Life

A quick snap of the back-end of the Queen Elizabeth 2 at Circular Quay today (8 March 2012). They say it’s the largest ship ever to have docked at that terminal and about 10 meters too tall to make it under the Harbour Bridge.

Rock band really did Brussells [sic] A concert on October 28 by the Irish new wave band U2 in Brussels rocked not only their fans but also seismic equipment at the Belgian Meteorological Institute, scientists said today.

I saved this image years ago from a New Zealand news paper – a great set of characters. The text reads:

Mrs Iris Strickland – one of the few voices supporting the MP for Hastings, Mr David Butcher. Mrs Strickland said the National Government had hit superannuitants harder and she was now “living better than I ever have.”

Clipping from The Hawkes Bay Herald Tribune – 1984

It has – there’s not a bloody original thought left in the world. Just try and come up with a catchy name for a web-site. Someone has always been there first. Pricks!

When I was a kid I used to look out the car window on long, boring, family holiday trips and watch the lolly-pop men at each end of the inevitable New Zealand roadworks – back then the concept of roadworks was to rip up the road, dump a whole heap of rocks all over the place and let the traffic pack it all down for a few weeks.

They had lovingly pumped her full of so much food, she spent the next twenty-four hours pissing and shitting everywhere. She was the shape of a small hippo’ at first but looked more like a staffy-shaped puppy on the last day. Tears of course upon having to return the beast to the shop. She stayed elsewhere on another occasion and caught ring-worm. It knocked her about a bit. Eventually she went to live with someone who sounded like they would take good care of her. Note the puppy spit in the image, she did a bit of that.

There’s a whole history to this alphabet and various different versions of it.
It’s all out there on the web if you are interested in that. I’ve just put this up here ’cause I keep needing to remember it in the middle of a phone call and wish I had it with me… so here it is.

Global nuclear disarmament would be nice, I’d be happy about that, but what can you do? Various people have had a crack at it over the years but they all seem to loose traction after time. In 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan came close to taking an unprecedented step. During the Reykjavik Summit in Iceland, they almost…

Waking up today and seeing the grey, overcast sky reminds me of working on the farm. The feeling of what the day would be like out in the the weather was tangible. What the wet grass, the frosty gate latch and crossing the ice on the wooden foot bridge would feel like.

This puzzle was hours of fun as a kid. It was just a box of wooden blocks with pictures stuck on each side. There was a bus, car, plane, ship, steam train and a second newer train.

A few life tips for the risk-averse, things I have picked up along the way that you may find useful

Late ’60s in New Zealand Somewhere…