New Zealand Listener Issue 2, 2023

The other day, my computer was giving me a problem or 10, so I took it to a techie in the Christchurch suburb of Halswell. His abode was in a relatively new housing development with the grandiose name of Country Palms. The thing is, post earthquakes, that area’s gone from being “country adjacent” to one of the First Four Ships Town’s largest suburbs. So, it’s not in the country and there aren’t palms. At least, there aren’t palms plural. There is one solitary palm, singular, which must have given someone quite a bit of grief nurturing it to maturity through the Canterbury winter. But calling the area Suburban Palm wouldn’t have appealed to any developer. No, they like a grand name to get cut-through and compete with all the other developers,…

WINNING CAPTION David Scott, Gisborne FINALISTS Caption: Palace security report they are unaffected by recent budget cuts. – Ben Arcus, Masterton William, Prince of Wales: “ When they suggested downsizing our security, this isn’t what I had in mind.” – Niels Jonker, Wellington William: “Honey, I shrunk the Guardsman.” – Richard Laimbeer, Dunedin William: “Where are you really from?” – John Edgar, Christchurch William: “I thought it was the police who were meant to look younger.” – Mike Hamblyn, Dunedin Guardsman: “My mom said the flowers are for Meghan.” – Ann Love, Nelson…

One of our country’s political parties claims the financially wealthy will all suddenly turn into philanthropists if the government does not increase taxes for our highest earners. Of course, there are genuinely philanthropic wealthy people, but not that many. In my experience, it is people who are not financially wealthy who give to those less well off – people who volunteer their time helping various organisations run by people who give, give, give. I know a woman who still worries financially about making ends meet but says she’s wealthy because she has her health and her children are doing okay. And, surely, that’s what wealth is? She is fit and well and still has three part-time jobs, even though she’s in her mid-70s. Lucky her. Every January, she goes to a large stationery…

“Mail your packages early so the post office can lose them in time for Christmas.”– Johnny Carson“It doesn’t feel like I’m truly home for the holidays until I’ve taken my parents’ phones and said, ‘Here, let me show you’, at least 25 times.”– Seen on Twitter“The best measure of a man’s honesty isn’t his income tax return. It’s the zero adjust on his bathroom scale.”– Arthur C Clarke“My fake plants died because I did not pretend to water them.”– Mitch Hedberg“My New Year’s resolution is to be more assertive, if that’s okay with you guys?“– Seen on Twitter“Summer afternoon – summer afternoon; to me, those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”– Henry James“What’s another word for Thesaurus?”– Steven Wright“The only way not to think…

The QI elves are a team of writers and comedians who find the answers to impossible questions, doing the research for the long-running QI TV series, podcasts and the spin-off books. For the next little while, we’ll be running some of their finest findings: the weird, wonderful, witty and wise, from their latest book, 222 QI Answers to Your Quite Ingenious Questions. Why is our planet called Earth, and who gave it that name? In English, planets are usually named after Greek and Roman gods, but Earth is not. Its name is derived from an ancient word for the ground. Most European languages are descended from the same ancient tongue. That’s why lots of words are similar in other languages. Take the word ‘two’. It’s ‘du’ in Lithuanian, ‘deux’ in French, ‘dwa’ in…

The US has a long history of wildly unqualified and/or ill-suited candidates for our Senate, whose members like to call it – without irony, mind you – “the world’s greatest deliberative body”. James Buchanan coined that moniker and, until the orange dumbsicle came along, he was widely considered our worstever president (1857-61). Why, just in this infant millennium we’ve seen candidates who’ve “dabbled in witchcraft” and said rapes seldom result in pregnancies because “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down”. But the Class of 2022 offered a seven-layer dip of dysfunction, everything from ignorant and incompetent, dissembling and delusional to kooky and criminal. The last to go was Herschel Walker, the former football star who is stunningly unqualified, which really…