KEY POINTS:
Hard as it may be to believe for those who've spent the past two months glued to a TV set, swanning around France, or, latterly, engulfed by depression, there was and is life beyond the World Cup.
We can, for instance, be reasonably sure that New Zealand women
didn't let the All Blacks' limp performance spoil their sex lives. After all, they - the women that is - have a reputation to live up to: that of being the most promiscuous females on the planet. A survey has found when it comes to getting laid not only are Kiwi women world leaders but New Zealand is the only country where women have more sexual partners than men.
This isn't so surprising given New Zealand has always led the way in women's affairs. We were the first country to give women the vote and Onehunga, of all places, was the first borough in the British Empire to elect a female mayor. I'm no statistician but I'm intrigued by the discrepancy in the number of Kiwi women's and men's sexual partners - 20 and 16 respectively. Where does that missing foursome come from? Do New Zealand women make more productive use of their OE - I suppose a modest orgy in Amsterdam would account for it - or are visitors to this country reaping the benefits of our womenfolk being gold medal goers? Perhaps the growth in tourism has little to do with our clean, green, nuclear-free image and a lot to do with the fact that even the most repulsive male visitor is virtually guaranteed to get his leg over.
If that's the case, where do those weasels in the British media get off suggesting that New Zealanders are too staid and narrow-minded to make the 2011 World Cup a memorable experience along the lines of France 2007? French women mightn't get fat and they might have a certain je ne sais quoi, but they're way choosier than our sheilas.
Speaking of staid, the winds of change are blowing through straight-laced Singapore, where this week oral and anal sex finally became legal. At least that's what we think happened: the legislators actually repealed a section of the penal code criminalising "carnal intercourse against the order of nature". Before you jump to the conclusion that it's now open slather in the city-state where not so long ago having hair over one's ears was seen as degenerate and subversive, these practices remain illegal for gay men.
"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways," wrote the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. If you're a gay Singaporean man, the fingers of one hand should more than suffice.
"Gays are free to lead their lives and pursue their social activities," droned Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong with that majestic disregard for reality so characteristic of prohibitionists. If it's true that the ability to hold contradictory ideas simultaneously is the mark of a sophisticated mind then Mr Lee, who can acknowledge the existence of a different sexuality but deny it expression, is that rarest of creatures: a worldly Singaporean.
Speaking of gays, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling - apparently the first writer in history to achieve billionaire status - stunned her fans this week by revealing that the character of Dumbledore was gay.
"He's my character," she prattled. "He is what he is and I have the right to say what I say about him." Fair enough but if it's relevant, why didn't she ease him out of the closet at some point in those seven interminable books? And if it's irrelevant, why make an issue of it now?
Still, the army of Harry Potter scholars entrenching themselves in schools and universities will be thrilled, since the gay subtext opens the series up to a whole new interpretative thrust and gives rise to the tantalising prospect of a crossover into the academically fashionable field of queer theory. And it will give Singaporean gays something else to do between cold showers.
Speaking of writers, fresh from winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, 88-year-old Doris Lessing told Americans to get over 9/11 because it "wasn't that terrible".
Displaying an undergraduate sophistry that puts one off her work even more than having to factor in Dumbledore's gayness puts one off Harry Potter, she compared 9/11 to the IRA's campaign which killed 1000 fewer people over three decades.
By contrast, New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones didn't seize the opportunity of the announcement of the Booker Prize - for which he was, probably to his ultimate disadvantage, hot favourite - to pontificate inanely on world affairs.
Jones may have his eccentricities - when playing cricket he elects not to wear batting gloves - but we should take pride in his outstanding achievement.
