Bledisloe Cup-Rugby ties that bind

 By extraordinary coincidence, given the current financial constraints, most members of the New Zealand Cabinet managed to be in Australia just the day before last night’s crucial Bledisloe Cup rugby game, to take part in a serendipitous joint Cabinet meeting with their Australian colleagues. 

 The most reported  decision from the joint ANZAC meeting was that the losing Prime Minister has to wear the other team’s tie on Monday. 

As we now know, the All Blacks squeaked in. The All Black tie will go well with the Australian P.M.’s ruddy complexion and will make ex-patriate Australian coach Robbie Deans homesick for his old province.  

The black fashion accessory may even start a new fashion frenzy among normally casual Australian males, especially cricket fans, if England wraps up the Ashes cricket series tonight, after Trott got the runs in his debut test. It will also double as an armband. 

In 2011, if Australia beats New Zealand to win the world Rugby Cup, the losing Prime Minister will be wearing a noose from the House of Ned Kelly Fashions.

 Footnote: Our Cup Runneth Over

Lord Bledisloe appointed Governor-General of New Zealand from 1930 until 1935, proving to be extremely well-liked and respected. His social conscience was much appreciated during the Depression era, as was his insistence that his salary should be cut as were the salaries of public servants at the time. [This custom has not continued].

Bledisloe also contributed to improved Pākehā – Māori relations, purchasing the site where the Treaty of Waitangi was signed and presenting it to the nation as a memorial. Bledisloe also promoted various causes and events by the presentation of trophies, the most famous of these being the Bledisloe Cup, the trophy for an ongoing rugby union competition between New Zealand and Australia, first awarded in 1931, and currently contested annually.[In the modern professional age, no winning team is permitted to drink in one sitting all the sponsor’s product that this generous sized trophy contains].               Wikipedia

A Skeleton in Te Papa’s Closet

“They could do a lot better with his neck and head, and front legs, too. He’s not exactly standing tall and proud.” Phar Lap fan Robin Marshall 

The New Zealand racing public has always bridled when Australians have claimed Phar Lap for themselves. The Aussies tanned his hide when he died, Clyde, in California in 1932 in fishy circumstances soon after his first international race-and comprehensive win-in Mexico.  Phar Lap’s hide is in Melbourne and his heart is in Canberra, which does seem rather back to front, but, make no bones about it, we have got the skeleton. The famous ex-horse is an equine taonga at Te Papa: our horse in Our Place.

But according to Robin Marshall, who has created an overlay image of the champion galloper and his skeleton, there has been some equine shortchange in the spinal department.  Definitely not Phar enough-slipped discs and that sort of thing.  She thinks that he is not set in a strikingly elegant and proud pose befitting a horse that stood at 17.1 hands and won 37 of his 51 races.

If the skeleton is bowed Te Papa is completely unbowed. The museum’s Chris Paulin says Phar Lap was mounted in the style of taxidermy in the 1930s. In other words, go and get stuffed.

Perhaps the horse’s poor skeletal posture  reflects the cultural cringe of  other New Zealanders in 1930s-heads bowed, forelocks tugged, shrinking themselves  in the full glare of the imperial sun that never set.

They have just hauled Sir Peter Blake’s Black Magic into Te Papa in order to string it up from the ceiling for a hundred years to commemorate New Zealand winning  the America’s Cup, sponsored by the International Law Association. (The keel is ersatz-otherwise this would not be possible).  I bet that they won’t display that with a broken mast: they would be keel hauled if they did.

Things will be restored to proper proportion and equine amends will be made in November when the Phar Lap Trust in Timaru unveils an anatomically correct bronze sculpture of their most famous son.

 

BLINKS: 

Phar Lap stance irks horse expert | Stuff.co.nz

 Phar Lap wins the Agua Caliente Handicap- 1932   YouTube video 

 Legend of Phar Lap rides again | Stuff.co.nz

Tacky One Too:Taekwondo and the Olympic Spirit

What would Auckland pioneer and benefactor John Logan Campbell, one of Auckland’s best known and respected citizens before his death in 1912 and benefactor of the Logan Campbell Centre for Performing Arts,  have thought of his namesake prostituting his sport to get to the London Olympics 100 years later?

New Zealand Olympic Taekwondo featherweight Logan Campbell and business partner have launched an up market horizontal “gentleman’s club” near Auckland’s infamous K Rd, and Campbell hopes to get to finance his next Olympic OE off the earnings of short term double room hires from the 14 rooms, plus domestic assistance. http://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/news/2586055/Olympian-pimps-bid-with-fundraising-trick  

Campbell had earlier received a $15,000 “performance enhancement grant” from government sports funding body Sparc for finishing in the top 16 at Beijing, but Taekwondo New Zealand (TNZ) has suspended the funding because Campbell has not been competing.

The obelisk on One Tree Hill was erected to John Logan Campbell, the “Father of Auckland”, in his lifetime. Appropriate though this edifice may be may to his namesake’s business venture, one can’t help feeling that he is making a monumental mistake.

They are, after all, other funding alternatives. There is clearly a role here for other  private enterprise initiatives, with Viagra, for example, being a prospective sponsorship target for a generous replacement “performance enhancement grant”, or perhaps  Bayer sponsoring complementary headache remedies.

Perhaps Sparc could get in on the act with some new fund raising ideas of its own which would extend their oddly named Push Play activities in the name of fitness. There are some fitting “escort” agency franchise possibilities which could be encompassed by the Olympic five rings. Theme concepts could include the high jump and the long jump for players, the marathon for stayers and the sprint for the prematurely challenged. We won’t even talk about possibilities to incorporate the pole vault, the discuss the shot put and certainly not the equestrian three-day events, with the funny hats and uniforms and whimpy whips.

Sparc can forget any stress on performance: in these Olympian indoor sports it’s surely not winning that matters, it’s taking part.

It’s all in the lap of the gods.

Shocking Taekwondo  Video: X-Rated video of Solitary Taekwondo in action.  Parental discretion and earmuffs are advised. Children, do not try this at home  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdWtNLkxg3c .

Underestimating our intelligence

In the spirit of the dogged pursuit by the New Zealand constabulary of the French state terrorists who clumsily sank the Rainbow Warrior in 1985 in Opération Satanique,  killing a photographer in the process,  five Wellington detectives spent five days last week exposing the “I was assaulted by five Kiwis” claim of French Rugby International Mathieu Bastareaud.

 Even Inspector Clouseau would have pounced like a panther and quickly realized that Bastareaud’s alleged “assault” was an inside cover up, if not an inside job. There were, after all, three rugby players, including the now disgraced Bastareaud,  and  two women who entered the hotel together early on Sunday morning. Numerical gender equality niceties, expressed in an equal ratio of males and females, has not always been top of the social agenda of rugby players in post-match warmdown mode. (And certainly not for Australian NRL players, who are in quite a different League). 

Perhaps there was a competive  maul or a melee, with Bastareaud being sent to the blood bin by fellow players. Whatever the real story, in good French culinary tradition he is now being fricasseed in his own juices. French fries with that? 

If the French Rugby union take any action, say, like banning him for ten games, Bastareaud can take heart that, applying the Rainbow Warrior judicial penalty rebate scheme, he will only really be banned from two games-and given a Club Med holiday. 

The French water should be immediately removed from  the lying Bastareaud’s name.

[In the absence of the cellphone coverage footage of the alleged assault, here is some top secret footage of the French DGSE in action in Sacre bleu!   This may not be satanic but it is certainly diabolical. Viewer discretion and parental guidance are advised.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hvo1AFGJDkM ]

Pleasure Dome

Christchurch City councillors, having bought the Ellerslie flower show, have now paid $480,000 to purchase a 30 m diameter, inflatable dome similar to the large rugby ball tragically on display in London in 2007 after the All Blacks premature ejection from the Rugby World Cup. Some would say it is more shaped like a lemon. 

 

The dome can hold 525 people and will be first used at the Ellerslie flower show, which, of course, is no longer to be held in Auckland but in Hagley Park, Christchurch. This is a step forward from the Council’s previously aborted Flower Show which was going to be held at Otahuna, which is not even inside the Council’s boundaries. But why didn’t the Council really think big and buy the Chelsea flower show? 

 

In the words of the mayor the dome “is a very special structure and will be used sparingly.” Perhaps in these frugal times it could be used to house a downsized council staff and save the costs of the shift to the new council building.

Madoff Ripoff

The Swan fraud is a pygmy compared with the giant Madoff ripoff. Over several decades Bernard Madoff made off with US$50 billion from the inner sanctum of New York’s financial tabernacle via an upmarket Ponzi scheme.

 Charles Ponzi http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ponzi  arrived in the United States in 1903 virtually penniless. The scam which bears his name is an illegal investment vehicle that pays off old investors with money from new ones.  Relying on a constant stream of new investment such schemes eventually collapse under their own weight, especially when times are tough and people inconveniently want their money out.

 Both Ponzi and Madoff played on the credulity of investors like the virtuoso fiddlers they both were.

Ponzi offered first to friends and associates and then to fast multiplying members of the public, many of them new migrants, a 50% return on investment in 45 days based on the “great returns” available from postal reply coupons which, he explained to the credulous, made such incredible profits easy.

Wall Street fixture Madoff’s modus operandi was more upmarket and  conservative-he only offered 11-14%. International banks, hedge funds, charities and wealthy private investors are among the Who’s Who of investors ruefully counting the cost.

When jailed for an earlier financial infraction before he hit upon the scheme which bears his name, rather than inform his mother of this career impeding  development, Ponzi posted her a letter stating that he had found a job as a “special assistant” to a prison warden.  Madoff’s court case is ahead of him but with his insider knowledge he can no doubt aspire to be the Executive Assistant to the Prison Governor.

Money Transfusion Fraud

A guilty verdict was returned earlier this month after almost $17 million was fraudulently siphoned off from the Otago District Health Board between 2000 and 2006.

 

This was the financial equivalent of having a patient hooked up to a blood transfusion system in a public hospital ward for six years without a doctor or a nurse stopping even once to check on progress.

 

Michael Swan, the leading fraudster, pulled a six figure annual salary from the ODHB as IT supremo and much more from the fraud. No one in authority appeared to raise an eyebrow when he swanned in and parked his late-model Lamborghini next to the Board’s Toyota Corollas.

 

The fact that he and his partner in crime Kerry Harford could keep the drip feed money transfusion going so long raises questions not just about the Board in question but the whole health system, with  23 district health boards in a country with the population of Melbourne.