Posts by Yamis
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NFL Game Pass
(waiting to see if it will be free again this year).
Good man. :) I've got my fingers crossed because I probably can't justify paying for it when I get 2-3 games a week on SKY anyway. I did enjoy it, but it's a relatively short season (17 week reg season) so if you miss a few weeks for being away on hol or other reasons then it would get a bit pricey.
I suspect it won't be free and last year was 'sponsored' by somebody. I have tried googling to find out why it was free but to no avail.
I can't ditch SKY because my daughter watches the cartoons channels and we watch a little of the other channels.
But looking at that, Sky sport (without the rugby channel) is 26.45 a month, that's 6.10 a week which is a pittance (40 cents an hour over 15 hours) for how much I watch and how convenient it is.
It's the 46.92 for the basic package that I have more of a problem with.
I don't see how it costs them that amount per person a month to acquire the rights to 15 year old episodes of fuzzy documentaries, odd-ball cartoons, and low budget cooking shows etc.
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Hard News: The future: be careful what…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Typical NZ boys seem to play rugby or league until their early twenties while thriving on a diet of cheap beer and KFC. Then they give up the sport but not the diet and wonder why they die of obesity and diabetes.
Well you described me well enough :)
I teach at a large high school where rugby is the number one sport (well, debatable but in the hierarchy's eyes it is) and about 15% of boys at the school play rugby (7 teams) and 2% play league (1 team).
In total that's about 200 boys playing those codes out of around 1,100 boys. About 100 boys play basketball (10 teams), and a similar number of girls (we are co-ed).
Our rugby numbers aren't decreasing they have been stable in the 7+ years I've been there.
On SKY and rugby and league though, if they lose those rights (say the NRL decides to set up a league pass type setup and the NZRU follows suit then SKY as we know it would be dead within a year unless they completely re-invented themselves in 5 minutes flat.
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Hard News: The future: be careful what…, in reply to Hadyn Green,
I subscribed to NFL Game Pass last season and MLB TV this year. For this I get every game in the pre, post and regular season on demand and in full HD.
Hope you didn't pay too much for NFL League Pass. It was free last year (might have been a short running promotion but it came in the first week or two). God knows why, maybe to suck in more fans so that next year they'll decide stuff it, and pay for it. I took advantage and loved watching games in the school hols, 8 games on at once multi screened across my laptop, could flick between them depending on time outs, HT's stage of the game, tight games, blowouts etc, and then watch full replays later with all of the stops taken out and just showing the plays. Picture quality was good and never had any trouble with connections.
BOOYAH!!!!
Is an option for SKY to blow itself up and start offering a channel by channel package where you choose individual channels at a certain price ie SKY SPORT 1 for $7 a month, SKY SPORT 2 for $6 a month, Living channel for $2 a month etc etc. Pulling those number out of my arse, but thats been the basic gripe of everybody I know, or talk about them with since I can remember. They could base it on how much it costs them to get the content for each channel.
I just did a survey with SKY a week ago where I had to say what channels I watched each day and for how long and over the course of a week I watched sport, sport, sport, sport, a bit of home stuff on Living Channel and a few episodes of Time Team on the History channel. There's a good 25 channels of theirs that I don't watch 2 seconds of .... EVER.
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Field Theory: Part of the Game, in reply to Ben McNicoll,
Slightly, but maybe not really, off-topic: watching the (FTA) buildup to French test, and the (female, not that it matters maybe) presenter tells a *funny* story about how the guy she was interviewing liked to wind people up, and he was throwing bread at a lunch until his captain took a fork and drove it through his hand, pinning it to the table.
"That's one crazy Frenchman," she said with a smileMelodie Robinson? errr....
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Field Theory: Part of the Game, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
My rule of thumb is, if I fuck up, the players are allowed to swear within some reason, because they have the right to expect that I do a better job. I completely missed an Auckland player that threw an elbow the other week and right clocked a guy from Dunedin. Fair enough that the injured party gets up and says "for fucks sake ref, open your eyes" when I tell him I missed it, because it was a shit job on my part and he's right.
I suppose it depends on what the sport is because in league, rugby, soccer and maybe other sports you can stop and give the lecture, but in others it is supposed to flow. I don't know.
I always appreciate a ref who says "shut the &^%# up" after they have given a call. Provided it isn't against any team I support and is following a correct call :)
I was never a captain and found that the first time I asked a ref a question like, "what was that for?", I got a verbal response, and the second time I got penalised :(
Mad props to them.
F&%ken cheats ;(
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Field Theory: Part of the Game, in reply to Russell Brown,
We've gone through this at some length in my thread, but basically, you're wrong. Eden Park is a far more civil and safer place than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Many women attend games. I can't recall the last time I saw behaviour like that in question. Which made the park's weird, dismissive response all the more odd and unacceptable.
That's the weird thing to me. In some places and some respects things ARE more 'civilised' than they used to be. I find sport a lot cleaner than it used to be in terms of less on field violence. I could crank out a decent chapter in a book on violent incidents I saw in games played in (rugby league and rugby union) or saw growing up, but I find in most of the school and club games I see now that the players show more self control towards each other in league and union, but LESS to the refs/umpires. I was embarrassed to hear what was being said to umpires in cricket games I saw. And the umpires didn't deal with it. I escorted one of our abusive spectators (student) out of the school grounds a few years ago and he and his mum and mates were all pissy with me for being so 'strict'.
But I guess it depends on where you've been and what you've seen. When I was at school in the 80s and early 90s I don't remember hearing anybody swear within earshot of the teacher. Now it's a steady battle with a significant chunk of kids. The F-bomb (both of them) and C-bomb are regularly heard in the playground. Even in the class room I have to tell kids off fairly regularly for overly colourful language.
I was going to ask you guys if you'd kicked anybody out of the 'ground' or seen anything like that but then saw that you had which gives me a warm fuzzy because that's exactly what all refs and umps should be doing so keep it up. Backslap them fools err, metaphorically speaking :)
I was running the touchline for a game a couple of years ago and one of our boys dived in in the corner at great speed with tacklers involved and he planted and went through the corner post at basically the same time so benefit goes to the attacker especially given I had no chance to see it in slo-mo and so I told the ref it was OK and got called a "cheating c*nt" by the opposition team for my troubles. I went over to the ref and told him and he says to me "Ha, I've been called worse than that" and walked off.
Well mate, so long as you ref you'll continue to be called way worse, and regularly.
A lot of these refs ref in the same comp everyweek so you get ones that you know, because you'll have them 2, 3, 4 times a season, so if you know what they'll accept and not accept then you'll adjust. And the same goes for most other places, classrooms, schools, stadiums, fields, wherever...
Planet Earth, it's a battle ground.... :)
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It all basically comes down to tolerance by those in power. In the case of Eden Park it's those running the venue. If they think that it's up to society to sort out then perhaps they think it'd be a good idea for those being abused to get in a verbal stoush with them, or smack seven shades of shit out of the abuser(s) right there in row 33, section 6? Would they find that to be part of the solution? I doubt it.
In terms of abuse of referees at local sports fields the most power is with the referee. No ref = no game. They have to seize it. When I played in the 90s we would get penalised for saying things like "c'mon ref" after a call we didn't like so we pretty much knew not to go there. In hundreds of games I played in I can't clearly recall a ref being directly abused by a player or spectator (not that I could hear anyway :) ). We were conditioned like little puppies what to say, and what not to say.
The larger sporting bodies are very supportive of their referees and when games get called off for violence or abuse of referees they tend to be quite harsh with their punishments. But there's not much they can do if it's put up with by the victim and then whinged about later. What is interesting is that the referees at higher levels actually would stop the game and order the abuser from the ground. By ground I mean basically outside the park boundaries. I've seen it happen when I've been a spectator more than once when they've been able to identify the abuser at small suburban grounds. So the authorities at stadiums should be mindful of their role in policing that sort of thing when it's happening out of ear shot of the match officials. That's their zone.
So good on this lady for calling these losers out and doing the stadium authorities job for them PROPERLY. Perhaps next time they'll do it themselves or else pay those who do it for them.
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Some break the midweek blues stuff here with a group of 11 year olds rocking out Time Square with some heavy metal piledriv'n shit!
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OnPoint: What Andrew Geddis Said, But…, in reply to Gareth Swain,
I have lived outside NZ for a long time now so it's very possible that I've lost touch with these things, but isn't $65 million a very small amount as far as budgets go? Among the various billions listed in national budgets, roughly $40 million in savings seems like such a small amount for the government to be making such a high-risk move as suspending the normal law-making processes.
It's sod all in the scheme of things. The wage bill at the school I teach at alone is over $10 million annually and then you throw in all the other running costs and the $65 million is only equivalent to about 4 large secondary schools. I'd try finding a remote control like in the movie "Click" to fast forward to the next election but god knows what we'd miss that they fucked up in the next 18 months.
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Meanwhile the big 'sports' story in the US today.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/magazine/news/20130429/jason-collins-gay-nba-player/?sct=hp_t11_a1