Do the bloggers and emailers who are copying, pasting, posting and forwarding what must now be the best-known quotation from Winston Churchill’s “greatest early work” know that it doesn’t appear in any of its more commonly available editions? Was the quote too strong, even for Churchill? More

Sizeism from Russell Brown; Warwick is Rogered; in praise of Peter Williams; Christopher Hitchens on the 'reactionary, conservative' Michael Moore; and how recording has changed our experience of music, in Column Comment.

Only 19 days till you get to sprint, walk or crawl up and down five volcanoes in a couple of hours.

Now where could you do such a crazy thing? Where indeed.
Auckland. And you thought New Zealand's biggest city was a bit dull? Well, maybe it is, but we have 49 volcanoes and you don't. (Scroll down for the map of the Auckland field.)

If you're wondering why anyone would attempt such a stupid feat, remember that this is the country that brought you Edmund “knocked the bastard off” Hillary. And this is the country that popularised bungy, Zorbing, parapenting and other madness.

They're not active volcanoes, of course. That would be really stupid. And far too much fun. Mind you, Rangitoto, the magnificent mount out in Auckland's Waitemata Harbour, only went up a few hundred years ago, so there's hope yet.

There's no set course. You just figure out the fastest way up, down and between the cones of One Tree Hill, Mt Eden, Auckland Domain, Mt Hobson and Mt St John. And because there's no course, you don't really know how long it is. It's called a half marathon, though I would think it's a bit less than that if you plot the shortest route. It takes the best runners about 1hr 06, though some of us take a little longer. Like half an hour longer. Still, it's the taking part that counts, right? Like hell it is.

The best bits? The views of Auckland's two quite brilliant harbours, glistening in the mid-winter sun, and freefall running down each beaten peak towards the next one.

It should be underlined in every fitness freak's diary.

A while back Dean Parker wrote this and for some reason it keeps springing back to mind. I don't know why. No, really ... If you haven't already read it, you must.

I also came across this full text of Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage, which is brilliant - and free! Declared a bastard at birth by Act of Parliament and harassed by his mother, to the point where she tried to see him hanged, he died in a poorhouse after his friends failed to deliver on promises of a pension. A classic loser's tale told with the utmost sympathy.

Finally Dion Tuuta's Hot Night in a Small Town, the story of a relatively small treaty claim by Ngati Mutunga in Taranaki, is a refreshingly honest reflection on how the Maori and Pakeha communities in New Zealand relate, or rather how they fail to relate.

Oh, and a gratuitous pic of Scarlett, who at the first NZBC board meeting in 28 years a few nights ago was unanimously elected our blog muse.

I've just done my cyber duty and informed Things that don't exist to remove chocolate flavoured cheese from their listings.

The folk at dairy conglomerate Fonterra have launched just that into the Taiwanese market and it's doing very well, thank you.

However, the product is not available anywhere else, for now, so if you are looking to share a bit with someone special over a fruity Sauvignon Blanc, you're out of luck.

Apparently the Taiwanese don't go for cheese in a big way, so Fonterra decided to just add chocolate flavour. It's been so successful, they are now working on other varieties.

Yum.

Out of the same stable that brought you Survivor/The Apprentice franchises comes Rock Star: INXS, in which 15 wannabes squawk and strut to win the chance to replace Michael Hutchence. Sexily inspirational or asphyxiating? More

The Old Soaks here at the NZBC sympathise with Lord Byron, who said about a hostile review of his 1807 poem Hours of Idleness: “...Instead of bursting a blood-vessel, I drank three bottles of claret, and began an answer.” Our Director of Light Entertainment struggles with his own monster hangover to provide some insight into the ‘Great Thinkers’ in the Mark Steel Lectures on Kaleidoscope: The Culture Channel.

While the colour of the paving in Vulcan Lane obsesses some, the "T" word is on everyone else's mind - except at the BBC. More

There is an election looming and it is time we remind ourselves why it is our solemn duty to get out there and vote. A certain Mr Dagg, Fred Dagg, who used to hang around here, made a recording of our Parliament in action that will serve to give us all a renewed faith in our democratic processes.

Mr Dagg, incidentally, got the pip with the NZBC many moons ago and upped sticks to the West Island, where he now lives in relative obscurity under a bland pseudonym, John Smith or Jones or something. As Director-General I would like to say, here and now, that if he should ever wish to return my door is always open - provided he makes the right series of obsequious gestures ...

Life. Sometimes you wake up in the middle of it. And sometimes when you do you feel like Russell in Huff. It wasn’t about perfect characterisation. It wasn’t about brilliant storytelling. It certainly wasn’t about plots too convoluted to second-guess. Huff made for excellent, gripping, addictive television, nonetheless. Find out why, on Kaleidoscope: The Culture Channel.

I suspect the makers of The Island have seen Minority Report and The Matrix, paying particular attention to the former's holographic analysis tools and the latter's nano-devices and motorway pile-up (or was it Mr & Mrs Smith? – no, too recent – or the marginally underrated schlockster Final Destination 2?). And maybe Coma. Or maybe I was the only one who saw that. More...

One of the first telegraph messages sent in New Zealand, according to Keith Newman's Wordworx website, was "Mr Oakes is coming round in schooner Colleen Baun with good dog Pedro poisoned and dead." That memorable sentence was transmitted in 1862. Now we crusties at the NZBC are all in favour of commemorating our heritage so I propose an immediate campaign to immortalise Pedro outside Telecom's headquarters in Wellington. I see a freestanding, or in this case lying, statue on a plinth, or perhaps a bas relief over their front door - a dead dog, a coil of rope on wooden deck with the inscription "Good dog Pedro is dead". The dead dog should become the symbol of our national carrier forthwith!

I posted about this in another blog life but didn't have a picture. Now those good custodians of our culture at the Auckland War Memorial Museum have kindly provided one. The story goes that in the 19th century a Maori carver, Potororo Tamatea, a recent convert to Christianity, carved this Madonna and Child as a gift for a missionary in 1845. It was rejected as blasphemous.

For my money this can sit beside any image of the Madonna anywhere. For me it is one of those works of art that produce a viscerally emotional reaction that I find a little hard to explain.

When customers ask you whether your products are environmentally safe it’s probably better not to tell them that no approved test exists to substantiate environmentally safe. And try to make absolutely sure you know how to spell the name of the company that employs you, and not to send back a response that lends itself to a post on NZBC at Compass: The World.

The smaller the pond, the more vicious the pond-life. Perhaps not for frogs and dragonflies, but certainly for food writers, poets and short-story writers. It’s hard to get published, next to impossible to make any money and your fellow writers all hate you. Who would bother?

Something smells bad in Adland. From the Strand all the way downtown, an insidious proliferation of bodily functions is oozing and bubbling to the surface of the country’s already sulphurous television advertising landscape. Burger King’s farting girl is the latest to break the silence, masking a dearth of creativity with the whiff of utter desperation. Flatulence is natural but whose idea was it to make letting rip during our prime-time food advertising the Next Big Thing? Sound it out now on Kaleidoscope, your Culture Channel.

Intellectual property and the internet make for uncomfortable bedfellows (especially if you only have a single bed). These days, writers and publishers have almost given up complaining about their works being pirated on the web. The creative commons licence is designed to make it easier to share writing while protecting it from commercial use. But until recently, at least, it hasn’t been web writers trying to protect their work from old-world publishers purloining web content to spice-up their tired old print rags. So who stole the story now showing on Kaleidoscope: The Culture Channel?

Naturally we at the NZBC worship the ground Philip Sherry walks on. For years we welcomed him into our homes to give us good news and bad. We still remember the sad night he broke the news that an Air New Zealand flight 901 was missing over the Antarctic. It was one of those "Where were you when ..." moments. But what the hell is he doing on this "Famous People with Foreskins" list?!? Definitely a case of too much information here, but at least he's got Jeff Crowe for company.

The Australian Labor Party takes a unfamiliar lead in the polls, but through no credit to its retread leader. Blowhard Beazley is missing the best opportunity Labor has had in years to seize Howard's constituency of "battlers". Read more on NZBC World.

Grumpy Old Men: The third-best thing on New Zealand TV. Bar none. Well, barring the first and second-best... Grumpy old men won’t be reading this because surfing the web is for tossers — at least according to Will Self. I mostly agree with Will, but I do surf the web. All of which probably makes me a tosser. Fortunately, it’s time for the ads, now showing on Kaleidoscope: The Culture Channel.

I’ve been watching rather a lot of The Open University’s Mark Steel Lectures on the Arts Channel lately, but they don’t seem to be working: I’m still more like Russell on Huff than Albert Einstein on ‘Great Thinkers’. Need... more... Fruity Bars! Perhaps not. There’s something better on the Kaleidoscope: The Culture Channel.

The NZBC's sister public service broadcaster, aka the ABC, across the big ditch to your left, has an extremely good selection of broadband video content available - even to kiwis. It include the music programme Rage, documentaries, news and all sorts and for all you mediaphiles the Aussie version of Media Watch. Well worth repeated visits here.

The resignation of Sandra Day O'Connor will send the online punditry ablaze. Slate is covering every angle saying why they'll miss her in NZBC World.

Okay, so some of you may have got across to the Sydney Writers' Festival but for those who didn't there are seven sessions now online Check it out in NZBC1, your culture channel, here