If you must be doused in iced water to raise funds, take a tip from the Cancer Society and avoid liquor

The headline atop a Stuff report today is bound to cause some dismay among Alf’s mates at the Eketahuna Club. It says:

Don’t mix drink and ice water: charity

Some people regard ice and/or water as an important component of their tot (or two) of whisky and other spirits.

Advice on the acceptability and benefits of of this can be found here.

As it turns out, the headline doesn’t quite tell us the full story.

Nor does it focus on an aspect of the story that should be causing some disquiet among our law-and-order authorities – the burial of a bloke before coronial officials could be sure of why he died.

Flying into Taupo looks dodgy – but shouldn’t GPS be brought into the safety calculations?

And the odds of flying into the mountain are...what exactly?

We are given good statistical reasons today for avoiding air travel to get to Taupo.

The odds of flying into danger are set out in an NZ Herald report –

Every second plane flying into Taupo is pulled off course and on a collision course with Mt Tauhara, a coroner’s inquest into a plane crash that killed three people has been told.

This is a scary number.

If you had to fly to Taupo for whatever reason, you would be smart to inquire if the previous flight was one of the two that is pulled off course and headed for Mt Tauhara.

Comforted by the knowledge this indeed was the case, you could be more confident about taking the trip.

But if the previous flight had been one of the two that is not pulled off course, you should skip the one you were about to get into and wait for the next.