For this is the law of the profits

An old friend, Shine Leu, who sadly passed away last year, loved to go fishing at Lake Ferry. Shine was a fine arts teacher at a college in Taiwan and he couldn’t get over the fact that we effectively allowed vast quantities of fresh water in the Ruamahunga River to flow out into the ocean. In Taiwan, he told me, every last skerrick of the liquid gold is captured and usefully used for both agriculture and commerce.Last week we were...

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Wanna buy a new watch?

I’m sure when many of us watched the film Blood Diamond we would have considered what a different world we might be living in if women, mostly western women, were not so enamoured with the brightly sparkling gem.Blood Diamond featured the Sierra Leone civil war of 1991- 2002 and depicted a country torn apart by the ferocity of diamond trading. This weeks’ Time magazine has a report on a different gem, jade, which is causing the same sort...

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Sanitising sex on the shop floor

Back in 1976 I was appointed to a quango with the unlikely nomenclature of The Sawdust Working Party Committee. This unit was set up by the government who had decided in their wisdom that it needed to ban sawdust from butcher’s shop floors. The entrenched little men from the Health Department had carefully scrutinised the sawdust and had decreed that it was chock full of organisms and that these little beasties were scampering up the legs...

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A curious compilation of carraigeway

When I changed from marketing meat in the middle of the town centre to becoming a signwriter in the outer fringes in Victoria Street a local businessman told me I would now discover that the commerce of Masterton is not solely focused on the central business district. He was right of course; businesses flourish in all corners of the borough, and even beyond, but a town is often judged by its main street, thriving or otherwise.Currently...

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Who are you going to believe?

There are a growing number of theorists in America who think 9/11 was a conspiracy. The book 9/11 The Ultimate Truth has had a number if reprints and revised editions and apparently claims the real culprits were Israeli Mossad agents working hand-in-glove with the Bush family. They point out that the Twin Towers collapsed in a controlled demolition configuration as did the next door building which housed the office of the U.S. Secret...

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