WisteriaDrapedWishingwells

Monday 30th October
I wonder if there is a 31st of October…remember that little childhood ditty about the months of the year, you know… “thirty days has blah, blah, bah…?” I never learned it. My kids know it and they recite it all the time, but it never seems to stick inside my head. I wonder why that is? Perhaps it is because it involves numbers? Oh well, I will find out if there is a 31st tomorrow.
It is freezing cold here, the wind is blowing a gale and we have the Antarctic sea breezes blowing through…aka Penguin weather. So, this is summer? Hmm!
Matisse is settling in really well. She has made friends with Selphie…sort of. Raven hates her. Domino tolerates her. Manhattan is fascinated with her. Ogster ignores her.
My friend has decided to put a little link on his page for people to donate funds to help with the running of the site, etc. He has put it off for five years and finally decided to include and he asked me what I thought. Actually, I think it is a good idea as I am sure that there are many over the years who agree with what he is doing. Many others would do what he is doing, but they lack the technical know how and possibly the literary expertise to make it sound coherent. I know I do, I tend to be so long winded about making a point. But he is very good at what he does, straight to the point, concise, yet balanced and easily understood. If people want to help, then I think that it is good that he has provided a means for them to do so.
I guess what worried him is that his message, in part, warns about those who constantly ask for money from people, but I think he needs to remember the ilk of the ones who do so and he is nothing like them. Anyone who truly seeks to understand what he has to say will see this clearly, and those who don’t? Well there is usually no getting through to people like that anyway. That is just what I think, for what it is worth…anyway.
So, yeah…that’s about it for now.
Laterz

Saturday 28th October
Matisse came to join our family today. She is a gorgeous little thing and has made friends with Wunny Babbit...aka Gorgeous. I still miss Chompski a lot and I think about her every day. Matisse has helped to make us all feel a little bit better and she is a very funny wee thing. She has a personality that is different to the other cats...all animals have their own little personalitites, I think anyway. People who don;t think they do just haven't taken time to stop and notice.
Laterz

Friday 27th October
There has finally been an arrest in the Chris and Cru Kahui murder case. The twin's 21 year old father has been arrested and charged with their murders. He is pleading not guilty, but who knows. The Police have taken 20 weeks to build a case against him and the twins have now been dead longer than they were alive. Anyway, here is hoping that there will be at least a measure of justice for them.
It is really odd because the father of the twins, Chris, well his father Banjo was absolutely convinced that he was innocent and even the mother's mother is saying the same thing. The family is basically saying that they have arrested the wrong person. So if he is not the one who did it, then begs the question why the family will not implicate who they really think did commit the crime. It is so odd I think.
Laterz

Thursday 26th October
There is a DVD doing the rounds in Aussie. These boys in Melbourne attacked a girl in a park, filmed it and sold it all around the schools. The girl was intelectually challenged and they did all sorts of mean stuff to her, even set her hair on fire. What sort of people do that? And they threw a home made flare onto a homeless man. That is really sick and there is not much further down than you can get than that.
Laterz

Wednesday 25th October
Broadband is up and running finally. What a drama! Even if they get another version that works even faster, I am not changing again. They had to find a whole new port and a bunch of other techno garb that I did not understand. But it works now, so that is the main thing and it is sooooooo fast compared to dial up.
Got the 1974 TV series Planet of the Apes series. It was kind cool watching it again after all those years. I still prefer the TV series to the movies, and prefer the old movies to the new one that was made a few years back. The Charlton Heston one, movie one, was pretty good. James Naughton was very cute in his young days...dark brwon hair, brown eyes. Anyway, I watched them all and really enjoyed them.
Laterz

Tuesday 24th October
Chompski used to come in to the loo when I was in there. She'd jump on my lap, sit there until I was done and then stand up against the side of the loo to watch it flush. We all miss her a lot.
The other cats seem to be looking for her as well, Selphie did something weird, she followed me into the loo last night. She jumped up on my lap and stayed there until I was done. She didn't jump up against the side to watch it flush, but still, it was kind of odd that she did that.
Laterz

Monday 23rd October
Buried Chompski out at Beachlands at June's place. Paul dug the hole...in the pouring rain...wearing a coat and hat, looking a lot like Steve Irwin.

Sunday 22nd October
Chompski died this morning.

Saturday 21st October
Well, first of all, I made two critical mistakes this week. First mistake? Signing up for Broadband. Second mistake? Buying a copy of the DVD Sione’s Wedding. Let me explain.
When the Broadband people tried to get me to buy into their package deal they made it sound so simple. Any and every scenario that I came up with, they had an answer for it. I said to them, “I like dial-up because I know it well. I plug the cable in, log on, and I know that it will work, short of Xtra being down.”
“Oh, but Broadband will be just like that, only it will be like going from travelling by pushbike through the web to riding a train through it.”
Having never ridden a bike in cyberspace nor a train for that matter, I could not relate to his comparison…anyway! So, silly me signs up, against my better judgement, I might add. Then I entered what I lovingly now term ‘Broadband Hell’ and I have been there ever since. The ADSL light flashes on and off and never receives a ‘fixed signal’. The Tech Heads at Extra are priceless too…I spent an hour or so on the phone with one who assured me she knew EXACTLY what she was doing. When I rang back three hours later and got another Tech Head on the phone, he assured me that the last Tech Head had absolutely no idea what she was doing, “She has only been here a week,” he says to me.
The new Tech Head’s name is Pierre (odd, I wrote a novel two weeks ago and wrote into it a character named Piere. Dropped the extra ‘r’ for the book though). Anyway, so Pierre tells me (after an hour or so of messing around with the system) that he will have to pass me onto another department. Now I was not yet breathing fire. No, I remained calm the entire time…they were very lucky that I was having a GOOD day! End result? I have Braodband, but it doesn’t work. I am paying $39.99 for 1GB of upload or download a month and it don’t even work! I am now having to use dial-up at $2.00 per hour, because I now have Broadband and they charge you $2.00 an hour if you revert to dial-up once you have Broadband. I hate Xtra! I hate Broadband! But most of all? I hate that I did not listen to that ‘inner voice’ that smelt trouble right at the very start! I now have to wait for a technician to come out here to sort out the problem and apparently I will be charged $81.00 for it. I am very seriously considering telling them to stick their Broadband where the sun don’t shine and taking out an Xtra ad in the local newspaper. The ad will be worded something like this... “Xtra, if you cannot be a good example then you will just have to be a horrible warning!”
Now, Sione’s Wedding.
Some time ago, before this movie was unleashed on the unsuspecting New Zealand public, someone was bootlegging this DVD and selling it at the Pasifika Markets on Saturday mornings in Mangere or Otahuhu, or some place like that. I kind of felt sorry for the people involved in the movie that their hard work was ripped off in that manner.
But I watched Sione’s Wedding last night, having purchased it at the Warehouse yesterday, and I gotta say, this movie should come with a public warning! It is the worst New Zealand made movie that I have EVER seen. Basic storyline? Bunch of bros trying to be funny and failing miserably! NO ONE should EVER have to part with GOOD money to see this HORRIBLE, PATHETIC piece of ABSOLUTE SHITE that they trying to pass off as entertainment. The guy who bootlegged it shouldn’t be prosecuted, he should be given a medal! It was terrible, awful, horrible, stupid, banal, puke material! There were racial overtones, like racist remarks toward people of European descent…and they basically made white women out to be slappas who only date men of darker complexions to get back at their daddy, and white men to be absolute dick-heads! And, as an aside…I once dated an African man…he was blacker than the night itself…I dated him because I liked him…I had no daddy to annoy. All the typical racist Pasifika slurs against the ‘palangi’ were in the movie and they weren’t funny, rather they were offensive! The producers of this movie DESERVED to be ripped off and I will NEVER buy another movie based inside the Pasifika community of New Zealand EVER again! Truly, Jim Carey in his worst movie is better than this. There is only one fitting use for a DVD such as Sione’s Wedding and that is…first cover them in mud…leave in sun to dry…donate to hunters in the off-season so hunters do not have to go and purchase more clay ducks! ENOUGH!!!
Laterz

Friday 13th October
Okay, so only the truly weird coincidences happen to me…I think. I have loved Poco for years and I have had several friends around the world looking for something of theirs even just on CD for me. Anyway, I went to the Warehouse and was going though the ‘there’s no way we will ever sell this' bin, always located below the 'junk' bin and I found a Poco live in concert DVD! I couldn’t believe it…and it has got all the songs I know and love on it…I am sooooooooooooooooooooo happy!!!!! I think I am the only New Zealander who even knows who Poco is! I have said for years that I would love to go to a Poco concert now I have one on DVD…it is Poco Live from the Belcourt Theater, Nashville, Tennessee. It is so funny after so many years of listening to these guys to finally see what they look like…to fall in love with music that has nothing to do with faces…and yeah, kind of like the Doobie Bros, they’s just a bunch of old coots (imagine the Gump accent) but my, can theys saing!!!
I am soooooooooooo sooooooooo happy to have found this. Now all I got to do is accidentally find Orleans, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Freejack…and my world will be a little more complete! Oh yeah, and Poco were soooooooo true to Magnolia...it was beautiful! Magnolia is my sunset song. Often in summer I go out and sit in my swingseat and watch the sun go down listening to Magnolia on the discman...kind of like Dan Fogelburg's Wisteria, exept his song is a cloudy/windy day song...both are kind of haunting to me...I have many Magnolia photos (sunsets)...anyway, that is my crazy talk for one day...at least I know what I am talking about...doesn't matter if no one else does. Like I often say..."ECHO!"
Tallyhooooooooooo!

Ps Got sprung listening to Poco full battle and um, my son Shiloh heard the muzik (music) and asked, “You okay? What’s that horrible noise?” Poco was singing Bad Weather…I told Shiloh how cool it was to find the DVD etc, he just looked at me like I came from another planet! My parting words to him were, "Hey, I was two when Poco started...and he was like, "You were soooo obviously brainwashed!

Monday 8th October
North Korea has gone nuclear. They tested a nuclear device today and everyone is really peeved about it. All the leaders from around the world have made comments, but the most ironic one came from no other than a New Zealander. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Winston Peters said, and I quote, “North Korea has crossed the red line!”
But that should not surprise anyone, Winston Peters is the same politician who managed to go to Malaysia and get bitten on the ass by a spider. In the history of politics, I think that was a first too.
Apparently the suicide cells in England had planned to kill the Australian and English cricket team during the Ashes series in Birmingham. They were going to use nerve gas, but the plan came unstuck when one of the terrorists who was a cricket fan, said no. So they instead did the bombings on the English underground in London.
Mark Porter, a V8 car racer from New Zealand died in Australia at a race at the Bathurst track…which was being held in memory of Peter Brock. Paul Radischich was badly injured yesterday and is in a serious condition in hospital too. Our car racers are not faring too well.
We have had our 8th homicide in our area in four months, the latest victim was a young teenaged girl. I am thinking that maybe it is time to move away from this place. Auckland and the surrounding areas, of which Papakura is one, is not a great place to live. You basically have North Auckland, West Auckland, East Auckland and South Auckland. North Auckland is poncey and extremely wealthy people live there. West Auckland is sort of an interesting area. Part of it is hob nobby and the other is kind of middle class riddled with crime, yet not the Bronx kind of deal. East Auckland you never really hear anything too much from there (some doubt it even exists at all) and South Auckland is the Bronx. Doesn’t matter how many hob nobby areas there are (and our area is actually quite nice) it is still not a safe place to live.
We are still getting snow dumps…in spring? Weird!
Laterz

Wednesday 4th October
I watched Benny Hinn this morning, out of curiosity, as per usual. Benny Hinn showed a plane and indicated that it had miraculously landed in their lap (looked like a lear jet). He then proceeded to tell people that it had to be paid for…within a month…six million dollars worth. He then went on to manipulate people into paying for the private plane for him, which he has called Dove 1...(so much for miraculously landing in his lap, huh!) He said that he was believing for six thousand people to pay six thousand dollars each. I could not believe the audacity of the man! He then went on to justify the plane by saying that it was getting dark in the world and that the plane was essential to getting to gospel out to the world. What is wrong with taking a regular plane like everyone else? Jesus didn’t ride around on a stallion (lear Jet) he rode a donkey (regular cattle class on our planes). What a scammer Benny Hinn is, he knows NO shame whatsoever.
I saw him preaching the message of Jesus Christ and to begin with I thought, ‘maybe there is hope for this guy after all?’ But then he went all screwy and started saying some really bizarre things, then he went to the Lear jet and well, there you have it. Am I spelling Lear right? Someone tell me, or does no one come in here? I hear an echo, perhaps they don’t, in which case it no longer matters whether I am spelling Lear right or not…what about a Lare, Leer, Lere or a Laire jet…I could play these stupid games all day…who cares? But I think it is Leery! Having never owned one how am I supposed to know? If anyone takes pity and decides to donate me a Leer/Lear jet, if only to correct my spelling, do not be backward in coming forward, I could use one!,(remember, miraculously making a Lear jet land in my lap means that it comes with NO BILL...and Ps we don't tip here, so it will have to be purely a 'love' offering and I get to name it whatever I want...ha ha ha...)
Laterz

Tuesday 3rd October
Man, what a day! I feel as though I have been swimming through crap all day trying to get my e-mail account sorted out. I mean, computer lingo is tough enough to deal with on its own, but try throwing in a technician that has a very slight grasp on the English language! I got two of them in a row and in the end I nicely asked the second one if they could please put me through to someone who has a good grasp on the English language. They said that they understood English just fine, so I ploughed ahead and explained my problem. When the technician explained my problem back to me, to ensure that they understood clearly what the problem was, it was apparent that they did not have the slightest clue about what I had said.
By that time I was so short of patience it wasn’t even funny and I hung up while they were on another line.
Why can’t Telecom, in an English speaking country employ technicians that have a solid grasp on the English language? It is tough enough to deal with problems of an e-mail nature without throwing in a language barrier for good measure. If I lived in China, Thailand, Uganda, or Swaziland, I could accept that I am going to get predominantly people who do not have a firm grasp on the English language, but in New Zealand? It makes me so mad! We end up wasting their time and they waste ours because even when you slow it right down and spell it out, they still don’t get it. Perhaps they should install an option, ESL, or EFL? How hard could it be?
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!
Laterz

Monday 2nd October
Bought the old movie On Golden Pond, was nice to see it again after so long.

Friday 29th September
I watched part of the funeral for Maria Fyodorovna, mother of Tsar Nicholas 2 last night. Actually it was 2.00am or so this morning on BBC. I taped it, but the quality is poor as our reception to TVNZ 1 sucks a lemon. But it was still nice to watch it. Now she lies in St Peter & Paul in the crypt beside her husband and her son. I have probably said this before, but right up to 1928 when she died, she refused to believe that her son and his children were dead. That’s very sad, but also shows that hope can some times spring eternal.
So, short of the bodies of Marie and Alexei being found, this would appear to be the end of the Romanov saga. Of course there is still the question of Heino Tammet, but after having seen Prince Michael of Kent, who is a distant relative of Maria Fyodorovna, I am quite stunned by the resemblance he bears to Tsar Nicholas the second. It makes me wonder more about how much Alexei would have looked like his father, I mean all the Tsars from Tsar Alexander 2 through to Nicholas looked strikingly alike, even some of the cousins. Also, I saw another medical show last night, a doco on forensic doctors. One of the things they said during the doco was that the ears on a person do not change, they do not grow bigger or smaller, unless as a result of a physical accident or strain such as playing rugby. So, yeah, well, who really knows anything for sure?
Laterz

Thursday 28th September
Bought the DVD Schindler's List today. Saw it back in 1994, but had not watched it since. After watching it, I again asked myself how God was ever able to look upon this world once that had happened and ever seen any redeeming features in mankind whatsoever. He is an amazing God, I think. To be able to still see a shred of humanity in a world that sat back and allowed that situation to even get to where it got. A portion of mankind is truly revolting, even today, part of what passes for humanity is truly repulsive and their actions repugnent!
Laterz

Wednesday 27th September
I went to the doctors today and I found out that I am, apparently, abnormal. This is kind of personal, so if you do not want to read personal details then may I suggest that you stop reading about now. If you are still reading, then you are asking for everything that you are going to get.
So I went to see my doctor and somehow he wormed his way around to getting me to speak of intimacy issues. He asked me, “You are sexually active, yes?” And he went to tick the yes box on his computer screen with his little mouse. He stopped when I said no. When I say that he stopped, I mean that he STOPPED. I swear he was not expecting me to say no. He then went on to ask me how long it had been since I was sexually active and when I said not since 2000, he went into deep shock and almost fell out of his chair. Even his mouse began to shiver with shock and then he smiled, laughed and said, “You have not had sex since 2000?”
I was like, “No.” I watched his little brain ticking over as he stared at me like I was some kind of archaic freak. Well okay, it is probably a big brain, he DID go to medical school; at least I assume he did. He looked at me and then laughed and he said, “No!”
At that point I was really tempted to smile and say, “Gotcha!” alas, I do not lie well and so I sat there and said, “No, I have not been sexually active since 2000.” I felt my blood pressure increasing as I sat there with him staring at me like he just could not believe what I was saying to him. My face was glowing red and I swear I could have been mistaken for one of those glowbug toys, but I thought that was the end of it and began to relax a little. Yet, it was not over, and that was made crystal clear to me when he asked, “Why?”
That was when the walls began to close in on me and I suddenly felt how Kofi Anan must have felt when he fronted up to the UN that very first time, all eyes on him waiting for the pearls of wisdom to drip like honey from his lips. Unfortunately, I sat there gaping like a guppy, groping for words that refused to come. When they did come I just said, “Because I don’t want to.”
Was that the end of it? Of course not! He then asked me, “You never feel like having sex?”
“Not really,” go I and to a point I was lying, we all feel like sex sometimes, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t live without it.
”You don’t want to have sex or you don’t feel like it?” he asked me. It was at this point where I was caught between telling the truth and taking the easy way out. Easy way out? “I am a dyke,” alas, it would have been a total lie. Or the alternative, “No, I sleep with a different guy every night, happy now?”
But I said neither of those things. I explained to him (and I felt like I was having to justify myself here) that I could not just sleep with anyone and that I am not in a relationship. Finished that sentence badly with a feeble, "I had a bad marriage?" explanation (remind me, why was I explaining ANYTHING to him?)
“You do not need to be in a relationship to have sex.”
I should have responded with, "Dang! Don't you?" alas I responded weakly with, “I do.” I went on to explain that I could not just sleep with anyone. He still sat there staring at me somewhat bemused. I got the impression that he would have been more comfortable had I have told him that I was a screaming nympho who went out every night to find a willing participant, much like a Black Widow or something. No, Black Widows eat their mate don’t they? Okay so maybe a grasshopper, praying mantis? No, they too eat their mate once they are done with them. Okay, I give up! But it seems that celibacy makes you odd and I tell you something else for nothing too, I have never run so fast from a doctor’s surgery than I did today.
Laterz

Saturday 23rd September
I have started a Empress Marie Fyodorovna page following the repatriation progress. John Kendrick has been sending me all the info from newspapers etc, it has been getting no coverage here at all. A service is being held in Denmark today to send her off to Russia on a warship. She left Russia back in 1918 on the ship Marlborough and never saw Russia again while she was alive. She died in 1928. Anyway come the 26th she will be interred with her husband Tsar Alexander Romanov 3. So anyway, the page is there for anyone who wants to see it, scan the list, it is in amongst the Romanov pages on the home page here.
Tomorrow the ozone layer is going to be the thinnest it has ever been over New Zealand in recorded history (records on ozone started here in 1970). It is raining again, starting to wonder if it is ever going to stop? And my wisteria has flowered, it is dark purple, gorgeous! I have been photographing it since it podded right up until the flowers appeared (still more flowering to occur though) which has taken about a week or so.
Tasha’s computer had to go into the tech head to be fixed and they found over three hundred spyware, adware, trojans and viruses in it…crikey! Anyway, so Norton has been reinstalled and I hope that it will keep her virus free now…she switched it off because it was annoying her. I asked her what was more annoying, Norton or not having her computer for over a week and having to work off the $280.00 it has cost to get it fixed? I think she prefers Norton now, at least I hope so, because it is not being fixed again.
Saw Brockie’s funeral on TV, was kind of sad, saw Steve Irwin’s too, that was VERY sad! The guy from the British TV series on cars also had a really bad accident, so seems to be the month for people who push the envelope to ping off, which is kind of sad. The British guy is still alive, but he sounds like he’s pretty banged up, so hope he recovers…he was going at speeds of 350 miles p/h trying to set a land speed record for Britain and he lost the plot and crashed. The fact that he has survived so far is nothing short of a miracle, so who knows, he may yet pull through.
Our politicians are indulging in some major mud slinging right now, really dirty dirty tactics and normally the sort of carry on you see in American and British politics. Don Brash got sprung having an affair with some woman from the business round table, and Helen Clark’s husband has been accused of being gay! Apparently both sides hired private investigators to dig up the dirt on each other…it is all very banal. I mean if anyone of you have seen Don Brash, then you know that anyone who even considered having an affair with him needs their head examined, and what Helen Clark’s husband does in his down time is his business not anyone else’s. I mean sure, being gay ain’t great, but at the end of the day, in light of her job, worse things happen at sea! Anyway, that’s me for now.
Laterz

Wednesday 20th September
I just figured it out, I got dumped! I am not sure why this mysterious occurrence occurred, only that it did…is it kosher to have used occurrence and occur in the same sentence? Maybe that’s why I got dumped?
I don’t know why it took me so long to work this out, usually I am more onto it than this, perhaps it was something I said, perhaps I said too much…or not enough? I am not sure on that one, but life is odd like that, many things insist on occurring without warning or reason. Perhaps it is that life, or the people within it, inside it, like to hide their reasons because they are too scared to voice them, or perhaps there are none, or the reasons are to shallow to mention? Still trying to work that one out too. Opps, just committed another unkosher thing, used too too close together too many times!
And yes, there is no such word as unkosher, but hey this is my blog and if I deem it necessary to use a word that does not exist, then so be it!
I can’t believe I was so stupid though, you know, that I did not see it? But I guess that is life too, we live in a disposable society and even people are sometimes viewed as disposable, or they have a shelf life…although this shelf life is rarely acknowledged or discussed. This is bizarre, why am I concerning myself with this, the dumper isn’t losing any sleep that’s for sure, and here I was thinking that I knew her!
Well, you know, life is an interesting thing, you race through it busting a gut to reach all your milestones, and then come a certain age, you bust a gut to avoid them, isn’t that odd? And that brings me to the next thing, what is all the stuff in between the milestones? That part is called life.
I often find myself thinking about why we are here and what the point of it all is when I look at the world and see what we have done to it. As humans, we are not respecters of much, not really, we should be, but we are not. We are like locusts, we rape the land, don’t put much back and then pretend to be all dazed and confused about why global warming is happening. We put the onus on the little guy to halt the process when the little guy contributes little to the problem and does not possess much agency to bring about the change necessary to make a difference.
Kofi Anan is retiring from the UN, but he has said it like it is on his way out, I think he is an honourable man, and no he has not always been effective in his role, and then again, it takes a whole team to play the game, and I personally believe that he has been stonewalled a lot in his role. They say the New Zealand PM is in the running for the top job, but Helen Clark in Kofi Anan’s role? I don’t know that I can picture that, but then again, she is straight up. I can’t imagine her getting the job though, she has given George Bush the middle finger several times on several issues, right or wrong, I can’t see someone he won’t support getting the job. I mean let’s face it and not kid ourselves, Muldoon didn’t make it onto the G8 because he knew how to win friends and influence people. The only way you get somewhere with people in power is to play the game, and Helen has either played the game really well and will be justly rewarded, or she has played her own game and will also be justly rewarded. I just can’t see her getting the job, but I guess only time will tell.
I think it is scary that George Bush is pushing for more powers to be able to torture people, I can’t see that it will help matters much, and from what I have been hearing, reading and watching, I can see why some radical Muslims got their nickers in a knot! Not that I support what their feelings have culminated in, I don’t.
I don’t like George Bush, I never have, he speaks like a lamb but he behaves like a raging beast and I think he is dangerous, but what I think of him, I guess, is nothing new. Tony Blair is going to be gone soon and I have no idea who is likely to take his place, that will be interesting to see. They had another doco on TV about the Romanian orphanages, I cannot believe that that horrid situation still has not been resolved, and to see kids living like that was absolutely heartbreaking. I mean, people go on about saving the panda, the elephant, the whales, the Kiwi, the rare birds and a hundred other animals, etc, and they are all worthy causes with much merit, but you see the children in Romania and you wonder what’s up with priorities? Anyway that is my bleet for the day.
Laterz

Sunday 17th September
Been thinking about life again (groan inwardly now, for I do not intend to stop any time soon). I was thinking about life, trying to analyse what it is really all about and you know what I figured out? Well…I figured out that I do not have a clue, you see, life seems to be a series of relearning the things you thought you already knew. And like Don Henley once said (and I dare anyone to defy Don) that whatever we have, whatever form or shape what we have takes, there always seems to be this voice outside life’s open door that makes us want to throw out our good ticket and beg for something more. And as contrived as that sounds, it is incredibly true.
Don also says that these times are so uncertain, there’s a yearning undefined and people filled with rage, and when you look around the world it is not too hard to see what it is that he was trying to say, even if he did say it back in 1989 or whatever. Why am I going on about what Don says? I suppose I think it is a little more inventive (and somewhat more flowery) than anything I might have to say and aside from that, he is an expert wordsmith and how he manages to read my mind as he does, I will never know…(slight chuckle). How can love survive in such a graceless age? How does friendship survive, hope or any of those other attributes that are supposed to make life so worthwhile? No I am not down or depressed, just thinking out loud, it is just that things I thought I’d figured out I’m having to learn again, I am having to re evaluate, to rethink, to reassess and all that stuff that goes with new territory. Well it is an old stomping ground that has not been visited for some time, well, yeah that is it.
My friend has fallen into some kind of sadness, second guessing his existence, his life, his place, actually I am not sure what it is. What I do know is that since he has fallen off it has been pretty weird. I don’t even know if I am going to hear from him again, he even indicated that I might not, and that scares me too because in a funny kind of way I love him. Not romantically or anything like that, I just love him because, well, just because, there is no reason. I don’t love people easily, my kids, my two best friends and him that’s about the head count, well and of course God, but that goes without saying. But my friend, well he is kind of special, he is different and he is incredibly talented and he keeps me on my toes. I don’t even know why I am talking about this really, seems kind of pointless, it is not going to change anything.
I have been busy uploading my stories into this site and initially I was terrified of doing it, wondering what people would think, and then I reached the conclusion that I do not care what anyone thinks. I will never get published, it is practically impossible to get published in this country. But I figured that I can be published, in a way anyway, by being on the web, by publishing them on the web. I really enjoyed writing them and they are still a work in progress, I wonder if that is why my friend has gone the way he has, maybe he thinks I don’t need him any more? I wonder if it has occurred to him that being needed is not what this is about, sometimes people just want you to be in their life, for no other reason than that they like you? I don’t know.
My brain is kind of tired, our neighbours had a party until 3.00am and they had the bass up real loud and my head was kind of buzzing and I couldn’t get to sleep. Haven’t watched the news since Thursday, wanted to give my little mind a rest from reality for a while. The world sucks a lemon some days and...(for the sake of sanity) as Phil Collins would say, “switch it off and it’ll all go away.” Hey, for all I know the world could have imploded and I just haven’t noticed yet.
Laterz

Thursday 14th September
Well it has been an interesting week all round, peaceful yet interesting. The preparations for the arrival back in Russia of Tsar Nicholas’ mother have begun. They have an exhibition of all her old belongings and what have you at one of the museums in St Petersburg, at the Catherine Palace I think. She is due to arrive in Russia sometime before the 26th of September, but the actual ceremony is on the 26th. I’d love to go to it, that would be awesome, but alas, I will have to watch TV to see if there is any coverage of it, but here in NZ, I doubt it will rate a mention, pity really.
Got a new camera and it is 4.1 mega pixels, and the clarity is amazing. I got it on Tuesday and I have taken over 130 photos so far. See top of page for pic of my budgie Moon, he is a psycho, but I still love the yellow fellow! Finally the movie about Aramoana screened at one of the film festivals and it was apparently well received, the premiere is in Dunedin, but I will most likely go to see it when it hits the theatres. It is about the first mass killing here in New Zealand and I think it happened the year Tasha was born. It actually was the precursor to two more mass killings within two years here in our country, and it was the first time anything like that ever happened here. When the second mass killings occurred, it happened in my own home-town where I was living at the time and I knew the family, it was terrible. The third happened up North somewhere and after that it has never happened since.
It is spring here (not that you can tell) and my wisteria is finally budding, so I have been photographing it every other day from the same angle. Can’t wait until all the flowers come out, only hope it is not white wisteria, I like the purple best. Also got some great shots of a spider web, which I will post on my new photography page, once I get around to making the page.
Laterz

Friday 8th September
Obviously it is not Australia’s week, Peter Brock has been killed in a racing accident today, not good. He was in Perth taking part in the Targer Rally and he crashed his car into a tree and died at the scene by the sounds of it. He was an awesome guy and he appeared in many different arenas here in New Zealand, including drink driving campaigns.
We have a coal miner trapped underground down in the South Island and a prison hostage situation in the North Island…never a dull moment at the moment. At Paremoremo Prison they have taken a guard hostage, I am not sure what the demands are, but what the heck is wrong with our country, seriously, it is a total mess.
Just heard that the miner down on the West Coast has died and they have recovered his body, apparently the mine collapsed. The Roa mine has been mined since 1907 and is the only mine that exports the coal.
A 24 year-old woman was stabbed to death in her car in Christchurch, her little baby was in the car with her but was unharmed. The adult death by murder rate here is the third highest in the OECD, there are 27 other countries in the OECD. Our child murder rate is third highest in the OECD as well. New Zealand is turning into a shockingly violent place to live, since July there have been seven murders in South Auckland alone.
The Progressive Foods protest is getting worse, the Maritime Union is speaking of coming on board and not allowing their goods to be offloaded at the wharfs. Even in Australia they are speaking of supporting them by not allowing the things to leave Australia in the first place. The checkout people and shelf stockers are also speaking about striking. Oh yeah, they are speaking of doing a McDonalds with Auckland region, they want to make the whole region one huge city, you know, they are going to super size it...anyone want fries with that?
Laterz

Wednesday 6th September
Was listening to Talkback Radio this morning and the DJ asked this question, and that was, “Why do some women stay with abusive men?”
The question was asked in light of this escaped con we have on the loose who beat his seventeen-year old girlfriend to death, he basically repeatedly belted her with the butt of a shotgun for over an hour. He ran, and some other young girl ran off with him and both are in hiding from the Police. The radio announcer wanted to know what women in her right mind would run and go into hiding with a man they knew had just murdered someone so brutally?
It made me think about a lot of things. One of them being some things I learned when I did my degree and others I learned through being an avid doco watcher and prolific reader of non-fiction. When a child is born their brain really begins to develop, you know its rocking and rolling and learning all these new things in rapid-fire fashion. This continues until the child is around seven, at which point the development is not so aggressive. But the thing is, that if a child is in an extremely violent atmosphere, it can actually cause brain development to be stunted or halted altogether. I do not mean by the physical abuse aspect of the violence, I am speaking of the physiological reaction the body has to the stimuli of fear, the same physiological reaction that any normal human being has to the stimuli of fear. Thing is, when we experience fear, our bodies release all kinds of different chemical reactions to it, very real chemical reactions that occur within the body that alter the way that your body functions. In normal situations where fear stimuli enters into the realm of a child, the physiological reactions actually enhance your chances of survival, amongst other positive reasons, that is what they are there for. BUT if you are triggered to having these physiological chemical reactions every day; many times a day, then it becomes extremely detrimental to the development of a child’s brain. It has been proved, in fact, that it can actually harm the brain and stop certain areas from developing as they are supposed to develop. This can affect learning, thinking processes, rational thinking processes which then go on to affecting an individual’s levels of empathy, being able to accurately gauge right from wrong or even controlling impulse behaviour. If a child is constantly in a state of fear for the first ten or fifteen years of their life, can you even begin to understand how that must affect them physiologically? Never mind the psychology or emotions of the individual. That alone is enough to explain how a female might find it perfectly acceptable to be with a man who has just murdered some other female. I mean there would be all kinds of psychology going on in that situation, and also, if young girls seek out men who are like their fathers… (and keep in mind that it has been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that young females do tend to seek out men who replicate the dominant male in their life, albeit subconsciously) then who is to say that that is not what that girl has done.
If you take all of that into account, (and that is only scratching the surface) then it does not take much to work out why a woman might stay with a man like that. Other things that may well impact upon her decision will be a little of nature (what she has inherited biologically from both parents) nurture (what she has learned through watching behaviours and listening to attitudes of those around her and replicating said actions and adopting said beliefs). Those in turn flow onto her locus of control which, (if she was brought up in an extremely violent situation) would more than likely be very external. That would also lead into her perceptions of agency, and depending upon the situation of her parents, socio-economically speaking, her agency may in fact very well be non-existent. So as you can see, it is not a matter of a woman merely being an idiot or her exercising bad choices, that is only a part of the problem. If you take into account all of the above, then you can see how powerless she may have been (and I am not saying that this is the situation of the women in question, but I would hazard a guess that it is). If in fact the above is her situation, it will probably take nothing short of an epiphany to wake her and make her want to do the hard yards in order that she break some of the habits she has adopted and inherited. This will involve her having to learn to change her thinking patterns and recognising the triggers in her life that cause her to behave in a way that you or I would deem irrational. And let’s face it, running off with a man, who is being chased by the Police for a brutal murder, is NOT rational behaviour, but, oddly enough, to her it probably makes perfect sense. That’s me for today.
Laterz

Tuesday 5th September
What a noong, I have gotten all my dates seriously screwed up and now I have to go back through here and fix them all…hate that when it happens.
Well, today there is talk of giving Steve Irwin a State Funeral, I think that is an excellent idea, the guy deserves to be honoured for his work and for the achievements he has attained in his efforts.
I was thinking about technology today and how incredibly banal some of it is; how insane it makes us behave sometimes and how incredibly lazy it has made us! Take me (for an example)…a few nights ago I could not find the remote to change the channel on the TV, which was around four or five feet away. Rather than just get up and change the station by hand, I preferred to take the easy route, pulling the bed completely apart and feeling my hand along the sides of my waterbed to see if it was hiding there. That all took about half an hour by the time I was done and I missed the program I had wanted to switch the station to see. Now, why did I not just change the station manually? Why was I possessed with the notion that I must find the damn thing? What weirdness has led me to this point in my life where I HAVE to know where the remote is or I just cannot function normally…and Ps…don’t even sit there and try to pretend that you have never done something reasonably similar. It is like the drive through at McDonalds, I only go there for their coffee and I am being sincere when I say this. That is my one overriding thought when I head in that direction, MUST HAVE COFFEE…but when I get there, rather than parking up and walking in, I go through the drive through. Now we all must have figured out by now that it is in fact far more proficient, time wise, to walk in and order it at the counter. But I do not like crowds, they make me feel claustrophobic, I would far rather drive into the drive through with six cars in front and six cars behind boxing me in so that I cannot leave the place at will. I, of my own free will, choose to sit there for ten minutes longer than the walk into the store would have taken, why I ask, why do I do it? Why do you (and you know that you do…ha ha ha). Which brings me to my next point, I heard this morning that they have invented an alarm for your car that can be activated by a text message…huh? Several things ran through my mind at once, first being, why not simply activate your alarm as you walk away from the car, like we do now? To send the text to activate the car alarm you have to be a certain distance from the car, not much further away than an ordinary hand held activating alarm device needs to be to be effective anyway. I am sorry, I just don’t ‘get it’.
What about this for laziness, I have lost my TV remote but can activate the TV using the video remote (cos I hooked them up that way, as you can) and so if I switch off the video with the video remote, then the TV will turn itself off five minutes later. But this same system does not work with the DVD player, so I am confined to watching videos as I go off to sleep. I feel very controlled by this…I hate that I cannot watch a DVD to go off to sleep to! I also hate that my DVD player only holds one disc at a time and I am waiting, with great anticipation, for the day when multi DVD players will be available. When did I become such a lazy techno freak? When I was twelve years old I thought nothing of standing up and walking over to the TV to change the channel or to switch it off. I thought nothing of having to change the 45 on my turn-table every 2.36 minutes, I didn’t even resent the fact that if I jumped up too suddenly that the needle on the record might jump. What happened to me? Never mind that a watched microwave never beeps, a watched washing machine on spin cycle never stops spinning, multi CD players cannot change discs fast enough, broad band seems slow, dial up is now relegated to the realm of the dinosaurs, digital cameras take forever to download their images into my computer (and I have to plug the darn thing in to do it) and regular mail is now no longer an option I will seriously contemplate.
WHAT HAPPENED TO ME? (she laughs!)
Laterz

Monday 4th September
Steve Irwin, Crocodile Hunter died today. He was struck in the chest by a stingray, apparently the barb went straight through his heart. Apparently his wife Terri is in a remote part of Tasmania and may not even be aware of his death yet.
I think Steve is a great loss to this world, he was one of the few who actually got out there and did something about animal welfare, and he did not differentiate between exotic animals, pests or domestic animals, ALL were creatures worthy of respect and care in his mind. I really admired the work he did, and yes sometimes he did very silly things, like the stunt with Baby Bob and the croc, but the good he did far outweighed any of the stupidity. I guess if you hang out with wild animals long enough and take yourself into their environment, then odds are that sooner or later you WILL pay with your life. I think no one understood and accepted this more than Steve, yet he still did what he could to save any animal in any given situation. I think also, he imparted a love and an awareness of animals, that perhaps a lot of people would otherwise not have adopted.
Anyway, it is a great loss and very sad, and not to be forgotten those he left behind, wife Terri, daughter Bindi and baby Robert. This larger than life character, Steve Irwin (who never put on airs) has, I think, left a huge gaping hole in the realm of the care of those animals who have no way to defend themselves against those who would abuse them. I can only hope that his good work is continued to the standards that he himself set.
Laterz

Saturday 2nd September
Okay we have had the last of the snow and now we have forest fires, can you believe that?
The strike by Progressive is seeing the Supermarkets slowly running out of a lot of food stuffs. I went shopping yesterday and over half the products I normally buy, they did not have. I could have gone to another supermarket that deals with the other company, Foodstuffs, but they are way more expensive. They do not know how much longer the strike will last for, but it could be a while. Yet on a more positive note, we are not lining up in snow storms for six hours to pay a thousand bucks for a roll of toilet paper or a scrap of bread, as they did in Communist Russia, so it ain’t that bad!
There was a protest outside Helen Clark’s Auckland house against Feminazis, yeah, I know, original. They were protesting against the family court who traditionally favours women.
A man crashed into a checkpoint in Auckland and hurt four or five people, he had been drinking! Gas has been switched on again in Central Wellington, so all the bars and things have reopened. I watched some American couples on Fear Factor tonight chewing up mouthfuls of gross bugs to win a trip to Queenstown, New Zealand and I had to laugh. If they saw Queenstown, they would have given the bugs a miss. I mean it is nice and all, but there are better places they could go!
Laterz

Thursday 31st August
The last day of August, wow, the year is racing away...again! I remember as a kid how a day seemed to last forever and an hour could stretch before me as an endless ocean. Now days, take your eyes off the clock for two seconds and you can lose a whole hour! I wonder if it is by God's design or whether it is just an age thing? I have a friend who used to speak to me every day, and once this person said that initially they thought that I was someone else that they used to speak to before I came along. Like I said, we used to speak every day and now I hardly ever hear from them at all. Maybe it was that I am not imaginative enough, or maybe I am not interesting enough? I don't know. Maybe they have a new person whom they speak to every day? Someone who thinks more like them or who is interested in more of the same things, maybe even has a higher level of intelligence? It is tough when you get usurped and replaced by someone else, you know you have been relegated to the peripherial. I guess that is life too, just takes a bit of getting used to.
Well, Olaf Viig and Steve Santini (I remembered his last name this time, points to me for that) have been released unharmed, which is good to see. As a result of that kidnapping, most foreign journalists have pulled out of Gaza, kind of don't blame them though. I wouldn't want to be in a place where that kind of thing happens when there are other safer places you could be to report the news from.
Here in New Zealand we have had the usual weekend murders, robberies and all that other horrid stuff. But our police force has a new toy, tasers! They are undergoing a twelve month trial of them and they informed the cannon fodder (us) last night that they are so safe that they can even use them on pregnant women, neato! NOT!
Anyway, so that is about it. Life is a little quiet around here, although I did add two new pages to this site, Rasputin, Hinn & Co and Favourite Fibs For Fleecin' Flock. Both are interesting pages, I think anyway, well I would, I wrote them! I have a few other pages I am working on at the moment, you know, researching and gathering data for. People think you just get some info and throw up a page, and in some cases, especially where someone says you can borrow their stuff, then that is the case. Most of my pages though have taken hours of research, scanning in pictures and what have you. I enjoy it though, I am a scrap booker from way back, and let's face it, that is what websites are to a point, electronic scrapbooks.
Part of this site is used to inform, part of it is used to remember, part of it is used for expression and part of it is used to simply record.
In my Sandanizta story I finally worked out an explanation about how the whole place came to be, and I attributed it to a thing called the flight of the Nephilim. It is just a work of fiction, always has been and has absolutely no reflection on reality at all, but some people are bound to take it seriously and think it a reflection of what I believe even though it is not. It is kind of tough trying to create a work of fiction, and then stave off the guilt for using your imagination to create things that never were, or changing the concept of something that once was for the purpose of fiction. It is not to tell lies or change anyone else's understandings, and yet a part of me worries that it might be taken that way. Thus I will not explain what I have done with the story line, I fear I will be ridiculed, laughed at, perhaps even...I don't know. It was really interesting researching people's different ideas on who they thought the Nephilim were though. I took their ideas, jumbled them around a bit and came up with a story line and it was fun, cool! Anyway, that is about it for now, bizarre, I don't even know if anyone comes in here and reads this stuff or not!
Laterz

Monday 28th August
Olaf Wiig and his friend reporter Steve (?) were dropped back at their hotel this morning, is that weird or what? I think the whole thing seemed weird, oh well, at least they are back safe and all is well.
I started watching The Pianist last night, haven't watched it in ages and I fell asleep not long after it started. There are so many stories inside the Jewish tragedy of the second world war and all of them are interesting. They give you an insight as to what it must have been like for those people caught up in it, and it gives a voice to those who may not have normally had one inside that situation. Schindler's List is another movie I have been after for ages, and oddly enough, it is very hard to find, same with Gilbert Grape and another called Johnny Got His Gun.
I found a website where they advertise portraits from the Russian Romanov dynasty, what I would give to have an original portrait of Tsar Nicholas, imagine THAT hanging in your lounge!
E-mail has been real quiet, haven't heard from anyone in a while, oh well. I almost don't bother checking it any more. Well, it is a nice sunny day here today, for a change, makes a nice alternative to the rain. There were more mudslides in Wellington, houses hit and a train knocked off the tracks, no one was hurt.
Laterz

Friday 25th August
Have you ever smelled a rat and been a little hesitant to say so? There is something really odd about the kidnapping of Olaf Wiig and Steve (can’t remember his last name). Supposedly, a group that has never been heard of before has kidnapped them, and said kidnappers are making outlandish demands, the release of all Muslim prisoners in the United States. Does that not strike anyone else as odd? And Anita McNaught, there is absolutely no emotion there, she is dead calm and she reads her pleas from a piece of paper in almost the exact same way as she used to read the news. I don’t know, but the whole thing seems really odd to me and when I watched her speaking I got the oddest nagging doubts. What do I think really happened? I don’t know. What do I think is really going on? I don’t know that either, but something seems off.
After having read all the accounts of the demise of the Romanov dynasty from all the different points of view, particularly from the point of view of Felix Yussupov, I have come to the conclusion that poor old Nicky never stood a chance.
Felix Yussupov is the one who actually killed Rasputin and his account of the murder is really quite grissly! At first Felix had to go through a meticulously weird ritual of befriending Rasputin and some of the things that Rasputin said to him sound so much like the televangelists today that it is unreal! Anyway, once he had managed to befriend him, he lured him into a trap when he invited him to Moika for an evening visit. Felix had an empty basement in Moika filled with furniture and covered in carpets etc to make it look as though it was lived in and he picked Rasputin up himself from his flat. In the basement during their visit, Rasputin apparently Rasputin ate cake after cake laced with cyanide (Dimitri laced the cakes and the wine) and didn’t feel a thing. He then drank Maidera wine, also laced with cyanide and although he felt a slight tickle in his throat, it didn’t really do anything to him either. In the end, Felix shot him apparently in the heart and he did drop down and Felix thought him to be dead. He went upstairs (he did this to Rasputin in the basement of the Moika Palace) and spoke to Dimitri for a half-hour, went back down stairs only to discover Rasputin staggering around the room. So he ran off in horror to get Dimitri (who was loved by Nicky like a son) and they went back to the basement only to find Rasputin on his hands and knees climbing the stairs. Felix shot him again and he got to his feet and staggered out the door into the courtyard. Felix said that Rasputin’s refusal to die was almost a demonic thing. In the end they had to shoot him when he got out into the courtyard and that time he did drop, but a policeman heard the shot and came to investigate it. That was how they were discovered in the end, although they first said that a guest had shot a guard dog.
The next day when the police turned up Dimitri told them they had shot and killed Rasputin, but they did not believe him, and when it was discovered that someone there actually HAD shot Rasputin, no one particularly cared. Apparently Nicky was being given something that Rasputin had prescribed in his tea on the train. Nicky was apparently willing drinking it, thinking it to be a tonic that would help his health. According to Felix, it was a drug, and when you read Nicky’s diaries, he often got horrid headaches and things like that with no apparent causes, so makes one wonder.
Nicky only punished Felix and Dimitri for killing Rasputin to make Alexandra feel better, apparently he was relieved to have him gone.
According to the account of Felix, once Rasputin was dead they were supposed to take Nicky away (depose him) and put Alexei on the throne and his regent was going to be Nikolai Nikolaievich, Nicky’s 6.8 cousin. What is interesting is that this story ties in with other accounts that I have read regarding the desire to remove Nicky from the throne. It was not so much that they did not like Nicky, it was the supposed influence of his wife that they did not like and the fact that she was German. Also, Rasputin was definitely orchestrating things from the Palace when Nicky took over supreme command of the Russian Army and spent most of his time at Starvka (Stavka?).
Anyway the Romanovs who made it to the Crimea only got out by the skin of their teeth, they were literally hours away from execution when they were rescued and taken to the Marlborough. If Nicky, Alexandra and their kids had made it to the Crimea, I don’t think any of them would have gotten out. As it was it seemed that the fact that Felix had shot and killed Rasputin saved their lives because they were seen as slightly sympathetic to the new cause, even though they weren’t.
Laterz

Tuesday 21st August
A man stole a yacht, yup a yacht! He beached it, tried to run and got caught by the police. The woman who had the highest recorded ever breath alcohol limit has been let go with 200 community service hours. 1583 micro litres of alcohol per mml of breath, I think that is how it goes, I am not a mathematician! Bet if I were to do that they’d chuck the book at me, toss me in a cell and throw away the key?
Another man, James Junior Lawire, who killed a dairy owner got sixteen years jail for his crime, the Indian man he killed I cannot name because I can hardly say the name let alone spell it! A female shop-keeper was threatened with a machete by two armed robbers in Hastings, so robberies seem to be escalating. Poor dairy owners, the biggest threat used to be being driven mad by the buzzing of the door trip every time someone walked in…always just as you sat down. I know this from when I managed a dairy for a week for a friend some years back. You would think that I would have sympathy for dairy owners in regard to the door buzzers, but I do not. Anyone dumb enough to buy a dairy as a business asks for the madness of the constant interruptions they endure.
The Overlander (train that runs from Auckland to Wellington, a nine hour train ride) is due to stop running next month, but they are trying a last minute ditched effort to save it. The weather has also taken a nasty turn with a huge dumping of snow and it looks so beautiful, even down the Desert Road near the mountains. I would love to take a train trip right across Russia, through Siberia, the whole thing, the way it used to be, back in the day of the Tsar.
Saddam Hussein’s second trial has started where he has been charged with the genocide of the Kurdish people, and it appears that his disdain for the court has not mellowed any. He refused to even confirm his name to the court saying that everyone knows his name. Even when asked for a plea Hussein said it would take volumes of books to answer that, not just a mere few words. Makes me wonder what Hitler would have said had anyone have gotten the chance to put him on trial at Nuremburg?
I think Iran is about to give the UN and the USA the big finger in relation to stopping their nuclear development. The Ayatollah basically said that he will do what he wants until he achieves what he wants through keeping such a program. They say that events of the Middle East have changed attitudes in regard to Bush, he is no longer gung ho, rather, he is undecided and non-committal.
Okay so finally there has been new meaning brought to the saying, ‘death by chocolate’ a man fell into a vat of hot chocolate and was stuck there for hours. They had to pull him out after it set. The pictures looked pretty funny and he was not hurt, so all is well that ends well.
The oldest man in the world just celebrated his 115th birthday and attributes his longevity to avoiding alcohol, and having given up smoking when he was 90; he even had a little dance at his birthday party! Sometimes the stories in life just defy all logic, and yet at the same time you have to smile. And the Pakistani cricket team, accused of ball tampering! Bad Pakistani cricket team! I wonder if it is possible to tamper with golf balls?
And last but not least, how to tell with one hundred percent accuracy whether you might have actually finally gone stark raving bonkers! Okay this is how you tell, real estate agent rings you and leaves your phone number to ring her, you ring it and leave a message on it and do not discover your mistake until you check your answer phone later in the day and wonder how the hell the message you left for your real estate agent ended up on your phone?...and the final nail in the coffin? You look at the paper where you wrote down her phone message and see your own phone number written in YOUR OWN HANDWRITING below her underlined name. Don't even ask!
Laterz

Monday 20th August
We now have a new Maori King, and I had to laugh as they announced him as Kingi, the Maori word for king. They are making a big deal about it and yet Maori never really had sovereigns until they met the British, and yet all they have done since they met them is complain about the harm British influence has done to their culture.
The British stole their land, erased their language, performed racist fetes against them and yet they want to model sovereignty, I find that odd. I suppose it is easy for any culture to complain about the influence in their lives of another. I can imagine how it would be so much more appealing to be living in grass/mud huts wearing grass skirts having to chase your dinner around before you can chow down on it. It must be so much more peaceful dying of old age at thirty, dying in childbirth and having all but eleven of your babies dying before the age of five. I mean who needs clean drinking water and good teeth? How terrible it is of the British to have brought over doctors, dresses, fast food, medicine, alcohol, tobacco, motor cars and Play Station. How cruel can an ethnicity of people be?
Yeah I know, shut up Sarah. It just annoys me how a group will complain bitterly about another and yet will take all the perks that come with it. If you hate it, have nothing to do with it, but if you insist on partaking of it, then shut up!
There were three murders over the weekend, in a population of four million that’s pretty bad. I watched BBC last night and they had the Maori Queen’s funeral on their segment called Asia today…Asia? Oh well, perhaps they had nowhere else that they could slot it.
Laterz

Saturday 19th August
A man was killed by being dragged by a car at high speedsf or over two kilometres starting from Otahuhu. Apparently the driver accidentally ran him over yet did not stop once his attention was drawn to the fact that the man was trapped under the car.
Still no word on who has kidnapped Olaf Wiig and Anita McNaught is beginning to become very worried because no one has yet taken responsibility, that is apparently very unusual.
The Maori Queen’s funeral is still going strong and a successor has not yet been named. The King of Tonga is gravely ill also and they expect that he may die any day now, darn Monarchs, they have absolutely no sense of timing! Speaking of Monarchs, I have read four books in the last two days, Left Behind – Fourteen Months in Siberia by Baroness Sophie Buxhoeveden, Memories of the Russian Court by Anna Vyrubova, Last Days at Tsarkoe Selo by Paul Benckendorff and Thirteen Years At the Russian Court by Pierre Gilliard. All were very interesting stories, especially the story as told by Sophie Buxhoeveden and the other by Pierre Gilliard. The story as told by Pierre Gilliard seems to be the closest to being an unbiased account when it comes to the personalities of the royals. Gilliard is honest, almost brutally in places. United 93, the movie about 9/11 has been received with very good reviews here and I may go to see it next week I think. I will sneak away to the movie theatre one day when Jonty is at school and Shiloh and Tasha are otherwise occupied. I like to go by myself, that way I can leave whenever I want to, this is generally enough to ensure that I stay for the whole movie…I loathe the confines of the picture theatre!
Laterz

Thursday 17th August
I haven’t blogged all week because I haven’t felt like it, but much has happened in the last few days. The peace deal seems to be holding between Lebanon and Israel, which is really good, and people have been able to return to their homes etc. However, Hezbollah is still up and running and the two Israeli soldiers have not yet been recovered, so it makes it kind of an odd success, if any success at all.
Anita McNaught’s Kiwi husband, cameraman Olaf Wiig has been kidnapped in Gaza while he was working for the Fox network, and so far there have been no demands made by whomever took him.
There has been an arrest in Thailand of a man thought to be responsible for the murder of the little girl JonBenet Ramsay back in 1996. Unfortunately, her mother has since died also, but still, it will be nice for what is left of her family to finally have the truth known.
The Maori Queen died here on Monday and her funeral is being held in Ngaruwahia and thousands are attending it, I didn’t even know there was a Maori queen until months back and I live in this country, DOH!
Did I mention that I got an e-mail from John Kendrick telling me the exact details of Marie Feodorovna’s repatriation to Russia? She was the wife of Alexander 3, mother of Tsar Nicholas 2, murdered by the Bolsheviks.
Have met another truth seeker person on line, he has his own website similar to Wolf and he seems like a straightforward sort of person. His name is Mike and gave me some helpful stuff to use for my site and I can also direct people to his as well as Wolf’s, so that’s cool. Can never have too many contacts, well I don’t, I now have two, but hey it is better than being alone in this. So that is about it for now.
Oh yeah, Noel came up to Auckland and we did the divorce papers and he took Jonty and Shiloh out for dinner. Tasha went out with him on Tuesday, took her a little while the thaw out with him, anyway, but the kids had a good visit.
Oh yeah, a lady had a panic attack on a plane, she had claustrophobia and was acting a little strange, so they escorted the plane back to the airport with two fighter jets. But it shows how concerned officials are about flights. In Gatwick Airport a runaway managed to board a plane to Portugal without detection until it was about to take off; they are still trying to work out how he did it, he was 12. I think that is about all now.
Laterz

Sunday 13th August
Two baby girl twins three months old have been found dead in their house in Porrirua; they are saying at the moment that the deaths are unexplained and that the family is cooperating. It may well be that they have died of cot death.
Another landslide happened in the South Island but it was a landslide of boulders, no one was killed, but that was luck as opposed to good management.
British police believe that they may have arrested the British Al Queda leader, they are not sure, but if they have it sure will be a major victory, and those have been sadly lacking thus far. The thing that is a little disconcerting, I guess, is that racial hatred is rife on all sides. I got sent an e-mail today showing signs that Muslims were carrying in a rally in England. Admittedly the signs were not nice, assuming that the pictures had not been photo shopped, I am going to send them to my friend Wolf and ask him if he thinks they were. But whether they were or whether they weren’t; the e-mail was clearly designed to incite ethnically based hatred of Muslims. Now I am not pro-Muslim any more than I am pro-Pentecostal Christianity, but when one group tries to incite hatred of the majority of another, based upon what a minority did, then it becomes very selective and very dangerous. And if this is what the world has come to, then no wonder we are in such a pickle and I guess what really concerned me the most is that the senders of the e-mail are Christians, that has got to be the most disturbing part of it all.
Apparently there is to be a cease-fire effective tomorrow between Lebanon and Israel, I do not know how it will go, but it sounds positive. Tomorrow will tell the story I guess.
Laterz

Saturday 12th August
They are now saying that the terrorists were going to do a dummy run this weekend on planes, and then a few days later were going to carry out the real thing. There were going to be three separate sprees of exploding planes. They interviewed one of the fathers of three brothers arrested and he was devastated and insists that they are innocent of the charges. They are saying that ipods, cell phones and fizzy drinks are the new tools of the modern terrorist, interesting how seemingly harmless every day objects can be turned into weapons.
Laterz

Friday 11th August
The whole world airports have changed their security measures over night. Heathrow has armed guards all around it, a never before seen measure. They say that the terrorists were smuggling explosives onto nine planes and were going to explode them over USA airspace. They say it was only days away from happening and that the carnage would have been unbelievable.
Passengers are only allowed to take clear plastic bags onto planes now and any baby milk must be taste tested by the carrier before they will be allowed to take it on board. The youngest arrested of the potential terrorists is seventeen and they are all highly educated young Muslims. England has raised its terror alert to the highest level and they are saying that if they had gotten away with it then the death toll would have been as high as September 11th. USA has raised their security alert to red too at the airports and they have banned anyone taking any bottles of anything onto planes. People had to throw away perfumes, shampoos anything at all that was bottled. A lot of people at the airports were unhappy about the new security measures and thought that enough is enough. But the thing is, that life as we knew it is over and will never be the same again, such is the way of this world.
New rules for American bound flights from New Zeland are the same as in the USA, but it is only those flights that it applies to, no other destinations have been affected. The New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark advised that people ought to think carefully about whether it is necessary to go there at all, that the arm of terrorism has proved that it can potentially reach anywhere it chooses.
We lost our cat Malfoy today, he was hit by a car and killed. We were all very sad to say goodbye to him and it was very reminiscent of when we lost D’Artangnan two years ago. Anyway, that is about it for now.
Laterz

Thursday 10th August
I hate Microsoft Word and Bill Gates should be lined up against a wall and shot for developing such a stupid program! Every time I do a really good blog the SOB freezes and I lose everything, ass wipe of a stinking program.
Did you know that the Holocaust all started with a test case in 1938 when a father of a baby, known only by the name Knauer, wrote to Adolf requesting to have the baby put to sleep? This baby was the very first victim of Hitler’s holocaust. He was born with a leg missing, part of an arm and blind and the father wanted to end his suffering. When that happened it sparked an idea in the head of the mad Adolf and he actually opened centers for putting handicapped babies to sleep. He then extended it to adults who were handicapped and then he spread it further to those who had mental illnesses, alcoholism and other so called defects. He actually ran advertisements to make the country, as a whole, accept it, and oddly enough, they did. They got rid of the bodies through mass cremations and they sent ashes to the relatives. After a while the clergy started to become a little dismayed with the practise and so they started to do it in secret. Trouble was, because it was being done in secret they were sending out certificates saying that the person had died of appendicitis, when in fact the person had had the organ removed in childhood. So they had to dismantle the crematoriums and find a new use for them, that combined with the idea that mass extermination of undesirables would now be accepted, birthed the idea of the death camps. Hitler had all along wanted to do something about what he termed the Jewish question, baby Knauer was the inspiration for the solution. Wild eh? My reason for pointing this out?
The second you allow one man to play God and deem someone’s life as undesirable then you lose your morality to the last. The wars we see being fought these days are not too much different to what Hitler did in some aspects, especially while those who have the power to do something about it don’t. What is that saying? ‘In order for evil men to succeed good men need do nothing,’ or something like that. I really hate what I see going on in the world, it is depressing and it is really hard to look around and see anything to really smile about. Sure if you keep your head in your own corner it is possible to pretend it all away, but I was never that good with corners.
Wow a terrorist plot has been uncovered in Britain, apparently the terrorists were planning to explode planes in mid air between the UK and the US, twenty people have been arrested so far. Such a happy, pleasant little world we live in.
Laterz

Wednesday 9th August
Had to go and get Jonty from school at 11.00, he was really sick, lots of flu going around the place at the moment. He also has an infection in his toe and in his finger, so I am noticing a wee bit of a decline in his health this winter, he had been doing quite well for a while there. His immune system is not the best anyway, the specialists have said that it is quite bad, so we have just got to see how he goes with this latest series of sicknesses.
Seems the Government’s meningococcal vaccination experiment has fallen flat on its face, two children who were fully vaccinated have died of it recently. I never allowed my children to be mass vaccinated against it along with all the other millions of kiwi kids who were, I was too suspicious of it. So it would seem it did not make their odds of getting the disease, in comparison with a fully vaccinated child, any greater.
Apparently one of the actors out of Once Were Warriors has been arrested and charged with three counts of sexual violation, he has name suppression for now, but makes me wonder which one it is. Perhaps the infamous Uncle Bully? Probably not, Cliff Curtis has never managed to get himself into the spotlight for any kinds of troubles. Temuera Morrison, he has several times. May even be an unknown, you know, someone who had a cameo role in the movie?
Oh and here is another piece of interesting news, a sheep farm down South has been chosen to provide the wool that makes the tennis balls to be used in the US Open. That is kind of neat for them, certainly involves a substantial amount of money and business prestige, Wilson are apparently the makers of the tennis balls.
Graham Capill, ex-leader of the Christian Heritage Party has finally been struck off as a lawyer in relation to being convicted of sex crimes against children. It is odd because this man still claims that the girls led him on, I remember their ages as being something like 6 and 9, sad man. But some people like that just don’t like to embrace their fault or their responsibility. I remember when I was a kid my Christian foster father saying to me, “Sometimes little girls do things that cause this type of thing to happen.” Ain’t that just the sweetest thing? I don’t know, it seem to me (and both of these men were pentecostal folk) that if you can blame the devil for all the bad stuff and God for all the good stuff, then you successfully take man and his freewill right out of the picture, thus absolving man from any responsibility. Dangerous isn’t it?
Anyway, that is that for now.
Laterz

Tuesday 8th August
No one here can agree with the spelling of Hezbollah, some say it is Hizbollah and some say it is Hezbollah, but no one can agree. I read the different papers online and even they are inconsistent! Alas, I did not have the winning $20’000 ticket, but I did get $64, so that was cool.
Around the countryside there is yet more serious flooding, and some houses up on the hills in Wellington started falling apart as the hills disintegrated, apparently the houses were built on landfill back in the 60s and now it is eroding.
Laterz

Monday 7th August
A New Zealander has been accused of the first murder on Norfolk Island for over one hundred years. He murdered an Australian waitress three years ago.
Israel has had its most deadly attack today with bombs raining down on Haifa, 12 soldiers killed by Hezbollah and some civilians. The Israelis have got concerns about the Peace Plan drawn up by the UN, and it sounds as though they will reject it, as will Hezbollah. I saw film of the rockets been set off and I hate to say this, but from a photographic point of view, they were eerily beautiful, like flashes of light like you might see in a thunder storm, but more organised and timed. Apparently Hezbollah has officially rejected the Peace Plan presented by the UN.
Syria is also back in the mix and some Syrian official visited Lebanon and said that Israel had better watch where they are aiming their rockets or they will have more than Hezbollah to worry about. Oh yeah, I took a Lotto ticket again our Lotto shop sold a $20’000 ticket in the extra bonus draw and it has not been claimed yet, did I mentioned that I have not yet taken my two extra bonus tickets in to be checked yet either? Oh well, one can dream, I thought maybe I might check them at the place tomorrow on my way back from Jonty’s doctor appointment.
Laterz

Sunday 6th August
Decided to spend the weekend pretending that all is well with the world and that people are not dying in a futile war somewhere over in the Middle East. I have not watched the news all weekend, some times you just gotta shut it off and make it all go away, ya know? I know, 'but the people in Israel and Lebanon can’t shut it off,' and for that I commiserate, but there is only so much my sorry little head can take.
Jonty had an accident and hurt his spine, he fell over and then went to stand up and fell over again hurting his back. He got transported to hospital by ambulance to be sure he had not taken a direct spinal injury, turns out it is just badly bruised. Then he did something to his toe and it is twice the size of the same toe on the other foot, so he has to go back to the doctor. To top off my weekend of ignorant bliss, he and his brother and sister came down with flu. Well, that will teach me to turn the TV off won’t it?
Other than all the miseries of real life, I have spent the weekend ‘misting’ i.e. writing Sandanizta Mist 6, (I relegated the original 6 to 7, so now we have a seven part novel saga…where oh where will it end?). Other than that, aside from the accidents and extreme flooding all over the countryside that caused 13 deaths (Shiloh told me that, I did not watch the news) it has been pretty quiet.
Laterz

Friday 4th August
A few days ago Mel Gibson got caught drinking and driving and apparently he was so mad he starting spouting anti-Semitic insults. Now everyone is getting all upset saying he is not anti-Semitic and that it was just the heat of the moment yada yada yada. Think about it logically though, (not that I am looking for logic inside anti-Semitism, I am not, because there is none) for that to be the thing he resorts to in his anger, wouldn’t he first have to have held those kind of sentiments? You see, if he didn’t, then it would make it a random act, in which case he could have just as easily come out with slurs against rabbits. That sounds ludicrous, I know, but so is coming out with anti-Semitic slurs if you don’t actually hold any inside yourself to begin with. One thing extreme anger combined with alcohol does is it seems to wash away inhibitions and you tend to do things that normally you would not dare to do or say things you would normally keep to yourself. Not that I drink, I do not, but I remember when I was a teen and I did have the odd drink, it tends to make you think that you are ten feet tall and bullet proof. Just my thoughts on that topic.
Funny I mentioned the fact that Tony Blair has been deathly quiet on the subject of Israel/Lebanon because this morning on the news he actually came out and commented. Oddly enough, he is staying totally neutral on it, he didn’t really say anything in favour, nor against any side in the conflict. I thought he was actually quite cleverly diplomatic the way he stuck to the fact that it is an extremely tenuous situation and that it needed to be handled with the utmost care.
Oh yeah, Winston Peters, the truth has come out, he was bitten on the bum by a spider in Malaysia, my thoughts….that’s one point to the spider and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy!
I used to like Winston back in the Winebox days (Winebox was kind of New Zealand’s version of Watergate, only somewhat smaller), you know, he used to be straight up and a man for the average every day Joe Bloggs. But these days he seems to have become rather puffed up and arrogant and I think it is kind of cool that the spider put him in his place. Bad Sarah!
Got a phone call from the ex-husband (out of the blue) asking for the kid’s clothe sizes, he said he has decided that he wants to help with the kids. Hm, I guess I will believe it when I see it, such scepticism, I know. Oh yeah and I got some of the new coins yesterday, they are horrid! The 50 cent piece is the size of the old ten cent piece and the new ten cent piece is the same colour as the old 1 and 2 cent pieces. The twenty is the only one that stands out as different because they etched notches into the rim of them.
Laterz

Thursday 3rd August
Russia reported today that many things have gone missing from the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, to the tune of 8 million dollars. Most of the stuff that has gone missing used to belong to the Romanovs, Nicky and Sunny, kids and other family members. The Hermitage Museum used to be their Winter Palace. The authorities say that the curator of the museum was found dead a few days before the inventory was taken.
A New Zealand police officer rushed to an accident to help and was done for drink driving, he was the sole charge policeman of a small town, so he was the only one who could be called. Once the city cops got there they breath tested him and arrested him. Even the police commissioner is saying that the fact that he is a sole charge policeman of a small town should be taken into consideration.
Things in the Israel and Lebanon thing have heated up considerably. The Israelis stormed a hospital looking for Hezbollah and fighting continued there for four hours and they managed to get five Hezbollah soldiers. Hezbollah denies that they have gotten any of their soldiers. End result, ten are dead and five Hezbollah taken back to Israel. Cars on the road who came near to the troops were fired upon immediately. Hezbollah fired upon Israel today ruthlessly (200 missiles) and their missiles seem to have managed to reach further into Israel than ever before. Talks of ceasefires and what have you seem to have come to a screaming halt and as the newsman said, “Olive branches are burning.”
George Bush has gone on holiday so he is out of the picture until he gets back and apparently no one from the Government has been in contact with anyone of significance in regard to the war. Britain is staying deathly quiet and has not said a word about this conflict that I have seen and I have been watching this daily.
The Syrian ambassador in U.S.A is saying that the bombs of the Israelis are getting way too close to their boarders. UN has reached no resolution and no peace deal in the matter either and yet Condi Rice was on TV saying that in her opinion, a peace deal was only a matter of days away. Everyone else is totally confused!
So there you have it, the state of the world for another day and I wonder where this is all leading to, I really do. How many times can you say, “The world has gone mad,” without it starting to sound old?
Laterz

Wednesday 2nd August
Ron Mark in Parliament yesterday gave someone the middle finger and got caught on camera and the speaker of the house refused to censure him, much to the chagrin of the opposition party. Instead of censuring him they are speaking of kicking the media out of Parliament for filming a sitting MP in Parliament inside the house. They are not allowed to film an MP inside the House unless they are standing and speaking.
Margaret Wilson, speaker of the house, is saying that she wants Parliament to have their own cameras and then they will release footage to the media, that way unseemly incidents of Politicians will not make it to the TV thus improving their image. Huh, why not leave the cameras there and make politicians accountable for their own behaviour and that way their image might improve. The idea of the speaker is tantamount to covering a pimple with a plaster and saying, “see, it is not there any more, problem is gone!”
What a joke!
Israel and Lebanon are still at it; Israel trying to hit Hezbollah hard, but apparently it is not really making an impact. Another town in Lebanon has been levelled and Amnesty International are there searching for evidence of war crimes. I don’t know, I still say that Israel has a right to defend herself and to give Hezbollah a right bollocking. After all, Hezbollah did start this and could very easily put an end to it by stopping shelling Israel and handing over the two soldiers they kidnapped thus sparking the whole sorry saga.
Mike McRoberts and his team are still in Southern Lebanon and helped one family flee the disaster and I can not help but think that New Zealand is very slanted toward helping Lebanon, and extending its synpathies to Hezbollah. I do not agree with Hezbollah at all and think that New Zealand ought to be very mindful about what she says and does right now.
Laterz

Tuesday 1st August
Israel has rejected a cease-fire and is still firing rockets despite the 48 hour cease-fire, so is Hezbollah. It has been rumoured that Syria is gearing up for war, but nothing has been officially announced. There is supposed to be a International Peace Keeping force formed, but nothing is happening still.
The focus tonight on the news is now the elderly who can not seem able to get away from the bombing. How the face of war has changed, a man recorded a bomb hit on his cell phone and it is now being played on the TV here, such a difference to the great wars that were fought, out of sight and out of mind for most, back in the 1900s.
Saw some footage from a few years back where Fidel Castro took a wild fall down some stairs and landed on his face, looked real painful. Apparently he has stepped down from the leadership of Cuba, temporarily, as he is ill with some kind of bleeding in the intestines. He has handed temporary control to his brother Raul Castro, and some are saying that this is indicative of the fact that whatever is wrong with him may actually be serious. Fidel has been in power since 1959 and is what they refer to as a dictator and people like that do not generally hand power over to someone else if the problem they are experiencing is something they expect to recover from fairly fast. It will be interesting to see what happens in the next few months in Cuba.
Laterz

Monday 31st July
Israel has killed 50 civilians in an air strike, mostly women and children, 37 were children. It is unbelievably bad there now, the 50 killed had been told to leave, but they were too scared to try.
In Beiruit they attacked the UN building and they broke in while the staff hid in the basement. Faud Saniora (Lebanese PM) is spitting tacs, understandably so, but he is saying he will not speak with Condi Rice any more, she then appeared on TV trying to say that she called the talks off. Kofi Annan had a lot to say, but really that is all that seems to be being done, talk, talk, talk! It is a terrible situation, I still think Hezbollah is responsible for this mess, they should never have sparked the trouble by doing what they did. I am not sure what Israel is up to though, they have agreed to a 48 hour cease fire to get civilians out.
Whetu Tohiko was charged with the murder of Lois Dear today, he is only 23, I wonder what his reason will be for doing what he did? Winston Peters was bitten by an insect in Malaysia and now lays in a hospital in Australia, apparently he is really sick.
Oh no, now someone is trying to sue a casino for allowing a woman to gamble away 5 million dollars and they are saying that it is the casinos fault! Huh? What happened to personal responsibility? What a crazy world, she did it, no one else!
Today the coins all changed and all our old coins are being shipped off to Korea to be melted down and turned into…wait for it…Australia currency! Can you believe that? All the way to Korea and then backtracking to Australia, wild!
Laterz

Sunday 30th July
In the Middle East all hope for a truce has gone and Israel still says no to 72 hour cease fire. Syria has closed its boarders between itself and Lebanon, and Condi Rice has gone back to Israel to talk. Hezbollah has passed Condi’s peace ideas off as the USA showing off. Israel and Lebanon are interested in bringing in a multi national force, to help with peace keeping, but Hezbollah is totally anti the idea, therein lies the original problem, Hezbollah. As an aside, Mike McRoberts, a New Zealand correspondant in Lebanon was stopped by Hezbollah today, and he and his film crew were searched. Mike said that he handed over his passport and air tickets, which had a substantial amount of cash in it. When it was handed back, he was urged to check that everything he had handed over was still there. Mike looked surprised to see that everything was still there, including his cash and the Hezbollah man looked at him and said, “See, we are not criminals.”
The PM of Lebanon was speaking about how two pregnant women were killed and a one-day old baby was also killed, and he said, “Why are babies who have not even yet been born being made to pay for the problems of the countries?”
There is a rumour that USA is supplying Israel with bombs while it provides Lebanon with blankets and food, who knows what is really going on at all?
Laterz

Saturday 29th July
The UN has asked for a 72 hour cease fire between Israel and Lebanon to get children and elderly out of harms way. They said that once you have more dead children than men in uniforms in a war, then there is a problem. I think it has always been that way, they just notice it more now because of technology. Seems that colour/ethnicity and/or religion makes much difference as to whether the world will notice and cry foul for your situation.
Look at the Hutu genocide of Rwandans back in 1994, look at Mumbai a month ago. When 9/11 happened and then the London subway was bombed, those things were plastered all over our screens 24/7 for days. Mumbai got five minutes on the evening news and Rwanda hardly got any mention made of it at all. What about what is still going on in Zimbabwe? That situation is still current, yet the world hears nothing because it is not newsworthy, why not? Well could it be that those people are not considered in the minds of a minority (who controls just about everything) as important to the big pictures as others?
It is not that I do not feel sorry for the Israeli and Lebanese civilians, I do, it is just that there have been other disasters of a greater magnitude that get hidden from the world due to being kept off the screen.
Laterz

Friday 28th July
Okay, well yesterday a man went into an Auckland gun shop with a machete intent on robbing the place. The guy that owned it, pulled out a loaded gun and shot him in the stomach. Just about everyone is saying, “Yeeha, about time people starting kicking back at these armed and dangerous crims!” Like the guy who owns the shops dad said, he would rather be watching the news and hearing the his son shot someone in self defence than to be hearing about the death of his son at the hands of a nut job wielding a machete.
Even the Sensible Sentencing Trust is saying good on him and that it is about time that criminals started to realise that if they decide to try to perpetrate violent crime that it may in fact start costing THEM their lives. Will make a change instead of all the defenceless unarmed people who get killed every year at their hands! But the irony in all of this? The Police are still deciding whether they will charge the man who shot the guy with reckless endangerment, discharging a firearm in a restricted area, can you believe that? Fuck our country is stoooooooooopid! We protect criminals and punish those who stand up for themselves and then we stand around scratching our heads saying, “What’s wrong with our society, I don’t get it!” Well DOH! GO FIGURE! If they charge that man with anything I am going to go and join in the public rally that will march through Auckland city, I swear I will.
Still no arrest in the Chris and Cru Kahui murder investigation and it sounds as though it is very unlikely that there will be. That is sad, yet again, no justice for victims, at least not in this world.
Laterz

Thursday 27th July
My am I being slack or what? I have been lacking in things to say apart from reporting on the news, which as you already know, is all entirely bad.
Laterz.

Wednesday 26th July
Four UN observers have been killed in Lebanon today, one from Austria, China, Finland and Canada. They were sheltering a bunker when it was hit. In Rome there is a huge conference and UN has condemned the attack on the UN. The Israeli Prime Minister said that they will not stop and Condi Rice is right behind Israel.
You know, I can understand the outcry against Israel and I feel real sorry for the civilians on both sides of the conflict, but at the same time, I can see how Israel has been driven to this kind of reaction. It is like being bullied for so long and then just having the one act that is the straw that breaks the camel’s back and then the object of the bullying totally explodes!
Shiloh said to me, “How would you feel if your land was taken away and given to someone else?” I replied that there would not be a lot I could do about it and for the sake of my sanity I would have to eventually get over it. I also pointed out that it was some time ago and to my mind, not a relevant reason for continually picking on someone. We all have shit that happens in our life that we do not like, but comes a point where you have to accept that you just got to let it go!
Anyway, we discuss without arguing, which is good, but he is very firmly anti-Israel, so is my other son Ashaan, he is of the same mind, as seems to be the state of mind of the majority of people. Perhaps I am the one who is really not seeing it how it really is? There is a Mark Twain saying (I think it was Twain) I read it in a book and it says something to the effect of, ‘the second you find yourself on the side of what is popular then that is the time to re evaluate your position.’ I have probably seriously screwed the saying up, but it is something to that effect.
A New Zealander is staying in the city of Tyrie to help the people of that place to survive the onslaught of Israeli fire. The Gaza mess is still in full thrust as well and they are now calling the conflict ‘routine’.
Anyway, there is not much more to be said at this point.

Tuesday 25th July
Birthday today, got to finally take my trainer wheels off for I am a real adult now! Ha ha ha, I think when you hit the 40, finally you do not have to put up with people looking at you and saying, “Well, when I was young,” blah, blah, blah. At 40 your life is finally half over! Ha ha ha, no, I am just playing around, I don’t feel too much different to what I did at 25 (which by the way, I remember like yesterday), of course my understandings have matured and my outlook on life has changed, but that is not a sudden thing. It did not happen just because I turned 40!
Anyway, so that is about it for now.
Laterz

Monday 24th July
The grandmother of Chris and Cru Kahui has finally spoken out, she is saying that a female member of the family killed the babies. Two sisters of the mother of the twins also spoke out and they are saying it was the father of the babies who killed them. It seems to be that everyone from the family is blaming other people within the family and I guess some of us are wondering whether they are all seeking their 15 minutes?
Labanon is still all fired up and ugly, and the first New Zealand family has finally gotten out. The family was saying that even though shells were dropping three kilometers away, the noise still shook all the windows. Apparently New Zealanders are having trouble getting out of Lebanon. Some of the footage coming out of Lebanon is getting pretty graphic and Israel is sure hurting the civilians terribly. The Lebanese Government needs to make Hezbollah give up the two soldiers that they abducted, they have got to, that is the only way this madness will stop!
Winston Peters is still going on about the tanty he threw at the John McKain meeting in the USA, he’s an uppity little git is Winston Peters. He has broken three major rules in politics, he has contradicted the Prime Minister, given the opposition ammo against him, and I forget the third thing! We hey, it is just Winston, I can’t believe the Government was stupid enough to allow him to be Minister of Foreign Affairs, he has no dignity, no class and absolutely no sense whatsoever or social etiquette!
A blow up castle in England got launched up into the air by a rogue gust of wind, apparently two people died and many got hurt, bad business! I had never really thought about the vulnerability of those bouncy castles outside in the elements. My kids played on them all the time at galas and that. But when you stop to think about it, they really are quite vulnerable in that they are light and it would not take much of a gust of wind to move one.

Sunday 23rd July
Have you ever stopped to think about the ugly history behind us as a race? I guess having done my page on the World Since 1966 has made me see how truly ugly we have been to each other down through the ages. I mean yes the page only goes from 1966, but obviously I have seen much further back than that on the journey I took to make the page. I don’t think there has really been any time where we have just all stood still, looked at each other and recognised each other as people, as only human. I don’t think we have ever just stood there and acknowledged, collectively, that when push comes to shove, that we need each other. I could sit here and spout ideals of a utopian society and what is really so sad is how cliché that would sound, how sad that basic ideals of freedom, ie each other living in peace is now a defunct idea?
You know, I have come to the conclusion that there is no hope for us as a race, we will never be at peace with each other, we will never view each other as expedient to the cause of the betterment of mankind. You know? It seems it is in our nature to destroy each other, and if not to do that, at least to be right. And to tear down anyone who is not as clever as us, as smart as us, the same colour as us, or the same ethnicity as us and on it goes.
A lot of Muslims hate Christians and a lot of Christians hate Muslims, and within the two factions, the minority who does not hate the other is seldom heard for the roaring that emits from the hateful. What are we doing? What are we hoping to achieve and why are we not getting there? Is it because it is inbuilt within our nature, inherent within us to destroy anything good? Is it inherent within us to find something to fight about, to disagree on? I do not think there has ever been a time of peace, where the whole world was still, where no act of genocide was being carried out, where no war was being fought, where the innocent weren’t dying.
And then there’s all the people who fought to their very last to make this place a better place to live in and now I wonder what they really died for? All those people who died in WW1, WW2, all those people who laid down their lives for an ideal, for an idea, what a waste! They achieved nothing because the world still marches onto the crazy beat of a war drum or whatever you may want to call it. I remember this song where this guy says that there are several inalienable truths, politicians will philander, prices will rise and you too will get old. That as you do, you will look back and imagine that there once was a day when politicians were honourable and prices were reasonable. I think they call that waking up and smelling the coffee, not liking the smell and thus burying your head back in the same sand as you momentarily lifted it out from.
I always imagined as a teen that one day the world would wake up and that one day we would all live in peace because we would all suddenly be the adults and we understood the world so much better than those who came before us. But you know, as we became adults, the ones who went before us poisoned us with the same prejudices, greed, ideals of right and wrong as they held, thus we have gone on to become yet another generation who have reeked havoc upon this world. We were faced with the same situations, and as kids, we thought there were answers and solutions that were attainable, it seemed so straightforward, how wrong we were!
See, we grew up and learned what life was really about, eat or be eaten, kill or be killed, the almighty dollar reigns and we learned how the world rewards lust and greed. We also learned how intolerable the world is of honesty, of truth because often being honest and truthful means that someone gets denied, someone can not have the slice of pie they were counting on getting.
I am not a Communist, nor do I think that autocratic rule is the best thing, but I do not really think that the ideals of democratic rule are working out too well either. I mean, democracy, when you pare it down, is merely the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half the time. At the end of the day, democratic decisions are supposedly the result of the combined consideration of what the majority would like to see happen. But more often than not, a democratic government makes decisions that are not popular with the majority anyway, and if majority rules, how is that any different to autocratic rule? Autocratic decisions still have the input from some kind of advisory, they still reflect what the majority thinks, the only difference might be the size of the majority.
When mankind got started, and God placed Kings as the head of countries, He knew what He was doing. Yes it was autocratic rule and yes there were still wars, but if God ordained that countries should be headed by kings, not governments, then maybe there was a very good reason why? Most kings accepted that they were there by the hand of God, and they felt responsible before God and took that responsibility very seriously.
Sure some of them were corrupt, some of them did wrong and people suffered, but look at the way of the world now, it is far worse than it has ever been. Most kingdoms have had their reign reduced to that of a figurehead and look at the mess their land and their people are in. Maybe it was a mistake to topple dynasties, any dynasty and to install our version of democratic rule? Because when I think about it long enough, (and I guess it could be argued that I shouldn’t think about it at all) democratic rule isn’t really that democratic, not unless you are rich enough to buy favour.
Maybe everyone will think I am a closet Commie or something? But I am not, I am just trying to work out where we went wrong when we should by now know better. If we do not know better it can only be indicative of the fact that we are incapable of learning from our mistakes. I do not find anything beautiful about this world right now, we have wars, famines, murders, animal cruelty and all that other icky stuff going on all the time and it never stops, it is hard to see beauty when everything seems so dark and hopeless. I guess beauty needs to be appreciated in the very tiny glimpses we get of it every now and then.
I am not depressed, just incredibly frustrated by what is going on with us as a people, me included, I mean I have taken a side in what is going on, to remain neutral, to my mind, is to not care at all. But if no one cared then no one would takes sides thus maybe the problems would stop? How insane is that? I do not know what the answer is, thank goodness for God is all I can say, and even then, how must He weep at what He sees us doing? We are out of control, we have lost our collective vision of humanity and what that really means, or maybe we never had it? And again, this all probably means nothing at all and I am merely thinking out loud.
Laterz.

Saturday 22nd July
Winston came home from his tanty throwing tour of USA and stopped in Aussie on his way. While there the Aussie politicians said they were so happy with NZ that Kiwi can rely on Australia to get them out of Lebanon. I laughed so much at that offer, crikey, Australians can’t rely on Australia to get them out of Lebanon, so why would Kiwi?
There was a protest march today here in Auckland against Israel. Lebanese, Palestinians and a few Kiwi protested against Israel’s actions toward Lebanon. All I have to say to that is that so long as Lebanon continues to actively allow Hezbollah to be a part of their Government and then shield them when they kidnap people from another country, then they will just have to take their lumps. The protestors should have been yelling and screaming at the Lebanese government, not the Israelis. If Israel was really just interested in wrecking Lebanon and killing as many as they could, then they would not be dropping fliers telling the Lebanese when they are going to bomb and where to go to be safe. I don’t know of any other war where the opposition did that kind of favour for the people and certainly that kind of behaviour is not indicative of a nation trying to commit genocide, as they are being accused of doing.
Hezbollah tried to act like a big brutish bully, and now that they have bitten off more than they can chew, they want everyone to feel sorry for them. Well I feel sorry for the average Joe Lebanese citizen who has nothing to do with this and does not support Hezbollah, but if a country wants to support terrorists, then they need to take it up with their Government or just shut up and take their lumps. And NO Israel should NOT give Hezbollah the prisoners they are demanding in return for the two Israeli soldiers, remember, “We do NOT negotiate with terrorists,” we have seen others lose their life because of this policy. But the policy needs to be adhered to because terrorists need to know that people are not going to buckle and give them what they want, the second we buckle and negotiate, they have won. If terrorists realise that terrorism will not reap them the benefits they seek, then how long can they stay in business? Okay, so maybe they can stay in business for a hell of a lot longer than I give them credit for. But still, it would not be as bigger chunk of time as it would be if their actions procured for them what they seek every time they pull their crap on innocent people. I think Israel is doing the right thing, like I said before, they did not go looking for trouble, trouble came looking for them, as it invariably does.
Laterz

Friday 21st July
Australians are saying that their government has abandoned them in Lebanon, not sure why, I guess if I watch the news I’ll figure it out. Kofi Annan has asked for an immediate cease fire between Israel and Lebanon, and he is blaming Hezbollah. But he is also kind of banging USA for not being assertive enough with Israel, both Israel and USA went Kofi back, saying how do you get a cease fire with a group of terrorists? The British newspaper said the only countries rejecting what Kofi said are Israel, America and Britain. I still maintain that Israel needs to show that you can not walk into their country and kidnap Israelis for free, and Hezbollah is still refusing to release the two soldiers they kidnapped until Israel agrees to let their Lebanese prisoners go. Bottom line, if Israel agrees to their demands, then they are negotiating with terrorists, something no other country will do. Israel has a right to react as she has, if Lebanon wants to shelter terrorists then they can not cry foul if they get bombed.
The Australians are unable to get out, they were supposed to get onto a ship, but it was double booked and the Canadians got it. The Greeks allowed some Australians to board their ship, but they had to stop after boarding 40 Australians as Israel was about to start bombing again, and the Captain wanted to get his ship out.
Laterz

Thursday 20th July
47 Patricia K was convicted of drink driving and was five times higher than the legal limit, that is the highest recorded level ever in New Zealand history.
We are being hit by rain, sleet and snow again, there are slips floods and goodness only knows what else. A house has slid down a hill too, more landslides but that is what happens when you build on steep hills. Wairarapa is going under water again too. 2000 people went to the Tongan Prince and Princesses funerals in Nuku Alofa, they were killed in a car accident in LA, some young girl was racing her car, lost control and smacked into the car containing the Prince and Princess.
Laterz

Wednesday 19th July
Don Brash (National Party) is trying to get all cool by getting in with NZ clothing labels and young bands. Don Brash looked a little silly! The band they are hooking up with, their first hit was a song called White Trash, and they are using a clothing label called Dawn Raid, but National Party was the father of dawn raids on Pasifika over-stayers in the 70s…ahem, Don, big mistake, huge, phenomenal!
They are getting closer to an arrest in the Lois Dear case, which is good, but are no closer to arresting anyone for the Chris and Cru Kahui murders.
New Zealanders are finally leaving Lebanon, Israel suspended bombing to let rescue ships in and out. Israel is still bombing Hezbollah hard out and they are retaliating with almost as many bombs. Lebanon fears that once the foreigners leave, that Israel will step up their attacks. Bush has accused Syria of helping Hezbollah with weapons and providing a safe haven for Hezbollah terrorists. Bush also suggested that Syria might be wanting to go back into Lebanon, Syria strongly denies this and also state that they quit supplying Hezbollah with weapons when they left Lebanon a year ago.
The tsunami that hit Java is much worse than first thought, and the Indonesian Government is saying that they were warned it was coming, but warning alarms had not been put into place. Many people have been lost in Java, but still, the Israel/Lebanon crisis takes top place in the news reports.
Laterz

Tuesday 18th July
The teacher who was killed in the classroom was 64 year old Lois Dear and everyone is pretty mystified as to why anyone would do that to her. The school is to reopen tomorrow.
Islamic Jihad held a march through Palestine yesterday in support of Hezbollah and they have been burning Israeli flags. George Bush was caught swearing on mic when he was speaking to Tony Blair, and all he said was, “All we have to do is get Syria to tell Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it is all over.” He did not know that the mic was still on and, as far as what he said, I thought good on him. It is amazing how many times when I worked as a sound tech that people forgot they were wired. Sometimes the first I’d know that they had forgotten was when I heard them tinkling in the loo or something. One of my colleagues once heard Gary McCormick chatting up a woman on Lampton Quay back in the late 80s. It was Tony Blair who realised it was on and switched it off, Georgie boy was oblivious.
A tsunami hit Java, they had no warning system, it washed in ashore a reasonable way, 90 dead and many missing.
Three New Zealanders missed their ride out of Lebanon, they arrived too late and are now stuck there. Northern Israel (Haifa), is being hit hard by Hezbollah bombs and so Israel is hitting back hard too. In six days 215 Lebanese and 24 Israelis have been killed. Israel did say that they are not trying to hit civilians, they are trying to take out Hezbollah, unfortunately, Hezbollah are spread out through the civilians, so Israel is causing collateral damage to civilians. I feel sorry for Israel and the innocent people in Lebanon who really have nothing to do with the conflict as such.
A man has been charged with sedition (first in years) for attacking the Prime Minister’s electorate office with a bomb and because he distributed leaflets urging like minded people to do the same.
The space shuttle Challenger landed safely at around 1.00am this morning New Zealand time. At least it didn’t explode and vapourise the occupants like the last one did. Personally I have trouble celebrating space flights, they just seem supurfluous to the world’s troubles right now. But I found something real interesting that they said though, that they were trying to work out how the heat levels work upon the space craft during re entry of the Earth’s atmosphere. Am I the only one who finds this an odd thing to say? Think about it, they landed on the moon many times in the late 1960s early 1970s, so why not just use whatever those spaceships were made of? Why are they trying to fix something that is actually not broken? Obviously they had no problems with the heat on the ships upon re entry back then, I mean no astronauts got fried coming back in, no ship fell apart and exploded, so why not stick with what works? Why the need to study it now? I am sorry, but sometimes the things they say make no sense at all, I mean if it worked in the late 60s early 70s and was safe enough to land on the moon, then why not just use it now? Fair enough statement I think.
And another thing that Bush said last year has really been nagging at me for quite some time, he said, and I quote, “By 2018 we hope to possess the technology to be able to return to the moon.”
Um, what’s wrong with the technology you used in the 1960s and 1970s? It worked then, so why not stay with it? I don’t get it, either Bush's advisors are blithering idiots who know nothing about space travel or NASA is, not sure on that one yet. What I find confusing is that if they have been to the moon before, then there should be no need to wait until 2018 for the further technological advances to get there again or anything else. Anyway, that is me for now.
Laterz

Monday 17th July
Eighty-eight years ago at a few minutes past 12.00am the Romanovs were murdered.
Okay, so New Zealand has enlisted the help of Britain to get our citizens out of Lebanon. Around thirty or so Kiwis will depart Lebanon on British warships, what is to stop Lebanon ‘accidentally’ firing on those, I do not know. Putin still maintains that Israel is over reacting and USA says she is justified, I am with USA on this one.
In Tokoroa a teacher was found beaten to death in her classroom yesterday, she was there getting her class ready for today. She taught infants, year 1. There seems to be no clues as to why what happened to her has happened.
The Coroner has released the official cause of death in regard to Chris and Cru Kahui, he stated that they both had their heads either struck with or struck against a blunt object. One of the twins had a broken femur, also sustained during the attack that killed them, and both children had other injuries sustained before the events that killed them, what a sad short life those two little babies had. Still no arrests in the case, and apparently the investigation team is no closer to arresting anyone.
Two other people were murdered over the weekend in separate incidences, one was shot, and one was stabbed. Our murder rate is absolutely incredible!
Bob Geldof was here during the week slamming our country because, in his humble opinion, we do not give enough in foreign aid to third world countries. I have only one thing to say to Mr Geldof on that topic. “Well Bob, while our country has such a high murder rate, particularly infant deaths, it is my humble opinion that we should be spending any spare money we have on sorting out our own shit before we try to further sort out anyone else’s.”
I think Geldof is arrogant and should look at the whole picture before he shoots his mouth off about what we are doing here. We have people in this country who can not afford to feed their children three times a day because their income is so low. Until we work out where we are going wrong, then I don’t believe we have any business upping the aid that we send overseas. We send millions overseas every year and if Geldof doesn’t like the level of our contribution then I would suggest that Mr Geldof get his big mouth back over here and dispense some of his ‘great wisdom’ and help our Government sort our problems so we can send more money. Until he is prepared to do that then he should shut his great gob!
So there!
Anyway, so Jonty went back to school today in his brand new uniform totally happy and glad to be going back. That’s about it really.
Laterz

Sunday 16th July
America and Russia in St Petersburg are having trouble on agreeing who is at fault in the Middle East, that is what they are saying. Vladamir Putin is saying that Israel has responded disproportionately, but I think they should react harshly. I mean, hang on a minute, if one country goes into another and kidnaps their soldiers, then I would have thought that it was obvious who was at fault. Clearly Israel did not seek out trouble, trouble came to her on both sides and within days, makes you wonder whether the Hezbollah/Hizbollah folks and the Palestinians came up with this between themselves. And now Lebanon is firing Iranian-made rockets and missiles at Israel, so if the two sides are keeping Israel occupied, what is the middle doing? Would the middle be Iran? I would need to refresh my geography, but if Iran is to the side of them, keeping in mind Labanon is directly to the North side of Israel and Palestine is to the South, on the West is the sea, so on the East, is that Iran? I don’t know, was just wondering. Geography was never really my strong point.
New Zealand is scrambling to get our people out of Lebanon and I think we are getting them to Cyprus like most of the other nations. Korea is now being hit with sanctions for playing with matches in the fireworks factory, so I hope that it will put an end to their games with missiles and nukes and what have you.
At a little after midnight it will be 88 years since the Romanovs were executed, sounds like such a long time ago on one hand, and yet not that long ago on the other.
Anyway, nothing much else to talk about at the moment. Oh yeah, I have managed to get all the way up to the start of 98 on my ‘The World Since 1966’ page in here.
Laterz

Saturday 15th July
Watched that doco last night, it was called One Day in September. It was really quite a heart wrenching doco to watch, the hostage takers were really quite cold and devoid of human emotion. They killed two of the hostages at the Olympic Village in Munich to begin with and the German Police were going to storm the building, but an East German film crew were on the roof opposite them filming what they were doing and broadcasting it live. Thus the hostage takers knew exactly what was going on, so the idea of storming the building in an attempt to rescue the hostages was abandoned, which was just as well because it would have been a blood bath.
So the hostages were taken by bus to waiting helicopters which then took the hostages and the kidnappers to the airport to board a plane. On the plane was a team of German police officers, supposedly they would overtake the kidnappers and rescue the hostages once they boarded the plane. About a second or two before the helicopters landed on the airport runway, the team on the plane decided to abandon the idea, they believed they were not skilled enough to overtake the kidnappers and thus unanimously voted to leave the plane.
Meantime, between the Olympic Village and getting on the helicopters, they discovered that there were eight kidnappers, not the four or five they had originally thought there was. At the airport there were only five marksmen waiting and there was no communication between the marksmen or anyone else, so there was no way to tell them that there were eight. The plan for the marksmen was, once the first marksman started shooting, then the rest would follow suit.
The helicopters landed and two of the kidnappers got out to check the plane out, on their way to the plane, one of the marksmen started firing and all hell broke loose. In the meantime the hostages sat in the two helicopters bound at their hands and tied to each other and under guard of the other six kidnappers.
One of the two kidnappers outside the helicopters was mortally wounded and so the other ran back to the helicopters, knowing it was all over. The kidnappers then opted to throw grenades into the two helicopters where the hostages were trapped. The grenades went off but did not kill all the hostages, the ensuing fire did, and in the meantime, the marksmen were duking it out with the kidnappers. Such was the disorganisation of the operation that the marksmen actually shot their own men.
If all of that wasn’t enough of a horror, the worst was yet to come. The police inside the tower could hear the hostages screaming, but because the firing of the marksmen was so wildly out of control, with no synchronicity, common goal or even identified target (they were shooting at anything that moved and had not even strategically placed themselves around their target, to the point where some of the marksmen were in the direct line of fire of their fellow marksmen), they could not get to the hostages to help them. They instead watched them die.
Somehow one of the team outside the airport rang the local TV station and told them that the eleven hostages had been successfully recovered and then two hours later they had to announce that they had been misinformed and that all the hostages were gone. Three of the kidnappers survived and were immediately set to prison and the next day the remaining Israeli athletes flew home to Israel with their dead team mates and the Munich games resumed as though nothing had even happened.
Three months later, before the three kidnappers could be tried or even deported to Israel to face charges, another plane was hi jacked and the hijackers demanded the release of the three kidnappers. Without consulting anyone, the German government elected to secretly release them to Libyan authorities and the three were welcomed home as heroes later that same day.
The kidnappers were smiling and saying that they were pleased that they had done what they’d done to the Israeli hostages, stating that now the world would hear the Palestinian voice. They were almost smug about the fact that they had killed the innocent Israeli athletes.
I don’t know how much after these events that the next sequence of events occurred, but Israeli Secret Police managed to kill two of the three remaining hijackers and the one remaining hijacker has survived numerous attempts to take his life. He now lives in Africa with his wife and two daughters. Even today, he states that he is proud of what he did in Munich in 1972, no regrets, no compassion, no empathy, just pleasure at a job well done.
It was in that instant (and as the TV announcer broke the news that the hostages had been lost) that I kind of had a fleeting understanding of how one generation of an ethnicity can so readily hate another ethnicity of people. I understood how that hate is passed down, and I am speaking on behalf of the Israelis, not the Palestinians or Libyans. I have no tolerance for a people who can have the mindset that it is okay to go and hurt others who are innocently going about their business. Those kidnappers irreparably changed lives and they didn’t care about the pain they had inflicted on anyone else at all, all they cared for was pursuing coldly and blindly, a wide path of bloodshed and destruction in an effort to attain their goal. How numb of conscience must one be in order to be able to kill another man and think that it is okay, that the means justifies the end? I don’t understand that kind of mentality, I don’t understand it and I don’t even want to try, it is not worthy of being understood.
And the state of the world as it stands? I wholeheartedly support Israel in their attacks on Lebanon and on the Palestinians who have taken that soldier, for once I agree with George Bush, Israel has the right to defend herself as does any other nation. Israel did not set out looking for trouble, the Hizbollah and the country that allows them refuge there sought out trouble, they provoked it and now they are starting to think that they may have bitten off more than they can chew. I hope Israel blows them to Kingdom Come, I really do. Israel has taken a lot of grief from those people for years, it is time that those others realised that they can not just take innocent life on their wide path of blind cold murder to achieve their goal. Israel won’t wear it any more, and if you attack her or her people, then best you have your running shoes on because you are going to need them.
Laterz

Friday 14th July
When I was twelve, in 1979, I bought some stamps to post a letter and I lost them, I could not figure out what had happened to them. I found them today 27 years later, can you believe it? I was looking at my scrap book from 1979 and I saw this little piece of white paper poking out from under one of my Bee Gee pictures. (I was thinking of doing a ‘My Teen Years’ page) and anyway so I decided to pull on the piece of paper, and what should come out? Two pristine International Year of the Child 1979 10 cent stamps. Well initially I laughed, I mean that is like so weird because they have been in there all those years and my scrap book has been packed into so many boxes and moved from house to house to house. I can not believe that the scrapbook has stood the test of time let alone the stamps being hidden in there all this time. I have looked at the scrap book many times over the years and never even noticed the little piece of white paper poking out. Sorry, I am just blown away because I actually remember losing the stamps! Well that is me for today. Okay for something even weirder, I just did my 1972 page in The World Since 1966 and I highlighted the Munich Games in 1972 where Israeli hostages were take, well on TV at the moment there is a doco on, Munich Olympic Games 1972, is that bizarre or what?
Laterz

Thursday 13th July
Israel sent troops into Lebanon after some Lenabnese, (Hizbollah) took two Israeli soldiers hostage and killed eight others. Israel is calling their actions an act of war. Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said his government had not known of the Hizbollah attack and did not endorse it or accept responsibility. The Middle East is going to hell in a handbasket rather rapidly.
God help us all.
A twenty-one year old man has been arrested and charged with the murder of the man who was washed up on the beach with his hands cut off. The murdered man was Tony Stanlake, an ex-fireman. Apparently the young man is denying all charges, so it will be a wait and see as to what happens.
Still no arrest in the Chris and Cru Kahui case. The sneaker with the foot in it story seems to have fallen off the radar. I don’t know, our country and the world in general seems to be in a mighty fine pickle right now, what is to become of us all, really?
Laterz
Ps I rang my soon to be ex-husband today and let him know that I think it is disgusting that he makes me do favours for him in order that he help with HIS kids. I told him that he will have to organise the divorce papers from his end and if it costs him money then tough break. Jonty is HIS child too, not just mine and he has left me struggling for the last eleven almost 12 years to feed, clothe and house them. He pays $21.00 child support a month, and he earns a substantial amount of moolah from the business we started together that I got NOTHING out of when we split. So I don’t think I am wrong taking a stand on the principle of the thing, I mean I am quite happy to sign the papers when he sends them all written up and ready.
I expect that I will receive a rather nasty phonecall from an irate ex tonight sometime, oh well you get that on the big jobs!
Laterz

Wednesday 12th July
Was watching BBC early this morning and saw breaking news that there had been an explosion on a train in Mumbai, India. Fell asleep not long after. Woke up this morning to read that it was six bombs on packed trains in peak hour traffic and that the carnage is unreal. I spoke with my son Shiloh and I said to him, “What’s going on with the world Shi? There’s India and Pakistan duking it out, Russia and Chechnya, Afghanistan and the Americans, America, Britain and Iraq, Israel and Palestine, Iran messing with nukes, Korea playing with long range missiles and China getting upset about it.” He looked at me and he said, “Well, mum seems the world is intent on playing with matches in a fireworks factory.”
I thought about that and I said, “Yeah, aren’t they though?”
God help us all!
The above was written in the morning, the following the night before. Still no arrests in the Chris and Cru Kahui case, sadly, it becomes ever more apparent that it may be another Lilybing!
I am a day ahead, it is really only Wednesday, but I used Wednesdays date on Tuesday as well as Tuesdays date, but I won’t tell if you don’t.
Anyway, but I have been thinking about music. I mean we all know that I am always thinking of something, but I was listening to Pavarotti singing Miss Sarajevo with U2. Wow, I mean I am NOT an opera buff not in the slightest, but man there is something about his voice when he sings in that song. I turn it up and I just sail away, there is something almost pure in the sound when jumps in at his part of the song and then when he holds that higher note for a few seconds near the end of his solo. I wonder if he could break glass with the mere sound of his voice like a really good soprano may be able to?
Normally that kind of music would make me want to burst my own ear drums with a kebab stick or an exceptionally long skinny cocktail fork, but wow it is just so good. It reminds me of the electric guitar in the bridge of California by Manfred Man, you just kind of get lost inside it and don’t think of a thing except to listen. I wish I could find more opera like that, like Pavarotti does in the track Miss Sarajevo.
Another song that is just pure delight is Israel Kamakawiwo ole’s rendition of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. I stumbled on it when it was used here a few years ago for a Dulux paint ad on TV. I finally tracked the song down and it is just delightful. Mazzy Star’s Wild Horses is sublime too.
Same Day
I did some more on my page called The World Since 1966 and I learned an interesting little fact of which I was previously unaware in regard to New Zealand history. Back in 1986 two French agents from the DGSE in France planted a bomb on our peace activists boat called the Rainbow Warrior. What I did not know was that the former Prime Minister of France, 1981 - 1995 François Mitterand, was the one who gave the direct order for the agents to bomb the boat.
I also was reminded of Bob Marley, he died May 14th 1981. I remember being on holiday down the South Island when I was around twelve. We stayed beside a rivermouth that flowed into the sea...(back in the days where you didn't need a permit to fish in the river, pitch a tent by the sea, light a camp fire or bbq, spit in the wind or breathe the wrong way). We swam and caught fish by day and at night we went floundering in the lagoon. I had a new pocketknife and I remember cutting a lid from a tin just to show my foster brothers that my knife was better than theirs. Only a girl would do something like that!
Another day down there, I remember we were in this pea field. My three foster brothers and I lying on our backs in the middle of this great field, I mean it went for miles and we were just lying there getting the peas out of the pods and eating them. We ate so many that our entire mouth got so itchy it almost drove us insane! But I remember Bob Marley’s song Is This Love playing on my radio as we lay there in that field under the hot summer sun. Back in the days where we never thought about being blown to oblivion by nuclear war heads courtesy of Russia and there were not videos of terrorists beheading innocent people floating around on the internet, there was no internet. There had been terrorist acts, but we knew them as guerillas, not terrorists.
We headed up toward Picton that afternoon to catch the Ferry back to the North Island, but we had an overnight stop to make before we got there. We stayed by a river somewhere near Kaikoura, and it was not long after there were all these claims of there having been UFOs over Kaikoura. My biggest concern there that night was being carried off by little grey men to their space ship and having little components shoved up my nostril into my brain or something. Perhaps I feared becoming a food source for them? No, I am quite sure it was the gadgets up the nose that concerned me most or perhaps it was the fear of being dropped off in a little red post office phone box in the middle of Blenheim naked or something! I mean my foster mother would NEVER have forgiven me for THAT!
I remember we swam in the river as the sun was going down and I kept moving to the part of the river that the sun was still shining on because it was warmest. I did not notice that my foster family had become mere dots on the horizon because I had wandered following the sun so far away, I was popular let me tell you. Once we ste up camp for the night we got eaten alive by mozzies and sandflies and let me tell you, they don’t breed em bigger than they breed em in Kaikoura! The next morning we headed off toward Picton and we had some time to kill so we stopped at a beach and us kids wanted to play so we made balls out of kelp and played cricket. I don’t know if you ever made a ball out of kelp as a kid (kelp is seaweed that washes up on the shore during the tide) but man can those suckers bounce high! And man do they stink!
We tried to make sammies for lunch and all us kids about puked because the stink of the kelp on our hands got onto our sammies and ooh yuck it was gross! Then we got on the boat for the 2.00 pm sailing and it was nice, the weather was clear etc. I always liked the sailings across Cook Strait, I never thought about Jaws or Poseidon when we were out there, I often thought about the Wahine though and used to keep an eye on Red Rocks as we passed by…and we’d stand on the edge of the boat screaming out to Shari, Marlene and Linda (our cousins) just in case they were staying at their bach at Red Rocks while we were sailing past. They probably wouldn’t have heard us anyway, but the other passengers on the ship did.
Then we’d dock at Wellington, get in the car, drive off the Ferry and drive home to TeHoro, and I always loved coming home. There was just something pure about the way the sun shone on the green hills, the shadows in the tall trees, the sounds of the wood pigeons and the smell. I loved the farm.
Why am I talking about this? I don’t know, just felt like talking about it.
Oh yeah the man who was found in the water with his hands chopped off was Tony Stanley an ex-fireman. No one seems to know why it was done. India's space bid failed, a four storey building in America collapsed due to an explosion courtesy of a gas leak, and a Chechnyan(sp) terrorist was killed. Oh yeah and I saw a man on the news last night, a Chinese man and his name was Peter Pan, I couldn't stop laughing when I saw his name, don't know why I found it so funny!
Anyway, laterz.

Tuesday July 11th
I guess it is kind of egocentric to think that anyone actually comes in here and reads these entires isn’t it? I mean really, what other kind of person but an egocentric one would even keep a diary or a blog? Okay, maybe I am being a little harsh here. I enjoy writing this.
I was thinking about Nicky Romanov and how mortified he would probably be to discover that the whole world had access to his diaries? Or maybe he knew that one day they might? I don’t know, I just can’t imagine that it would have been a thought that would have particularly thrilled him. And reading his diaries is kind of eerie, you know participating vicariously in his little humiliations, particularly after they were placed under house arrest and he was no longer Tsar. How the mighty fall, the only sad thing is, that I don’t think he was in the least bit arrogant, I think he was really quite normal and down to earth, in some aspects.
I have kept diaries since I was ten, and I had this one particular diary I kept when I was twelve that I would be absolutely mortified to find out was being read by people. The worst of it is, that I don’t recall what I did with it or what became of it. I kept this other one that stands out from all the others when I was fifteen and I had this screaming raging crush on a teacher, oh my he was cute. I used to write in my diary every time he even so much as stared at me. I remember this one night when I was working at my job at the fish n chip shop, it was called Kiwi Grill and I was busy doing something when my boss said that he had to go out for a few minutes. I was left in the shop alone and suddenly we had this influx of people. Anyway I was cooking burgers and frying chips and fish in the deep fryer when I turned around to look at the customers and there was my crush standing there staring straight at me.
I just wanted to jump into the deep fryer thus ending it all, however, that was not an option. I had to serve him and he was with his friend from school, my history teacher, who was also quite cute, but whom I thought was a bit of a drip. Anyway, so I tried to ask him what he wanted and I got all my wucking murds fuddled. I gave him the wrong change and he checked cos he was my Math teacher and he knew my dreaded secret (that I sucked at Math!). Then I had to cook his food and he watched me the whole time, my heart was in my mouth and I felt like every move I made was under the microscope. While I was doing his food I remember Waiting for a Girl like you by Foreigner playing on the shop radio and then Open Arms by Journey played too, and those two songs seared the memory of those moments into my mind forever. As much as I had a crush on him, I about passed out in the corner of the shop with relief when he left.
After work I went to stay at my girlfriend’s place for the weekend and I remember when her dad picked us up I couldn’t wait to get back to her house to write in my diary to report the incident of my crush in the fish n chip shop! I guess the irony is that I would give anything to feel those emotions again sometimes, and above all, oh my I would hate to think that THAT diary is anywhere around being read. It was all Steve Meyers this and Steve Meyers that and Steve grew wings and flew today and yesterday he walked on water, ya know? Ha ha ha ha, wow, diaries and memories, some of them are pretty cool.
Laterz

July 10th
I believe we have some incredibly insane Kiwis here. A man’s body was washed up on the beach with his hands missing and his head almost severed. He washed up on the beach at Red Rocks where I used to go holidaying as a kid. Further up the road (about one hundred miles on the other coast) at Himatangi (where I holidayed once or twice as a very small child) a sneaker washed up on shore with a foot in it. They say that that foot is totally unrelated to the Red Rocks body and so one has to conclude that there is another body floating around somewhere (seeing as how no one has come forward to claim the foot). A fifteen year old boy was stabbed to death at a party up the road in Maurewa on Saturday night, and also a man was stabbed in the face in Albany on Friday night. He ended up with the knife snapped off in his face but he has miraculously survived. And an elderly lady (95 years old) was robbed and beaten for $5.00 and a bottle of milk.
HELLO!
We have a population of just on 4 million people, and our murder/violence rate is incredible! Even compared to San Diego who has like 7 million people (maybe more actually) our murder rate is way higher than theirs. There is something incredibly wrong with our little Island nation, there is something inherently wrong within a society of four million people who have a murder rate as high as we do, there has to be. Stuffed if I know what it is though, perhaps it is just that general humanitarian deficit we seem to have as a world in general. Perhaps we are somewhat numbed to the concept of life and death because TV makes it seem so insignificant. I mean think about it, how many movies did you watch as a kid (aside from war ones) where a body count over twenty was generated within the first 30 seconds? I mean a movie isn’t a movie if it doesn’t generate a body count within the first few minutes of viewing. There are so many cop shows, CSI, Gone Without a Trace, 24, you name it, where the loss of life is reduced to a looking glass microscopic lesson on biology. That, as opposed to offering anything by way of a truly honest, straight-faced moral stance on death or the taking of a life. I think there is a sector of society that is truly anaesthetised to the concept and consequences of taking life, and we as a society don’t hold people nearly as accountable for what they do as we should. Oh yeah, and there still have been no arrests in the case of Chris and Cru Kahui, it will most likely be another Lillybing, no one will be arrested and charged with anything at all. Lillybing’s murderers got away scott free, so will Chris and Cru’s, such a shame, our country is truly screwed.
A Russian Air bus crashed on its way from Moscow to L (can’t remember the name) but it is the second fatal air crash in Russia in two months. Whole families have been wiped out in the crash, it was real sad. In Iraq, killing squads were going around murdering any people identified as one ethnicity. Bombs are still going off, car bombs and all kinds.
Dr John Money has finally died, he came home to New Zealand, donated his million dollar art collection to a gallery in Gore, and promptly kicked the proverbial bucket. He was involved in sex reassignment ops etc at Johns Hopkins Hospital in American and was involved in the case of the twin boys. I wonder if he felt as though he had really achieved anything in his life?
It is kind of interesting how many of the great minds and actors, sportsmen etc come from New Zealand, in fact in some aspects, if you research it long enough, it is just plain scary! Italy won the World Cup, took it from France, good old Italians, Mussolini would have been proud! Okay, enough with the sarcasm already!
Laterz

Sunday 9th July (June's birthday)

I was walking in the park
Dreaming of a spark
When I heard the sprinklers whisper
Shimmer in the haze of summer lawns.
Then I heard the children singing
They were running through the rainbows.
They were singing a song for you
Well it seemed to be a song for you
The one I wanted to write for you

Lavender's blue, dilly dilly,
Lavender's green
When I am King, dilly dilly
You will be Queen
A penny for your thoughts my dear
I.O.U. for your love

Lavender's green, dilly dilly,
Lavender's blue
When you love me, dilly dilly,
I will love you
A penny for your thoughts my dear
A penny for your thoughts my dear
I.O.U. for your love

Lavender dreams dilly, dilly
Lavender true
Will you miss me dilly dilly,
I do miss you
A penny for your thoughts my dear
A penny for your thoughts my dear
I.O.U for your love
For your love

I included those lyrics because they are just so nice. The song is Lavender by Marillion and I used the song to make a movie in moviemaker of the Romanovs. I got all the pics of them that I liked and I set them all out, timed them all the way I wanted them and the result was actually really quite beautiful. I sent a copy to a friend who sent me the song and a copy to another friend Jackie, and both liked it very much.
I think I worked out how I lost all my text out of here, I think it was one of the nights when the site crashed, and when it went back to screen that whole section got wiped. Pico are having another, 'be nice to Sarah day' they upped my storage to 400...Thank You, Thank You, Thank You Piczo, you ROCK!!!!! It means I can build more pages and do some of the other projects I had a mind to doing in here.
Anyway, it is SUnday (all day if I am good) and so I am chilling out listening to Lavender and working in here, so all in all a pretty nice day, even though it is raining again and all the poor flooded people down South are getting even more flooded. If you can find Lavender by Marillion, bogart it and have a listen.
Laterz

Saturday 8th July
Our neighbours decided to have a party until nearly 3.00am and their stereo was so loud man, it was unreal. Anyway, this morning at around 8.00 my two Newfoundlands decided to bark crazily at the seagulls that have come in from the beach on account of the storms. I lay in bed thinking I should go tell them to be quiet, but I thought no, the neighbours might enjoy the incessant barking of my two great LOUD Newfoundlands in their hungover state.
Some times nature has a knack of delivering justice in a way that we can only dream of doing. BIG SMILE!
Well nothing much has been going on really. Jonty went off to the wave pools with his friends and stayed there all day, he really had a blast. He then went back to their house to play and I picked him up in the evening. Shiloh went camping the night of the great floods, got wet, came home. Tasha has not really been doing much of anything, it is school holidays and already the boredom has set in.
Watched BBC early this morning (on account of not being able to sleep) and saw that the Israel thing is begining to get a little ugly, hope it doesn't blow too much out of control, however, I suspect that it will. Still no arrests here for the murder of Chris and Cru, the baby twins that were murdered.
I tried to track down some details on Tsar Nicky's mother, Maria Feodorovna, she is supposed to be being interred with her son this year, been trying to find out when and by whom and if it has already been done, no dice though. I contacted someone at the St Petersburg Times (I think that was the name) but maybe they don't speak English?
Anyway, that's about it for now.
Laterz

Thursday 6th July
Heard from Wolf, doesn’t sound like he has been up to much. Apparently July 4 was stinking hot and so they didn’t do much. Sounds bizarre to hear about it being stinking hot in Colorado while we are just freezing here. I mean there is snow in places that haven’t seen snow in yonks! I seem to have my grey Dickies beanie permanently attached to my head these days and I have already managed to lose the green pair of fingerless gloves I bought like two weeks ago, teach me to buy green I suppose.
Been talking to John Kendrick in e-mail about various things to do with the Claimant. The whole thing sounds sad, apparently the claimant rarely spoke of what his life was like, that he instead used to sit at the piano and play music and sing songs, he dealt with it that way. I can’t help thinking about how haunted he must have felt if he was Alexei, living with the horror of what was done, that room in the dead of the night, the carnage, the brutality. No wonder some humans lose their minds, not that he did.
Ghosts are a terrible thing, by ghosts I mean the things that you keep hidden from the rest of the living, the people around you, and you hide it because you know that they would never understand.
Then you die and in one way or another it doesn’t really lay the ghosts to rest, they seem to live on in the minds and the imaginings of others. What must life have been like for him when he shut his eyes in the dark of night? What did he think of, where did his mind wander to? To Yekaterinburg? To Tsarkoe Selo? To the train with his Papa? I know it is pointless to wonder these things, yet I do, I try to imagine what it must have been like for him? It almost seems to awful to comprehend that he could have survived that night in the cellar of Ipatiev House, the kinder image, to my mind, would be to believe that he did not.
I saw some terrible things as a child and I lived through some terrible things and I know what those ghosts are like for me to live with. Like, when I was three I saw my step-father kick our little dog so viciously, all because she wouldn’t stop barking. He kicked and kicked her even after she was lying on the ground not moving and not making a sound. He was in such a rage, I still hear the slamming of the door as he came hurtling outside to attack her, in my mind sometimes, like an echo of a ghost that has lived with me and every time I hear a door slam I jump and I feel sick.
I didn’t even remember I had seen him do that until my older sister told me about it, she said I stood rooted to the spot watching what he was doing. She said that once he was done, and the dog was lying on the ground all bloody, that I still just stood there, but I didn’t remember it until she reminded me of it at my Grandmother’s funeral.
She said we both stood there for the longest time after he stormed back inside, and we were still standing there when the SPCA came and took the dog away, her name was Tina. I remember the beatings, the evil rages he used to be in. I remember the night he nearly killed me by suffocation and if those things haunt me, how much more haunted would Alexei been if he had survived what happened before his very eyes?
I know that the human mind has a marvellous ability to lock things into our subconscious and leave them there, but sometimes there are certain things or situations that trigger a fear response in you, yet you don’t know why, I know that sometimes it happens to me. Maybe the strongest people have their worst things locked securely under lock and key in their subconscious? Maybe they are the true survivors, the ones who are not haunted? Maybe he was Alexei and he survived what happened because his mind was strong enough to lock it away and never let it out?
I don’t know, I just know that the ghost of memory is one of the most truly heinous facets of being human, and also is one of the most truly heinous facets of lost humanity. Lost humanity is what allows people to perpetrate the most evil things upon another, and it is that loss of humanity that allows ghosts life in the minds of the innocent. This is what we do to each other, we have done it ever since time begun, we see the results, and yet we learn nothing, nothing at all.
Laterz

Later the same day.
I am missing so much stuff from this blog that it is unreal. I remember talking about the St Petersburg/ Pertrograd/ Leningrad, St Petersburg name changes. I remember speaking at length about a lot of things. I am soooooooooooooooooooooooooo mad! Grrrrrr, I am not even going to attempt to recover what was lost, what is the point? What I am doing is now keeping a hard copy in MW, something I should have done to begin with. What I don't understand is why stuff is missing from here, yet nothing in missing from Sandanizta files in here and they are way larger than this page could ever hope to get. Maybe I did something? Maybe I made a mistake and accidentally cut the info? Who knows, I am just soooooooooooooo pissed about it!
Sarah

Wednesday 5th July
I am so annoyed! I have just noticed that all my May blogs and the majority of my June blogs have disappeared into thin air! The worst of it is, that I don;t even know where they have gone! All I can do si go back into my MSN and retrieve what is there and start again, I am so pissed Ican not even begin to tell you how pissed I am!

Tuesday 4th July
I think I must have been extremely tired on Monday to have felt that bad, I generally fall to pieces when I am extremely tired. The traffic outside our house is quite loud from around 6.00am and a lot of our neighbours are noisy and their dogs bark half the night away. Thus, I do not sleep well some nights, too many nights of broken sleep and I really go to pieces.
I heard f rom John Kendrick again, as I said on Monday, and I also found another article about the Claimant, not written by John and I have to say that I am atthe point where I have to say that I do not know anything for sure any more. I am not convinced that Alexei Romanov died in Ipatiev House, and I am not sure he survived either, obviously it has to be one or the other, but I have to admit that at this point in time, I don't know what I think.
John also sent me some other photos and I have to say that, in some aspects, they are pretty convincing, yet I still don't know what I think. It is interesting, it is kind of like the Lindy Chamberlain thing, was it the dingo or the mother. Like the moon landing, hoax or truth? It is like a lot of mysteries, like JFK, was it really a lone gunman, or was it kick back at the CIA for trying to take darling Fidel Castro out? You know, you can reach a conclusion on some things, based upon what you have read, the opinions of others and weighing up the evidence, but in the end, does anyone really know?
Apparently the Russian scientists were ordered to stop any more DNA testing from anyone claiming to be a Romanov, be it Marie, Anastasia or Alexei. Did the claimant get unlucky in that his tests happened to be asked for when everyone had just had enough of it? Or did something else happen? I haven't got time to go into it completely right now, but I will, this has really peaked my curiosity.
But for now, I have things that I have to go and do, but I will come back to this. You know, it is kind of odd, I write all these things and I do not know if anyone reads them or not. I view it like the diaries I kept as a kid and as a teen, what does it matter? It allows me to speak of that which I desire to speak of, so what does it matter if anyone reads it or not? It doesn't.
Oh yeah,. Piczo must have been having a 'be nice to Sarah' day, they increased my storage to 350 pictures, even though I have only had 74 visitors at that point. I don't know why they did it, but I do appreciate it, it allowed me to do my 'The World Since 1966' page. If not for the extra storage, I would have had to mess around with Photobucket again.
Anyway, that is me for now.
Laterz

Monday 3rd July
I don't think my head is on very straight today, and maybe it hasn't been for a while. I feel so bad today, so tearful, unhappy and heavy, like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders, yet I don't. I been staring out the window at the trees, but I don't want to look beyond the trees, I don't want to know what lies beyond them, and I don't even want to imagine that anything does. Been thinking about the fact that I could be here yet for another 40 years and that is scary because I don't know how I can do another 40 years of this place, I have had moments today where I feel like I can't do another 4 minutes of it. Yet I thought that over 40 minutes ago, so I can't be doing too badly.
Typoes are bound to be rife through this piece of writing, I am emotionally peaked, I always make mistakes when I feel this way, I seldom correct them when I feel this way too. I thought about e-mailing my close friend and telling him how I am feeling, but like anyone needs this crap? I thought about phoning Robbie, but she needs my crap on top of hers like she needs a hole in the head, and I am not even sure what is wrong with me. Besides, she'd want to know what was wrong, I don't know. She'd want to know what's broken (so to speak) sheesh if I knew the answer to that I'd fix it myself!
It just seems to be that the purity of every new moment is marred by a thought, a feeling or a memory, and tomorrow stretches out like an endless ocean of everything that is too much to carry, and then nothing at all. I miss my father, even though I don't know who he is and I miss my mother even though I know well who she is. I miss my brother and I miss my sisters, even though I know that to have them is to cause more misery to myself. What is wrong with me?
Everything I have ever done wrong seems to be fresh in my brain and everything I have ever done right seems to have faded into obscurity, in my mind at least. My dreams seem pointless, they seem far fetched, unattainable and pursuit of them seems terribly hopeless and yet I strive for them anyway, knowing what the reality is, that, well you know, I don't really know that either. I just keep hoping and trying, so maybe not everything is wrong?
GOD? I hate some people sometimes, I really hate that some humans are selfish and ugly and out for their own interests. Someone by the name of M has provoked this tirade, long story for which I have no energy to share.
Another thing, while I am speaking of pet peeves, I hate that knowing God has been so complicated for people because some Christians take something simple and make it difficult. I hate that we aregue about it, who cares if you celebrate Saturday or Sunday as your Sabbath, isn't it more important that you do observe a day, and isn't what you do with the day, as opposed to which one you observe, more important?
I see people in chat getting so irate and angry with each other about it, Hebrews states very clearly that one man will view one day as more important than the other,and that this may well differ from man to man, the advice given on said topic? Basically, don't sweat it, just keep the day to the Lord, whichever one it is that you observe. I mean the bible caters for every single scenario you can possibly come up with in this life, yet we complicate it by taking things out of context, applying it to a context it was never intended for and we fuck everything up!
Even loving God ain't simple any more, what the heck is wrong with us? We scare ourselves and each other silly with tales of how we can never measure up so we are all destined for hell. Well if that's the truth than why the hell bother in the first place? You know, loving God and following Him was never intended to be some huge exam that you are doomed to fail no matter how hard you try, and yet that is exactly what it feels like sometimes. Why do we do it?
You know and there's some really hateful spiteful Christians out there, man they are some of the cruelest people I have ever had the misfortune to run into. Some of them are so quick to say that those who have committed suicide are in hell, those who are homosexual are hated by God so they should hate them too. The mean, hateful things they say are endless and they don't care who they say it to, a grieving mother, a man dying of AIDS whatever, they don't care.
I tried once to tell them that every time they come into contact with someone like that, it is an opportunity to abide by the greatest commandment, love. I mean it ain't over until you are dead, one person has no way of knowing whether a seed has been planted in that homosexual man, no one knows for sure or not whether it might just be waiting to be watered, maybe that is why he has appeared in front of you, despite his denials of God's love.
IT AIN'T OVER TIL HE'S DEAD!
Who are they to know WHAT God might be doing in that man's hidden heart? Then he comes into chat to say hi, to have company, you know, maybe he is too sick to go out, what do we know of his situation? And people jump all over him, instead of potentially watering the seed, and they run the risk of killing something very precious every time they do it, and they don't get it. They are Christians, how can they not understand the importance of love? They say, "Oh but the bible says to rebuke him," they forget that the bible also says that he who is without sin can chuck the first rock! It makes me so angry, those who should know better don't, and those who don't know any better are often the kindest people there are, they are just hurt and some Christians go out of their way to hurt them more. Some are pious and arrogant and puffed up with their own sense of self-rightousness, I mean come on, not one of us is better than the other, how dare we presume ourselves to be above someone else?
Often in chat when someone comes in cussing, I say hi and I ask how they are, while everyone esle cusses back, nine times out of ten they stop cussing and they will talk to me, even if it is only about the weather. But you know, people have feelings, people have heartache and it is our job to love them, to speak to them where they are at, just as God loves us all where we are at.
You know Mike Warnke was full of shit, a total liar about his entire life, and yet he said some of the wisest things I have ever heard and one of them was this, "You don't clean up to take a bath."
I think of that often, and it is true, you don't get cleaned up to meet Christ, He meets you where you are at, so long as people don't screw up another person's preparedness to meet Him. And sometimes someone elses preparedness to meet Christ can be soured by a few well meaning pious, self righteous Christians. I am too tired and sad to even work up a sigh.
Laterz
Ps I heard from John again and he is quite convincing in his theory and his proof is quite damning against the idea that Alexei Romanov died. I might even have to recant some things I have previously said, and certainly do intend to do so and talk about what he has told me. Seems too, that Louis Mountbatten was Alexei's first cousin, so my family tie to the family of Romanov is heck of a lot more close than I was first aware. I am kind of stunned ot be truthful with you, I thought it was very distant at best. Anyway, feeling better than I did earlier, can muster up a bit more than a sigh now.

Sunday 2nd July
Well still, what I wouldn't give for a fried green tomato like the ones they used to make at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Love that movie, love it, Jessica Tandy was just brilliant in it, so was Kathy (Annie Wilks) Bates.
War, well back to that again. Did you know that today is the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme? One million men lost their lives in that battle, and what for? What was the Somme? I hear some people asking, or maybe I dont? Anyway the Somme...here goes it...It happened in 1916 (oh by the way, it is official, we have had the coldest June since 1972, I was five then, turned 6 that July) any way, back to the Somme.
Comprising of the main Allied attack on the Western Front during 1916, the Battle of the Somme is famous chiefly on account of the loss of 58,000 British troops (one third of them killed) on the first day of the battle, 1 July 1916, which to this day remains a one-day record. The attack was launched upon a 30 kilometre front, from north of the Somme river between Arras and Albert, and ran from 1 July until 18 November, at which point it was called off.
The offensive was planned late in 1915 and was intended as a joint French-British attack. The French Commander in Chief, Joffre, conceived the idea as a battle of attrition, the aim being to drain the German forces of reserves, although territorial gain was a secondary aim.
The plan was agreed upon by the new British Commander in Chief, Sir Douglas Haig, although Haig would have preferred an offensive among the open ground of Flanders. Haig, who took up his appointment as Commander in Chief of the BEF on 19 December 1915, had been granted authorisation by the British government, led by Asquith, to conduct a major offensive in 1916. I could give you many, many facts, but basically, it was an exercise in futility and the ensuing disaster was of biblical proportions when compared to modern day warfare. The Battle of the Somme has been declared, by some, to be one of the top five military disasters/blunders in the history of warfare. I am inclined to agree.
The spark of the Great War was the assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife by a Serbian nationalist on the morning of June 28, 1914, while traveling in a motorcade through Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Archduke was chosen as a target because Serbians feared that after his ascension to the throne,
he would continue the persecution of Serbs living within the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Serbian terrorist organization, the Black Hand, had trained a small group of teenage operatives to infiltrate Bosnia and carry out the terrible assassination of the Archduke.
On July 28, 1914 Austria declared war against Serbia. Russia responded by partially mobilizing against Austria as a 'protector of Slavs', and Germany insisted that Russia immediately demobilize. Russia refused to do so, and on August 1 and 3 declared war on Russia and France. When war was declared in August people involved on all sides
felt that it would be a short war, and would be over by Christmas. In order for Germany to accomplish its Schlieffen Plan, Germany occupied Belgium. By August most of Belgium was under German occupation and the Schlieffen Plan appeared to be going well, but it brought Britain into the war because they had made a treaty with Belgium before, and Schlieffen Plan involved the invasion of neutral Belgium.
The First World War was the first war to use poison gas as a military weapon. Nicholas Romanov actually wrote an account of having watched his Russian chemists (for want of a better name) experimenting in a closed train carriage with gas as a weapon. Nicholas found it bizarre and distasteful (to the point of revolusion) that any man or army would ever consider fighting a war using chemicals against each other. The experiments were deemed necessary as a way to figuring out how Russian soldiers could survive an onslaguht of an attack where the enemy was using chemical weapons, in those days, mustard gas was used (I think).
Germans also had the first submarines and used them to blockade Britain by sinking British ships. The sinking of Lusitania is the famous example of the submarine warfare during the World War I. The Lusitania had civilians on board, where 100 passengers were American citizens. After sinking Lusitania a letter was sent to the German Government by President Wilson to warn the German government against killing Americans citizens.
The two biggest and horrifying battles of the World War I are the Battle of Verdun and the Battle of the Somme. This has just been a real quick overview to show you sort of how they got to the Battle of the Somme from the Archduke being assassinated. Doesn't take much to cause a huge disaster does it?
War? What is it good for? Tombstones and epitaphs and not much of anything else if you ask me, and yes I admit it, no one asked me, but I am saying so anyway. Okay, so this blog was a little longer than I had initially intended it to be, oh well, you get that on the big jobs!
Laters

Saturday 1st July
I am ever reminded of a line from a movie, "Oh what I wouldn't give for a fried green tomato like they used to have at the Whistle Stop Cafe!"
What I wouldn't give for some kind of stimulating conversation! I miss talking, I miss conversing with people about things that matter and things that don't. I miss having to think about things from other angles, my brain feels as though it is rotting away in my head for lack of intellectual stimualtion!
I went into chat to try to get conversation going, but they are all talking about sex and the likes, which is fine, just doesn't do it for me. So I have figured out why I blog so much, it enables me to talk, which is also probably why I write so much too, it gives me an outlet for my thoughts, seeing as how there isn't really anyone around to share them with.
I used to get some really good thought provoking e-mails, but with life changing as it does for people, them days seem to be gone.
I been checking the hit counter in here, no one has even been in here for at least two days, so this is really a carthartic exercise for me more than anything, and I have accepted that probably no one even reads this, and that is okay too, means I can say what the hell I want without fear of repurcussion I suppose.
Made a Falkland Islands War page today. I was born during the Vietnam war, at least I think I was, I think it had started by then, but the war that really impacted upon my life and my thought processesfor the first time was the Falkland Islands War. For the first time in my life I was able to appreciate the impact of war upon people. Sure I learned about World War 1 & 2 at school and I had nightmares enough about World War 3, but the Falkland Islands War was different to all the others.
For a start it was the first time that they used computer projections to try and figure out who would win, Argentina or Britain. The odds were heavily in favour of Britain. but you know, the second you start killing each other, who really wins? Anyone?
What is wrong with us that we never seem to really understand that no one wins? War is not a game of two opposing sides where you fire imaginery missiles at each other's ships and subs and then declare a winner among the ruins, it isn't that simple. War wrecks things, it destoys lives, futures, hopes, dreams, especially the small ones.
Laterz

Friday 30th June
I got an e-mail this morning from the J. Kendrick. His name is John and he seems like a very nice person, astute, but yeah.
So he had some answers for me.
On the issue of the Claimant's ears sticking out and Alexei's not, he blamed the Siberian winters and frost bite. I googled the effects of frost bite on ears, and it only changes the shape if you have to have them lopped off. Unless the Claimant played some severely harsh rounds of rugby with the All Blacks, resulting in his ears being tugged on by ten tonne Hopowati or Jona Lomu, his ears should not stick out at all. So John loses that arguement, according to modern medicine, according to Dr Koop and a few others.
The next thing he dealt with was the shape of the Claimant's mouth in relation to the shape of Alexei's and my contention that this does not change over the years unless you have some kind of catastrophic facial trauma. John said to me that it depends entirely what photo you use to compare as to whether you will see the likeness in the mouth, touche, John, is all I have to say on that one!
He said that the DNA samples got sent to investigators in Russia and that they did the tests thirteen years ago but have not released the details. Methinks they probably didn't even do the tests, I think those 'in the know' know that Alexei died and therefore the need for DNA tests on the Claimant are a dead duck.
He never even touched on the male balding patterns, so I reasked my question and added a few new ones to the list, (he invited more questions if I had any.)
So it will be very interesting to see what he has to say in his next e-mail, if in fact he replies again, I have no reason to think he won't. But he DID send me comparison photographs of the adult Claimant and Alexei, the two that look the most alike, but as soon as you introduce other photographs of Alexei and then compare them to the Claimant, it all falls over. Again in relation to his photographs theory, touche.
I went through Jonty's toddler photos and I have to say that I found a couple where his likeness to Alexei is astonishing, yet when you look at the finer details, it falls over also. There are certain finer details of your face that do not change until you hit the part of your life where you really begin to age. If you want to test the authenticity of likeness in a photograph, look at the shape of the inner part of the ear, the lobe, the way the eyesbrows sit in relation to the eye, the shape of the distance between the middle of the bottom of the nose down to the top lip, dimples, eye distances from each other, basic shape of eyes, all of those things never change with age until your age is considerable and the evidence is wiped away by wrinkles.
Anyway, we will see what happens in the next e-mail.

There has been no arrest in the investigation into the deaths of Chris and Cru Kahui, the police are still being stonewalled by the family.
Israel and the Plaestinians are set to have a right royal rark up, that could potentially be very nasty. The Belgians seem to have solved their 'who dunnit' and bombs are going off all over the place in Iraq again. What is wrong with our world? Oh that's right, we are what is wrong with it.
It is still freezing cold here, so cold it is unreal! I have even been wearing my grey Dickies beanie to keep my poor little ears warm, my ears ache hideously if they get too cold and it makes me feel quite unwell.
I have heard nothing of Wolf this week, he is probably in some place I have never even heard of again, I miss him though, I miss him a lot. I did hear from Gail, one of those, 'what is your fave food' etc surveys. I have filld them out that many times that I am sure that if they were all to be compared, that the one thing people would assume from it is that the only certainty about me is that my fave colour is purple and my eyes are blue. Wild!
Still listening to Billy Joel, haven't changed the CDs since I put them in, but I am not frowning at the stereo yet, so maybe Billy will stay for a few more days. I discovered this song he has called Captain Jack, it is really out there and I don't know what he was smoking when he wrote it, but it was definitely not typical Billy.
Haven't been into chat for ever, but heard from Rosie that its been pretty wild in there, people screaming and yelling and cussing and carrying on. HELLO! They are just names on a screen and voices on the end of a mic.
You know what I'd really love to do? I'd love to take go back to the late 1800s and take my working laptop around the place and see just what people would make of it? That would be so cool.
Anyway, well I have been working on Sandanizta Mist 6, it is going okay, I don't even know why I keep working on it, oh well.
Laterz

Thursday 29th June
Okay well there are few things going on in the world at the moment. Israel has gone into Palestinian controlled areas to retrieve a kidnapped soldier. I don't think they are unjustified at all, but I do admit to being a little worried about where this might all go. I guess we are just going to have to wait and see, but I suspect it is going to get real ugly real fast.
Here in New Zealand there were twin baby boys murdered, they were three months old and their names were Chris and Cru, The police are having trouble getting to the bottom of what actually happened because the family are stonewalling the investigation with their wall of silence. Pita Sharples (a Maori Political leader) has come out and tried to work with the family to help the investigation along, he has subsequently washed his hands of them. The Prime Minister has even come out and spoken publically about wanting to find out who did this terrible thing to these two babies.
I guess that is one of the benefits of living in a country where the population is only four million, it is very hard for murdered babies to just quietly fade away into a pile of sad statistics. I see that Belgium is fairly similar in that they have been searching for three weeks for two missing little girls, they found them murdered, but the whole country was rallying around trying to help them get to the bottom of what happened. It seems to be the same here.
Also, the investigation into what happened to Chris and Cru is being held in our town in that this is where the parents and some of the family are from, so there have been cops everywhere, Police helicopter flying around nearly every day and so it goes.
But anyway, so that is the world the way that it is at the moment.
Laterz

Wednesday 28th June
I watched the Amazing Race last night for the first time because there was nothing else to watch, unless you count Coronation Street as good viewing material. Anyway after the first thing they had to do, a huge flying fox ride over the most amazing scenery, they opened the envelope at the bottom of the ride and guess where they had to fly to next? Yup, Moscow, Russia! I couldn't believe it!
So I watched the rest of the show and from what I could see of Moscow, some of the cathedrals were just truly awesome. I was hoping they'd get sent to St Petersburg (Petrograd) next, but it looks like they may in fact get sent to some other country like Holland or Denmark, not sure.
I am having a Billy Joel day today, got all his CDs out and plonked them in the CD player. It has been roughly a year since I really listened to Billy Joel, but it is good to hear all the oldies but goodies, Pressure, Allentown, Goodnight Saigon, Honesty, Say Goodbye to Hollywood, While the Night is Still Young and Leningrad, etc.
For those of you who don't know (and this always confused me up until a while ago) St Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in 1914, and then in 1924, when Lenin died, they renamed it Leningrad, and then it got changed back to St Petersburg again in the 1991. A lot of people think that Moscow was renamed Stalingrad, but in fact Moscow has always been Moscow, Stalingrad was called Volgograd too. But it had another name before it was called Stalingrad and I can't remember what it was. I don't think I have seen a country that has had so many name changes to its cities. Also, Petrograd, or St Petersburg used to be the capital, then it got changed to Mocscow during the revolution under Lenin I think.
But anyway, it was kind of nice to see the city of Moscow on Tv.
It is still darn cold here and we have had what is called Haw Frosts down South and oh my I have never seen anything so beautiful, a photographers dream! And my camera still hasn't made daylight yet, I have no idea what Jonty has done with it! Anyway, that's me for now and I will cathc up tomorrow in here again I guess.
take care
Ps I had some kind of sad news yesterday, my latest house keeper, whom I have gotten to know resonably well as she spends four hours a week here, well she had a major meltdown last Friday morning and tried to kill herself. She took a bunch of pills and they rushed her off to hospital and she is now in the Psyche Ward. I was thinking of going up to visit her when she is feeling a bit better. But you know it was kind of sad to hear that it had happened and it made me think of the world and the way that it is. This life is terribly harsh on some people and for some it is just more than they can stand. I don't know why she did what she did, her husband sort of explained to me on the phone what was going on. I don't know if depression and such are much worse today than it was a hundred years ago, but I am picking that it probably is. We live in a world that moves fast, and changes often and that in itself can be incredibly stressful for people too. Gone are the days where you are born in one house, move to your husband's house, have your kids and then ping off, (a simplistic comparison I know and rather inaccurate too, but I am in a hurry) there is so much more to life these days and it is no longer simple. I am just thinking out loud and not really going anywhere with any of this, just meandering my way through thinking about what is going on with Debbie, but the bottom line is, I really don't get it at all.

Tuesday 27th June
Yes yesterday was a little heavy going I guess. But I wanted to add another thing. Apparently when the Claimant came out and said that he was Alexei Romanov, he eventually received a visit from some official people from the Palace.
They basically said to him, "Yes that's very nice, now for your own good, live your life out quietly."
J. Kendrick seemed to think that this was a significant thing, I do not. There have been over 80 people who have claimed to be Alexei Romanov alone, the Palace Officials will be well used to dealing with this kind of thing being that it obviously happened frequently. After the Anna Anderson fiasco I imagine they were taking a one size fits all approach.
They know that Alexei Romanov died along with the rest of his family, and that anyone who stands up and claims to be one of the dead Romanovs obviously has some issues. So rather than deny them and cause the claimants to make even more noise they probably say, "Yes, yes, okay," send them a letter with the royal seal on it basically telling them to 'bug off" (in a language and way they would not take offence to,) and then finish by saying, "Now live out your life quietly."
That pretty much solves that problem until the next desperado jumps out of the woodwork. Well that's what I think anyway.
I changed the font, I like this better than my normal comic sans, this is Trebuchet MS, it takes a little bit of getting used to, but I think I will keep it. I hate typoes, do you know how many hours I spent trying to debug the last three days blogs of typoes? Too many, that's how many and every time I thought I got them all, another glaring mistake jumped out at me, it was sooooo frustrating! Those last three are probably still riddled with typoes, making me look like a blithering idiot. As it is my brain works like ten steps ahead of my fingers and I am sure half of it came out half pied.
It is so cold here I feel like I am living in Siberia! Okay I have never been to Siberia, but I hear it is cold, it is so cold here that I am inside and have steam coming out of my mouth every time I breathe. Might write some more later, but that's me for now.
Laterz

Monday 26th June
Okay so now I am up to the part that involves the man who claimed to be Alexei Romanov, he died back in 1977 at the age of fifty or so from the complications of Thrombocytopenia. [Be prepared for some very critical thinking on my part, but it is not a bad thing, one should think critically when presented with speculations and suppositions, even if they do seem to add up on the surface of a presented school of thought, whatever that school of thought may be.]
The Claimant also had a severely damaged right ear and was totally deaf in that ear, you will understand why I mention this further on in this blog, but it may merely be coincidence. (American statistics [AARDA-Press Release on Autoimmune Disease statistics] say that 20% of the population, or 1 in 5 will be affected by Thrombocytopenia [it is not wildly beyond the bounds of probability that Russian statistics could be fairly much the same], so the occurence of it is not rare, therefore it is quite acceptable that the Claimant and Alexei Romanov could have suffered the same disease in isolation from each other. In other words, the fact that the Claimant suffered from the same disease that Alexei Romanov possibly had in no way evens up the odds that the Claimant was Alexei Romanov. It is quite likely that it is merely a 'happy coincidence', for want of a better term.) [As an aside here, I cannot help but be reminded of my own son's run in with Osteomyelitis when he was around eight years old when I read of the details of Alexei Romanov's sickness. Jonty screamed uncontrollably and pulled up to his chin the affected limb. He was also delirious and had a whopping temperature, which is consistent with Osteomylitus and Thrombocytopenia. He was in pain for a week or so before we knew what was wrong. Once he was very sick, the pain was evident and he was taken to surgery where they drew fluid off his hip joint and they put in a pic line. The pic line ran from his arm to just above his heart and they did that to get even dispersion of the high grade antibiotic they were using intravenously to kill the bug. He was hospitalised for three weeks and for the first week he was on Morphine for pain relief as nothing else worked. As Nicholas could not bear his son’s screaming, neither could I bear Jonty’s, it was a truly awful time. I had never heard Jonty scream that way before then and I have never heard him scream that way since. They used to do some kind of level of infection blood test every day while they were treating him, I do not recollect the medical name for this test. To begin with his levels were in the 300s, a normal healthy person’s will be anything from 4 – 11, so that his was in the 300s tells us he was a VERY sick little boy. Also, I wondered as well about Alexei possibly having Osteomylitus as opposed to having Thrombocytopenia because they told me when Jonty had it that he probably contracted it from a cat or dog scratch, we had cats and a dog at the time, out of interest, Staphylococcus aureus remains the major offending organism in hematogenous osteomyelitis, particularly in childhood. Alexei too had a kitten around 1912 when this servere attack occured, and his sisters and father always had dogs, both cats and dogs are carriers of Staphylococcus aureus and Alexei had a weakened immune system and Ostemylitus can be recurring in a weakened immune system,I know this because Jonty was tested regularly for months to ensure it was not going to recur. Another thing that makes me suspect that Alexei could have had Osteomylitus is the way in which the attacks crept up on him, almost always they started with localised pain in his limbs, namely his legs and feet and this is commonly where the Osteomylitus infections can present, sometimes in the knee and hip joints too, why not in upper limbs like the arms? I do not know. I am not a doctor, neither is J. Kendrick, again I am interjecting with my own thoughts, suspicions, theories and limited knowledge as well as J. Kendrick's because it is my blog and I can basically do whatever I want...she says with a very big Cheshire cat grin!
Oh and PS untreated Osteomyelitus can affect the spleen causing it to swell, and Alexei Romanov most certainly had spleen swelling as evident by the swelling near his stomach. (and how could they have treated Osteomyelitus back then any more than they could have treated Thrombocytopenia if they didn't know what it was exactly that he had?) Remember, the physicians had all presumed Alexei had Haemophilia, and in line with the medical customs of the day, any undiagnosable illness in males was placed squarely at the feet of Haemophilia because their medical knowledge was still reasonably limited. They did this more so in the case of Alexei Romanov because of the possibly wrongly supposed Haemophilia genetic link within his maternal family). So ya know, I might not be as far off base as others might think me to be and one would never think of Ostemyelitus if they had never heard of it. I am an educated girl and I had not heard of it until my son was diagnosed with it, which could account for J. Kendrick coming to the conclusion that Alexei Romanov had the same disorder as the claimant.
Another thing to remember is that Alexei Romanov's symptoms could probably match many known conditions or diseases today, no one can be absolutely certain what it was exactly that he suffered, only that is was more than likely NOT Haemophilia. BUT Alexei Romanov, if he had Thrombocytopenia would probably have died very young without treatment for it. For all intents and purposes, there is no record of the Claimant, as Alexei Romanov, receiving treatment for even Haemophilia at all during his teen years (which his minders would still have presumed he had at the time,) not in Yekaterinburg as Ernst, or in his teen years in Estonia as Ernst. There is no way that haemophiliac Alexei Romanov, (if he was in fact being passed off as Ernst,) could have made it all the way through his teen years without some kind of fall or accident, which would have necessitated his needing treatment for his supposed haemophilia. Yet there are no such records of Ernst having any treatment of the kind, not even in the Claimant's recount of his life, that I am aware of, is there any such instance of him needing treatment in his teen years for his haemophilia. Don't forget, his minders were convinced he was a haemophiliac, the Crown Prince no less, a treasure entrusted to them for safe keeping, the sole survivor of a dynasty, a child who had witnessed much and must live on in memory of his family if nothing more. So if he had hurt himself, they would not have messed around getting him help and there would have been records of him receiving the critical care he would have required to recover. The lack of any such recorded instances alone makes me very suspicious that the Claimant was NOT Alexei Romanov. Also worth noting is that Osteomyelitus will not kill, but it will certainly make you exceedingly ill and it can take some time to recover from, aside from that, the patient is generally well and healthy, Alexei Romanov was certainly that.
Again, these are just my meandering thoughts because it is my blog and I can meander, gosh darn it, any time I feel like it.]
It could be that J. Kendrick made the link between Thrombocytopenia and Alexei Romanov purely because the Claimant had it and the symptoms were similar therefore making it a jolly convincing coincidence, thus they turned it into fact for their purposes. Or perhaps Alexei Romanov really did have Thrombocytopenia or some other completely different sickness altogether? Again, a lot of this information is speculative, and any matches with historical accounts may be by happy coincidence alone, maybe through the need for it to match on behalf of the author's sincere belief in the Claimant's claims, or again, merely because of happy coincidence. No one knows anything for sure.
The Claimant, (as he shall be known from here on out so as not to be confused with Alexei Romanov, ironic really! Besides that, I do not think this 'claim' merits using Alexei’s name by someone else until we prove conclusively that he is Alexei Romanov. Thus far I most certainly am not convinced) reported that in Ipatiev house, when he was shot in the ear that everything went black (consistent with what we know of the murder scene from Yurovsky) and the next thing he knew he woke up in a farmhouse.
How did he get to the farmhouse?
When the truck got stuck in the mud, Veermann (who was passing by at the time with a cart because he lived in the area)was ordered by the Bolsheviks to place some of the bundles on his cart and as he did he saw that one was moving. Veermann claims to have found the Tsarevich in one of the bundles, alive and so he hid it.
The Claimant apparently 'had' papers that ‘suggested’ that Veermann’s wife was related to the Grand Marshall of the Tsar’s Imperial Court. Keep in mind, the papers only ‘suggest’ this, it has not been proved to be absolute fact, so again, this is more speculation and supposition and is offered at least in the third party and is NOT directly from the horse’s mouth. Remember too, this Claimant had, up until his death in 1977, access to all the information known about the Romanovs to that date.
The Claimant’s widow, Sandra, is the one who suggests that her husband had this paperwork proving the Benckendorff tie. She is still living and up until 1997, when J. Kendrick’s paper was written, had access to even more information than her husband did, therefore a fabrication of her facts is very clearly possible. Is it a fabrication? I will explain what I think at the end, but you can make up your own mind.
So back to Veermann’s wife and her relationship to the Grand Marshall, Count Paul Benckendorff. The maiden name of Johann Veermann's wife was Paula von Benckendorff-Känna.
This is what J. Kendrick, (1997) states, “Evidence discovered by Estonian journalist Helle Tamm suggests that the two Benckendorffs were cousins descendant from the same great-great grandfather. The revelation that one of Alexei's rescuers was also a Benckendorff suggests that the Count may have engineered the escape of the Crown Prince and that he was heading to Estonia after setting up a very successful smoke screen. While Alexei was playing the role of a Yekaterinburg farmboy, his former language tutors Charles Gibbes and Pierre Gilliard were accompanying Nikolai Sokolov on his official investigation of the Tsar's death. Is it possible that they were leading Sokolov astray to prevent him from stumbling upon Count Benckendorff's scheme?”
Assuming this contention of J. Kendrick’s to be correct, what would leading Nikolai Sokolov astray actually achieve in the long term? Nikolai Sokolov was an astute man and would have smelled a rat if there was in fact a rat to smell. Why form a plot to keep Alexei Romanov alive and then hide it from Sokolov? Would it not have been more prudent at that point to expose the fact that Alexei Romanov had survived? Alexei was safely incognito by then, they could have done nothing to harm him, being unable to even find him. And if they were wanting to eventually reinstate Alexei to the throne somewhere down the line, then hiding it from Sokolov at that late stage in the game was a pretty silly move. I do not understand their thinking in this instance, if what J. Kendrick proposes happened at this point is actually true. I am most certainly suspicious of the fact that there is no logical reason whatsoever NOT to tell Sokolov that Alexei was alive and perhaps provide some proof of said fact. And, why is there no recorded evidence of his former language tutors Charles Gibbes and Pierre Gilliard trying to maintain contact with their beloved student Alexei Romanov whom they supposedly went out of their way to protect? One would think that they would have at least tried to maintain a link with the boy if they knew his whereabouts and who had him. Why did they not in the least leave written manifestoes in their last wills and testaments? No one could hurt them then, Communists or anyone else and Alexei was by then well out of harms way, if in fact the Claimant is Alexei and assuming this story to be true.
Back to the story, and here is an interesting question that might have occurred to you (it most certainly did to me) how did Veermann and his wife Paula get away with suddenly appearing to have a son? Easy, they had a child who was a year younger than Alexei, and Alexei is said to simply have taken the place of their dead son Ernst who had died one year before the Bolsheviks moved into Yekaterinburg. The irony in all of this, if it is in fact true, was that Alexei ended up herding cattle in the very same fields and forest where his family’s remains were hidden, Koptyaki Forest and RIGHT under the Bolshevik’s noses lived a royal escapee.
The Benckendorff family can trace its military history in Eastern Europe back as far as the twelfth and thirteenth century. By the time that Nicholas II had ascended the throne in 1894 there had been members of the Benckendorff clan in the Russian Imperial court for the better part of two hundred years. The earliest Benckendorff in the Imperial Court was Johann Michael who, as a young boy, served as a page to Tsar Peter II just before his death in 1730. Johann's eldest son Christoph served under Catherine the Great's son Paul from 1776-81. Twenty years later the third Benckendorff in the line, Alexander, was a participant in the assassination of Paul I in the fourth year of his reign in 1801.
So it is not far fetched to assume that the Benckendorff family had a history with the Romanov dynasty and an allegiance with them as well. How could you serve a family for that many years and not have a sense of pride and kinsmanship with them? (is there such a word? Okay, well there is now!)
From the moment that the head of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, had placed Nicholas and his family on a train for Siberia in August of 1917 the Count Paul “Benckendorff made every effort to initiate a rescue or find a place of exile for the banished Royals. The Tsar's Grand Marshall was a meticulous record keeper and a stickler for detail who would leave no stone unturned. Paul remained in control of the Tsar's accounts and tried to raise money for the imprisoned Romanovs with the help of Empress Alexandra's friend Anna Vyrubova, while his stepson Prince Vasily Dolgoruky stayed near the Royal family in the Siberian town of Tobolsk to look after matters at that end.
Paul Benckendorff died in January of 1921 in a small hospital in the Estonian border town of Narva where he had fallen ill after being stopped at the border by visa problems. Author Robert Massie suggested in his well known work "Nicholas and Alexandra" that the Count had decided to leave Russia after giving up his painstaking efforts to trace all of the rumours about the Imperial family and the disappearance of his stepson. What has been unknown until now is that eight months later a family of six crossed into Estonia at that same border town of Narva. That group included yet another Benckendorff and the missing Tsarevich Alexei masquerading as one of the sons.” J. Kendrick, (1997).
Well I have a great deal of difficulty with this last assertion of J. Kendrick's, he states, "What has been unknown until now is that eight months later..." unknown because it is not historically recorded? Or was it unknown because the Claimant revealed it for the first time to J. Kendrick? You see either way there is a glaring oversight in J. Kendrick's assertion and perhaps it is overlooked in his desperate need to believe that the Claimant was in fact Alexei Romanov. If it really happened then there is a historical record of it, which the Claimant could have known about as could many others and all could potentially access the historical document or information. If it was unknown because the Claimant revealed it only to J. Kendrick, then there is every chance that the information is false and a part of the elaborately clever plot to pass himself off as Alexei Romanov. Either way, this 'unknown until now' information is not reliable proof that the Claimant is in fact Alexei Romanov and I have trouble even understanding how J. Kendrick could view that as a critical piece of the puzzle. I can only assume that he sincerely believed in the Claimant's story to the point where his view and sense of judgement became clouded with bias in favour of the Claimant being Alexei Romanov.
However, that aside, so far it seems quite feasible that what the Claimant states happened, could have in fact happened. Most certainly his recount fits with the recorded history, BUT remember, this recorded history has been around for quite some time, it would have been easy to fabricate a story if someone was meticulous enough in the details. I am suspicious by nature, so I can’t help but keep drawing your attention back to the fact that people can be liars, schemers and dreamers and truly pull off a scam if they want to.
“It was during 1939 in Tallinn that (The Claimant) made the funeral arrangements for his foster mother. The wife of the farmer who had been instructed by the Cheka executioners to put Alexei's blanket wrapped body on his cart had died at the age of seventy-four after caring for the Tsarevich since the murder of his family twenty-one years earlier. He buried her under the pen name he was using of Tammet and that name appears on the death certificate. However, funeral notices that were printed in the newspapers of the time show that she was born with the more familiar family name of
von Benckendorff-Känna.” J. Kendrick, (1997).
Again, the paperwork only ‘suggests’ that Paula may have been related to the Benckendorff family, it has not been proved. I mean I could die tomorrow and my kids or significant others could put any name they wanted in the death notice besides my own, it is called freedom of speech. Just as when my children were born, I could have registered their last name as Magoo if I wanted, the only stipulation on their naming is that THAT is the legal name they must use on any official documents. If the Claimant's foster mother was truly of the Benckendorff family then legally there would have been no problem with him including that name in her legal death certificate, but he did not. Could the problem be that a death certificate necessitates the procuring of a birth certificate for accurate date of birth, etc. Could it be that the name Benckendorff is not on that either?
As for the newspapers carrying the name Benckendorff, that is easy, the Claimant could have written those up himself and submitted them to the papers for printing, or he could have provided the information to the funeral service provider. Either way, he could put whatever name he wanted in the death notice, a newspaper is not a legal document as such and he could have added the name Romanov if he wanted to, no law would prevent that. So long as nothing illegal is included on the death certificate then he is home free. Is this why Benckendorff does NOT appear on her legal death certificate? Because it was not legally a name she could claim or that the Claimant could claim on behalf of her? Oh and by the way, what of his foster father? Where is his death certificate, when did he die, where was he buried? What about their wedding certificate? Family bible? I have our family bible from my maternal side and it goes way back to around 1886, so it is not unreasonable to ask these questions. Some could say, oh but the Claimant’s family were moving from country to country, so were my maternal family at the time, they still kept records of everything. Also worthy of note is that, around 1996/1997 Paula's grandchildren were located in Estonia by Helle Tamm and they told her that while they knew something about the foster son they did not know of his identity or the Benckendorff connection. I find that interesting, you would think that much information would have been kept well known within the family. If the family had indeed 'saved the Tsarevich,' I mean that is not just something you let die in your family, it is of historical importance, if it is in fact true. I do not believe it to be so.
I personally think this guy the Claimant did his homework fairly meticulously, he laid a trail of birdseed many years before he came out and claimed to be Alexei Romanov. He was a writer, he would have known how to research (any writer worth their mettle is also a great researcher and often quite meticulous with pieces of information. They have to be or else as a writer they will fail or fall to ruin because their work will not make sense...writers also generally have a wonderful imagination...I think you hear what I am saying).
To be very honest, I would hazard a guess here and say that I could randomly choose a man to claim as my father, so long as he was old enough to be my father and the same ethnicity as me. If I researched his background thoroughly enough, I could potentially say that he was my father and the only evidence that would truly refute it is DNA. Through investigating his past thoroughly (and trust me, for a writer who is also a proficient researcher, this is not a big ask at all) I could pin him down to an event around the time I was conceived. And if there was even a week or two that had questionable whereabouts of the man concerned or questionable activities around that time, I could potentially make a claim. And I say this in relation to a stranger, how much easier would it be to do when almost every piece of information on a family is available for public perusal as is the case with the Romanovs? I mean, most of us can tell you where Tsar Nicholas was on any given day between at least 1914 and 1918, so a claim by the Claimant is fairly easy to pull off and the gaps easily filled. Again, as in the case with me claiming against a stranger and the Claimant's assertions that he is Alexei Romanov, the only thing that would truly refute either claim would be DNA testing. See what I mean now?
Back to the Claimant's story.
In order for this whole thing to have been truly carried out, the Bolsheviks would HAVE to have been in on it, otherwise it could never have happened. Yurovsky was a tool of the Bolsheviks, he did not supposedly ‘save’ Alexei Romanov out of the goodness of his heart, remember, Yurovsky despised Tsar Nicholas and his autocratic rule, that is why he got involved in the revolution to overthrow the dynasty in the first place. Yurovsky would have had no personal interest in saving the legal heir to the throne.
Now, to the favour that Lenin owed Kaiser Wilheim, Nicholas Romanov's cousin.
As I stated earlier, Kaiser Wilheim went to extraordinary lengths to try and save his cousin Nicholas and family, even though their countries were at war with each other.
This next piece of information is very, very interesting if not startling, Wilheim’s General Chief of Staff was an old Prussian by the name of Field Marshall Paul Hindenburg... the very same man who would later be forced by circumstances to hand over the reigns of Germany's government to Adolf Hitler. When the Kaiser gave command of his armies to Hindenburg the journalists in Berlin had trouble finding his military record. The reason for this was that his record was not filed under the name of Hindenburg.
“The Field Marshall's file was found under the name of Beneckendorff. His full name was Paul Ludwig Hans von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg. Not only do we now have another Benckendorff involved in this story but we also have a third with the first name of Paul or Paula. A wise man once said that there are no coincidences! The Benckendorff family history reveals that Field Marshal Paul Hindenburg was descended from Johann Otto Gottfried von Benckendorff, who had been granted permission to combine the defunct Von Hindenburg family name and coat of arms with his own in 1789.” J. Kendrick, (1997)
You need to remember this next piece of information; it is crucial to understanding why Lenin may have owed Kaiser Wilheim and his staff a huge favour. The Field Marshall’s second in command was General Erich Ludendorff who had the real control of the Kaiser’s army. Lunderdorff was that same person who arranged safe passage through Germany from Switzerland for Lenin’s famous sealed train back to Russia. Thinking Lenin would bring and end to the war on the Eastern Front when he reached Petrograd (St Petersburg) the German Commanders handed him the opportunity to seize control of the Russian Revolution, so thus, Lenin owed the Kaiser and his staff one huge favour.
As winter turned into spring in the town of Tobolsk, Nicholas and his family were having trouble making ends meet. Their available funds were running desperately low and they were having to sell the few belongings they had with them just to get enough food to help them stave off the Siberian cold. Then when February turned into March things suddenly started to change.
On the first day of March of 1918 Lenin's government in Moscow ordered that the family be placed on soldiers' rations. Only two days later, on the third day of March, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed thereby ending the war between Russia and Germany and leaving the Kaiser's armies free to devote all of their efforts to the Western Front against the Allies in France. The treaty forced Russia to surrender thousands of square miles of eastern Europe occupied by millions of its citizens to Germany, and the Baltic country of Estonia that is key to our story was now outside of Russia's borders.
In "The Romanov Conspiracies" historian Dr. Michael Occleshaw devoted a full chapter to Kaiser Wilhelm's desire to exert every effort possible to save his Russian cousins. Dr. Occleshaw's book tells of rumours of a secret codicil added to the treaty to surrender the family to the Germans, but then goes on to say that none of the five secret clauses that have been found makes any mention of the Romanovs. Amongst the other records of that period a British Foreign Office memorandum confirmed that the Germans did make overtures on behalf of the Imperial family during the negotiations. One of the best ways to make sure something stays a secret is to avoid putting it on paper. Sometimes a handshake is all that it takes and J. Kendrick says this in relation to the Masonic Lodge memeber's honour system, that a handshake is as good as a signature.
From this point out however, the whole story of Alexei being saved by Yurovsky on behalf of Lenin, as a favour to the Kaiser and his staff begins to need a giant leap of faith in order to believe it.
J. Kendrick goes on to assert that there is Masonic Lodge involvement in the rescue of Alexei Romanov, it is possible, anything is possible, is it probable? I don’t personally think so. However, and I must say this, I have a certain knowledge of the Lodge and Masonry (no I am not involved in it, but do understand some of how it works, particularly the 'honour system'secret handshakes, taking care of one of their own regardless of how they may feel about that individual on a personal level). Taking my knowledge into account and applying it to the various credible points that J. Kendrick went on to make in his article, and having an understanding about how things often work, (and that bible verse that states 'the heart of man is deceitful but above all desperately wicked) I know that anything is possible, that nothing is so terrible that a man will not entertain it to achieve his end. Therefore, I concluded for a split second that, based upon J. Kendrick’s argument, there it would be possible to convince others that there was a very slim chance that Alexei may well have survived Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg.
Do not get me wrong, I was totally convinced to be completely honest with you, that Alexei had not survived and yet I did continue to read the article. These are my reasons why I was completely convinced at this point that he had not survived; you see I have seen the photos of the Claimant and comparing skeletal impressions through photography, does not convince me that the Claimant is in fact the Tsarevich Alexei, not at all. You see, as we get older, many things on our bodies change, but the two things that don't (short of accident) are your head shape, mouth shape and your ears. The Claimant has very sticky out ears, Tsarevich Alexei did not. Also the Claimant’s mouth tended to be shaped in a downward fashion (kind of sad faced) Tsarevich Alexei's was very evenly sitting (neither sloping slightly down nor up). Even when I superimposed the Claimant’s photographs with Tsarevich Alexei's photographs and that of Nicholas, the skeletal shape of their heads was reasonably different enough as to cause me to severely doubt that there was any even slight genetic link between the Claimant and Alexei Romanov. The Claimant has a sort of pronounced forehead and wide face around his temples and eyes that kind of tapers in more narrowly downward toward his chin in a sort of triangular fashion. Alexei Romanov did not have a pronounced forehead and in fact had a square/ oblong shaped face, not dissimilar to the shape of my face. No I am not the missing Alexei either (also the receding hairline in no way looks like Nicholas' did, and it is to a certain degree, fact that son’s receding hairlines generally go by the same pattern as their father. Nicholas also had what we would term cowlicks in his hairline, the Claimant doesn't seem to. Note I used the words seem and generally,) however, there are differences enough so as to cause me to still sincerely doubt that there is any chance at all, however remote that the Claimant is/was Tsarevich Alexei Romanov.
Further to this, (even though by fourteen the head of a human has usually formed to a point that will grow no further, therefore kind of eliminating the Claimant from the running to be Tsarevich Alexei Romanov) I have to admit to having had a certain few split second moments of inclination to allowing myself to wonder if the Claimant might in fact have been Tsarevich Alexei?
But nearing th bottom line, I have to say that there is too much speculation and nowhere near enough fact. In fact the only fact I can see in this article of J. Kendrick's is that he has gone to a lot of trouble to reconcile the Claimant's story with facts, and although for some he has done a pretty good job, for those of us who look for truth, it in no way convinces us of anything but the fact that dear sweet Alexei Romanov sadly did not survive.
How could one be convinced otherwise? Certainly none of J. Kendrick’s theories are in any way far fetched, and most of them line up historically, also to be remembered is that the Claimant suffered from Thrombocytopenia (it is in fact what killed him in the end,) But then again, we must remember that no one knows for certain what it was that Alexei Romanov had. It could have been Osteomyelitus, or any number of other medical ailments. Also, not to be overlooked too, is the fact that the Claimant had a completely annihilated right inner ear, which is consistent with having had a blank shot fired into it, remember, Yurovsky even claimed to have shot the Tsarevich in the right ear. BUT also, the ear damage is consistent with many other types of accidents people can have in childhood, the Claimant's ear may well have been damaged due to some other catastrophic event in his young life and may well have been yet another one of those happy coincidences, and I firmly believe it was just that, another coincidence.
You have to weigh carefully all the evidence and try not to jump to conclusions. This is what I am attempting to do, but for one who is determined to believe that Alexei Romanov survived Ipatiev House, the evidence is pretty convincing, especially if one was approaching it with the mindset that Alexei 'had to have survived'.
However as I said earlier, all of this historical information that is being used to prove Alexei Romanov survived Ipatiev House has been around for many years and has been accessible to anyone who is inclined to go searching for it. Also keeping in mind the way people will bargain, lie, trick and deceive the general (cannon fodder...that would be us) public, one needs to keep in mind that a scam may in fact have been pulled off by the Claimant, to what end? I am unsure.
I guess what I would like to know is, what were the results of the DNA tests that were done on the Claimant? Were they ever done and if so, what did they conclude? What I do know of the children of the Claimant is that they want nothing whatsoever to do with his claims. Why do they feel this way? Do they know something about the Claimant that we don’t? The only person actively pursuing it is the Claimant’s widow Sandra.
Bottom line? I don’t believe he was Alexei Romanov.
No information has ever been published in regard to the DNA test results and I have made efforts to contact the author J. Kendrick who is in close contact with the Claimant’s widow, thus far he has not responded to my e-mail enquiries as to the results of the DNA tests. It is my thought that he is not responding at all because the DNA tests proved conclusively that the Claimant was NOT Alexei Romanov. Otherwise J. Kendrick would simply respond that the tests were not done or were inconclusive. J. Kendrick put much of his life and time into this search for Alexei Romanov, I suppose if one wanted to believe something badly enough they could, the disappointment of finding out it was all a hoax would definitely buckle one’s emotions and ego. Does this explain J. Kendrick icy silence on the topic? I personally think it does, because at the end of the day, photographs don’t lie and if the people who had rescued Alexei wanted to be sure to be able to reinstate him as the Tsarevich/Tsar of Russia one day, they would have consistently taken photographs as he got older so that they had proof of their claim. It would have been the ONLY credible proof they had that he was Alexei Romanov, yet they didn’t do it, why not?
Also, even as far back as 1977, no one had any reason to believe that DNA testing would be around by 1997. Any bogus claim comes incredibly unhinged with DNA testing, especially if it is not true. That is what I think happened here, which is a shame because I really like a conspiracy theory, and this one is a pretty darn good one. However, although it made me consider things from a new angle, it did not convince me in the end when weighing up the evidence and comparing the photographs of the Claimant in adulthood with the photographs of Nicholas and his son Alexei.
I would like nothing more than to be able to believe that the Romanov's got the last laugh and pulled one over the Bolsheviks by having Alexei survive. I would love nothing more than to be able to believe that one of Tsar Nicholas' beloved children, in this instance, his son Alexei, lived through Ipatiev House and went on to keep a part of his father alive to this world.
Unfortunately it is not possible for me to believe such a thing happened, I believe that, sadly, sweet Alexei Romanov died in Ipatiev House with his family on July 17th, 1918 at Yekaterinburg in the Urals. I believe that his body is more than likely buried with his sister nearby the place where his family was found. Perhaps his and Maria’s bodies were never found due to chance and circumstance? Short of ploughing up the whole forest, they won’t be found and it is fact that the bodies did become separated from each other when the truck got stuck in the mud and thus they ended up being concealed in different parts of the field. I believe that the Claimant was an imposter who sucked in a good hearted journalist whose only crime was that he wanted to believe that something of Nicholas had survived the carnage, as do a lot of people. The sad fact still remains, no Romanov survived the events in that house and thus they became martyrs.
So sadly there you have it, my conclusion is that sweet Alexei Romanov died and has in fact been dead since July 17th, 1918 along with the rest of his immediate family.
May the family rest in peace and I hope that soon we will see an end to imposters trying to selfishly benefit from the names of the Romanov family, Nicholas, Alexandra, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and Alexei.
Laterz

Sunday 25th June
(in order for todays blog to make sense, you will need to read yesterdays)
Okay so I talked about Alexei’s illness and I think I established clearly that the illness that Alexei suffered was more like Thrombocytopenia as opposed to Haemophilia, particularly when you take into account the long periods of remission, which is certainly consistent with Thrombocytopenia and is NOT consistent with Haemophilia.
However, I also have to point out that nothing is certain, although certainly the Tsar’s letters are of great help when looking at Alexei’s symptoms, as the Tsar was meticulous in the recording of personal details of his travels with Alexei for his wife and daughters back home.
Second piece of the puzzle, why would the Bolsheviks allow Alexei to survive and how did they pull it off?
Yurovsky himself said during interviews that he was the one who shot Alexei in the right ear with his pistol, would one survive that, Haemophiliac or not? No! BUT, what if he had fired a blank? Sure it would burst the eardrum and cause considerable aural damage, but it would NOT kill him, though certainly he would pass out from the pain alone. When thinking upon traditional firing squads of the day, even back then even if there were ten or eleven executors, not all would have had live ammunition. Secondly, the one who prepared the guns for the firing squad was Yurovsky himself.
What we do know about Yurovsky was that he singled Alexei out for preferential treatment, bringing in cheese and milk especially for him and he was often concerned with Alexei’s health and happiness. This is according to recorded accounts of other people who were in the house and observed Yurovsky with the royal family in Ipatiev House. Why would he single Alexei out? Yurovsky was a hard, normally unfeeling individual who very much opposed the autocratic rule over Russia of the Tsar, so why would he care for the son of the deposed ruler?
The second thing we need to keep in mind is the Tsar’s abdication itself. You see the Tsar signed an abdication in favour of his son Alexei. Three or four hours later, (after receiving advice that if he allowed Alexei to ascend to the throne that he would have to abandon the boy to Russia and never see him again,) he made an addendum to the abdication and abdicated on behalf of Alexei, in favour of his younger brother Michael. BUT once the Tsar signed that first abdication, he was no longer Tsar, therefore when he made the addendum to the abdication and made it on behalf of his son, in favour of his brother, it was illegal and would not hold up in a court. The Tsar by then was Alexei Romanov and the only one who could abdicate the role of Tsar for Alexei, was Alexei himself, as then Tsar of Russia. Any lawyer, even today, will tell you that the second abdication that Nicholas signed was not legal and would not hold up in a court of law, so technically and legally, Alexei Romanov was still Tsar of Russia right up until his supposed death in Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg.
Keeping in mind the aforementioned, you can see well that Alexei may well have become a bargaining chip for Lenin, and Lenin actually owed Kaiser Wiheim (Nicholas’s first cousin and the Kaiser of Germany) a huge favour. Despite the fact that Russia and Germany were at war, it is known that Wilheim bargained desperately to save the lives of his Russian cousin, and the cousin’s wife and children. Problem with that? Nicholas was of no use, he was no longer Tsar, he had abdicated. Alexandra was most hated by the Russians for being of more Germanic descent than the Tsar and the girls were viewed as excess baggage, they couldn’t ascend the throne, ever, it passed to males only, that leaves Alexei as the only viable bargaining chip. And remember, if not for Wilheim, Lenin may well have never been able to go back to Russia, so he owed a huge favour, was the sparing of Alexei the fulfilment of that favour?
When you take a closer look at the murder scene and read the reports you very quickly begin to see discrepancies with bullets fired into bodies and bullets found in the grave where the bodies were exhumed decades later. In that the murder scene was never closed and protected, all manner of things could have happened to it over the years, but the one inescapable fact is that there were seventy-five shots fired, twenty-five were accounted for, 14 bullets were found in the mass grave, the others in the cellar of Ipatiev, but where are the other 50? This gives further credence to the fact that Yurovsky, in keeping with normal rules of a firing squad, had some of the squad firing blanks. It also explains why some of the squad reported that their bullets were ineffective against the people they were firing them at. Yurovsky also gave each member of the squad a specific target; he kept Alexei for himself. Another thing we must remember too is that if each gun held seven rounds, or even six rounds and 11 or 12 people had guns and were firing them, why would you need that many bullets to kill eleven people in a tiny cellar? Usual firing squads of the day consisted of four.
Well that can be easily be answered if one were trying to pull a ruse. Yurovsky, right in front of all 10 or 11 firing squad members, (10 or 11 other witnesses to attest to the world that in fact the entire Romanov family of Tsar Nicholas had been killed, who will argue with that?Inconsistency in the numbers depends entirely upon whether the original counts included Yurovsky or were aside from Yurovsky, no one is certain), shot Alexei Romanov in the right ear as the girls were viciously bayoneted to death. So if the others thought that all the ammunition was live, well when Alexei passed out, they may well have been forgiven for concluding that he was dead. Also (and this is an aside), even if the girls did have jewels sewn into their corsets, any bullet that hit them would either shatter them and go off at an angle. Or if the bullet hit the jewel straight on, it would have pushed the jewel with such force that it would have penetrated the flesh of the girls. No jewels were found in the grave of the Romanovs when it was exhumed, so that further goes to proving the theory that maybe only four of the 11 or 12 firing squad had live rounds, and thus when they found their guns ineffective they had to resort to using bayonets.
When they took the bodies to be buried, for some reason the body of the Tsarevich and one of his sisters were taken separately from the others, why? What was the point in doing that? Why not plonk them all in the same mine shaft and then consequently move them to the shallow grave in the field of Koptyaki Forest? Could it be because Yurovsky knew that Alexei was still living?
Okay, so why take one of the dead girls with him?
Well if the grave was ever discovered missing only the body of Alexei, that might cause much suspicion, but if two bodies were missing, it would be more easily explained away. So if Alexei lived, what did they do with the other girl, supposedly it is Duchess Maria whose body is still unaccounted for aside from Alexei’s. Could it be that the cunning Bolshevik had Maria buried in the nearby Yekaterinbug Cemetery under a false name? Apparently they tore that field to bits looking for the bodies of Alexei and Maria and came up with nothing.
Now I know that some of this is highly speculative and we still haven’t gotten to why they would even be interested in keeping Alexei alive, trust me, I am getting there. Keep in mind, I am not saying that I believe that any of this is true, I still think Alexei died in the house along with his family, and I will explain why after the next edition of "who gives a fig whether Alexei died in Ipatiev House or not...ooh I do," tomorrow.
Laterz

24th June
I read an article last night about the possibility that Alexei Romanov had escaped the fate of his family in Ipatiev House at Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains, July 17th 1918. The article was written by J.Kendrick in 1997. The article was long and made many valid points, some made no sense whatsoever, but some sparked a peculiar suspicion in me as to whether Alexei might have in fact survived and more importantly, why he may have been allowed to survive. Oh look now, no need to complain, you knew before you came in here that I was probably going to torment you with useless pieces of information that were sprinkled with other people's suppositions, conspiracy theories, my own meandering thoughts, facts that don't change a darn thing anyway and opinions, so stop raising eyebrows, signing, acting all surprised and just read...ha ha ha.
I will only speak about the points that made me kind of mull the idea over longer than I normally would have. First of all, Alexei’s illness, it was thought to be haemophilia, but after reading a description of how an attack of haemophilia follows a certain path, and having read about the attacks Alexei had, it becomes quite clear that Alexei may not, in fact, have suffered from haemophilia at all. There is no doubt that the boy was suffering from a potentially deadly blood disorder, but it may not have been haemophilia.
You see Alexei could go for months without an attack, which makes his illness episodic, and yet haemophilia is not that kind of disease, it never goes away, it is always there. For example, at the Tsar’s hunting lodge in Spala, Poland during October 1912, Alexei screamed in pure agony and was doubled up from the pain of internal haemorrhaging. His face was pale and he had black circles under his eyes. What was really going on with Alexei can be easily seen in a sentence Nicholas wrote in a letter, “The days from the 6th to the 10th were the worst…His high temperature made him delirious day and night.”
The problem is that fevers and deliriums are not consistent with a diagnosis of haemophilia, sure they will bruise easily and bleed excessively, but fevers and delirium do not follow these attacks as a rule. Alexei’s attacks also included bleeding in the joints and abdominal swelling and sometimes his fevers were as high as 105 Fh, these are symptoms commonly found in people who suffer from an illness called Thrombocytopenia.
Thromobocytopenia can either appear on its own or is associated with Aplastic Anaemia or Leukemia. Aplastic Anaemia can also cross that fine line between the two and become Leukemia later in life... if it doesn't kill the patient first. Thrombocytopenia has the peculiar ability to fade away almost as quickly as it first appears...again, if it does not kill the patient first. Why is she bringing this up? I hear you all groaning!
Well it is simple, well its kind of not simple either, but I will get to why very soon.
Alexei's doctors surmised that his haemorrhaging caused a loss of blood flow to the head, thereby producing his delirium and pale appearance. This hypothesis may have been a little too simplistic. As well as causing haemorrhaging, pallor, and fever, leukemia produces delirium by affecting the central nervous system. It was also assumed that a swelling high in the abdomen was due to a haemorrhaging stomach. One of the things that the boy did to relieve the pain was pull up his left leg. This is more suggestive of an enlarged spleen... one of the features of Thrombocytopenia. Removal of the spleen is a frequent remedy.
There were no reliable methods of testing for blood disorders during Alexei’s childhood, and one year before Alexei was born, 1903, the medical world had just figured out how to blood type people. The only reason the physician made a diagnosis of haemophilia was based on the fact that it ran in his mother’s family, ie made based on the families known medical records.
There are other royal males said to have died as a result of haemophilia, but when you place under closer scrutiny the facets surrounding their deaths, each diagnosis become questionable at the least.
Victoria's grandson Frederick of Hesse... Alexei's uncle fell twenty feet out a palace window and landed on the concrete headfirst. He was thought to be all right, but died later that night. His death was attributed to a cerebral haemorrhage due to his haemophilia, but any child falling out a window twenty feet to the ground and landing on its head on the concrete is likely to sustain a cerebral haemorrhage, this is not confined to the ranks of the haemophiliacs.
The second relative who died supposedly due to their haemophilia was Victoria's fourth son and Frederick's uncle Leopold who died eleven years later in 1884. His health was described as frail and once again the death was attributed to haemophilia. The thirty-one year old Prince had died in his sleep and, just like his nephew before him, the physicians said that "bleeding on the brain" was the cause of his passing. At this point, well over a century down the road, we call this an aneurism and know that it is certainly not exclusive to those who suffer from the bleeding disease.
Then there were the two Spanish princes who died in a car accident, but again, you do not have to be a haemophiliac to die of internal injuries sustained in a car accident.
Also there was much stigma surrounding haemophilia back then and a diagnosis of that was received in pretty much the same way as early diagnosis of AIDS used to be received. It was mostly hidden and anything that could not be explained away by something else was often placed at the feet of haemophilia, in males anyway.
My point in bringing this up?
In that Alexei clearly may not have suffered from haemophilia, it would be possible for him to sustain some bullet wounds and not bleed to death from them, assuming he was shot with a live round, which brings me to the next piece in this puzzle. But Ps (before I go to the next piece, during the scariest moments of one of Alexei's attacks, (ie Spala 1912) the end appeared to be near during the lowest point of Alexei's 1912 Spala episode and four doctors circled the boy's bed. A priest gave the Tsarevich the Last Rites and death notices were prepared. It was at this point that the most mysterious figure of the day, Grigory Rasputin, made his grandest entrance and he did so without actually being present. He sent the Empress a telegram that said, "Do not grieve. The Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much". Within a day or two the boy began to show miraculous signs of recovery. So there you go, that is how Grigory Rasputin managed to get such a strangle hold on the Russian Royal Family, at their weakest point, their lowest moment he rode in like a knight in shining armour on a brilliant white horse and saved the day (supposedly). Fact is that the worst was being endured by Alexei and the only way from there in the cycle of his Thrombocytopenia was up and had absolutely nothing to do with Rasputin, Raspy just got lucky through an accident of coincidence and nothing more. However, during those days, medical knowledge of Thrombocytopenia and haemophilia was a thing of the future, which was obviously of no use to the Palace physicians or the Tsar and Tsarina, to them, Grigory had performed a miracle and saved their dying son.
Tune in tomorrow when I shall provide the next piece of the potential puzzle, assuming anyone is actually interested.
Laterz (remember, this is mostly a retell of what I read in J. Kendrick's article of 1997 with a few of my own thoughts chucked in for good measure)

23rd June
Let me correct my statement of the other day World War 1 began after the Archduke of the decaying Austro-Hungarian empire was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 by a group of Serbian nationalists. This event began the struggle between Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian government. (Shot in Sarajevo BY Serbians!) Serbia (DOH!) how dumb can a girl get? Well I knew it started with an S, does that in any way count in my favour?
Guess not!
Also I have been watching the EU Summit on BBC still, it is interesting to watch them all scratching each other's backs and tickling each other's fancies with their high fancy schmanchy words, that are designed to confuse us or to cause us to believe that they are so much smarter than the average garden variety member of the cannon fodder....that would be you and me.
Ah yes the vices and trickery of those in power, what does the bible say? That's right, the heart of man is deceitful but above all desperately wicked, and I actually believe that this is truly the case when it comes to come of our leaders. Blind following the blind and that is why we continue to fall down into the pits of destruction and never seem to really get anywhere. Well hey, this is my blog, I can say whatever I like, I no longer care if anyone agrees or does not. My freedom of speech expires only once the tomb lies over my body and even then (with my epitaph) I intend to have the last word. Ha!
Okay so here's something new, my doctor thinks I have haemachromotosis (sp), that is a situation where your blood retains far too much iron. He thinks I either have it or are a carrier of it. He wants me to be tested for it, but I don't want to know because I prefer denial (and it is true denial is not just a river in Egypt). If I have this thing then I have to have copious amounts of blood taken out of my system every six months and have to have regular blood tests to ensure the iron levels stay balanced. That might explain why iron tablets in pregnancy used to make me feel absolutely dreadful and I quit taking them after my first baby.
I don't fancy becoming a pin cushion, but if I am a carrier then all my kids have to be tested because I might have passed it on to them, that is kind of scary. Even still I do not want to have the tests and have not yet decided whether I will or whether I won't. I need to read up a little on it too I guess so that I know exactly what I am dealing with or facing. It is not a terminal illness or anything, but it can make you feel pretty damn bad, and may explain why over the last four or five years I have felt, 'off' from week to week sometimes. If you have it, it can make you tired and cranky and I admit it, I get tired and cranky a bit more than the normal person, BUT it could be that my life is stressful with my youngest having higher needs than the usual. Or it could simply be that I do have haemachromotosis and might start to feel better if I have it treated.
Anyway, that's me for now, I am tired and cranky and have the rest of an EU Summit to watch.
Laterz

22nd June
Wow, I really got on a roll yesterday didn't I? But I really enjoyed it.
Well we have huge snowfall down in the South Island today and the electricity in some places there has been out for over a week. Luckily, it is not lambing season yet, otherwise the losses would be huge. It is pretty cold here too and not much fun getting up in the mornings.
Jonty made me a pillowcase at school, it is blue and has yellow teddy bears on it, it is cute. I have it on my fave pillow (you know we all have a pillow we prefer above others for when we sleep, or perhaps it is just me?). Jonty is pleased about the fact that I have so willingly messed up the colour scheme in my room to accommodate his lovely gift. He is now in the process of making a pair of pyjamas! I told him to make them for him cos I draw the line at blue pyjamas will yellow teddy bears (I would have nightmares forever!) just kidding, but real pyjamas are not my thing.
Was considering cutting my hair to maybe my shoulders, but then as I went to do it I had a sudden change of heart. My little sister (about two years ago upon seeing the length of my hair) said, "No one over 35 should have long hair," and I thought about what she said. See, her hair won't grow, it just stubbornly refuses to do so, so I got the impression she was just being a little spiteful about the fact that my hair grows like wildwood weed, as does Jonty's. Tasha's hair takes FOREVER to grow too, but her hair is very pretty.
My sister is kind of odd, she will ring every now and then and leave a message, but she won't leave a phone number for me to ring her back, which I probably wouldn't do anyway, but still, how banal is that?
I did not grow up with my brother or my sisters, so I do not know them as well as I would have had I lived with them my entire life. But in adulthood (and a few times in my teen years) I have made the effort to try to get to know them, but every time it has turned into an unmitigated disaster of biblical proportions (okay so I embellish, but never has the result been pleasant for too long!) The last time I tried was a few years ago and what a disaster that was. You see, they have all inherited their mother's proclivity for playing mind games, like, they pack a sad and you have to guess what it is that you did wrong, and things like that.
My older sister likes to drink...a lot and then will get on the phone in her drunken stupor and abuse the hell out of the person on the other end, usually me. The last time she did this to me was, wow, let me think here, must be nearly two years ago, or maybe it is only one year ago? Anyway but she told me everything that had been wrong with her childhood and then subsequently her life, and oddly enough, apparently it was all MY fault. Well I let her rant for almost two hours and then she packed a hump when I would not play her game and then hung the phone up in my ear. I changed my phone number and that was that.
My brother, his fave game was to be at home yet sit in his house and refuse to answer the door when I knocked on it to go see him. At first I put up with the behaviour (amongst all the other crap he used to do and say, has a very caustic mouth when it comes to me) and then he did the, 'car is in the driveway but pretending I am not at home because I don't feel like seeing you today' routine for the last time and I said to myself, "Screw him. I am not a doormat or a toy for him to play with every time he gets bored!"
And my little sister still plays her, 'leave me a message to phone her but leave no number' gig and I just listen to the message and then erase it until next time.
I think the ties of sibshipness (is there such a word? I know there is a word sibships, it is commonly used in medical/scientific terms, but sibshipness? I don't think so, but for the sake of this convo, I am going to keep it...because this is my blog and I can make the rules to suit myself...ha ha ha) were well and truly severed years ago and we were merely trying to make (or perhaps it was me) something out of nothing? But I am content with the way things are and oddly enough (as opposed to previous years) I am quite happy to let sleeping dogs lie. My friend Wolf once said to me that I really needed to decide whether I was going to be a doormat for the rest of my life or not, and he was right. I was being a doormat in my desperation to make something out of nothing with my siblings, because truly, if they were not partially biologically related to me, I would have no desire to have anything to do with any of them because I am so different to them. I view the world differently, I view people differently, my perspective on life, love and relationships is quite different and my aspirations are clearly different too. I think the only true commonality we share is that we all got carried around in the same womb for nine months once upon a time, after that, there is no common thread between us, which is sad, yet you have to be realistic about these things.
I tried being irrationally hopeful (hoping against hope well beyond the point of fatigue with them) it does not work, you have to learn when to let go, for your own sake and sanity, and that is what I did. See how well I can go off at a tangent and I bet you didn't even notice?
Okay, well that's about it for now, I have to go to the dreaded supermarket to buy food and then I might go to the Warehouse to see if they have any interesting DVDs this week.
Laterz
Ps I watched the EU summit that was held in Vienna, Austria last night, well actually it was 1.00am this morning. I watched the Austrian Chancellor and George Bush talking with each other and discussing Iran. It was really quite interesting to listen to what they were saying.
Initially when this whole Iran thing popped up out of nowhere, George Bush said he wasted to talk with Iran, you know negotiate and stuff over their plutonium enrichment activities (was it plutonium? I forget), but last night (well this morning) he was saying that he would only be prepared to sit down and talk with them (Iran) once they have given a definite decision to cease and desist on their plutonium enrichment scheme (again...was it plutonium? I forget). Anyway, it is just interesting watching them speak to each other, you seldom get to see that kind of thing, so go go go BBC World!
Laterz (for sure this time.)

21st June
I got kidnapped in MSN today. There I was minding my own business working on Sandanizta Mist 6 and I did have my MSN open. I looked up and saw that I had been taken into Rosie's MSN, and in there with me was Gail. After about ten minutes Paul (the Waffleman from Maine) turned up, then Theresa from (well I forget where Theresa is from) turned up and then someone from Alberta, Canada called Happi turned up too. Just when I thought the kidnap confines of the MSN box would burst, Jackie showed up too. I was like, "How did you do this Rosie? How did we all end up in here?" Apparently MSN kidnap is very easy to pull off, and I have to say that I didn’t actually mind all that much, it was kind of fun. Did I mention that Gail is from Ohio? She is a lovely dear lady, very pleasant, kind and kind of 'old school', I can imagine her as a school mam back in the civil war or something.
Rosie is my friend who can pull off such a good rendition of a Jamaican accent that she would make Bob Marley (if he were still living) seem an imperfect imposter of the Jamaican ranks, which we all know he was not. I adore the Jamaican accent; it is one of my faves.
I haven't heard anything from my Russian priest friend in days, he is a little shy and perhaps I may not hear from him again? Tis a pity really, he was interesting.
I was reading more of Tsar Nicky's diaries today, gosh he really did have a sense of humour, in one letter he said to Alexandra, "Sleep well, have pleasant dreams.... but not of Catholic Priests!" I found that funny. She was a little bossy boots at times, Alexandra, but Nicky put her in her place at times. Sure he apologised if he thought he upset her in his reprimands, but still, at times Nicky stood his ground.
I think Nicky was ill suited to the role of Tsar and as we all know, or perhaps we don’t, he never wanted to be Tsar anyway. I think he would have made a rather pleasant country inn owner, farmer or perhaps land owner. He was not selfish enough to fully aspire completely to the role of Tsar of Russia, he was too family oriented, and he was not cold enough, as were the other royals of the day. I think his lovely disposition was ill suited to the role of tyrannical Tsar, and that was kind of his undoing. I don’t think he really understood politics, he most certainly admitted to having no clue about the rules of supply and demand, something I have in common with him, I do not understand economics too well either, and I might, save they involve numbers. Nicky was clearly a literary intellectual, but was not really practically minded, none of us airy-fairy dreamy writer types are.
I mean he could make a garden and grow vegetables, and he could also chop wood (how many other Tsars would have done that?) and I too can do those things, so being self sufficient was not a problem, what I mean is that he did not possess an understanding of the intricacies of the running of a country from an economic standpoint, quite frankly, neither do I. That in itself would not have been a bad thing, save for the fact that he was Tsar and in an autocratic role, that is where his inability to understand the running of a country from an economic standpoint (especially rules of supply and demand) led him and subsequently the country, to peril. Well that is what I think from what I have read, not only did the Tsar not understand those things, but also he had no desire to try.
Anyway (and as I have said before) no matter what one has done be it through intentional neglect or though unintentional naivete, no one deserves to be executed without trial nor recourse of said sente