The second harbour bridge opened in the weekend with much fanfare and a classic calm, sunny Tauranga day.

Depending on whether you like thronging masses or not, it was either a great place to be, or a good part of town to stay away from.
Let's hope the city doesn't grow out of it in a hurry. It seems like only yesterday that I was standing on the end of the first bridge, photographing the last yacht race through the gap before the first bridge was pushed across.
Even then, speculation was rife that it should have been four lanes, not just two.
However, it was the demise of tolls that opened the bridge to the onslaught of extra traffic that choked it overnight.
Hopefully this bridge is also the end of the proliferation of structures strangling our beautiful harbour. There are enough crossings and obstructions now.
There's a strange mindset – a not particularly sustainable attitude – that it's okay to work on one side of the city and live on the other; and that the council owes it to us to make sure we can make the trip quickly and freely. This is despite the city being built around a sprawling harbour – one of the very assets that draws so many people to this beautiful part of the world. We can't expect to live on the edge of inlets, estuaries and beaches, without some compromise in travelling around them. There's a cost that usually comes with that; either in time, money, fuel, patience or all of those.
Let's hope this is remembered by the designers of the next phase of road development, around the 15th Avenue area, as Tauranga's transport infrastructure forges forward.

Great feedback
We've had a huge amount of feedback on last week's expose on terrorists. Many letters, phone calls and emails of support – and a handful who didn't like it at all. Several wrote letters (pages 36-37) and some called me names, which is a little hurtful and caused me to go a bit sulky, for, gee, maybe a millisecond, till being swept aside by uncontrollable laughter spasms.
I don't need to defend my right to an opinion here. But I will, because it's fun baiting some of the more easily-irritated members of the public whose brains were injected with Politically Correct Serum at birth and consequently rush to their letter writing stations the moment someone mentions anything to do with any other race or religion.
And good on them. It makes great reading for us all. Keep it coming, we all need a good laugh every week.

Torturous
If you were sick and tired of Michael Jackson even before he died, you will be climbing the walls by now.
The constant drip-torture of news bulletins about this goon just won't go away.
Now a video has surfaced, purporting to show a figure matching his likeness jumping out of the same coroner's van that took away the body. No-one was really fooled and it turned out to be a hoax. But that won't deter the conspiracy theorists and there's a lot of support for the belief that his death was far too convenient for the failing star.
I've always thought that his death was faked. I have absolutely no evidence at all to support this theory, other than this: What else could he do? It makes perfect sense.
His career was over. His reputation world-wide sullied by child molestation accusations. He was heavily in debt. He did not have the health to continue performing. He couldn't go anywhere in public without being heavily disguised.
Compare that life to the benefits of being ‘dead'.
Rocketing sales, milking the outpouring of cash from grief-stricken fans world wide.
Instant anonymity.
It's also a convenient and believable exit strategy from his dead-end life, barricaded in his fantasy world.
Other advantages for Jacko faking his death:
He'd seen it done successfully by his former father-in-law, Elvis. So he's had first-hand, family experience of how to pull it off. Plus, he learned a lot of the pitfalls along the way. Such as: Avoid working in high profile jobs, such as hamburger joints.
He's no stranger to plastic surgery, so getting the face chop wouldn't have fazed him. In fact, his face at time of death was falling apart. He had a selection of five spare noses in a jar.
It makes perfect sense for Jackson to have gone one step better than overdose or suicide: Exit his current life by faking death.
By now, the plastic surgery will have been completed and Jackson will be starting his new life, complete with new income stream from his renewed record sales, somewhere in the South Pacific.
Send your pictures of potential Michael Jackson suspects here. We'll have a prize for the best. If you snap the bonus trifecta – Jackson hanging out with his ex father-in-law Presley and his best mate, Lord Lucan, and we'll throw in a trip to an exotic island paradise and split the photo royalties with you.
Others to watch for, probably lurking in the same vicinity, will be Nessie, Amelia Earhart (now aged 112) Bigfoot, and Azaria Chamberlain celebrating her 30th and the youngest known person to have faked her own death, aged nine weeks. She did however, have assistance from the dingo, now with a new identity and living a new life as coach of the Australian rugby team.