Daryl Somers and Ossie Ostrich face the music (pic 9)

Mike's Pith & Wind - PC
I had lunch in town with bro’ Dick today. As we were walking from the Rialto to the restaurant I said that I was hoping that our conversation would provide a topic I could discuss in this column. We both laughed, but, of course, I was quite serious.
It’s good to arrive at a restaurant at just after midday as nobody seriously contemplates eating at such a ridiculous hour and as a result there’s no contest for a table, but Richard reminded me that he regularly rises at 6.15, so for him it’s a long time between meals.
It’s perhaps our fourth visit to this particular restaurant, so we were looking for a little variation, but I nevertheless managed to order the same meal I had the last time. I purposely ordered the Ashton Hills Pinot we’d enjoyed the previous couple of times and thankfully it lived up to our memory of it.
That observation became the first point of discussion, because when I visited him in Warrandyte last Saturday night, Dick had proudly opened a bottle of NZ pinot that he and daughter Elizabeth had discovered on their visit to the hallowed Pier 19 restaurant in Queenstown, and while I found it perfectly adequate, Dick was dreadfully disappointed and described it as ‘mute’. We wondered if the wine had gone into a developmental phase in the bottle or in fact it was the occasion that made the wine seem so special in the first place. I favour the latter theory and I’m pretty sure that millions of bottles of wine are sold predicated on that very assumption.
Before Dick could ask me to justify my.. read more

All the very latest news, gossip and pics

Find all the back-issues of the Bloody Newsletter and Stop Press

Some helpful links to Spectrum's fave people

Listen to Mike & Bill's demos and check out their YouTube videos

You wanna learn guitar or buy a classic piece of equipment? Check the classifieds

Give us your thoughts on the file-sharing conundrum

How to book Spectrum for that special function

E-mails to the editor on any and every subject

Dick's Toolbox - Golf and the Olympics
Like most people I have average coordination and a physique better adapted to sloth, idleness and the consumption of alcohol. As a consequence I am not terribly sporting. My achievements peaked with the captaining the school’s 13th XI at cricket and, much later, suicidal skiing and recreational tennis.
Growing up in New Zealand I was obliged to play rugby at school. This was not an unalloyed pleasure as a result of New Zealand’s frozen winters and a school with limited hot water. Nothing can compare with cycling fifteen kilometres in the rain covered with Canterbury topsoil to find that the hot water had gone and the only way to keep warm was by escaping the clutches of House Prefect deeply involved in making the choice between.. read more