blogging it real

Dave Dobbyn, proud owner of a new website, new album, and title of all-round New Zealand rock legend. Not to mention "Welcome Home", the new single which provides a wonderful antidote to the Winston Peters Brigadge and their reprehensible scare-mongering, slandering, and pandering to base fears. Dave's song's good enough to start a riot on Queen Street, what with it looking like Hong Kong and all. :)

The All Blacks vs Fiji was a good laugh, wasn't it, and a useful reminder that there are only about 7 or 8 competitive teams in the world of test rugby. Jim Kaves points out it's not Fiji's fault they "are starved of games and resources. That fault lies with the IRB which takes every penny it can from the World Cups but seems to do nothing with it." They certainly don't use it to build their own poxy stadia, or anything resembling an international game. Kaves concludes, thoughtfully, that the whole exercise was "sad for Fiji, bad for rugby and largely a waste of time." Well said.

Update: Graham Reid at Public Address has an incisive piece on the media's mid-winter "silly-season", complete with the following comments:

I can live without the daily drip-feed of Barmy Army stories, what some blokes on the West or East Coast thinks about our team, the articles about women supporters of the Lions, the photo shoots of players going about their PR business, and so on. [...]

Consider this from statement from Brendan Telfer on Radio Sport: "It's part of our ethos, that every man, woman and child is behind the All Blacks whenever they play."

Bullshit.

I for one am looking to profit from betting on the Lions to win. As for "media stories we'd like to see" ... with the fortunes of National and NZF on the rise, I'd like to see an investigation of what types of people are likely to make it into Parliament on their lists.