The exterior of the Mayfair picture theatre bespeaks another era and a sense of colour that is, shall we say, Mediterranean. Which is odd, because it's in Kaikoura NZ. Read Dick's Toolbox to find out what went on in this innocuous looking building that influenced both our lives.

Mike's Pith & Wind - Big, bad brother
A few years ago I heard an interview on the ABC with a visiting Canadian academic, who asserted that once a society embarked on a course of state endorsed gambling it was on the road to inevitable decline. He gave examples, none of which I remember, but I think they went as far back as biblical times.
I’m not overly fond of gambling anyway, and there’s a Sodom and Gomorrah feel about the Southbank Casino which makes my skin crawl, so I mentally ticked the concept and have kept a weather eye out since for signs of our Victorian society’s decline.
Maybe I’m too close to it, but nothing leapt out at me as being intrinsically any more rotten than usual - evolution tends to masquerade as moral decline to the older generation, and I put down my occasional disapproval of the fashion in this area as just that.
But I’ve now realised that the signs have been right in front of me all the time, only I hadn’t identified this nagging agitation as being an indicator of something far more sinister and deep-rooted.
What triggered my epiphany was receiving another e-mail today advising me of all the locations of speed cameras round Melbourne. For those of you that live elsewhere, the State of Victoria has decided to plonk a host of cameras at various locations around this otherwise quite liveable city of Melbourne read more

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Dick's Toolbox - The End of Entropy
It is said that you cannot go back, and in the case of the Entropy Pizza Company in Kaikoura New Zealand, you can’t go back as it is out of business. Why is this important ?
Well, if you were like me and thought that it was arguably the best pizza place in the whole galaxy, it is.
I first went there in 1993 with my wife and daughter and nearly exploded with delight and excess calories. These were seriously bent hippy pizzas with the most real and organic of ingredients. Deep dish blue vein, mushroom and broccoli were typical specialities. In my diary I wrote “Viva Entropy ! $50.50 not so Viva Entropy.”
I returned 10 years later with my daughter and the place was still there but now themed as a Mexican bar, most of the esoteric pizzas were gone, but the two women who ran the place had kept a small number of the recipes that were not read more