BREAKING NEWS

News* has just cone to hand that the leading human recognition of superhuman controlling power blog - Geremy Watkins the third has had all its posts stripped. See here:

GEREMY WATKINS THE THIRD

There is a strong rumour that the entire blog may be removed soon. This reporter has decided to investigate the reasons.

Having accessed the blog  Geremy Watkins the third it was immediately obvious that there were no posts to be seen. Using the links lead me to a geographically close blog Petone Ponderings.  The author of Petone Ponderings is very reclusive seemingly going into hibernation for long periods and only occasionally surfacing to witter on about local events, meeting minor celebrities and of course the seasonal status of her garden but she was able to provide some insight into the status of Geremy Watkins the third.

"Geremy Watkins the third is a front for the Moera chapter of The Holy Ghost Appreciation Society. Sometimes going by the alternate name of Geramy The Lesser (yes, I know the spelling is atrocious) the blog bangs on attempts to inform the reader about the existence, form and relevance of The Holy Trinity to our modern lifestyle. No wonder it has disappeared. It has been bringing a bad reputation of naivety and frankly dumbness to our Petone community. Thank God that its base is in Moera or as Geremy/Geramy likes to call it 'Petone Heights'." 

The Petone Ponderings spokesperson then descended into an obscene and blasphemous diatribe about Geremy/Geramy and his predilections that this writer has decided, in the best interests of all, not to publish.

Calls to the Archdiocese of Lower Hutt proved unfruitful (despite what is promised in all of those prayers) but a call to The Tablet, the official media outlet for the Catholic Church in New Zealand brought this insight by its editor Ima Arssey:

"Yes, we are aware of Geremy Watkins the third and are relieved that the posts have been suspended (voluntarily) . We warned Geremy/Geramy that propagating Catholic Church bulls....dogma is the responsibility of The Tablet as the Church's official organ and that claiming sole ownership of the Holy Ghost and stating that he/she/it resides in his house in Moera is frankly preposterous. If The Holy Ghost was to choose to live anywhere in New Zealand then he/she/it would surely live with me. We have four bedrooms, two bathrooms, 3 carparks and are on a nice quarter acre section that is North facing for all day sun. Any offers over....... Sorry. As I was saying we are aware of Geremy Watkins the third and are relieved that the posts have been suspended and if they start up again we will take strong measures to see that the blog is terminated. Amen."

* Brought to you by Fake News the fastest growing media platform.

ANZAC DAY TOMORROW

I'm not in Auckland so won't be able to go to the Dawn Parade tomorrow. That's a shame as I have always liked attending this when I can.

My sister no doubt will be there playing drum in a pipe band. Good on her. I should have given her dad's war medals to carry.

I'll go up to the local club I belong to for the 2PM service. It is good but the later-in-the-day services don't have the same edge that the dawn services have.

Richard, bless him. will be playing trumpet (bugle?) at two services tomorrow. I hope that he doesn't ruin his lips so he can't give Shelley a kiss when he gets home.

I don't know if Robert will be playing at any ANZAC services. In my experience there's not a great demand for fiddle players - although I might be wrong. He'll probably be busy selling illegal cakes at a fair and arguing with Seventh Day Adventists or Mormons or someone anyway.

Anyway, enjoy the day but not too much as the day is after all a remembrance of fallen soldiers.

WINDOWS 9

Windows 9?

No, just kidding.

I'd like to post a lot more windows but a grumpy old sourpuss from the Lower Hutt electorate has complained. Sorry about that.

I read this guys post today:


RICHARD BASS BAG ITALIAN RUBBISH

He bangs on about visiting Wellington's waterfront which is a pretty brave thing to do at any time of the year except in the 2 weeks of summer they have down there.

He also recounts how he went into an Italian wine shop and bought a bottle of Bardolino which he apparently drunk before creating his blog post. At least that makes sense. He finishes the post by saying:

"Now I am a little bit pissed. Ma chiva piano va sano e va lontano."

Which I think, given my limited understanding of Italian, means "My Piano has been drinking" a line that he stole from the great Tom Waits:

THE PIANO HAS BEEN DRINKING

Now this piano obviously liked a drop or two I only hope that it had the good sense to drink a decent Italian red wine like a Barolo, a Chianti Classico, a Barbaresco, a Barbera d'Asti, a Gattinara, a Brunello or Harvey's Bristol Cream..

WINDOWS 8

Not this

I'm excited at the acceptance of my new 'Windows' series. It's smashed all records - ha ha, did you see what I did there? Smashed all records. All of my blog followers have now created their own 'Windows posts although I seriously doubt their dedication and stamina so they will probably fizzle out.



Quite frankly, if they hadn't shown so much interest by copying the theme I might have discontinued it.

I took some more photographs of windows in the house and today will show you another one.

This one is of a door in one of the spare bedrooms. It leads out to the path at the side of the house.
I'm not sure why this was ever installed but will come in handy if we do the Air B&B thing so that a guest can have an additional exit/entrance.

I like this doorway because it has a really nice Nikau palm tree outside set in a garden of ferns. It is on the west side of the house so the afternoon sunlight filters nicely through it.

Good news is that I have a lot more windows in the house and will keep taking and posting photographs for your enjoyment.

COLD, COLD, COLD

COLD, COLD, COLD - LITTLE FEAT

 Boy what a change of weather last night and today. Yesterday I was swimming but last night had to put an extra blanket on the bed. Today has been 'freezing' (at least in Northland terms) and had to wear longs and a sweatshirt.

The Old Girl came up today and worked in the study all day with the wall heater on. I was wondering why the cat was in the hallway trying to get into the study. She knew it was warmer in there.

This cold and rain spell is forecast to last for a week. I hope we don't get another cyclone

WINDOWS 7

Not this

I've been a bit remiss in the Windows series lately. Sorry about that. Easter and the necessity to mock Robert's religion got in the way.

The window that I'll show you here isn't actually in the house although we've had it for about 20 years

I bought it at a demolition warehouse in Christchurch when we were living there and had planned to install it in an internal door in the grand old house we owned.

It has nice celtic/Irish features in coloured glass that catch the light really well.

The motif along the edges match a similar motif we have in the glass at the top of the back door of our current house. I should put my home handyman hat on and create a door from the kitchen to the hallway with this panel installed in it......


....maybe not. The Old Girl gets nervous when I get the toolbox out.

BEING OPEN MINDED

This is a great interview with Michael Palin, John Cleese, Malcolm Muggeridge and an Archbishop debating the film The Life of Brian.

Robert should watch this and listen to the reasoned argument coming from Cleese and Palin.




PALIN, CLEESE, MUGGERIDGE AND SOME JOKER IN A PURPLE DRESS


The viewers comments after the film clip are a hoot:

“There's a man in this video wearing a purple dress because he thinks he has acquired some position given to him by an imaginary being”

“Catholics do tend to know a lot about fourteen year old boys”

“It (the Catholic Church) has also produced countless wars, torture, the Spanish inquisition (nobody expected that), burning at the stake, massacres, forced conversions and treating non-believers across the world as inferior, mass child abuse and murder covered up by its institutions and supposedly holy leaders, support for ruthless dictatorships"

OK, BUT JUST BECAUSE MY EASTER HASN'T FINISHED YET

LIFE'S A BEACH

Yesterday I went to Ocean Beach, the surf beach that is close to where I live.
It was a nice day, a bit of cloud but sunny and the waves were still a bit violent after the storm of a couple of days before.

This is a magnificent beach looking out westwards towards - Argentina? - I don't know but there's a lot of big water out there.



One of the nice things about this beach is the interesting rock formations and the small islands that lie just of of it - Hen and Chickens and others.

There was lots of birdlife (and I don't just mean the surfer chicks) to look at. These little guys let me get quite close before I disturbed them and they flew away.

FOR HE IS THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE

Well, here we are again for that special long weekend in the first half of the year - Easter.

The four days from Good Friday through Easter Monday have great significance as they portray the trials and tribulations of a very special man.

On the first day this man is wrongfully charged with crimes that he didn't commit and is made to suffer for them.

On the second day he withdraws to meditate and to ponder the reasons why he has been given a task that while benefitting mankind will ultimately be dangerous for him.


On the third day he is brutally set upon, wounded and ends up in a cave.


On the fourth day our man returns, rejuvenated and victorious and saves us all.

_________________________________________________________________________



Yes, this weekend on television we once again have the full Sylvester Stallone quartet of films to thrill and entertain us, to uplift our spirits and gladden our hearts.

Starting with First Blood on Friday, hero John is wrongfully accused and abused.

On Saturday in Rambo First Blood Part II John takes time out to allow his spiritual side to lay out the path he must take.

In Rambo Part III, on Sunday John fights valiantly but is injured and has to withdraw from the fray to recover.

Finally, on Monday in Rambo Last Blood, John is resurrected and claims the day for us all.

Wonderful stuff this and is worth waiting all year for it to come around again.

SEQUELS ARE USUALLY RUBBISH

Have you noticed that most sequels especially film ones are usually crap?

I'm thinking here of all the follow-on Alien films, the appalling Halloween and Jaws spin-offs, and anything featuring Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson.

There have been some good ones though like Godfather 2 and Trainspotting 2 (T2), but these are few and far between.

Robert, that increasingly isolated born again Christian, when he said recently that he reads the New Testament more than the Old Testament, got me thinking about the relative merits of The Bible 1 (Old Testament) and its sequel Bible 2 (New testament).

The more I thought about it I became aware that Bible 1 is more like an action adventure film full of action, violence and sex with a minimal amount of touchy-feely stuff):

Bible 1 has it all

And Bible 2 is like a chick flick. Touch-feely, wan, boring.

Bible 2 is boring

I mean you only have to look at the lead characters:

Bible 1 God

Bible 2 God

I know which one old Richard would want to go and see and end up, under sufferance, being dragged along by Shelley to see.

I reckon that Charlton Heston's version of the Bible 2 story was much, much better:

Interestingly enough the remake of Ben Hur in the 1950s was better than the (still good) original but the recent remake of the remake is crap.


Bible 2 is only livened up at the end with the psychotic and perhaps psychedelic ravings of John in The Apocalypse. Good stuff this which is like looking at a Grunewald or Bosch painting.

SATURDAY NIGHT'S BEING STOLEN

I've got a lovely memory of ambient listening to Saturday Night the National Radio Saturday Evening request programme. We were living in Christchurch from 1995 to 2000 and had wonderful elderly neighbours. Our house was set in nice gardens and we shared a long driveway with our neighbours whose house, also set in nice gardens had been subdivided off our one some time before we bought. As a consequence we both had a private and peaceful setting to live in.


We never heard much from the neighbours but we did have a lot to do with them. Wes, in his mid 80s used to tend our vegetable garden and his wife Mary, in her late 70's would invite us in for tea and cakes. They were very quiet and the only sounds we heard from their house was on Saturday evenings.


After dinner they used to play the radio with the National Programme's Saturday Night playing - loud enough for us to hear from next door. They looked forward to this all week and would sometimes put in their requests. A couple of times we saw them dancing to a favourite tune. Magic.

Peter Fry used to compere Saturday Night from about 1995 to 2014 along with Cadenza. He was an experienced announcer having presented Morning and Midday Report for many years before this. He had a nice, friendly voice and manner and this made for a great programme.

Peter Fry

It wasn't a programme for me and The Old Girl though as most of the music was quite a bit before our time. We did appreciate that it was available though and Peter Fry's selections and the listeners requests were a kind of welcome relief to the awful crap that was played on commercial stations.


Fry retired in 2014 and Saturday Night has been taken over by Phil O'Brien. Now I don't have anything against Phil, he was a Marist Brothers and St Patricks College classmate for years after all and he has extensive radio DJ experience. His encyclopaedic knowledge of music from the 1960s to present day is impressive.

Phil O'Brien

I also respect that, twenty plus years after the music we overheard in 1995 needs to be updated, at least by the same couple of decades. Old buggers like me will soon be listening to Saturday Night if they aren't already and so the music should be from the 1940s through to say the 1970s to keep pace with their ages and wants.






On Saturday last I listened to O'Brien's programme and was very disappointed. He had some great selections that resonated with me from my youth to my 20s but unfortunately a lot of requests were for much, much more recent music.

David Gray for god's sake

It occurred to me that the generation after that of my elderly neighbours, and the one just before my generation, are being cheated. This wonderful programme - long may it last- is being bastardised and will probably result in a loss of listeners in the ideal age bracket. Once this happens it's a short road to programmers axing the programme due to low ratings. On the night that I listened many of the requests were from the 90s and 2000s. Surely there's plenty of outlets for this on other radio stations. I suspected that a lot of listenership came from those who listen to O'Brien's and Simon Morris's Matinee Idle which was quite good when it first started up 10 years or so ago but has since become tiresome.

CHRISTIANS WILL BELIEVE ANYTHING ....

....And they'll bend the truth to suit.

Look, I don't mean to have another go at Robert aka Geremy about his incomprehensible belief in a non-existing deity and his blind faith in a corrupt, money grabbing, misogynistic and paederastic organisation known as the Catholic Church - really, I don't. But, really, if there is belief it's beggared by the nonsense that comes out from Christian organisations and their acolytes.

We are all aware of the hypocrisy in USA with naive people linking belief in God with an equal belief in their right to kill anyone who doesn't agree with them.

This is funny (and sad) to watch:


DIVINITY OF DONALD TRUMP

WINDOWS 6

One of my favourite windows isn't unfortunately in our house. I wish it was.

This 'window' is the stained glass mural by Harold Coop which is in the cafe of the Auckland Medical School in Grafton.

It is beautiful.

The Old Girl loves this as she is a great fan of Harold Coop. She has many of his paintings - watercolours, oils and acrylics - and particularly likes the ones featuring pohutakawa trees in Northland settings.

One of her Northland series acrylics.

These are really nice pieces of original art and are generally about 1m x 75cm so, with the vibrant colours, really stand out. She likes them so much that when she went to Canada and UK for 2 and a half years she took three of her favourites with her.

I like them as well and have been, over the last decade, on the hunt for different ones for her. I've bought from art auctions, galleries and Trade Me and we have made some great bargains.

My favourite isn't a Northland scene and doesn't feature a pohutakawa. It is scene from the Kepler Track on the West Coast and features pungas in a beech forest.

It's magic with the golden light filtering down. I never get tired of looking at it.

DOORSTOPS

There's been overwhelming interest in my recent Windows series of posts. I'm worried about the network crashing. I still have some amazing windows photographs but thought that I'd ease the pressure by doing a post on doorstops.

I've noticed that The Old Girl has a few of these scattered through the house - all different.

This little guy props open the lounge door when required. He does a good job and often goes unrewarded and unremarked. Every now and then I've noticed that the cat gives him a swipe across the face with her paw when she passes. I don't know why.

We use this one for our bedroom door. It's perfectly serviceable even though it's many years old. Given that the Old Girl doesn't let the cat sleep in the bedroom at night though I think that it's a bit of a cheek.

We use this one for the study door. It's made of sold cast metal and is a bugger if you stub your toe on it. Pretty though.

This one is deceptive. It's small but incredibly dense and heavy which is why we use it for the back door which is quite a large door. It can prop open the door on quite windy days if necessary.

This sweet one has been propping open one of the spare bedroom doors but I think that he's mainly decorative. I don't think he'd be able to handle any big draughts.



I was sure that we had more - maybe the Old Girl has taken a couple down to the Auckland apartment.

This one though is holding open the door to the flat sitting room. It's a bit prosaic but it is functional.


I hope that you enjoyed my doorstops. Let me know if there is some other household items you want to see.

BOTH BATHROOMS MATEY!

We've got guests staying at Easter. No Robert, I won't be locking them out of the house as you surmise - they are friends. OK?

Anyway, as Easter is the weekend after this I've been given my instructions by the Old Girl to have things neat and tidy:

• Garden
• Lawn
• Driveway
• Weeding
• Vacuuming
• Dusting
• Kitchen cleaning
• Bedrooms set up
• Bathrooms
• Both bathrooms!

What? Both bathrooms?.

Yes she said and properly, including scrubbing the toilets.

"Bloody hell" I thought "what a fankle having two bathrooms to clean ....." until I remembered a couple of episodes from film and TV that quickly made me change my mind.

FATHER TED


There were lots of others on the web, mostly being from low-brow American films but Henry Fool was a good film. Here's a clip:


HENRY FOOL







I couldn't find the excellent scene from American Splendour (Check out this film from 2003 if you haven't seen it. Classy.)

WINDOWS 5

Many years ago The Old Girl bought some nice lead light bird sculptures.
We used to have these hanging in the windows in our Christchurch house, another old house - a two level bungalow with lots of windows.

We've kept these through the years and they suit our current house really well as it too has old frame windows.

We have them positioned around the house and they each catch the sunlight at different times of the day.

WINDOWS 4

Not this

It's a grey day here today although fortunately not as bad as Wellington is likely to be over the next couple of days. The Great Flood springs to mind - Robert will know of the relevant bible passages.


Today's window is brought to you by the number four. 4. It's the laundry door that leads out to the back porch.

While not a particularly attractive or different door, it is functional.
The top third is clear which looks out to the wood sculpture affixed to the porch wall and my gardening hat which is stuck on top of a broom.

The middle third panel is a textured glass (quite old) which affords some privacy for anyone in the laundry.
I guess that you could be standing there with no pants on, talking to someone through the door without them fully knowing your state of undress.

The bottom third is wood and has a cat door affixed in it.

As I said this door leads outside from the laundry. We don't use it very often but, if and when we use the rear end of the house for Air B&B, it will provide a separate entrance for guests as we will be able to lock off the hallway access to the 'flat' and people can come and go without bothering us.

I'll have to leave a window open for the cat to come and go though as this will also lock off her door.