Wonders will never cease News that Auckland manufacturer, Autex Industries, has bought the Warriors league club is a splendid opportunity for the quick-minded entrepreneur. Autex would be a certainty purchaser for the Brooklyn Bridge. Get in now and join the queue of other vendors outside their doors, offering similar opportunities.

Below is a letter just in from a noted Berkeley Professor friend, whose name for obvious reasons I shall hide.

Le Conte was one of the mid‑19^th Century most famous and respected American natural scientists, thus his name on science awards etc.

But, as was common he was also a slave-owner and wrote and researched on negro intellectual inferiority, hardly unusual at the time. Indeed it wasn’t until about 1980, for quite amusing reasons (autopsies on London taxi‑drivers brains) that it was only first realised that IQs are not genetically fixed as hitherto believed and instead, that the brain works just like a muscle, that is use it and it will grow.

For 18 months Jacinda enjoyed a wonderful honeymoon from our political journalists and could do no wrong. Largely that was because she’s a genuinely nice person, impossible to dislike.

But for two months now she and her government have been subject to unrelenting media criticism. Partly that’s a reflection of the media’s long‑established pack‑hunting mentality, but mainly it’s because the criticism is valid and consistent. That is the government’s seeming inability to govern, substituting endless enquiries and investigations for actual action.

News that the Electoral Board cocked up some Auckland region candidate info’ brochures and mixed up candidates data and photos, brought back an amusing memory. That was a libel action I was on the receiving end of 40 years back.

This eventuated after I wrote about the 1979 Rangitikei by‑election which resulted in the mad Social Creditors then leader, Bruce Beetham entering Parliament.