Posts by Rob Hosking
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As explained to me, by a drunk Marxist, the key to having a successful religion is to have a really big book filled with contradictory information. Then religious leaders sell all subjective truth in religion by reading the bits that appeal to their customers.
I suspect that worked very well for Christianity until the tail end of the middle ages, when some troublemakers started insisting the Bible be printed in the common language and not Latin.
And then a few hundred years later mass literacy took a hold and all heck broke loose.
But no, you're not the only one - this atheist too. I think they are too ready to attribute various ills to religion, which are really just consequences of human nature.
A presumption of one's own moral righteousness is the villain. Not to be trusted in anyone, no matter what form it takes.
And when it takes organised form - as it does in religious groups and political organisations - it is particularly toxic.
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Master Chief could be a great show... hunting bison, peace pipe preperation, teepee erecting.
Signing the UN Declaration on the Symbolic Aspirations of Indigenous Peoples....
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In October 1961 Leggy Mountbatten, a retail chemist from Bolton, entered their lives... Leggy hated it. He hated their music, he hated their hair, he hated their noise: but he loved their trousers.
Yep.
And he made them bigger than Rod.
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The 1960s as the golden age of women characters on telly? Might be something in that.
Something for the Pratchett fans: Ena Sharples = Granny Weatherwax?
Back to the SciFi, lates 60s/early 70s - Dr Who never really did it for me, but there was a great short series called 'Timeslip' - anyone else remember that? Two kids playing, ducked through a broken fence and slipped back into 1940 Britain. I think they discovered the dad of one of them was a Nazi spy, or something like that.
Later episodes had them going into the future, where they met themselves, grown up. In one of them there was a globally warmed world; in another a future ice age. I think one of them found their own corpse in the snow.
Cool.
(Just checked - its been released on DVD and they have it at Aro Vid. Excellent)
Then of course there was Catweazle - not technically Sci Fi, but there was time travel. And brilliance.
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Glad to know I am not the only one who remembers Patrick Troughton.
Oh, I remember him too. Indeed he later went on to run Telecom, I believe.
I thought the first Doc I remembered was Pertwee but when I check the dates it must have been Troughton.
Around 69-70. Used to be on in the late afternoon, 5pm ish I think. I didn't watch it much because it wasn't funny, like Get Smart or the Monkees. Or the Partridge Family.
But it used to give my little brother nightmares: the music would come on and he'd start screaming and demand the folks buy a couch for him to hide behind.
Mum would invoke the 'Go Play Outside In The Fresh Air' rule and that would be that.
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Came across this Weller collaboration with someone called Andy Lewis a year or so back on an Uncut giveaway compilation. Boring picture, great picture is boring the the song is great. The tune is very Motown, the horns very Stax-ish
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Two anecdotes re: cycling and driving -
A friend of mine didn't learn to drive until her mid-20s, went for her first driving lesson and the tutor said after a while 'I can tell you're a cyclist'
It wasn't her strong thighs (although that may have been part of it) it was the way she read the road and anticpiated what other vehicles might do.
It back up my own experience. One of the things they emphasise in defensive driving - well, they did back in the '80s, when that grumpy Judge made me do a course - is reading the road ahead. And although I got the idea in principle I never fully understood its value until I got into cycling some years later. You tend to watch the next couple of cars ahead as well as the one directly in front, and also whether any parked cars have anyone in the driver's seat. It becomes automatic, after a while.
In short, my own experience is that cycling improved my vision and my awareness of the road far more than driving did.
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My favourite: "Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots."
I think though the author of "The Changing World of Inflammatory Bowel Disease" is trying too hard.
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Yes, they really accused someone else of a "beat-up". Clearly, they're not afraid of embracing irony at the Star Times these days.
That isn't an embrace, its indecent assault.
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So who's going to be the host when Agenda reappears on TV3 this year?
John Campbell?Stephen Parker. He resigned from working as Brownlee's press secretary just before Christmas.