Where the emperor has no clothes

A letter to the editor and a number of personal letters and phone calls criticised a column I wrote a couple of weeks ago challenging the efficacy of global warming. I guess my trouble is that over many years I have seen “cry wolf” so many times that I've become a sceptic.

Set aside the claim the world was freezing over as postulated in the 1960’s. Next up was the Club of Rome, a group of distinguished academics and scientists who in the 1970’s claimed that the world would run out of oil before the new millennium with dire consequences for civilisation.

Greenpeace, a wealthy American multi-national and another great doomsayer recently said that the world was now awash with oil and therefore the Russians have no need to drill in the Arctic Circle for more. Some of their dopey advocates attempted to hijack the giant oil rig and are now languishing in a Soviet gulag complaining of the cold and the fact that their captors don’t speak English.

Last week the International Panel on Climate Change said that starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, wars and disease will worsen as the world warms from man-made climate change.

I recall back in 1986 the Wairarapa Catchment Board, the forerunner to the regional council, calculated that due to global warming the sea at Riversdale Beach was encroaching towards the land at a rate of a metre a year. The Masterton District Council panicked and put a hazard zone restriction on most of the beachfront houses. 27 years later the waves still lap the shore exactly where they always have.

I also remember being taught at secondary school that the low-lying Pacific atolls would soon be under water and uninhabitable. I’d hate to admit to you how far back that was.

But the doozey of all doom and gloom merchants was undoubtedly Paul Ehrlich who scared the living

daylights out of us all back in 1968 with his alarmist book The Population Bomb which sold in millions. Ehrlich is currently in New Zealand for a lecture tour with his new scare-the-pants-off-you tome Avoiding Global Collapse. The usual sycophants will fawn over the author and his book, conveniently forgetting that his predictions in 1968 were so far off the mark that in hindsight they look like the ravings of a man with serious mental problems.

The battle to feed all of humanity he wrote in The Population Bomb is over. “In the 1970’s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programmes embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate. We need to rapidly bring the world population under control,” he warned, “Reducing the growth to zero or making it negative. Conscious regulation of human numbers must be achieved.”

Ehrlich even floated the idea of adding “temporary sterilants” to the water supply or staple foods and expressed support for government mandated sterilization of Indian males with three or more children.

I’m thinking the Politburo in China must have bought the Chinese translation and this was their catalyst for the one child per couple policy. Apart from the words cousins, aunties and uncles disappearing from the vernacular as a result, the Chinese are now discovering that there are not sufficient young people coming along to create enough wealth for their ageing population in retirement.

Let’s just examine Ehrlich’s other predictions. In 1970 he forewarned that in ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of the coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.

Well at least we were going to have a coastline, which will have surprised the boffins at the Catchment Board.

In a speech in1971 Ehrlich predicted that by the year 2000 the United Kingdom will simply be a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people. “If I was a gambler,” he said, “I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.

“When you reach a point where you realise further efforts will be futile, you may as well look after yourself and your friends and enjoy what little time you have left. That point for me,” he said, “Is 1972.”

And so Ehrlich is back in New Zealand peddling more of this nonsense and I’ll bet he’ll find a willing audience morbidly hanging on his every word and subsequently criticising the rest of us for not preparing for the worst.

His latest rant is that Earth has too many people consuming too many things and imposing far too much stress on land and water and that only unprecedented cultural change provides any hope of averting a catastrophe.

Sounds like The Population Bomb all over again.

If I had my way I’d put him in a Russian jail.

“When I look back on all these worries I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened.” 
- Winston Churchill 

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Not a book for the faint-of-heart

My young friend Paul Henry has written a new book. It’s called Outraged and I suspect many who read it will themselves be outraged. In typical Henry fashion Paul pulls no punches and systematically slaughters all the sacred cows you could possibly think of and some of which you probably haven’t. Labour supporters, and those of the green persuasion are quite likely to organise book burning sessions and even those on the centre-right are sure to find something to enrage them.

My sensitivities were bruised with the language and I told Paul that I would have deleted the expletives. He was also critical of church goers and hybrid car owners. Last time I saw Paul I took him for a short drive in my Hybrid from where we were to where we were going. His literary agent was with us and she was amazed he would lower himself, literally, to get in it. On the journey, which was mercifully short, he found endless fault with the car, mostly unjustified.

In the book you will discover that he has an unrelenting fetish for cars and boats. Some years ago he rang me from Auckland and asked if I would go and check out a Rolls-Royce that Majestic Motors had for sale. “Take it for a test drive and let me know if you think I should buy it” he instructed. I was delighted with the commission. I had never ever been in a Rolls-Royce, let alone driven one, so I did as I was instructed. What expertise I was supposed to have in the field of Rolls-Royce appraisals I wouldn’t know, but I reported back positively and he subsequently bought it.

Last week he emailed me to say that he had just taken delivery of   Dodge Challenger SRT8 new from the States. It has a 6.4 litre Hemi V8 motor that would eat Hybrids he reckoned.

And yet he spends at least two pages of his new book complaining about the price of petrol!

The back cover of the book explains a lot about where he’s been and where his future lies so I’ll quote verbatim: “Since being kicked off TV in New Zealand, among many  other things I have written a best seller, been kicked of TV in Australia, filmed a movie in Hollywood about myself, been offered what could have been the best show on TV and turned it down, turned down a political advance that would certainly have seen me enter politics, and spent a small fortune on both boats and cars. Luckily I have never been in such demand, so obviously I hunted down a network that had just gone into receivership and immediately signed on with them.”

The network in receivership of course is TV3 and The Paul Henry Show starts in the New Year screening at 10.30 each week night replacing Nightline. Cameron Slater, in his  incredibly popular Whale Oil blog says: “At last we’ll have a reason to turn the TV back on.”

The book is embellished with drawings by his ageing mother Olive. Olive would know as much about illustrating a book as I would know about Rolls-Royce’s. However Paul reckons that as she ages her masterpieces, far from deteriorating in technique, have taken on a more Dali-esque quality. This is largely due, he says, to her failing eyesight, a crumbling mind, arthritis and a potpourri of medication.

The book is punctuated by Paul with afterthoughts using the same thick-nibbed felt pen Olive used for her artwork. The felt pen is also used for the page numbers which adds to the uniqueness of the publication.

Among other things in Outraged Paul tells us that Seven Sharp was ill-conceived and badly executed, that homosexuals should understand that they are not special just because they are gay, that Maori activists are ungrateful fools sabotaging a nation, that there are too many disability car-parks, that Sky City Convention Centre critics “queer the pitch” by misrepresenting the negatives and overlooking the positives, that we have too many tertiary time-wasters who are racking up bills at our expense and will spend decades trying to avoid repaying, that Muslims show little tolerance for other religions but are playing the long game of breed and infiltrate which will eventually bring success, and admits not all Asians are bad drivers, just most.

Something in it then for everybody to be outraged about, but I predict it will become another Paul Henry best seller bought by his critics as well as his admirers.

It was not that long ago that he was voted by the New Zealand viewing public as this country’s most popular TV personality and his outrageous speech at the award ceremony went viral worldwide on U-tube.
A lot of water has gone under the bridge in that comparatively short time.

He is coming Masterton to promote the book next Wednesday and I will be interviewing him in a local bookshop endeavouring to flesh out the mystique behind the book.

But hang on; there’s no mystique behind the book, it’s just Paul Henry being Paul Henry.

“I’ve never had a humble opinion. If you’ve got an opinion, why be humble about it.”                                                                                                                         -Joan Baez

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The left and right of global warming

Two opposing events clouded the global warming issue last week. The Blue Mountain bushfires certainly caused concern in the Lucky Country. Tony Abbott’s new administration is rich in climate change sceptics, and opponents blamed the fires and Sydney’s soaring temperatures on global warming accusing the Liberal/National coalition of having its head in the sand.

Abbott has already closed the government’s climate change department and the state funded Climate Commission which advised on the effects of climate change and is soon to dump the unpopular carbon tax introduced by the now much-despised Julia Gillard led regime.

Meanwhile NASA last week announced new record growth of sea ice saying that the ice in the Antarctica has extended over an area of 19.47 million square metres at the end of September. This is the highest since measurements began in 1979. This puts paid to those gruesome pictures and claims that the polar regions are melting and rising tides will soon swamp us all.

Lines seem to be drawn between capitalists and socialists as to the verisimilitude of global warming. I guess those tensions will always be with us.

Karl Marx reckoned capitalism would make the rich richer and the poor poorer. If someone was to gain, someone else had to lose in the free market, he surmised. The middle class, he wrote, would become the proletarians and the proletarians would starve. But the industrial revolution gave freedom to innovate, produce and to trade and the proletariat became the middle class and the middle class began to live like the upper class. And the most liberal country - England - led the way. According to trends in mankind, until then it would take 2000 years to double the average income, but in the mid-19th century the British did it in 30 years. When Marx died in 1883 the average Englishman was three time richer than when Marx was born in 1818.

Despite their obvious flaws Marx’s ideas were eventually taken up, but prominent modern socialist Robert Heilbroner in 1989 famously admitted: “Less than 75 years after the contest between capitalism and socialism began, it is over: capitalism has won. The tumultuous changes taking place in the Soviet Union, China and Eastern Europe have given us the clearest possible proof that capitalism organises the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism.”

But Heilbroner did not make peace with capitalism. Someone he concluded would have to pay for its success. He decided it would have to be the heavy cost to the environment. After having been opposed to capitalism because it would create waste, inefficiency and poverty, a socialist could now be opposed to capitalism because it was too efficient and created too much wealth, and that it would destroy nature.

Johan Norborg, head of the political ideas at Swedish think tank, Timbro, says this argument is as popular as it is false. First of all the worst environmental problems in the world are not smokestacks. Much worse is that so many people burn wood, coal, crop waste and dung indoors for heating and cooking. Respiratory diseases kill about 1.6 million people every year. Undoubtedly the modern production of energy creates environmental problems, but it doesn’t kill someone every 20 seconds as this killer in the kitchens of the third world does.

And diseases transmitted by water kills about another 5 million people every year. Just the number of people who die from these two environmental problems is 300 times the number of dead in war every year. These diseases also happen to have been eliminated in every industrialised nation on earth.

Norborg goes on to say that people in western societies live longer lives, with better access to goods and technology, and with bigger opportunities than the kings in Marx’s day.

Oh well, said Marx’s evil apprentice Lenin, we might have got that wrong, but the working class in the West could only become richer because they are bribed by the capitalists. Someone else would have to pay for that bribe – poor countries. Lenin meant that imperialism was the next natural step of capitalism, whereby poor countries had to give up their resources to feed the West.

The problem with this argument, continues Norborg, is that all continents became wealthier, albeit at different speeds. The average Western European or American is 19 times richer than in 1820, but a Latin American is 9 times richer, an Asian 6 times richer and an African 3 times richer. So from whom was the wealth stolen?

In this country we worry about most of the goods we buy being sourced from China. It’s true that a New Zealand manufacturing worker might lose his or her job because of this, but there are other mitigating effects. A Chinese worker gets a job of course and his new income means he can spend his money on luxury goods which to him may mean a Fonterra milk product. New Zealand consumers get cheaper prices and when they do they can spend the extra purchasing power on new goods and services and so an unemployed New Zealander can get a job in a newly created sector.

Socialists tend to be atheists; Marx said religion was the opiate of the masses destined to keep downtrodden workers in their place as they waited for their rewards in paradise. Capitalists however probably believe that God has “got the whole world in His hands” and we are all safe and sound.

Is it possible then that global warming is just a new tool that died-in-the-wool-socialists are using in their centuries-old effort to discredit capitalism?

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamouring to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” - H. L. Mencken.

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The local body elections analysed

I first stood for the mayoralty back in 1992. There were three of us vying for the title; Bob Francis and myself and a lady whose name I won’t mention because I have not sought her permission to do so. In the event more than 11,000 votes were cast and in round figures Bob got 6000, I got 4000 and the lady, who was a credible candidate, got 1000.

Twenty-one years later, when the town will have grown, though perhaps not as fast as we might have envisaged, there were just over 8000 votes cast in a similar three-way-contest featuring again two males and a female.

Interest in local body elections seems to have waned in the interim and you have to wonder why.

By all measures Lyn Paterson did well. She risked splitting her votes by standing for both the mayoralty and a seat on the council, but still beat the incumbent Mr Daniell, who has run a pretty steady ship over the last six years. Mr Daniel put all his eggs in one basket, standing for the mayoralty alone and will now have spare time to spend.

Gary Caffell polled well and will wonder if it might have been more prudent for him to have also stood for the mayoralty alone. He got 3600 votes for the urban ward; some of these may well have gone to him in a single mayoralty bid.

Surprisingly Mr Daniell also lost his seat on the Trust Lands Trust after a term spanning more than twenty five years. His claim that he was deprived of the mayoralty by the “women’s vote,” was not well received, but could also apply to his departure from the Lands Trust. His place will now be taken up by newcomer Sandy Ryan.

On the District Health Board two-term incumbent Viv Napier lost her seat meaning the South Wairarapa now has no elected representative on a board that is responsible for the health of the whole Wairarapa. Mrs Napier was an exceptionally effective board member and there were other excellent southern candidates. Among these were Greytown resident Paora Ammunson who was the initial chairman of the Wairarapa Primary Health Organisation and would have represented Maori well on a board that has a strong focus on improving Maori health and also new Martinborough resident Michael Lamont. Lamont is a physiotherapist by profession and is currently the CEO of the Mangere Community Health Trust in Auckland.

This lack of South Wairarapa representation doesn’t bode well for the potential combining of the three district councils. Those communities south of Carterton who already run their affairs extremely efficiently may find their influence on a combined Wairarapa Council easily compromised.

The Licensing Trust gained two members of the fairer sex after the last one, Josephine Maxwell, left the stage in 1989. Lucy Cruickshank and Mena Antonio will no doubt add a fresh perspective to the organisation, but in the process the Trust have lost the experienced and very capable Steve Blakemore. Craig Roberts, who took local body advertising to new heights, missed out after being highly critical of the Trust’s financial reporting.

That just leaves the Greater Wellington Regional Council where first termer Gary McPhee was re-elected. Three years ago McPhee stood on the platform that the Rimutaka summit toilets would be reinstated. They weren’t and after his success this time he is reported as saying that he is keen the see the Wairarapa become a unitary authority resulting in the regional council withdrawing its myriad of essential services to our neck of the woods and in the process causing him to lose his handsome stipend.

I think I’m now starting to get a handle on why so few people vote.

                                                          **********************

I’m also starting to get a handle on why many women are reluctant to report a rape. The affair between the mayor of Auckland and his paramour was certainly not rape, but I’m surprised how the left-leaning press have come down so hard on the mistress in this case; though of course Len Brown is their darling.

Writing in the New Zealand Herald Kerre McIvor, in a rather vicious attack on Ms Chuang, said she was “no doe-eyed virgin and that it would probably be a good idea for her to give up blokes for a while and sit at home reading self-improvement books to increase her chances of finding a real boyfriend.”

Although Ms McIvor conceded Ms Chuang is single and can therefore sleep with whoever she chooses she went on to say that “she will be lucky to find a soft toy willing to share her bed with her in the future, far less a real live man.”

No support from the sisterhood then.

Don’t you just love local body politics?

“He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.” - George Bernard Shaw.

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In faint praise of the salesperson

After we were married and were creating a stable of young children we were accosted one evening by a door-to-door salesman selling encyclopaedias. The brand was Britannica, but it could just as easily have been Collins. Both products were sold by slick marketers who seldom left a household without extracting a sale. If you think accost is too strong a word to describe someone who is merely plying their trade I checked my trusty Chamber’s dictionary and saw that accost means: To approach and speak threateningly; to solicit as a prostitute. Both, in hindsight, applicable in this case.

The encyclopaedia salesmen always used the guilt factor to endeavour to sign you up to buy. Your offspring, they’d reckon, would be hugely disadvantaged if you didn’t expose them to this fountain of knowledge as a reference library to propel them to the top of their class. A purchase would eventually lead to tertiary education and a life of untold wealth from a professional vocational field of their infinite choices.
In the ultimate case they might even end up as encyclopaedia salesmen.

Door-to-door salesmen weren’t confined to selling encyclopaedias. The Rawleigh’s man sold elixirs for all sorts of ailments and essences for the most discerning of cooks. Vacuum cleaner salesmen called regularly too, and with a few sweeps over what you imagined was a spotless carpet they would produce so much dirt from the bag you were often compelled to buy. The most famous brand – and the most expensive – was the American-made Kirby. I know because we bought one.

Now Sir Bob Jones always espoused the theory that if a product was any good, it didn’t need anyone to sell it. The only merchandise worth buying, he would intone, was the one you sought to buy of your own volition - like going into a shop and purchasing the product off the shelf. If someone had to come to you and talk you into buying the product then the product wasn’t worth procuring. He particularly exampled life insurance. If life insurance was any good, he’d say, then it should be called by its more appropriate name death insurance, and there would be shops selling it across the counter.
To rename life insurance death insurance of course would put paid to the industry. I think it’s almost gone anyway.

And yet sales men and women, slick or otherwise, certainly have their place. It’s even been said they are the most important people in the industrialised society. The factory floor comes to a halt if there are not sales people at the consumer end of the chain pushing the product whether the customer needs it or not.

But todays salespeople tend not to go door-to-door. They’re ensconced in the advertising agencies making ordinary products irresistible. Salesmanship now originates in the factory backrooms where for instance they plot to apply superb paintwork and added features on the new car you don’t really need.

Perhaps the best examples of the hidden hawkers are the artists and technicians who come up with enticing brightly lit graphics on addictive gaming machines.
Incidentally, we didn’t buy the encyclopaedia, even though a redwood bookshelf was being thrown in for nothing and creative methods were offered to pay for it over an extended period. We didn’t intentionally set out to disadvantage our children either; we simply couldn’t afford it at the time, despite all of the above.

And anyway we were still paying off the Kirby.

Today, families only need to invest in a computer and go online. Encyclopaedias and all the knowledge of the world can be found in a word - Google. The Google brand is now so entrenched that the noun has become a verb. Google any subject and the popular search engine will likely as not lead you to another important word in the quest for knowledge - Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia in 2001. This community-edited  nline encyclopaedia boasts more than four million articles in over 125 languages. You can add your own knowledge on any subject to the text, so the information grows.

Wales is reported as saying: “My passion is captured in the vision statement that guides my work. Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet has free access to the sum of all human knowledge,” and he went on to say, “And by free I just don’t mean ‘free’ as in free beer, but also, free as in free speech. People must be empowered to copy, modify and redistribute - commercially or non-commercially - the knowledge that we have to share.”

This is a remarkable statement from the founder of this incredible tool and provided the knowledge sought is not destructive, it must surely have the potential to change the world for good in a relatively short time-scale.

T. H. Huxley disagreed with Alexander Pope’s claim that a little learning is a dangerous thing. He wrote: “The saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing is to my mind a very sad adage. If knowledge is real and genuine, I do not believe that it is other than a very valuable possession however infinitesimal its quality may be. Indeed, if a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?”

I think I just heard a knock at the door. It’s probably a guy selling computers.

“A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep or taste not the Pierian Spring.” - Alexander Pope.

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The good old days not that good

Those standing for office in the upcoming local body elections, having rushed to media outlets to inform the public of their excellent attributes, will have found that it was not only an expensive exercise, but they will also have been given an infinite variety of choices.

There are at least 5 radio stations and three newspapers that will have plausibly endeavoured to convince the incumbents and aspirants to choose their particular vehicle for their message. As each option tends to have its own defined audience, and as you need to reach a wide cross section of potential voters to promote your cause, they may have felt it necessary to spread themselves across the lot.

It wasn’t always like that. When I first stood for public office we only had one newspaper and one radio station and in those days the news was left entirely to newspapers. Radio stations had no news segments on the hour or half hour. They played music, advertisements and mid-morning and in the evening “serials” which in those pre-television times you found yourself fixated with.

Mums, most of whom were at home in the mornings, would tune into ‘Portia Faces Life’ or ‘Doctor Paul’ and in the evening we kids would listen to ‘Life With Dexter’, ‘Hagen’s Circus’ and as the night wore on cops and robbers shows like ‘Night Beat.’

Night Beat starred an unlikely newspaper crime reporter named Randy Stone. “I cover the night beat for the daily” he would intone in his opening stanza. Near the conclusion of the thirty minute drama, after numerous criminals had either been jailed or shot, he would noisily recall the outcome on an outdated typewriter and then yell out: “Copy Boy!” addressing apparently a young lad who would no doubt hasten the story to a grateful editor.

Radio provided great entertainment, but almost everybody got the daily newspaper. I used to do a paper run in Lansdowne and we only needed to know the names of those households who didn’t subscribe.

It was a very short list.

Today, news has become big business and radio and television stations have encroached on this once sacred preserve of the newspapers. Now each media competes for audiences and the news is packaged and presented with more gore than Randy Stone would have dreamed of.

A study conducted by the New York University made a list of ‘Journalisms greatest hits of the twentieth century.’ You might have expected news stories about new vaccines, fantastic inventions, the rise in living standards or the spread of democracy from ten per cent of the countries to sixty per cent over that 100 year period.

Well you would have been disappointed. The greatest hits were all about war, natural disasters, dangerous chemicals and unsafe cars. 

We don’t really want good news at all.

The problem with an interconnected world is there is always a flood, a war, a plane crash, an earthquake, a serial murder or starvation somewhere and with the proliferation of video cameras, now even an integral part of your mobile phone, there is a constant supply of horrific scenes to fill our TV screens and to be fleshed out later in print in our newspapers.

These disasters were always part of the world order, but by bringing them to us daily, particularly with such clarity as allowed on our modern highly pixelated TV screens, we risk imagining our world is getting worse, when in fact it is vastly improving.

In a town that has barely grown, the rise of news media outlets, despite causing unwanted increases in your advertising budget, should be applauded not bemoaned. We tend to look back wistfully as though there were better times, but life improves daily, even if we are loathe to recognise it.

When 19th century liberal historian and politician Lord Macaulay, wrote his History of England he couldn’t understand why the English always talked about ‘the good old days' and he warned later generations - and that’s you and me – not to romanticise the past.

He wrote: ‘In spite of overwhelming evidence that living standards are improving, many will still image to themselves the England of the Stuarts as a more pleasant country than the England in which we live.

‘It may at first seem strange that society, while constantly moving forward at eager speed, should be constantly looking backward with tender regret. But these two propensities, inconsistent as they may appear, can easily be resolved into the same principle. Both spring from our impatience of the state in which we are.

‘That impatience, while it stimulates us to surpass preceding generations, disposes us to overrate their happiness. It is, in some sense, unreasonable and ungrateful for us to be constantly discontented with a condition which is constantly improving.

‘But in truth there is constant improvement precisely because there is constant discontent. If we were perfectly satisfied with the present, we would cease to contrive, to labour, and to save with a view to the future.’

“Copy boy!”

“The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire” – Voltaire

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Important questions for our age

From time to time I devote the column inches of my article to searching locally, nationally and internationally for the most important questions that currently need to be contemplated.

Here they are:

1. If Oracle’s catamaran was designed and made almost entirely in N.Z., and if their CEO is Sir Russell Coutts, and if Jimmy Spittle owns a multi-million dollar home in Auckland then how come Peter Montgomery didn’t say as he concluded his commentary of the last race “And the America’s Cup is once again New Zealand’s cup?”

2. What will happen to the All Blacks if Larry Ellison sets his sights on the next Rugby World Cup?

3. If next year’s general election is fought on the notion of a David and Goliath battle between Cunliffe and Key won’t Cunliffe have the advantage given his Christian name?

4. Does anybody find it odd that the people who gave us golf and called it a game are the very same people who gave us bagpipes and called it music?

5. And while we’re on that subject, if there were no golf balls, how would we measure hail?

6. Why do vegetarians never care about the insects killed to produce vegetables?

7. Are people more vigorously opposed to fur than leather because it’s easier to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs?

8. If Good King Wenceslas ordered a pizza, would it be deep pan, crisp and even?

9. If you mixed vodka and orange juice with milk of magnesia would you get a Phillips screwdriver?

10. Did the ANZ Corporation purchase the National Bank in Lincoln Road so you could buy a pie when you walked out the front door?

11. Why are “Save the Trees” signs made of wood?

12. When will TV One finally abandon Seven Sharp and give us back a decent current affairs programme?

13. There is a lot of comedy on TV. Does that cause comedy to break out on the streets?

14. Why do we call countries that haven’t yet trashed their environment “undeveloped?”

15. Is Sir Russell Coutts another Lord Haw-Haw?

16. Why do women’s libbers have trouble with chairMAN but not feMALE?

17. How come no one said “it’s only a boat race” when Team New Zealand was winning?

18. Why don’t we refer to the Northern Hemisphere as “up over?”

19. Kim Dot Com says he will sponsor Team New Zealand next time. Will that be before or after he pays for the undersea telecommunications cable he promised us?

20. Why is it our children can’t read a Bible in school, but they can in prison?

21. Have you ever heard any one call February, Feb-roo-air-ee?

22. If Fonterra lost millions of customers worldwide after its “Botulism scare” how come they are forecasting a record pay-out for next season?

23. If you left your windscreen wipers going all the time, could you park illegally without getting a ticket?

24. What’s the difference between a pioneer and an illegal immigrant?

25. If the GH in enough is pronounced like an “F” and the O in women like an “I” and the TI in nation like an “SH” how come fish isn’t spelt GHOTI?

26. Why don’t we ever see the headline: “Psychic wins Lotto?”

27. Would you ever buy anything from Briscoe’s that didn’t have 60 per cent off?

28. If the pen is mightier than the sword and a picture is worth a thousand words how dangerous is an email?

29. If every country in the world is in debt, where did all the money go?

30. And finally, a question with an answer. Ever wondered why gorging on delicious puddings makes your kids hyperactive? Try spelling desserts backwards.

The rest of the answers I will give to you in my column of the 29th of Feb-roo-air-ee next year!

“That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realises that in truth his wisdom is worth nothing.” -Plato

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