Posts by Rob Hosking
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I read a book as a teenager which seriously suggested you could achieve something like this. They called it 'Lucid Dreaming' and the idea was that you could not only become aware that you were sleeping, but also control your dreams.
As a kid I taught myself, somehow, to go ‘its all right, its only a dream’ even when I was still having the dream. Don’t ask me how.
And then I'd go 'well if its only a dream, I can fly!!'. And off I'd go.
So even now its very rare for me to have a dream where I'm not aware on some level that it is a dream.
I think this must be close to the ultimate in self-consciousness.
I can't fly in my dreams any more though. I have tried.
I had flatmates at one point who had heard you could have more vivid dreams if you eat pumpkin seeds before you go to bed. They used to scoff them after dinner.
After a bit of time it emerged they were really dreaming about each other: they moved out and set up house together.
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A bit of an Anglophiliac book list:
'Amis and Son' by Neil Powell - not a bad summary of the two writers. I'm still not a particular fan of Martin A: partly because there's something too self conscious about his writing, partly because he seems to glory too much in squalor. (that said, his memoir 'Experience' is one of my favourite books). Kingsley's work varies from the sublimely witty to the bitter and tendentious but on the whole I'll take it over his son's stuff.
A biography of Douglas "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" Adams - can't recall who by. A book about someone like Adams just should not be boring, but this one was.
Another biography of a funny man - Tony Hancock. John Fisher earlier wrote a very good book, called 'Funny Way To Be a Hero', on the British music hall comedy tradition and how it survived into the tv age. This book is as good. Unlike previous books about Hancock it keeps his decline into alcoholism and suicide in perspective.
'Our Times' by AN Wilson - latest in a trilogy of British social and political history which began with 'The Victorians'. Didn't enjoy this latest one, which covers the period since 1950. I think this is partly because of the period it covers: the social and political history of Britain prior to 1950 was still very relevant to the social and political history of NZ but since then thankfully much less so. But even allowing for that, this work is much more small minded than the previous works. I've usually enjoyed Wilson's writing, especially on religion, but this was a chore and I didn't quite finish it.
'How Fiction Works' by James Wood. Very enjoyable, very educative. I still can't be blowed with Jane Austen or - to a lesser extent - Henry James - but this is a very good primer on how some great writers have put together their prose.
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Yesterday I made a backwards version of hallelujah and it's not bad...
What, no messages to worship the devil or similar?
My daughter (aged five) has a similar intense reaction to some music - the latest, slightly bizarre one, is to the music on the Vodafone ad.
She hates it. Leaps up, yells "NO!" and turns the teev off. As the ad shows most news hours this is kind of vexing.
Her current two favourites are a collection of Bach Oboe Concertos and Sandie Shaw singing 'Wight is Wight' in French. I suspect this is the only time those two will ever appear in the same sentence.
Re: Muppets - I still treasure memories of the pigs on motorbikes doing the Beach Boys 'I Get Around' and a bunch of crocodiles doing the back up 'Laa - la la la la la - bit to Elton John's 'Crocodile Rock'.
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WHY do we have children?...
A few explanations suggest themselves:
1. its something to do with genes being such selfish little bastards.
2. The Supreme Being told us to Go Forth and Mulitply so by crikey we'd better.
3. to fill an aching void of meaning.
4. 'it'll be safe, honey, I'm sure of it...'
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Seems to me that given the huge diversity of relationships even within PA that defining the actual activities is going to be hard for either wife or husband job.
That is pretty much my first thought. There are a number of people here - and I'm one of them - who are dealing with at least one family member with long term illnesses and/or conditions.
When you're in that situation a lot of traditional roles/expectations go out the window. As they probably should anyway.In the words of St Brian of Python, We're All Individuals.
Main differecnes? Its the husband's job to kill spiders. Wife's job to say 'No, don't kill it! just get rid of it!'
Oh, then there's mending fuses.
Put out rubbish.
Get groceries and other jobs involving lifting.
Make curries.
Also do that nurturing stuff.
And in my own case, Claudia is a detail person. I'm a big picture person. I know lots of couples with this sort of split and its not a male/female thing.
Mostly this works. When it doesn't its when she turns into an anal retentive control freak and I turn into an impractical dreamer. But this doesn't happen very often. Any more.
Oh, and on Paul's letters: Eddie Izzard.
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Who would have guessed that part of Radio New Zealand's public service mandate was to provide a home for more awesomely crapulous music that you could shake a colostomy bag at..
About 10 years ago, one insomniac night, I tuned in, and there was a kind of fore-runner to 'Matinee Idyll' playing - the 20 (or whatever) worst songs ever recorded.
It was where I first heard William Shatner's 'Mr Tamborine Man' - which I dreamed about last night.
Yes really.
I think it was the Parmesan On Vogels dinner I had.
Re: 'Windmills of Your Mind' - for years I thought it was a Leonard Cohen number.
Probably the best version though was this one:
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I got dropped in Ohingaiti by a very stoned hippy when I was hitching north back in about 1990.
The guy looked like a frantic version of Neil from the Young Ones - imagine maybe a combo of Neil and Rik.
Its one of the small places I've got stuck, lift-less, for several hours (others being places like Himatangi Junction, Buller Gorge turn-off; the junction at the south end of Lake Pukaki...)
I think it also had a Post Office in those days. The building is now a craft place.
You can stick Chch. We peaked at 40, it's still 35,
Sheitt...I passed through yesterday and it was 34. That was bad enough.
I'm in Arthurs Pass. Its blowing a bit, but still very warm. Nothing like 35 or 40 though.
@Sacha: the good coffee place in Taihape - 'Brown Sugar'? Compulsory stop when I'm driving through with my daughter. She has her own table she insists on sitting at, or at least trying to....
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And besides, capitalism is so a philosophy these days.
Well, it has become one, or at least an attempt at one
I think that's been a massive wrong turn, but that's a whole thesis away...
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How's capitalism working for a lot of people? Until such time as it starts catering for everyone, I shall remain grateful that there are people who advance alternative philosophies.
Couple of points: firstly one of capitalism's great strength is it isn't a philosophy, or at least it didn't start as one.
It just evolved out of people buying, selling, and trading with each other. Inother words, it evolved out of people just doing stuff naturally.
It wasn't dreamed up by, for example, some social misfit sitting in the British Museum Library. Having evolved, was retrospectively defined.
Which is one of its weaknesses - it tends to be defined by its enemies.
Isn't it ironic how pro-capitalists never mention that the people in abject poverty that their beloved system creates (or tolerates) are ultimately looked after by people - including plenty of religious organisations - who are themselves anti-capitalists?
non rather than anti-capitalist, I think. And they do mention such groups. Start with - I think - Burke's 'little platoons' of social groups of the kind you mention. Also look at more latter day work by communutarian writers such as David Selbourne. Fukuyama has had arather a lot to say about this as well.
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Well if we're talking vehicular nostalgia, and British engineering...this was the first vehicle I ever drove:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ferguson_TEF(1955).JPG
No power steering, no safety bar, and the brakes tended not to work in winter because they got full of mud.
The best way to stop it was to drop the hydraulics quickly and hope the tray dragging on the ground would stop you in time.
Oh, and also hope anyone riding on the tray was ready for you to do this.