LOCAL NEWS
Four men were found guilty of rape committed sixteen years ago. Two still have name suppression. A surprising result given the time since the event and the complainant against four people.
A man was found in a cinema in cardiac arrest, they could not move him to perform CPR (I assume he was pretty solid). Police are treating it as "unexpected death in a public place". The way they put it, it sounds like it is a 374, and they have a list of events like this. Prizes may be offered for the funniest police situation (see below).
After copping flak for being in a position to choose who governs for the whole of New Zealand, Winston Peters has announced he will select a running partner in three weeks time. An interesting ploy to keep the profile up. However, this does give strategic voters the chance to vote for the party that he won't go with in an effort to weaken his chances of being king again.
The self-styled Prime Minister of Aotearoa has been remanded in custody and her "police" have been slowed down a lot.
A psychiatric patient wants compensation for being let out (and killing his father).
Sadly, in an apparent reaction to the London bombings, four mosques in Auckland were attacked on Saturday night, with slogans like "RIP London". Not quite sure what the perpetrators hoped to achieve, given that it is unlikely anyone attending mosques in Auckland was involved in the bombings. Mind you, hard to see what the bombers in London were hoping to achieve. Thing is, it could even be some disgruntled Lions supporter and we'd never know.
No official date yet for the election, although a Labour party candidate wanted help to deliver pamphlets the weekend before the election, and his notice wanted them on September 10th. This suggests that the election with be September 17th.
A New Zealand boy died after a statue in a Bali hotel fell on him. Described by some as a freak accident, I would not be so sure. Apparently the boy had only just started to climb up the statue when it toppled on to him. Coincidence? I think not.
Some youth spent Friday and Saturday night on a smashing spree in the Eastern Suburbs of Auckland, attacking anything that had windows from cars, bus stops, soccer club houses, and so forth. Police reckon the cost will be $50,000.
Twenty years on, they are still whinging about the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior. I wish they'd let it go.
I think it is sixty years since the end of the war in some respect but not sure how or why. Too late for VE day (was in May) and VJ day was in August. The Queen did things and so did Prince William here in New Zealand.
WORLD NEWS
News of London's success for the 2012 Olympics was followed the next day with six blasts in bus and rail. My first reaction was that the Paris bidders were behind it. I caught some of the coverage early one while they were still figuring out what was going on. Early on they were trying to discourage speculation it was a terrorist attack but six separate blasts was unlikely to be an awful lot of accidents. Then six blasts became four. Still too many for coincidence. We got all the usual stories, you know, how many New Zealanders were killed (none), how many were hurt (a few), and how much Tony Blair was helped by a reassuring phone call from Helen. The list of New Zealanders near or in the blast areas has grown from one man from Timaru to about four separate people who all have told their story. There does appear to be one New Zealand woman missing still, and her family has gone to try to track her down.
Paranoia in England continued, with evacuation in Birmingham. What a massive waste of money this all is, in terms of additional futile security measures, and a waste of time for travellers.
At times like this, as the coverage of certain events reaches super-saturation, whether there is something wrong with focusing too much on one event and basically ignoring bombings in places like Iraq because they are more common than Tupperware parties. Bear in mind that the English road death toll is about ten people per day.
At least 7/7 won't cause confusion, because lots of people here think 9/11 happened in November.
REAL SPORT
No water polo this week, although Rory attended one and a half training sessions.
Rory's soccer was cancelled (which was good because they were missing four players) and we thought Hannah's would be, but it wasn't. This was bad news. Five of the Sirens were away or sick. That meant we had no subs and not enough to field a full team. Saturday morning I did some negotiation and had Hannah and Miranda play for the Furies (the team we played last week) for the first half of their game. Then they came to our game and after the Furies game finished, two of them came to play for us for the second half (the two games were a half hour drive apart). We had two friends of the players play for us, both of whom hadn't played this season, which gave us one sub in the first half. We also had an official referee, who was very young. I don't know how old he was but the girls were all looking at him and one said "I think I look older than you do", which was very funny but not really appropriate. It was nil-all at half time, we'd had some chances but also had some work to get the ball away. Then, in the second half the cavalry arrived and we had three subs (luxury). We scored one goal, then Helena made a gutsy save in a one on one situation to stop the opposition equalising. The Sirens scored a second goal before full time, so they won 2-0. Great result for a depleted team, their first win of the championship (Sirens were cold motherless last on the table this week, not somewhere they were happy to be).
SPORT
The Lions mid-week team beat Auckland 17-13, I did think Auckland might win. The dirt trackers won every game.
The Lions decided to stay on and play the third test, post bombings. It would have been a bit of bad luck if they didn't.
Auckland narrowly beat Hawkes Bay in the basketball final 69-68. Bit of a shame really as the Bay doesn't win many national titles.
The third test was a better game in many respects than the previous two, although the All Blacks had two players sinbinned so play 20 minutes of the game with 14 players. Final score 38-19 to the Abs over the Lions. They did a minute's silence at the beginning for London.
Australia beat South Africa in the Nelson Mandela Cup (rugby, in case you were wondering) 30-12. Sounds like they are playing each other two extra times this year and possibly in future years. You would think they would be sick of playing each other already with the tri-nations every year.
MY SAD LIFE
Diana was sick for a few more days this week. She surfaced once or twice but basically disappeared until Thursday, then finally went to work on Friday. She still took a sleep in the afternoon though, even on Saturday. She is still spluttering a bit. It was a busy week with all the things going on this week. Hannah had a school show three nights, which required drop off and pick up. The kids helped a fair bit, Hannah more than Rory.
After the whole (non-sick) family helped with the science project, he got a merit and that was it. Total waste of time, really.
Rory was practicing his debate a lot this week. Culminating with practices over the phone to his team-mates on Thursday night. There is no denying they worked pretty hard on it. Rory had a good day at school on Friday, his debating team won and he later won a game of chocolate bingo (the best kind of bingo to win, apparently), and it was the last day of term. The kids are now on holiday for two weeks. This means a holiday for us from homework, too. We are going to go to Rotorua for a few days this coming weekend.
Rory seems to be planning on seeing almost every movie that is on during the holidays. Both the kids seem to have rediscovered a number of computer games, as they just haven't had the opportunity to go near them during the term.
Hannah was fizzing all weekend, despite having a cold, not sure why but I think she was very pleased with herself on Saturday with soccer.
Brett is away, somewhere warm I presume, but no idea beyond that where he has gone (normally he is in Perth).
I didn’t really achieve very much this week, although went into paranoia mode about my office. Finally had a new lock installed and have re-keyed the back door to be the same as the office and front door of the house. Not used to it yet, but pleased that it is done.
A PRIZELESS COMPETITION
The phrase "unexpected death in a public place" got me going. The way they put it, it sounds like it is a 374, and they have a list of events like this. Prizes may not be offered for the funniest police situation. I ask you for your ideas. As a starter:
622 - excessive diarrhoea in a confined space
754 - extreme act of stupidity involving an umbrella and a can of non-dairy whipped cream
641 - suspicious activity behind the bike sheds
647 - death by statue responding simultaneously to the forces of gravity and stupidity
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