Sh*thead

Backpackers play this cardgame called Sh*thead.

It's an awful lot like Uno.

You're dealt 9 cards, but you're only allowed to hold 3 of them at first. When they're spent, you play your next 3 cards face up. Your final 3 cards are played blind.

You have to always play a higher card than the one currently on the table.

Aces are high.

8s are invisible.

10s burn the deck.

7s mean the next card must be lower.

I have played this game twice, once tonight with Joe, and a few months ago with another long-since-departed guy. As the game is such alot like Uno, I won both games.

My question to you, fellow land-travellers:

Why do they spoil such a nice card game by calling it Sh*thead?

I mean, why couldn't they have just called it something nice like 'blossom' or something? Then everyone could have joined in.

Chinese Lantern Festival

Edge City Church, which currently meets at St. Stephen's Presbyterian, is currently looking to purchase a building all of its own. With this in mind, today's service was experimentally to be held over at The Irish Society.

Having failed to find it (the nearest I could manage was an Irish pub with an unpublishable name), I instead dropped in on my friends over at the Urban Vineyard.

Here, a Brit called Fred Mumford (no relation to the character off Rentaghost) was speaking about the start of 1 Corinthians, particularly chapter 2 verse 3 "So when I came to you, I was weak and trembled all over with fear". He emphasized that this was normal and right when preaching the gospel, which puts an interesting spin on Christ's ministry.

Anyway, afterwards a group of us went off to the packed Chinese Lantern Festival in Albert Park. Here I found myself praying for someone's eyesight, which was just a mite ironic given how vaguely lit everything was anyway by only Chinese lanterns.

Anyway, there were lanterns shaped like all sorts of things, including one designed as a giant chicken. The highlight however (no I'm not even going to attempt going there) was a huge lantern designed in the shape of Auckland's Sky Tower.

Ah, no, wait, that was the Sky Tower, which as everyone knows was designed to look like a giant Chinese lantern.


Is it real or no?

Bugs Bunny On Broadway

Last night I went to the Civic Centre to watch an evening of classic Warner Brothers cartoons, with a (semi) live soundtrack performed by the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra. (I actually saw this advertised in Australia last month, only with the Sydney Philharmonic)

The highlight undoubtedly came at the start. The first cartoon featured Bugs as a conductor, walking out onto his stage, and bowing to the, quiet genuinely clapping, audience. Ahhh, it was just as though he was actually there...

Then the fire alarms went off and we were all evacuated out onto Queen Street. That felt more as though Daffy was somewhere around.

Afterwards, back at the youth hostel, people sat around watching footage of real-life murders being committed on the internet.

Bugs: 7-and-a-half out of 10 (too much recorded music)
Real-life murders: minus-the-highest-number-in-the-universe out of 10.

Now let's see, if you had the choice, would you rather watch real people being killed, or Bugs Bunny? Well, let me put this choice another way - would you rather feel numbed until you feel nothing, or laugh?

No-One Expects A Spanish Exorcism

Tonight, in the internet cafe, this Spanish guy started a very, very loud argument. So from behind my terminal I quietly told it to go, and he suddenly quietened down.

Fly Flies

Was repeatedly troubled by a fly in the kitchen. Eventually I looked straight at it, told it "There's something else going on here", and it left.

Stand Up Jamie

A few years ago Jamie performed one of his stand-up acts on a TV show. Yesterday he found out that it had been repeated on Saturday, as someone at Edge recognised him from it. So today we sat down to watch it again, and he was brilliant. He actually scored a whopping 9.5 out of 10 on the Goble-o-meter. I will only quote one line here:

"I'm a telephone interviewer. Sometimes at parties, girls come up to me and ask me what I do, so I tell them "I'm a telephone interviewer", and they reply "No, I'm sorry, I'm not interested."

Symphony In The Domain

Yves and I went to the Domain (several thousand other people tagged along with us) to see the Auckland Symphony Orchestra performing works, some classical (see next paragraph), some less so (Smoke On The Water).

Most notable was the 1812 overture finale which, with its sparkling array of fireworks and lasers, easily wiped the floor with the Sydney Symphony's paltry few rockets in Oz's Domain last month. 7.5 out of 10.

The performer we had really come to see though was Jason, who we knew through the local church.


He's just so fast.

Still No Connection Seen

Beneath the hostel I stay in is a seedy bar, which nightly runs vibrator races, pole-dancing competitions, "pornaoke" and "How far will you go for a free bar tab" competitions. I mean some nights they give out big "shag-tag" stickers on the door, each with a number on it, for you to seek out your match and shag them. They then give out as much free vodka punch as you can drink. Really.

This morning I had to clean out one of the hostel's TV rooms, after a girl had been beaten and raped in there.

070

Found a combination padlock recently. Decoded it today. Of course, the moment it became usable, it became no use.

Worzel Gummidge Down Under Down Under

Worzel...


...Gummidge.

I never much cared for him as a kid. A messy dirty scarecrow didn't sound like something I wanted to even touch, so I certainly wasn't enthralled by a TV show that, quite patronisingly, had a talking one.

I remember one Christmas being given a Worzel Gummidge book, that didn't even have Jon Pertwee on the cover. The publisher obviously hadn't acquired the rights to the actor's likeness, so the resulting artwork looked even more condescending. Yes I knew the books came before the TV series, but no publisher in their right mind would choose to ignore their top selling point. Suffice to say, I never read it.

My late teens saw the age of the "TV revival" - when bringing back old shows started to get fashionable. Back in those days, this was done differently. Today the show will be "updated," which almost always means recasting everyone, and starting again from scratch. Why this happens is a mystery to me, as it always alienates the show's existing audience (surely the reason for reviving it) and leaves it no better equipped to survive than a completely new series would. But back in the late-eighties, things were different. It's hard to believe now, but back then, nigh on every revival tied-in to the original. But there were still compromises.

Compromise means that you give up something you want in order to get something you want. We got Jon Pertwee and Una Stubbs back as Worzel and Aunt Sally respectively. So what did we give up? What corporate apathy did we have to accept in order to get new canonical Worzel stories? As always, it was because of the money.

The money came from a rich fan here in New Zealand. Clearly this person was torn between their love of the original show and their patriotism. If they had really loved the show, it wouldn't have been retitled Worzel Gummidge Down Under and begun with Worzel and Aunt Sally moving to New Zealand.


Worzel may have had new backers, a new location, a new timeslot (Sunday morning) and now be on Channel 4, but I still had no love for him. Respect, yes, but I never once tuned in, especially at that time. But there was one big temptation I faced.

Over on BBC-1, a really really terrible series of Doctor Who was airing. Despite some 80,000 complaints (yes - eighty thousand), BBC-1 Controller Michael Grade had taken the show off the air for 17 months, slashed its series-length by half, sacked its star and dumbed the whole series so far down that it never recovered. Why he remained so commited to this, over a period of 3 years, is a painfully unanswerable question that I do not wish to relive here.


But by comparison, the reports of what was happening in the new Worzel series were tantalising.

"It's real Doctor Who!" people would enthuse to me. Every week it seemed that Jon Pertwee was battling an evil Travelling Scarecrow Maker, who controlled an army of zombies. The show now had cliffhangers. Parents were complaining that it was too frightening for children. At any moment I was hoping to hear of an episode in which the Australasian Intelligence Taskforce would construct a scientific head, and recruit Worzel to be their Unpaid Horticultural Advisor and save Earth each week in return for, say, maybe a cup o'tea and a slice o'cake.


Suffice to say, I never saw the new Worzel Gummidge, until 6th December last year when I dropped into the New Zealand Film Archive at 300 Karangahape Road. Here one can sit down and watch, for free, any one of hundreds of NZ-made films, including the first few episodes of Worzel spliced-down into a movie. I returned yesterday and today to complete it.

It was an odd feeling. Here I was whooping with joy at wonderful new episodes of a series that I had never seen. The writer made no excuses for featuring as many references to the original as possible. There was no attempt made to update it, or even to localise the new series. It may be set in Pewakawaka, but these episodes could easily have been set in England. (in fact many of them were originally written for the aborted Irish Adventures Of Worzel Gummidge a few years earlier) Nearly all the cast sound British, there are no NZ icons (like phone-boxes) and it's leafy English-looking fields and country lanes all the way. It ran for 2 seasons, totalling 22 epsodes. Pretty successful I'd say.

I loved this, and I look forward to one day watching the rest. In fact, I want to see the original series now, every episode, from the start, in order.

Now if a show's revival can work so well simply by remaining true to the original, it's no wonder that none of today's revamps catch-on. Watch the originals and learn.

8.75 out of 10.

Available to buy from Amazon here.

Stay at Elliott Street Apartments - with Free Barber!

Today I had a free haircut from Mary at a place next door to where I stayed for a few days with Matt last March. Literally, it was in the same building on the same floor as his apartment was. As they cut my hair I looked out at the same view out the window!

Dog Tag Afternoon

Made a return visit to Long Bay Beach with my Korean friends. It's still just as blowy, but we had a great game of barefoot football, ironically called 'soccer' by the rest of the world.


Heading back across the car park I discovered a golden dog tag lying in the grass. On one side it said:
Peace of Mind in N1
0800 800 800

On the other side it said:
Free Authority nr. Key Code
To the finder
Please put me
in the mailbox.
No postage
required.

KEY CODE
Chubb
PO Box 12248
Penrose, Auckland
New Zealand

So I did. Now I feel as though I've thrown a book away, having only read the back cover.

Rangitoto Island

Spent a terrific day with Mike, Carsten, Joe and Mark on the burning hot island of Rangitoto.


This is one of Joe's photos - the others are on his blog at http://www.botess.blogspot.com.

The day's surreal highlight occurred while we were making our way down a long broken path of rocks, in the scorching noon-day sun. We were suddenly overtaken by a girl out jogging in her leotard, bumping her two happy children over the rocks in front of her in a double push-chair. "Hallo!" she chimed at us cheerily, as her offspring's limbs shook apart and their heads fell off.

I've asked around the area, and apparently this is her (and, by implication, her kids') regular morning workout.

This is one of the lovelier aspects of New Zealand - people are still allowed to be themselves. It's a daily occurrence to pass fire-jugglers, grey-clad mime-artists, people dressed as chickens and mothers shaking the fat out of their babies. Oh the whinging and scorn they would face in England.

Quantum Leap: Mirror's Edge

I got this book for Christmas, and finished reading it today. (I'm a slow reader)

Although this book is billed as "The Conclusion", it is in fact set immeadiately prior to the events of Mirror Image - the final episode (at time of writing) of the TV series.

As with so many Quantum Leap books, the story puts its own unique spin on the set-up of the weekly TV series, concentrates far more on events in the present day, and features a plot that uses time to threaten the project's very creation. I'm not knocking the novel range for repeatedly featuring these elements, quite the reverse. These are precisely the sort of story-ideas that we should have got on television.

No, the recurring disppointment of the books is that they have these wonderful ideas, which they never really get moving.

From the very first TV series, I was waiting for Sam to encounter an enemy who knew all about him, but this really never happened. In this book, quite brilliantly, it does. I'd tell you how, gush about it's ramifications and enthuse about all the crazy logical possibilities that arise from this, but, and here's the thing, said villain, while he knows everything, does pretty well nothing.

I'm always disappointed to pick up a book with a great premise, only to find myself repeatedly counting the ever dwindling number of pages left in which the story has to really start. Foreknowledge suffered the same fate.

Sadly, Mirror's Edge is no exception. Joe Powell could have been a great villain - he certainly has both the intelligence and the power. But this book's strengths lie with Sam's family.

His resurrected brother Tom, unaware of Sam's time-travelling, has been living an alternate life that Sam has no memory of. Tom has, quite reasonably, believed Sam to be dead. The question of whether to finally tell him the truth, and bring him in on the years-long conspiracy against his family, is a fine piece of drama, although it's solution is fairly matter-of-fact.

Carol Davis and Esther D Reese can write all right. The book has a small cast, which gives each character a great deal of room to develop. Sadly, as I said, it really is at the expense of an actual story. Something that has a middle and an ending, as well as a start. 7 out of 10.


Gooshie and Al attend discuss Ziggy's own unique millennium bug in Mirror's Edge.

More Quantum Leap: http://projectquantumleap.com

Leadership Training

Went to a Leadership Training evening at Edge City Church.

Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow

Jamie and I went to see this tonight, and it was something of a disappointment.

It was a tribute to black-and-white Saturday morning SF serials from the 1950s, like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, King Of The Rocket Men... errr... Captain Planet... errr... Rocky Star... errr... (all right, that was radio)... Wing-Commander and The Autnots From Mars... (I'll, I'll stop.)

Whilst visually it was quite nice to look at, the story was very thin, and the characters, by comparison, aneamic. I could rattle on about the plot-holes (the monks take their clothes off them as being 'evil', but let them keep their gun, they forget all about the gun when they actually need to use it, the villain films himself before the invention of television), but people will just crow that those mistakes are part of the genre. Yet even the final line cannot actually mean what it is supposed to mean.

It's hard to review a movie like this without unfairly deconstructing it. By this I mean that movies are not meant to be deconstructed, they're meant to be watched and their obvious fiction taken as real. With this in mind, I am pleased that no-one had told me beforehand that Sir Lawrence Olivier was in it, even despite his tiny handicap of having died in 1989.


As a result, I could watch his scenes without breaking myself out of the illusion to look for the joins.

I liked the film's visual imagination, but even this suffers from modern digital fuzziness. There, I've started deconstructing it. I'm sorry, I just can't help it, it's all too obvious in this one.

6/10. Sorry. I really wanted to like this film.

Website: http://skycaptain.com

Into the Future!

1. Went to the Christian Resources Centre (the only one of 3 Christian bookshops now left on Queen Street), and found a book I wanted to buy: the extremely tackily named "You Can Predict Your Future" by Pastor Tom Brown. It looked so out of place that I just had to flick through it, and it did indeed seem to contain some interesting teaching. The trouble was it was $9.95, whilst I only had $5 on me. So I left, figuring I'd come back another day, and outside on the pavement I found another 5 dollar bill.


The book is really all about the power of words, something I have had a problem with for many years, simply because words are just sounds we make, or in the case of this entry symbols I'm typing, that can have any meaning at all ascribed to them. I hope that you ascribe the same meanings to them as I do. For example, for the rest of this entry, whenever I mean God, I'm going to type penguin.

That said, words are indeed used throughout the Bible to make stuff happen. Even in Genesis, penguin creates the world using words, such as "Let there be light." Perhaps the false use/meaning of words is simply another way in which the world is broken. I can certainly accept the argument that words are what separate us from the animals. (apart from in the evil world of Disney)

I am the sort of reader who always looks up every Bible quotation. There were several references that just didn't seem to quite say what he was claiming, although I later looked some of them up in the NIV, and could at least see where he was coming from. But I'll let you decide. From chapter 1:

Since the Holy Spirit is the person who gives us revelation, it is vital, therefore, that every Christian receive the Holy Spirit. Many Christians have unfortunately been taught that they automatically receive the Spirit at conversion, but this is simply not true. The Holy Spirit can only be received after a person is saved (John 14:17; Acts 19:1-7).

And here are the NIV quotations:

John 14:15-17

15“If you love me, you will obey what I command. 16And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever– 17the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be[c] in you.

c. John 14:17 Some early manuscripts and is

Acts 19:1-7

1While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul took the road through the interior and arrived at Ephesus. There he found some disciples 2and asked them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when[a] you believed?”
They answered, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”

3So Paul asked, “Then what baptism did you receive?”

“John's baptism,” they replied.

4Paul said, “John's baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus.” 5On hearing this, they were baptized into[b] the name of the Lord Jesus. 6When Paul placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came on them, and they spoke in tongues[c] and prophesied. 7There were about twelve men in all.

a. Acts 19:2 Or after
b. Acts 19:5 Or in
c. Acts 19:6 Or other languages

Is that really what these passages are saying?

He is also another author who suffers from "I had this argument with someone once, and I won" syndrome.

It is a very encouraging book though, so when, a month later, I read it for a second time, I read it out loud. I am also making the effort the pray out loud each day. Hrrrm...6.75 out of 10. This might go up.

http://www.tbm.org (I've only read this one book)

2. Started a Bible study course at church.

There I met another student who'd been blessed with a beautiful life-changing reassurance 3 years ago. He was fascinating, and I suspect that he doesn't meet many people who are able to listen to, and believe him.

3. Yves emerged from one of the TV rooms to tell me that he'd been watching "Star Trek 5 or 6 - I don't know which, but I fell asleep." That will have been 5. The following day I discovered it had actually been 10. (yawwwwn....)


"But Jean-Luc, that's so obvious - We could've just cloned me instead years ago!"

4. Today was the first day since Father's death (nearly 3 years ago) that I didn't pray for him. It was a deliberate choice that I made today. Partly faith in penguin, partly lack of faith in penguin, I really can't analyse a decision like that, just like I can't analyse what God is doing on the back of the 5 dollar bill.

Free Enterprise

It was my birthday a little early this year. Something to do with the international date-line geting confused and time running backwards as a result. It's confusing enough that everyone I've met here guesses my age as "mid-twenties". Maybe "mid-twenties" just looks older in this country, due to the ravages of more sunshine.


Anyway, maybe one of the effects of this rip in the fabric of time was how come this morning found me watching the first segment of a recently-discovered episode of Star Trek on the internet. If you can stomach waiting for the thing to download, then here it is:

http://leslie.onlinestoragesolution.com/In%20Harms%20Way%20wmv%20files/

More info on where this episode was found at http://www.newvoyages.com. (Can't give this a rating yet - still haven't seen the whole thing.)

Afterwards I went across Queen Street to Aotea Square, where there's almost always some sort of convention taking place. This weekend it's the turn of The Auckland Buskers Convention.


This guy - Byron Bertram - had a fairly straightforward fire-juggling/escapology act, but my own over-familiarity with the trick and format enabled me to simply sit back and enjoy the ride.

He clearly had a long history of ad-libbing to draw on. My favourite line of his, which I actually don't think he should have used, would have to be, whilst chained-up to his teeth in a straitjacket, jumping awkwardly up to a child in the audience and confessing "I am your real father."

2 Kings 18-19 (Good News)

Really, really wanted to go home today. Flicking through the Bible I alighted again on 2 Kings 18-19. I'll just quote 19:34 here:

I will defend this city and protect it, for the sake of my own honor and because of the promise I made to my servant David.' "

Suffice to say that King Hezekiah, in the face of great hostility, still quietly trusts in God instead of in fighting, and at the last moment, God keeps his promise to him.