Information Archives - kiwiboomers

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.

By Chris Perkins

Understanding dementia

My mother once told me in a hushed voice that one of our neighbours might have TB. My mother-in-law spoke behind her hand about epilepsy (“E-P”). Then, it was considered poor practise to tell people they had cancer (they gave up hope) and of course we never mentioned people with that “condition”, homosexuality! Things have changed. So what makes it so hard in the twenty-first century to talk about dementia?

By Paul Smith

Words and consequences

As a presidential candidate Trump dissed reporters as being ‘slime, ‘dishonest slime’, unfair’, ‘not good people’ – and much more. In the land where free speech is a constitutional guarantee, he threatened to open up libel laws and added: “…we’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before.” Much of this must have been shrugged off by reporters covering his campaign as Trump’s bog standard rhetoric.

But then the Candidate became the President and over his 18 months in office, intensified his attacks on the media.

By Chris Horan

It’s a hacienda – sort of

Is it a house? Only just by the look of it. Are those really gates? Are they ever! Contributor Chris Horan snapped the Spanish hacienda of sorts when he stayed there, discovering that it would be unthinkable in the country to put a house on the market without such daunting security. He found it a an accepted characteristic of many Spanish homes and apartments in Calypso.

‘What a way to live!’ he wrote.

By Paul Smith

Why do boomers do it?

Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, if you’re young at heart, sang the late great Frank Sinatra. But sometimes being young at heart isn’t always the fairy tale you want, or need. At a certain age you forget the boomer body you’ve inherited over the years. You flip back multiple decades to those never-ending summers of youth, when anything was possible. It’s then that the less cautious resort to daredevilry, attempt things the boomer body would never allow except that… the teen brain has briefly taken charge.

By Max Cryer

Max’s Dogs – Canine inequalities…

The lifestyle gap between rural dogs and their urban cousins is never more apparent than on a visit to a city pet shop. Apart from extensive shelves of ‘dog toys’ there are also dog toothbrushes (attached to the end of a firm plastic finger stall for the owner to administer), accompanied by beef flavoured toothpaste. There is shampoo and conditioner in fragrances of chamomile and strawberry. A plastic ‘peeing post’ treated with a pheromone, persuades the dog to pee wherever you put the post – rather than where the dog might want it.

By Gordon Ell

Kiwiosities: The redoubtable miner

Bill Fox won his nickname through his exploits as a gold prospector in central Otago and Westland during the 1860s. Patrick William Fox learned mining in California and so recognised rocks in the Arrow River as similar to rock forms that bore gold in America. In secret, he and three partners gathered a fortune in gold. When they came to bank it at Dunstan (Clyde) others came to track them back through the gorges of the Arrow.

By Max Cryer

Superstitions and why we have them

Drunkenness

Over time a number of preventions and cures have accumulated to deal with this common problem. However there is sparse information about their effectiveness. Consider the following:

In the absence of any available pigs, slip an owl’s egg into the drink of someone who is already drunk.

By Ann Andrews

Why do people lie?

I’ve been stunned and amazed at the sheer number of President Donald Trump’s lies. Unfortunately for him the New York Times is counting. It found that in his first 10 months, he told six times as many falsehoods as President Obama. Trump told 103 separate untruths, many of them repeatedly, said the Times. Obama told 18 during his eight year Presidency. For some time, I’ve I wanted to better understand why people lie.

Written by boomers for boomers

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