Ron Hann
Posts: 5783
Joined: 14 Aug. 2003
From: Christchurch New Zealand
Status: offline
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Some more Rules to Live By.
Count on me to lead the way
Here are my 25 rules for a righteous and contented life.
* Never be awed by people with impressive-sounding academic qualifications. The world is full of highly educated twerps.
* Refuse to buy anything from a shop or cafe that insists on bombarding you with obnoxious noise.
* Never allow yourself to be seen running for a bus. It's undignified.
* Don't hesitate to walk out of a bad movie; life's too short. You usually know within the first 10 minutes whether it's going to be worth persevering.
* Be courteous but firm with telemarketers. Tell them you're very sorry, but your mother-in-law is on fire and you don't have time to talk.
* Don't trust journalists who boast of being cynics, as if this were a virtue. Sceptics demand to be convinced – an honourable attribute. But cynics believe the worst of human nature and assume ulterior motives for everything – a very bleak world view.
* Life is too short to keep up with new music. It's more fun to rediscover the old.
* Treat fashion as the absurdity it is, created primarily to exploit insecure people who lack confidence in their own taste and right to dress as they think fit.
* Be tolerant toward habitual stirrers and activists, no matter how irritating they might be. They are the price we pay for living in a free society.
* Don't condemn religion out of hand. Better to be a kid growing up in a Destiny Church household where there's a cooked dinner on the table every night and a father in work than a kid living in a P house who might be lucky to get KFC on benefit day.
* Never trust a man with a ponytail.
* Don't waste your precious time reading venomous opinions, such as some of those on Internet blogs, whose authors are too gutless to put their names to them.
* Be suspicious of anyone with personalised number plates, unless it happens to be your brother-in- law.
* Don't be ashamed to be seen eating at McDonald's. The sausage- and-egg McMuffin with a hash brown is a tastier and cheaper breakfast than you'll get at most trendy cafes.
* Remonstrate with people who drop litter in public or allow their dogs to foul parks and footpaths, even if you risk a bit of biffo. (This rule is probably safer for old ladies, but not necessarily.)
* Make a point of visiting Parliament at least once to observe the sheer concentration of vanity and infantilism on display there. No one ever said democracy's perfect.
* Accept that there are almost as many bigoted atheist zealots as there are religious ones.
* Keep at arm's length men who dress up in strange clothes and indulge in odd, all-male rituals, such as freemasons, Ku Klux Klansmen, scoutmasters and clerics.
* Relish the prospect of boasting on your deathbed that you never wasted a moment watching a reality TV programme.
* Give thanks for the fact that they didn't have closed-circuit TV that day you set fire to the Waipukurau Post Office fence.
* Distrust ideology in any shape or form. No matter how perfect the idea, humans will always stuff it up.
* Always read the birth and death notices. They remind us what an intimately connected society we are.
* Never trust an academic who uses words such as "paradigm", "construct" (in its noun form), "narrative", "discourse" or "post- structural". These are terms that should activate even the most low- powered BS detector.
* Disregard the lifelong propaganda that teaches us all discrimination is bad. Discrimination is just as often good – it's what enables us to distinguish between good and bad. We need more of it.
* Observe traditional male courtesies such as opening the door for a woman. Even some feminists appreciate such gestures, though they rarely admit it.
* Never trust a newspaper columnist who pronounces 25 rules for a righteous and contented life, especially if he can't count.
_____________________________
Ron Hann.
On present indications, my site will be unattended from Wednesday, 15th., October, 2008, to Sunday, 19th., October, 2008, both dates being inclusive. Any e-mails received within that time frame may be deleted unread.
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