Posts by Rob Hosking
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Oh yeah, and Peter Cook didn't see any point in doing satire, did he? He gave it all up and became an accountant.
Cook, if you read the excellent but in the end depressing biography by Harry Thompson, didn't really see the point of anything . The occupational hazard of satirists - nihlism and depression - got to him.
They were probably relieved that the liberals were watching sci-fi sagas and reading comic books (sorry, graphic novels) rather than doing anything that threatened authority.
I know plenty of right wing readers of such publications (not one myself, Pratchett excepted)
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First Job, in Whakatane, Feb 1983. I was 18. Got put up at the Whakatane Hotel til I got a place.
Small room, with one bed - a wire mattress which sagged lower than our current account deficit. One washbasin in the corner, which rattled everytime anyone else on the floor used a tap.
One sash window, out onto the main street. When the wind blew it rattled. The aroma from the takeaways across the road wafted in (the takeaways was one of a small chain across the central North Island around that time – they tried to emulate KFC, had a name something like the Cheerful Chicken).
Communal showers and toilets along the corridor. (the proprietors hadn’t taken advantage of a tax break in Muldoon’s first Budget which encouraged hotel proprietors to install en-suite bathrooms in hotels).
Wallpaper that sort of psychotically tanned colour, but I suspect it had once been a different colour, in about 1954.
Meals in the dining room: choice of fish or meat, the meat part alternating beef, lamb, pork. It came with vegetables: spuds, of course, and a blend of boiled silverbeet, pumpkin and cabbage. In summer. Dessert was tinned fruit and cream.
You could order a glass of McWilliams Red if you felt like pushing the boat out.
I remember thinking, wow, staying in a hotel. At last, the big time.
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ended up somewhat randomly in this hotel in Damascus
Yeah, that happened to a bloke called Paul, once...
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How 'bout twelve Bloody Marys?
And twelve How's Your Fathers? Elvis Costello album wasn't it?
You guys are so articulate with your near-death experiences. Any time Death has clearly been in the room with me the closest my brain could have got to vocables would have been 'you're fucking kidding me', and more honestly, something with no vowels.
I gurgled the one time I thought my number was up, but that was because I was caught in a rip at a west coast beach. The fact it was New Years Day and I was hungover didn't help my clarity of thought.
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I have heard that book described as 'Zen and the Art of getting Soulful Sheilas into the Sack'.
Something about being seen with it being a good way to project an aura of sensitivity and manly practicality.
I tried reading it once. (No, not because I wanted to project an aura of etc etc.. well, I don't think so, anyway. After all this time, I'm not sure. If I was, I was deluding myself, but then one's 20s are full of such delusions. God this is getting deep.)
All I can recall now is something rather turgid and humourless. You know that line from some famous reviewer of some famous book: 'this is not a book which should be cast aside lightly. It should be hurled with great force...'
Reader, I hurled.
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__I find a simple, fierce 'PISS OFF' will suffice.__
Yeah, 'cos there's nothing people COLLECTING FOR CHARITY deserve more than a good shouting at.If you had read the comment more carefully you'd have noticed it was about being pestered by evangelicals of various types. Not about charridy at all.
It seems to me that most religions seem to take three very distinct questions and bung them together.
How did the world get here? What happens when we die? How should we live our lives?
A threatening narrative is used to answer the first two questions[God made the world and he can unmake it again; follow a bunch of rules we just happen to have here or you'll burn forever] as a way of sort of enforcing the third.
All the questions are tied up with issues of the meaning of life but they are quite separate.
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I thought Craig's avatar was a rather endearing kiiwifruit angel...I prefer Cthullu (clean out of soul & cinnamon though.)
Heh. I thought it was one of the Southpark characters turned green.
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I've found that barking loudly like a dog gets JW's, Mormons and the like to leave you alone.
Why be so elaborate?
Anyone who knows me will tell you my default position is almost pathologically polite (OK, until about the third drink) but I find a simple, fierce 'PISS OFF' will suffice.
I find it presumptuous to just bowl up to a stranger and start talking religion. If someone does have a 'relationship with God' its an incredibly personal thing and not the sort of thing to bandy with strangers.
Yeah, God, I'm back.... and THIS TIME ITS PERSONAL.
Hmm.
Just uncorked the third drink....
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I'm being a pendant, after all,
You're a little flag??
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Two random things I want to throw into this: firstly I've learned a lot about the legislation reading this thread (and so far this year I've managed to avoid covering the issue, what with all the economic stuff and everything...) so, cheers.
Also the heading on the thread must be why I've been humming 'Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling' all day.
Nice tune, that. Wonder if I can download it on rapidshare.