Roy Colbert

Good grief. Herman's Hermits are playing at the Oamaru Opera House.

A  sub-editor and blogger of enviable note at this newspaper - let's not name names, a life spent in quiet privacy is a life cherished - wrote recently of her loathing of the dash.

Jono, or JC as they knew him as a photographer on this newspaper, was back in town last week, down from New Plymouth. Jono was my partner in early 1990s literary larceny when we combed the lower South Island for characters we came to call doozies.

The grandchildren arrive from Chicago forever in 44 days. I am being slowly crushed from the pressure like a potato chip beneath a big man's boot.

I think it was Oscar Wilde who said Facebook Friends only count as friends if they write back. This is a very sad thing for all those people out there who claim to be friends with Michelle Williams, the Prince of Tonga and Usain Bolt just because a software programme automatically added them to a colossal unfeeling database.

I doubt if any rational thinker would dispute that the reason many men flinch from housework is because of the design faults in vacuum cleaners and oval-shaped fitted bedsheets.

Whenever French existentialist philosophers gather in Octagon cafes, and July is a particularly luxuriant month for them, you will invariably hear talk of the Cher song If I Could Turn Back Time. The warship setting for the song's video, huge gun barrels thrusting at Cher's supplicatory body, is clearly compelling for existentialists, but if you have been eavesdropping on them, as I have, you will have heard their particular fixation this year has been - CAN we turn back time and SHOULD we turn back time.

For years I thought a man cave was a floating thing, a space where a man could be his inane onanistic self.

Another birthday gone. A few who thought they were close personal friends, and until last Thursday they assuredly were that, mentioned how old they thought I was, which is hardly something you say to someone on their birthday, is it?

"Art is a hard mistress, and there is no art quite so hard as that of being a wife." Ah, you will be saying, is there a new Leonard Cohen album out?

Apparently, we turn to entertainment when times are tough. Like now.

Natasha's departure from Coronation Street a month ago remains the finest thing shown on television so far this year.

Howls of protest greeted my recent Jayne Mansfield column. It is only now I have plucked up the courage to come out from behind the sofa and leave the house.

In the mansion-construction one-upmanship that swept through Beverly Hills in the early 20th century, each famous actor trying to appear the richest and best, there was arguably none finer, none more outrageous, than Buster Keaton's 10,000sq ft Mediterranean palazzo.

A firend texted last week, Wednesday, in a state of pure epiphany.

Most rational thinkers are fully aware of the Mendelian Laws of Heredity, the once (1865) controversial but now accepted theory of how powerfully we are controlled by inherited genes. Far fewer are aware of a side-dabble the great man toyed with back then (1861), Mendel's Law of Complementary Intelligence.

Most rational thinkers would agree the four most significant inventions of the past 500 years have been Paul Crowther's Hot Cake guitar effects box, the thing, probably a lever, that keeps planes in the air so they won't fall on the ground, chocolate, and peanut butter.

Columns are not the easiest things to name.