Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Tarot cards

Wow. I've just been to see a tarot card reader for the second time in the last two weeks. Something she told me four years ago has come to pass so I thought it might be helpful going back to see her again. She just blows me away. I have received the most helpful words from a woman who doesn't even know me. I feel like I am getting my life back on track. I won't go into detail cos it's all pretty heavy stuff, but I just have to say that tarot cards are a very useful tool, especially in the hands of an experienced and intuitive reader. Thank you Antonia.

Monday, February 27, 2006

trekkie

Thanks to Lilly for this one.

Okay, I used to be quite a Star Trek fan, but only really the original. As a kid I had a bit of a crush on James T. Oh, and that one with the thick Russian accent that looked like Davey off The Monkies. Anyway, on with the silly quiz. I was almost my crush - James T. Kirk! Oh my.

Your results:
You are Deanna Troi
































Deanna Troi
75%
James T. Kirk (Captain)
65%
An Expendable Character (Redshirt)
60%
Beverly Crusher
55%
Will Riker
55%
Chekov
55%
Spock
54%
Worf
50%
Uhura
50%
Mr. Sulu
50%
Data
48%
Jean-Luc Picard
45%
Mr. Scott
35%
Geordi LaForge
25%
Leonard McCoy (Bones)
20%
You are a caring and loving individual.
You understand people's emotions and
you are able to comfort and counsel them.


Click here to take the "Which Star Trek character are you?" quiz...

Global situation

There's a guy on National Radio just now talking about our global situation and how we are all ignoring it. We all know the oil is going to run out soon. Well, apparently 99% of the cost of our food production is directly from oil - tractors, transport, storage etc. The implications of this are pretty grim. The world is screwed.

Sunday, February 26, 2006

Service and creativity

I love going through old journals. Just a few pages after the last one I found is this quote. I love this one.

Service… is love in action, love "made flesh"; service is the body, the incarnation of love. Love is the impetus, service the act, and creativity the result with many by-products.
Sarah Patton Boyle, US civil rights activist

quote of the day

I've realised it's not feasible to move to an office. Looks like I'm on my own for a while again. SOD and I are having a break from each other to sort out our lives. I had everything mostly packed for the move to the new office which I was going to be doing today, but instead I'm having an almighty cleanout and reorganisation of my home office. I went on a huge cleaning binge yesterday around the house - this is something I seem to do when I need to purge feelings. For some reason I find it quite therapeutic.

Today I found an old journal from my first year in Wellington - 1994. I had a quote I found somewhere that I still really like: "Art is an axe for the frozen sea within us". Ain't that true.

I'm finding at the moment that concentrating on the practical aspects of life is very comforting. If I stop and think too much today I start falling to pieces.

Postscript: It seems this was a quote by Kafka - had to google it since I never made a note of the source at the time.

Friday, February 24, 2006

Pens and paper



SOD's given me a little book and I nabbed one of his pens to play around with. The second drawing also includes some of my lipgloss.

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

My De Facto Husband is a Bitch

When a play fight turns into a something else.... and he thought the resulting welts were funny. I'm gonna get him back, don't you worry.





Sunday, February 19, 2006

Deerhoof

Okay, I have just been to one of the best gigs of my life. Deerhoof just kicked off their world tour and how cool it was to be the second international gig of the tour. These noise popsters have moments of weird jazz bridging straight into rock guitar riffs that drill into your head like a machine which then switch to quiet moments accompanied by the sweet voice of the dimunitive asian singer. I think it's this constant swing between the hard and the soft that I love about Deerhoof. Yin and Yang. Cutesy one moment, hard-arsed rockers the next. A pop melody suddenly jarred apart by big big drums and darkly deep bass guitar thrum - then back to sweet-voiced pop again. There wasn't a big crowd at Indigo, but everyone there was loving it. I've had Deerhoof in my head now since the gig. They are so much fun. I wish I could do it all again.

The support of So So Modern was a good match.

Time

Time gets away on me all the time. Too many things to do, too little time to do them. One of the things that never gets done, of course, is updating this blog. So I'm taking a few moments out of my work schedule (yes, it's Sunday, but I'm working) to do just that.

I've been to see a few movies recently and I'll have to try and remember what they were. One was River Queen which SOD and I both enjoyed. It had an uneven start - it seemed as though the introductory narration was going to go on forever (I was starting to think the whole film was going to go on this way and I was starting to feel very uneasy) but then it swung into the story. It would be great to see the film in its entire length - apparently there was a huge amount of footage that had to be canned to cut back the length. Another grizzle would be about the score - I'm getting sick of turgid emotionally manipulative scores in films. Less is more, people. Let the story speak for itself. However, the war action was amazing and the storytelling pulled through. I liked the happy ending too - you don't get those much these days (oh, except in schmaltzy mainstream cinema - does this fit in there?) and I don't mind a nice happy ending every now and then.

Walk the Line, the biopic of Johnny Cash, was essentially a love story with his musical career as a background. Joaquin Phoenix was pretty impressive as Cash and Reese Witherspoon surprisingly good as June Carter. I just couldn't help but feel sorry for his poor first wife though. Cash's daughter, Roseanne, felt her mother was unfairly portrayed, and it wouldn't surprise me at all. Good film, recommended. I won't go on about it too much - there have been plently of reviews. I've had friends who haven't liked it at all and others who have enjoyed as I have.

Brokeback Mountain
- sweet simple love story. What the hell is the fuss all about? I find it extremely perplexing that people would ban this film. Why does the notion of two men in love cause people to be so fearful and bigotted? There is nothing explicit here. The sex scenes are unrevealing, short and necessary to the story. And so what if they weren't? There are parts of society that just need to grow up and get over themselves. It makes me so mad. I loved this film. It was poignant and beautiful.

Monday, February 06, 2006

25 things you may not have known about New Zealand

From the NZ Herald

1 - Cook's cure
Captain James Cook, the man who navigated New Zealand, is said to have discovered a cure for scurvy, a disease that results from Vitamin C deficiency, when he played around with medicines.

2 - More births
New Zealand births exceeded deaths by 29,890 in the September 2005 year.

3 - Older brides
New Zealanders are getting married older. The latest statistics show that the median ages of men and women marrying for the first time is 29.9 and 28.1 years. These brides and grooms married, on average, nine years older than their parents did.

4 - Big on butter
For each person who lives here, New Zealand produces 100kg of butter and 65kg of cheese each year.

5 - Clever Kiwis
A New Zealander invented the tear-back velcro strip, the pop-lid on a self-sealing paint tin, the child-proof pill bottle and the crinkle in hair-pins so that they don't fall out.

6 - Olympic gold
New Zealand has won more Olympic gold medals a head than any other country.

7 - Sheep dip
In the early 1980s, New Zealand was home to more than 70 million sheep, but now has 40 million, or about 10 sheep to one person. This decline hasn't stopped New Zealand from bringing in 50 per cent of all international trade in sheepmeat.

8 - Golf swings
Measured by club memberships, golf is the most popular sport in New Zealand, followed by netball.

9 - Curious Kea
The kea, native to New Zealand, likes to eat the strips of rubber around car windows.

10 - Quick work
The shortest interval between separate births in the world is 208 days. New Zealander Jayne Bleackley gave birth to Joseph Robert on September 3, 1999, and Annie Jessica Joyce on March 30, 2000.

11 - Why bother?
Two Massey University students broke a Guinness World Record in December for the world's largest tape ball. The ball, which weighs 53kg and has a circumference of more than 2.5m, was made by winding Scotch tape continually around itself.

12 - Spelling test
The longest place name in the world still in use is Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwenuakitanatahu, a hill in Porangahau in the Hawkes Bay. The Maori name translates to "the place where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, who slid, climbed and swallowed mountains, known as Landeater, played his flute to his loved one."

13 - Middle age
The median age of New Zealanders is growing. In 1901 it was 23. By 1991 it was 31 and in 2001 it was 35. By 2021 it is expected to be 40.

14 - Rising prices
In 1984, $43 in New Zealand would buy approximately the same as $100 today.

15 - Blacked out
The longest blackout in the world was on February 19, 1998, when the four main power cables supplying Auckland city, broke down. The disruption, which lasted 66 days, affected 7500 business and residential customers and cost businesses an estimated $300 million.

16 - The sea, the sea
No part of New Zealand is more than 128km from the sea.

17 - Lost in space
In the scene of Star Trek: First Contact, when Picard shows Lilly she is orbiting Earth, Australia and Papa New Guinea are clearly visible but New Zealand is missing.

18 - Bottom line
No capital city in the world is further south than Wellington.

19 - Animal farm
Less than 5 per cent of the population of New Zealand is human - the rest are animals. This is one of the highest ratios of animals to humans in the world.

20 - Pipebands galore
There are more Scottish pipe bands per head of population in New Zealand than in Scotland.

21 - Big readers
New Zealand has more book-shops per head of population than any other country; one for every 7500 people.

22 - Bad behaviour
New Zealand has the third highest rate of deaths in the developed world from maltreatment among under-15-year-olds; third to Mexico and the US.

23 - Freshwater spring
More fresh water flows up from cracks in the limestone at Waikoropupu, near Takaka, than from any other freshwater spring in the world - more than 2100 million litres every 24 hours.

24 - Trout heaven
More rainbow trout in the 2kg to 3kg category are caught annually in New Zealand than in the rest of the world put together.

25 - World-beaters
New Zealand is home to the world's smallest dolphin, the Hectors Dolphin, the rarest sea lion, the Hookers Sea Lion, the largest flightless parrot, the kakapo, the oldest reptile, the tuatara, the heaviest insect, a weta, the biggest earth-worms, the smallest bats, some of the oldest trees, and many of the rarest birds, insects, and plants in the world.

* Facts sourced from Statistics New Zealand, Strange Facts & True About New Zealand, Guinness World records, The Kiwi Site and the ENZ New Zealand Immigration Guide.