KEY POINTS:
One disc you can hope Santa won't be depositing in your stocking. If this is the band's Very Best, what can the very worst be like, we wonder.
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"Last week, while discussing an investment, I bought some house contents insurance at my local bank purely by chance," says a reader. "As the forms were being filled in, I was unexpectedly asked questions about my distant past. I blustered without confessing (how do you tell your local bank you have a history, however far distant, of, er, holding them up?). But I got home and realised that not telling the whole truth would render my contents policy useless. So I contacted Westpac. I didn't mind cancelling as I was within the 30-day trial period, but decided to leave it to whichever way it went. The clerk returned from discussing it with a higher power and told me I was accepted as a customer. Without further amendment to premium. I thought it was jolly sporting."
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Some kids get the season of goodwill idea, according to these emails sent to Telecom's Santaline:
"Dear Santa, I would like you to prove to me that you are real. I still believe in you but I demand further evidence that you are real. That's all I want for Xmas."
"Dear Santa, I would like to give a present to the children in one of the poor countries, a pig or a cow."
"Dear Santa, I don't want much, just something nice for mum and something nice for me as we can't afford Christmas this year and I know that upsets my mum but I'm okay with it."
"Dear Santa, I wish you could make the children in other countries as happy as me. My mum says they don't have enough food when I won't eat my veggies and she said we are lucky to have a roof over our head and a nice warm bed. I will not ask you for anything again if you can just help the little girl who sits on the road crying on the telly.
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Lou Girardin writes: "The new traffic signals on the motorway onramps will certainly reduce congestion if they're all like the Wellington St examples. The flash of green light is so brief, a mere nanosecond in time, that the two leading cars I saw managed to roll less than a metre before the light was red again. Does Transit NZ realise that your average driver needs at least five seconds to wake up, realise the light is green, check for red light runners (I know there isn't an intersection there, but the habit is ingrained now), put the car into gear and drive on?"
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Further to the report on the statue of athlete Alan Elliot, a reader writes: "An elderly friend, well into his 80s, recalls that when he was stationed in Auckland during the war, he and his mates thought it was very risqué to check out the statue when it was raining and note the dribble trickling down from the statue's penis."
