SPRING BULL FALL

On 2/04/2010, at 5:17 AM (though it was still the 1st day of April in the US of A) James Spinti wrote:

Spring is finally here, and the many avid gardeners among us are turning over a new leaf - quite literally, in the case of our compost piles. With that in mind, we bring you four new products from partner Winged Bull Press on the themes of "green" and "compost." Happy digging!

Find ... all the latest Winged Bull Press titles here:
https://www.eisenbrauns.com/ECOM/_2WR17OVB9.HTM


Regarding the Winged Bull Press, it brought to mind a pseudo-documentary that our celebrated Peter Jackson made, named FORGOTTEN SILVER, about an early film-maker in NZ; a Biblical epic (and moving pictures of the NZ aviator who actually got off the ground before the Wright brothers) was found in a chest with a magnificent bull pictured on its lid; it was a hoax that fooled us all; but in the subsequent public analysis nobody but myself, it seems, picked up his bull-reference. So I was ready for this winged bull of James Spinti.

Movie-critic Leonard Maltin was included as an authenticating witness; and when it was later shown on Australian television, I happened to be there; advertisements for its coming had NZ prime minister David Lange (he was always a good joker) urging people not to watch it! At that time my son Michael and I went to an Australian film commission building (or whatever) in Canberra,  and we discovered that the name of an Australian prominently on show was the same as the name PJ has chosen for his fictional NZ film-maker. Not many people know that. Somebody might like to tell Peter that his secret is out.

The 1st of April was the date on which Helen and I had our first conversation and our first misunderstanding, at a Methodist youth camp, in 1956.

This year, on the 2nd of April, Good Friday, I did a church crawl (analogous to a pub crawl, which I have never done) involving 9 church services (9.30 -5.00); I sang Isaac Wattsisname's "When I survey the wondrous cross" four times, and at the first one (at Wesley Broadway ... that leads to destruction) I declaimed my own translation of The Servant Song (Isaiah/ Yesha`yahu 52-53) in which I boldly changed 'They made his grave with the wicked and a rich man in his death' (which some Xns take as meaning Joseph of Arimathea; but the parallelism seems wrong, unless we allow that the wealthy are villains, and there have been plenty of them robbing me of my savings in recent years) to "He was given a grave with the wicked, a burial place with evil-doers" (turning `$yr into `sy r`).

I gave my black compost  boxes an autumn (or 'fall') shake-up, and scattered the results on the garden, on Saturday 9th of April.

There was a farmer who was showing off his bumper crops to some visitors, and repeatedly attributing his success to 'manure'. One sensitive soul asked his wife if she could persuade him to use the term 'fertilizer' instead. Her retort was: It has taken me 30 years to get him to say 'manure'.

Brian Colless