Dad, chocolate, dad, choc..(mouse over pic repeatedly)

Mike's Pith & Wind - Persona non grata
There’s been a bit of discussion lately about the nature of autism. My son Chris (pic) is autistic, so I’ve had a good cause to reflect at length about autism. At various stages in our father-son relationship I’ve become quite defensive and sometimes even pretty angry at the glimpses of myself I see in Chris’ behaviours, which has caused me to speculate as to whether I’ve contributed genetically to Chris’ being autistic in the first place.
Consider the schism between Mike Rudd the performer, (or My Crudd for that matter), and the possibly boring and very nearly invisible man about Camberwell we’ll call Michael Rudd. I’ve often quoted the pat ‘over-compensating introvert’ to describe the phenomenon of Mike Rudd the performer, but his alter ego could equally be an over-compensating extrovert.
It’s when we have any amount of time off performing, like over the past month while Robbo’s been away in Edinburgh, that I start to feel strangely lop-sided, as well as depressed, of course. There are problems associated with your principal source of income being derived from something you love doing, one of which is sorting out whether you’re depressed because you’re unable to adequately express a part of your personality, or you’re depressed simply because you’re not earning any money. I don’t think it’s possible to devise an adequate test for this, so you’ll have to take my word for it that both are factors in my case.
I suspect a lot of performers are in the same boat. There was an episode of Seinfeld where he felt compelled to ditch his girlfriend because she didn’t think.. read more

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Dick's Toolbox - It rains in NZ
I hadn’t realized that an Auckland Buddhist Temple had already captured Peter Costello the man, his book and attendant publicity in concrete. To me it says ‘Take it like the man you are Peter, and stop sulking around the stage like some aged and smirking Hamlet. You have had your go and, strangely, nobody thinks as much of you as you do. You didn’t do a particularly good job, you demonstrated that you had neither spine nor character and that only thing going for you is that Tony Abbott flatters anybody in personal comparison’. (pic on next page)
All this leads to the fact that I returned briefly to the Long White Land of my birth in the company of my daughter Elizabeth, who can now claim her profession as lawyer. New Zealand Customs and Immigration asked to see where her golf shoes were – and it took a while to see that it was a joke. read more