My fail-safe recipe for cool school lunches
Imake kick-arse school lunches for my kids. Lunches that humiliate the efforts of lesser parents. They’re exciting, delicious and served in the coolest multicompartment clip-top boxes on the planet.
I used to think getting excited about school lunch preparation wasn’t macho. But nowadays, like thousands of other Kiwi men, I’m crafting powerful lunches for my children. Lunches that blow their tiny little minds. Most importantly, my lunchboxes return empty.
There are three key secrets to creating outstanding packed lunches but first some history.
I suffer from terrible school lunch guilt. Like little Bruce Wayne watching his parents get murdered in a Gotham City alleyway, I have a lunch-related superhero origin story.
My lovely mum made me a packed lunch every day. But I’d never eat them. I’d leave them in my backpack till it was full. Lovingly prepared lunches ignored and left to rot. When there was no more room in my bag I’d hiff all those unopened lunches down a bank near our house.
My mate Andy was given money
Three jobs helped get a roof over your head in 1972
A reader writes: “In 1972 my annual income $2000,” writes a reader. “New townhouse in Long Bay $25,000 — 12.5 times our wage. Teamed up with a mate to buy one at more than 10 per cent interest rate. Worked weekdays at airport (no motorway connections in those days) plus at gas station on weekends and a bakery one night a week. That’s how we got ahead — old fashioned hard work. PS: 12.5 times a $50,000 wage these days is $625,000 and interest rates are only 5 per cent so are houses really so unaffordable?”
We’re wired to befriend cautiously
The loneliest people among us are set up to get lonelier because they are more likely to interpret social situations more negatively. University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo explains: “If you look at early humans and other hominids, they were not uniformly positive toward each other. We exploit each other, we punish each other, we threaten each other, we coerce. And so it isn’t that I want to connect with anyone, I need to worry about friend or foe. If I make an error and detect a person as a foe who turns out to be a friend, I don’t make the friend as fast, but I survive. But if I mistakenly detect someone as a friend when they’re a foe, that can cost me my life. Over evolution, we’ve been shaped to have this bias . . . (Via The Atlantic)
Phone book wasting away naturally
Dave writes: “The 2015 phone book was 31mm thick; the 2016 book 27mm thick; the 2017 book is less than 24mm thick. At that rate, the 2022 book will be the last at 4mm thick.”