People go to university for many reasons. I assumed back then my own reason - wanting to know why fingernails grew so fast - was completely normal. Like most boys straight out of high school, I knew pretty much everything else there was to know, but the fingernail growth thing mystified me so much I often broke out into a rash.
I would be the first to admit I am far too kind to the city's $2 stores.
I don't know whether it is the colossal amount of zombie television on offer, or, within that, Mike Hosking, but people around me appear to have lapsed into an intellectually arid state I can only compare to what I find embedded in the soles of my sneakers after walking through mud.
Spiders. Spiders as big as tennis balls, rolling through our house like, well, tennis balls. Bigger than tennis balls. As big as microwave ovens. I have photos. Why?
Patience, as the cliche goes, is a virtue.
A close friend, steeped in fashion, was chatting steeply to me during iD Fashion Week, and, noticing, with a pointing and immaculate fingernail, one of the week's male acolytes across the room, mentioned to me that he would look a lot better if he didn't dye his hair.
Stroke of genius provides the best fashion show soundtrack ever.
Most rational thinkers agree the best things in life are free.
What a day last Wednesday was!
My people in the music industry, unaware I left the music industry some time ago, continue to send me information daily.
The power of a morning newspaper is the way it can awaken a deep-sleeping brain so early in the day.
I have written before of the creative power one has when up-to-the-nose sunken in a bath, and when I survey my column schedule for the next three years, I see I will be writing on The Bath quite a few more times.
In recent years, there has been a shoal of new sports either added to or withdrawn from the Olympic Games.
As someone who has curled in and out of the media for most of my adult life, I love what we media people call "the silly season'', that time of the year when somehow we patch together programmes or newspapers despite so many (male) staff lying beer-comatose on their backs staring into the sun.
What an enormous huffing and puffing of glee there was at the start of this year when it was announced books were holding their own against the abomination of Kindle culture.
Rational thinkers appear to be in substantial agreement that the opening line of Ronald Hugh Morrieson's novel The Scarecrow - "The same week our fowls were stolen, Daphne Moran had her throat cut'' - is one of the finest openings to a book extant.
The command went out this Christmas from the sister-in-law, the most querulous call I have heard in years, I have to say, that there were to be No Christmas Presents For Adults.
That hoary old chestnut - and the fact I am considering whether to spell hoary that way underlines what an old chestnut this is - came up again last Wednesday during fervent discussion at an inner city cafe: men, says the chestnut, think about sex 1500 times a day.
The fascinating thing about Lorde's climb to the top of the global music tree was the sheer speed of it.
The evening began at the former Rugby Hotel in Carroll St.
