Shorts

Remember going to the movies in the old days? Before the feature they had the shorts: little cartoons or documentary films or trailers for the next feature or an episode of a Hopalong Cassidy serial. Well here's the blog equivalent: a few little items which don't really deserve a whole post to themselves

The Hobbit.
I went to see the third Hobbit movie the other night. Well, I'd seen the other two, so I had to, really. Martin Freeman is an excellent actor and the visual effects were pretty good, but as I was expecting, this was one of the most forgettable movies I've ever seen, so 6 lines is about as much of a review as it deserves. In brief: 144 minutes. No memorable characters. No plot. Basically the 2 hours and 24 minutes went like this: A dragon sets fire to a town. A bloke shoots it. There's this humungous pile of gold. A whole lot of people fight over it. The good guys win. The end.

Music.
My daughter Catherine left for the UK this morning. While she was here she took my musical education in hand. Amongst others, she introduced me to (appropriately enough)European Indie band, Daughter.

Retreats
I will be leading two retreats this year. In October I will lead a taught Centering Prayer retreat - an opportunity to learn and to practice this form of silent prayer - but more of that later. From February 21 to February 26 I will be leading, with John Franklin and Sr. Judith-Anne O'Sullivan a directed silent retreat at En Hakkore, the retreat centre in the old sanatorium in the hills above Ranfurly. Cost is $390. Further details or registration contact our office.

Comments

Wynston said…

For those that like that sort of stuff there was plenty of action in the fighting (very little of which featured in the book though).
Like you quite disappointed in it (and the other two).

14 January 2015 at 18:03

Brian R said…

Agree. I love LOTR, have read the books countless times and saw each movie in the cinema twice then bought the DVDs. However I have not really enjoyed any of the Hobbit movies. The book was written for children long before the much better LOTR. The Hobbit movies have just exploited the success of the LOTR movies.

15 January 2015 at 07:17

Kate said…

I wasn't even fascinated by the orc make-up or whatever they were. Bored. Found myself in existential contemplation of the much more interesting green glowing EXIT sign during most of the long battles. Yawn.

19 January 2015 at 20:01

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...

Why I Hold the Views I Do

St. Hilda's Collegiate School, taken with my phone after a recent meeting. This picture has nothing whatsoever to do with what follows, but I like the interplay of shapes and particularly the shadow on the wall. My mother is a Methodist, liberal in her theological and social opinions. My father was a socialist, just slightly to the left, in his politics, of Karl Marx. My siblings -there are 5 of us- are all bright, eloquent and omnivorous in their consumption of books and other intellectual fodder. One of my most cherished childhood memories is of mealtimes in our little state house. The food was ingested with copious amounts of spirited, opinionated, clever and sometimes informed debate on whatever subject happened to catch the attention of one of the family that day. Or whatever one of us thought might get a rise out of someone else. So, sex, politics and religion it was then - oh and motorbikes, economics, international relations, demographics, cricket, company ownersh...

Living the lies

In 1969, when I was 16 I left school and got a job as a labourer. My wages weren't high but to me they were a fortune and within a few months I bought my first car, a 1938 Morris 8 sports, this one here. It had a minuscule 4 cylinder engine and a wood framed body which meant it was slow and it flexed so much when going around corners that the doors would sometimes fly open. Nevertheless I thought it was pretty damned cool, especially with the modifications I made to the muffler for performance and advertising purposes, ie, removing it. Back then, the most popular TV program was The Avengers, in which the suave and resourceful hero, John Steed drove a 1928 3 Litre Bentley. Which looked kinda like my car, right? Yeah, right. Anyway, John Steed usually entered his car by leaping nimbly over the door, so I emulated him whenever possible. Now all this is preamble. I want to tell you about something that happened to me one day in Papanui Road, Christchurch. My car ...

2 More Years

An autumn leaf, the evidence of the death whereby the grapevine lives and bears fruit There are 31,102 verses in the Bible, or at least in the Protestant version of it which the conservative section of our church recognises. Of these, there are 6 verses which explicitly condemn homosexual practice. The best scholars in the Christian world have pointed out the ambiguity of even these scraps of scripture, but this does not prevent their becoming the basis of an antipathy to contemporary same gender sexuality which I was repeatedly told, during General Synod, was "First Order". I'm not sure what "First Order" means exactly, but I was told that this is a "Salvation Matter". So, presumably, holding a proper view on homosexuality is right up there in importance with belief in the doctrines I would consider foundational for the Christian faith: namely the Holy Trinity, Incarnation and Resurrection. In any event, antipathy to homosexuality has already ...

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