It's such a feeling, my love I can't hide (The Beatles)

After a shitty week, being at school for 12 days in a row didn't help (last week + Saturday swimming sports + Sunday chapel + this week), I came home after school on freaky Friday and decided to play some loud music and do a workout.

Music (in this case a live Coldplay CD) and hard exercise usually does the trick. 

I had a shower and turned on the TV and it was Sochi Olympics figure skating. I reached for the remote but then stood in amazement, watching a Russian figure skater - 17 year old Adelina Sotnikova - do her stuff.

It was breath taking - literally, and EXACTLY what I needed after purging the week via Coldplay and the cross trainer.

She was amazing. Free. Sassy. Effortless. Carefree. A thing of beauty.

I also loved her emotional moment of release after her performance. She gave it her all. She never gave up, never surrendered. That's inspirational people!

I notice today the usual suspects are on social media (and American news shows) saying the Russians fixed the result, that the silver medalist (Kim Yuna - also amazing) was robbed. 

I know nothing about judging figure skating but I still figure I have the right to say, I'm sorry, but, "Fiddlesticks!!!!"

Have a look at this (not her Gold medal performance at Sochi but the next best thing on youtube) and tell me she's not a glorious freak of nature.




Love and peace - Wozza

Motion (Lee Konitz)

Boy on a bicycle

I am thinking of one of those photographs you see: a pan shot, a boy on a bicycle. The world is a brush stroke movement, a set rolled by to indicate the speed of another who passes on wheels. It is time passing on paper. The boy, although the viewer knows his feet are furious with motion, is absolutely stilled. He is in a moment of intense relaxation. It reads like grace. And this grace bleeds ‘now’ with ‘before’ and ‘after’; denies the isolation of the moment, insists on continuity.

You can no longer make the separation between stillness and movement in the boy. Understand that motion is this grace, this point of eternal departure that is the boy.

So much knowledge is required to move those wheels, those limbs. Yet it is all granted to the boy. It is inside his body. This small movement is precipitated by this body of knowledge. And death entrances through this knowledge-motion, this boy. And there are no stops no freeze frames in death. Death itself is precipitation.

Love and peace - Wozza (brother to the boy and btw - he's on my bicycle and I took the photo with my Kodak Instamatic)

Ketchup, pretty name for a girl (Jerry Seinfeld)

Sadly Waffles has not returned home. It's been over two weeks since we last saw him. We have no clue what has happened to him but clearly something bad has. 

We're searched Red Phoenix farm and all the roads around us, contacted all the neighbours to check if they've had any locked buildings, reported his disappearance to the SPCA and nothing.

Being somewhat resigned to the inevitable, SWMBO and I decided to rescue another cat with the open plan idea that if the Waf returns we'll have two cats from the Waipukurau SPCA to look after and so... please welcome Seven to the whanau.

Seven is very like the cat we had before Wafi - a smokey grey and white female - which we called Soda.

Why Seven? Simple - watch the following clip from Seinfeld.



In the same episode Soda emerges as George's second favourite name so given the similarity in the cats' colours - Seven seemed like a perfect choice. 

Watch out for Ketchup (or Mug) next time!

In life, as in football. you won't go far unless you know where the goalposts are [Arnold H Glasgow (sic)]

It's February and that means a couple of things, first, a new page and quote from my 2004 calendar.

This month it's the one in the post title. It kind of makes sense but it's not phrased brilliantly. I don't like that phrase about moving the goalpost and. I guess, it must be aligned to Glasgow's quote.

Sidebar: Who was Arnold H Glasgow anyway? No one seems to know much.

Turns out his name may be misspelled on my calendar. According to Wiki answers it should be Glasow without the 'g'. 

Here's the sum total of web information on him (and I'm not sure how reliable it is): 

Arnold Henry Glasow was born in Fond-du-lac, Wisconsin, USA, in 1905, and died in Freeport, Illinois in 1998 age 93. He graduated from Ripon College, and started his own business when he moved to Freeport just after the Great Depression. His business was a humour magazine that he marketed to firms nationally, which firms would turn into their own "House Organ" to send to their own customers. He ran this business for over sixty years but didn't publish his first book until aged 92. The book was titled "Glasow's Gloombusters", one of the many titles he put to his work during his career. He was cited frequently in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Chicago Tribune and many other major publications. He was a regular contributor to the humour sections of Reader's Digest. Sixty years of productive work. Many accolades. A real American thinker, self-effacing and generous of spirit, he shunned the national spotlight.

Anyway I didn't really want to get into the actual quote but instead focus on the other thing about the move into February - that means it's Superbowl time, which is on Monday in New York. 

Wahoo - a superbowl NOT in the sunshine of Miami is very welcome.

All of the hype around the game is always amazing - it's just a game of American Football afterall. At least this year the two best teams will be meeting in the final.

The Seattle Seahawks go up against The Denver Broncos. I'm hoping for a Seahawks win. I have no allegiance to them beyond the fact that one of the whanau is a Seattleite, and, although Clay is not a big football fan, that's enough for me.

But there's more: there's the fact that the pissed off, I'm gonna getchew, seahawk icon (left) is way better than the Denver's slightly manic bronco (right)... 

...and there's Derrick Coleman. He's a Seattle Seahawks safety who also happens to be deaf. He wears hearing aids and lip reads the plays from Russell Wilson. Amazing and totally inspiring.



Besides which Peyton Manning, the quarterback for the Broncos, kinda rubs me up the wrong way. It's his whole mucking around at the line of scrimmage that gets me, plus his whole Tom Hanks aw shucks good ole boy personality. VERY unfair of me I know - but no one is that nice (apart from Tom Hanks that is).

Yes I'm really that shallow.

So - GO SEATTLE!!!!

Love and peace - Wozza