Posts by BenWilson
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Field Theory: Straight for the throat, in reply to Paul Williams,
It generally means they can only drop one game. A really big ask.
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Hard News: The Minister's Brain Has Exploded, in reply to Deborah,
Yes, meerkats, soz.
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Hard News: The Minister's Brain Has Exploded, in reply to Russell Brown,
I can't see why anyone would want to be overflowed onto an empty container wharf, though. I'd just as soon overflow into the city, where there might be cover from the elements, and shops open, and from whence I could escape by some means other than swimming.
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Field Theory: Straight for the throat, in reply to recordari,
Samoa should be good to watch.
Yes, I want to see their form prior to the game I'm attending - you're going too, right?
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On the jamming by the big screen, some of what happened was that security decided to stop people passing beneath the screen, forcing the entire crowd streaming towards it to part around it, an obstacle that took up the entire road. I was the very first person to get to there, just as the cordon closed, and a polite but firm security lady told me to go back and around, which seemed impossible as thousands of people were streaming forward. I managed to get back and around, negotiating the 1 meter wide strip of road covered in power cables to eventually, 15 mins later, get to the front of the screen, to watch a little bit of Dobbyn, and then scratch my head and wonder WTF I was doing there anyway, it's only a screen.
This diversion caused the blockage in front of the ferry terminal. It was probably sensible not to let people camp directly under the screen, since that seemed likely to encourage people to climb it. Practically everything that could be climbed had people on it. I have a great photo of the crowd with 8 people standing above them all on narrow bollards, looking like lemmings peering around. The roof of the ferry information kiosk right there had about 10 people on it. I later saw the police getting them down, and thought that was sensible, they had damaged the gutter and a bad accident could easily have happened. I was surprised no one fell off a bollard, actually.
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Hard News: The Minister's Brain Has Exploded, in reply to Russell Brown,
As Toby says, if it had been made clearer to people who hadn’t worked it out that Queen’s Wharf was a non-starter, that crowd would have dispersed
I'm not sure. I think the crowd wanted to be a crowd. That's how it looked from inside that crowd, anyway. It's certainly how I felt, that just showing up for the purposes of letting everyone know that we support this event, was a big part of it. In terms of actually seeing anything, staying at home was the best option, usually is.
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Field Theory: Straight for the throat, in reply to Hadyn Green,
The fact that the "interviewer" doesn't seem to ask any questions also points to the fact that it is a walk-through with little actual content or insight into the game.
Yes, the "question" is usually an extremely open ended one, usually a statement about the general run of play, which the captain can ignore or use as they see fit. It was rather painful to hear a lengthy question put to the Japanese captain, who clearly doesn't speak good English and just wanted to say his politenesses. Fortunately, he realized there was no point at all attempting to understand 15 seconds of kiwi-unglish spiel, and just said what he wanted to, simple and effective.
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Hard News: The Minister's Brain Has Exploded, in reply to Toby,
Part of the problem seems to have been that they were relying for communication between organisers on the mobile network. I’;ll say that again: the NZ mobile network.
Yes, I was relying on it myself and it failed. After that, I fell back on old-school methods like "wait and see", "use my brain", "go with the flow", etc.
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Hard News: The Minister's Brain Has Exploded, in reply to Toby,
Apart from a solitary display at the main entrance, there was no means, as far as I could see, employed to let the crowd know.
And yet, strangely, I knew, despite going nowhere near the main entrance. Perhaps I guessed it because they said so on the news the night before, that it could only hold x thousand people, and it was clear there was something like 10x people there. When you can't even move towards the gates from over 100m away, you know it's pointless. It seems to me that if there was any ugliness it would have been in the few minutes just when the gates had to be closed. Then people could jolly well find somewhere else to sink piss, if that's all they came to do.
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Hard News: The Minister's Brain Has Exploded, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I don't undertand the ideology - can anyone explain why our government believes that an essential service such as electricity supply is most appropriately provided by the private sector, while running a glorified bar is an essential state function?
Well said.
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