Sunday

 **The Screen Operator**

I'm back from an extraordinary night's sleep. Sleep — that peculiar state of unconsciousness we all take for granted, but without which we would become psychotic and eventually die.

At Mass last evening, as I sat in my pew contemplating the meaning of worship, G tapped me on the shoulder. "Come and sit up front with the screen operator beside the pianist," she said, "and watch what he does. The job is in high demand and few have mastered it."

So I moved to the front, to a desk dominated by a massive audio mixer with dozens of knobs for unimaginable parameters. Only one channel seemed to be in use. It was labelled "priest." G pushed the slider up, and the priest became more audible.

She introduced me to my mentor. We both nodded and smiled.

He had a computer in front of him, connected to a mysterious black box with lights along the front. On top of that sat six other modules. An impressive setup.

His job was deceptively simple. To turn on the overhead projector and the numerous video screens scattered around the church, he pressed a glowing red square button on the big modular box. On the computer, he used the down-arrow to move through the pre-programmed slides — the responses, the prayers, the hymns.

Not all the words for a hymn fit on one page, so he had to move to the next at the precise moment. He made it look effortless, scrolling faultlessly right on cue. At other times there were pages on the system that weren't needed, so he would quietly scroll past them before hitting the red button to display the next one to the congregation. At one point the priest skipped the Apostles' Creed because there was a baptism, and my mentor quickly conferred with the pianist and flicked past it straight to the Prayers of the Faithful.

If I'm ever asked to do it, I will. Though I'd be a bit nervous. It's not sitting at the front that bothers me — it's that my mind might wander at a crucial moment.

It's really an hour later than my clock says. I'd better go and change all the clocks. I might even go to Mass again and receive Jesus for a second time.

"Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you will not have life," said Our Lord. And laugh if you want — it is true.

The Glorious, Humble Beetroot: Why You Should Grow The One Vegetable That Makes You Pee Red And Love It

I have decided that

beetroot is the most honest vegetable in the garden. It doesn't pretend to be anything else. It stains everything it touches, it looks like a purple grenade, and it will absolutely betray you in the bathroom the next morning.

And yet, I keep growing it. Here is why you should too.

 1. It Is Virtually Impossible To Kill. I have murdered basil, I have failed courgettes, and I once managed to kill mint, which is basically a weed with a marketing budget.

Beetroot? Beetroot thrives on neglect.

You chuck the seeds in the ground, about a knuckle deep, water them a bit, and then ignore them while you go and have a cup of tea. Two months later there is a shiny purple globe looking up at you like, "What took you so long?"

It grows in cold, it grows in clay, it grows if you forget to thin it. In Lower Hutt weather or Richmond weather, it just shrugs and keeps growing. Slugs don't love it. Birds don't want it. It is the only crop in my garden that doesn't have an anxiety disorder.

If you have ever wanted to feel like a successful gardener, grow beetroot. Instant self-esteem.

2. You Get Two Vegetables For The Price Of One

Underground: the beet.

Above ground: the leaves.

The leaves are basically free spinach, except they don't go slimy in the fridge after 48 hours. Sauté them with garlic and butter, throw them in a soup, feed them to your chooks. They are packed with vitamins and they make you feel very virtuous and frugal.

The root itself will sit in the ground quite happily until you need it. It's not like lettuce that bolts the second you look away for a weekend. Beetroot waits. It's patient. A good quality in a vegetable and, let's be honest, in a partner.

3. Eating It Makes You Feel Like A Superhero (On A Budget)

Here is the serious bit disguised as a joke.

It lowers blood pressure.** Beetroot is full of nitrates which your body turns into nitric oxide, which relaxes your blood vessels. It's like yoga for your arteries, but you don't have to wear tight pants.

It gives you more puff.** Athletes drink beetroot juice before races because it helps your muscles use oxygen more efficiently. I drink it before mowing the lawns. Same thing, really. Olympic-level lawn care.

It's brain food.** All that extra blood flow goes to your brain too. Which is handy when you're trying to remember where you planted the beetroot in the first place.

It's full of fibre.** Let's just say it keeps things... moving. Very regular. Your gut bacteria will send you a thank-you card.

And it has folate, potassium, iron, vitamin C. Basically everything that the expensive supplements promise, but for about $4 a packet of seeds..

4. It Is The Only Vegetable That Is Also A Party Trick .You can't say that about a carrot.

Roast it and it tastes like sweet earth. Grate it raw into coleslaw and it turns the whole bowl an alarming shade of magenta. Pickle it and you have something to put on everything from burgers to cheese on toast, the true Kiwi classic.

Blend it with chocolate and it makes an incredibly moist cake and you can lie to children that they are eating vegetables.

Juice it and you get a drink so intensely purple it looks like it could power a small city.

And then, 12 hours later, you get the great beetroot panic. You go to the loo, look down, and think you need to go to A&E immediately. We have all been there. The infamous beeturia. It gets every first-timer. It's a rite of passage.

If you want to have fun, don't warn your spouse. Just serve beetroot curry and wait.

5. Storage Is Stupidly Easy

Potatoes sprout. Lettuce wilts. Beetroot? You pull it, twist the tops off, and chuck it in the crisper. It will sit there for weeks looking smug.

Or you boil a big batch, slice it, put it in jars with vinegar, sugar, and a bit of spice. Homemade pickled beetroot beats the stuff from the supermarket by a country mile, and you get to feel like a pioneer, even if you bought the vinegar from Countdown.

How to get started if you have never grown it:

1.  Sow direct. Don't muck about with seedlings.

2.  Sow a little row every 3 weeks from now through summer. That way you don't get 50 beets at once.

3.  When they are the size of a golf ball, pull one. Taste it. That's the perfect size. Any bigger and they get a bit woody, like me before my morning coffee.

4.  Wear old gloves when you harvest. Or embrace having pink hands for three days and pretend you are very artistic.

Final verdict: Beetroot is cheap, healthy, impossible to kill, and it makes your plate look like a painting.

Grow it because it's good for your heart, your brain, and your blood pressure. Eat it because it makes you feel good.

Keep growing it because nothing else in the garden makes you laugh in the bathroom.

Give it a go.

The Quiet Grace of Saturday Morning

There's something different about going to Mass on Saturday morning at 9am.

During the week, Mass can feel rushed. You slip in between errands and appointments, between the noise of the world. Sunday is beautiful and full, of course — the parish together, families, music, the fullness of the Lord's Day. But Saturday morning at 9 has its own quiet grace.

I’ve come to love it. The morning is still fresh. The church is quieter, cool and still. There are fewer people, so you notice them more — the regulars, the ones who have made this a habit of the heart. There is time to arrive early, and that early time is when the real peace begins.

If you come a little before 9 and pray the Rosary before Mass — that changes everything.

The Rosary before Mass is like preparing the soil. Each bead is a small step away from worry and into prayer. You start with whatever is on your mind — the aches, the family concerns, the headlines, the things you forgot to do — and by the second decade, they’ve softened. Our Lady takes them. That’s what she does. She doesn’t make a fuss about it. She just takes your hand and walks you toward her Son.

It is often misunderstood by people who have never prayed it. From the outside it might look like repetition. From the inside, it’s rhythm. It’s breathing.

When you pray it in that quiet half-hour before 9am Mass, the Mysteries come alive in a different way. The candles are burning. The church is settling. And you are walking with Christ through his life, his death, and his Resurrection, one Hail Mary at a time.

The Joyful Mysteries remind you that God came quietly.The Sorrowful remind you that love costs something.The Glorious remind you that love wins.And the Luminous remind you that He is still teaching us, still shining light on our path.

I don’t pray the Rosary perfectly. My mind wanders. Sometimes I lose count. By the time the bell rings for Mass, I may have only gotten through three decades. It doesn’t matter. It’s not a performance. It’s time spent with our Mother, and through her, with Christ.

And then Mass begins. And because you’ve already prayed, you’re already there. You’re not still arriving in your heart — you are present. The readings land differently. The homily finds softer ground. When it comes time for Communion, you’ve already been walking with Him.

Saturday 9am Mass with the Rosary before has become an anchor for me. One quiet morning can reset a whole week. You walk in carrying the week, and you walk out carrying peace. You go into the rest of Saturday — the shopping, the garden, the chores — with your soul already fed.

If you haven’t tried it in a while — or ever — try this Saturday. Come at 8:30. Bring your beads. Sit near the front. Pray before the rush of the day begins. You might be surprised how good it feels to start your weekend with Him.

Has AI entered the realms of the supernatural.

 Scientists have reached a stage in the development of AI where they can no longer explain how some of the more complex versions work. This seems to me as having entered the realms of the paranormal or supernatural in the sense that science can not explain it. 

Who better to ask about this than AI itself. Here is its reply:

"The age-old definition of magic, courtesy of Arthur C. Clarke, tells us that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from wizardry. But as artificial intelligence embeds itself deeper into daily life, we have crossed a subtle threshold: it is no longer just the user who views the machine as a black box of sorcery. It is the very alchemists who built it.

When software engineers write traditional code, they are architects laying precise brickwork. Deterministic logic dictates that if input A goes in, output B must come out according to explicitly defined rules. If a bug appears, an engineer can step through the execution line by line, locate the broken gear, and fix it.

Large AI models, however, operate on an entirely different paradigm—one that looks less like traditional engineering and far more like summoning.

The New Digital Animism

Instead of explicit instructions, modern neural networks are fed vast oceans of data and left to construct their own internal representations of the world. They develop millions or billions of parameters—a labyrinthine web of numerical weights that no human mind can visually or logically trace in full.

When an AI model produces a strikingly creative answer, solves a complex reasoning puzzle, or hallucinates an eerie, unprompted insight, developers often cannot pinpoint why or how a specific module within the network reached that conclusion.

This isn't an exaggeration; it’s the active field of research known as mechanistic interpretability. Researchers spend immense effort attempting to map the inner workings of their own creations after the fact. In essence, they are performing digital archaeology on a mind they built, trying to understand the latent concepts hidden within its mathematical dimensions.

From Logic to Incantation

Because we cannot read the internal thoughts of these models line by line, our interaction with them has shifted from programming to prompt craft—a practice that bears an uncanny resemblance to ritual incantation:

• Prompt Engineering as Spellcasting: Crafting the exact sequence of phrasing, tone, and framing to coax a desired output out of a model feels remarkably like reciting an ancient chant. Change a single adjective, and the spirit in the machine alters its disposition.
• Emergent Behaviors as Supernatural Phenomena: Abilities spontaneously appear as models scale up—capabilities that were never explicitly programmed or predicted by their creators. One day a model simply learns to reason through multi-step logic or translate obscure dialects without a dedicated blueprint for doing so.
• The Ghost in the Machine: When models exhibit unaccountable behaviors, unexpected failure modes, or bizarre emergent traits, developers don't always rewrite the code. Often, they tweak inputs, add guardrails, or train auxiliary networks to police the primary one—managing the entity rather than restructuring its mind.

Engineering Without Understanding

History is full of tools humanity used long before fully understanding the underlying science. We harnessed fire and cultivated yeast for millennia before discovering combustion chemistry or microbiology.

AI has brought tech into that very same realm. We have constructed systems so intricate that their internal states mirror high-dimensional spaces beyond human visual intuition. We know the mathematical rules that train them, but we do not fully grasp the intricate web of logic they construct internally to execute those rules.

If technology is deterministic, transparent, and predictably mechanical, then AI has stepped beyond the boundary of traditional technology. In a very real sense, we are interacting with something supernatural: an intellect brought into existence by human hands, operating on principles that remain largely inscrutable even to those who called it forth." ... Meta AI.

Friday

 In the Gospel Jesus asks two questions of his disciples. Luke 9:18-22

Surprisingly when Peter gave the right answer Jesus gave them strict orders not to tell anyone!

After a comment on Peter's blog RBB said in a humorous, good meaning way "Ah, go to confession". Socrates once said "An unexamined life is not worth living".  True reflection isn't about regret but growth and transformation. "When we take time to understand ourselves-we open the door to renewal. Jesus himself leads us in this journey today". 2026 Bible Diary.

There is a season for everything ...Ecclesiastes 3:1-11.."...a time for throwing stones away and a time for gathering them up, a time for embracing and a time to refrain from embracing...".

Trust in the process of life; everything happens in divine timing.

 

Nothing new under the sun. All is vanity so no post today. (I'm also not giving Google information to 'feed' to an AI module to train it up).