.. to TJM. Anyway, now that the parameters of my existence are becoming confrontingly clear I’m not sure that I’ll have the time to expand on an idea for a sequel to TJM called The Cosmic Detective that my late wife Helen and I started working on in the ‘90s. I got as far as…
..interval between, might be more ‘natural’ than trying to compress sleep into the one eight hour stretch. I seem to recall hearing on a radio program that the segmented pattern of sleep might been preserved in the ritual of monastery life but otherwise the tradition has slipped from modern society’s collective memory. Having said that…
..of Waitangi of 1840 is often held up as an example of how to establish a more or less just relationship with the native inhabitants. Which it is, as unlike treaties with other indigenous peoples, it is largely honoured now. The Treaty of Waitangi is short, consisting of a preamble and three articles. The preamble…
..has a great chapter on anarchism and the gross social inequalities that caused it. My research was brought on by a passing reference in last month’s blogette (which you have forgotten already you ungrateful Christmas hung-over swine!) to my antipodean romantic infatuation with the Black Flag of Anarchism. The sheer panic that was engendered by…
.. in any case, I was on modest stipend (a bursary) that I was contracted to repay by becoming a teacher after graduating. In fact, now that I mention it, ambition is another area I’ve always been deficient in, so you put that together with a lack of vision and you might begin to understand…
..close makes animosity almost inevitable, rather like sibling rivalry, but fortunately other religions take a more peripatetic view of the calendar and have festivals at other times. Would you have to work at all if you held every possible belief? It was a rhetorical question, so don’t put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard…
..shaped. Firstly came the issue of who should be invited. The number of elders has not changed; in fact it has sadly decreased by one since last year, but the number of children and grandchildren has grown, if not exponentially, at least arithmetically. We are unique amongst the group in only having the one daughter…
S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M S P E C T R U M M I K E R U D D B I L L P U T T . C O MM M I K E R U D D B I L…
.. brand-new in-balance ears on that very same night – and not just any mix, but a headphone mix. Now, every recording engineer will tell you that headphone mixes can be very dangerous, especially over a prolonged period. As you and your ears get more tired the volume tends to edge up to compensate and…
..about the issues they raise and are careful to get the tone and the clarity of their arguments just right to pass the editors’ stringent scrutiny, real or imagined. Sure, the letters are still not all great, but the standard is generally streets ahead of the ‘anything goes’ FB sewer. And I suspect that a…
.. in the course of being interviewed by Michael I discovered quite a lot about the goings-on of Geof before and after our lives briefly intersected in an exchange of letters back in the ‘70s. This Geof-type information curiously resonated with the first writer, Shane Homan’s brief, which is to record the history of venues,…
.. existence, I volunteered that the Max Merritt song I’d commissioned myself to write was on hold while I executed another actual but highly unlikely commission to write some English lyrics for an Italian sixties pop song. The ‘being commissioned’ thing is a good story, but in practice it’s not quite as romantic as it…
…as you turned sixteen. I reminded Dick about the Wolseley the other day and we both remembered the other as having been responsible for dinging it at some stage. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the guilty party, but I do remember a hairy moment on the Summit Road with a few of my friends on…
..a television for a week we had no idea what it meant. My French is adequate enough to cause confusion, invite strangers to go roller skating or to admire the buttocks of my neighbour’s goat, but collapses entirely when the speed goes above the very slow and deliberate pace which one uses when addressing the…
Well, for one thing he’s usurped a traditional Rudd family name. My great-grandfather on my father’s side was named Minchin Rudd and my father still carries Minchin as his middle name. OK. In fact, I couldn’t give a fig about happenstance like that. It’s his talent I resent. M couldn’t have been absolutely riveted to…
..me over for the holiday weekend until I could arrange for another visit from the plumber to fix it properly. That evening I decided to pop down to the local Red Rooster as I’d absolutely nothing in the fridge. As I arrived home there were lightning flashes as the predicted change swept over Melbourne, so…
Currently we have state and federal government where advertising is seen not only as the most appropriate and almost certainly the only activity to solve a problem. The billboard struck me as the equivalent of Speed Kills advertisements which are seen as a substitute for proper driver training and a way of eliminating the gross…
Mike’s Pith & Wind cont. .. David packing. (Or so the story goes – David’s recently been giving my brother and me unsolicited hints that there’s another side to the story). Jump forward forty years and I’m holidaying in NZ and stopping off in Rororua on the way to see mum in Auckland. To my…