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The man who gave New Zealand the tree-hugging woodsman Bogor, cats that paint and dance, and now oval golf balls, tells Diana McCurdy why he loves challenging the status quo, living life creatively, and of alternative uses for golf tee adaptors
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BURTON SILVER stands excitedly in his kitchen, clutching a bottle of wine.
His long wiry hair frizzes wildly about his face as he shakes the bottle vigorously. With eyes glinting beneath wispy grey eyebrows, he is enthusiastically explaining the merits of using a rubber golf tee adaptor as a wine stopper.
It's a somewhat surreal sight. This is the man who gave us cartoon character Bogor, painting (and dancing) cats, and now golf with an oval ball. He's sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his books, and made a name for himself as an innovator and creator.
And he's standing in his kitchen getting excited about the idea of using a golf tee as a wine stopper.
But this, apparently, is how the mind of an inventor works. Concepts that seem ridiculous and untenable in the minds of most people, become completely reasonable when filtered through the brain of Burton Silver. "If there's any reason why I do what I do, it's because I've got fuzzy logic going on in my brain," he says.
Silver feels an irrepressible urge to challenge things that most people simply accept as the status quo. "I love changing things. I'm terrible, I go to the opera or go to the ballet, and I always see different ways of doing it."
Hence, in the past decade, the idea of our feline friends making art and doing the two-step has become almost mainstream in New Zealand. Even more intriguingly, conservative Christchurch very nearly found itself hosting the world's first Fringe Games last year. And now golfers throughout the country are pondering the idea of using an oval golf ball.
Silver seems almost...