The Weekender 08/01/2001

Interesting would be a good way to describe this week - both on and off the field.
Cricket has it's highs & lows in the same week. In Wellington NZ beat Zimbabwe by 8 wickets, but then last night after NZ got a competitive 273 on the slow (Eden Park ?) wicket and had Zimbabwe at 64 for 5 earlier on, they let Zimbabwe sneak home to win. That gave Zimbabwe their first away series win since they started ODI's.
So there will be some changes and Tama Canning is hoping to be a recipient of those changes. The Australian born player has been playing for Auckland and is the leading Shell cup wicket taker as well as having a batting average of 55.
In news I missed last week, the Football Kingz had a 2-0 win in Sydney sometime late last year.
The Auckland Heineken Open seems to be building it's reputation with quite a number of top level entries. They include Greg Rusekski, Franco Squillari, Andrei Medvedev, Jan-Michael Gambill, Byron Black and Juan Balcells. Ok so I don't recognise any of those names but hopefully Andrew does!!
Wellington is preparing itself for the arrival of the BT Global Challenge fleet. It is the longest port of call, and the halfway stage for the race.
Finally a golfer is paid more than a caddie! In a strange but true story, NZer Steve Williams who is Tiger Woods' caddie recently had a chat with Michael Campbell about how much each made. Campbell (after bowing out of the rich Australian tour) made about $A3.4 million in 2000. Woods' $A20 million would give Williams about $A2 million considering caddies get about 10%. They had a laugh about it as Williams conceded that NZ's top golfer now gets more than NZ's top caddie!

Ok, on the ATM/Chubb heist in Wellington, the Police this week rounded up 6 of the 7 people they believed involved and recovered a "significant portion" of the $960,000 stolen. The people were mostly in the Hutt area and the money was in the Waikato - they could have planted it in MY back yard!!

Lord Rutherford was maligned by a British author for degrading & being abusive to women! Rutherford actually married a prominent suffragette's daughter and actively promoted women's rights - something the writer was rather surprised at! Rutherford reportedly said at the start of his lectures, "Welcome Ladies and Gentlemen" which the only woman in the class didn't like. It seems the British author got his cannon fodder from the biography from that woman who became a prominent British astronomer - what can I say ... get your facts right you pommies (you tell em Andy)!
Huntly Power station is having an upgrade that will generate (pun intended) up to 270 jobs during the next four years (only a fraction of those permanent though). And the Green Party is opposing the expansion (why why why???).

The NZ dollar has reached the US45c mark for the first time in six months. Good in general but the exporters (like Gallaghers) will find their profit margins decreasing.

And in terrible news, it looks like i4free, one of NZ's free Internet providers might be forced to shut down. Clear has ended a deal with i4free which gave them revenue sharing on deals with Telecom. i4free have said they will continue but they no longer have any steady income. The rumour is that there is another Free ISP that may also be closing down (my guess was FreeNet).

Have a great week.