Alan Joyce, the chief executive of Qantas, in the news over a shock lockout of airline employees and grounding of the fleet thought to have cost the airline millions of dollars, has trimmed the Aussie carrier of more than 1000 workers this year. His ostensible reason?
Brrrrr! Not great weather for camping. It'll soon be a bog up there in the Octagon - where the good folk of the "Occupy Dunedin" movement have parked their tents. Can't imagine they'll want to stay long in this sort of weather but one or two of them seem determined to remain.
Some time in the mid-1990s I met Commander Robert Green (retired), a former British Royal Navy commander who had met and married a New Zealander and moved to Christchurch.
Here we go again. No sooner do the elections appear over the horizon - a horizon amply obscured by the Rugby World Cup, it must be said - than does the issue of what is and isn't an election advertisement raise its persistent head.
Someone asked me the other day what I thought about the Rugby Haka Peepshow in the Octagon and I had to confess I didn't have an opinion. I didn't have an opinion because I hadn't then had a chance, or taken the time, to have a look.
On behalf of you, the taxpayer, who - after all - is footing at least part of the bill for this great international festival which, allegedly, has something to do with a game played with an oval ball (I'll leave the salient details to the sports department), I have taken it upon myself to venture out in to the wide blue yonder.
Does anyone remember way back when banks operated on the basis of lending money at a slightly higher interest than they paid on the funds that savers deposited - and drew their staff's wages and their profits from the difference?
Tom Scott's and Danny Mulheron's excellent television movie Rage, screened on Sunday night, brought it all flooding back.
New Zealand's news is coming from some new quarters following a shake-up of the industry, Andrew Stone, of the NZ Herald, and Simon Cunliffe, of the Otago Daily Times, report.
Ah, the young! Where would we be without these yelping pups, these wanton purveyors of licentiousness, these brawling, mewling, puking specimens of underdone humanity?
And so the debate on the British riots rolls on. At the weekend, former British prime minister Tony Blair put his two bob's worth in with an Observer article, reprinted on this page yesterday.
On occasion one has to wonder whether it is in the water. I'm all for the idea of an engaged, informed and - yes - even argumentative society.
Big Stevie Williams has done it again, carrying the bag right up the leader board and on to the winner's podium at the Firestone Country Club in Akron, Ohio. This time for top Aussie golfer Adam Scott.
One of the enduring echoes of the Murdoch affair in the United Kingdom arises from the extent to which politicians had become "too cosy" with the media. Too cosy is a euphemism: it's code for a relationship in which influence may have been peddled. I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine.
Skipping town on a balmy evening late last week, a passing glance at the early-flowering camellias and more than a hint of vernal equinox in the birdsong, it was possible for a moment to imagine the winter had passed us by.
There must be something in the water up there in Hampden. They're a steely mob; determined. Not likely to take no for an answer.
Anyone wanting a primer on the Murdochian school of newspaper ethics - and a hint as to how and why the News of the World has so spectacularly come to grief - could do a lot worse than read Bruce Guthrie's entertaining and revealing account of life with and without Rupert. It is titled Man Bites Murdoch.
Is anyone else out there getting a little weary of the cynical, destructive know-the-price-of-everything-and-the-value-of-nothing approach to life promulgated by some of our politicians?
Alasdair Thompson evidently forgot for a moment he was not in the boys' locker room, nor in the beer-swilling back room of a venue where social intercourse is oiled by a cosy, men-only clubbishness.
Admittedly it can be quite fun to think, talk about and speculate upon those who, as a nation, we like to think - or imagine - we trust the most. But without wishing to rain on the Reader's Digest parade, to elevate a survey of , ahem, eccentric methodology to anything other than a diverting pastime is at best a stretch.
