Paper Jets

My iPhone rings on the way to work. The number's American. My heart skips a beat. "Hi," an accented female says. "This rarely ever happens, but Jennifer Lopez is back from an event and running 15 minutes early. I think it's 15 minutes. What's the time there?" We still have a good 45 minutes by my clock. I madly scribble last-minute questions. The subconscious part of my brain doesn't help things as JLo's tunes that I listened to in high school - Love Don't Cost a Thing and I'm Real - come flooding in. Thirteen years on from those songs, JLo's just released her 10th album A.K.A. and I'm interviewing her about it. I'm nervous. "Hello? Hello? Hello!" It sounds like the caller's standing under a waterfall. Then it's quiet. The phone buzzes again. "Oh hello, that sounds better. I have Jennifer Lopez here on speaker phone. You have 15 minutes. Will you keep time?" Ah, sure. Sm...

Watching a Michael Buble concert is like being in the theatre. The crowds are hushed and well-behaved - apart from the occasional screeching from a middle-aged fan-girl that gets added to as the lights dim. The drums roll, fire balls burst and the curtain parts teasingly to reveal a silhouette of the Canadian jazz singer. He bursts forth, cord microphone in hand, gesticulating cheekily as he slides about the stage to aptly named Fever. The dramatic entrance is followed with crowd standing for Haven't Met You Yet. "Tonight it's our last night, I want you to let yourselves go," Buble says. "I don't want you to give a s**t about anyone who's sitting next to you." Ma and Pa Buble are in the audience tonight so Buble junior promises not to hold back on the final night of his Australasian tour. "We're going to take it nice and slow like we've just met at a bar," he says. "Maybe we'll slow dance and by the end o...

Rose Matafeo knows she can't play the cute young thing forever. "I know I can't . . . I'm tall and I have wide shoulders, that's not very cute." The two-time nominated Billy T Award comedian has come a long way from the frizzy haired, nervous ball of energy who cut her teeth in the Auckland standup scene at just 15. Previous stories on the Grey Lynn comedian of Samoan, Dalmatian and Scottish descent have referred to her nervous habit of playing with her hands and her polite, self-effacing manner. Just a couple of years later, her growing confidence is evident but low key. Sitting in her bedroom in the weatherboard Grey Lynn flat she shares with comedians Joseph Moore and Nic Sampson, the now 22-year-old Matafeo isn't sure how she got here. "I don't know why I started out in comedy, I don't know why I'm still doing it and I don't think I'm funny." Instead, she takes her hat off to other girls pursuing comedy. ...

As he watched her stir her cup of tea, Neville Anderson knew his love of 51 years was back. The Titirangi man had watched helplessly as the life of his once-active, social high school sweetheart ebbed away to Parkinson's disease. Diagnosed 11 years ago, Christine relied on three pills, three hours daily to ease the chronic trembling. But while replenishing the depleted dopamine in her brain, the chemical messenger responsible for movement, there was little for the involuntary jerks or dyskinesia that her body would often make as it reacted to the drugs. At times she could not talk or sit. Sometimes she could barely move, she said. "It's like your body's possessed by a demon." That was last year. Today, Christine Anderson is a completely different woman. The 67-year-old is one of 51 movement disorder patients to have undergone deep-brain stimulation surgery after it became available in New Zealand in 2009. The major surgery allows some patients t...

Having lived all over the world, the owners of 202 Heta Rd had plenty of ideas on what they wanted their new build to look like. With near-dizzying vistas across the forest-clad valleys of Merrilands, a sneak peek of the sea on one side and a mountain backdrop on the other, Belinda and Hamish Brown have finally found home. “We’ve thrown away the boxes the appliances came in,” Belinda confirms. “We’re staying.” It’s a welcome statement for the family of four who has spent the last 15 years in South East Asia. The couple met in London and moved to Brisbane before starting a family in Kuala Lumpur. The latter location was where the family oversaw the New Plymouth build from, something they were surprisingly not rattled about. “We were either naïve, stupid or trusting, I’m not sure which,” Hamish jokes. “We took a lot of faith in the fact that New Plymouth is a town in which reputation is everything.” An appreciation for the natural is evident from first glance. Outside, the house ...

I envy men. Not in the power-grabbing, pants-wearing, pay-raise kind of way - though the latter would be nice. No. It’s the no-fuss lifestyle which sees me turn green when I see my other half showered, spruced and ready for work in minutes while I scramble around with cleanser, concealer, mascara and GHDs for an hour before feeling ‘presentable’. I have heard of women who sneak out of bed early in the morning to apply makeup so their partners don’t catch them - shock horror - looking normal see here . And I remember as a child watching my Mum countless times applying a plethora of makeup products just to head to the supermarket. I may be a little slow to catch on, but I’m finally grasping with both hands the no-makeup trend that swept through Hollywood last year see here . Battling with mild acne for the first part of my teenage years, and then the pockmark scars in the latter part, I always longed for a day when I would feel comfortable sans makeup. I would lo...

Chocolate. The comfort of those in the throws of emotional upheaval; the sneaky under-the-desk classroom treat; the 3pm office pick-me-up; the easy-chair-in-front-of-the-telly snack. New Zealanders' love affair with the gooey brown goodness dates back to the 1880s when biscuit-maker Richard Hudson set up the country's first chocolate factory in Dunedin and soon joined forces with the British firm Cadbury. Back then, chocolate was synonymous with good living - the Cadbury family set up the model town Bourneville in the UK and sold tea, coffee and hot chocolate to keep workers away from the dreaded alcohol - but now the tasty treat is associated most with indulgence. We enjoy milk chocolate, which dominates the market at 70 per cent. But we prefer dark, which holds 20 per cent of the market, to white. So what is it about chocolate that we find so addictive? Here's the science. Chocolate's natural form, the cacao bean, contains the amino acid tryptophan which...