Confidence. It’s the jewel in the crown of human behaviour isn’t it?

Down and out on Squid row having a Kraken good time.

Here at the Ruminator we like a bit of audience interaction, so here’s a question for you:

Something is happening in my local community that makes me cringe. Where I live, people drive big shiny black block-of-flats cars. They pull hair-raising u-turns outside busy school zones, mount two wheels on the footpath as five-year olds walk past.

In an idle moment on twitter I asked people what their claims to fame were. The responses were fantastic so here’s the collection.

Let’s not talk about incest any more aye? It was fun while it lasted but we’re moving on. Here’s some world news you may not have known about.

  Hat tip: Laura McQuillan

Get your pitchforks, light up those torches and pack your bags kids cause apparently there’s a bandwagon to jump on and it’s called Condemning Online Bullying.

This is the second entry in my free-political-advice series. Today we look at the incumbents, the National Party. Or as I call them “John Key and the suits”.

So in the course of discussing how I find it appalling that the Prime Minister of our country interacts with – and provides copy to – Cameron Slater given his “hilarious” revelling in the death of children with ethnic names, a few people called me out on my pseudonym.

Sure, watch the Campbell Live coverage of all the people who are still living in very messed-up circumstances. And yes, read the newspaper reports on the battles over the city’s recovery.

So it’s election year. And I’m a thoughtful, intelligent, relatively non-partisan kind of guy. So I thought I’d do some thinking about what each party should do in the run-up to the election.