Dementia is a subject which dominates this issue. It’s not just individuals who fear the onset of it. It’s the fact that huge numbers will suffer from it. After Covid 19, it is the next plague in waiting.
On a lighter note, Chris Bourn recalls a comic incident in his auditions for TVNZ. And they involve common or garden instruments.
What a difference benevolent government policies can make to a society.
Venezuela’s low-cost housing programme is building new homes at a breakneck pace of over 200 a day, according to the government.
Here, Statistics New Zealand figures show more than 21,000 new dwellings were approved last year, 26 percent more than in the previous year.
When Freda Du Faur partied at The Hermitage in 1909, they moved the piano into the dining room, rolled back the rugs and everyone danced. By Christmas that summer, The Hermitage overflowed with mountaineers, adventurers and artists. One year later, Freda was the first woman to reach the summit Aoraki/Mt Cook.)
These days The Hermitage Hotel is more likely to see Asian bus tourists stretched back in chairs, ensconced in a 360 degree cinematic experience – viewing the night sky in its Digital Dome Planetarium: See the night sky like never before. Leave Earth. Fly to the edge of our galaxy and far beyond to the reaches of our known universe. So the promo goes.
Went shopping for a hat-rack the other day. No big deal, this was a need rather than a want – my hats had multiplied in direct proportion to my vanishing hair.
I rang a store which stocks everything from rope to paints and plants, and asked for a hat-rack.
“No we don’t sell any” said a South African accent a little too emphatically, the way some people do when they want you off the line.
“Really?”
“I’ll put you through to hardware” she said, and was gone, though Hardware was displeased.
Baby-boomers might just identify with the description of this country:
…’it maintains a welfare state — a set of government programs designed to provide economic security — that is beyond the wildest dreams of American liberals. It provides universal health care; college education is free, and students receive a stipend; day care is heavily subsidized’.
The country is Denmark. The writer is American Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winner for Economic Sciences. And many of those state-funded programmes paid for by taxpayers were once also ours before the 1984 election.
The ends (oops… no pun intended!) that marketers will go to promote that wonder drug, Viagra.
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Just when we had got used to calling the landmark One Tree Hill, None Tree Hill, we hear that nine trees, not just one, will finally be planted on the volcanic cone.
We should be grateful that Maori are, in general, inveterate forgivers even if their own are harmed by that generous custom. Tariana Turia and three other prominent Maori women think Chris Brown, the African-American entertainer, should be allowed into New Zealand despite a conviction for assaulting his girlfriend, pop Diva Rihanna.
My father in law passed away a couple of months ago. Well, it was his time and at 102, he knew it. Always more a good friend than a relative, he was a bundle of bones in his bed in his last weeks but to his delight, was surrounded by the women he loved (the old flirt!).
Laurie had lived at his little Northland beach resort for nearly 50 years and from his deck had watched the rhythms of tides and currents, much as his loved ones watched life finally ebb from him.
Auckland lawyer, veterinarian and author has published his new book, Animals, Welfare and the Law. It encompasses ethics, history and the law, so it’s a weighty read for those of us who routinely plough through fiction. But Mr Robertson has not overlooked the dark – but often comical moments in the long history of animals and humans. Some of these include the criminal trials of animals…
“The outcome for children in the care of the state may be no better than if they had not been in care at all”. So says the Commissioner for Children’s report on the performance of Child, Youth & Family service.