Posts by Tom Semmens
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I have been quite pleasantly surprised.
I'm not. A lot of women like their men, well, manly and nothing says "man" like facial hair.
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Perhaps the one that good old queen vicky refused to believe existed?
I was talking to another Vicky about this option the other night, and she opined that while she gave it a shot just to see, nothing beats us blokes, hairy or otherwise.
So we are reasonably safe to assume that if we become all bewiskered and hold out long enough, they'll be back. Just be staunch, praise the Lord and pass the hair tonic.
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Good morning Craig! Lovely day isn't it? Or is that one dark rain cloud I spy away yonder directly over your house?
I am glad you agree with me about Mr. Kearley.
However, Kim Hill has lived here since she was fifteen, was educated here and therefore I find your criticism of her rather unfair.
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Dangerous ground Joanna! I am not sure that a women is wise to comment on the subject on male facial hair, unless invited to do so...
Hmmmm.... Actually now I've had my morning triple expresso I am thinking we need to get back to the days when we blokes were too busy taking God to the natives on the frontier to worry about shaving or what the ladies think. If we all went back to those fantastic moustaches, proudly heursuite mutton chops or vast, well-tended beards resting on large, self-satisfied tummys seen in the sepia photos from the salad days of male yore, what choice would the girlies have but Hobson's one?
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having listened on Morning Report to the explainations of Eric Kearley on why TVNZ has decided to run 135 party political broadcasts on behalf of the National Party, I have concluded he is a highly paid fucking idiot.
His lack of awareness of the historical context of the advertisment is an indictment of our continual use of foreigners to oversee programming on our state run TV channels and his refusal to admit he might not have a clue about New Zealand's near past tells me he is a mediocre administrator as well.
We have plenty of mediocre administrators who are actually bona fide New Zealanders and why our state broadcaster had to go all the way to Sweden to get one who adds cultural ignorance to his toolbox of medicocrity is quite beyond me.
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Speaking of pursed lips...
Families First's Bob McCoskrie said the images were "not a good look". "Teachers are role models and having a teacher linked with Penthouse is taking things too far," McCoskrie said.
"This is something the teachers council should be having a very hard look at."
I am sure Bob has already had a very hard.... ...look. -
last time I started a moustache I spotted a grey hair on day five. The whole lot came off pronto!
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Reflecting on this, what unsettles me the most is Tolley's rampant anti-intellectualism in all this. She isn't interested in what the experts or the stakeholders have to say about education policy. In fact, I think she is suspicious of educational experts and dismissive of intellectuals in general, preferring a to talk in Palinesque platitudes of a "common sense" policy.
This creates an environment where objective truth goes out the window and facts are examined within a matrix of received prejudices. Any facts which don't agree with these pre-conceived notions are simply ignored and their bearers denigrated as self-serving and self-interested.
It is all seems very, very American rightwing in it's mindset and tactics, and educationalists here had better work out a better way of dealing with it than progressives and intellectuals have done elsewhere in New Zealand so far.
Simply sitting around on places like Public Address doing a passable rendition of "It isn't easy to be us" to the tune of Kermit the Frog's famous tune won't cut it.
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Thanks Auckland! We thrashed you by almost fifty and still do us a favour at the end of the season.
Hawke's Bay are peaking at the right end of the season and I, for one, am smacking my lips at the chance to humiliate an All-Blackless Canterbury at home in the semi-finals before taking the final off Wellington - a team we Magpie supporters have unfinished business with after they beat us in round robbin play.
The problem was never really that the competition should be less than fourteen teams - ten or twelve or whatever. The problem was always that the NZRFU never had the balls to simply say "If you finish in positions eleven to fourteen on the points table at the end of the 2009 ANZC, you will be relegated."
Instead, they prevaricated and jacked up a system to ensure than none of the big cities miss out. My view has always been that if you can't, say, get 5,000 fans to Albany then why should Bay of Plenty who get 10,000 to every game be relegated?
Look at the crowd at the Waikato v Auckland game tonight. 10 years ago that would have been three quarters or more full now it's lucky to have 3 or 4000 regardless of what bogus figure Waikato and the NZRU make up.
Yamis - Your thinking reflects what the NZRFU thinks, and to my mind it is hopelessly out of touch with the realities of NZ rugby traditions and culture. The game might be suffering in the massively over-exposed rugby markets of the main centres, but it isn't in the provinces.
To me, the best solution to poor crowds in Albany (for example) is to relegate North Harbour and give them all a shock. Either they'll care enough to do something about it or they won't.
Same with the worst performing Super 14 team. Three super franchise bases - Auckland, Waikato and Otago - finsihed out of the top four ANZC teams. My solution to this lack of performance would be simple. The top finishing non-super team (Southland) would replace the worst performing Super team (Otago) as the Franchise holder for 2010, and ditto for 2011 if necessary.
Next season there would be no Highlanders playing unenthusiastic rugby to a near empty stadium, but instead a well reinforced Stag's team playing in front of ecstatic packed houses in Invercargill, hell - they could even generously play a game to Dunedin, if Otago begged enough.
The Stags may well still finish last of the NZ teams, but that wouldn't be any worse than the Highlanders would it? And in the process, a real incentive for doing well in the ANZC would have been created, a lot more people would have had fun and a clear message would have been sent to the other far, far to smug and complacent Super Franchise holders.
The base, the fans who actually care, are sending a clear signal. They would rather watch a "low quality" encounter where Southland beat Canterbury 9-3 in a Ranfurly shield in the rain at night in winter in a game played at a building site and then celebrate wildly and in person with THEIR team than watch "entertaining" pajama rugby between teams made up of remote genetic freaks on a balmy February evening. They would rather engage in wild triumphalism when Zac Guilford scores against Canterbury and rail on talkback against the linesman who denied "our" boys "their" try than remotely cheer on Colin Cooper's designer also-rans.
For ten years the NZRFU has hoped that people would stop supporting Southland and start supporting the Highlanders, or stop supporting Hawke's Bay and start supporting the Hurricanes. But NZ rugby is built on rampant parochialism and ferocious group loyalty to the province - often, and proudly, to the detriment of New Zealand rugby. These fans are not stupid, and they'll be buggered if they give up those traditions and identifications to please a bunch of Wellington based rugby bureaucrats. Worryingly, the NZFRU's nonplussed and uncomprehending response appears to be little more than to say "Fuck you, take your medicine and like it, we know what is best for you."
The provinces will never support the Super teams, and if the NZRFU can't see that particular wood for the trees of the All Blacks and the bottom line, then they are heading for a first class disaster where their jaded big city rollers can't be bothered turning up and the alienated provincial heartland won't turn up.
The low crowd numbers for the Super 14 next season will cause a financial crisis for the NZRFU - you heard it here first.
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I think most people kind of hoped last year we went from people who read the Guardian online and watch the BBC to people who read the Telegraph online and watch CNN.
Unfortunately, this government clearly aims no higher than the Daily Mail and Fox News.