If you are cooking Italian style - especially if you are in holiday mode - it is a good idea to have a bottle of wine on the go, partly because most recipes will benefit from a splash or two, but also because a glass in the hand always helps it seem less than a chore.
It's time we went back to first principles on ACC. Because there's been so much politicking over it, the corporation's original intent tends to be lost in the increasingly acrimonious mists of spin and misinformation.
Deep down, most New Zealanders are environmentalists. It runs in our blood, is laid down in our bones. But many of us seem to have a deep aversion to it being suggested how certain actions might be having an adverse effect upon the natural world around us.
If rather too much is being made of the Government's supposed current woes, that is probably because, in general, it had such an easy ride for its first three years.
So the Government is going to set up a "working party" to look again at teacher-pupil ratios in schools. I hope it is going to include some educational experts, and not just stack it with "analysts" and economists, because, as we now see, even this supposedly numerate approach to devising educational infrastructure can come up short.
Paula Rebstock is a well-educated person with an impressive CV. She has worked in Treasury, for the Labour Department, in the Office of the Prime Minister, and headed the Commerce Commission. I wonder if she's ever spent time in a soup kitchen.
Apologies for returning to an old hobbyhorse, but now the Government and TVNZ have conspired definitively to put TVNZ 7 out to grass, and with it the last vestiges of public service television in this country.
There is the letter of the law, there is the spirit of the law and there is intent. Like the Prime Minister, I'm no lawyer but it seems to me most ordinary people do not have a high opinion those who behave with questionable intent to flout the spirit of the law, yet whose actions might not contravene the actual letter of it.
My friend's father had been a prisoner of war. That much I knew and not much else; and I knew it because he had named his only son after the man who, he said, had saved his life, by sharing his...
I recall some time ago having an animated debate with an acquaintance over a policy of the newspaper for which I then worked. It concerned the letters to the editor column, and the rule that anonymous letters would not be published.