23 June 2008

South Auckland's reputation continues to head south, the status quo returns in Zimbabwe, weird things in our street - 23/06/2008

LOCAL NEWS

Two people were awarded $1000 each for being served dishwashing liquid instead of mulled wine. Sounds rather odd. Pretty sure it wasn't an accident but why do it?

Another nasty incident in Manukau with a woman being hunted in a car park after her handbag was snatched. They hit her with their car, she got pretty serious injuries. South Auckland is getting very bad press at the moment, a nasty place to visit and you wouldn't want to live there. Arrests have since been made.

The same day, a woman was quoted in the news telling us how we needed positive stories about South Auckland. You have to admit the timing wasn't great. We do get plenty of positive stories:
- police made a positive ID of the gunman
- sexual attacks by HIV-positive men
- man dies after being positive he was on the correct side of the motorway

A senior police officer was killed on a bicycle this week, he was an advocate of bicycling.

A week after black Friday, we had a pretty bad one. Two died and one was injured in a boat crash. A man was crushed by a digger. Another man was toasted when a car caught fire in South Auckland (yep, South Auckland again). It think there was another event as well, but who needs it?

Winston Peters, who has managed to play a part in every government since MMP came along, has announced he is going to re-take Tauranga. I would hope that all his elderly supporters have died or got dementure sufficiently to have forgotten who he is and the younger ones coming through have seen enough to be convinced he doesn't need to be voted for.

Been a bit of gang warfare going on this week. It came to a head in Hawke's Bay, after gate crashing a party. This was not South Auckland, which was a good thing.

WORLD NEWS

As the GW presidency commences it's death roll, he now wants to open up offshore drilling for oil again. Let's think, he has about five months left. One awful thing per month should do it. How about:
- free maccas to every house-bound morbidly obese person;
- a scheme to give firearm offenders a course on firearms use and a second chance (should create a whole generation of law-unabiding sharpshooters;
- compulsory intelligent design instruction in schools;
- repeal amendment 21 (which repeals amendment 18, which was abolition);
- allow the use of pets, mannequins, and sacks of hammers in the car pool lane (because anything with a higher IQ than GW is a person too)

An Australian and a New Zealander fell 26 stories when something failed while they were patching walls on a multi-storey building on the Gold Coast. Not nice.

Morgan Tsvangirai has pulled out of the run-off election in Zimbabwe. That can't be a good sign. He says a fair poll was impossible among all the violence. Mugabe wins because he has more goons, eh? Democracy at work. When you think about it, it does basically come down to money. Whether you buy hired muscle, spin doctors, or advertising, is it really any different?

Yet again, boating in the Philippines is proved to be a little x-games like with 800 missing. Must have been a pretty big ferry.

REAL SPORT

Hannah's school soccer team played Lynfield this week. Lynfield looked scary on paper, having scored ten goals in two games and conceding none. We'd only had one game, had no trainings for two weeks, and didn't look convincing in the first game. However we scored reasonably early, then scored again from a penalty when the goalie picked up a ball passed back to them from their own player, and then the floodgates opened. We won 7-0, which would have been a bit of a shock to the Lynfield team. With only two games under their belt, Springs are now top of the table (some have played three), and Lynfield is second.

On Saturday, in pretty ordinary conditions, Hannah's team played another team that came up to div 1 after grading. They weren't bad but didn't really have much of an attack. Hannah's team won 2-0.

Rory played three games of polo over the weekend for his under 16 team. They drew 5-5 with Northsport, beat Marist 7-3, and then drew 6-6 with the New Zealand U15 team which contained four players who came from our club. Rory scored the last goal to equalise with 5 seconds left, great effort, he was pretty happy.

SPORT

The Black Caps are not having a great tour. In an ODI on Wednesday that they were going to win, rain forced abandonment just one over before they could call it a game. Even at that point I think that if England had taken one wicket with every ball in the unplayed over, New Zealand would still have won (not quite true, but not far off).

The All Blacks beat England 44-12 in the second test but key players Richie McCaw and Ali Williams were injured, not sure how bad.

And the same night the Black Caps managed to beat England, finally, to level the ODI series. Wasn't a pretty game though, nobody got a decent score.

New Zealand won the under 20 world rugby title and the NZ team got three golds in the world rowing event in Poland.

MY SAD LIFE

Spent 90 minutes getting from Roskill to Otahuhu on Wednesday. No wonder I avoid going places. I heard the Mad Butcher on the radio while I was in the car (and the same adverts over and over again). He had a conversation about dyslexia, which he has, except he pronounces is "dillexia". It was pretty sad.

Kind of scary on Thursday, the invasion of the babies. Was leaving to go to a meeting and there were four or five pushchairs charging down the road. It was for a coffee morning that Sarah was attending. I just focused on the road and got the heck out of Dodge. It was nearly as bad as the weird chanting going on in the front house when we walked past it on Sunday, which was very "village of the damned".

On Friday, went for a walk with Sarah and the twins. I was pushing them up and down when Sarah was in the post shop. Lots of randoms kept coming and talking to me, it was weird, haven't had that happen for a while.

We seemed to be seeing the Chambers family serially this week. Hannah and I bumped into Jaqui on Friday, Allan popped in on Saturday, and Hannah and I saw Emma on Sunday when we were, um, shopping. We are going looking for Paul today to complete the set.

We had to go see teachers about Rory's performance in exams, it went okay, just made Thursday night kind of busy.

Hannah delivered her presentation on scallops on Friday, and does sharks today. She seems to be really in to seafood subjects at the moment.

I finished reading the God Delusion. Interesting, but a bit overwhelming at times.

Today is Diana's birthday. A dinner is planned, not sure how good it will be. Scurvy could result.

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