A close friend, let's just pop into the Scrabble dictionary and pick out a suitably anonymous name for him, Marshall Seifert, shares quite a few thoroughly rational Man Cave theories with me, but one flies high and proud above the rest - a loathing, hissing contempt for all things Canterbury.
The mere sound of the word brings white foam to the lips.
Our teeth clench like pliers gripping a nut as rising bile clogs the larynx into enraged silence.
Sport is, of course, at the root of it all.
Has there ever been a more repugnant thing than a Canterbury sports team? The Crusaders horses and that awful music? Yes there has, a Canterbury sports fan.
A Canterbury sports fan can read 10 pages of sport and absorb only the points pertaining to Canterbury.
Together these two rapacious subcultures feed on each other and produce a one-eyed baying heinously dislikeable populace that has been the bane of both of our lives since birth.
Seifert, of course, was born in Melbourne and raised in New York.
But he is adamant the vile stench of Canterbury has always been with him.
My suggested panacea for this boil on the rump of the nation is quite simple - carve the province from the South Island and send it out to sea.
Ideally this wholly unnecessary terraglob would wash up around the Chathams, a suitably cold and rain-swept sea fill where Cantabrians could inbreed for years and sing songs about Grizz Wylie and Craig McMillan.
That this constant inbreeding would raise their collective IQ is a given.
Hair-splitters may caw that my wife comes from Canterbury, but as she is still in Chicago, I think there is no need to bring this tautology to the table.
I have always been, after all, a man who deals exhaustively with the here and the now.
Anyway, she lives in Dunedin.
My anonymous friend Seifert has complemented my purification theory with one of his own.
Marshall, as those who remember his softball commentaries from the late 1940s will know, is one of this town's great thinkers.
It is not uncommon for him to rise poppy-eyed at two in the morning with A Great Idea, and proceed to stamp around the house thrashing it into shape before ringing me at an hour he considers more humane than 2am.
Six am.
But every piece of mud you fling at a wall has a chance of sticking, and last week he flung a piece that stuck, a gleaming silver tray of empiricism that has so far inexplicably by-passed the New Zealand sporting media - the fact that the current New Zealand cricket team is completely devoid of Canterbury players.
It is all too glib and simplistic to thank Glenn Turner for this.
Seifert sees it as a deliberate drive towards finding tunnel light, a drive that dates back to when they shifted the national administration from Christchurch to Auckland.
And now, claims Seifert, the Canterbury-less New Zealand cricket team is in its best shape for years.
And he's right.
For years, international airports have been cluttered with Canterbury cricketers as New Zealand teams came and went.
Wherever you looked, Canterbury.
There was a Hadlee behind every pole.
What price the hard-working grafter from Dunedin with a far superior record, when laid beside Cantabrian mediocrity raised in the protectionist cricketing nursery that is Christchurch? No price whatsoever.
Cricket in Otago was reduced to rubble until they cleansed the game, and that's a cold hard fact.
Otago thrashed the Canterbury cricketers to within an inch of their lives this year.
And now a Canterbury-free New Zealand team is right in line to win the twenty/20 World Cup.
They have already beaten Scotland, and as if that wasn't enough, they have beaten Ireland as well.
Cricketing powerhouses both.
It's early days, but I think Marshall Seifert, for so long known cruelly as The TAB's Friend, has finally nailed a winner. - Roy Colbert
