Posts by Rob Hosking
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the only Milne parody I know is clean:
"Hurrah! Hurah!
Nobody cares.
Christopher Robin
Has fallen downstairs."I loved the the House at Pooh Corner (and Winnie the Pooh, albeit less so) as a kid but never could get into the 'Now We Are Six' poems. Too twee.
And yeah, Eeyore was always my favourite. LIke when he's introduced to Tigger and Pooh (or was it Piglet) says 'he's just arrived!' and Eeyore looks up and says 'When's he going?'
I wrote a column in NBR this year talking about how B ill English was playing Eeyore to John Key's Tigger. I seldom skite about my work but I was rather proud of that.
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@ScottY : the only concert I went to last year was the Wiggles.
And funnily enough I kind of don't mind. To everything there is a season, and all that...
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glingle, glingle, glingle
Did you hear that??My bet is its the Oh God of Hangovers, about to pay a visit.
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I also think, without any known justification, that he is Terry's take on life
The same thought crossed my mind when writing that little effort, but I figured I'd gone on long enough.
Mind you, Ridcully is my own personal hero.
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"Hogfather" - the movie -is apparently on, on Thursday evening
EXCELLENT.
I knew it was on at some point but my daughter has shredded the Listener in a protest action following a breakdown of talks relating to bedtime.
Hogfather is brilliant. Not just because it features Death in a main role, and that one of the best ongoing jokes-which-is-more-than-just-a-joke in the Discworld novels is the way Death, with all his bewildered concern for humanity, is one of the most sympathetic characters in the entire series.
More because it is a quite subtle and insightful examination of some of the themes around myth, atheism, belief, stories, and, well, humanity.
In an essay dealing with the atheism of Richard Dawkins a few years ago British philosopher John Gray pointed out that calling oneself a humanist and then rubbishing one of the most unique things about humans - our religious instincts - seems a little off.
The villains in Hogfather are the shadowy Auditors, who want to remove the Hogfather, and similar demi-Gods, from the world, because they are untidy and irrational.
As a result, other figures start appearing - the Verucca Gnome, the Eater of Socks, the Oh God of Hangovers, and my personal favourite, the Cheerful Fairy (with shoes so sensible they could do their own tax returns). Surplus belief "sloshing around" creates them.
The point being that "Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape," so they can believe the big lies we need to believe - " Justice. Mercy. Duty. That sort of thing."
Someone in an earlier thread quoted the next bit -
"Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet" - Death waved a hand...."And yet you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.....You need to believe in things that aren't true. How else can they become?"
And it is no coincidence, I'm sure, that it is the character of Death which delivers that lesson.
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I am currently doing a seasonal re-reading of Hogfather - prompted in this case by an earlier discussion on this site.
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Well, now that I - and everyone else here - has read about the Manic Pixie Dream Girl I don't have to make a contribution to the 'Love' thread, 'cos its all there, pretty much.
Whew.
I must get hold of David Nicholls' latest, ta for the tip. I loved Starter for Ten and not just because I, too, am an alumini of the NZ Uni Challenge.
Oh, and yeah, the Douglas Adams 'sequel' I read about that on the weekend and just went No.......
Some concepts are fundamentally flawed at the outset and this just has got Tandoori Pizza written all over it.
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For the fellow Pratchett fans - the Master himself at the Guardian Book Club:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2009/dec/19/terry-pratchett-book-club
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Blondie did a couple of songs in French as well: 'Sunday Girl',
definitely, and I think 'Denis'.(Debbie Harry was French Singing in the USA [snort!] )
My daughter loves Sandy Shaw's 'Wight is Wight' but the only version available in digital format is in French.
It is actually better in French. The original words are kind of naff.
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Most of those comments were even funnier when uncaged from their original context and allowed to soar freely.
And Mr Hayward's line about that c*nt Bollard staying off my turf flashed into my head last Thursday morning, when I was in the media lock up at the Reserve Bank.
I don't usually get many laughs on monetary policy statement day...well, actually I do, because the economy is a never ending source of humour-only-slightly-tinged-with-hysteria...but this one was different.