Sideswipe: August 9: Fishing spots popping up all over NZ

First, it was the rubber duckies, now fishing holes. The pothole campaigners sure know how to get attention for their cause. Noel Rodgers saw this one between Taupō and Tokoroa. "Just got another wheel alignment last week." Remember to report any potholes in your area, because if authorities don't know where they are they can't fix them. Local roads should be reported to councils, and state highways to Waka Kotahi.

Middle-age ravers of the UK

Your 20s is the time to get completely off your nut before calming down and respecting yourself. But increasingly, it seems that British people have a different idea. More than 3.7 million over-45s go raving once a week in the UK, and there has been a 518 per cent increase in over-60s being treated for cocaine abuse since 10 years ago. These gravers, aka "geriatric ravers", have a lifestyle of party drugs and old-school acid house and trance music, but also face health risks that younger ravers don't – the drugs are stronger, and their hearts aren't.

Shh, sleeping ice-cream

Patients are the worst

In a 1978 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital psychiatrist James E Groves categorised the patients "whom most physicians dread": Healthworkers of New Zealand, does this seem harsh, or accurate?
"Dependent clingers": Escalate from normal requests for reassurance to "repeated, perfervid, incarcerating cries for explanation, affection, analgesics, sedatives and all forms of attention imaginable".
"Manipulative help-rejecters": Appear almost smugly satisfied, returning "again and again to the office or clinic to report that, once again, the regimen did not work". When one symptom is relieved, another appears in its place.
"Self-destructive deniers": Show "unconsciously self-murderous behaviours, such as the continued drinking of a patient with oesophageal varices and hepatic failure". These patients "seem to glory in their own destruction. They appear to find their main pleasure in furiously defeating the physician's attempts to preserve their lives."
(James E Groves, "Taking Care of the Hateful Patient", New England Journal of Medicine, 1978.)