“Was it just me, or did the New Year’s Eve fireworks starbursts over the Sydney Harbour Bridge resemble the coronavirus?” asks Ron Schaffer of Bellevue Hill.
Garry Champion of Jamisontown attempts to make sense of the uproar over his Christmas decoration (C8) tale. “Let me get this right. I can buy hot cross buns before January 6th but I shouldn’t take down my Christmas decorations? I’m perplexed.”
“If it’s any consolation Garry, ‘my mother’ said it was ‘bad luck’ to leave the decorations (C8) up after the 12th night, so you, and we, are probably fine this year,” Robert Hosking of Paddington.
One to help with dealing with your tsundoku, the Japanese word for buying books and letting them pile up, unread. Helen Wyld of Avalon Beach is finding American librarian Nancy Pearl’s advice on how far to persist with an unsatisfying book helpful as she stares down the barrel of her 70th birthday. “Her Rule of 50 advised committing to the first fifty pages and then deciding whether or not to put the rest aside. After the age of 50, subtract your age from 100, and the result gives you the number of pages you should read before abandoning without guilt. The older one gets, the fewer the required number of pages and the less time wasted. On reaching the age of 100, one is permitted to judge a book by its cover.”
Now that Britain has left Europe, Dave Horsfall of North Gosford wonders, “Does this mean that they’ll revert to pounds shillings and pence, and change all the kilometre posts back to mileposts?”
