Owen Stewart saw this sign as he was passing through Warkworth. "Any farmers had a hard year? Maybe this is the perfect gift for them!"
Who should rule the roost?
A reader writes to Miss Manners, the advice column in the Kansas City Star. "Dear Miss Manners: My daughter-in-law uses her name when making hotel reservations for the entire family. Should not she have used her husband's name? She also has her voice on the answering machine. Should not the husband be the one with a message on the answering machine?" The Bad Advice Tumbler responds: "Gentle reader, like so many women who mistakenly believe they are autonomous human people, your daughter-in-law has wrongfully appropriated her husband's God-given right to be the sole defining member of his family ... What must hotel workers think of her gumption? Think of the tens, even twenties, of them who, over the years, will by shamelessly misled by your daughter-in-law into believing that women are capable of making hotel reservations for others ... But the shame your family will feel at the hands of the various motels will be nothing compared to abject dismantling of world social order that is likely to result from the sound of a woman's voice on her own answering machine."
How manly, to kick a pigeon to death
Averil Clarke would like to draw attention to the sad individual who thought himself a hero when he kicked a pigeon into the doorway of Ricochet, on High St, Auckland on Sunday evening. "I was the person who found the blood smear and feathers that led me to the poor little animal crunched in the corner of the doorway with a terrible injury to its tummy, far beyond repair, still alive and gasping. Was that brief moment of bravado with your friends worth the agonising death this little bird suffered at your hands?"
