Random Play by Graham Reid

Former Kiwi and current Sydney South’s off-side flanker Ramon Noh-Mana was last night suspended for life or longer by the Australian RNL after he admitted to an assault charge.

Noh-Mana -- with a season average of 16 points a game and personal best of 12.5 seconds -- is facing further criminal charges after it alleged he punched a model and former star of Shortland Street in the face, urinated on her and left her to die on the side of a mountain.

Last night after a judicial hearing by RNL officials Noh-Mana was suspended for life or longer and in a prepared statement apologised to his team mates, the RNL and the mountain.

“I’d like to apologise to my team mates, the RNL and the mountain,” he said.

He declined further comment and is believed to be spending time with his family and pastor at a luxury retreat on Bateman Island.

Noh-Mana earned the derision of many in the code for his actions, although fellow RFL player and one-time Ellerslie Rooster Dave Sorenson said last night he thought the punishment “a bit harsh because Roman is good mate and an asset to any team”.

Noh-Mana is alleged to have met the woman in Gold Coast bar after a night celebrating a 26-5 win over the Coasters.

“Basically it was just a case of good-natured hi-jinks that went a bit far,” said South’s manager Bob Pedersen after the RNL hearing. “I think Ramon has learned his lesson, that he probably shouldn’t punch women, but we’ll be looking at how we can help him and his family in the coming days.

“People need to understand that this is a young man at the peak of his career and he probably needs a bit of breathing space to move on and put this thing behind him.

"Suspension means only that, and we could see him back in the game next season, he‘s a good mate and an asset to any team.”

Cycling New Zealand and the Prime Minister’s department have condemned Noh-Mana’s behaviour, both confirming that if he applied for a job he would not be considered. The producers of Shortland Street also issued a statement last night saying he would no longer be considered for the part of Rangi, the sensitive doctor who works with South East Asian orphans in a Remuera clinic.

Sir Hawthorne Hadley, who also once celebrated a win over the Coasters in 1963, has said that in his day no team member would consider leaving anyone on the side of a mountain.

“The fact is that this is a tough game, but once you punched a woman and urinated on her in the early hours of the morning you do the decent thing and call either an ambulance or someone in management to come and sort out the problem.”

Last night the young woman Mandy Watson, who is undergoing surgery in a Brisbane hospital for frostbite, could not be contacted for comment although her surgeon underwent a gruelling hour-long inquisition by Checkpoint’s Mary Wilson who gleaned nothing.

It is believed Watson may lose the use of her nose, and three fingers of her right hand may have to amputated.

Her parents Doris and Peter Watson of Te Papa were last night preparing to fly to Australia to be at their daughter’s bedside. They refused to comment but insisted that the media was responsible for the incident and the subsequent publicity.

“You mongrels in the media are responsible for the incident and the subsequent publicity,” said Mr Watson late last night.

“We have no further comment to make and will not be commenting to the media again, until after we have signed the agreement with Channel 23 for an exclusive 20/20 interview and profile of Mandy in New Women’s Day.”

The first two items on National Radio’s 5pm bulletin on Saturday were as follows: Australian PM John Howard said he was keeping an open mind towards nuclear power options and the enrichment of uranium; and Phil Goff saying that the ANZAC bond was strong so if Australia was under threat New Zealand would come to it’s aid, and vice versa. Hmmm.

** The following message was intercepted from a CNN broadcast by New Zealand Civil Defence yesterday. After checking it for tsunami or earthquake information, Civil Defence has now released it to the general public with assurances that as no natural disaster is pending there is nothing to be alarmed about. Text follows:

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA . . .

My fellow Americans, I address you tonight on a matter of great urgency. As you well know many of the freedom and democratic ideals we in the United States hold so dear are under attack from evil regimes and corrupt leaders abroad.

I refer not just to those in Europe who would prefer to live under the rule of repressive regimes, nor those in the Middle East where religious fundamentalists hold their people in a ruthless grip.

We are all too familiar with the acts of cowardly terrorists from those regions who fear the freedoms and democracy that we in America have fought for, and now cherish dearly.

We have been strong and unrelenting in our pursuit of terrorists and those who would harbour them, and that war on terror will continue. We will be victorious in the struggle and generous when we prevail.

But today I have received news of a new threat to the American way of life and that of freedom loving people everywhere, a threat which will cause more instability in the world and one which we will be called upon to deal with in the coming days.

I refer to what is happening in the country of Australia, a nation we once thought was our ally in the war against terror, a country which stood side-by-side with America and Britain and our other allies in the coalition of the willing.

But today I have learned that the prime minister of Australia, following the lead of those in the state of Iran, has announced his country will embark on a programme of nuclear development.

I need not tell you what that means for the stability of the world and the threat that poses to the United States. The axis of evil which we have long spoken about now has another ally, a strong and powerful ally which will soon be nuclear capable.

I have already spoken to the heads of many of our relevant government departments and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I am here to tell you that we are willing and ready to counter this threat from our former ally in the South Pacific.

I cannot help but note in this provocative action by Australia that it is counting on the support of New Zealand, its neighbour in the region.

My fellow Americans, we should not be surprised by this. New Zealand has long denied the United States military access to its waters. We know all too well the character of New Zealand, a country whose people have long been ruled by an evil regime under the leadership of the iron-fisted Lord Sauron.

It has been brought to my attention that in recent weeks one of that country’s leading weekly magazines ran a major feature on why New Zealanders hated Americans, and that there have been consistent attacks in the New Zealand media by doctors and dieticians on American institutions such as fast food franchises.

New Zealand is country which is not friendly to the United States, and its support of Australia in an alliance they called Anzac dates back many decades. Now New Zealand is lining up alongside Australia in this provocative and hostile action which threatened the stability of the region and of the free world.

The United States will not tolerate this.

My advisors tell me that the prime ministers of New Zealand and Australia are intractable leaders, not easily swayed in their opinions. So rather than go through the protracted and fruitless process of weapons inspectors from the United Nations as happened in Iraq and Iran, we have chosen more direct action to counter this threat.

We will not negotiate with Australia in the matter of uranium enrichment and its developing nuclear programme. We believe the time is right for a short, decisive attack which will demonstrate the power of the United States military and the resolve we have as a people in defending freedom and democracy.

As of this moment I am giving the prime minister of Australia exactly 24 hours to meet our demand that all work on nuclear sites be halted, and that mining of uranium cease immediately.

Failure to comply will mean that the United States will treat consider Australia and its ally New Zealand as engaging in a hostile act against the United States and its people -- and we will unleash the full might of the United States Third Division Air Combat Unit.

These highly skilled pilots and crew will undertake a carpet-bombing mission across the North Island of New Zealand.

Even as we speak aircraft from Hawaii and the USS Roosevelt aircraft carrier stationed near Guam are on their way to New Zealand. If I have not heard personally from Australian prime minister Howard within 24 hours then the attack on New Zealand will take place with devastating consequences.

I have already advised the small number of our citizens in New Zealand that for their own safety they should leave the country immediately. We will welcome them home.

The United States has carefully considered this momentous decision, but for too long the empires of evil have threatened the rights of freedom loving peoples around the world, and we believe now is the time for decisive action.

Thank you, good night. And God bless America.

** This message was broadcast at 11.30pm Monday May 22, New Zealand time.

Good morning, I’m Katherine Rhine and this Nine to Noon. Later in the programme, the Comedy Festival: is it just a bunch of people telling jokes, or is it actually funny? We’ll talk with some British and local comedians, all of whom have a joke about being in economy class on an aeroplane.

Then it’s cooking with Alyson Gofton whose Meal in a Minute programme on television has celebrated it’s 1,000th product placement. We’ll be talking canned spaghetti and why it is superior -- nutritionally, and for your dental hygiene -- to the stuff you buy in packets and that Italians make such a big fuss about.

Before noon my special guest this morning will be Dr Peter Rapson who has undertaken some ground-breaking research into obesity, and the results may surprise you.

His five-year study of teenage girls reveals that not enough of them are getting the message from teen magazines that skinny is good, and our anorexia rates are declining at an alarming rate.
Fat is in apparently and he’s blaming manufacturers, not of fast foods, but of those low-slung hip-hugger jeans. And he doesn’t have a good word to say about tattoo parlours who let teenagers get their navels pierced in the hope it attracts attention away from their fat bellies poking out between their tank top and fake Gucci belt.

But right now: leaked to us yesterday was a damning report about the state of the Civil Defence services in New Zealand.

According to the report commissioned by Pupkin, Chen and Marbreck, if a natural disaster of any kind hit the country at any place Civil Defence would be ill-equipped to deal with it. The report says that the recent tsunami warning in Gisborne where people self-evacuated -- in layman’s terms, they started shitting themselves when the heard the big wave was on its way -- only served to highlight how dysfunctional Civil Defence actually is.

And the slow response to last night’s earthquake in the capital in which at least 60 lives were lost once again highlighted the service’s shortcomings.

I’m joined by Dr Allen Wood, Head Chief of Civil Defence for the Greater Wellington and Nelson Districts.

Good morning Dr Wood.
Good morning Katherine.

This report, a damning indictment of the service, surely?
Well not really, and first of all you have to understand the context in which it was commissioned. Initially there was no reason for anyone to believe that any natural disaster might happen and so in that breathing space, as it were, we allowed our services -- which are run on highly professional lines in accordance with the principles of transparency, rapid response and mild panic -- to be analysed. Regrettably what happened during that time was the tsunami which rather caught everyone unawares.

But isn’t that in the nature of such things, the element of surprise?
Yes, I see your point but we have professional monitoring systems and when, just by unfortunate coincidence, none of them were manned at that time, we were not in a position to respond as we might have done otherwise.

And if they had been manned, what might have happened?
I suspect much the same as happened anyway. People courageously used personal initiative, panicked and fled for the hills, which is exactly what we would have told them to do.

You would have told people to panic?
Not in so many words, but let’s be honest there are only a few ways you can convey certain information, like ’Christ! There’s bloody big wave coming and we’re all gonna die if we don’t get out of here!’ In the past that kind of clear and unequivocal message from Civil Defence has been quite effective.

But of course in this case there was no tsunami.
Yes, and I think no one could have anticipated that. That seemed to prove that the people who panicked rather than the service itself were at fault. But I don’t want to get into the blame game.

This report says that Civil Defence doesn’t seem to be much good at anticipating any emergency and has few protocols in place to deal with them if they do happen. Is that fair?
What you need to understand is that this is about people. For the past three years we have been undertaking a careful monitoring programme of the very protocols you mention, and when you crunch the numbers you’ll find at the end of the day the figures do actually match up. Cost analysis vis-à-vis achievable outcomes in accordance to the Treaty and the Charter are what we are about.

Sorry, I’m not sure what you mean.
Yes, and that rather proves my point that this is a very complex area and reports such as the one we have just seen can only scratch the surface.

You mean if the report had gone any deeper it would have found even more fault with the service?
That’s not what I am saying. In the cold light of day it is all very well to be wise after the event, but our people are professional and very hard-working, and I might add some of them are very highly qualified, so I wouldn’t like this to turn into some kind of bashing of Civil Defence.

No, it isn’t. I’m just asking if the system is as fundamentally flawed as this report suggests?
Oh, indeed it is, and that’s why we welcome it. What it has allowed us to do is focus attention on some of the infrastructure, analyse the data and then approach central government with a realistic and workable plan to upgrade essential services. We are not running for cover. If we did, that would send an unfortunate message to the public and the next thing you know all the high ground would be overrun with civilians, and there would be no room for us anyway.

So at the moment people should have no faith in Civil Defence?
Not at all, we have a sophisticated monitoring system using the bNet radio stations which warn us of any impending crisis, we have people with cellphones at the ready to convey a sense of panic and urgency to the civilian population where necessary, and in the unlikely event of a natural disaster we have people who can swing into action immediately and start writing reports to protect ourselves from criticism later by those with a political agenda. Or even those who just want to know why lives were lost, homes destroyed or there was widespread panic, looting and mayhem. I’d hate to think anyone would blame Civil Defence for any of those consequences just because we hadn’t warned people.

So you are saying, despite this report, that all is well within Civil Defence and people should have faith in it?
I stand behind my staff and am prepared to let them take the consequences. So, most definitely people should have faith. I pray daily to every deity there is and I am commending that as a wise practice.

Well, were you prepared for the devastating earthquake that hit Wellington this morning?
What earthquake?

I'm told the new poster boy for entrepreneurs is 26-year old Canadian Kyle MacDonald: he’s the guy who traded a red paperclip for a fish-shaped pen, then traded that for a doorknob, that for a barbeque and so on.

He’s still trading up and some weeks ago looked set to get a house out of his on-line trading skills.

My negotiating abilities are such that the other day I was prepared to swap a car for a car stereo. I guess Kyle would see that as trading down.

By way of explanation let it be said first: I’m not a car guy. I’ve had the same increasingly battle-scarred Japanese import for 16 years and even now still have to check whether it’s a Honda City or a Honda Civic. I know it’s white and the numberplate begins “SI” -- but one of my kids is “Simon“, so that part was easy.

A car doesn’t interest me. All I do with one is get in and drive the damn thing. If the radio works it works -- ours did but only around the central city, and the tape player was broken -- and when it needs petrol I put some in. In the past year I may have opened the Honda Whatever’s bonnet once, when the water in the window washer thing was empty.

But when I clipped off a wing mirror recently I started thinking about getting something a little better.

It was overdue: the hatchback was jammed shut; the driver’s seat was a mass of bum-abusing bare springs; and the rubber around the driver’s window had come away so a howling wind came whistling in.

A month ago we came back to the car one rainy day to find three centimetres of water on the floor -- but worryingly it was on the passenger’s side. We have no idea how that got there.

The wing mirror hanging off was the final indignity.

We did a couple of desultory trips to car yards -- obviously I know so little about these things that an auction was out of the question -- but one Saturday morning we saw something we liked.

It was a Mazda Something and the numberplate was easy to remember. It was out of our range but Blain said he could do a deal.

“And of course,” he added, “we could get it down lower if we do a trade on your car. What have you got?”

I laughed and said not to bother, but he seemed to think our Honda Whatever might even pull another two grand off the price.
I laughed even louder.

When we took the green Mazda Something for a spin he went off with our keys -- “It’s the white one, SI something, without the wing mirror” -- to see what he thought.

By the time we came back he had “good news and not so good news“. The good news was he had an acceptable deal for us and the not so good news was . . .

“You don’t want our car, right?”
“Well, my boss says we could only give you $450 for it.”
“Well, that’s $50 more than I expected, so that’s great.”

He went off to get the paperwork and we watched War of the Worlds on the showroom’s flat screen television.
When he came back he looked crestfallen.

His boss had now seen our Honda Whatever and said, “Actually . . .”

No problem, we would be a two car family until we could flick the surplus somehow.

But then Blain brightened up, he’d had an idea. He’d take the white Honda Whatever off our hands in exchange for putting a decent stereo in the green Mazda Something.
It was such a hilariously stupid exchange that we accepted.

Blain went off to get some more paperwork while Tom Cruise hid in a house surrounded by aliens, and then came back. Actually . . .

Turns out new car already had a pretty good stereo, so . . .

So we now still have the white Honda Whatever and I’m thinking of trading it on the internet.

I’m accepting an initial bid of a red paperclip.

While some television critics and media commentators have been indifferent to the dance floor manoeuvres on last night’s Dancing With the Stars, others have been commenting on the singing and dancing of Jason Gunn who ended the show with a belting version of Save The Last Dance For Me.

“Frankly the show was fairly predictable in the dancing,” said singing tutor Emma Halliwell, “but the really interesting thing was Jason when he sang at the end. The way he slipped around the melody and keys in a kind of sassy and even slightly sexy way made me wonder about Frank Sinatra or Bobby Darin or Sammy Davis Jnr or . . . So much stuff got brought up.

“In fact, the more I watched him perform the more I kept bringing stuff up.”

Talkback callers have been equally vocal in their opinion with comments ranging from “I never thought I’d see that on my television” to “there seems to be no beginning to this man’s talent.”

Gunn took on an especially difficult song. Save The Last Dance For Me was written by Brill Building legends Mort Shuman and Doc Pomus and it was originally covered in a romantic fashion by the Drifters.

The song is a classic and has been covered in a reggae style by the Heptones, by Ben E. King, and most recently by Michael Buble in a more up-beat style.

But Gunn’s treatment -- a risky big band outing in which he danced with well-known transvestite Candy Lane -- seemed to touch on many styles.

“What amazed me,” said cabaret singer Frankie Ellis, “was the way he took the risk to improvise lyrics towards the end to include a mention of Candy. This is the kind of style more commonly found in respected jazz singers such as Ella Fitzgerald or Dakota Staton.

“I hadn’t expected to hear this kind of vocal maturity and breadth on a show like this -- and even though I didn‘t the guy is obviously someone who has a unique approach.

"A bit like Wing, but who looks more like Michael J Fox, if you get my meaning.”

Other commentators noted that not only did Gunn sing and dance but he pulled out a range of facial expressions which added to the performance.

“I couldn’t help but think of Frank Spencer in Some Mothers Do Have ‘Em.” said theatre manager Ron Pederson. “It was as if he had found a new facial mannerism for each line, if not every word. He went from sort of cheeky to vaguely surprised and then into looking like a man suffering from acute constipation.

“It was an extraordinary thing to watch and I have never before seen so much facial mobility in a singer. And that was pretty tough to pull off when you consider the lyrics go, 'Oh I know, that the music's fine like sparklin' wine, go and have your fun . . . ‘

“They might be simple and perhaps even full of pathos, but Jason found a whole new upbeat meaning in them -- and gave us the expressions to match. Extraordinary.”

And while talkback ran hot over whether Gunn should be given more time to sing and dance, one caller summed it up for many when she said that television directors obviously believed Gunn to be talented in ways that audiences had never previously realised.

“So I suggest he put together his own show and take it to theatres and clubs around the country to discover the true depth of interest in his abilities.”