Mike Crowl's Blog, page 14

Not quite satisfying...

I Care a Lot is a new movie that's just arrived on Netflix. Brilliantly directed and shot, but it has no heart. Rosamund Pike plays an amoral woman running a business that claims to care for the elderly by making herself their guardian. It's a scam, helped along by a number of other scammers, and the end result is that the old people wind up in a rest home against their will and all their income, that is, what's left over they've forked out for all their weekly costs, goes to Pike's character, M...

Weak week on Netflix

It's been a couple of weeks of poor selections on Netflix NZ. We watched the first episode of Daughters of Destiny, about a school for lower caste children in India. Each one is selected and their education is paid for. It was interesting but quite slow, and so far we haven't watched any more of it. 

We gave up on Operation Buffalo, a dreadfully overacted and overdone Australian series which didn't seem to know whether it was a comedy or a drama. Set in the Australian desert where scientists were...

How not to make a movie, even in Hindi

I used to post a lot of movie reviews on this blog, but for some reason that no longer happens, even though we possibly watch more films and series than ever due to Netflix and the like. 

Having got a little irritated with the way Netflix presents what it thinks you should watch on its main screen, we hopped off to the search section last night looking for something a bit different. We got something different all right. The Girl on the Train, an adaptation of the novel by Paula Hawkins. 

Oh, yes, ...

The Psalms: prayers for all the time

 I ran a Christian bookshop in the 90s and the first decade of the 2000s. One of my customers introduced me to Dale Ralph Davis’ books. He’d written helpful - and often witty - commentaries on the books of Joshua through to 2 Kings. I’ve read them all repeatedly since then. 

Davis has more recently written books on the Psalms. There are now three of these books, each one looking at around a dozen Psalms. The books began life as a series of sermons he’d preached in his home church. He reminds us ...

When I first began this blog, I used it mostly to publish...

When I first began this blog, I used it mostly to publish quotations from books and articles that I'd enjoyed for various reasons. Over the years the blog took other turns, but today I'd like to return somewhat to its roots, and give a quotation from a book by G K Chesterton. 

I've had this book on my shelves for decades, and only recently realised I'd never read it - it helps to have a clean-out of your books so that you can see what you've actually got. 

The book is George Bernard Shaw, and whil...

Slang in an early Wodehouse story

I've moved house recently, and one of the things I had to deal with was getting rid of a number of books I've had for a long time. This took place over the last two or three years, with the result that I've now got less than half the books I used to have. 

That's still quite a few books, but now they fit on two bookcases instead of four or five. And we'd already culled our books a couple of times before the most recent slashing and burning. The house must have been straining under the weight of a...

Evolution: the catch-all explanation

I find one of the most irritating things in much modern scientific writing, or in television 'scientific' programmes is the notion that evolution explains everything. These days if a writer starts to tell me (without any evidence) that something evolved in such and such a way - and particularly if they introduce this without any necessity - I stop reading, or switch off. Evolution has become the catch-all approach to science, and is basically so nonsensical in the way much of it is used that ...

East is East and West is West

For many years now, I've been memorizing both Scripture and poetry. As with all memorized material, I have to keep revising the pieces in order to retain them, but this is a normal part of the process. Some of the ones I learned longest ago are the most readily accessible, and one of these is Psalm 103, which I set to music way back - probably in the 70s. 
Music helps retention, of course, and though it's harder to learn things that way initially, the words stay in place much more than they do in...

Blogger, boohai and Puhoi

It's taking a bit of time getting used to Blogger's new format. There are some things I like about it, but as so often with these sorts of changes, things that are most useful get hidden out of the way and take some finding. Such as the way to create a new post. You'll look in vain at the top of the posts page for any indication that you can ever create another post, and then out of the corner of your eye, in the far distant bottom right corner is a plus inside a circle. That's the thing to clic...

Fighting off the internal critic

When stuck on a book, Anne Lamott writes about letting your characters speak, giving them the opportunity to work their way forward, and even showing you what the climax should be. For myself, stuck in the middle of a book that refuses to move forward, I have occasionally in the past used a kind of monologue from various characters to give me some better understanding of their 'thoughts' and 'aspirations.' So it's worth considering what Lamott has to say, since my book has been stuck for...