Most rational thinkers would agree that the Christmas New Year period is the one time of the year when you should be seeking out highly intelligent and complex information.
After all, at this time, most people are asleep or drunk, fat with food, their minds snoring louder than their nose and throat can manage.
It is the time when lesser men can pounce and briefly appear to be half-clever.
I am unquestionably one of those lesser men.
An absorbing article by the esteemed media observer Michael Whalen in The International Risk Analyst was one springboard I leapt on to atypically besparkle dinner party content for the early weeks of 2011, an article wherein Whalen predicted the complete demise of not only the print media, but also the music and film industry in toto.
It is now all about content and media-delivering devices, everything aimed at the three-inch screen, information for a world on the run.
The ability to create, retrieve and display information in a nanosecond has become so advanced that it is a wonder our brains don't tumble out of our heads like Lotto balls.
I was reminded of this when I began sorting out the detritus of Christmas Day, the presents I loved to death (books, a sizeable Warehouse voucher, and A Classic Album Series DVD of how AC/DC made Back In Black), the ones I would be re-gifting (it would be cruel to mention names), and those that would have to be exchanged because I got more than one copy.
Books, obviously.
I am mystified why people give books without exchange cards, but they consistently do, and our present-opening room was rife with shrieking double-ups being discovered on Christmas morning.
Mine was Stephen Fry's autobiography The Fry Chronicles.
My son and father-in-law had obviously equated Fry's ever-widening girth, his criminal record, and his Vesuvian moods of depression and low self-esteem with my own 48kg frame, spotless judicial CV and unwavering optimism.
Interesting.
Unfortunately, son and father-in-law had not only not obtained exchange cards for the books, both bought at Whitcoulls, but they had lost the receipts as well.
The father-in-law had bought in Christchurch, so that was unable to be pursued, which left me wondering how I, a man who thinks he is smart enough to read Michael Whalen without hurting his head, should confront Whitcoulls Dunedin Meridian Mall branch.
I had searched through the wheelie bin of Christmas wrappings, and managed to find the receipt for my daughter's purchase at the same shop, and as son and daughter had shopped together, I hatched a Baldrickian plan.
I ran it past my son, who has an IT degree.
"Were you together in the queue?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
"Who went first?" I asked, leaning closer to him and speaking slowly and clearly.
"Me," he replied.
"So," I concluded, "because all electronic information is now able to be retrieved in a nanosecond from any source, I merely have to present your sister's sales docket and tell them the one issued immediately before that at the very same cash machine, information clearly somewhere in among the bar codes and numbers on the docket I have attached to your still-wrapped Merry Christmas Dad book, dampened slightly by having lived in the same rubbish bag as a used nappy from the second grandson Jude, and I'll be laughing!"
"That won't work," said the son.
The woman at Whitcoulls the next morning was delightful.
She looked at the sister receipt, banged a few numbers on to the screen, and wrapped up the Jeremy Clarkson I had chosen for exchange.
The book was appropriately entitled How Hard Can It Be?.
Whalen was right.
I walked home with a zing in my step.
This, the book, the thinking behind the plan, the mental trouncing of someone with a respectable degree from Otago University, was my finest Christmas present.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
