h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Walter, I would be more than pleased to share with you how the mighty Kiwi Olympic machine will go in Sydney's upcoming, magnificent, event.

Gold: Womens discus, mens rowing (singles), equestian (2), sailing (3, women's cycling.

Silver: Women's hockey, men's cycling, rowing, sailing.

Bronze: Probably about another 5 medals, covering various events.

Apart from the swimmers and Cathy Freeman, do you think any other Aussies will win gold?

Have you been enjoying Kiwi, John Clarke's, excellent TV satire about The Games?

Loony, a humble, caring, sharing, modest, type of guy.

PS. In Tasmania, is Tumbridge Wells anywhere near Margate?

Gooday Looneytunes,

Yes, I thoroughly enjoy John Clarke's 'The Games' - he is one of your best-ever exports (in fact I can't actually bring to mind any others, leaving aside the million or so Enzedders at Bondi).

Sorry, if there is a Tumbridge Wells in these parts it has escaped my notice, but then many things of lesser importance suffer a similar fate.

I may get burned at the stake for saying this, but I don't actually give a tinker's toss who wins what at the Olympics but by the same token I will not begrudge NZ competitors winning a swag of medals if they are up to it.

Has anyone caught up with the result of the South Africa-New Zealand game? No? Me neither, although I guess on exposed form the All Blacks must have got up quite comfortably. Take care,

Walter.

Without wishing to pass any comment of the performance of the Australian ref, in a shocking upset in SA overnight, SA narrowly defeated the mighty All Blacks 46-40.

The game was an excellent spectacle, played in a devil-may-care manner.

The Aussie ref....

Gooday Looneytunes,

Sorry, I was being mischievous, I watched the Game. It can't be too often that an international team scores forty points and still goes down. South Africa had a pretty good weekend all round; Australia lost the final cricket one dayer, but only because match referee Brian Hastings robbed us of two overs. Does anyone know what nationality Hastings is? Take care,

Walter.

Dear oh dear. Normally, if I get a masochistic urge to see a national team lose at the last moment to Australia, I'll watch the netball. But the All Blacks' second test against the Wallabies proved difficult to escape.

The build-up was frenzied and the fans were happy And that was just in my house. As for the ticket-scalpers, they were positively ecstatic. Andrew Mehrtens was poised to break some points record or other. And didn't we do so well last time? The Bledisloe Cup, that faithless minx, beckoned. The siren call of Tri-Nations triumph was on the wind. "I sense a great game on our hands here today!" predicted commentator Murray Mexted, wildly. In other words, all the ingredients for a major national disappointment were assembled in Wellington's flash new "Cake Tin" and ready to pop in the oven.

Well, at least Truebliss won the sing-off. How would they approach the task? At the World Cup, we got the national anthem once in Maori, not at all in English. At the last test against Australia, we strained patriotic vocal cords and the patience of the opposition, by doing it twice in Maori, once in English, never mind the haka still to come. TrueBliss took a conservative approach - just the once in Maori, same again in English. In their Blackout gear they looked, prophetically, as it turned out, like a brace of stylish undertakers They did pull out a strong, upbeat ending to the dreary dirge. which is more than could be said for the game that followed.

Bardot looked cold. They took the normally stirring "Advance Australia Fair" by the throat and over-harmonised it into submission, as Australian players and fans struggled to sing along.

As for the commentary, in NZ we Sky viewers now get a choice of Murray Mexted and Grant Nisbett, or "Mex and Nisbo", on the television or tune into "the guys from Gore" on the radio. Nerds can do it on-line.

I stuck with Mex and Nisbo, which in Mexted's case, turned out to be an entertainment in itself. I hadn't experienced the full Murray before. While he lacks the Old Testament, "Cometh the hour, cometh the man!" thunder of Aussie commentators at full throttle, his genteel verbal stylings in the arena of rugby discourse are endearing. They reminded one of 'arold Steptoe, of the classic British sitcom Steptoe and Son, when he tried to rise above his surroundings by talking posh in the junkyard. "Anton Oliver playing with panache at first-five-eight," Mex would ejaculate. "A goal is imminent, I would imagine," he would suggest, as Mehrtens lined up a kick.

"They are a handful when they've got the ball in hand!" Murray would muse affectionately, as the Australians once again took possession. Though, when the Wallabies Ben Tune got tackled hard for the third time, Murray revealed his stoic side: "I dare say he's the sort of man who can handle it.

In keeping with this digital age, Murray's commentary is often interactive. You can choose A, B, C or all of the above, as with this masterful analysis of a nice drop kick.. "He seized the situation and sized up the situation and took the opportunity!"

Only occasionally did Murray entirely drop the ball. At one point the ref went over to consult the linesman about a possible infringement. Thanks to the miracle of modern voice amplification, we could all clearly hear the linesman advise the ref to give the player in question "a serious bollocking". Murray seized the situation, sized up the situation and ... got confused. "What does that mean?" puzzled Muzza. "He's going to tell him off," explained Grant Nisbett patiently.

Oh well. When things got dull, which didn't happen too often in what was largely a belter of a game, there was always Murray's wind commentary The new surroundings had him flannelling on happily. "The wind is swirling a bit here inside the stadium," he noted. "The architect tells us that 65 percent of the wind is deflected off the roof. Whether that's a reality or not, I'm not sure." The wind was certainly swirling around Mex's side of the commentary box, undetected by any new architectural features.

So, was it all South African ref Jonathan Kaplan's fault? Mex and Nisbo had been extolling his virtues earlier on, but that second half did seem awfully long to me. Our household's visiting armchair expert laid the blame squarely on St Toddy, for thinking it was over well before the fat lady had finished singing. To make the point, he paused the VCR at the point where Blackadder made the international hand signal for "This game is #?!%ing over, ref" and was comprehensively ignored. See? All they had to do was slow things down, hang on to the ball and wait it out. Instead they managed to cram half a game's worth of mistakes - an ill-judged kick, two failed line outs and a penalty against them - into those last minutes. Whereas, of course, the Wallabies, one point down, played like men possessed right up until the final whistle.

"Obviously, needless to say," Murray observed sadly, "when the heart is in it, it hurts a lot to lose by so little. " Thus proving again that, when something is obvious and doesn't need saying, as is so often the case with rugby, Murray's your man.

Toddy, grappling with his first loss as captain, left the thesaurus to Mex and stuck to elementary sportspeak "Yeah ... a lot of intensity ... always disappointing ... That's rugby. That's just the way it is ... Never mind ... There's always next time."

And, at the end of the day, as the Wallabies carried of the Bledisloe Cup, again, there was really nothing more to say.

Apart from the sound of a multitude of Australians geeting very drunk, I'm sure not much sound was heard at all.

To get me (hopefully) up to speed with the conversation:
- 'The Games' is an excellent series; John Clarke has always been a most welcome defector in my view.
- The cricket ended up as a draw only because some supposedly 'in form' South Africans were rather late in achieving said form - Australia should never have had a chance (though they did play some outstanding cricket in the first game).
- As for the Olympics, I am beyond overhyped - the quicker it's over and done with and gone the better - the Olympics is like Star Wars: The Fandom Menace: no product is worth this much hype.

And in breaking news, the, some would unkindly say, uncultured, Aussies go and put a picture of the wrong building on the Olympic medals.

Hey guys, the old building in Greece, where the Games originated, is the Pantheon.

Giggle.

Gooday Looneytunes,

Pantheon? Take even more care.

Walter.

Walter, be careful not to confuse the words "pantheon" and "The Pantheon".

The Greeks used early Roman concrete technology based on that used in Rome's version of a pantheon to build their colosseum.

Gooday Looneytunes,

The first Olympic Games were staged in 776BC, when the Romans had not even cemented their names in ancient history, let alone discovered the marvellous properties of cement. Olympia, and places such as the Panathenian stadium are where it all happened in Greek antiquity. No cement, just acres of marble and stone. Rome's Pantheon was built in the second century AD (although conceived by Marcus Agrippa c25BC), nearly a thousand years after the Olympic Games began. It was a temple, not a stadium. And although the word Colosseum derives from Greek, it was the Romans who built and named it as such. Take care,

Walter.

Carefully moving right on.

We won't discuss the result, but after several clangers in the games preceding Sunday's rugby test against the Springboks, the commentary team deserves some credit.

Murray Mexted called the cauldron of Ellis Park "deepest, darkest Africa"; Grant Nesbett referred to the All Blacks "user-friendly defence". All was going well till a siren went off. Mexted couldn't resist: "There are hooters here everywhere, Nisbo."

Loony

Gooday yet again Looneytunes,

Why exactly is it that we should not discuss THE result? 46-40: FORTY-SIX, is that the highest score recorded against the All Blacks? If it isn't it can't be too far short. And knocked off by the previously winless Seth Efricans. Looks like the Tri-Nations trophy is headed across the Tasman this year, but after all NZ has done very well in the competition in recent years - you've got to give us second-rank nations a bit of a sniff once in a while. take care,

Walter.

My my my. Gentlemen please.

...saucer of milk anyone?

Gooday Wowbagger,

Meeow, but not that lite stuff. Take care,

Walter.

Be careful boys

*Priscillas asked to close Games

A group of Sydney's most glamorous drag queens will frock up in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert outfits to take a starring role in the Olympic closing ceremony. They will perform on a float which is a "tribute to drag", featuring as part of a celebration of Australian culture

Gooday Looneytunes,

Hey, our press is covering TODAY the breaking 'controversy' about the design of the medals. Congratulations on being first to bring us this scoop. Absolutely no doubt in my mind that the medal shows the Colosseum, and this seems to have been confirmed by the medals' designer cum engraver, who claims he worked to 'directions'. Even the Romans made a sharp distinction between 'Games' and what passed for entertainment in the Colosseum.

Given the accuracy of your medal story, I guess I have to take seriously your report on Priscilla et al. To coin a phrase, moving carefully right on .... Take care,

Walter.

This is the latest I have seen about the medals.

* Medal design upsets Greeks
Sydney Olympic organisers have been ridiculed in Greece after
it emerged that medals for next month's Games mistakenly depict
the Roman Colosseum instead of the Greek Parthenon. SOCOG has
claimed that the medal design, which was approved by the
International Olympic Committee, depicts a generic colosseum as
opposed to the Roman edifice

Gooday Looneytunes,

The 'drag queen at the Olympics' closing ceremony' has certainly started a furore. A quote for you from this morning's press: The Rev Fred Nile MP: "Homosexual and lesbian behaviour is not a true representation of Australian culture and lifestyle." So there! Take care,

Walter.

Walter, after carefully reading your latest post and taking into account the scorn being heaped on Australia by Greece, I believe I have spotted a conflict of interest regarding the origins of the Rev Fred Nile, MP, (or his ancestors) and his anti-Pricilla stance. I suspect his debatable view on Aus culture is a flag-waving, vote-catching, distancing exercise.

I remain...etc