There was a trick displayed on a recent episode of Boardwalk Empire where a prohibition gangster whanged a sharp knife on to a table between his outstretched fingers at extremely high speed.
To say I was skilled in languages at high school would be semantic skewering of the most scurrilous kind. Rather I was monstrously unskilled at everything else, and languages were all that was left.
There are more grains of sand on Middle Beach than there are times I have spent in inner city cafés listening to pregnant women droning on about food cravings.
The cottage organ has left the building.
Medals. Everywhere I look, I see medals.
The Beau Brummels released a great single in 1965 called Don't Talk To Strangers.
I've met plenty of train fanatics in my time, but bus fanatics seem to be much thinner on the ground.
There's an awful lot of jumbomumbo out there about headphones and earbuds.
I am congenitally unable to perform musically in front of people.
The die area has finally finished. I think.
For the bulk of my life, certainly since the tongue started to talk, I have been well off the pace when it comes to new things.
The phone call came during Coronation Street. I depressed the Pause button on MySky and wondered what manner of human could possibly ring at such a sacrosanct time.
Kim Hill interviewed someone on Saturday Morning recently who mentioned they possessed a second television set.
Dunedin has developed a diverse base of musical talent in recent years, and veteran local musicians Doug Wright, Craig Reeves and Marcel Rodeka are determined to develop opportunities for many of them to show their skills.
Every Saturday morning, as if to remind me of my increasing age and armchair inertia, hordes of tiny soccer players with limitless energy scamper all over the Oval across the road from our house.
We were at The Duke. A Film New Zealand quango, plates of food, my drink was free, some brief speeches.
The word is that August and September will be awful.
Bill Direen was one of the true geniuses in Flying Nun's formative years.
It was the lettering on the window that did me in.
"Chives!" Coronation Street's recidivist adulterer, the wretched Ken Barlow, is quaffing a forkful from Martha, the floozie he found on a barge in the canal while walking Eccles.
Credit Ken with having a dog called Eccles, but credit him morally with nothing else - he is back in the sleaze saddle, spurs clicking hungrily.
