Rugby: AB's 20 Australia 25. I hope it is a wake up call but things are not looking good. I think that 5 teams can win, England, France (depending on which team arrives on the day) Oz, the Boks and us.
It is easy after the event but I see Richard Loe and I agree with Gear missing out being a travesty and we both think Toeava is very lucky. He also likes Crockett and being an ex prop should know. A good point he had is the workrate around the field is now more important than scummaging. How Corey Flynn makes it is beyond me.
The Shield went north after Taranaki beat Southland and it is on the line today against Hawkes Bay. You would have to favour the Bay but the Shield brings the best out of the defenders and as I type this the 'Naki are well on top.
RWC: I hope the powers that be ensure the staduims are full and not empty at every game by giving the tickets away to schoolkids. They are probably too dumb. The prices are just too high for Kiwis.
Idiocy: Again. A murderer was running a business from jail due to a loophole in the law. How we ask could he make the phone calls? His lawyer (Tony Ellis - isn't that a surprise) couldn't see anything wrong with that!! Anyway they are to change the law.
US Political Idiocy: A great commentary by Richard Dawkins about Gov. Rick Perry of Texas -
There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today’s Republican party is this : In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s Republican Party ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.
A politician’s attitude to evolution is perhaps not directly important in itself but it can have unfortunate consequences on education and science policy. A politician’s attitude to evolution, however peripheral it might seem, is a surprisingly apposite litmus test of more general inadequacy. This is because unlike, say, string theory where scientific opinion is genuinely divided, there is about the fact of evolution no doubt at all. Evolution is a fact, as securely established as any in science, and he who denies it betrays woeful ignorance and lack of education, which likely extends to other fields as well. Evolution is not some recondite backwater of science, ignorance of which would be pardonable. It is the stunningly simple but elegant explanation of our very existence and the existence of every living creature on the planet. Thanks to Darwin, we now understand why we are here and why we are the way we are. You cannot be ignorant of evolution and be a cultivated and adequate citizen of today.
We would hope that a politician espousing his views in NZ would be treated with derision.
Computer: Now with a new desktop and a laptop. As usual all the stupid changes that are purely cosmetic are a pain. As usual 400 things are available but only 20 will be used. As usual some sensible things have been deleted (especially those from XP - which was probably too good a system).
A side issue was that for the laptop we could enter a competition (although the website didn't work and I had to phone them - typical - and it is a technology company) and won tickets to the Oz-USA game.
Billy T James: We went to a Rotary fundraiser and saw the documentary about him. It was excellent - although the personal part of his marriage etc was skated over. As I understand it he married one sister but his daughter was to the other sister. His voice was much better than I remembered.
Metrics: Got a Netguide from the library and it had a letter about another of my many hobby horses. Why after 42 years do we still quote in Inperial. As the writer said (he is a teacher) his students don't have a clue what inches and feet etc are. They had the usual answers of USA still being 500 years behind.
