A former classmate and a friend of mine from a New Zealand public primary school had his children homeschooled by his wife. They were both university graduates, very religious and conservative and didn't want their children to be influenced by atheist public schools. Things were going along fine until his wife came into a substantial inheritance from her mother in the USA. Her grandfather had been a top executive for a well-known company in the USA and had become quite wealthy. She promptly told my friend to close down his business and let her control the family. He didn't appreciate her telling him to drop everything and so they separated. Several of the younger children went with her when she moved to another area in New Zealand and a few of the elder ones stayed with my friend. She joined a very conservative splinter cult in the new area and she doesn't seem to be putting much effort into homeschooling her younger children. So homeschooling worked fine for his elder children, but now the younger children are missing out on a good education.

We have a Panasonic microwave oven and a few dozen Panasonic Eneloop rechargeable AAA and AA batteries. Panasonic New Zealand did a memorable TV commercial some years ago that is still occasionally seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. - H.L. Mencken

After much searching on Youtube, here is the Lexx intro that mentions the protoblood https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I have a small connection to this story. As previously mentioned, one of the co-founders of Rocket Lab was the internet entrepreneur and space-nut Mark Rocket who changed his name from Mark Stevens. Many years ago, he was one of our tenants and a neighbor to us. My main memory of him is of him feeding left-over food to our hens. CEO Peter Beck set up Rocket Lab in 2006 with funding from rocket-mad angel investor Mark Rocket who became a 50% owner until he exited in 2011. Mark Rocket was originally booked to fly into sub-orbital space with Virgin Galactic in 2008 and was the first New Zealander to book a flight, but sold his ticket after delays.
I seem to recall in the late 1980s that some Royal New Zealand Air Force pilots were meant to be trained to become Space Shuttle astronauts, but nothing seems to have come of this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... http://www.markrocket.com/

I remember when reports of those space balls were in the news in New Zealand https://www.odt.co.nz/star-new...

or German? Mark Twain said "Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."

There's also the much-delayed Dream Chaser cargo space plane that is scheduled to launch no earlier than May of 2025.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

We didn't have a computer room at my high school while I was there. We did programming in 1981 for our 7th Form Applied Maths class at the Christchurch Polytechnic. It was across the road from my school and we used two PDP-11 computers. We learned to program numerical methods using BASIC. I spent many hours using them on my private projects such as printing out variable-sized banners, oblivious to the fact that the school was being charged for my usage. I was the top user in my class that year, costing them $200 instead of the budgeted $50; fortunately the school didn't ask me to pay the difference. That same year our Physics teacher showed us a friend's $5000 Z-80 microcomputer that had a built-in keyboard with wooden sides and a perspex top and used a TV screen as a monitor. He was using BASIC to do some scientific calculations and wrote his own random-number generator.

Hale and Pace - TV detector is amusing too https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

I'm not good at verbal communication so I look firstly for the now-rare feature of call recording; then the size of the phone. Ideally, I wouldn't use a phone that has a screen size of more than about 5.5 inches.

Here is a digitized scan taken of the actual newspaper by the National Libary of New Zealand https://paperspast.natlib.govt...