Reaching Mars, failing Earth
Yey! We reached the red planet. Arid place, clearly had its day. Is our lovely blue planet on the same track?
Here’s an informative sample of climate change research in 2018:
Posts by Paul Smith
Left field thinking
If you’re ever short of a laugh or two – try this Listener brain teaser on your friends:
‘You have a wolf, a goat and a cabbage and you need to get all three across a river in one piece. You have a boat, but it’s so small that it can fit only you and one of the items and you can’t leave the wolf and the goat, or the goat and the cabbage alone together. How do you get them all across?’
Most of us failed – though we got past the first stage. Our friends did the same, but succeeded with repeated and hilarious solutions as they grappled with the question:
The not-so-unstable Coalition
What is it about coalition politics of the Left which so upsets the Nats and the Party’s media partisans. Can’t be disappointment at the electoral loss surely – that’s just peevishness. Could it be envy that the upstarts are in power? But that can’t be true, for the Coalition has the Greens. Or is it simply because of the power of fresh ideas when National had very few.
Miscellany – October
Doesn’t seem to matter where you are in the world, there’s often another Kiwi close at hand. Even in the ‘60s long before mass travel a friend arrived in London and, walking down Earl’s Court Road one day, bumped into the last person he expected to see – a high school classmate.
Yawn.. another business confidence survey…
Does anybody else out there wonder why drooping business confidence matters? Okay, business is important but it represents just one part of the economy.
Miscellany – September
Spotted: Not the sort of thing you’d expect in a suburban Street. Certainly not in a nobby Epsom avenue. But things change. After another day’s downpour in this waterlogged Spring, a Gypsy woman emerged from one of the street’s impeccable gardens.
“Keep looking up…”
She’s already been humbled and now, as a new homeless person, she’s about to be humiliated. Living in the streets she has no money and so tries her luck at the nearest shop.
“I’m homeless today – can you give me a dollar for a coffee?”
Fresh ideas versus same old, same old…
Oscar Wilde once observed that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. So let’s talk about it, that unprecedented threat to our health and well-being – public service television.
Never mind that we’ve never had it, the mere mention of it makes some in the commentariat fume. Take Mike Hoskings. Nice bloke. Shame about the rash he’s developed over this issue, though he’s not alone. Here’s a take from his comments:
Yey! It’s official – we’re a happy lot!!
Good news for Enzed: we came eighth in World Happiness, one ahead of Australia and Sweden, according to the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for the UN.
Happiest country of all was Norway, followed by Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland in a tightly packed bunch. All of the top four countries rank highly on all the main factors found to support happiness: caring, freedom, generosity, honesty, health, income and good governance. Norway has insulated itself from the boom and bust cycle of many other resource-rich economies.