To sort this washer out required spilling enough water out onto the street to fill several baths for several households.
The bloke under the house is now back after his lunch, and is tidying up the longstanding bit of frigeridoo that's been holding up the drain from the sink ever since we arrived in the house. That it's stayed together as long as it has is something of a miracle. The last time we sorted it was way back, when we noticed an unpleasant smell and found that all the sink drainage wasn't going down the drain but sitting underneath the house on the ground. Poo - what a pong that was. I remember nearly breaking my back digging out the old garbage soil and replacing it with clean stuff - all this done in an area where you can't stand up straight.

Apropos of none of that, why wold you misppel weight losss supplements if yo wontid to taulk abart it? Obviously that extra s has snuck because the link to this site has three in a row. Adding in a fourth, however, is just a bit excessive. Anyway, with all this flu stuff around, both of probably have no need of w l supplements - neither of us have been eating as much as usual!

Fallalery

There was a question on Who Wants to be a Classic Millionaire the other night about costume jewellery (or jewelry, as the residents of the World's Greatest Nation insist on spelling it).

I hadn't realised that costume jewellery was a style of decoration that doesn't use real gems. (Wikipedia, for instance, says it has a variety of names, such as fashion jewelry, junk jewelry, fake jewelry, or fallalery - ain't that a great word?) And it's big business. Apparently it came into its own in the 1930s. At that time it was regarded as a cheap, disposable accessory meant to be worn with a specific outfit, would be fashionable for a short period of time, would then outdate itself, and then, presumably would be binned.

In spite of the idea that it might be 'junk' jewellery, it actually uses a lot of real stones. They're just of a lesser quality, in most cases, than 'real' jewels. I have a friend who has a lovely ring which someone in a fashion shop insisted she should get valued. If it had been the actual stone it was thought to be, the ring would have been worth something like $1200. But it was in the costume jewellery line, and consequently was worth something closer to $120.

Costume jewellery is made from rhinestones and lucite, amongst other lower class gems, and set in pewter, nickel and brass. This doesn't mean that the items don't have a classy look about them; it's just that their value in monetary terms is considerably less.

So there you go. That's what happens when you come upon a topic and decide to check it out a bit further!

Fallalery (or fallalary) is defined as: a bit of finery; a showy article of dress.

Francis Collins in discussion on evolution

There's an interesting discussion on the Books and Culture site, in which Karl Giberson talks about Christianity and evolution with Francis Collins. Collins recently launched the BioLogos Foundation, which "promotes the search for truth in both the natural and spiritual realms seeking harmony between these different perspectives."

What's interesting about this discussion is that Giberson is more than able to hold his own in terms of questioning Collins' belief in evolution, and Collins is more than able to hold his own in stating why he believes in it, and still remains a Christian. It's certainly not a discussion that covers all the ground, and no doubt sceptics on either side could look for holes and find them. Neither will it convince anyone overnight. As Collins notes: I would not want them, after one lecture, to suddenly say, "OK, you must be right; everything I've learned for the last eighteen years is wrong." I give people credit for wanting to engage the topic as opposed to shutting down and saying, "Oh, it's one of those evolution guys and I was warned about them and I'm going to stop listening right now."

The issue remains vitally of huge importance in the States, where the arguments go much deeper than whether the science has got it right or not, but the argument is also of importance here in New Zealand. Collins doesn't, in this discussion, come up with anything particularly revelatory in terms of apologetics for evolution, but it's good to hear someone of his credibility speaking in a balanced way.

Karl Giberson is the author of Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution (HarperOne) and executive vice-president of the Biologos Foundation. This might be a book worth checking out. Certainly I've never been convinced by anyone yet that evolution has got the goods. (Though the first review on Amazon.com doesn't do much to make me think it's actually going to help me much in the debate.)