Category: Eccentric

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This Is It

If there’s one subject on which I have written a good many words over the years, it’s the topic of Getting Rid of Stuff. Way back in July 2014 – nearly ten years ago! – I was Feeling the Urge to Purge. Then in September I was wondering how much distillation it would take to get Drunk on Life.

By late February 2015 an alert reader was commenting that “The number of times you talk about purging, your house must be completely empty by now,” – and that was just before I’d posted about The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.

I regularly listed things I was getting rid of as 2015 continued, pausing in July to toy – for the first time – with the idea of Zero Based Budgeting: starting from zero and adding in what I was sure I wanted to keep, instead of starting from Dear Me What A Lot and subtracting only what I was sure I didn’t want to keep.

Black and white. An empty room with a fireplace, an open door, and a busy floral pattern in panels on the walls.
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Is It A Bird? Is It A Bug?

New Zealand has a history of strange elections. That time the Prime Minister called a snap election while pickled to the gills, for example. The time when two parties who respectively got the support of about 1/15 and 1/21 of the enrolled voters got into government.

And yet, despite this history of oddity, I was nonetheless Yours Truly Baffled last night when I read in the news that seventh place in Bug of the Year went to Powelliphanta superba.

Which is a snail.

A large dark snail shell lying among small plants.
P. superba staying in and having an identity crisis.

This is even wackier than a bat being voted Bird of the Year. Birds have wings, bats have wings. Bugs are the Things With Many Legs, snails are…(checks notes) legless. So legless, in fact, that they’re gastropods, i.e. the Things Which March On Their Stomachs.

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Modern Clothing: A Rant

I have been doing a bit of clothes shopping lately, and this has inspired a rant. Or, more accurately, a collection of related mini-rants, which – as I do not have a hotline to garment industrialists worldwide – I present here.

In the first place, there seems to be considerable confusion about the significance of length. If the wearer cannot bend over in a certain garment without flashing passersby, it is a top. Kindly stop charging extra for it under the pretence that it is a dress.

A model pauses at the end of a runway in a short-sleeved minidress which skims the tops of her thighs, and knee-high boots worn with over the knee socks.
From an Autumn/Winter collection, believe it or not.
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