The Lowest Form of Wit

I’m going to diverge slightly from my usual ravings for a moment, to talk about the state of cricket in NZ.

It seems that NZ Cricket has stepped up it’s involvement in recent times, with outspoken head Justin Vaughan fast becoming a near-ubiquitous feature of media reports and broadcasts.

And it is good to see strong leadership in the sport, provided it knows it’s place - but that leads me to the issue of Stephen Fleming.  I’m still a bit stunned personally that one of NZ’s most successful and universally-respected captains of all time - even the Aussies at their peak never had anything but praise and admiration for the man - was relieved of his captaincy.  Statistics never told the tale when it came to Steven Fleming, and I can’t help but feel that the NZ side have lost a couple of what could have been valuable years under the leadership of one of the best we’ve had, and that it’s more than a little criminal to have Fleming walk out into the park in the NZ test uniform in a role other than captain.

I’ve grown to dislike World Cup Fever (an attitude I probably share with a lot of Kiwis, after our sporting debacles of 2007) - the ’special preparations’ that the teams put in during the lead-up year, the frantic pressure on the players, the drastic changes and measures put in place in an effort to miraculously step things up (often to no avail, in my opinion), and the one-track mind focus on the whole furore, at the expense of all else.

I think Fleming was the obvious (after-the-fact) victim of WCF this time around, but I also think that the selection and development departments have at times squandered the opportunity to foster and build a stronger and more consistent team when they’ve had the chance.  For one thing, selectors are too quick to act on short-lived form of late.  There’s more of a tendency to drop players overnight if their past few performances aren’t at the high end of their achievement scale.  This can be seen with Stephen Fleming, and perhaps even moreso with the recent announcement that Scott Styris won’t be part of the current test squad.  

Perhaps I’m a little simple-minded when it comes to the backroom tactics and reasonings of cricket, but I can’t help wishing that team selection was primarily driven by old-school criteria such as "being one of the country’s best-performing and most respected international batsmen".  I respect the fact that they wish to have batsmen who they feel can occupy the crease a long time in the impending test series, but to focus on that to the extent that you’d overlook a player of Styris’ ilk?  Not good selection in my books.  If Cumming, Sinclair and co. work out, then great, but I still don’t think it’s fair to leave Styris out on the basis of only a couple of tough series abroad, after all of his positive and consistent achievements in both forms of the game over a long period of time, and excellent form.

It’s a fair tactic to plan and groom players for the future, but I don’t believe that NZ has the depth of talent to forego recognised world-class players on a regular basis, in pursuit of a gamble hoping to stumble upon some winning formula of fresh talent.  Particularly not when some of your top players (including the best pace bowler NZ has seen for literally decades*) are being enticed away to rebel leagues, and when early retirement by experienced and accomplished players seems to be becoming more and more commonplace (is it because they’re "past it"? or because the administrative environment became untenable?).

While it’s understood that NZ Cricket has a duty to the game itself, let’s not forget the game’s most valuable asset - the experienced players.  And let’s also not forget that we are a small country with few sporting resources compared to many of our rivals, and that we are often, by default, the underdog.  Hastily throwing out players that, despite a bad patch, have thoroughly proven themselves on the world stage, and hoping that new blood will suddenly elevate us to the top is just not going to work.

*RIP Shane Bond in NZC - probably.  Seeing one of our quicks bowl out the Aussies (instead of the other way around, for once) was one of the greatest highlights of my 25-year-and-counting cricket-watching career.

Yarrr 2008 [editor: this was written not long after the New Year].  With those prolonged festivities out of the way, let’s get on to today’s topic - an endearing little human-interest news item I read earlier.

Snipped article below:

So, let’s recap.  God was clearly "looking after the place" - after all, what better way is there to look after something than to have it catch fire??  Though one would infer from the article that the church catching fire in the first place was in fact not God’s fault, but that the actions of the woman who put the fire out were obviously his manifest will.

Backing up this startling miracle, we have a further heart-warming surprise in store - get this: hay-festooned items in a nativity scene were apparently burned in the short-lived fire, while a nearby ceramic angel - whose construction incidentally involved being fired for hours in a kiln-oven at 1000+ degrees - incredibly enough, failed to burn!!  Oh my gawwd!

The icing on the cake though, is the final sentence.  "She was sitting in the middle looking like nothing was happening".  Well stop the presses here folks, and bring out your boldest headline fonts:

Somebody call the Pope, he’s gonna want to hear about this one.  I think we may just have the basis for a New New Testament here.

I indulged in a healthy dinner of Macca’s last night, and tried that new Name-It burger among other things.  I think I’ve devised a suitably catchy moniker for it - The Not-Particularly-Good BurgerKing-Ripoff Burger.  I’m sure my prize is coming any day now.  Provided it’s not a lifetime supply of those burgers, I’ll be happy.

It’s quite funny how they blithely sell these burgers that have "50% daily saturated fat intake" written on the box, yet still do their damnedest to market their healthy wholesome image.  I’m sure there’s some alternate-reality where having 150-odd% of your recommended daily saturated fat in one meal is considered healthy, but I think Macca’s may have picked the wrong one.  Unless they wanted to make a trillion dollars of course, in which case they’ve definitely come to the right place!

Still, at least they put that 2 mouthfuls of lettuce in your Big Mac - that makes up for all the bad stuff, right?

Maybe in the future we’ll have teleportation at our disposal.  That’ll be the ultimate - we’ll be able to laze back on our floating couches and have an edible sack of blended Maccas-and-Coke teleported directly into our stomachs.  Mmmmm.  None of this pesky chewing business.

On the other hand, while fast food’s great, we’re not all in a frantic hurry.  I think "slow food" is a niche market yet to be fully explored.  Maccas could have McDonalds, McCafe.. and McHangi.  You go in and pay for your meal - then they start digging the hole and heating up the rocks…

Ahh dating sites - strange, strange places.  A segregated, exaggerated digital reflection of the twistedness of real-life human interaction.

They often feature profile-search boxes, and while some sites have the foresight to set the default search age-range as 18-30, or 20-30, as you’d perhaps expect, others have the default search age-range set as 18-99 - obviously anybody who uses these sites is presumed (perhaps unfairly!) to have potentially low standards, but I think I’ll refine my search just a little further than that, thank you!  Though I applaud the technical prowess (not to mention other areas of prowess that we won’t go too far into, for your imagination’s sake) of any 99-yr-old women out there who are using dating sites.  I note (for no particular reason, I swear!) that the highest selectable/searchable age is 99 - a shame for any horny cyber-centenarians out there!  

[editor: great topic, by the way!  Who wouldn’t want their readership comprised of people who’ve Googled the terms “dating horny 99 year olds”??]

Speaking of which, I had my first look around a NZ dating site last night (just for fun, I assure you - you won’t find me on there!).  It was a little surprising to see over 100 women from my region on there – none that I specifically knew, but there were a few that I thought I recognised from having seen around at random places.

A few of the profiles had me in stitches.  Like this one, who could have alternatively called herself Miss_Subtle:

Maybe I should follow suit and call myself vag_obliterator or something equally ‘cryptic’.  (side note: you wouldn’t expect any Google search results for the term "vag_obliterator", would you? Well, consider yourself educated - not surprisingly, it’s been used before by none other than an online role-playing nerd, whose only theoretical involvement with vag involves the steady obliteration of his chances of ever actually getting any).    

This profile is an absolute gem, it has me cracking up every time I think about it:

"Sometimes in alleys" is undeniably classy, but when I read "im not desperate but im keen to meet new people who are free of STD’s" I was almost rolling on the floor.  I mean, that’s setting the bar real high right there!  I could model my profile after hers, with something along the lines of "I’m quite picky, I only go for girls who have exclusively-female genitalia".  Not an entirely untrue statement by the way!  I don’t loves_the_cock…

(‘chop courtesy of OCAU’s Assasinator_2)