“There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge” – Bertrand Russell “In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays” (1935) “Well, Bonzo” said his mother,”Today is a big day for you” “Why Mum...
Surely now is the time to call for equal rights for all the different typefaces of the world. Fonts have feelings too, whether they are full blooded serifs, shy little sans serifs, script fonts that can only mimic a handwritten...
Come with me on my personal tour of cardboard, and together we will unlock a new world of drama, impersonation and flavour benchmarks. My curiosity about cardboard began recently when I read a movie review, which gave a...
They know if they miss buying some now, they will have to suffer eating supermarket doughnuts that are as cold, rubbery and unappetising as a dog’s chew toy. So they buy the fresh warm doughnuts in front of them. And a box...
“There is no such thing as a weed. Weeds are just plants growing in the wrong place”. So said Angus McBeard, the huge and hairy owner of our local garden centre “Thistles and Thorns”. I had simply asked him what...
I grew up in the Wild West, the wild western suburbs of Sydney, in the 1950s and 60s. In some surprising ways it was just like the American Wild West of the 1850s and 60s. We knew all about the real Wild West from TV series...
We all know the difference between off and on, or do we? Our washing machine, having finished the thankless task of removing smells and stains from my clothes, should be off, but it’s not truly off. It’s doing something...
“Marie Kondo your fridge” the headline urged.* As you probably know, Marie Kondo is the tidiness and decluttering queen. Who doesn’t like her concept of “tidying up in a way that will spark joy in your life and change it...
As soon as I walked into my local electronics store, I started to feel something was very wrong. As I browsed the aisles of gadgets I overheard a salesman saying “Male subject, purple New Zealand t-shirt, arriving one minute...
We live in the mild temperate southern part of Australia, so you may think that we would not be troubled by avalanches, but you would be wrong. I’m not talking about snow. We don’t have much snow in my home state...
