The Weekender 07/02/2010
Submitted by weekender on Mon, 08/02/2010 - 10:40
Welcome to yet another long hot week of summer, and next month I'll be married!
Sport
Sport Numbers:
8: teams will battle it out in America's Cup class yachts in Auckland next month
13min 13sec: time it took Kiwi Melissa Moon to run to the top of New York's Empire State Building, winning this years women's race to the top
78: runs total that Bangladesh got against NZ in their Twenty20 match, NZ reached the target without losing a wicket
146: run win for NZ against Bangladesh in their first one dayer
The Wellington Phoenix have secured a spot in the A-League playoffs after Adelaide United beat the Brisbane Roar 2-0 last night. The top six go through and the Phoenix are still aiming for a top four finish which would give them a home playoff match.
The Wellington Seven's tournament continues to elude our team as Samoa beat NZ 14-24 in the semifinal. Fiji went on to beat Samoa 19-14 in the final.
Willie Mason actually found somewhere to play rugby league in Australia! He will be joining North Queensland for the next season.
Rowing dominated the Halberg Awards this year with Mahe Drysdale taking the sportsman award, Eric Murray & Hamish Bond taking the sports team award and Richard Tonks taking coach of the year. Caroline & Gorgina nee Evers-Swindell (now they are both married) were crowned sports champions of the decade. Valerie Vili won the supreme Halberg Award for the third consecutive year.
The NZ Breakers continued their comeback by beating the Wollongong Hawks who they've lost to for the last five times the teams have met. They didn't just win, they smashed them 88-60.
NZ News
A teenager got off lightly this week when a shark had an "exploratory bite" of her & her wetsuit while she was out in the water at Oreti Beach near Invercargill. The girl whacked the shark with her boogie board and it took off. Shark attacks are rare in NZ with only 13 fatalities on record.
Kiwi students topped the results for 29 subjects in the 2009 Cambridge International Examinations (that's Cambridge England, not Cambridge Waikato!). The Cambridge exams offer an alternative to NCEA and with all the NCEA problems over the past few years, a number of schools throughout NZ have switched.
7.3: % unemployment rate - the highest in 10 years, but it seems to be a result of more people wanting work than more people out of work
12: tyres on an Air NZ Boeing 777 burst during a aborted take off in Japan
50: days on the run for escaped prisoner Kevin Polwart came to an end with his arrest on Thursday, he beat his 41 days on the run in 2001
500: people including Prime Minister John Key celebrated Waitangi Day at the dawn service at the Treaty Grounds
47,632: $ drop in average house prices for Auckland from December to January - so we can't really trust those numbers ever then?
54,758: $ power bill for a couple who have been under-charged for years
59,000: kids started school for the first time this week - my fiancée teaches 14 of them!
150,000: trampolines forecast to be sold globally, have helped a kiwi designed safe trampoline to be voted top children's product of the year in America
630,000: $/graduate world-leading Hamilton youth offender programme to be closed down as too expensive despite a zero re-offending rate
4.25m: $ going to 400 athletes including Valerie Vili from the Prime Minister's Sport Scholarships
5m: $ compensation package to share among the 215,000 Telecom XT users who were without cellphone services last week
1.4b: pages served by NZ's busiest website TradeMe in January
Finance NZ Dollar
GBP 0.4407 (+0.0018)
EUR 0.5046 (-0.0016)
USD 0.6899 (-0.0116)
AUD 0.7947 (+0.0004)
The Weekender NZer of the week
Edward Joseph Nathan
GLAXO FOUNDER
Joseph Nathan was a New Zealand entrepreneur with extraordinary foresight. In 1906 he founded Glaxo, producer of the dried milk formula that became a household name for infant health. On a world scale, he was a pioneer of direct marketing and branding. The Glaxo name now fronts one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, GlaxoSmithKline.
http://www.nzedge.com/heroes/nathan.html
Sleeping Leg
A lady had been exposed to strep and needed to visit the doctor's office just to have her throat swabbed for a culture. She sat in the waiting room for quite a while with her legs crossed, reading a magazine while other patients came and went. Suddenly her turn was called, but when she stood up to go in, she discovered her leg was "asleep". Not wanting to keep the nurse waiting, she limped and staggered toward the inner office door. She noticed one elderly lady nudging another who sat beside her, as the two of them sympathetically watched her painful progress .
Two minutes later, her procedure completed and her leg back to normal, she walked easily back into the waiting room. As she strode past the two elderly ladies, she overheard one whisper triumphantly to the other, "See, Myrtle, I TOLD you he was a wonderful doctor!"
Check out my photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/dunwich42
Darren Harrison: darren@harrison.gen.nz
The Weekender: mailed weekly (Sunday nightish)
Website: www.dunwich.co.nz/weekender/
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