God queries how Man got circumcised in Dick's Toolbox

Mike's Pith & Wind - Asparagus
I never used to like asparagus. To my brother and me when we were kids, any sort of vegetables were the unsavoury (cold) green bits left over after we’d finished the meat, vegetables were the yucky bits that our parents insisted we eat so that we’d ‘grow up big and strong’, and vegetables were the poisonous grunge that we toyed with endlessly before mum eventually relented and we finally got our ‘pudding’ (dessert to you). I quite liked the peas and beans and potato and kumara (sweet potato) that accompanied the Sunday roast, but that was just about it. And tomatoes. But asparagus? If I thought of it at all, I thought of it as being in the same league as onions, and I couldn’t cope with onions. Mum was a pretty snazzy cook for those days, and when she entered the Mrs New Zealand competition she became quite adventurous in the kitchen, even trying some Asian rice-based dishes out on us – pretty radical for Christchurch in the ‘60s, which only boasted one Chinese restaurant that I can remember. I loved mum’s thoughtfully unspiced Nasi Goreng, but I had to take out every speck of onion before I could eat it, which was truly boring for everybody concerned.
Asparagus is an acquired and quite sophisticated taste I’d reckon – it’s certainly not the first, second or even third vegetable you think of when you talk of yer traditional Anglo-Saxon ‘meat and three vegies’ - you even feel moderately well-educated just saying its name. But what makes asparagus such a boon for the chattering classes is its singular and oft-remarked on property of producing a distinctive sulphurous odour when you urinate, quite out of proportion to the innocuous taste it has when you’re eating it. read more

Dick's Toolbox - The Age of Unreason
Following last month’s display of prescience and gruntle with regard to climate change and Australian politicians, we move on to discuss the wonderful world of belief. This has been instigated by a randomly observed line in the real estate pages of The Age, where it was noted that a particular newly developed Mc-suburb had no places or worship. My first thought was ‘and ………..’ but quickly moved onto ‘do people actually worship in this material age?’ That is do they “Show reverence and adoration for (a deity), honour with religious rites - treat (someone or something) with the reverence and adoration appropriate to a deity?”
Curiously the existence of the many hectares of this self same suburb, with its two storey cheek by jowl retro architecture, seemed to have also eluded the notice of urban planners, who had neglected to provide any public transport. Both man, and the deity of your choice, had read more