Showbiz life

Another Saturday night, another comedy gig for the Pukekohe Vegetable Growers’ Association. On paper it was probably my strangest corporate engagement since being enlisted as the host/judge of Urologist’s Got Talent, a variety show performed by the major players of the sexual health and faulty urinary tract industry.

The Worst Restaurant in Auckland

The worst restaurant in Auckland opens soon. I don’t know anything about it, and I suppose I shouldn’t review it before it opens, but I read a couple of things in the Herald AND I’ve seen their logo on a letterhead. What more is there to know?

How to eat a city: Brisbane

I’m getting pretty good at finding the best food in a new city. Here’s what you do: ask everybody you meet where the best food is, and then secretly rank their answer based on how much you respect their opinion. You might think that you could circumvent this approach by only asking for help from people whose opinion you trust, but you’d be wrong.

October eating round up

I've eaten a lot recently, and some good stuff too. But I'm running behind on telling you about it so here's a catch up - 25 interesting things about Auckland food you might not know:

Secret, amazing, cool new restaurant

Bloggers. They’re quite annoying. No sooner has a new café/restaurant opened its doors than it’s flooded with curious, mousey-looking boys and girls, hovering over the food with their second-tier smartphone cameras and asking the owner for her ‘story’ while a queue of real people wait at the till trying to give said owner some money so that she can open her doors next week as well.

Thinking inside the box

A few years into writing comedy for a living I discovered something amazing. The more restrictions you have on what you can write, the more creative you become. Forget blue sky thinking, the best way to write a great joke is to be told it has to be about a llama, and can’t use the letter E, and has to rhyme, and can’t mention any aspect of the llama.

Back to the Intercontinental

I used to work in an office, in Wellington, with a boss who’d read one too many yet one too few self help books about how to be a great manager. The office was going to hell in a handcart but he’d been appointed recently and was convinced he could turn things around. One day he held an internal competition where you had to come up with the best idea for improving the business. He told us he wanted ‘out of the box thinking’. Ironically, we had to write our idea down on a piece of paper and drop it into a box.