Skinny ties

Phew, nearly had heart failure...

Okay, that may be a bit of an exaggeration, but when I saw a site advertising skinny ties I certainly got a little perturbed.

Turns out that what they're calling skinny ties are pretty normal-looking. They're just not those wide ties that are still around to a degree.

Really skinny ties are what we used to wear - was it back in the sixties? They were pretty dreadful to be honest - even then. The picture shows an example, though most people barely notice the tie, probably. (Found on this site.)

You have to be skinny to wear a skinny tie. So that lets me off the hook.

Actually, truth to tell I've hardly worn a tie for years - since 1989, when my then manager proclaimed there was no need to wear one. I only wear them for formal occasions now, and there aren't too many of those.

I seem to remember wearing a skinny one for a play, but in my decrepitude, I can no longer remember what play it was. It may come back to me.

Still flawed

From the Maxim Institute's latest newsletter:

A Bill that is "functionally equivalent to a bill of rights" is back before Parliament. It's the Regulatory Standards Bill, introduced by Hon Rodney Hide. The Bill is virtually identical to a Regulatory Responsibility Bill recommended by a Taskforce 18 months ago, so it has the same aims—and the same flaws—as that bill. A recent Guest Paper that we published discussed some of the issues. The Bill might sound bland, but the paper's authors critiqued a lack of problem diagnosis, concerns about the Bill's principles of good law-making, and the potential to get civil servants and judges involved in contentious policy issues. The Bill is waiting for a first reading in Parliament. If it passes, it will go to a Select Committee for submissions.

Culture as a social ingredient

In [a] far more perfect world ... culture would be recognized as a crucial social ingredient and would be funded as generously as science and social services. Public art would be part of curriculums from kindergarten through doctoral programs. Bureaucracy would be cut to a minimum, and all concerned would be trained in collective process. Writers and other related workers would be involved in public art projects from beginning to end, so that words as well as images, physical residue or experience would be part of the collective communication.

Lucy Lippard
The Lure of the Local

Cigars...

A couple of years ago I had a part in the J B Priestley play, When We Are Married, here in Dunedin. The three main male characters were supposed to smoke cigars at one point, though with it being a play, only one of them actually got to do so for any length of time.

I don't think they were Cohiba cigars which apparently are a mix of Cuban, Indonesian and African elements....and sound fairly classy! In fact they were the cheapest cigars our props lady could find at a local shop that would look effective and actually smell like cigars. She even managed to get the cast to smoke ones that were already opened, by rewrapping them.

Such is the life when economics preclude you using just the best...

Anyway, one night, the actor who played the main cigar-smoking character got a bit of a shock when he lighted up....his cigar started to go up in smoke in a different kind of way. It helps if you remove the cellophane wrapping. On this occasion, his fellow actor had failed to do so, and there was something of a stink on stage...in more ways than one.

Thoughts on gold digging

In November 2009, just before I had problems with my prostate (though you didn't need to know that) I was staying for a few days at the former Waipiata sanatorium (now called En Hakkore) near Ranfurly in the Maniototo. One afternoon we walked up the hill to a cemetery that was situated on a slight slope overlooking the plains. The gravestones were scattered around the not-very-large walled-in area, and everyone of them spoke of people who'd been buried there around a hundred years before. There were no recent ones.

The reason for this was that the cemetery is all that's left of a small town that once stood up on this hill. Though the view is magnificent the inhabitants must have found it a rather windy spot. The town, called Hamiltons, came into existence because of gold, and died not long after the gold ceased to be found.

I found some information about Hamiltons on a Central Otago tourism site

The area is named after Captain Hamilton, who along with two others drew up and took up Run 204, know as Hamiltons Station. In late 1863, gold was reported and the field initially proved very rich, yielding thousands of ounces of gold. [I wonder how many gold bars that amounts to?] Some 2000 miners first worked the area, peaking at 4000 in 1864. Ironically, the surviving township of Patearoa once relied heavily on Hamiltons for shops and services. The town of Hamiltons, which included 25 liquor outlets and 40 stores, did not last long, although a few miners did stay and continue hydraulic sluicing.

Patearoa, as the extract notes, survived, even though its gold rush was comparatively short-lived. Perhaps its situation, down on the plain, is more sheltered and less exposed than Hamiltons.

This last week there's been a lot of celebrating going on in Lawrence, where gold was first discovered 150 years ago by Gabriel Reed. Lawrence's population was at one time 11,500 - it's now around 550. Gold digging must be one of the most unpleasant occupations a person can choose, even given the end results. Out in a lonely place, living in a tent or a shack of some sort (if you're lucky), often without friends, definitely without wives and children, and continually afraid that someone's going to steal what you've gained. And for the Chinese people who came here to search for it, it was an exceptionally difficult lifestyle, as they were despised and hated by the Europeans. You can still see some of their old shelters near Cromwell. The landscape around is pitiless, barren and rocky.

Going Local

On the bus this morning a friend and I were talking about the slow trend away from outsourcing to other countries and towards in-sourcing - in other words going more local than overseas. Interesting, then, to see this extract turn up in The Daily Asterisk, a six-day-a-week quote that I get by email.

Going local does not mean walling off the outside world. It means nurturing locally owned businesses which use local resources sustainably, employ local workers at decent wages, and serve primarily local consumers. It means becoming more self-sufficient, and less dependent on imports. Control moves from the boardrooms of distant corporations and back to the community, where it belongs.

Michael Shuman
Going Local

Housewife, 49

A couple of days ago TVNZ aired a TV movie called, Housewife, 49. It was written by Victoria Wood, who also plays the main character, Mrs Last, the housewife of the title, aged 49 at the time the story begins. Mrs Last is on the verge on another breakdown at the same time as England is on the verge of the Second World War. Her somewhat off-hand doctor recommends getting some friends (with the assumption that this is easy to do); in fact, what Mrs Last needs is a purpose in life, something to bring out her real and lively nature. Her two sons have grown up and are moving on, her husband continues to dominate the household by expecting everything to revolve around him - even though he's a person with almost no personality and no other interests in life except his joinery business. It all seems very bleak, and then Mrs Last joins the Women's Voluntary Service, who truly come into their own in the course of the war.

Things aren't all plain sailing from then on; her favourite son, Cliff, decides that he's acting as a coward by not fighting in the war (as opposed to being an army PT instructor) and ultimately he turns against her when she continues to mother him in the way she's always done. (He also turns out to be gay, something which of course he finds difficult to reveal.) She runs up against some strong-minded (and class-minded) women in the WVS, and more than once retires, battered and bruised. Her husband opposes her every move and it's only her sense that she's doing the right thing - not just for the war effort, but for herself - that keeps her going and eventually shows her that he's the weaker partner in the marriage.

There's a lot more subtlety in it than that brief synopsis allows, and Wood has provided a script full of great lines for her various characters to deliver, particularly Mrs Waite (played by Stephanie Cole) who never says anything without using the English language to its fullest extent. David Threlfall, as Mr Last, maintains a dour aspect throughout, and puts a damper on the slightest show of life in his household; yet he has moments in which we can sympathise with him. It's a superb performance, showing how even the most drear person has humanity and uniquness.

Throughout the story, Mrs Last writes a kind of diary, in pencil and on scrap paper, and sends this off as part of an initiative called the Mass Observation Project. Their Archive site notes: The Archive results from the work of the social research organisation, Mass Observation. This organisation was founded in 1937 by three young men, who aimed to create an 'anthropology of ourselves'. They recruited a team of observers and a panel of volunteer writers to study the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain. This original work continued until the early 1950s.

There were two aspects to the Project: one consisted of observers going to all manner of organisations and taking notes, the other was called The National Panel of Diarists and was composed of people from all over Britain who either kept diaries or replied to regular open-ended questionnaires sent to them by the central team of Mass-Observers.

This latter is where Mrs Last's (true) story fits in. Her notes are kept faithfully by the Project team (along with thousands of others) and her sometimes heart-rending story is seen as a kind of serial in their day to day work. The original Project came to an end in the 1950s, but was revived via the Archive in 1981, and continues to this day with a wide range of writers still contributing to it.

Circus Aotearoa

Last year my daughter, grandson and I caught up with the Zirka Circus, a mostly Asian troupe. This was a circus that relied heavily on every member of the team being willing to so everything, including selling programmes, light sabres, tickets and so on. It was circus rendered small-scale, we thought.

And then we saw Circus Aotearoa. This is circus on a very small, very tight budget. (The aerial artiste's fishnet stockings had a large patch sewn on, for instance.) In fact, our first reaction was, this is pretty budget - and that not thought in the most friendly of senses.

A clown had some fun with small kids and an unstrung tennis racket before the actual show started, but the opening two acts didn't do much to encourage more enthusiasm. The string broke on the ringmaster's eggcup device (it's that thing you have on a string and send flying up into the air in order to catch it). He coped well with this, and managed to do his short act without one handle. The next act was the lady tightrope walker - except that she was performing on what you'd have to call a slack rope. Intentional, I'm sure, but it seemed a little odd.

However, after this, things suddenly picked up and it was a matter of spotting which of the eight performers was doing what for the rest of the afternoon. The ringmaster (yes, this circus, unlike Zirka, had a ringmaster) had a stint as a clown, and was very good. The clown from the beginning turned up again in his own act of balancing on various things that shouldn't be balanced on while juggling, and again as a half-clown tennis pro who juggled his tennis racquets and again in some other guise. The tight-rope lady did various other swinging or trapeze-type acts - four in all. One of the guys who seemed to be on hand only to throw things to the other artists, or pick up after them turned out to be a rope-swinger, doing some dazzling stuff up above our heads. The lady who'd ushered people in and then turned her attention to the sound desk came on for at least three acts in which she turned from total clowning (complete with whistle in one act) to some wonderful stuff with up to ten hula hoops. And a couple of guys who were supposed to throw knives - at someone, it never became clear who - were also on hand to do other jobs and acts at different times. (Their knife-throwing act was both clever and clownish - taking some poor guy out of the audience and fooling him into thinking he'd thrown two knives at one of the cast and somehow managed to hit the right spot each time.)

It was the good Kiwi humour and sense of fun that enlivened the show. A nice down-playing of the talent - talent good enough to fit into any decent travelling circus (you were never sure whether someone had intentionally goofed or whether it was part of the act) , and a sense of teamwork made you forget there were so few performers. There were no pyrotechnices, no lighting displays (in fact, someone had apparently forgotten to turn the - one and only - light on at the beginning), no big pieces of equipment, and even some of the costumes had a slight look of having come from an op shop (those of the clowns rather than the 'acts' people). And yet once it got underway it engaged the audience without difficulty and spoke on a level everyone was comfortable with.

It may not be a show to make you gasp at the displays of skill (we've become a bit blase about people doing daring things) but it's very entertaining and well worth a visit, though if you're expecting to see everything listed on their site's FAQ, you'll be disappointed....

Peter Brook still making magic

At the end of the Guardian article about Peter Brook's latest production, Mozart's Magic Flute, the writer quotes Brook as saying: what does touch me is when people come up to me in the street, as they sometimes do since they mistakenly think I've retired, and talk about some experience that has remained with them. That for me is the only real legacy: the idea that one has left a lingering trace in people's memories. In the end, that's all a director can hope to do."

I still remember seeing his Midsummer Night's Dream in the sixties - the set was a bare white box with a door at the back (I don't remember any other entrances). Everything was 'created' in this white space, and amazingly what was seen and heard was wondrous. It had a marvellous life. As Brook notes, you can't recreate 'Brook' - each director has to do his own work.

My first reaction, however, to his Magic Flute production was that he's skimmed it down to next to nothing. Here's how it's described.

His 90-minute production of Mozart's A Magic Flute, which comes to the Barbican next week, is quintessential late Brook. Out go the opera's pantomimic spectacle, big processions and trios of boys and ladies. Instead, we have a stage bare except for bamboo poles and minimal props and a young, nine-strong cast who deliver the work – sung in German with dialogue in French – crucially situated in front of Franck Krawczyk at the piano. As Brook wryly says: "If you come to this production looking for something that will slam you in the eyes, you've come to the wrong address."

That, at first, puts me off. However, you need to read further into the article. While this can't be a visual spectacle it's obviously going to be effective.

One other thing struck me: he also says:

"I have an unshakeable conviction," says Brook, "that never in history has a guy written the tunes, and someone has come along and put the words to them. I once asked Richard Rodgers whether he had any tunes in his bottom draw waiting for a lyric. He told me that it was only when he heard the lyricist's precise words, such as Oscar Hammerstein's "O, what a beautiful mornin'", that the melodies emerged. And in Mozart, the music is drawn to the surface by the words."

Brook's 'unshakeable conviction' may or may not be correct. I've certainly puzzled over the idea that tunes came first for many of the great musical comedy writers of the 20th century, but it's been stated in more than a few places that that's how they worked. Perhaps the answer is closer to this: the lyricist proposes some words; the composer gets a framework of an idea for the music; the lyricist fits his words to the music; the composer rearranges his music to make it work better; the lyricist alters his words to fit the rearranged music - and so on, until the product is ready. This may happen in a matter of hours, weeks or months. And perhaps the composers/lyricists, in reflecting back on how a song was written, forget all the to-ing and fro-ing that's gone on.

Learning from a disaster

Matthew Taylor from RSA writing in relation to the Japanese disaster (and also the Scottish economy, but that doesn't get mentioned in the following extract)...

It was...fascinating this morning...to hear James Naughtie on the Today Programme describing the issues which some Japanese people hope their country will now face up to in the wake of their unfolding tragedy:
first, how could the Government and the people have a deeper and more honest conversation about the choices facing a country which already had a debt twice the size of GDP even before the crisis.
Second, how could Japan rediscover the entrepreneurial flair which led to it being the world’s economic powerhouse in the seventies and eighties.
Third, how could Japan develop a new and stronger civil society to fill the gaps between big Government, big corporations and individuals?

The idea that Japan could turn this crisis into a national conversation about a new idea of citizenship and society is inspiring. It is also fascinating how recognisable these issues are to us in the UK.

Defend and Betray

Having found that the various non-fiction books I've got on hand at the moment aren't inspiring me to read them, for a bit of a change I decided to grab something off the Public Library's fiction shelves. Wound up with Anne Perry's Defend and Betray, written back in 1992, and one of the earlier books involving her detective, Inspector Monk.

It has the benefit of being written by someone who knows how to use language, which is a plus - there are plenty of thrillers/detective stories out there that are abominably written. (Interestingly enough on page 138 of this copy some person has corrected Perry's - or the editor's - 'bare' to 'bear' in the sentence '...bear the social shame of it.')

But after a good start, the book has bogged down a bit in the middle as the three investigating characters, Hester, who worked in the Crimea with Florence Nightingale; Rathbone the lawyer, and Monk keep going over the same ground trying to find out why the character who has confessed to the murder either couldn't have done it or, if she did, must have had some so far unexplained motive.

Hopefully things will start to move forward again or it'll join the League of Books I've-read-quite-a-bit-of-but-never-finished.

Anne Perry, it turns out, is actually Juliet Hulme, who with her friend Pauline Parker, murdered Parker's mother in Christchurch in 1954. I find it a little odd while reading the book that Perry should write about murder, murderers and victims with an objectivity that must have been difficult to achieve after her notorious act as a teenager. Still, given the chance to move on in life, I guess she had to do something, and she's certainly been very successful as a novelist.

Update, 20.3.11.
I've now finished the book, and yes, it does pick up on page 252, when the trial of the woman who's murdered her husband starts. From this point on it moves forward at a good pace, and the trial scenes are well written.
Some of the character drawing throughout, however, is a bit puzzling. Her detective, Monk, and Hester and Rathbone are constantly portrayed in ways that seem to show them being in conflict with themselves, so that we never quite get to grips with them. The three get on well, and yet, Perry is always telling us something that makes it seem that they don't. This character approach is a bit odd, to me.
The sub-plot concerning Monk's previous murder investigations and his gradually recovery of memories about them is just annoying. It interrupts the flow of the main story, rather than adding to it, and I found myself skimming these sections again and again, because they broke into the forward movement. Further, in the end they contribute nothing to the main plot, and merely show more of Monk's seeming conflicts in himself. Since these aren't terribly relevant to what else goes on, they were another irritant for me.
I think Perry overwrites: in building up the 19th century London world around her characters she often adds two or three paragraphs of detail. Yes, it reminds us that these people exist in a time different to our own, but it's extraneous to the book's basic intention. We don't need to know about the hansom cabs and vehicles in the streets, just because someone is crossing a well-known London square. We don't need to know how the various jams and stuff were made. And so on. These things need to be integrated into the book more.
Further, she's always giving us characters' feelings, and yet these are often out of tune somehow with the mood of the scene, as though she wants us to know that none of the main characters is really the same underneath as they are on the surface. For a mystery, these are just excess.
IMHO.

Accurate reporting

Two posts from GetReligion.org today show the difficulties of reporting the news accurately - and why it's always worth asking questions about reported pieces. Furthermore both of these pieces involve the difficulties inherent in clearly understanding religious issues as opposed to sectarian ones.

The first discusses various clashes between Muslims and Christians in Egypt since the removal of Mubarak. The second looks at a particularly horrific attack on an Israeli family, allegedly by the Al Aqsa Martyrs (who at first took credit, then later claimed they hadn't done it).

In both cases, the writers attempt to clarify who is who and who did what to whom. In neither case are these things as clear as they should be in the original news reports, and the reports often leave out vital facts.

Sometimes the problem is publication policy; sometimes it's inept reporting; sometimes it's a biased use of language. Whatever the problem, it shows that in a world where we can actually compare reports, it's worth doing so before we make up our mind about what we've been told.

Japan on the 11th March

I'm posting this in full....it appeared on the Tall Skinny Kiwi blog (he's in NZ just now) on March 11th and is a 'conversation' between him and a colleague in Japan. It gives some idea of where things are at for those on the ground.

He writes: My friend Mika Goto was stuck in Tokyo tonight after the earthquake and I asked her some questions for the blog. I am posting it unedited.

TSK: Did you feel the earthquake in Tokyo? What is happening there now?

MIKA: I and co-workers, felt the earthquake in the central Tokyo.
It was the biggest earthquake in my life, intensity 5 in Tokyo area.
After emergency escape, we are told to go home or to go safe place,
but trains were stopped, there were traffic jam,
so that, there were lots of people walking to go home, or to find warm and safe place.

some of co-workers, who live near central Tokyo, they walked home.
some of us, who live away from the central, we stay at office for tonight.
hotels and restaurants were full, lots of people are staying in some building to keep themselves warm.
from around 11pm, trains started moving in Tokyo area.

phone line has been too busy, we lost contact with each other.
I kept calling to my parents, so that I could reach them to find that they are safe.
(my father is also staying in his office in the central Tokyo.)

tokyo, is ok, i gues, but the area close to the origin of the earthquake,
people there are facing difficult situation, with collaption of building, landslide, seawave.

one of my co-worker, her family is in Miyagi, near earthquake center,
inside of their house is messed up, but the family is safe and their hous is ok.

I heard, the parents of a guy in our church, live in Sendai, which is also near earthquake center, he hasnt reach them yet.

TSK: Have the churches begun to respond in Japan? What do you think they will do?

I dont know if they have begun, without any info,... but I hope, the churches aound the epicentral area will help, such as offering them place to stay, food, blanket, caring of those who lost their family...

TSK: People around the world are praying for Japan right now. And we expect that churches and organizations everywhere will want to help in any way we can. Which organization is the best one to donate money to help Japan?

I don't have any church org in mind now. I will ask some of church friends for this...

TSK: How can we pray for your country?

it will be great if you pray for Japan, asking Jesus what to pray.
I pray that no more death will be caused by this earthquake,
and that God will use good of this for the future benefit of this country and the people in this country... (coz this gave us opportunity for us to think what is really important in our lives.)

no photo for now......and,,, i m going to sleep... hope i can go home tomorrow morning.

thanks for your prayers, mika goto

Rambling on about hats

Look at photos from the early twentieth century, and everyone - men, women and children - is wearing a hat. Everyone.

Even up until the fifties, when I was a child, most people wore hats. We wore caps to school, caps that had a little brim out the front made of hard card which was good for flicking someone else with.

And then suddenly this all stopped. It was as if overnight a switch had been reset and hats became invisible. You have to wonder what happened to them all.

We've never quite gone back to the total hat scene, although hats of various sorts are much more visible now than they were a decade ago. A few weeks ago, for a few days in a row, there was a man in a suit, on the bus, wearing a hat that looked like the one on the right - it's the sort of hat very few people wear these days.

Which reminds me that a couple of decades ago some brave soul started up a hat shop here in Dunedin, at a time when hats were practically invisible. A friend of mine bought one that was even more stylish than the one pictured, and wore it briefly - until he realised that just no one was wearing anything like that. And the shop closed within months of opening, as I recall, which was hardly surprising.

Women's hats, of the kind that used to be worn by every woman (with exceedingly extravagant versions available to those in 'society'), appear at weddings, but not much anywhere else. (My wife wore one to my son's wedding.) We seem to have moved on from the age when the hat was a symbol (more than something to protect your head) and when people spent a good deal of time on windy days holding onto their hats - or chasing them along the street. And we've certainly moved on from the time when it was normal to wear a hat,whatever the weather, and whatever the occasion.

In the hotel room we stayed at in Heidelberg four years ago, the only other item in the room was a hatstand - which seemed a bit optimistic.

However, having said that hats are well nigh invisible, that's not quite the truth. Hats of the more formal kind, with a brim all round seem to have gone into hiding, but hats in general (covering a wide range of styles) still appear - if you keep your eyes open.

Men and boys wear the baseball type cap (thankfully the right way round for the most part) and these are particularly useful for wearing as a kind of shade to keep the sun out of your eyes. Consequently I wear one through the summer when I'm walking to work, and even well into the winter - both to keep my head warm and also to act as a shade against the very low winter sun. I even wore a cloth (or flat) cap for a time - someone had given it to me and it just suited the purpose.

And talking of winter, that's when a vast array of hats appear: beanies that fit all around the bonce, (by beanie I mean the NZ version, not the one in the picture) and the occasional balaclava, and those peculiar knitted things full of colour that hang around down the ears and would loop around under the chin if it was stylish to do them up (I've just discovered they're called a 'chullo'). Knitted hats, in fact, are very common in the winter, and certainly in our climate they're great for keeping the heat in (although I've read somewhere recently that we don't actually lose a large percentage of our heat from our heads after all - wish scientists would get their facts right and stick with them).

Wikipedia, of course, has articles on the hat - this one has a great list of them with photos attached - it surprising just what a wide variety there are around the world. You can even buy Wikipedia trucker hats with various sayings on them...rather like the slogans on t-shirts.

Well, there you go. How to ramble about the hat when I could possibly, and probably should be, doing something else. What the heck, I'm nearly retired!

Buying online

Is it safe to buy life insurance online asks someone. The question might better be: is it safe to buy anything online?

If the law of averages is anything to go by, I'd say, Yes, of course it's safe. But then I've never had anything really serious go wrong with an online purchase. Occasionally I've received a book that wasn't the one I ordered, but the supplier has then turned round and given me the right one free of any further cost.

Dell Computers can be a bit difficult to deal with - for instance I'm waiting on an order I requested back at the beginning of last month. Dell usually comes through - even though they may take some time and a number of calls to people who speak English in such a way that it's hard to understand. I wouldn't buy from them again, (I've had to order printer cartridges because no one else can supply them) but to be fair, everything has eventually resolved itself with them.

I once ordered a DVD on Trade Me, and the seller turned out to be a bit dodgy, I think. He was basically waiting for the sale before he ordered the DVD from his supplier, which meant there were much longer times of waiting for goods to arrive than would be normal for a Trade Me transaction. His dodgy behaviour eventually bit him in the bum...he had so many people complaining that he stopped selling stuff altogether. It didn't help that he tended to accuse the buyer of causing problems (having a letterbox next to a shop, or across the road from a school??) rather than accepting that he was the problem.

Hmmm. I started off saying that on average it was okay to buy online. My stories are pretty mild by comparison with some I've heard. It's always worth dealing with a company that's reputable (Trade Me itself is far more reputable than the odd seller on there and they will sort out problems if needed) - I guess Dell is reputable, but their service aspect leaves something to be desired, and their speed of delivery is poor by comparison with most online companies. They also make it more difficult to get back to them than necessary.

As for life insurance, buying it online will be safe as long as you're sure the company you're dealing with is a legitimate life insurance company. There's the rub. If you don't know the company, check it out first - in some way or other. Don't rush in and take up a deal before you've got some further information. Pretty simple, really, but not everyone is patient enough to do it....

Incidentally, I've just remembered something that I did find odd when trying to buy some shoes online recently. Shoes? Yup. When we were in England in 2007, my shoes were wearing thin, and water was getting in. When we were passing through a town called Oswestry we came across an op shop (charity shop in the UK), and my wife spied a pair of Clark's shoes with Gore-tex waterproofing - the kind that are slightly more like a boot than a shoe. They'd been worn in, but that was all, and they were only £7.99. And they fitted like a glove.

I've worn these shoes ever since, and they're still going strong, except that they're starting to feel as though they're letting a little water in when it rainds. I'm not sure if they're actually doing it or whether it's just that my feet sometimes feel cold in them. (Not helped by the fact that during the Christmas holidays we went walking after a heavy shower and the water off the tall grass we were pushing through soaked my trousers and then drained off into my shoes. It took a couple of days to get them dry.)

Anyway, we decided that since we had a bit of cash in an English account, we'd buy another pair of these shoes before I finished work at the end of March. We found an equivalent pair online, Gore-tex and all, and went to buy them. Here's the rub: firstly Clark's wouldn't send shoes overseas. Okay, that was a bit of a pain, but we decided we could send them to one of our English rellies and they could forward them on. Went through the process of ordering them only to find that they didn't accept credit cards unless your home address was in the UK! That is extraordinary, particularly as we have a credit card that comes from a bank located in London.

Finally we had to direct credit money to our rellies so they could order and pay for the shoes. That seemed ridiculous, since Clark's is a well-established company, is very visible on the Internet, and advertises to all and sundry. Except that 'all and sundry' only includes citizens of the British Isles.

Occasionally I've come across American companies that are like this - although they're becoming a dying breed, thank goodness - but I've never found an English one supplying only to those inside its borders. Anyway, the shoes are here, they fit very well, and I'm gradually wearing them in. Hopefully they'll last as long as they last pair...!

Copts under fire...again

So you thought everything was going to be hunky-dory in Egypt now? Not for the Christians, it isn't. In a somewhat lawless time, Copts are once again being attacked. As Terry Mattingly notes, the treatment of the Copts in Egypt is the equivalent of having canaries in a mine. If the Copts are being treated okay, things are going well; if they're not, Egypt remains a troubled nation.

Here's a section of a report from the Assyrian International News Agency, for example.

For the second time in as many days, Egyptian armed force stormed the 5th century old St. Bishoy monastery in Wadi el-Natroun, 110 kilometers from Cairo. Live ammunition was fired, wounding two monks and six Coptic monastery workers. Several sources confirmed the army’s use of RPG [rocket propelled grenades] ammunition. Four people have been arrested including three monks and a Coptic lawyer who was at the monastery investigating yesterday’s army attack.

As Mattingly notes, what's sad about this is that it's only a few weeks since Muslims and Copts stood together called for reform.

Micro-managers

In the musical I've been writing with my collaborator the mother and father are going to a dress-up dinner at the beginning. However during the course of the story, the mother's dress gets torn. I was originally thinking that we'd need two identical formal dresses, one intact and the other needing repair, but my ever-creative collaborator said there's an easier way. Start off with the torn dress and have it invisibly 'mended' in some way at the beginning of the play.

I'm not sure why this is something I should be trying to micro-manage...in due course the costume people will deal with it, but I think I like to at least know about how these things are going to work. My collaborator is the same: even though we've sorted the script out, she wants to go through it and work out when scenery can be set, when it can be dispensed with, when tabs (inner curtains) close, when they open...and much more. In fact, if it seems like I'm a micro-manager, you should meet her! :)

And we still have to figure out how to fly some characters off the stage in one of the later scenes. It's going to be interesting.

Confirming opinions/hobby horses

Some see Investigate as a controversy-making populist magazine that hypes up some facts and ignores others. However, I'm inclined to a more moderate view of the mag, which has more than once brought material to light that's been ignored or quashed in other media, isn't afraid to state its case (even if it occasionally winds up with egg on its face) and is also open about its editor's Christian beliefs.

The following paragraphs come from their latest email promo.

".....David Cameron’s controversial speech signalling the death knell of multicultural policies in the UK and Europe. Cameron says weak liberalism has left Westerners scared of defending core values for fear of offending someone.

“A passively tolerant society says to its citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values.”

Instead, argues Cameron, what is needed is a much more “muscular” defence of Western culture: “Freedom of speech, freedom of worship, democracy. The rule of law. Equal rights regardless of race, sex or sexuality...This is what defines us as a society. To belong here is to believe in these things. Each of us in our own countries must be unambiguous and hard-nosed about this defence of our liberty..making sure immigrants speak the language of their new home...ensuring that people are educated in elements of a common culture and curriculum.”

The UK, France and Germany are all now backpedalling from decades of politically correct policies..."

I've believed for some time that both the bi-cultural and multi-cultural models here in NZ haven't done the country good; nor have they achieved much abroad, it seems. It looks like others are finally getting to grips with the problem.

And something else I've said for a while is that perhaps all the weather problems we're having around the world are related to a shift in the earth's axis. Not being a scientist of any sort, this was a merely intuitive idea. Curious then, to find this also in the Investigate's promo:

"Did you know the magnetic pole has begun shifting at a startlingly accelerated pace?

“NASA has been warning about it...scientific papers have been written about it...geologists have seen its traces in rock strata and ice-core samples. Now ‘it’ is here: an unstoppable magnetic pole shift that has sped up and which may be causing life-threatening havoc with the world’s weather,” begins the report from Terrence Aym in HIS.

Two weeks ago, the US Geological Survey issued a new report warning that massive superstorms could be in the offing capable of causing US$300 to $400 billion worth of damage – far exceeding the US$12 billion tag for the Christchurch quake, by way of comparison."

While that's not exactly a shift in the earth's axis, it's similar. Curious, and scary.

Some Presbyterian views on the Christchurch earthquake

There have been some messages sent through to a group I'm on (and they've gone to other groups too, I understand) from two or three Presbyterian ministers in relation to the earthquake yesterday. There particularly interesting because they're from eyewitnesses. Here's part of one from Geoff King, whose church (Knox) was already damaged in the first earthquake in September:

Thank you for the messages and prayers of support that greeted me as I switched on the computer this morning - power was restored to our place around 9.30 last night but I was still dealing with texts and trying to find somewhere for the family to sleep in the mess of our manse. At midnight I accepted a friend's offer to take [my wife] and our two boys north to catch the ferry to the North Island, so it's just our dog and I getting ready for another day.

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

Got around some of our older parishioners yesterday afternoon but by no means all of them - back on the bike after I've had breakfast today. It's hard to describe the destruction in the central city - modern buildings have collapsed crumbled this time, and there is now no need for the reconstruction meeting that was planned for Knox tomorrow, as only the wooden pillars and roof are still standing - I am profoundly relieved that no one was injured when the wall on Bealey Ave collapsed towards traffic. I've heard that at least one bus in the central city was not so fortunate, and all of us are anxiously awaiting the release of the names of those who've died. I've closed the Knox Centre as a precaution - whilst the newer building is still standing the rear wall of the church collapsed through the gallery and hall/centre stairwell, so may have damaged the centre's outer wall.

And a shorter one from another minister:

Trinity Pacific is in a really bad way including fire. As is Knox. Centre of town looks like a bomb site. I was next to Durham street Methodist as it collapsed in a pile of stones . Thank you for your prayers.

The Pacific church she's referring to had already had a fire before the September earthquake.

And finally, from Martin Stewart:

Thanks to you all for your messages of prayer and thoughts - so far from what I have been able to find out we have four churches in considerable strife (all were damaged in September) - fortunately the workers on the St Paul's trinity Pacific restoration were on lunch break and all got out.
This church is diagonally opposite the devastated CTV building.
Our Methodist friends have had more damage and there are reports of three people still missing on the Durham St Methodist Church which was ironically being made safe. The Methodist Connexional Offices are closed with some damage to that building.
The pic [photo - above right] is of Oxford Terrace Baptist Church which totally collapsed. Knox Church is also one of the significantly damaged Pressie buildings.
Time will tell as to whether the ones lost are known in our church families, but we all feel emotionally drained in a way different from September because of the loss of many lives.

Danny MacAskill

There's a reasonably long video showing cyclist Danny MacAskill's acrobatic skills as he zips up and over and under and across and through various obstacles with an extraordinary ease - and after years of practice.

The video is called Way Back Home and takes MacAskill back to Skye, where he does his stunts on the beach and around the castle and rocks and so on. Amazing man. And the video isn't filmed in lots of short cuts so that you don't really see what's happening; instead it allows you to see the full extent of MacAskill's skills interspersed with some fabulous scenery.

All you young blokes who think you're pretty cool on your skateboards...watch what MacAskill can do...

Reading

If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.

Sherman Alexie
National Book Foundation Interview

Unpleasantness

"When did we become so enamoured of unpleasantness? More importantly, when did we start automatically accepting it as truth, particularly in literature? The world is, of course, often quite unpleasant, and any brainlessly pain-free book purporting to show truth can and should be dismissed as unrealistic contrivance. But while contrived cruelty may seem more artful than contrived sentiment, it’s still contrivance."

Patrick Ness in The Guardian, writing a review of the book, More Than it Hurts You, by Darin Strauss.

I'm just about finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a book I've been keen to read since a friend let me skim through the first few pages while I was waiting to accompany him in a singing competition two or three years ago. The book is overlong - Stieg Larsson never spares on detail, even when it contributes nothing to the story in hand - but that's survivable.

What I've struggled with is the emphasis on sadistic sexual violence. I think if it wasn't for the fact that the story itself is intriguing, I'd have put it away early in the piece. Larsson is making a point, I guess, and puts statistical quotes at the beginnings of chapters about how many women are abused sexually each year - and in terms of the way women are abused throughout the world, it does no harm to remind us of how awful some women's lives are.

Nevertheless, there's a sense of enjoyment in the way the book writes about these episodes, and most of these episodes are written in such a way that they draw the reader in. This is particularly evident when one of the main characters takes revenge on a man who's abused her. However, I found myself skimming pages when Larsson continued to add more and more sickening detail to later parts of the book. I didn't feel it was necessary to have all this hammered home.

We've got the other two titles on Kindle, but if they're similar to the first, I think I won't be reading them.

Short Aussie films

Movie Extra Tropfest 2011, the Australian short film festival, was held on Feb 20 this year at the Domain, Sydney, as well as at live sites around Australia including Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, Hobart, Adelaide, Surfers Paradise and Perth.

Sixteen short films were up for the honour of winning the prize, each complying with the four conditions of the contest. The film had to be made specifically for Movie Extra Tropfest 2011, have their irst public screening at Movie Extra TropFest 2011, be no longer than seven minutes (including title and end credits), and contain the Tropfest Signature Item (TSI) – which is ‘KEY’ for 2011. The trailer for this year’s festival was directed by Steve Baker, winner of TropFest in 2007 with An Imaginary Friend.

The video below is the advertising trailer for 2010. It was directed by Steve Baker, and narrated by Anthony LaPaglia.



The winner for 2011 was Damon Gameau. The Australian film and television performer, who has appeared in Nine Network's Underbelly series and the 2009 movie Balibo, was widely praised for his film Animal Beatbox.

The movie is an animation described as having a catchy lyrical and poetic narrative. It was shot in Gameau's mother's spare room and cost just $85 to make.

art, theology, marxism, atheism, the mix!

I've published this post elsewhere, in relation to the theology aspect. Here it appears more in relation to the cinematic/art aspects...!

One of the blogs I read regularly is entitled 'Never mind the bricolage' and is written by someone who calls himself 'Superflat'. There was a point when I had an actual name, but I can't just track it down on the blog at present. He works with students doing courses in which he discusses art and theology, (at least these topics come up regularly in his blog), and in his latest post, Criticism of Heaven he begins by writing the following...

In the Art, Cinema and Theology class we have been exploring the role of women in the arts and particularly women painters and their general absence from Western Art History. We found our way to a discussion about Frida Kahlo, inspired by the movie about her starring Selma Hayek and directed by Julie Taymor.

I think that there are rich conversations to be had around her life and work, but a question came up during class about how to 'do theology with someone who is a communist and an atheist'--points that I actually think are favourable for a conversation, but somehow seemed to be a stumbling block to at least one person. I guess it all depends on how one understands what theological discourse might be--for me it encompasses at least some aspect of bringing things (anything) into dialogue and conversation. While I part company with the conclusions of the Radical Orthodoxy mob, I do like Graham Ward's idea that doing theology somehow means 'reclaiming the world'--bringing all the things once ceded to the wider culture back into contact and conversation with sacred communities and with theology. So for me Frida Kahlo offers up some major theological potentials: sexuality and gender; socialism/Marxism, theism/a-theism, pain and brokenness just to name a few.

I like that idea of 'reclaiming the world' in relation to art/theology -it resonates with a number of different writers on art and theology I've read.

Superflat has a little more to say....here.

[Bricolage is a term used in several disciplines, among them the visual arts, to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process. The term is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler, the core meaning in French being, "fiddle, tinker" and, by extension, "to make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are at hand (regardless of their original purpose)". In contemporary French the word is the equivalent of the English do it yourself, and is seen on large shed retail outlets throughout France. A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur. Thanks, Wikipedia!]

I'm famous cos God loves me

Before they were famous, many of the biggest pop stars in the world believed that God wanted them to be famous, that this was his plan for them, just as it was his plan for the rest of us not to be famous. Conversely, many equally talented but slightly less famous musicians I’ve interviewed felt their success was accidental or undeserved—and soon after fell out of the limelight.

As I compiled and analyzed these interviews for my new book, I reached a surprising conclusion: Believing that God wants you to be famous actually improves your chances of being famous. Of course, from the standpoint of traditional theology, even in the Calvinistic world of predestination, God is much more concerned with the fate of an individual’s soul than his or her secular success, and one’s destiny is unknowable. So what’s helping these stars is not so much religion as belief - specifically, the belief that God favors their own personal, temporal success over that of almost everyone else.

From “God at the Grammys: The Chosen Ones” by Neil Strauss.

Commonplace post

One of the fun things about Google desktop, and also about Evernote, the programme that allows you to store virtually everything you like via Cloud, is that if you put a particular word in you can come up with all sorts of things: things you've forgotten, or things you didn't know you had.

For instance in relation to the word, 'insurance' which I checked out because I wanted to put in a link for rv insurance quotes, I came across three items, all unrelated, and all of interest. Firstly there was this footnote to one of Jason Goroncy's recent blog posts - in this case on the subject of holiness. The original quote comes from William Stringfellow.

‘Can a Homosexual be a Christian. One might as well ask, can an insurance man be a Christian? Can a lawyer be a Christian? Can an ecclesiastical bureaucrat be a Christian? Can a rich man be a Christian? Can an infant be a Christian? Or one who is sick, or insane, or indolent or one possessed of power or status or respectability? Can anybody be a Christian? Can a human being be a Christian? All such questions are theologically absurd. To be a Christian does not have anything essentially to do with conduct or station or repute. To be a Christian does not have anything to do with the common pietisms of ritual, dogma or morals in and of themselves. To be a Christian has, rather, to do with that peculiar state of being bestowed upon men by God … Can a homosexual be a Christian? Yes: if his sexuality is not an idol’.

And with that succinct piece of theology we move to quote number two, this time from Seth Godin. It comes from a post he wrote in Feb 2010 called Phoning it in and he began with some concern about a minister of religion who told him that some days she just works...

I know doctors, lawyers, waiters and insurance brokers who are honestly and truly passionate about what they do. They view it as an art form, a calling, and an important (no, an essential) thing worth doing.
In fact, I don't think there's a relationship between what you do and how important you think the work is. I think there's a relationship between who you are and how important you think the work is.

The third reference to 'insurance' (I'm sure there are plenty more, as Google desktop came up with several pages worth) comes from a draft of a blog post I'd written which doesn't appear to have been published....

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 they're 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.

To go back to the original phrase that inspired this digging around in my computer: rv {recreational vehicles} insurance quotes. You hear a lot about rvs on the Internet, but they're not something that New Zealanders tend to have much to do with [though the photo on the right was taken in Rotorua, NZ]: we lean towards converting old buses into the equivalent of an rv, sometimes in a superb way.

Most of my experience with rvs comes from the movies - Sandra Bullock, desperate to go to the loo, boarding an rv owned by total strangers; or Jack Nicholson watching the stars while sitting on the roof of an enormous rv he and his wife had bought just before she unexpectedly dropped dead doing what she was passionate about: cleaning...and many more. The way rvs get treated in the movies, they'd need massive insurance, I'd think!

White Blackberry

I think one of the first zip drives (pen drives) I had could only hold 128 megabytes of data on it. And no doubt it cost a heap. My daughter has just been telling me that a few years back she bought a 1 gb drive for a friend which cost $NZ80 at the time. Now they're selling 4gb drives for two for $20. All the kids are getting them for school - and no doubt losing them as fast as they acquire them.

I've just been looking at a site that sells Blackberry bolds for $US99.99, which at today's exchange rate is a ridiculous $NZ129.75. Buying a Blackberry for $130 is crazy; only a short while ago they in the region of $700-800.

These kind of prices rather reduce the exclusiveness of Blackberries - it doesn't seem long ago that characters in movies would nonchalantly mention their 'Blackberry' and another character would gasp and say....You have a Blackberry? Now they'd say....So what?

And talking of Blackberries, if you haven't seen the skit set in a fruit shop with Ronnie Corbett (the One Ronnie) catch up with it now.....

Note the white blackberry. Isn't that an oxymoron?

Books vs e-books

Interesting set of tweets as recorded by a site called 40Key, about which I don't know a lot. They say on the site: 40k means ebooks. Here you can find:

* Thinking. Culture is going digital. Our essays will tell you stories about this shift. and
* Fiction. A sophisticated selection of stories and a lot of award-winning authors.

Plainly their focus is literature in many forms.

The post's subject is If Book Then: a Recap, which I'm sure makes sense, but don't quite ask me how.

The topic in discussion (I think*) is the advance of e-books and the retreat of real books and bookstores. Some of the comments are just a little scary, especially from someone who goes by the Twitter name of mikeshatzkin.

Mike Shatzkin says on Twitter that he's interested in publishing and digital change.

Make sure you read the Tweet list from the bottom up, otherwise it doesn't make a lot of sense...!

* My lack of understanding here is because Tweets on their own, or even in a bunch like this lot, often don't make enough sense - they lack a bit of context, one might say.

The King's Speech

We've just been to see The King's Speech, a good old-fashioned movie with a literate script, good parts for the actors to play, and a situation that's emotionally involving for the audience.

The two main parts are played by Colin Firth, as the soon-to-be king, George VI, and Geoffrey Rush as the Australian speech therapist who manages to get the King past his terrible public stutter and into a place where he can actually speak clearly and (mostly) safely in his public persona.

It's often very funny, with both Firth and Rush getting a share of the good retorts to the other's statements, and for once Rush doesn't have to play the part to the extreme in order to present an interesting performance. Firth's stutter seems as natural as is possible for any actor to present, and he brings the audience alongside him bit by bit, turning from a man who's always expected to say and do the right thing into someone whose humanity is gradually allowed to shine through.

Helena Bonham Carter plays the woman who would eventually be known as 'the Queen Mum'; at this point she's a woman of strength and character, and considerable support for her struggling husband. There are a bunch of other great British actors, including Derek Jacobi, Michael Gambon, Claire Bloom, but few of them have any great length of screen time.

It occurred to me during the film that George VI must have died relatively young; his daughter Elizabeth succeeded him in the early fifties, and he only came to the throne a few years before the war, when his somewhat harum-scarum brother (as he's portrayed in the movie) abdicated. Of course, I only need to check out Wikipedia to get at the facts: George (or Albert as he was actually called until he ascended the throne) was born in 1895 and became king in 1936, when he was 41. He died in 1952, when he was only 57, after only 16 years as king. His brother, known as Edward VIII, was on the throne barely a year - 325 days in fact, and was never officially crowned. Edward wasn't just harum-scarum; he was a considerable womaniser. As his former private secretary, Alan Lascelles, wrote (not very privately) "for some hereditary or physiological reason [Edward's] normal mental development stopped dead when he reached adolescence."

Quirky water

I guess this happens in many cities, particularly those built on hills, but one of the things I find quirky about Dunedin are the number of little streams that run down through people's properties, under roads, out the other side and then go....who knows where? (Well, someone does, no doubt, just not me.)

At the back of my son's property is a stream that trickles down behind all the properties in that area. I have no idea where it eventually comes out, as it doesn't seem to be visible around the corner of the block further down the hill.

When I walk to work down Neidpath Rd, there's a stream that runs between two properties on one side of the road, can be heard running under the road, and then appears not opposite where it's first seen, but two or three houses further along. There it has its own little space in someone's garden, and then it goes...who knows where?

I noticed this morning that after the heavy rain there was a good deal of water coming down the side of the hill further along Neidpath. This fall of water isn't usually very obvious and heads into a culvert that doesn't seem to have any outlet on the other side of the road.

At the bottom of the Glen is a large outlet for water that comes, presumably, off the hill. But I don't know that there's any sign of it further up.

And I only just learnt, after a number of years of being puzzled, that the water that comes out of a pipe in Broadway (a short street which, in my childhood, used to be a pedestrian mall with a pile of tiny shops - the only one I can remember sold nothing but umbrellas), and runs - often at quite a pace - down the gutter, around the corner into Rattray St, isn't a broken pipe but the outlet for an underground spring. It must come out at quite a high point, because there's a bank down below the place it appears leading onto the back of the Southern Cross Hotel.

Apparently the Dunedin City Council get calls almost every day from someone asking why water is being 'wasted'. (As I did.) It does seem odd that the water is being allowed just to drain away. If it's spring water, it's possibly on a par with the spring water that comes out of a tap on the Speight's Building. So why let if just disappear again? I have no idea.

25.4.15 Update. It seems as though the water in Broadway may be part of the Toitu stream which runs across Maori Rd at one point (or rather, under the road), down through the bush and under Canongate, and then under more of the streets. Of course it has a much longer trip than this, but that's part of it.

Leaning towards Orthodoxy

Having been brought up as a Catholic the liturgy, the statues, the incense and all the other stuff that goes with it have never particularly bothered me, even though I have 'moved' from the Catholic Church into something different: Christianity rather than a particular denomination. We go to a Baptist Church, and are members there, but I don't consider myself a 'Baptist'. A Christian, definitely, but I don't define it beyond that.

I've been following a blog written by Joseph Black. He's an American lecturer at a Christian College in Nairobi, Kenya. In the last few years he's leaned closer and closer to the Orthodox Church (not a 'denomination' as such, but a major stream of the Christian church, as Catholicism is), and in recent months was baptised into the Orthodox Church. He's been writing about his journey on his blog, and though personally I couldn't see myself going 'backwards' as it were, into something like Catholicism or Orthodoxy, I understand his reasons.

In his latest post he talks about taking several of his students to an Orthodox service - it's part of their course to attend different churches. For anyone who wants some answers as to why the Orthodox church does some of the things it does, particularly in relation to icons, read Black's post. It's very helpful.

By the way, Orthodoxy as a word gets used in different ways within Christianity: G K Chesterton wrote a book on Christianity and called it 'Orthodoxy' - but it has nothing to do with the Greek or Russian Orthodox streams. Rather it relates to the basics of Christianity as a whole, though in typical Chesterton style, it isn't in any sense a formal introduction to Christianity, nor a manual that tells you specifics about the faith.

As Chesterton writes in the introduction: "When the word "orthodoxy" is used here it means the Apostles' Creed, as understood by everybody calling himself Christian until a very short time ago and the general historic conduct of those who held such a creed. I have been forced by mere space to confine myself to what I have got from this creed; I do not touch the matter much disputed among modern Christians, of where we ourselves got it. This is not an ecclesiastical treatise but a sort of slovenly autobiography. But if any one wants my opinions about the actual nature of the authority, Mr. G.S.Street has only to throw me another challenge, and I will write him another book." [G S Street being one of his regular opponents.]

Getting the truth ain't easy

As the Egyptian crisis increases, more and more confusion reigns as to who is what, who isn't, and whether anybody really knows what's going on.

The Atlantic Monthly blog reported: A number of White House officials were given an Encyclopedia Britannica-like briefing about the basics: how many U.S. citizens were inside the country and contingency plans to get them out; reminders that Egypt wasn’t a Muslim country; Hosni Mubarak was a Coptic Christian of a certain sect; the Muslim Brotherhood was at once an opposition political party and a co-opted part of the social system...

Who knows who gave the briefing, but there are two specific errors in this paragraph alone (one of them has since been corrected on the blog): Egypt isn't an Islamic state, but it's certainly very Muslim; Mubarak is in no way a Christian of the Copts, or any other 'sect' (the Copts not being a sect in the first place) - he's a Muslim. (The fact that his full name is Muhammad Hosni Sayyid Mubarak might give a clue.)

And talking about the Coptic Christians in Egypt, a people who are between 8 and 12% of the population, the fact that they are regularly persecuted doesn't rise to the surface very often. It was the same in Iraq, where the Christian percentage of the population has almost entirely gone underground or left the country - the war only intensified hatred of the Christian section of the community.

The situation in Egypt is similar: Christians are persecuted regularly. The bombing of the Coptic church around Christmas time made world headlines, but the recent massacre of two Christian families by Muslims in Northern Egypt - because the police were otherwise engaged in the riots - went almost unacknowledged.

Google Art Project and grudges

No doubt I'm way down on the list of hearing about the Google Art Project, but at least I'm not like one commenter on the videos relating to the Project who said that now Google was taking over the art galleries!

As another wisely pointed out, many people don't have access to these galleries; they're on the other side of the world, and even if you wanted to visit the Uffizi, for instance, you have to wait in a queue for hours. By which time you're exhausted and don't have the energy to spend time with the art. (We waited in the queue for around a half an hour and then decided there were better ways to spend our limited time, went down the road, and found a superb gallery with hardly anyone in it!)

It's never going to be the same experience as standing in front of the original - no more than the Google street photographs are the same as the reality of standing outside a real house - but there are advantages. Access is great, for starters; you can go in really close on the paintings and see the detail not in a fuzzy way, but as clearly as you can see the whole thing. This is something I'm really appreciating. When you look at an art work in a book, for instance, you can't get any closer than the page and your eye's focus will allow. Consequently, details are out of your range.

The colours are superb as well, and the range of galleries is beyond belief. What is there not to appreciate about the Art Project. Good old Google, I say.

Check out the videos on the site, too, particularly the behind the scenes one which shows the photographers capturing the works digitally, cycling, in some cases, around the laminate floors in order to give you a sense of actually walking through these museums.

As I said above, there are always the grumblers. Here's one commenting on this particular video: Google lack any ingenuity or creativity of their own and either buy or steal intellectual property to compensate for their lack of creative vision. This project is a strong example of them stealing from me after presenting the idea to Google Ventures. It's not just myself who have an aversion to Google. Groupon told them to shoveit after being offered $6 billion and Path denied them after googled offered $100 million. There are stealth groups in SV who want to see google fall..

Hmm. Groupon and Path turned down $160 million between them. Some people must have grudges.

Newman the literary workaholic

Many years ago, I was given a biography of Cardinal John Henry Newman to read by the priest who ran a Catholic library in London, after I'd asked (in some frustration) for a book on someone who was a 'modern' saint. Newman, by that time, had been a long time dead, so I'm not sure that he could be classified as 'modern'. by which I'd meant 'contemporary.' However, the biography, which ran to two volumes, was very interesting. Here's a quote from a recent review on a biography of Newman that focuses on his literary achievements.

It was also at Oxford that Newman was to develop his prodigious talents and astounding work ethic. (He recorded having once written for 22 hours straight while working on his Apologia.) Cornwell dubs Newman a "superabundant literary workaholic." While preparing to take his honors examination, he sometimes read fourteen hours a day.

From Newman's Unquiet Grave, a review of John Cornwell's book of the same name, by David J Michael.

Cruisy

My brother-in-law and his wife are just off on another cruise - to Hawaii. Apparently they've just been on a cruise - to Hawaii - but due to storms couldn't stop off at most of the ports. So they're going again. It was cheaper than flying there!

Seems that if you book a cruise while you're still on a cruise, you get a discount cruise. In fact, that's what they did a few years ago while they were on the cruise that brought them to Dunedin, where we live. (That was the first time I'd met either of them, and the first time my wife had seen her brother in some forty years.)

They came for a day. Such is the nature of cruises. And then went onto Auckland for Christmas Day, and found everything closed...

Friends of ours recently went on a cruise around some of the Pacific Islands. One of the various cyclones that's been floating around recently decided that it would blow, and so they missed visiting several ports as well. However, they haven't rebooked...at least as far as I know. Considering the number of photos on Facebook, (some 400), they had a pretty good time - without visiting ports.

Cruises obviously appeal to a great number of people - we're having half a dozen cruise ships visiting our city this week alone. I'm not sure that I'm one of the people cruises appeal to, though I haven't been given the chance to find out, as yet.

Maybe in my retirement - if I manage to actually have one - and if someone passes on a good deal of spare cash - I'll get the chance, and see what they're really like.

Time will tell.

The photo was taken by a friend of mine, Stephen Murphy, and shows a cruise ship at Port Chalmers, our local port.

Scary stats

With all the hubbub going on in Egypt, and across that part of the world, and the vying for leadership amongst different groups, it was rather scary to read this particular stat from the Pew Research Centre.

When asked about the death penalty for those who leave the Muslim religion, at least three-quarters of Muslims in Jordan (86%), Egypt (84%) and Pakistan (76%) say they would favor making it the law...

Note that Egypt is in the middle of these three. (Pakistan has even higher percentages on other punishments such as stoning for adultery and cutting off limbs for theft.) The article on the Pew Research site is full of detail about the attitudes of people in areas where there are high concentrations of Muslims.

For more about the possibilities of Muslim rule in Egypt, check out this overview from GetReligion.org.