The Government, panicking at the huge volume of cash reportedly flowing into the National Party’s coffers, have proposed dropping the amount at which individual donors must be named to a ridiculous $5,000. Presumably they believe this will deter some donors and they may well be right.

Over the past two decades I’ve lightened lives by placing numerous humourous signs in my company’s Wellington office building foyers and on their sides.

I love newspapers but two years back didn’t renew my subscription to Wellington’s Dominion Post, a publication I’ve frequently been a weekly columnist for over the last six decades.

When the new owner took over a few years back she immediately turned it into a ludicrous daily propaganda sheet about maori wonderfulness.

A couple of weeks back I wrote how having just returned to New Zealand after almost 4 months away, I sat down and plowed through all the newspapers awaiting me, or at least the New Zealand Herald as I not being a maori speaker, the Dominion-Post is largely unintelligible.

Anyway, I wrote about a phenomenon which such concentrated reading revealed, namely how the pre-fix “award winning” nowadays seems to be applied to virtually everyone and everything.

In Denver in early March, I cut out a newspaper item which will delight readers. It was headed,

“STOLEN BOX OF HUMAN HEADS INVESTIGATED BY DENVER POLICE”

Apparently thieves stole the box from a freight company truck, it being transported, according to the report, “for medical research purposes.”

No further details were provided but one can only speculate whether the original head owners had consented to this use.