Posts by Rob Hosking
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Make it easy on yourself?
Nah.
Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore. But there's No Regrets...
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The only time I recall lying about my age was to get alcohol. Haven't had to do that now for 24 years.
I had a huge party when I turned 30. My 20s were pretty screwed up and it was my way of saying Hooray to All That. ('all that' being an inability to drink moderately, followed by some very bad choices with women, and with a powerful and mostly self-inflicted Religious Hangover all mixed up in there).
The only thing which kind of annoys me is I've hardly ever looked my age. Until I was about 28 I looked, to a lot of people, very young. I recall being asked on my postie run if it was a school holiday job. I was 24 at the time.
For about half a day in 1993 I looked my age: then I suddenly looked 40.
Re:Stephen's comment on seeing a photo of yourself - yeah.
When we got the photos back from my sister's wedding there was one from the door of the church from behind my sister. Rows of backs of people's heads.
And I thought 'Who's that guy in the front row with the bald spot....Oh.'
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Star Trek conveniently ignored the absence or variations in gravity inherent in space travel.
Ye cannae ignore the laws of physics!
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I still can't get my head around the idea that Judi Dench was the original West End Sally Bowles in Cabaret.
I did not know that.
But Dench is my pick to star if they ever make a biopic about Elton John. They're looking more and more alike. And if she can pull the Sally Bowles thing off Elton should be a breeze.
Some friends and I once devised a scale of scenery-chewingness - it went some like:
1 Jeremy Irons in D&D = 10 Nick Nolte in Hulk = 100 John Travolta in Battlefield EarthWhere did Alan Rickman as the Sherriff of Nottingham go on that scale?
Because he was the only good thing I remember about that Robin Hood film. Whatsisface...genunine brain fade here and I'm not going to google the bloke...was insipid as Robin Hood.
Should have been Mel Gibson.
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It didn't matter so much (I'd just been offered my start in journalism), but I pulled a 49, which was quite pleasing.
Hmm. Spooky.
I did similar for Seventh form economics. Got the letter saying I'd been accepted for the journalism course the morning of the exam: told my mum I didn't need to go to any bloody silly economics exam but she had other ideas.
There were only four of us in the class. Three of us walked out two hours into the three hour exam and went to the beach.
I was a bit annoyed about this, because I had a crush on the one who stayed.
She passed, I got 49. She now helps run film festivals.
In general I remember very little about school exams but then it was rather a long time ago.
I do recall two things: one was wearing odd socks, which started by accident but which became an exam supersition for me.
The other thing was sixth form accrediting biology exam. I knew I wasn't going to pass, I was lousy at bio, and I'd also decided at the start of the year I could pass UE sitting.
I had a bad head cold. About half way through the exam my handkerchief had absorbed enough microbes and slime to start a political party of its own. It was certainly past blowing my nose on.
So I blew my nose on the exam paper and chucked it in the bin.
Got 16%.
In 7th Form the following year a couple of guys tried to beat that in the mid-years. One got 2% for Applied Maths, which is pretty damn difficult.
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Oddly, that's the conclusion my partner and I came to discussing this - on the assumption that smoke-and-whiskey flavour would age really nicely.
Well, if he were salmon, maybe...
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17 of 41 American Presidents had Scottish Ulster ancestry. New Zealand also has ulster culture, in it's Governmental history.
I think Massey and Muldoon are the only PMs with major Ulster ancestry. (Massey was born there: Muldoon's grandparents were from there)
We have a lot of Celts in general. As well as a high level of Scottish and irish migration (esp. the former although not I think as great a proportion as Canada) NZ also had a particularly high proportion of West Country migrants - Cornwall and Devon. I learned this when helping to put together a family history a couple of years ago (Hosking is a west country name).
When I had hair, it used to go reddy-auburn in summer. Does that make me a partial ginga?
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OK, who else can we bag - Albanians?
DRAT
Beat me to it...
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2/ If you were secretly an Arab terrorist, what would be the first policy you’d enact on taking office?
I think the key word here is 'secretly'. If a sort of Levantine Manchurian Candidate - a Syrian Candidate?? - did get elected to office and immediately banned lending at interest; ordered all women to wear burquas; and declared a fatwa on all television programmes it might kind of make people suspicious.
What he'd be best advised to do would be form an alliance with one or more of the Christian parties and offer them the roles of, ooh, lets see now, ministers of finance, health and corrections.
Get out of that one, smegheads.
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a) When you've got a bottle of really great wine and a bottle of crap wine, you drink the good one first so that you're a little bit drunk by the time you get to the other one and it therefore tastes better
Which raises a very important question I'm surprised hasn't yet been raised: this plane crash - are we in economy class or business/first class? Because if the latter, you can get a decent wine to go with the meal, perhaps even a good whisky to kick the meal off with. After which, it won't matter what order the pollies get eaten in.