Kiwiblog

This Lynx Ad (on You Tube) has been shown just once on TV it seems – just prior to England’s World Cup match.

The filimng of the ad must have been very interesting!

Sonya Thomas is known as the black widow. Not because she eats the males of the species, shet out-eats them.

She has just won another eating competition despite weighing only 100 pounds comnpared to the 250+ pounds of other competitors.

Her records include the following:

# Chicken nuggets
* 80 chicken nuggets in 5 minutes

# Buffalo wings
* 162 chicken wings in 12 minutes

# Eggs
* 65 hard boiled eggs in 6 minutes and 40 seconds

# Hamburgers
* 7 burgers (3/4 pound) “Thickburgers” in 10 minutes

# Lobster
* 44 lobsters totaling 11.3 pounds of lobster meat in 12 minutes

# Oysters
* 46 dozen (552) Acme Oysters in 10 minutes

# Meatballs
* 10 pounds, 3 Ounces of Carmine’s Meatballs in 12 minutes.

Matthew Hooton writes in the SST on “The tragedy of Winston Peters“.

Hooton talks about how Peters had the talent to become Prime Minister, but now is a political joke with “his latest embarrassment being the juxtaposition of him opening a craft house in that vital New Zealand interest of Vanuatu, while our real foreign minister, Phil Goff, was inspecting the troops in East Timor.”

The problem isn’t that Winston can’t be a very good Foreign Minister – it is the absurd notion that one can be a foreign minister not being part of the government. Hooton uses the analogy that it is like saying you are only a little bit pregnant.

Dear Wellington Zoo,

I see that you now hire your cheetahs out for private functions.

I have a regular function every Monday morning at 10 am which would benefit from the presence of your cheetahs.

Please let me know the earliest possible Monday they will be available, and then at 10 am deliver them to the 10th floor of the Beehive. I suggest you just place them in a lift and push the 10th floor button, as there will be specialist keepers up there waiting for them.

I’ll arrange for the cheetahs to be returned to you, well-fed.

Many thanks

David Farrar

Hat Tip: Clouds of Heaven

All the columnists today are on the same theme:

Kerre Woodham says the Kahui twins were tortured and killed, and the fact the Police don’t yet know who is responsible is “a damning indictment of the family”.

Matt McCarten calls for politicians to concentrate on child abuse, not dogs.

Michael Laws talks of an underclass within Maori who are resistant to both mainstream and Maori assistance.

Finally John Tamihere says “The murder of the Kahui twins is an absolute tragedy for Maoridom – and for all New Zealanders.”

The SST has details of secret talks between Air NZ and Government Ministers over the proposal to co-operate rather than compete with Qantas.

It starkly shows the problems you have when the majority owner of a company is also the industry regulator. Instead of acting in the national interest (ie consumers and competition) it wants to act in the airline’s interest – just like when they tried to push through a semi-merger with Qantas.

As a general rule I favour private sector ownership, as you avoid this conflict between owner and regulator. I’d sell all but core monopolies such as Transpower (and even that could be done if structured in the right way).

It is rare to be stuck for words, but today was one of those times, as I learnt the family members killed in the Lower Hutt car crash were people I know. They were the father, brother and wife of one my colleagues at InternetNZ who in fact is overseas at the ICANN meeting.

Any death of a loved one is a tragedy. But I can not comprehend the grief to lose your parent, sibling and spouse together. I don’t even know what words one can say to convey your sorrow – words seem so inadequate.

Life is so senseless from time to time.

UPDATE: The Sunday Star-Times has further details.

Great to see progress on a film about Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay conquering Mt Everest. if done well, I am sure it will be a huge success.

The hard part will be the casting. Who to play Sir Ed?

As I predicted on 12 June, Bob Harvey is backing away from his own e-mails which clearly showed Chris Carter had pre-determined the Whangamata marina decision.

The Herald reports today that Harvey is using two of the three excuses I predicted he would use (Nos 1 and 2).

Compare the words of the e-mail to the weaselly explanation afterwards:

E-mail: The minister had asked him to get a “group of people together to support him in his decision …

Later: At no point … was it suggested or indicated to me he had made a decision …

E-mail: The minister felt it would be “overkill” for him to organise it “so he has asked me to assist quickly and effectively in getting a group of people together to support him

Later: An adviser in Mr Carter’s office, Michael Gibbs, had called Mr Harvey on March 1 and “we discussed the desirability of there being a more balanced set of views on the issue in the public domain”

The Herald also notes that Harvey did not call Gibbs, but Gibbs specifically called Harvey to get him to wind up supporters. Now who thinks a Ministerial staff member would do this, if he did not know the decision?

Gibbs is incidentially, not a neutral official, but a Labour activist. Nothing wrong with that, but it fits in with him being the sort of person you would delegate the job of organising support for a decision that you had to announce and would be controversial. Again there is nothing wrong with that except when the Minister claims to not have made his mind up in public, and is saying he is still considering the matter. That is the problem Carter faces.

I’ve noticed that many websites have a small graphic appear next to their name in the title bar in a tab or window in the browser.

What is the html code one should use to have that image appear?

I was surprised to learn, when I was over in Canada, that the age of consent there is only 14. It has been that since 1890!

The Government has just introduced a bill to raise the age to 16, but to have a “close age” exemption for 14 and 15 year olds if their partners are no more than five years older than them. So a 14 year old and 19 year old would be legal but a 15 year old and a 25 year old would not be.

Seems a pretty sensible change to me.

Incidentially the age iof consent is just 13 in Spain and Japan.

Tim Bermers-Lee, blogs on the importance of net neutrality.

If you are wondering why we should listen to him, well not many people can start a blog entry with:

“When I invented the Web …”

Dick Hubbard campaigned on the basis of reducing the level of rate rises. Then he put them up 9.7% in his first year. He then said the increase would be less the following year.

However they are set to increase by a massive 13.2%. That makes two broken promises.

Hat Tip: Whale Oil

I was puzzled by the fact the Commerce Commission set a $28.04 wholesale price for unconstrained UBS, when late last year it set the price at $27.87.

You see the wholesale price is calculated off the average Xtra retail price, and in early 2006 Telecom announced huge drops in Xtra pricing, so hence one would expect a drop in the wholesale price.

But as the Herald reports, while the monthly price dropped, there were reductions in non price terms such as data limits, and hence the overall value of the plan didn’t decrease by much, if at all!

The Commerce Commission has given Ihug and Callplus a determination similiar to the Telstra-Clear one of Dec 2005 (which they dropped after legal action from Telecom for an inferior negotiated package).

No constraint has been placed on download speeds so 7.6 Mb/s will be available in 18 weeks, or in November. You will need to live close to an exchange to get this though.

The wholesale price of $28.04 a month is higher than I expected though, so too early to predict what effect this may have on retail prices.

Consumer Online has a nifty wee broadband speed test. It measures both download and upload speeds.

My download speed on Ihug was clocked at 1732 Kbps and upload at 130 Kbps.

In theory I have a 3.5 Mbps plan, but my connection speed is only 2.2 Mbps.

Good God. The seasonally adjusted current account deficit for the last quarter was $4.1 billion. This is the worst deficit in the 52 years it has been measured.

That brings the annual deficit to $14.5b or 9.3% of GDP.

It’s a hard problem for the Government as most of the borrowing is private not public sector.

People have complained about my lack of coverage of the Soccer World Cup.

Well I’m pleased to provide this coverage of the Sweden United team. They even have their own homepage.

Actually I should work out what team to support. I could support England, Germany or Australia to win.

Fresh from making Civil Defence look like Dad’s Army, Rick Barker is just as confusing with Internal Affairs.

DIA in early June said the Karori bird sanctuary grant was turned down primarily because of the loan from WCC.

But last week in the House he said the loan was not an issue at all which affected the decision.

So do you believe the Minister or the Department?

No wonder Marian Hobbs was heard to exclaim “bullshit” when Rick Barker was speaking in the House.

Fresh from making Civil Defence look like Dad’s Army, Rick Barker is just as confusing with Internal Affairs.

DIA in early June said the Karori bird sanctuary grant was turned down primarily because of the loan from WCC.

But last week in the House he said the loan was not an issue at all which affected the decision.

So do you believe the Minister or the Department?

The Christian Science Monitor has an article on anti-american vitriol in NZ.

It is of course absolutely legitimate to object to the policies of the current US Government. But too many Kiwis really despise the US regardless of who is in Government there – they see it as the most evil country and as a bigger threat to the world than Al Qaeda etc. People on this blog have even commented that the world would be a better place without the US.

For my part I actually agree with Winston Peters when he said something like if the world is to have a sole super-power, he would rather it is the United States than any other country.

The major policy concession NZ First got from Labour was the pledge for 1,000 more police.

However current numbers are actually 59 below last June.

This leaves the Government with just over two years to increase numbers by 1,000. Now one will have natural attrition of perhaps 500 in that time, so in reality the Government has to recruit 1,500 police officers in 24 months.

I’m not sure this can be done. I hope they do, but I think they have left it too late.

Sue Bradford (who was in the Wgtn studio with me this morning) did a good job explaining why the four Green MPs voted for National’s amendment. A partial victory is better than a loss. It’s the same principle that you would expect ACT to vote for a cut in tax rates, even if the cuts don’t go as far as they would like.

It is no bad thing that the Greens split on a non-core issue. National MPs also have the ability to split votes. Labour of course do not – you get expelled if you vote against the party without permission.

What is unusual though is to have the party leader in the minority, and quite clearly pissed off with her colleagues. It seems she only found out late yesterday that they were definitely going to vote for the amendment.

Anyway well done to Keith Locke, Sue Bradford, Nandor Tanczos and Sue Kedgley for not letting a difference in approaches between United Future and the Greens get in the way of stopping a measure which less than half of Parliament supported.

Fran O’Sullivan has some lessons from Ireland on how to grow the economy:

* Seduce direct foreign investment
* Get a sugar daddy
* Let the private sector just do it
* Surf the Wave
* Build roads

All works for me, well apart from the sugar daddy!

From Wednesday Question Time

Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN: As I mentioned yesterday, an alternative priority I am aware of is the suggestion that the Minister of Finance