Manager of the West Auckland tip recycling shop, Tipping Point Darryl Jellyman and his staff find treasures all the time, but this plastic piggy bank of the late PM Robert Muldoon was a rare piece of political Kiwiana. "Every work day his cold dead eyes accuse me of
being a 'trendy lefty', and a 'chardonnay socialist'," to which I reply, "you were virtually a communist, mate". You can put money in at the top, but there seems to be no way of getting it out at the bottom, "so perhaps Rob knew the truth about trickle-down economics," Jellyman quips. "My only brush with Mr Muldoon was as a wet behind the ears 20-year-old, press-ganged into being a wine-waiter pouring champagne at the topping off ceremony of the Regent Hotel (now the Stamford Plaza in Albert St). Rob was troweling some wet concrete on the roof of the building site a day or two after calling a snap election (while tired and emotional). I like to think he scratched 'Rob woz here' in the wet cement with his finger. Rob did the official business and photo ops for about 20 minutes, then buggered off to the workman's barbecue a couple of floors below, where he probably necked a sausage in white bread with fried onions and train smash (Watties, no doubt), and sunk a quart of DB Draught. "
Scientists from the University of Exeter in the UK were tracking the migratory patterns of oystercatchers when the data seemed to go crazy. One of the birds' tracking devices sent back data to show that it had been to a beach in Orkney, a pizza restaurant, a campground, various tourist attractions, and then to the London suburb of Ealing. While a bird might get a bite to eat at a pizza restaurant, the rest made no sense and the research team assumed that the tracker had fallen off the bird. But then what happened? Mike German had been on vacation in Orkney, where he found a mysterious device on the beach. He put it in his pocket and forgot about it until he got home, then put it somewhere else and forgot about it.
