So I'm sitting there, minding my own business, waiting for my wonderful wife to buy some clothes for herself to keep up with the latest fashion trends, and some guy starts talking to me. At first I am as cruel as possible, but he persisted, and he had what I at first took to be an Australian accent. And as any man of the world knows, any Australian would just as soon bash your head in as talk to you, so I knew I had to tiptoe carefully, lest I prompt him into making an ultra violent, anti-semitic depiction of the last 12 hours of Christ.

So I gave him some rope, conversationally speaking. And before I knew it, he tells me where he is from, which isn't Austrailia, but New Zealand, plus what he does for a living, plus what his wife does and so forth. I didn't want to be stingy, so I mentioned a little something about the weather, but he hardly seemed to need me, what with his holding forth about the Lord Of The Rings being filmed blah blah blah. So I told him the only thing I knew about New Zealand was the sheep were going blind there, because their eyes are mounted axially and the hole in the ozone layer is boiling out their eyes.

Well, it turns out that not only is he a city dweller, but he is pretty affluent as well, because he has a country place with 100 acres and 300 head of sheep. He has hired people who tend them and shear them and kill them for market, but he assured me that his sheep can see just fine.

Since he knew so much, I asked about swimming, because I also had heard that Australia has something like 50 poisonous spiders, and tons of poisonous jellyfish, lethal stinging nettles, sharks etc, and I was curious how New Zealand fit in to the man vs. nature issue. Which got him going on all the different names of these jelly fish that kill you, and how he vacations in Bali and all the danger there, and how there are many novel ways to die in that part of the world.

So let that be a lesson: never talk to strangers.