Kerinthian's

Blogging on this page has been temporarily disrupted due to the flu. Stupid flu I hate you.

It's finally happened. Something I've been holding out for since the day I became a Father - my three year old has reached the age where we can not only watch movies together, but movies that I might enjoy without being intellectually clubbed to death by the simplicity explicit in most shows made for her age group! Last night we had our first "family movie night" and kicked it off with Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs... ...the story of Flint Lockwood, a young wannabe inventor who up until recently has failed brilliantly at everything he has put his inventiveness to. From spray on indestructible shoes which can never be removed to a species of flying rats which plague his small island town of Swallow Falls, a sardine fishing community on the verge of rebooting its run down economy by opening a colossal sardine themed tourist park. Flint has invented a machine which transmogrifies water into any food you can imagine, which he hooks up to the town's power sup...

I know I've already written about this over exposed religious space epic but I couldn't resist coming back to it after having seen it again last night. I didn't see it twice because I thought it was worthy of a second look but merely because a friend wanted to see it and as a cinema employee I get in for practically free so why not? This is not a review by the way, just some random things I thought of during the revisit... The thing that really bugged me about this film was that the space suits were inconsistently strong or weak depending on what scene they were in! In particular during the massive wind storm that blows Dr Shaw away, battering her body with cricket ball sized scoria, and not a single crack in her space helmet! Then as the film progresses the bearded geologist, now transforming into a bearded something else, can smash a helmet open with one punch! I'm not happy with these helmets at all! The second thing was that the alien nazca lines that lead t...

It has been five weeks since I began the arduous task of becoming a Hundredaire (that’s like a millionaire only 10,000 times poorer) and I am proud to announce that I have finally earned enough to retire on, that is, if I was an ant. However I do feel that I am finally getting some traction on the whole enterprise and as slow as it has been I’m definitely moving in the right direction – forward! If you’ve just walked in on this series and can’t be bothered going back to the introduction to figure out what all this is about then allow me to bring you up to speed. I had a dream. A dream that by manipulating the forces of the internet, I could turn a simple $20 note into a more appealing and usable $100. To be specific, I proposed to utilize my love and knowledge of popular fiction, by purchasing cheap editions from local opportunity shops and selling them online via Trademe, otherwise known as the Kiwi alternative to eBay. With that $100 I would go on to greater things like adorn...

I’ve learned that the strength of being a Dad is found not in intellectual brilliance, physical strength or thickness of wallet – a Dad’s real strength can be seen in his ability to sacrifice anything for his kids. At least this is what I tell myself when I eat my Sultana Bran in the morning and my two girls, like a pair of starved sea gulls swoop to my side with open beaks and their fingers, sticky with snotty goodness, reaching into my cereal bowl. Another night shift the evening before and yet another bed time taking place almost six hours after when I should have gone to bed. The last thing I see before I close my floppy eyelids is my iPhone telling me that it’s nearly 1:30 in the morning and then everything goes black… … for about 5 hours until the shuffle of tiny feet in the kitchen is my first warning that whatever dream I was having is doomed in a sea of damaged dreams, where all the ships of broken sleep sink in a Bermuda Triangle of unprocessed thoughts. I flex the muscle...

You know you've just watched a feel good movie when the credits have rolled and well, you actually do feel good. Cameron Crowe directed We Bought a Zoo starring Matt Damon and Scarlet Johansson, tells the tail of Benjamin, a solo Dad, 6 months after the untimely death of his wife, desperate enough to break away from the familiar surroundings that haunt him with the memory of her - by buying a zoo. Benjamin is a writer with a history of chasing adventure but the purchase of the zoo anchors him to the adventure of real life as he, his son and daughter and die-hard zoo staff race against time (and depleting finances) to bring the dilapidated menagerie up to standard. The rebuilding of the Zoo works as a great juxtaposition against his own personal struggle to rebuild his relationship with his son and to finally let go of his lost but not forgotten wife. For years my experience of Matt Damon has been marred by Trey Parker and Matt Stones portrayal of him as an enthusiastically...

Can we skip any mention of my cat this week? I'm still recovering from the grotty thing he did to me this morning. Do you really want to know? Yes? No? Well, if you're grossed out easily don't read the next paragraph, but if you're the brave or deranged sort, and can handle nature at its most vile then read on... I was up watching Sunday morning cartoons at around 6 this morning (don't ask me why) and as I lay shivering in the seemingly arctic cold of my living room, under a thin polar fleece blanket, I become vaguely aware of the scrunching noise small paws make when shifting the crystals in the litter tray. This is Cat for, "Flushing" the toilet. Moments later Felix comes waltzing into the living room as if he's achieved a breakthrough in physical chemistry, jumping onto my cozy spot to snuggle up to me - only he hasn't wiped his furry butt and wants to share the fact with yours truly in no uncertain terms. He's an evil cat and I'm re...

A round about introduction: Recently I applied for an acting related Job which I came very close to obtaining were it not for the fact that someone better than me had also applied. Oh well... I actually got quite a way into the whole interview process before I was pleasantly rejected by the potential employer. I say pleasantly because it was the best rejection I've ever had to suffer, mainly because I did not suffer at all! They told me the thing that attracted them to me the most was my cover letter. They had asked for a cover letter that was beyond the ordinary and said that boring/standard cover letters would immediately experience swift deletion. I sat down to write my cover letter amidst great pain and sorrow, as is usually the case when I am trying to give birth to something without the seed of inspiration to impregnate my imagination. But then it came. What if William Shakespeare wrote my cover letter? And so, with the help of much plagiarising from the first scen...

(To save on Day Care, as well as not actually wanting our children to be full time Day Care Casualties, I have changed my weekend to be on Thursdays and Fridays. Here’s how this “weekend” went… oh, and due to sleep deprivation, this may or may not be entirely accurate.) Its two o’clock in the morning and I have been abducted from my sleep by the horrific screams of my three year old in the room next door. It’s as though at that moment the kid’s room has become the tangible imagination of Stephen King and I am lying in my bed, half in shock and the rest of me in delirious denial. The screams continue unabated. I’m trying to gather together my fractured consciousness, wondering at the terrible torment obviously taking place in the other room, thinking, hoping, maybe she’ll just go back to sleep? “DADDY! DADDY!” She cries from a throat that has become the very trumpet of fear in its most concentrated form. I try to go back to sleep. Am I a bad parent? Only if this was the first tim...

Feeling like a failure doesn't make you one, but giving up does! From The Book of Kerinthians

I’m well into week three of my ostentatious attempt of turning $20 into a chubby $100 and Felix, my testosterone factory of a cat has that snide look on his face as he licks his furry thighs while not taking his eyes off me. Oh yeah , he’s saying to me telepathically, you’re going to fail and ain’t nobody going to take my stones away from me! I burst a vain in the side of my head trying to relay my unspoken reply through the ether between us – better clean those things while you still have them cat! The war between cat and man has been declared, yet Felix with his claws has left me in the dust of the arms race as I wait for my slow economy to grow… Let’s recap quickly before the four legged ginger ninja manages his next strike! Last blog you saw me with $4 still crediting my Trademe account and a return of $17.50 from the original 20 that I “invested” into my Small Change Growth Plan. From that $17.50 I topped up my Trademe account, spent $6 on new stock and saved the m...

Attention Regular Readers!!! My "little" dictionary now has a new home! Please check out: The Vocabuverse In my effort to take writing seriously I've realized that my vocabulary needs some renovating - extending to be exact. If the linguistic center of my brain could be described as a floor plan it would probably resemble something like a two bedroom unit with a living room full of children's toys and an over-sized coffee table, which strangely enough resembles the very house I live in. What I really need is to push out a bit with some bigger and more complicated words to make my tongue more mansionesque, to impress the onlisteners with words I didn't just make up. But let's face it, the dictionary is a boring read, which is just as well, because in this series I don't intend to read the dictionary so much as re-write it! Poetically. Join me here every week as this blog expands to become the one and hopefully only Cleverly Devised Poetical Dicti...