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

Gooday Loonytunes and Wowbagger,

What tennis? Is tennis an Olympic sport nowadays?

But talking of choking back a sob, well, we won't be crying for Argentina, but we could maybe spare a condescending if sympathetic tear for the supposed potential gold medal Enzed women's hockey team. Haven't checked the medal table this morning, but would have to assume that medal-wise NZ is still the land of the dark, sombre, depressing cloud. Serves you right really for having women as Prime Ministers - in sporting terms your decline as a nation is directly linked to having sheilas at the helm. Bring back Piggy and Lange!

Walter

The Sydney harbour bridge was hit by lightening this morning (last night?) while NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark was walking over it. I wonder if she plans to go swimming?

Don't tell me she,s moved over here as well

Wowbagger,

Is it true?? Are you preggers? Congratulations to you and the mother to be.

Walter.

I post this insightful gem fromm the Sydney Morning Herald site without comment.

Silver medal: Jai Taurima takes the silver medal, and he is full of different emotions after the comepetition. It was extraordinary he would be in the gold medal position, but following his Australian record leap of 8.49m he probably thought he couldn't be beaten. But then came Pedroso with his wonderful pressure jump of 8.55m to take the gold from Taurima's grasp. The Australian had one last chance to have a crack at that total, but fell short with a disappoiting 8.20m. He would be more than happy with the silver though.

Gooday Loonytunes

I watched the long jump. Until last night I hadn't realised we had a long jumper named Jai Taurima. I actually expected to come here and find a reference to the men's hockey choke.

Moment of the Games so far? The Paralympian women's 800 last night, with Samaranch making presentations to the placegetters. True grit, true stuff, true Olympians.

Walter

G'day Walter, I missed most of last night's action because of a prior engagement at my Club which meant I saw the pictures of the wheelchair races through a bit of a drunken haze. I did enjoy Jai's retro 70s look though.

On NZ TV this morning they mentioned these are our worst Olympics, results wise, since Helsinki. The good news is that there will be enormous pressure put on the government to put more money into sport development programmes. At the moment most funding is targeted towards, so called, elite athletes. The money is being used to maintain elite lifestyles me thinks.

Yes Walter it's true.

Wowbagger,

Wonderful!!

When is the little one due to arrive?

Walter.

Some thoughts from the Olympic family of sports...

"Coxless Fours" - ye gods, what a fearful misnomer. It was a day of the Cox on that victory dais. Princess Anne hung the medals round the winners' necks - and well hung they were too. "She's Stephanie Graff so we must be careful not to call her Steffi," warns NZ TV commentator Brendan Telfer. 2.04 seconds later... "and it's Steffi Graff who... " "Michael, Michael, how was your run?" calls a TV reporter to 400m champion Michael Johnson. "Good," he replies. His answers are as long as his races. There are 33 seconds to go in our last game of women's basketball and we're winning 70-69. So, bearing in mind the NZ-Spain hockey game, I've switched off the telly and written this down.

I'm surprised the nandrolone steroid people haven't taken advantage of the occasion and bought TV commercial space at the Olympics. Hell, why not? They're represented in almost every event.

To put the mightiness of Eric the Eel's performance into perspective - the Napier under-10 girls' 100m freestyle record is 1m 13s. Eric's time was 1m 52s. In fairness to Eric, I should add that the under-10 record was timed using a hand-held stopwatch. If white men can't jump, how come there was only one black face in the high jump final? The opposite of sport is beach volleyball. Hooray - the Tall Blacks won their final game. They defeated mighty Angola, who once held Equatorial Guinea to a scoreless draw. Just kidding.

Why don't they synchronise beach volleyball and get rid of both silly sports at once? I knew how they scored at the diving until TV NZ commentator John McBeth explained it - now I haven't a clue. My friend Mac has a question: "If one synchronised swimmer drowns, do the others have to drown too?"

"He's a classy boxer this," says TV NZ commentator Tony Palmer. POW! KO" ... But as I was about to say, he's up against an even classier one." Ashol Danielyon broke the world record in the super heavy weightlifting event - and got third.

"She's now seen as Marion Jones, husband of CJ Hunter." Brendan Telfer. Hockey. We play Argentina for a chance at gold and alas, the dream-on team is born. Greco-Roman wrestling? My stars, it should be called Consenting Adults wrestling. Let's not discuss the discus.
Women's tae-kwon-do - we learn that women have a "below the belt" as well. A Cuban finalist aims there as often as Andrew "The Pelvic Polak" Golota does in boxing. "Cathy Freeman to sell winning bodysuit." She must have seen the footage of herself in the preposterous thing.

Pole vaults: I reckon a certain vaulter felt about 10,000 of them in his scrotum the other night. The saga of Marion Jones: DRIVE FOR FIVE" After the long jump ... CLAW FOR FOUR! To be continued.

Hicham El-Guerrouj is beaten! Are Moroccan children too soft? Should they be taught mongrel"? Should the Moroccan government pro-actively re-prioritise and allocate more dirham to sport? But then what a splendid Games impoverished little Cuba had. Should we starve our athletes to glory? Hmm. A royal inquiry into Olympic Failure is called for. Don't bother, the answer is simple: Aussies win because they're scared of losing. We lose because we're scared of winning. I'm CEO of a Failure Consultancy; that information has just cost you $24.3 million.

March.

Eric the Eel represents what a few of my mates reckon the olympics should be - a competition for amateurs - submit your name as a potential olympian, everyone's name goes into a hat and the participants are drawn out 2 weeks before the games - events are random too. It would be brilliant if you ask me .

....unless your name is drawn to run the marathon.

Weren't the fireworks spectacular. Was Paul Hogan looking so grumpy because he has lost the contract to repaint the bridge. Kiwi John Stevens is a better singer than Michael Hutchence. Funniest part of the closing ceremony was the lawnmower man. Did the PC police bar Priscilla and her friends? Has Australia got any youthful icons?

Gooday Loonytunes,

I'm a better singer than Michael Hutchence. Youthful icons: the lass who opened and closed the Games was youthful and gorgeous enough for me, and if she wasn't an icon before this extravaganza she certainly is now. But how good to see John Paul Young and Jimmy Barnes and Men at Work rocking the stadium and lounge rooms all over the world, and Slim Dusty didn't let his side down either. I thought Angry Anderson and Rose Tattoo might have got a guernsey though. Thought Priscilla and the girls were great, but not sure if the ceremony was any better for Mick Dundee and the Great White Mullet going around.

March. Will this be the first?

Cricket. Not really interested, but couldn't help noticing that Zimbabwe rolled Enzed in the deciding match of the limited overs series. Did it in style, actually; chased 264 and got home with two overs to spare and an opener sitting on 99 not out. Take care,

Walter.

Cricket update. Three of our top bowlers are injured. (We've only got four). I dread to think what the South Africans are going to do to us in the coming weeks.

The ageing male NZ commentators called the Priscilla lookalikes "kewpie dolls".

Gooday Loonytunes,

If you are receiving, could you pop over to Pheroneous, who is looking for advice on what happens to guide entries, or something like that. You are the only person I know here who will probably be able to help. Sorry, I can't give you a direct connect, but you can find P on my page under Hi-Fi chat forum. Thanks cobber, and take care.

Walter.

Loony,

Thanks a lot, cobber.

Walter.

Everyone knows that the best stories in the papers are buried in a column usually headlined "News in brief". It's here that we find such staggering and random reports that a swarm of bees has stung a flock of geese to death in Australia, that two burglars who appeared before a Zambian magistrate were wearing his shirts, and that a Russian killed his mother and ate her liver after flying it on the stove. Mostly to read up on ancient football reports, I occasionally buy old copies of the London Daily Mirror, which used to bind a weeks worth of newspapers together, and ship them out to New Zealand; they are a treasure trove of the vivid, trivial, brief report. July 15, 1954: a briefcase lost in Bolton and sold as lost property had two sandwiches in it. May 7, 1972: four armed men wearing Arsenal shirts robbed a post office of £18,000 on their way to the FA Cup final at Wembley.

And this just in, from Nelson - the opening sentence of a five-paragraph story told in 22 beautifully chosen words, with its Jack-and-Jill monosyllables and its one crucial comma: "He wanted to lie naked in the sun and drink wine, but ended up surrounded by armed police who shot his dog."

Bloody hell. At one level, the interesting thing about that sentence is the elegance of its language - in an attempt to influence the future of newspaper reporting, I handed out photocopies to liven up a typically boring lecture I recently gave to a class of journalism students. Cheers to the subeditor who crafted that small, shimmering miracle; the dynamic narrative (a nice lie-down shattered by a gunshot) and deep sense of mystery (who called the cops? what dog?) has the glow of art. It may even be the Great New Zealand Sentence. The rest of the story explained itself in the boring language of journalism - it was based on a case in the district court. The incident seemed sad, unpleasant, dismal. A 35-year-old man, described as "harmless" and "of no fixed abode", stopped by a house that he thought was abandoned, took off his clothes in the yard, and got stuck into some wine. "But the house was not derelict and the occupants called the police ... The prosecutor said the man's dog was shot because it was savage and had previously injured someone." The guy was convicted and sentenced to nine months"'supervision".

A sorry state of affairs. Quite obviously, the full picture is missing - the man's side of the story, the dog's side of the story, what it may or may not say about life in Nelson - but the fact of the matter is that I'll remember this story long after the front-page lead with its heavy-inked headline has wandered across my mind and disappeared. Some new crisis in the Clark regime, a dark warning about drug abuse, claims that business confidence is low ... on Morning Report and the evening news on TV, these solemn and important events go in one ear and out the other.

Always more astonishing is the ordinary chaos of the world. A few winters ago, friends invited me for the weekend at a holiday home in Leigh; someone cooked a big meal, there was an incident on a gentle hill involving vertigo, we had wood-fired baths in the pitch darkness; it was all very pleasant. But what I remember most is reading a small report in the local paper about some poor wretch who was caught masturbating in long grass outside a women's public toilet. He told the judge: "I think I might have a problem." You can almost hear his pitiful, accurate bleat. And while it's true that I don't recall the judgment of the court - although you would have to think the guy was given "supervision" -the poignancy of the event was as memorable as its sordid nature. Again, what it says about life in New Zealand is left to the imagination.

My own favourite as a working journalist involved a case of assault in the district court at Greymouth. It came just after a case where two blokes were had up for shaving a forestry worker's eyebrows while he was asleep - "It's just about a West Coast tradition," reckoned one of the assailants. "He who falls asleep loses an eyebrow." This kept me wide awake at all times. Anyway, it was then the turn of a guy to plead guilty to hitting a woman at a party. The night after he had helped to sandbag Greymouth wharf during a flood, he got boozed at a party, belted a woman, and her boyfriend stepped in and kicked him in the head, and threw him against a potbelly stove; he suffered second-degree bums. What had happened is that the woman treated the guy's dog "in a bizarre and unacceptable fashion". She had masturbated it. What this says about a dog's life in New Zealand is unclear, but the woman had clearly gone too far, and the guilty man's lawyer told the judge - this is verbatim, true, superb - "My client was highly upset, and so was his dog."

Loony,

Loved that piece, will definitely be able to smile better through the day. Particularly taken with the Russian who ate his mother's liver "after flying [sic] it on the stove." What, with a side dish of flied lice was it?

Walter.

Bill Gates and his dodgy spellchecker have got a lot to answer for

I see we had a draw with the poms overnight - must have got good odds on that one ...