Posts by Russell Brown
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__<That can happen in any form of the game.__
Except in 20-20. (So long as we're splitting these particular hairs).
But no!
The tie occurs (as it did just recently) and is then broken by the tiebreaker, surely ...
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On rugby matters, it seems as if John Mitchell's learned little about team management and may not last too much longer at the Force.
Sweet Jesus. He's still a self-obsessed fount of life-coaching psychobabble isn't he?
From that Rugby Heaven link ...
"I am contracted right through to 2011, so I feel very secure - but it is about evolving and improving myself. I am totally committed," Mitchell said.
"There are some behaviours, I guess, that have worked for me in the past. But again it’s just this club needing a certain style at the start of its introduction and, I guess, it’s now requiring me to evolve and pitch at a different level.
“You know the great thing about all this, a lot of people see it as negative and probably not conducive to teamwork and harmony, the great thing about it is that this group wants to take responsibility.
“To me that’s a real positive sign because that’s something that we’ve been seeking since our start and I sense there is an element of maturity in having come out of this situation, which is very pleasing from my point of view.”
Arggh ...
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In cricket, a draw occurs when the allotted time for the match elapses and neither side has been able to achieve victory, which effectively means dismissing the the other side twice.
It can't happen in limited-overs cricket.
A tie is the far rarer occasion when the game finishes -- because the allotted time or the specified number of overs has elapsed, or because both teams have been dismissed -- with both teams on equal scores.
That can happen in any form of the game.
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That DPF piece is not very good.
He made a series of tendentious it's-all-Labour's-fault posts that, frankly, did not do his credentials as a commentator any good.
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__Randomly picking a thread to derail, we have a new Doctor.__
Who looks pretty much how I'd imagine David Tennant's scruffy younger brother would.
The thing is, it's nearly two days since the announcement, there's a war on in the Middle East, and it's still the top story on the Guardian website.
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It was replaced by a 1966 Vauxhall Velox
not dissimilar to this.I can dimly remember, when I was really young, the family having an old 50s Vauxhall Velox saloon like this.
Its kind of like if a car were a hippopotamus.
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What's superior to a Super Snipe? The preposterous Humber Pullman
Heh.
So we've now had one of those, the Snipe and both the Morris and Austin versions of the Landcrab 1800.
Is this the big-assed British motor thread?
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But sorry Fran, if anyone is going to insinuate that Key's position is motivated by his ethnicity I'm going to reply "If it quacks like a bigot, and waddles like a bigot, it's probably a bigot."
I think that's what she was trying to say, really. But Fran was one of a number of columnists who would have been better to just have a rest over the holiday, rather than turn out gibberish like this ...
So it was this Christmas as my 83-year old mother - a farmer's daughter - talked of the impact of the Great Depression in New Zealand. The "swaggies" turning up on her family's doorstep for food and shelter. The incredible devastation then wrought by World War II which left many New Zealand men of her generation emotionally scarred but left those women "manning" the home front with enormous survival skills that many of today's Gen X and Gen Y - who are focused on "having it all" at an early age - lack.
The frontiers my parents' generation faced are different from today. But the frontier mentality that led my forbears to be proudly self-reliant and adamantly against government dependence endures, with a capacity to take delight in life's simple pleasures instead of being captive to a consumerist affluenza with all its attendant dissatisfactions.
Far better to reserve our dissatisfactions for what really matters and can be used as a motivator to change things for the better.
With that in mind I have boiled down my top 10 story wish-list for 2009 to just one issue: How to ensure that New Zealand - a young country that many of us love - draws once again on that frontier mentality which spurred our forbears to make the radical reforms that will be necessary to secure both us and our children a strong future in a changing world. Given the extent to which so many Kiwis have been glued to the State's welfare teat, this won't be easy.
But change we must.
Eh?
Of course, in the real world, rather than Bizarro New Zealand, New Zealanders had actually "pioneered" such craven nods to welfarism as old age pensions and land reform since the 1890s, and then responded to the privations of the Depression by electing the first Labour government, on its promise of a dramatic expansion of the welfare state, in 1935.
But ... whatever.
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I drove that road nearly every week for months, escaping to Christchurch for the weekends in the year I worked in Timaru.
I remember little enough of the route now, but a few of the journeys stand out:
The night I drove back from Christchurch with a bootload of free firewood. The Morris 1800 never handled better than it did that night.
Heading north to surprise Fiona for what I thought was her birthday (right day, wrong month), catching a lift with the local record shop guy, who got me so stoned I didn't straighten up for hours -- including the two, aching hours I spent making polite conversation with my mate's mum in Christchurch, waiting for him to get home.
Coming back on the back of Fiona's 185cc trailbike. That felt like an achievement.
And leaving for the last time, for a new job and a new life in Auckland -- crook as a dog after my boss, then my mates, got me drunk. I'd blown it with the girl who (I had been informed by her friend) was going to give me a glamorous goodbye shag, I'd thrown up in the garden, and I'd just left all my dirty kitchenware behind in the morning. But I wasn't looking back.
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Okay ...I've slung the hired tarpaulin over the deck, because it appears that it's going to rain some time, and if the north-westerly gets a bit too fresh in the evening, I'll drop the other 3m over the back and make another wall.
I also have outdoor coloured lights and an organic fillet of beef that I bought in a moment of madness.
We'll get through New Year okay, I think ...
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