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Showing posts from 2012

Do Children Go to Heaven?

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Watch out everyone, it’s a Biblical viewpoint! You better duck because here it comes! Every now and then a theological question pops up in my brain like flash fire and the only way I can put it out is if I write about it. My apologies if the Christian worldview offends you but here it is anyway… Sorry about the disclaimer but my blog site is a bit like what we Kiwi’s call a Lolly Scramble, we do them at kids parties (or used to when I was a young lad, now days they’re just dangerous) where someone throws a handful of assorted candy into the air and yells, “Lolly Scramble!” and then a million kids come stampeding into the throw zone like piranhas fighting over a cow who chose the wrong part of the world to take swimming lessons. Sometimes, you get lucky and pick your favourite sweet, other times you might get something you don’t like – my blog site is a bit like that. However this brief tackling of the question above is for my readers who do like this sort of thing and for thos

R.I.P. Commander Riker

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17 years ago a girlfriend gave me a present which would go on to become one of my favorite toys. It was a collectors edition Ken-sized Commander Riker action figure. Sure he spent most of the next 1.8 decades in my box of cherished bits and pieces but I still loved him. Until today that is. Today I ran him over with my lawn mower, and now... There's not that much left of him, I couldn't even find his face. It wasn't out if malice, I simply didn't know that my three year old had left him in the long grass, and whilst on his final "away mission" he came to his grizzly end, not by phaser fire or a breech of the core-reactor but by my rusty lawn mower blades. He served me well as the ornamental symbol of many fantasies which involved me wearing the red and black of Star Fleet, and now while giving him a decent burial would be silly, he at least deserves a blog post. Goodbye commander Riker, may your body parts serve as awesome key chain ornaments in

Pimp My Hundred Bucks - Part Twelve or The End is Nigh

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The year is ending, the world is ending and my 34th year has ended. There have been a lot of endings and almost endings this week all round, my allergies are ending because I have overdosed on antihistamines. Whatever patience I had for my four kittens has certainly ended after the last yellow puddle I stood on during a midnight visit to the loo... My birthday cake came to a dismal end tonight, being chomped to death by my hungry mouth. Im not sure which is harder, saying good bye to the year just gone or seeing the end of your birthday treats, not to mention the end of your diet! But as this day comes to an end I am glad to say there is at least one ending I am looking forward to... The day I write the last blog of this series and move on to the next - Pimp my $500 when I turn $500 into $1000... And that end is near... But not before Christmas, and not until I get back from my holiday. I'm afraid to say that that's it from me for 2012 as I "close up shop"

Jingle all the Way

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Hi all... If you find yourself in the unusual circumstance of actually being in Auckland this week, come pay me a visit in my Churches awesome Christmas Walkthrough... I'm on Wednesday 19th, Friday 21st and Sunday 23rd! Hope to see you there... Eastgate Christian Centre is located at 5 Ben Lomond Crescent in Pakuranga. Ben Lomond Crescent is just off Cascades Road which is a main thoroughfare between Botany Road and Pakuranga Highway.

Pimp My Hundred Bucks - Part Eleven or The Half Way Mark

The end is near. As 2012 draws to a close, the Mayan Calendar predicted that my last blog for the year would be sometime next week. It is rather embarrassing knowing that millions of people around the world are panicking over the end of almost everything when actually it was only that the Mayan thinkers of the time gave up on mapping beyond 2012 on becoming aware that the world would be thrown into chaos over most of my readers not having anything to read over the Christmas holidays. I’m terribly sorry everyone, please don’t sell your homes or give away your life savings just yet, it’s all just been one great big misunderstanding! Great, so now that we’ve cleared up that small matter I have to say in all seriousness that next Monday after writing Part Twelve of this series, I will be closing up shop so to speak, until sometime near the end of January. I have alluded to the madness of the last few weeks. I have weathered the craziness of work, faced off with an imaginary Santa

Pimp My Hundred Bucks - Part Ten

I’m afraid I find myself suffering from a severe case of endofyearitis – being the psychological disposition that causes a general feeling of apathy, complacency and a general feeling of just being over it all. Left untreated the condition can lead to potential procrastination and eventual giving up. Having just been to an imaginary Doctor, because I can’t really afford to see a real one for a condition that doesn’t actually exist, I found myself staring at a picture of a game of Tetris. There were painfully organized blocks desperately trying to squeeze together as they piled on top of one another by someone who clearly was not good at the game, but on closer examination I could see titles on the misshapen blocks, like “Christmas Presents”, “Church Nativity Play” and “Stuff at Work” jammed into other odd shapes entitled, “General Lazyness”, “Extreme fatigue” and “Morbid Boredom”. It turns out that what I was looking at was an x-ray of my brain. It is indeed that time of the year

Three Day Old Kittens

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Because everybody loves kittens, here's some more of my recent cuddly additions to my household...

Pimp My Hundred Bucks - Part Nine

This week I get to enjoy the disagreeable experience of blogging on the iPad... They're great toys and everything, but trying to type a lengthy blog on one makes you want to chop vegetables on it. So please bear with me... Or is it bare? I can never figure that one out... You might notice, if you've been following this series, that it is in fact 1 a.m. Thursday morning here in Hobbit Land (New Zealand is abuzz with Hobbit madness at present, it doesn't help that I work in the cinema industry either!) Which is unusual, for up to this stage I've been super consistent with spewing these updates out on Monday like clockwork vomit... But alas this week I rather dropped the proverbial ball, which then proceeded to deflate rapidly on the end of a sharp spike. In many ways real life caught up with me, as things at work got busy, family life tumbled along and my sleep betrayed me. Today I developed a croaky throat that would make even Vin Diesal jealous due to a synthesi

Pimp My Hundred Bucks - Double Your Money

UPDATE:  I'm not writing this blog anymore, but please visit my YouTube channel  The Vocabuverse   and subscribe for more great things to come! Have you ever felt like there is a concrete brick in your cerebral cortex, prohibiting your synapses from synapsing, thus preventing your thoughts from reaching their final destination because of the heavy traffic now blocking every ally way of your brain? It’s called writer’s block. I’m experiencing it now. My subconscious has become the proverbial prisoner behind bullet proof glass while my conscious mind tries to communicate with it via a broken telephone, and he’s just shaking his head and mouthing the words, “What? I can’t hear you?” It’s most likely because nothing very climactic has engaged me this week, and so I am robbed of any momentous lead in to how the renovations on my hundred dollars are going. On the other hand I have been sitting at this computer for the past hour wrestling with a sumo-quandary; not being happy

The Evolution of a Writer - Part One

At the age of about eleven I had a peculiar dream in which a maniacal man of magnificent delusions found himself in possession of a bulging ring binder full of notes and papers. His eyes widened in crazed ecstasy as he declared, “At last, I have everything that Kerin has ever written!” As if he had just found the Holy Grail of English literature. Well, I don’t know about that, but it must have had some influence on me, as from then on I became determined to become the writer of my dreams. For the next ten to fifteen years I tortured innocent notebooks and unsuspecting scraps of paper with invisible brilliance, meaning the “brilliant” part of my writing was cloaked in nonsense; the true value of my poetry and prose extended no further than the cost of the ink I had wasted… But I suppose not all is wasted, after all perfection can only come through perseverance, and my blindness to how completely rubbish I was certainly enabled me to persevere! Just to be clear, I’m not claiming

Two Day Old Kittens

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As forewarned here is another Kitten Video... If you are allergic to cute, do not watch this video!

Pimp My Hundred Bucks - Part Seven

In this series I am purportedly demonstrating how I, a self described monetarily challenged moron, am going about turning $100 into $500. Let me begin this week’s episode about “How I make money” with the true account of how I lost money. A lot of money… I believe it was last Thursday and my brother was on his way to my house to pick up $180 in cash for a job he had recently done for me. I popped down to the local ATM to withdraw the money, popped in the old eftpos card, selected my account, entered the amount, declined further options, took my card and went to the supermarket… Sounds pretty basic, except while standing in the queue at the grocery store, with my cocktail sausages, garlic bread and bottle of milk, I opened my wallet to discover that the money I had just withdrawn had gone to wherever it is that odd socks go when they mysteriously disappear! But I knew that that could not be it, because such a place does not exist according to Richard Dawkins and all the other

Men in Black 3 - A Review

When it comes to movies there is nothing I can’t stand more than a sequel, that is, unless it fulfills two specific requirements. 1. The story arc encompasses all subsequent movies. In other words the story might need three movies to tell the whole story as in Lord of the Rings, the Star Wars Trilogy or even Star Treks II, III and IV. 2. A good length of time has passed between those movies for a decent script to be written and to ensure the right director is given the job of directing it, as in the Back to the Future Trilogy or the Toy Story movies… When it came to Men in Black I wasn’t sure what to expect. The first movie was legendary, the second movie was clearly riding the cash splashing success of the first one and then… there was nothing… For almost ten years. When I first heard that Part Three was “coming soon” I had a nostalgic sneeze, blew my nose and forgot about it. But then I heard that the movie was going to be about one of my all time favourite movie

My Brother Does it Bear Grills

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My older brother is a Geography teacher and has been gracing the Youtuberverse with some great educational videos for the geographically challenged among us... Here's my favourite...

One Day Old Kitten

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My apologies to the   ailurophobes among my readers but my home world has been taken over by kittens.  For the next ten weeks you have the misfortune of enduring an abundance of kitten related posts... at least until they're old enough to be "relocated"... I decided to take short videos of them every day so as to track their growth and development... Here's day one...

Pimp My Hundred Bucks - Part Six

This week I witnessed four miracles. Miracle Number One: I got out of bed this morning. This “business” of trying to turn $100 into $500 has become like a second job, and while I’m not complaining, it is exhausting juggling family life, career life and the dream of rolling around in 500 $1 notes all at the same time, not to mention littering the blogosphere with every little detail along the way. Last night I actually dreamed that I was at work. It was that reoccurring dream again, the one where something goes wrong and for some reason I have to stay the night at work! I’ve caught myself saying more than a few times recently that my whole life feels like work lately! (in a good way of course, if I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t sacrifice sleep for it!) On top of it all my sleep over the past two nights has been punctured here and there by the razor-sharp meows of new born kittens… It has been a miracle that I have been able to walk away from my bed at all… Miracle Number Two: I w

Kittens have taken over my bedroom!!!

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My cat Fernando had her first (and last) litter the other night... I missed a friend's birthday BBQ to "assist"... This is the result...

The Cleverly Devised Poetical Dictionary of Prefixes and Suffixes

In my continuing efforts to expand my “vocabuverse” below is my recent attempt to poeticize the meanings of various prefixes and eventually suffixes. You know, the little words that make bigger words mean something more than what they originally did? I guess you could call this my own special form of “paratuition” or “dyseducation”. This is a work in progress (in the same way that my Cleverly Devised Poetical Dictionary of Difficult Words is a “work in progress”) so you’ll have to come back in a few months to see if I’ve “progressed” any further! Here goes… PREFIXES & SUFFIXES A PREFIX is a little word or “AFFIX” it is said added to a bigger word to make another word instead But if you like you can AFFIX a small word at the end this is called a SUFFIX which can change the meaning once again… ABNORMAL If you want a clever way to say something’s abnormal then insert PARA- at the start as in paranormal Otherwise you could indeed put DYS- in PARA’S pl

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made - a modern hymn

I'm not a huge fan of modern church music. I miss the meat that you got to chew on while singing the old hymns... Here's one I wrote based on Psalm 139. There is music but I'll have to post that at a later date.. God bless! Fearfully and Wonderfully Made Lord you have searched me and you know all of me you know when I sit and when I rise before a word is on my tongue you know exatly what I'll say I'm always found inside your loving eyes You discern my going out and even when I'm lying down you are familiar with all of my ways your magnificent omniscience scares ignorance away before a word is on my tongue you know exactly what I'll say! Oh my Father I thank you because I'm fearfully and wonderfully made You knit me together to praise you forever in the light of your glory and grace! How precious to me are your thoughts Oh God how vast is the sum of them were I to count them they would all outnumber every single grain of sand! Yo

Pimp My Hundred Bucks - Part Five

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Ok, so last week as your eyes drove away from my blog to more important things like real life, you left me like a kid who had been dropped off at the wrong kid’s birthday party. I’ve been eating their food and using their bathroom and have only just figured out that I don’t have a clue who any of these people are… and still no one else has noticed. I have been the first to admit that I find myself in completely unfamiliar territory when it comes to business. The dreaded “B” word – “bu – is – ness”… it passes very uncomfortably through my lips. Years ago I went through a boiling surge of musical creativity; I wrote songs about love, life and about being a loser. Every poor soul with ears who came within a guitar pic’s throw of me and my six stringed torture-tool was forced to endure my latest hit, which came as a deluge of passionate wailing and trademark angst; and yet to my very great surprise (now, not then) I was often asked for an encore. People would say to me, “Why don’t

Pimp My Hundred Bucks - Part Four

As brilliant as the past seven days have been, I am still not yet the master of the wobbly boat. First of all there’s Felix, my evil cat who I mentioned in my last series… Well, Felix has a “brother” called Fernando who was in every way the opposite of everything that made Felix a pain. Fernando was the perfect male cat until he got pregnant. This week I discovered his tummy was getting bigger and so were his kitty nipples… after further investigation I discovered he was missing something unique to all male cats, making him a female. Now I have to consider gender reassignment as a possible expenditure when all of this is over, that is if I want “him” to keep the name Fernando. At least my kids will enjoy having some kittens for a while, at least until for as long as it takes me to find them new homes! Anyone want a kitten? While this is a good example of the price of procrastination, it also demonstrates what not paying close attention will cost you! I’ve procrastinated on