The Book of Dave (And Gabba)
When I was about 15, maybe 16, my mother and her partner owned a Fish and Chip shop . That room there on the right of the building was my bedroom. Over the back fence there was a block of flats. In the end flat, lived a woman, possibly in her mid or late 20s. I saw her a few times over the fence. One summer she played the album Human Racing many, many times. Tairawhiti Gisborne summers were hot,…
In the very late 80s and early 90s I did a lot of travelling around Aotearoa New Zealand in Avis rental cars, mostly Toyota Corollas and Coronas. They all came equipped with Alpine car audio that had a really good button for rear mono. So you had stereo up front and punchy weight from the rear parcel shelf speakers. In all likelihood, given capitalism was alive then too, there was probably not…
Some time back I was having a particularly tough time at work, which is a relative measure. Because I can report a bunch of days much, much harder on the mental wellness scale in the past, and of course there is always someone else worse off than me. But on that day I idly asked the AI machines of the time, "How many months left until 17th November 2032?", and the machine came back with the lovely…
It has been a long time for us since we've had to overcome something difficult or sudden or properly bad. And for that I am thankful. Although that very statement seems weird, as if there is something that allows good and bad to happen to people. There just isn't. Three weeks ago, I was partially run over by a car after what seems like the stupidest chain of events that could be imagined. Gabriel…
In 1981, I escaped from my father’s house (of abject misery ) to go live with my mother in Tairawhiti, Gisborne. I joined Gisborne Boys' High School in Form 3 at the start of the third term that year. My maternal grandparents lived about 200 meters from the high school. For the first year or two, I'd ride my bike from Kaiti, where we lived, to my grandparents’, store the bike in the woodshed. I'd…
Way back in the 1980s, my third real job, I worked at a government department in Information Services doing what could only be classed as menial labour. Once a day I'd take a trolley down to the 2nd floor at Cumberland House (now student accommodation for Vic Uni) on Willis Street in Wellington, pick up a dozen, or more, boxes of printed line flow paper from the page printers down there and…
A post from one of my favourite acquaintances made me realize I didn't have a favourite river, which meant I was missing something, which got me thinking I should actually catalogue some of my favourite things. So here they are, in no particular order: Favourite candy-covered chocolate: M&Ms. There is a very bad smell when you first open the packet that smells of everything that is bad about…
Yesterday, someone assassinated the CEO of UnitedHealth in the USA. So far, I haven’t seen anyone particularly unhappy about this turn of events. Most commentary suggests they are not a good company. However, someone is dead, and that person had family, a partner, kids, parents, and friends, possibly, though I haven’t looked into it further. At the same time, the shooter probably has his reasons.…
I was almost 10 when Elvis died. He wasn’t really a part of our lives but I remember, vaguely, the day. He wasn't an artist that we listened to, rather artists like Roger Whittaker, Glen Campbell, and Neil Diamond that my father listened to at the time. My dad had an 8-track system in one of his cars, and he only had three cassettes that I can remember (Roger Whittaker, Glen Campbell, and Neil…
Most of the traffic to my website these days is AI Bots. I can't decide if I let them gobble up all my content or I block them. If I want to use AI, and I do, it needs content and my content is as good as any I guess. They will not get smarter or a broader, inclusive, "knowledge" without original thought without us people, humans, meat robots working in sectror 7G. Although now that I've read that…