Some time back I wrote a column deploring the sexual manners of Australia rugby league players and their tendency to come before the courts for excessive displays of physical "affection" towards their girlfriends, or others of the opposite sex with whom they happened to find themselves in hotel swimming pools, or in apartment bedrooms playing "stacks on the mill, pile on still", or in parking lots and back alleys open-throating gallons of vodka until their clothes fell off and someone got a bloody nose - if she was lucky.
We sold the railways and they were run into the ground.
I have been out of town for a week or so and thus missed much of the consternation over the sculptural installation on the south Dunedin foreshore.
On a mild and largely sunny Easter weekend, articles of faith have been reaffirmed across the country as holidaymakers mixed the traditional pastimes - beaches, fishing, swimming and so on - with religious observance.
For Minister of Energy and Resources Gerry Brownlee, the countryside appears to be something like a fruitcake.
A famous London-based composer and theatre producer frets about the future of his art form.
It was Mark Twain who said of Dunedin's Scots settlers, "They stopped here on their way from home to heaven - thinking they had arrived."
David Garrett has been thinking. Unkind people might suggest this is an oxymoron
Assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times, Simon Cunliffe, describes a musical interlude.
In the middle of last year, Broadcasting Minister Jonathan Coleman proudly told radio broadcasting students in a deliberate and detailed speech at Auckland University of Technology that the new Radio New Zealand Amendment Bill was "a stronger statement than its predecessor about Radio New Zealand's role as a public broadcaster".
Alison Mau is my new favourite TV "personality".
If nothing else, the steep and unexpected rise in unemployment figures to 7.3% - comprising in large part the young - should give us an indication that all is not well out there in the jobs market.
Wellington is about to be overrun by culture. Simon Cunliffe looks at the New Zealand International Arts Festival programme.
I found myself telling old friends the other day, when they asked about Harry, that more than ever he had become a member of the family; he seemed increasingly human with age.
On Friday May 2, 2003, George W. Bush, President of the United States of America, stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of California and announced the end of fighting in Iraq.
Haiti has had more than its share of calamities, last week's earthquake recalibrating the scale for natural disasters in the modern era.
So, I Am Dunedin is to become I Was Dunedin; that is to say, history.
Summer al fresco dining doesn't have to mean pounds of seared flesh on the barbecue.
6AM: Cellphone rings. Worse than irritating. A sliver of bleary optimism: gosh, perhaps it's work ringing to say that my abundant talents are not required for another week after all. Better still, I can go back to sleep.
In some ways gewurztraminer has never really recovered from the great floods of second-rate Muller-thurgau that crowded the shelves in the first flush of the local wine industry's youth.
