KEY POINTS:
A few years ago it became popular to give a family in the developing world a goat for Christmas instead of buying presents. The present-less friend or relative would get the gift of warm fuzzies, having sacrificed retail consumption to do some good in the world. These days,
the UK's Guardian reports, the market for charity Christmas presents is more competitive and has gone beyond the traditional goats and chickens. You can now buy a shot of bull semen delivered to a Rwandan farmer for £10 ($27). In Britain, Oxfam's 95 camels are the most popular charity gifts because they are multi-purpose - you can ride them... or even use their dung for fertiliser.
Top 10 charity gifts in the UK are:
1: Camel £95, Oxfam.
2: Fish cages £20, Practical Action.
3: Destroy recent war-zone guns £20-75, Good Gifts.
4: Pineapple plants £13, Concern.
5: Give a dog a cuddle £5, Dogs Trust.
6: Girl's school uniform £20, World Vision.
7: Sponsor a brain cell for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's research £15, Good Gifts.
8: 100 snails for Liberian family £8, Samaritan's Purse.
9: Heart repair kit for stem cell research £40, British Heart Foundation.
10: Sea boots £36, RNLI.
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Following the story about the ZM stickers, Fred Alvrez has his own stingy story: "We were driving through Colorado, heading into Denver and got to a toll road. After stopping 3 times in 18 miles at 3 toll booths (US$18 total) we got rid of some loose change at the last toll booth. I pulled away with a queue of traffic waiting behind us, and happened to look in the rear view mirror, to see the guy from the booth running after us shouting and waving his arms. I stopped and he ran up to the window, puffing, and said "we don't accept Canadian money". I had given him a single Canadian one cent piece. After swapping it for a US penny we were on our way."
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Calling Mitre 10 and asking for a copy of a credit due, a reader received this fax back from the branch. It reads: "I am unable to fax you the credit as I do not have that information here, but if you ring Onehunga, our Head Office on 636-7169 and ask for accounts they can fax it to you. It would be best to ring later on today as they had a fire last night and the phones are down." No kidding?
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A reader says bungy jumping is not a New Zealand expression and gives us all a history lesson: "'Bungy' was a UK schoolboys' term for their rubber erasers, from at least the 1930s. In the 1950s you can see it in Geoffrey Willans' Nigel Molesworth books. In the 1960s Cambridge University teams started jumping off bridges with elastic ropes tied round them - they called it 'bungy jumping'. New Zealand was quite a late entry into the bungy field and took over a pre-existing sport and pre-existing name. All we did was commercialise it, for what that's worth." Er, probably quite a lot.
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Adam Idoine says 21 minutes of ads and trailers before a movie is nothing! "When I saw the new 007 in Berlin, we were treated to 45 minutes of ads. And they were already started when we got there!"
Today's Webpick: Toyota New Zealand's iconic Bugger ad is copied by Volkswagen, UK, but with the word bollocks. Watch the clip here. Scroll down. These are the very best online videos from Ana's online magazine Spare Room.
