Hard News: Actually, I've always been really into yacht racing
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We're not a sailing nation. We're a nation of lawn-mowing mortgage slaves.
thats a bit depressing for a saturday morning. did you mow some dog poo or something? what you need is a trip to the beach
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Gregor, I tend to agree that sailing is an engaging sport to participate in, and NZ seems to be good at it. It's nice that an old fella can be part of it.
I think a lot of anti-America's Cup-ness is jealousy, and the perception is that sailing is a sport for the wealthy because yachts are expensive, especially America's Cup ones. Which is silly because most of the people participating don't own the yachts, just like most rugby players don't own the club.
Of course anyone who does own a yacht, or part share in one, is likely to take a keen interest, and the hype around the America's Cup is largely through strong promotion from such characters, who are regarded with a great deal of hostility throughout NZ. We have never had a culture of praising the wealthy, unless they appear to be self-made salt of the earth Bob Jones types, and even then they are eventually distrusted.
Call it tall poppy syndrome, or egalitarianism. Whatever, it's a phenomenon I didn't really encounter so much living in Ozzie. I don't think it's the most admirable quality about Kiwis.
Having said all that, I still find yacht racing a very substandard spectator sport. There's just not that much to see. The subtleties you refer to are mostly invisible to the human eye. The fact that a huge part of the outcome is simply decided by who has the better boat is also an unappealing factor. Every time I've ever watched a head-to-head yacht race series, it was usually an all-nothing outcome. One side totally dominates the other through the better boat and probably better crew. That makes for a dull spectacle. Once one boat pulls ahead, the game is usually over and the next hour is spent confirming that. Unless there's some kind of equipment failure, which hardly seems like a matter of skill.
Strangely, motorcar racing has a similar 'better equipment' factor, but it's much more engaging. I think that probably comes down to:
1. Everyone can drive so everyone can appreciate it
2. Lots of cars on the track means there's a battle for at least some of the placings to watch
3. The crashes are spectacularThese yacht races might be more interesting if there were more boats on the water? Just a thought. Then you'd have numerous tacking duels, possibly involving more than 2 craft, all sorts of drama would be possible. But 1 on 1 yacht races are just dull to watch, sorry to say it.
There are lots of sports like that. I personally like to watch MMA (no holds barred striking and grappling fights), but most people get bored watching the wrestling part, and most MMA, as with most real empty handed fights, goes to the ground and becomes a highly tactical war of attrition. I can see that does not interest even people who like martial arts, on the whole, much less people who don't like to watch violence.
But I'm not about to insist everyone else watches MMA, or that the city pays for a massive event. I just enjoy it in my own time on my own money. And I think that's really the main gripe NZers have with the America's Cup. It's just not fun to watch, however deep and fulfilling it is for the participants.
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Actually, dog trialling is the sport for old fellas.
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Rugby union is global, and while it stirs up a passion in NZ, it would not get a ripple in Indonesia and probably gets less coverage than the America's cup globally.
Not at all true. Rugby is quite well covered here, although it doesn't have a wide following....it is, unlike the Americas Cup, reported. And my comments related as much to the non-Indonesian media we get...the International Herald Tribune, essentially the New York Times, and The Independent are available here daily as are all the global news channels..CNN / DW / Fox / Al-Jaz / BBC...and I'm a news junkie.
The only references I found to it were in the NZ media. I'd confidently say that most non New Zealanders would need the Americas Cup explained to them.
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But I'm not about to insist everyone else watches MMA, or that the city pays for a massive event. I just enjoy it in my own time on my own money. And I think that's really the main gripe NZers have with the America's Cup. It's just not fun to watch, however deep and fulfilling it is for the participants.
I take a practical view of it. As you say, it's not much of spectator sport, but if Team NZ does win, and brings the regatta back, I'm all for it. Those events brought a degree of money and glamour to Auckland that made the city fun - and they were the making of a lot of small businesses. My buddy and his wife had a catering company - they barely slept for a year during the last challenge, but it got them a deposit on their house and capital for their next venture.
I would, of course, hope that public money is better spent next time. Some of what went on around the village was pretty bizarre.
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Russell, yes, despite it being a tiny sport, the America's Cup is the main event, so anyone interested in yacht racing worldwide would consider coming here and that's still a LOT of people, and many of them have a lot of money. Sometimes it's better to have all of a small pie than a tiny piece of a big one. The Rugby World Cup, even if we won it every time, would only be held in NZ once every 20 years. And we're pretty much showing that as a nation we're too small minded to actually do the World Cup justice. I'm betting it's actually going to be a bit of a humiliating experience for NZ. We could at least have got a decent stadium out of it, but no, the penny pinchers won the day. It's going to end up like the Athens Olympics, I think.
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Have you been to the North Shore beaches lately? Those who don't mow their lawns all day long take their dogs out for defecation there and to feed them seagulls and little children building sand pas because the high mortgage repayments mean they can't afford any more Butch rolls.
Now that's depressing.
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The simple solution to the Moet issue lies in Marlborough. Louis Vuitton Möet Hennessy also own Cloudy Bay. Their bubbles aint bad neither.
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Brian Gaynor wrote a brilliant analysis of the string of transactions through which F&R enriched themselves, usually at the expense of their shareholders
Don't forget the general public, too!
We have never had a culture of praising the wealthy
And why should we? I'm sure the various members of the Todd family (for example) are perfectly nice people, but most of them have done nothing more that have the good fortunte to be born to parents who have a hereditary connection to some shrewd businessmen.
It would be nice if we paid more attention to people who've built sucessful businesses, just as it would be nice if we paid more attention to succesful writers, or painters, or scientists. But we still, as a nation, have a fairly narrow vision of success.
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What tosh Rogerd! There is a long history of children of the rich who have contributed immensely to the wider humanity.
Here is but one example
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WH,
Murray Deaker was commenting on how he thought the 5-0 defeat of Luna Rossa was much more satisfying than the All Blacks defeating France 42-11: "Rebel Sport is also good at doing really well", he said.
Nice segue Murray, I thought, but if Rebel Sport doesn't have a biomag, how good can it be?
http://www.biomag.co.nz/testimonials/index.cfm
Some pretty impressive sports people have got themselves a Woolrest BioMag underlay, because they’re getting the results. Just to mention a few of these real achievers, triathlete Cameron Brown, Team New Zealand managing director Grant Dalton, Black Fern Anna Richards, All Blacks coach Graham Henry, Black Caps Shane Bond and Daniel Vettori, former All Black heroes Buck Shelford and Inga Tuigamala and former Silver Fern April Ieremia.
Is there any important achievement in this country that can't be linked to this amazing product? I wonder what April Ieremia is doing with her biomag nowadays.
Quite seriously, if anyone wants to buy me a biomag, I promise to tell you whether it works. I am not what effect the scarcely believable powers of magnetism will have on me, but I'm eager to find out more.
P.S: There is a great photo of Murray Deaker here.
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Selwyn Toogood once flogged Woolrests, back before they were magnetized. Perhaps he'd still be with us if they had been, by hokey.
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"Good parallel, It's way more usable to the public. But it kind of looks like an english council estate, without the poor people."
Um, I'm not sure which English council estates you've been visiting, but the ones I saw in Southwark and Tower Hamlets didn't have much in the way of Art Deco or faceted glass façades. Are you referring to the large amount of hard surfaces in Waitangi Park? They can look fairly harsh to some people's eyes, and will do until the trees have matured, but then again skateboarding and basketball were among the key users that the design intended to cater for, and it's (presumably) not much fun to do either of those on grass.
Perhaps the one thing that does remind me of an estate in Hackney is the large sweep of grass that hardly ever gets used except for special events. One of the big mistakes in the planning of those estates was the piling up of all the housing into high-rise flats in order to allow more "open space", which was then hardly ever used and became run-down and menacing. Mid-rise buildings with publicly-accessible ground-floors and well-designed intimate public spaces, as opposed to vast wind-swept paddocks, make for lively public spaces. The Waitangi Precinct was looking damned good and very popular today, and will get even better with the new buildings planned for the surrounding areas.
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It is interesting to me to see how the world perceives New Zealand and our sporting achievements, CNN reported that the team that won the Louis Vuitton cup was called Emirates and the forthcoming cup races would be sailed in Emirates. However, for once, they responded to a call about the accuracy of their reporting and then fixed the line.
Wish they had done that about WMD or Plamegate.
I digress,
If the current batch of race results from Valencia with Alinghi vs Prada are anything to go by then Dick better get something happening down the waterfront pronto......
hey, we could always throw in an iconic international stadium -
I assume this will have some effect on the biomag effect---are they doing the research to tell us if it's good or bad, though???
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The question that really needs to be answered is whether or not magnets would help Team NZ both go faster and fund a defence, if they are lucky enough to win
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"Or we're a nation that provides sailors-for-hire."
sailwhores? -
Bravely ignoring the yachting..
Russell, big thanks for the LBGP link. I have an old (badly beaten) tape from 84 (85?) that was recorded by a friend at Radio Contact of a LBGP gig in Hamilton. The version of Codeine they did that night was stunning.
That vid brought back those memories (though I have to hang my head in shame at not realising it was a cover for all those years....)
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Nobody: At the oppositish end I was rather surprised when someone pointed me at a certain Seinfeld actress
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nice link! The irony of the bit about That storyline expanded on Seinfeld's "show about nothing" theme by twisting it into a "show about a show about a show about nothing." is that it surely describes the premise of Curb Your Enthusiasm??
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"These yacht races might be more interesting if there were more boats on the water?"
That's the normal style of yacht racing for everything from small kids to millionaires in maxi-raters. Up to 100 (or even more) boats racing around anything from inshore buoys to thousand kilometre ocean crossings.
The Sydney-Hobart and Cowes Week are some of the prime yachting events.
Match racing is a tiny part of the sport, although it makes better telly.
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I think you'll find that it (Spitfire) goes very fast on a beam reach and doesn't really sail to windward very well, which wouldn't help on a triangular course.
Having said that, during the 1987 Louis Vuitton series (in Perth, back in the 12m days) there was a Tornado cat that was sailing around the outside of the course and spectator fleets faster than the Twelves could sail the basic circuit.
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I don't know if I'm qualified to really argue the America's Cup point, except that my Dad was a big part of it happening at all here. He had been to every America's Cup regatta since the war (that would be the second world one), and started NZ off in international sailing competition in a big way with Peter Blake and Ceramco (my dad's company), and the Whitbread races that ensued. And then, the America's Cup. I'm very proud of my Dad, and what he achieved in his long life. Like I said before, I'm not a great fan of yachting anymore (when I was a child, Auckland really was the City of Sails, and most pakeha in this little city had a boat of some sort to run around in) but I would just hate for us not to be properly organised if we win it this time. Just because I don't like to sail anymore, doesn't mean it's not still in my blood somewhere.
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These yacht races might be more interesting
If they mounted .50 caliber machine guns, as a witter writer than I once put it.
Seriously though (most sports are, after all, a load of old tosh when looked at dispassionately) the point at which the Cup lost any semblence of anything worthwhile for me was not when we were shovelling dosh at Messers Fay and Richwhite to help an Auckland yacht club get a trophy, but when it all turned into legal challenge after 'novel' design after rule change after legal challenge... it's like diving in soccer, only a billion times worse. Imagine if Rio Ferdinand could have a lawyer trot out every time the ref made a the forgetful one didn't like.
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WH,
BIOMAG UPDATE!!!
Some quick internet research has revealed that while some studies indicate that magnetic therapy is an effective treatment, other studies indicate that it is not. The jury is still out on this one, folks.
So, is $200 worth of magnetic placebo worth a pound of cure? Quite possibly. Whatever the merits of the Biomag project may prove to be, Joan's hard earned cash seems to have been well spent.
http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/mdd/99/aug/mysterious.html
Next week: Why UFO's from Atlantis built the pyramids.
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