Hey, uh, what are you guys doin?

When I first arrived in the United States, New Zealand was world-famous in this land of the free for one thing.  Lord of the Rings.  I had to struggle at times to get in my little “but-I-could-see-Mount-Fuji-on-The-Last-Samurai-out-my-bedroom-window-when-I-was-a-kid” line.  But that has changed, at least a little, with the Flight of the Conchords picking up their show on HBO.

Quite odd to watch the show here in the US, see how big the Conchords have become, and look back to when our little crew used to head out past the bucket fountain to see them and others at the Indigo comedy night in 1999/2000-ish Wellington.

Offices and tubes

Mondays are a killer. I wake at six, and after a shower and forcing food down my nocturnal self, I float three minutes to the Northern Line and find a seat in the tube. The littered carriages and ad cards above the tube maps weave into my dreams. As my night wrestles with my day, I feel like somewhere between the living and the dead.

Oozing with character

I was at the pool the other day, getting changed, when a boy of about ten walked in. He was short, awkward looking, and quite overweight. His puppy fat jiggled gently when he bent over to pick up his gear bag, an inch of butt-crack showing itself at the top of his pants. He pulled his bright blue speedos up to above his navel and studiously checked the length of the drawstring before tying it off tightly. They were pulled up so high that the crease at the top of his leg showed out the bottom of the togs.

I shook my head slightly, remembering my own uneasy years at primary school, remembering how cruel children can be about anyone even slightly different.

Who is going to heaven again?

It may come as a surprise to some, but heaven - as most people understand the term - doesn’t exist. At least this is according to one of today’s most formidable New Testament scholars, N.T. (Tom) Wright. A recent Time magazine interview with Wright can be found here.

Wright’s early years as a scholar were spent teaching at universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, and more recently he has moved into a church role as Bishop of Durham, the forth highest position in the Anglican Church.

Hello, goodbye, hello.

Tendai Biti cuts an unusual figure. His large black suit and bowler hat hangs a heavy frame around the secretary general of the Movement for Democratic Change.

Outside it’s thirty degrees. Creature comforts such as air conditioning is only found in the upmarket hotels, and days later I would be making regular stops to the Crown Plaza to bask in the cool Freon breeze. Of course given his wardrobe Tendai, I would assume, would choose air conditioning, but the news of the week was that cars were considered luxury goods and would be tariffed at sixty percent (PDF). Money is spread thin, but such news isn’t startling anymore. This is Zimbabwe.

Mind the (legal) gap

The times when people could know their place was shattered last Friday when none less than the Archbishop of Canterbury announced that Christian tradition be damned, England should take up Sharia law.

At least that’s what the media have been screaming. Since the bombshell was dropped on Friday the press have been like wolves to a pig. It’s man-bites-dog material here, and it’s whipped up a wee frenzy here in Blighty.

Evolution and Theism

If you haven’t noticed there is a debate still raging about science and religion. One of the bestselling books about religion at the moment is “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins (with over 1.5 million copies sold) and there are numerous other best sellers by atheists determined to convince all of the evils of religion, such as “God Is Not Great” by Christopher Hitchens, and “Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris. Christian intellectuals have been quick to reply, with Pro-God books emerging in great numbers. Notable examples include “The Dawkins Delusion” by theologian Alister McGrath, “Finding Darwin’s God” by biology professor Kenneth R. Miller, and perhaps most significantly, “The Language of God” by the head of the Human Genome Project, Francis S. Collins (a recent Time magazine interview with both Dawkins and Collins can be found here).

I say (little)

So far my part in this group-blog thing has been something of a misnomer, unless you were to add “nothing” to the end of the name.

Well, no more!

The problem is, I don’t have that much to say at the moment.

Surviving London in winter: Part 2, Goodbye light

“Sure, there are a few things I like about London, but there are many more things I hate.”

Kiwi mate Steve and I are sitting in the kitchen of my old flat in North London. It’s dark outside but then again it’s no surprise. Around these parts it gets dark around half three. Daylight decides to surface at around seven, which gives the working men and women a delightful one and a quarter hours of natural light a day, if you include a quarter of an hour on the tube and an hour for lunch. You’ll be lucky to get half of that.

The Cost of Democracy

The electoral finance bill has come and gone, and once again I find myself giving my opinion now that it is largely irrelevant. But at least the smoke has now cleared… just a little.
 
It seems to me that there were primarily two issues at stake. Firstly, there was the issue of whether individual parties stood to benefit by the reform. Secondly, irrespective of individual parties, there was the issue of whether reform would provide a more democratic situation in New Zealand. The debate seemed to centre almost entirely on the later, but I suspect that most who participated were motivated far more by the former. I doubt, for example, that all the rhetoric about “free-speech” would have occurred if all the political parties stood to benefit equally.