There is nothing that gets the blood boiling quite so much as hooning young people in fast cars who break the law with monotonous regularity and raise a big fat finger to authority and society in the process.
I've been mooching about on the information super-highway of late and more than once found the stall warning lights sounding: overload, overload, pull up, pull up!
We are all victims now.
It was as predictable as it was inevitable that the arrival of the first dead soldier home from Afghanistan would raise the issue of New Zealand's continued role in that country.
The eligibility age for national superannuation and the predisposition to send ever growing numbers of people to clink, don't appear to have a lot in common.
When I rang my friend Mike, novelist, playwright and screenwriter, to commiserate with him over the latest setback in the project that had consumed him for seven or eight years, I expected him to be down in the dumps.
Everyone's been Gung Ho about New Zealand's prospects with China in recent days and weeks, not least our Prime Minister.
Freedom of speech is not absolute, even in a mature democracy.
Another week, further reminders of what a brutal and unforgiving business the political game can be.
Pardon me for being something of a contrarian, and I know how we love to despise those who consider themselves so above the herd as to apply for public office, but am I mistaken in discerning a whiff of hypocrisy and cultural cringe about the great credit-card scandal of 2010?
Bear with me while I consider the rather dry matter of water.
Was John Key's press conference conversation stopper the other day simply an unscripted slip of the scalpel - err, sorry, the tongue - or part of a deliberate ongoing bloke-next-door charm offensive?
We are surrounded by reminders of the force of nature and the simultaneous fragility of the same.
Intermittently, ever since that rather shudder-inducing toe-sucking scandal, the Duchess of York has been at pains to embarrass herself, the Royal Family, and just about everyone else.
Tomorrow the Government will show us the colour of its money. And not an awful lot of it will be a great surprise.
Those worried about the prospect of electoral reform in Britain could do worse than cast a glance in our direction, where governments elected through a proportional representation system continue to throw up counterintuitive results, writes Simon Cunliffe.
I read the news to day oh boy About a lucky man who made the grade The Beatles' A Day in the Life came to me a day or two ago, prompted by the huge black headline covering the front page of one of our Sunday papers.
The Internet is a wonderful tool but it also has a lot to answer for. Conspiracy theories for one thing. And rumours, for another.
In certain circles there has been a bit of a backlash against the Law Commission's report, Alcohol in Our Lives: Curbing the Harm, but not at the Athletic Marist Rugby Football Club in Oamaru.
If there is a palpable air of anticipation in Dunedin legal circles this week, it is because of the arrival of a star in the judicial firmament.
