Dazed and Confused

The basement clean-up finally ended last week, by which stage I could well have gone underground by a metre.

Easter, for reasons that have never ever been clear, has always been the one time of the year when I work really hard. Physically.

This is a story about greed, corruption, insanity and the immaturity of youth. It is almost pointless to add that a story with these features could only involve horse racing.

I was watching the rugby. The Highlanders. Spellbinding. But my attention was being eaten into by a faraway voice, seriously affecting my ability to understand how the Highlanders were winning when the Chiefs were playing so much better.

Last Saturday was a Big Saturday. There is no other word for it. So many things, all bearing down on me like big bearing-down things, I barely knew where to turn.

On the eve of Saturday night's classical-meets-the-Dunedin-Sound Tally Ho! Concert in the town hall, two names have flickered down through the foggy ruins of time, Warren Green and Christopher Norton.

Most rational thinkers agree that 3 years old is as far back as a human can remember.

While the city was being roasted alive over the closing days of January, confirming for the cynics and curmudgeons of the north that Dunedin is in fact the sunniest and warmest city in all of New Zealand, I was slaving over a computer keyboard indoors transcribing, copying and pasting the lyrics of the 23 songs to be performed in the upcoming ''Tally Ho!'' town hall concert.

I don't think anyone would disagree for a single second that lying your head off at a social function is a tremendously under-appreciated skill.

Most rational thinkers would agree that a life lived without meeting an exceptionally intelligent human is simply a life not lived. 

If I have been asked the question in Trivial Pursuit where the word kitchen comes from once, I have been asked it a thousand times.

Anyone with half a brain will tell you the Ida Valley is idyllic.

In last week's column I described digging out a 1961 class photo in the basement, but this search unearthed something even scarier, a box filled to overflowing of all thing primary school.

Long-time Rolling Stones saxophonist Bobby Keys died at the start of this month after battling a suitably debilitating rock'n'roll disease, cirrhosis of the liver.

Most rational thinkers would agree there are two types of Christmas presents: smart presents bought both for and by people with big brains and an extremely sound idea of what is good and proper in this wretched life we are currently reeling from, and cretinously simple moronic presents, fads, destined to flood the charity stores of the city by as early as Boxing Day.