Mike Crowl's Blog, page 5

Jake Atlas

Libraries have always called to me, in whatever town or city I am. 

When I used to work in the Dunedin City Council, right in the heart of the city, the new, much-enlarged Library was built right next door. I can remember the first day it opened to the public: I ran out of my office at morning tea, took a few steps across a newly-built courtyard, and was in the Library door, racing up and down the stairs to see what was on each new floor, and amazed that the old library, which had seemed big enou...

For better or worse?

 While searching for something else today I came across the printed copy of the first article I ever wrote that received a payment:a huge payment of $25. Note the slight formal tone – it was publishedin the Dunedin Star Midweek’s Soap Box column, on July 27th, 1988. For the sake of history, I'm adding it to my blog, outdated and all as it may be...

When it comes to the matter of a casino in Dunedin, it is difficultnot to let my bias run riot. However, to be fair, it is necessary to look atthe...

Baffle-gab

First published in Column 8 in the 1990s, specific date unknown at the moment...

Second-hand bookshopsand an interest in curious words sometimes combine together for me in aserendipitous way. Last week, for the sum of $4.50, I purchased a book called Words.  That book, (by Paul Dickson), is the source ofthis column. (Please apply to me in writing via the Midweek* fora translation of any unfamiliar words!)

By the way, I hope no reader of thiscolumn is Hippistic, ie, has a philistine's resent...

Flabbergastation

First published in Column 8, some time in the 1990s 

Flabbergastation isn'ta word you'll hear very often. (The emphasis is on "station.") One ofthe local radio announcers flung it past my ears while describing Dunedin's welcometo the America's Cup winners.

Curiously enough, flabbergastationdescribes the state in which I've found myself over the last week or two, astate in which I feel as though I must see both sides (or more), of everycurrent argument. It's difficult to be appropriately op...

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

 One of those posts that for some reason didn't make it online when it was first written. Just rediscovered it and thought it was worth adding here. It's a review of what turned out to be an unexpected marvel. I think I caught up on it some years after it was made, on a streaming service. 

The notion behind TheCurious Case of Benjamin Button was always going to cause difficulties forthe writer of this movie: firstly in the outworking of the idea that a mancould be born old and gradually get yo...

Remembering Nuns

First published in Column 8, date unknown, but some time in the 1990s.

 In the memorycourse I did a while ago I was supposed to learn how to remember where I'd putthings years before, and how to recognize faces from the distant past. 

One face eludes me.Try as I might, I can't remember the face of the teacher, (a nun), who tied meto my desk with a belt because my childish exuberance was somewhat over thetop! 

On the other hand,during a recent visit to a convent, (for a friend's Jubilee), ...

Dinosaurs....are bores

 First published in Column 8 in 1993 (and later online under my Poems and Short Fiction blog in 2019). It relates to my surprise that the scientific world seems so obsessed with 'selling' dinosaurs to children. 

I’ve had enough of dinosaurs,

Especially Hadrosaurs.

Dinos must rank, I think, as the

All-time greatest bores.

Who cares about some fifty tonnes of

Hefty Brontosaurus

Shoving all his weight around and asking:

‘Don’t you adore us?’

Who wants to meet and greet some

Rampant Iguanodon,

Marketing his li...

De-bearded

First published in Column 8, Sept 1993.  

Fooled into thinking Iwas good-looking - even handsome - by photographs more than a quarter of acentury old, my wife and family hadlong nagged me to shave off my beard. I resisted the conspiracy to tame this full-bloodedfeature of masculinity.

However, while my wife was awayoverseas, I decided (quite unaffected by outside pressures), to see if shewould know me at the airport if I met her beardless.

The weekend before she came home, Itook scissors...

Inventive

First published in Column 8, date unknown, but sometime in the 1990s. 

Though only thirty years old, the discussions in this column seem like they come from a different century. Ah, wait! - they do.

Getting irritable with things that don’t do quite what’sexpected of them has its advantages. Wehumans delight in setting to and improving the aforesaid irritable things, orelse inventing something altogether new.

I know it sounds chauvinistic to say it, but usually it’sthe men who do the improv...

Goodbye to my little best mate

 Our lovely, warm-hearted little dog of immense personality was put to sleeptoday. At nearly fifteen 
years old he’d had a good innings (105 in dog years),but his back legs had gone phut to the degree that he couldn’t push up on them,making it almost impossible for him to get through the dog door. He’d surpriseus sometimes by going out through it without difficulty, but then couldn’t getback in; there was a step on the other side making it a bigger jump. And he’dstarted to baulk at coming ...