Grumpy Old Men was a successful and often entertaining television series a few years ago. It is also a medical condition and an anthropological phenomenon.
There are three phrases which most rational thinkers would agree have gone way past their use-by date - bucket list, elephant in the room, and Peter Dunne.
The book was 20 cents. A tad mangled, but you get mangled with 20c books. Charisma by Orania Papazoglou.
Ratioanl thinkers have argued for many years as to the worst card that could ever be dealt to a human.
The disadvantage in buying your own birthday presents is that if they are wrong, you look 10 times stupider than you look when buying incorrectly for someone else. You are, after all, meant to know yourself pretty well.
Recommendation is one those simple pesky words you sometimes spell wrong. Like commission, acoustic, embarrassed and twelfth.
Piano playing at its ragtime best.
It seems incredible that after loathing pianos as a teenager, loathing them more than rice pudding, centipedes and the Otago Boys' High School cane, I am now searching hungrily for one.
I grew up with pianos. My grandfather, a music teacher, organist and choirmaster, lived with us, and he had a Bechstein grand piano and a Schiedmayer upright.
Murphy has really been dealing it out lately. Nothing I can't handle, but it's winter, and Murphy and his infuriating Law always gets stroppy when the cold closes in.
There are myriad unusual human conditions out there with strange and arresting names, none stranger than the aptly entitled Putrid Syndrome. I have this awful thing.
When we were young, we loved the cold.
A ferocious discussion on phobias in an inner-city cafe last Thursday saw some arresting stuff brought to the table.
Minutes from a recent Otago District Health Board meeting have been furtively leaked my way, on the promise I keep all details under my hat. Such discretion goes without saying. Tight-lipped silence is my bond.
Ugging. Now there's a thing. I grew up in a non-hugging family and then trotted off to a single-sex school, boys, so I arrived at university as what behavioural anthropologists call, a Wuss, a Woefully Underhugged Social Simpleton.
I was chatting rationally to a close personal friend over the weekend as to how surprisingly fine X Factor NZ has been so far.
When my wife informed me her school was doing a history tour of Vietnam these holidays, I guffawed like a man in a guffaw tunnel. Could I come too, I said, I love history, me. No, she said.
A curious document fluttered on to my Facebook desk last week purporting to be a list of Redneck Medical Terms.
Home theatre 5.1-channel sound systems that make action movies swirl around your head like low-flying helicopters have been with us for quite a while now.
After my last bout of surgery, where a team of skilled knife-men somehow managed to find an abdominal patch hitherto undug, the chief surgeon said I would be fine, just so long as I didn't lift anything.
The old chestnuts are the best. Really? I don't know. Maybe old chestnuts conk better. Remember conking?
Aeons ago, I cannot possibly remember how many aeons, I went out to someone's house for an evening with computer enthusiasts. Computers had started appearing in shop windows, almost as if they might become The Next Thing. I was interested. I had just bought a Sinclair ZX81.
