President of the New Zealand Flat Earth Society, Sir Hugh Rennie, is off to Europe shortly to represent the country at the World Flat Earth Society’s Annual Conference in Rome.

Two decades back I wrote “Degrees For Everyone”, a comic novel on the collapse of universities as centres of academia. Instead, I claimed, they were now commercial ventures, dishing out nonsense degrees in non-academic topics. Since then university degrees (excluding the sciences, philosophy et al) have become an even bigger joke.

Stuff journalist Marty Sharpe began a story thus; “A couple that was married for more than 50 years…”