... if it's anything like the existing long-distance trains. My only time on a US train was when my wife and I travelled from New York to Washington DC. There was no indication of what platform it would leave from until shortly before departure (some sort of security thing). When the announcement was made there was a mad rush to board. We were last on. We walked from one end of the train to the other, and EVERY seat pair was occupied by a person on one seat and a bugger-off briefcase on the other. Eventually we found the one empty pair. One of the seats was wet. I found a piece of cardboard on the floor (I don't know what it was doing there) to cover the wet patch. Not a pleasant journey at all. And the only view seemed to be a succession of rusty abandoned factories.

Background: Professional kiwi soccer player Tim Brown had a brainwave. A way to use unwanted wool from Aotearoa -- make shoes using high quality Merino fleece. Worked well. Took it to America with much success. Which spurred imitation; so much so that it was too costly to lawyer a way out, and the company slid into irrelevance. Now they're jumping on someone else's bandwagon.

I write in English because this is an international forum. And, because it's an international forum, contributors from the US should be aware that people in other parts of the world find the American desire to adhere to outdated conventions to be at the very least quaint. Or to put it another way - god, you Americans are so insular.

Wrong. Do you spell it out every time you say it? En Eh Ess Eh? No. You say 'Nasa'. It's an acronym. Like Unesco. And no full stops. Keep those for the end of the sentence.

Back in my day ... In the 1940s and 1950s everybody got everything. Measles, mumps and chickenpox, at least. It wasn't very comfortable, but it got you out of school. The only problem (which no one thought about at the time) was that the chickenpox virus hangs around in the body and reappears many years later (50 in my case) as shingles. Ouch. There were no vaccines. The protection against polio was to wear a bag of camphor around your neck. Seems to have worked for me.

EFTPOS — Electronic Funds Transfer at Point Of Sale, introduced in 1985. I suppose it's easier to change things in a smaller country such as NZ.

A few weeks ago, one of my wife's cousins died. He was a kiwi living in America, but none of his NZ relations went to the funeral. No one wanted to risk being refused entry because of something antiTrump they may have said on social media. There has been plenty said because of the way America has treated us (we thought our two countries were allies).

I listen to nothing but AM in the car. Two reasons: Firstly, as soon as I'm out of built-up areas and into the countryside, FM just disappears. Seems to a line-of-sight thing. Secondly, I prefer to listen to the National Programme (RNZ) when I'm driving long-distance, because it's interesting and has no advertising, and I can't stand commercial FM stations with their idiot DJs and incessant commercials.

Look up -isostasy-.

I wondered what had happened to the Piasecki Airgeep from 1958: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Same idea, lighter engines allow smaller size.

A song that dates from 1982. This is not a recent new usage.

A point you might not realise is that te reo Maori (the Maori language) is an official language of Aotearoa/New Zealand. English is not.

Not for HAVING the video - for DISTRIBUTING the video. Where do you get your information from??

Wrong, wrong, wrong. There was NO handgun (strictly illegal in NZ). What the defender had was a handheld eftpos machine, which he threw at the attacker. He also picked up an abandoned (empty) rifle and threw it through the attacker's windscreen as he drove off to the third mosque. By then the police had seen the video, noted the licence number, saw the car, rammed it off the road, and dragged the attacker out. No shooting or waving of guns around by anyone except the attacker.

Because there's no number on the card, you won't be able to use it with a zip-zap machine during a power cut.