Brian Rogers Rogers Rabbits www.sunlive.co.nz

Summer must be here, the girls downtown are in short little dresses, the birds start singing earlier in the mornings and the nights are shorter.

The first signs of daylight seem to glimmer unreasonably early – or perhaps it's just Yasser Arafat glowing in the dark. He's just one of the famous departed who have been making the news recently.

The really big news story that you probably all missed was a grave threat to one of our famous poets. The jafas want to widen the Albany highway, so more of them can get out of the city in a hurry. (I can understand that. One lane in, and six out, would be my preference.) Trouble is, the grave of ARD Fairburn lies perilously close to the edge of the cemetery.

Dead irony

Ironically, one of Rex Fairburn's greatest works is 'The Disadvantages of Being Dead”.

Some may not have understood a lot of Rex's work when he was alive. Now we are starting to really appreciate what he was saying, about the disadvantages of being dead.

Clearly, a major one is that someone may one day want to run over your grave with a highway jammed with jafas in their Audis, swerving randomly with their lattes in one hand and a cellphone in the other.

Some in-depth research by the RR crew into Fairburn's work uncovered some quite startling pieces of literature by a range of equally oddball authors. Such as 'the History of Lesbian Hair”, the cover shot being a manipulated artwork of the Mona Lisa with the classic short-back-and-sides look.

Another piece of literary genius you should know about is: 'How to Write a How to Write Book”. It has been listed by one blogger as among the 30 least educational books ever written.

It enjoys the lofty company alongside these wonderful titles:

• How to Watch Football on Television
• Old Age: It's cause and prevention
• How to Abandon Ship (Is there more to it than ‘jump'?)
• Why I Hate the Nazis
• How to Avoid Huge Ships
• The Truth About Fonzie (What we always suspected)
• Will Christ Return by 1988 (I think we know the answer now)
• Cheese Problems Solved (Thank goodness for that)
• A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates
• Invisibility: Mastering the Art of Vanishing (Helen Clark must have read this)
• The Teach Your Chicken to Fly Manual (My chickens all fly on automatic)
• How To Be Pope: What to do and where to go, once you're in the Vatican.
• Does the Earth Rotate? No!
• How to Speak Cat
• How to Have Sex in the Woods (Must be the abnormal deviates)

Dangerously close

Meanwhile, there are some bizarre inconsistencies in the minds of those who want to keep us safe.

In the middle of the North Island, there's a massive volcano that blows its stack. You are relatively free to drive and walk pretty close. There have been a few temporary road diversions and the odd brief track closure, but by and large, anyone can wander into potential hellfire and brimstone with very little intervention from authority.

Compare that to Astrolabe Reef and its new abstract sculpture. An exclusion zone of kilometres, for years. Yet neither Astrolabe, or the remains of its shipwreck, are posing much of a threat to anyone. Astrolabe is not erupting or likely too. Nor has it killed anyone, unlike the volcanoes.

Sure, maybe exclude public from a few hundred metres of the shipwreck while the salvage progresses, for the benefit of the salvors, but we cannot see any need for the massive area of exclusion zone that still exists. But what needs putting in perspective is the risk, versus the reaction.

Even the adjacent surf beach at Mount Maunganui is more of a threat to public safety than the reef. People drown at the beach. Other people spend their entire summers trying to save people who are determined to drown there.

The surf beach is arguably more of a life threat than Astrolabe and its hardware, and probably more so than the mountain. More people have died at the beach than the mountain, and certainly a lot more than the reef.

So why are they not insisting the beach be closed?
Seems a large amount of inconsistency in the thinking of officialdom.

That's all for now, my normal deviates. Must go now and solve some cheese problems.