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Norman Edward Stace (1918 - 2008)
Corinne Helen Christine Hall (1915 - 2011)
Helen 1942
John 1943
Peter 1946
Brenda 1949
Nigel 1957
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Norman, Corinne, Brenda, Nigel, John and Narelle visited New Zealand in 1969. They are in this photo with Thora, Gordon, his wife and Rodney Stace. |
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When we talked of going to Hawaii for a couple of weeks in February 2018 several of our friends enthusiastically recommended it. To many of them it's a nice place to go on holidays - a little further to go than Bali but with a nicer climate, better beaches and better shopping - with bargains to be had at the designer outlets.
Waikiki
To nearly one and a half million racially diverse Hawaiians it's home.
Downtown Hilo
To other Americans it's the newest State, the only one thousands of miles from the North American Continent, and the one that's more exotic than Florida.
As another test of ChatGPT I asked it: "in 2 thousand words, to write a fiction about a modern-day witch who uses chemistry and female charms to enslave her familiars". This is one of the motifs in my novella: The Craft (along with: the great famine; world government; cyber security and overarching artificial intelligence).
Rather alarmingly, two of five ChatGPT offerings, each taking around 22 seconds to generate, came quite close to the sub-plot, although I'm not keen on the style or moralistic endings. Here they are:
Back in April 2007 I was in Washington DC and wandered into a bookshop for a coffee. On display was Stephen Kinzer's National Best Seller: Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. So I bought it to read, before bed and on the plane.
It is a heavily researched and work; very well described by the New York Times as: "A detailed passionate and convincing book... with the pace and grip of a good thriller." And like a good thriller it was hard to put down. I can recommend it.