Despite the sheer terror they induce in the populace, we have wind farms here in New Zealand. There are a couple dotted around the place, but new ones are difficult to build. The reason for this is that we have a lovely little thing called the Resource Management Act, which essentially requires an expensive application to local councils for the right to build things. Anyone can raise objections to proposed construction projects; including corporations, which was…

I have a large collection of obscure and ephemeral comics, and "Hansi The Girl Who Loved the Swastika" is one of my more obscure finds, picked up in a small Goodwill store for the price of twenty-five cents. This was many years ago, and only recently did I realize a few important facts about this comic.

• It was based off of a book of the same name.
• It is, as much as any autobiography is, true.
• It is a valuable collectors item in some circles.

When I first…

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You can smell it in the breeze,
when the wind changes
Picking up speed as it moves from West to Northwest

Then a few flakes, tentative and sparse
followed by waves of them, thicker and stronger
covering sidewalks, roofs and parking lots.

Cars overnight become all the same colour
buried monuments in silent rows

A few brave souls will…

A phrasal verb is a verb plus a preposition or an adverb which creates a different meaning from the original verb. These include things like 'figure out', 'close down', 'screw up', 'come across', 'spell out', 'keep up with', and 'stick up'. Among many others.

Some grammarians think that only idiomatic conjunctions should count as verbal phrases. (For example, you could not deduce the meaning of 'nod off' from the words 'nod' and 'off'; therefor it…