Kerinthian's

I come to this with some trepidation. Most of my blog site is full of my wit and is brushed with my own flavour of creativity but now I want to talk about something that is not my own and yet is mine to own and everyone's to share. Neither is this my achievement. It came to me some 17 years ago while I was sitting in my school auditorium watching some students rehearse something Shakespearian. At that time I was memorizing the Bard and had already had quite the theatrical background. But I also had this other life apart from School, and that was my growing spiritual side and my intimate relationship with the Lord and with his Word - The Bible. As I sat there I started thinking, if I could memorize Shakespeare then what was stopping me from memorizing Scripture? At the time the thought seemed revolutionary but as I dipped my feet into the shallow end of God's pool of amazing words I was soon to realize that there was something more to this than just committing a few good ideas t...

A couple of weeks ago I went to the home of some friends of ours. They have two kids with a 3 year head start on our young family. The smaller is just over a year old and every time I go round she hops up on her little trunks and waddles across the floor in a mammoth effort to make it to my legs and then tries to launch herself upward by tugging on my knee caps. They’re really cool kids. The three year old boy is already first in line to be my daughter’s husband (so far as I’m concerned) and every time I see him I make a point of asking him, “Are you going to marry H when you grow up?” He nods his head yes but sometimes gets confused and tells me who else he plans to marry. Actually he sometimes even tries to claim my wife as already being his! But it’s still early days and the brain washing process that I’ve started may take a few years, but at least the seed has been sown. He certainly enjoys kissing her good-bye at the end of each visit (In a perfectly innocent Anne Geddes sense). ...

I think when people heard the words “James Cameron’s first movie since Titanic” they lost perspective. It didn't matter anymore that this movie still might suck, it was James Cameron’s first movie since his last sinking ship and that’s all anybody cared about it. You could put the contents of a used tissue on a cinema screen for 3 hours and people would still go and see it if it had Cameron’s name on it. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Aliens, I also swam in the Abyss and relished in the Terminator franchise in which Cameron proved he could make virtually the same movie twice and people would still go and see it. Heck, I also enjoyed that other Arnie movie he made, True Lies. But somewhere along the line I can’t help but feel some directors lose the plot. John Carpenter lost it, Spielberg sometimes loses it and even Lucas lost it somewhere between episode six and episode one. Cameron has lost it as well - he lost it and used very expensive special effects to distract us from noticing...

I have a new state of the art alarm clock with arms and legs and a mouth that chimes “Wa wa waaaaa” every morning at about 6.30 in the a.m. The difficulty is I can’t set it to any other time and neither can I return it to the manufacturer to ask for a replacement or a refund. So I have no choice but to adjust my nightly routine of staying up with the Xbox until 3 a.m. to actually going to bed when the rest of the world does to minimize the effect when dawn comes and I don’t feel like a sledge hammer just tried to blow a raspberry on my forehead. Some alarm clocks you just want to punch with a closed fist so that the springs fly in all directions and you’re forced to buy a new one, but this one has a smile so it’s harder to negotiate with. I wake up in the morning to its wines; transfer it to the feeding station – the mother of the alarm clock, usually half awake and dreaming of the days when she was something other than a milk processing place. When the winging turns into smoochy fee...

To those of you curious enough to return... Thank you - come again! I promise I'll be back with something shortly, all this living out of a suit case business robs me of the internet sometimes... Thanks for stopping by! K

For the first time this week I’m sitting here staring blankly at the screen and realizing I can’t be bothered writing anything. But the show must go on even when I have nothing to say. One of my many New Years resolutions is to read more this year. This is one resolve I don’t want to see in the Grave Yard of New Year Promises. In 2009 I probably read a total of 3 books and yet saw over a hundred movies (slight exaggeration). Even scarier is that I wrote more than I read and when you read a blog by someone who talks more than he hears and writes more than he reads you know you are going to walk away from this hopelessly misinformed! Actually I’m reading a book on Prayer at the moment by the late great Derek Prince. It’s called “The Secrets of a Prayer Warrior”. It’s a pretty good Biblical perspective on how to pray and have your prayers answered, and goes about shattering the myth that so many of us hold on to – that prayer is like reading a shopping catalogue and unconsciously we...

I returned from my week off in the sunny Sunshine Coast and was asked by my jealous co-workers how I enjoyed my break. My honest reply was of course that it wasn’t really a break, at least not in the holiday sense of the word. My idea of a break is going to a place where people are a figment of someone else’s imagination, where you can leave your towel on the floor, walk around wearing the same pajama pants 24 hours a day, grow your beard so long so that your face becomes its own buried treasure and you can fart out loud and compliment your effort because there’s no one else around to criticize your personal escape to mandom. That’s a real holiday. But let’s face it, that sort of get away is boring, makes for an arcane blog and doesn’t present you with the mental and social challenges of Christmas with the family. And what a setting! Here in the Southern Hemisphere, and that’s the earth’s bottom for those of you who are wondering, you don’t just dream about a white ...

In a perfect world one intending to record a dream would get up early and make it the first thing he does before he goes to hades… sorry, I meant to say work; but I would rather trade a perfect world for a perfect nights sleep, which is what I was experiencing this morning as I slept through my alarm and it was a pure miracle that I woke up at all… The dream was intense, so intensely intense. I found myself in my pajamas and on a road trip with two other people who are rather close to me. We were travelling in my second car, a white Hyundai Excel with no air conditioning and therefore no soul. It was night and we were on our way to a camp called Chosen Valley, where I used to go as a child as both a camper and eventually a camp counselor. On the way we stopped for KFC but ended up getting ice-cream instead. I got mine first and got fed up with waiting for my two companions so I said I would walk along the road until they caught up. But as I walked I grew tired and pulled a blanket ...

Tonight I am rather exasperated and my heart is decaying for lack of company. I’ve been on my own for nine days while my wife and wonderful child are in Ozzie lappng up the sunshine and all the other glorious gems in that great big red treasure chest. Here I am in cold but beautiful New Zealand, alone in am empty house that is so quiet I can hear my fingers banging away on the keyboard like they were angry chickens who had just walked into a KFC and seen what was on the menu… Because I am in this despondent mood I would like to talk about something that brings me much happiness. Something other than my wife and wonderful child because although they make me happy, their absence and the steady reminder of it makes me sad and leads me to iniquitous thoughts of eating more of those “hundreds and thousands cookies” I found in the pantry or the box of Cadbury chocolates that doesn’t belong to me…. Nope, I must harmonize my thoughts to brighter and nobler affections - such as Calamari. ...

Recently I found myself locked in a dark room with a 21 year old university student and before your mind wanders in the wrong direction I should point out he was a new employee I was training at work. In between threading up movies and watching the clock we began discussing more topics than your average chimpanzee might over a bright yellow banana from religion, political philosophy (whatever that is) to the life and death hypothetical’s they throw at students these days, like “If you were in a life boat with five other people and one of you had to be thrown overboard to save the other 4 then what would you do?” He couldn’t get over how my Christian beliefs would throw me overboard as the one most likely to live forever while giving the other 4 a chance to live long enough to meet their creator this side of the grave. What does this have to do with anything? Well, as most such discussions go it came to the age old questions about the ethical demise of abortion and people like me ...

I find myself torn by my normal desire to tear through a film like the toilet paper it might have been or praising it for the simple fact that Robert Downey Jr was his usual brilliant self as he expertly portrayed someone else - in this case the famous detective, Sherlock Holmes. In fact Robert Downey Jr is one of the only reasons I consider the acting profession a real art form, because he does it so well, and after seeing him in this role of the clever detective I've also come to the conclusion that he just might be the only American capable of one day playing the role of Doctor Who, if only the producers of my favourite science fantasy would cast but a glance in his direction. Jude Law is ok as Doctor Watson but always under the bright shadow of the better actor of the two. Jude has slain his thousands but Robert his tens of thousands so to speak. Anyway, the story is obviously a prequel of sorts, or rather a set up for a bigger production soon to come, although I haven...