The national bash rate of babies continues at shameful levels. Television presenters are tut-tutting and lamenting “our” shocking rate of violence towards children. They continue to earbash us that “we” have one of the worst rates of child abuse in the civilized world. So much for the anti-slapping law. “We” apparently haven’t learnt to stop beating, stomping and dropping them on their heads. The More...

We’ve had enormous feedback from readers lately and will, over the next few editions, attempt to cover all the issues you have raised. This week is a real blast. Concerned reader Graham sent us a link to Al Qaeda’s latest publishing venture, an online English version of the terrorist magazine. It’s a bit like Woman’s Weekly, only with fewer pictures of Mike Hosking and not quite so bitchy. One of the most outstanding More...

Sun readers can be identified into two clear groups: Those who are devastated about the passing of Moko; and those who can’t understand why there’s so much fuss about “just another dead fish”. Of course we are assuming that the dead thing is actually the famous Moko that we broke news to the world about. It wouldn’t have happened unless Ross Brown and I got up at dawn to check out reports from surf photographer More...

It was looking like a quiet news week, with only the pesky ETS really showing any promise, until the devastating news broke about the national cucumber shortage. Yes folks, in these days of promises of super cities, Auckland Olympics, and every Kiwi home owning a panda – the biggest story of the week was the Cucumber Crisis. At least the cucumber story was a novel break from the nauseating vuvuzelas and the pathetic Hollywood football More...

Skinny girls are being picked on again and it’s the same old argument about skinny models setting a bad example. Most of the complaining seems to be coming from fat women. I know something about skinniness. As the T-shirt saying goes: “I battled anorexia and won.” For many years my own petite frame has been the subject of scorn and ridicule. Taunts of “chicken legs” and “skinny little white boy” did More...

At least that’s the headline that reader Stuart from Pyes Pa says would get a lot of attention in our paper. Stuart has been doing plenty of thinking about climate change and suggests that if human induced global warming is in fact happening, then women are primarily to blame for it. Plus, he expects such a headline on Rogers Rabbits’ column would gain a lot of feedback from the community. His reasoning is this: Women are the More...

The demotion of Mita Ririnui within Labour ranks for personal spending on his ministerial credit card is a bit harsh. While his colleague Shane Jones appears to have deliberately ripped off the system, Mita’s spending was clearly never intended to be ‘on the taxpayer’, and was repaid within days. He understood the difference between personal and ministerial costs, and merely used the credit as a matter of More...

Well I never thought a soppy story about the woes of duvet wrestling would draw such a response from our readers. It just goes to show that, along with missing socks and techniques for eating corn on the cob, it’s the little anomalies in life that can up a lot of our time. This, from concerned reader Kathryn: “Solving the problem starts when you remove the cover. A problem usually needs to be traced back to its roots. When you More...

Some excellent points are raised in this week’s letters. Amongst them, John Coster spells out some of the reasons why the historic village isn’t suitable as a museum site. Sure it’s a nice, quaint corner of the city and many of us are quite attached to it. But there are some compelling reasons why it will never be a suitable site for development, at least, not economically. It’s sometimes easy to forget the More...

I recently went to Australia to shoot some pictures. I had hoped to go to Norway to shoot some rare wildlife, also maybe club to death some harp seals and their last remaining Eurasian Otters, harpoon some endangered fin whales (before the Japs get there) and skewer a few rare polar bears before global melting finishes them off. Of course, I would video all this to gloat to my friends on YouTube as part of our reciprocal hunting rights More...