Who left the seat up?
Mark Honeychurch - 30th March 2026
Last weekend I roped (no pun intended) my kids into a fun little project, making a mystery/conspiracy board as a decoration for our house. For the low cost of $22 for a cork board, $4 for a pack of 200 pins, $4 for a box of 400 sticky notes and $4 for red yarn (all from The Warehouse), along with a bunch of free community newspapers and promotional brochures, we spent a couple of hours putting together a great looking board:
The title at the top of the board is interchangeable, and we printed out about a dozen strips including “Who hid the remote”, “Where is mum’s phone”, “Who left the freezer open” and the one it’s currently set to, after I committed the ultimate crime in the bathroom this morning - “Who left the seat up”. Some of my favourite parts of the board include pictures of our cats (along with some bagged fur from one of them), fingerprints my youngest created on a Pak n Save community notice board card by colouring her fingers in biro and then pressing them to the card, and four of my eldest daughter’s teeth in a sealed medical packet that she recently had pulled out before having braces fitted. The great thing about this board is that we can continue adding scraps of paper, pictures and more yarn over time, allowing it to evolve and change.
We’ve had three pieces of feedback to our last newsletter issue. Firstly, we may end up forcing Brian to pay for a Netflix subscription, so that he can see Louis Theroux’s latest documentary - sorry, Brian:
Thanks authors. Great stuff. I was very keen to see the Manosphere doco, but had cancelled my Netflix a while ago. Might be worth a brief restart.
Cheers,
Brian
Patsy had some interesting medical information about one of the Meaning of Liff’s documented oddities:
Nice to be reminded of this book and its apt descriptions of those human curiosities (but I might’ve done without the long intro about penises). The inability to pee when other people are present is a thing; not only a thing but it’s a medically recognised condition; not only a thing which is a recognised condition, but which has a latin name (and a wiki page): paruresis, or ‘shy bladder’. Often men… bless.
Patsy
And finally Mike Joy (who spoke to us at one of our conferences a few years ago) has strong feelings about what has and hasn’t been mentioned in some of Patrick’s recent articles:
Gidday, thanks for all the great work team. What sometimes jars for me is a lack of scepticism around the ‘energy transition’ (which isn’t happening, only energy addition). The last newsletter’s climate change article, for example, talks about the importance of more money being spent on renewables (rebuildables) than on fossil energy - as if dollars spent really means anything. This is a little naïve and energy blind. Similarly, with the Mike Casey article, there’s seemingly no understanding or acceptance of the issues of intermittency, capacity factors, energy density of mining and mineral requirements, and of course the fact that they are all mined, made, transported and installed using huge amounts of fossil energy.
Last but not least, there are multiple existential crises looming, and all of them, including climate change, are symptoms of overshoot - and renewable energy addresses none of these.
It would be good to see a little more scepticism given to the clean energy hype and hopium. I suggest a review of this book as a good starting point, or this paper.
Cheers,
Dr Mike Joy
The Morgan Foundation Senior Research Fellow in Freshwater Ecology and Environmental Science
School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences
Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington
Mike has floated the idea of writing an article expanding on these ideas, so hopefully we’ll be able to publish something from him soon.
In the meantime, in this week’s newsletter we have an article from Patrick about climate change and extreme weather - are the two related? We also have an article from me about Lloyd Evans’ recent pamphlet that he’s made for people to hand out to Jehovah’s Witnesses - it might be interesting to get our hands on a few copies and see how it is when the shoe’s on the other foot, giving them literature rather than them trying to foist copies of the Watchtower on us. Katrina has written about microplastics, looking into whether we should be worried about them invading our bodies. I’ve written an article about sugar and cancer, attempting to dispel a common myth that I most recently heard from a friend only last week. And finally Bronwyn has been investigating YWAM (Youth With a Mission), an evangelical missionary group with some interesting ties to New Zealand.