North Otago won – now it’s Southland’s turn

North Otago leads the Heartland rugby race for the Meads Cup after a 21-16 win against W(h)anganui in Oamaru this afternoon.

Pleased as I am about that, I won’t be celebrating until the end of the Ranfurly Shield challenge tonight.

I’d back Canterbury against any team from the north but my first allegiance is with teams from the right side of the Waitaki River so I’m hoping Southland holds tight to the shield tonight.

UPDATE: 26-16. Ah well, at least the shield is still on the Mainland.

Some old mayors some new in south

Two southern mayors lost their seats in the local body elections.

Central Otago District elected Tony Lepper, with sitting mayor Malcolm MacPherson coming in third place behind another challenger Jeff Hill.

Clutha District’s new mayor is Bryan Cadogan who beat the incumbent Juno Hayes who was seeking a fifth term.

Queenstown Lakes District has its first female mayor – Vanessa van Uden . Sitting mayor Clive Geddes didn’t seek re-election.

Waitaki District re-elected Alex Familton with a majority of 1183 over the only serious challenger and former Deputy mayor, Gary Kircher.

Invercargill people gave Tim Shadbolt a majority of more than 11,000 over challenger Suzanne Prentice.

Southland mayor Frano Cardno was returned for her seventh term.

Gore mayor Tracy Hicks was not challenged.

Timaru returned sitting mayor Janie Annear for a third term.

Mackenzie District elected Claire Barlow as its new mayor by only 30 votes.

Further north I’m delighted Christchurch voters returned Bob Parker as mayor – and not just because he defeated Jim Anderton.

Len Brown beat John Banks to be first mayor of the new Auckland council. Voters also delivered a left-leaning council which disproves accusations from the left that uniting Auckland was a right-wing plot.

I think this means Robert Guyton, a regular commenter here, won a seat on the Southland Regional Council. If so, congratulations.

Word of the day

Strikhedonia – the freedom or pleasure of being able to say “to hell with it”; the pleasure of leaving for somewhere new.

8/10

8/10 in the NZ Herald weekly news quiz.

Quote of the week #2

“In theory the system may lead to a proportional parliament but, in practice, that doesn’t translate to proportional power.

Enormously disproportionate power is delivered to fringe elements.

MMP has meant absurdly, that a charlatan like Winston Peters, with a handful of votes from the bewildered and deranged, has, over 14 years, been able to become deputy prime minister, treasurer and minister of foreign affairs.”

– Matthew Hooton in the print edition of the NBR.

 

Quote of the week #1

“The starting point of political correctness is a perfectly well-intentioned desire to give previously marginalised groups such as other races and cultures, women and homosexuals what in New Zealand we call a “fair go”.

The problem with political correctness is that this generous impulse is taken over and twisted into something else, something far less healthy.

“While exhorting us to be as ‘inclusive’ as we can,” writes [Roger] Scruton, “political correctness encourages the denigration of what is felt to be most especially ours . . .  Although they involve the deliberate condemnation of people on the grounds of class, race, sex or colour, the purpose is not to include the Other but to condemn Ourselves.

“The gentle advocacy of inclusion masks the far-from-gentle desire to exclude the old excluder: in other words to repudiate the cultural inheritance that defines us as something distinct from the rest.”

This definition is important in many ways because it makes the battle lines between a kind of non-ideological conservatism and the forces of political correctness much more clear.”

                                                                                                                         – Rob Hosking – print edition of the NBR.

He gives an example from the economy of what Scruton calls the culture of repudiation – environmentalists’ attempts to wreck dairying and says:

“It is a target not primarily because of its pollution – dairy farmers now have to be far more careful with their wastes than they did a generation ago – but because it is successful.

P.S.

If you’re interested in reading more from Roger Scruton,  a writer, philosopher and public commenter, he has a blog.

October 9 in history

On October 9 in history:

768  Carloman I and Charlemagne were crowned Kings of The Franks.

1201 Robert de Sorbon, French theologian and founder of the Sorbonne, was born (d. 1274).

 

1238  James I of Aragon conquered Valencia and founded the Kingdom of Valencia.

 

1264   The Kingdom of Castile conquered the city of Jerez that was under Muslim occupation since 711.

1446  The hangul alphabet was published in Korea.

Hangul (한글) or Chosŏn’gŭl (조선글)[1]

1514  Marriage of Louis XII of France and Mary Tudor.

 

1604  Supernova 1604, the most recent supernova to be observed in the Milky Way.

1635  Founder of Rhode Island Roger Williams was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a religious dissident after he speaks out against punishments for religious offenses and giving away Native American land.

1701  The Collegiate School of Connecticut (later renamed Yale University) was chartered in Old Saybrook.

1771  The Dutch merchant ship Vrouw Maria sank near the coast of Finland.

 

1776  Father Francisco Palou founded Mission San Francisco de Asis in what is now San Francisco, California.

 

1799  Sinking of HMS Lutine, with the loss of 240 men and a cargo worth £1,200,000.

 

1804  Hobart, capital of Tasmania, was founded.

1812  War of 1812: In a naval engagement on Lake Erie, American forces captured two British ships: HMS Detroit and HMS Caledonia.

1820  Guayaquil declared independence from Spain.

1824  Slavery was abolished in Costa Rica.

1831  Capo d’Istria was assassinated.

 

1835  The Royal College, Colombo in Sri Lanka was established with the name Hillstreet Academy.

1837  A meeting at the U.S. Naval Academy established the U.S. Naval Institute.

1845  The eminent and controversial Anglican, John Henry Newman, was received into the Roman Catholic Church.

1854  Crimean War: The siege of Sebastopol began.

1861  American Civil War: Battle of Santa Rosa Island – Union troops repelled a Confederate attempt to capture Fort Pickens.

1864  American Civil War: Battle of Tom’s Brook – Union cavalrymen in the Shenandoah Valley defeated Confederate forces.

1888  The Washington Monument officially opened to the general public.

1900 Alastair Sim, Scottish actor, was born (d. 1976).

1911  An accidental bomb explosion in Hankou, Wuhan, China les to the ultimate fall of the Qing Empire

1913  Steamship SS Volturno caught fire in the mid-Atlantic.

1914  World War I: Siege of Antwerp – Antwerp fell to German troops.

1931 Tony Booth, British actor and father of Cherie Blair, was born.

1934  The assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and Louis Barthou, Foreign Minister of France.

1936   Generators at Boulder Dam (later renamed to Hoover Dam) began to generate electricity from the Colorado River and transmit it 266 miles to Los Angeles, California.

1937 Brian Blessed, English actor, was born.

1940 John Lennon, British musician and songwriter (The Beatles), was born (d. 1980).

1940   Battle of Britain – During a night-time air raid by the German Luftwaffe, St. Paul’s Cathedral was hit by a bomb.

 

1941  A coup in Panama declared Ricardo Adolfo de la Guardia Arango the new president.

1942   Statute of Westminster 1931 formalised Australian autonomy.

1942 The last day of the October Matanikau action on Guadalcanal as United States Marine Corps forces withdrew back across the Matanikau River after destroying most of the Japanese Army’s 4th Infantry Regiment.

1944 John Entwistle, British musician (The Who), was born (d. 2002).

1945   Parade in NYC for Fleet Admiral Nimitz and 13 USN/USMC Medal of Honor recipients.

1950 Jody Williams, American teacher and aid worker, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, was born.

1952 Sharon Osbourne, English music manager and wife of Ozzy Osbourne, was born.

1954 James Fearnley, English musician (The Pogues), was born.

1962  Uganda becomes an independent Commonwealth realm.

1963  In northeast Italy, over 2,000 people were killed when a large landslide behind the Vajont Dam caused a giant wave of water to overflow it.

 

1966  David Cameron, British politician, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was born.

1967 The six-o’clock swill ended.

1967  A day after being captured, Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara was executed for attempting to incite a revolution in Bolivia.

 

1970   The Khmer Republic was proclaimed in Cambodia.

1978 Nicky Byrne, Irish musician (Westlife), was born.

1981  Abolition of capital punishment in France.

1983  Rangoon bombing: attempted assassination of South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan during an official visit to Rangoon, Burma. Chun survived but the blast killed 17 of his entourage, including four cabinet ministers, and injured 17 others. Four Burmese officials also died in the blast.

1986  The musical The Phantom of the Opera had its first performance at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London.

1989  An official news agency in the Soviet Union reported the landing of a UFO in Voronezh.

1989  In Leipzig, East Germany, 70,000 protesters demanded the legalisation of opposition groups and democratic reforms.

 

1992  A 13 kilogramme (est.) fragment of the Peekskill meteorite landed in the driveway of the Knapp residence in Peekskill, New York, destroying the family’s 1980 Chevrolet Malibu.

1999 The last flight of the SR-71.

2001  Second mailing of anthrax letters from Trenton, New Jersey in the 2001 anthrax attack.

 

2006  North Korea allegedly tested its first nuclear device.

2009  First lunar impact of the Centaur and LCROSS spacecrafts as part of NASA’s Lunar Precursor Robotic Programme.

Sourced from NZ Hisory Online & Wikipedia