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...

Kindle

Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on. I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...

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...

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...

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