Month: November 2017

19 types of clothes you couldn’t possibly get rid of

Ever wonder why your wardrobe is always overflowing with clothes, but you have only two outfits you wear? This is the secret–19 types of clothes it’s impossible to get rid of.

My wardrobe doesn’t have an ever-expanding interior and, though you might not guess it from looking at me, I do occasionally buy new clothes. Put these together, and you reach the occasional need for me to get rid of clothes.

Naturally I avoid this activity as long as I can, but eventually it becomes hazardous to my health to not deal with the problem.

I go into the task optimistic.

I’m sure I have only two pairs of pants I wear regularly, a couple of tops, a jacket or two, and maybe some socks and underwear. It’ll be no problem to pare back my wardrobe to a quarter full.

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The glorious and sad saga of the driveway from hell

I think my driveway is glorious, but many people hate it. Read for yourself and decide who’s right.

The driveway from the road runs along a valley, winds around a hill, climbs steeply past the orchard and chook house, and finally drops to my house. It’s 800 metres long. (I’ll tell you how I know this shortly.)

It’s home to an unreliable rabbit named Nicholas Augustus, several families of quail that appear each year with their puffball babies, and occasionally a mysterious cat (probably hunting the quail).

Taxi drivers vs the driveway from hell

I travel to Auckland quite often, and the taxi drivers who arrive at the house at 5:30am to pick me up inevitably have one of two reactions:

Reaction 1: What a terrifying driveway! I almost didn’t make it here. Do you actually drive up and down it?

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How had I never noticed how few females there are in epic fantasy?

I stumble across Amazon and tally up the number of male and female characters in the blurbs of fantasy novels. The results are less than encouraging.

If you hang out in the writing meadows of Twitter for long enough, you’re bound to run across outrage about the scant and pathetic roles of women in epic fantasy.

Before you start screaming, yes, there are some great female characters in fantasy books. But I’m confident to say (before endeavouring to count) that they’re in the minority.

And not by just a few percentage points.

Given than in real life there’s a very close balance between men and women, it hardly seems fair that men dominate the exciting worlds of sorcerers and dragons.

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You’re obviously a very calm person. What’s your secret?

Every person who stops me on the street and tries to convert me to an Eastern Religion uses the same line, and I can see why. It’s an excellent line.

I work in the part of town where the twanging and screeching of buskers rebounds across the streets, adults in bibs holding plastic buckets stand on the corners collecting for the charity of the day, and pigeons bathe in the splash of the fountain.

I try to avoid the street as much as possible because, you know, people, but sometimes I’m hungry, in need of coffee, or I have a meeting down the far end of town, and I’m forced to venture into this madhouse.

When I do, there’s another type of person who often steps into my path and engages me in inescapable conversation.

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Why I don’t write book reviews

Instead of writing book reviews in which I analyse books and lay out the reasons you might like or hate them, I write not-reviews… which don’t. But they are more fun.

You might have noticed I don’t write book reviews, though recently I have been writing a fair few not-reviews in which Sebastian and Rain rant or rave about something I’ve been reading.

I know I’ve talked about why I don’t want to recommend books. Today I’m going to (try and figure out and then) explain my logic for writing not-reviews.

I probably have a number of good reasons. Let’s see if we can work out what they are.

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