Lighter Moments From The Rugby World Cup (So Far)

Posted on September 11, 2011 | 14 Comments

Life as we know it is sort of on hold down here.

On Friday, the 2011 Rugby World Cup got underway.  That may not sound like much if you don’t live in New Zealand, but just to put things in perspective, when NZ was awarded the hosting rights for this year’s cup they created a government ministry and named a Minister of the Rugby World Cup.  Then they changed the dates of the school year around so the school kids would be on break during the finals and semi finals.  The official reason is to minimize traffic congestion.

A UK sports writer is persona non grata down here for complaining that New Zealand is “a nation in which parameters begin and end with its national rugby team” and that such a nation “invites ridicule for such a blinkered existence.”

Actually, some places have been designated “rugby free zones” so that people whose parameters extend beyond rugby don’t feel as if they have been stuck in a space/time warp.

But I can’t complain.  I lived most of my life in a city whose baseball and football teams rarely even made it to the playoffs so I’m finding the enthusiasm and exuberance all rather refreshing.  Every other car is flying the flag of the country whose team the occupants are rooting for.  And the opening ceremony on Friday before the All Blacks annihilated Tonga made me proud to be a Kiwi.

Even if you aren’t a rugby fan there is a lot to keep you entertained.

For example, there was the moment of national angst when it was revealed that PlayStation had released a video game called Rugby World Cup 2011 and someone ran a simulated tournament and the NZ All Blacks didn’t win.

Then there was the story about the Auckland City council safety person who was asked about whether panhandlers would be turfed out of town a la New Delhi and Beijing.  The answer was no, but we were informed that three security guards had been hired to patrol downtown streets to make sure that visitors were not “beseeched” by people asking for money.  I suppose that it’s possible to be “beseeched” for money and if too many people ask, you could feel “besieged.”

Some of the nicest stories have been about the welcomes that visiting teams have received.  Because no one place can accommodate all of the teams, the entire
country has been turned into an Olympic village of sorts, with teams being
billeted in large and small towns.  In fact, the matches are going to be played all over the country, some in venues with capacity as small as 14,000.  When
the All Blacks aren’t playing, the New Zealanders come out to support their new
‘home’ teams.  For example, the crowd supporting the Japanese team decked themselves out in kimonos and samauri and ninja outfits.

But not everyone is getting into the party atmosphere.  The American team is staying in a North Island town called Wanganui.  The local Maori wanted to treat them to a traditional Maori canoe ride on the Wanganui River.  Those are the
canoes that they came from Hawaii to New Zealand in, so they are fairly heavy
duty.  The American team declined for “safety” reasons.

Yes, there’s been so much going on down here that it’s been hard to concentrate.  But yesterday, everyone’s attention was focused on an amazing and unique event.  News about the All Blacks temporarily took a back seat because the Nude Blacks made their World Cup debut!

I’ve mentioned before how sports teams get their names down here.  So you can probably figure out what the story behind the Nude Blacks is.  They bill themselves as “New Zealand’s Premier Nude Rugby Team.”

They are also New Zealand’s only nude rugby team and last night they were defeated by an all female team from Spain, known as “Los Conquistadors.”  The Spanish started the game fully clothed.  According to the rules, which
are established by, and subject to change at any time by the Nude Blacks, the
ladies would be expected to remove an article of clothing each time the Nude
Blacks scored.

Some of Los Conquistadores got down to their underwear but that was as far as it went and the Nude Blacks were handed their first defeat in history!

According to eye witness reports, the Nude Blacks performed a haka to open the game and the Los Conquistadors were forced to cool off using Spanish fans which they had brought along for just such an eventuality.

The Nude Blacks are planning three more matches before RWC games in Dunedin.

Discretion prevents me from posting pictures of the event, but those with a strong constitution and sense of humor can see some  here.

And we are only two days into a six week extravaganza.

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Posted in Lighter Moments From The Rugby World Cup (So Far)--Sep 11

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Sanity Takes A Vacation

Posted on September 3, 2011 | 32 Comments

The other day I got this spam message advertising a newsletter containing lots of sage career advice.  It’s a little too late to have any benefit for me but a lot of people ask me to look at their resumes and that sort of thing so I decided to take a look at some of the articles so I’m up with the play on the state of the art.

Bottom line? There’s a recession on.

Resume cover letters are back to basics.  No pictures of your dog, no more saying how crappy the potential employer’s web site looks and how you can’t wait to
re-engineer it.

But the article that captured my attention was the one that talks about vacations.

To make a long story short, the message was if you are entitled to a vacation, you probably shouldn’t take it, and if you have to, plan to work while you are vacationing.

The idea is that times are so tough that if you show that you are expendable, by being gone for a week or two, you might end up being turfed out in favour of employees whose personal values are better aligned with those of the company.

Some statistics from the article:  Fifty-two per cent of people surveyed said
they were cancelling their vacations.  And in this case, cancel means
not taking time off.  Eighteen per cent said that they needed to be “available” in the event of an emergency and thirteen per cent said that even if they were out of town on vacation they would still be expected to do work.

One of the experts quoted in the article said “Checking out completely is an old-school mentality.”

Let’s deconstruct that statement.  “Old school” means out of fashion and therefore no longer accepted.  “Checking out completely” means having a life.

And that is now unacceptable.

I’m not one of those people who see conspiracies everywhere, but this makes me wonder if there isn’t some nefarious capitalist plot afoot to get as much work as possible out of the masses in order to maximize profits and shareholder returns.  Do they care if people get burned out and quit?  No!  There’s a recession on and for every poor schlub who can’t take it there are ten applicants waiting in line.  Why not squeeze as much blood as we can out of the turnip?

But you don’t need conspiracy theories to understand that what is happening is inevitable. It’s the way the world works.

All of this was explained in 1899 by Thorstein Veblen in his landmark book The Theory of the Leisure Class.  It should be required reading for everyone because it explains everything from Lady Gaga to the Tea Party to Creationism and reality TV.  And remember it was written in 1899.

I’d first heard of the book when I was in high school and my father made us read Chapter 9 “The Conservation of Archaic Tastes” in an attempt to get us to stop listening to heavy metal music.  It didn’t work but I ended up reading the whole book and that enabled me to see Veblen’s every idea validated as I’ve
lived through the end of the 20th century, and the 21st century so far.

Briefly, Veblen states that humans are fairly primitive and tribal people (just watch Jersey Shore if you disagree).  Back in the hunter gatherer days, for reasons having a lot to do with testosterone, the hunters emerged as socially superior to the gatherers.   Because hunting was only occasionally necessary but gathering was a full time job, the socially superior hunters had leisure time on their hands.  This gave them time to get up to mischief like starting wars with other tribes (I’m oversimplifying here).  Wars and military honors created additional opportunities to create measures of status in society and to create distinctive classes.  That’s how kings and nobles emerged.

What is crucial to the theory is that the lower class is dependent on the upper class.  Initially the gatherers were dependent on the hunters.  If the crops failed the hunters could always go out and kill a woolly mammoth.  Later, the lower class became dependent on the warriors to protect them.  In Veblen’s day the factory workers were dependent on the white collar workers to sell the goods they produced, give them paychecks and to keep the business running.  And today we look to politicians to protect us physically, politically and economically.  And to Hollywood stars to give us reasons to buy magazines at the grocery checkout.

Because the upper class doesn’t have to work as hard as the lower class, they have the luxury of leisure and Veblen argues that our innate desire to achieve higher status and demonstrate our achievements have led to conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure.  In fact, he coined both of those terms.

We all know what conspicuous consumption is.  Conspicuous leisure is the same thing.  When you don’t have to work as hard as the poor gatherers you have time on your hands.  So you can play polo or golf or spend your evenings on Facebook.

Of course, human nature being what it is, higher status people are generally not all that happy to share their wealth, leisure or status with the rest of us.  That is why it’s hard to get into a country club.  Veblen stated that just as the leisure class evolved rituals for demonstrating status, they expected the rest of us to be suitably impressed, and more importantly to do our part to support them and their leisure pursuits.

Which brings us back to vacations and one of my all-time favourite Veblen quotes:

“Servants should not only show a servile disposition, but it is quite as imperative that they should show a trained conformity to the canons of conspicuous subservience.”

And what better example of conspicuous subservience is there than to forego your vacation so that the CEO can take a private jet to his vacation home?

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Posted in Sanity Takes A Vacation--Sep 3

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The Fog Bow

Posted on August 26, 2011 | 28 Comments

This morning at CUE Haven we woke up to wonderfully thick fog.  It wasn’t such good news for travellers, but for us it made everything look wonderfully strange  and different.  It didn’t last long, however, because as soon as the sun came up it started burning off.

I decided to drive up to the high ground to get an overview and take some pictures and this was the view from up there:

Normally from here you would see the cottage and nursery and the neighbor’s farms, but this morning everything looked like it was under water.  The fog looked a lot thicker from above than it had been down below and I was thinking how cool it would be to drive back down—like an airplane descending into the clouds as it gets ready to land.

As I drove down I was mildly disappointed that the fog was rapidly dissipating but then I noticed something unusual.  There seemed to be a brighter than usual spot in the fog bank ahead of me.

As I got closer, the white column turned into a white rainbow!

I got back to the cottage and called my wife outside to see the “fog bow.”  Her response was that there is no such thing as a “fog bow.”  I told her that’s what I’d thought.

When we got back to town this afternoon I did some research and found out that there is indeed something called a fog bow and that is what we’d seen.  I have a book, which I’ve never read, called Wonders of the Sky and it told me almost everything I ever wanted to know.

According to the book, fog bows are really called fog bows, but are sometimes referred to as white rainbows.  They are caused by the same mechanism as
rainbows, but because the water droplets that cause fog are so much smaller
than the rain drops which cause rainbows, there is much less refraction and
therefore almost no color.  If a fog bow has any color at all it will be reddish and they are usually twice as thick as rainbows.

A fog bow will occur any time there is a light source behind you and fog in front of you, which is exactly what happened to me this morning.  The book says that on a foggy night the moon can create a “moon bow,” which would definitely be worth seeing.  Apparently, you can get a slightly less impressive moon bow from streetlights or car headlights.  But I don’t think it would be a good idea to stand in a road at night with fog in front of you and car headlights behind you.

I’d never seen or heard of a fog bow before.  I’m not sure if you have, but I hope you get a chance to see one!

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Posted in The Fog Bow--Aug 26

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When Is Enough Enough?

Posted on August 9, 2011 | 13 Comments

I’m not sure where you stand on the subject of corporate greed, but this is a story about one of my favourite companies who have decided that they are willing to endure a public relations disaster for the sake of a few bucks.

Next month New Zealand is hosting the Rugby World Cup.

The media and various politicians are reminding us daily what a Good Thing this is.  We are all supposed to feel good that all (?) eyes will be on little New Zealand and we will all get richer because (1) a lot of people, in the midst of the worst
economic downturn since the Great Depression, will spend a lot of money to come here and inject their hard earned dollars into our economy and (2) tourism, our biggest industry, will get a shot in the arm and even more tourist dollars will come rolling in.

All that may be true but it ignores the other side of the coin which is things like the debt service costs on white elephant stadiums and party venues that have been built with taxpayer money and the fact that the health service has basically said not to have a heart attack during the world cup because hospital emergency rooms are going to be overflowing with trauma injuries from alcohol fuelled fights and accidents.

But that’s not the basic issue before us today.  It relates to the behaviour of the
International Rugby Board and various organisations supplying world cup related merchandise.  As far as those guys are concerned, the World Cup is a giant pipeline designed to siphon money into their coffers from the pockets of people who can probably ill afford it.

And that mentality is epitomised by Adidas.

They have come up with a commemorative All Blacks rugby jersey that has been marketed as the “Must Have Item of the 2011 World Cup.”  Need I say more?  Adidas decided that they would sell 100,000 “units” in New Zealand this year and identified the lucky retailers who would carry them.  The “suggested (by Adidas) retail price” of the jerseys is NZ $220, which is about US $180.

That’s a lot for a sweatshirt, but the experts at Adidas figured people would cough up that kind of money.

Then two things happened.  First, someone figured out that they could
get a Chinese knock off online from eBay for about NZ $40.  But who wants a knock off when you can get the real thing?  The second thing that
happened was that people discovered that the real thing was available from
overseas Adidas distributors online at half the price including shipping and handling.

Who says globalisation isn’t good for the little guy?

Adidas, for one.

They don’t think it is a good idea for Kiwis to buy All Black stuff from overseas.  You know how when you buy something online they ask you what country you are in and you have to find your country on a scrolling list?  Well,
Adidas told people selling the jerseys on web sites to take New Zealand off the
list.  So we can’t buy the jerseys on line.

That was considered unsporting by just about everyone in NZ, even people who wouldn’t be caught dead in an Adidas All Black jersey.

So what did Adidas do? Did they say sorry, it was a mistake? No.  Did they say, we’ll lower the store price?  No. In fact they said that we were being unpatriotic and not willing to support local rugby because the “price reflected Adidas’s investment in the game in New Zealand.”  Which I’m pretty sure they’ve gotten a tax deduction for, by the way.

The New Zealand Herald had an online poll today asking whether people would boycott Adidas based on their “rugby jersey stance.”  Ninety percent said yes.  I’m guessing that the 10 percent who said “no” probably work for Adidas.

To put this in perspective, it is useful to remember that Adidas expected to sell 100,000 jerseys in NZ for $220.  If everyone bought them at $110, the total
loss would be $10 million.  Not all of that, in fact probably very little, comes out of Adidas’s pocket.  The retailers who have already bought the jerseys and have limited right of return are the ones who will take the hit.  And those are New Zealand businesses, unlike Adidas.  In fact, a number of retailers have lowered the prices significantly to give consumers a break.

Last fiscal year, Adidas earned $21 billion after tax in New Zealand dollars.  Ten
million bucks is less than .05% of that.  I’ve got to believe that someone at Adidas corporate headquarters thinks that’s worth losing the goodwill of an entire country.

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Posted in When Is Enough Enough?--Aug 9

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What’s In A Name?

Posted on July 29, 2011 | 30 Comments

It’s my favourite time of year! 

Every year about this time, the NZ Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages publishes a list of baby names that parents have proposed naming their children but which the Registry considers too weird. 

It all started a few years ago when it was learned that some loving parents had named their child “Talula Does The Hula in Hawaii.”  Apparently the poor girl was so traumatised that at age nine she applied (successfully) to the courts to have it legally changed.

The official line is that such names are deemed “too creative,” but you really have to wonder if something other than creativity is driving some of these parents’ decisions.

You’re probably wondering what sorts of names get rejected.  Well, this year Lucifer got rejected not once, but three times.  There was no mention of Satan or Beelzebub.  But Messiah was also given the thumbs down.  Nice try.

Punctuation marks are also out.  Someone wanted to name their kid *.  I don’t know if they planned to call him “Star” or “Asterisk” or what his nickname would have been in that case, but they wanted the symbol.  If I were those parents, my second choice would have been The Child Formerly Known As *.

Speaking of which, you can’t name your kid with a title.  So Prince is out along with King, Knight and Bishop.  But there was no mention of Pawn.  Usually names made of single letters are rejected, such as C, D, I and T.  But Q and J were deemed OK.

Some of the all-time favourites on the list of rejected names include Fish and Chips, proposed for twin boys, Sex Fruit and Stallion.

I decided to do some research to find out why people give their kids bizarre names.  My first thought was that people might be trying to emulate celebrities and not getting it quite right.  As bad as Harper Seven, Sage Moonblood or Moon Unit might sound, they are a lot better than Sex Fruit.

Unfortunately, the evidence points to an even more disturbing reason.  Apparently the main reason for giving kids unusual names is that parents think that run of the mill names like Mary and John are boring and insufficiently representative of the special uniqueness of the fruit of their loins.  The truly scary corollary to that line of thinking is that people think that a unique name makes the person unique.  One extravagantly named teenage was quoted as saying “If my name was Jane, I’d be plain like everyone else.”

Instead, she is unique just like everyone else. 

There are even web sites where prospective parents can search for “Unique Baby Names.”  I checked a few out.  They don’t say whether they guarantee that your child will be unique if you give them one of those names, but a quick look at the list makes one wonder whether a kid with one of those names would be in for some unique treatment on the playground.  For example, the offerings for boys include Ham, Innocent, Serius and Yorick.  Girls are equally at risk:  Flick, Lettice, Ralphina and Yaffa.

 In Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton says, “according to one influential wing of modern secular society, there are few more disreputable fates than to end up being ‘like everyone else’; for ‘everyone else’ is a category that comprises the mediocre and the conformist, the boring and the suburban.  The goal of all right thinking people should be to mark themselves off from the crowd and ‘stand out’ in whatever way their talents allow.”

It’s a scary thought if uniqueness is measured by the ability of one’s parents to pick a funny name from a web site.  We might as well all run out and get tattoos to differentiate ourselves.

 

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Posted in What's In A Name--Jul 29

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I Learn Something New

Posted on July 19, 2011 | 23 Comments

As you know, I have not always been charitable to Gen Y, viewing them as self-centred and overly focused on technology toys and generally uninterested in the wider world.  But lately I’ve had to reassess that view.

In order to meet our tree planting goals at the farm we have found it necessary to get additional help.  Our goal this year is to plant 21,000 trees and on a good day I can do about 100 and then require a week off to recover.  So reinforcements are needed, and we’ve gotten a lot of wonderful volunteer help.

One of the sources of volunteers is an organization known as Conservation Volunteers.  For a fee, they send out a group of volunteers, usually around 8 people and a professional leader and they spend a week planting and doing any other work that needs to be done.

The first time we used the Conservation Volunteers, my wife had made all the arrangements and I didn’t know anything about the program.  When a van full of young people wearing high visibility vests pulled up I assumed that they were a bunch of proto-felons doing community service.

Wrong!  They are young people, usually aged 18-25 from all over the world who are spending their vacations doing conservation work.  Instead of booking a Contiki tour or a week on a beach somewhere, they pay Conservation Volunteers for the opportunity to work.  They can sign up for as many weeks as they want and most of the people we’ve dealt with have come to work for three weeks or more.  They show up at the Conservation Volunteers headquarters in Auckland and are randomly assigned to clients anywhere in New Zealand.  They could work for a local government, at a national or regional park, or at a private project like ours.  

As far as I know, there was no such thing as Conservation Volunteers when I was that age.  And I am fairly certain that if there had been I wouldn’t have been a volunteer.

But these young adults are willing to come to a strange country, work outside all day long in all conditions from hot summer to wet winter weather, eat their lunch in the field and come back to whatever accommodation the site may provide.  We at least give them a reasonably comfortable cottage but in some places they stay in Department of Conservation huts which, if they were used to house prisoners or refugees would get someone slapped with a human rights violation.

We’ve now had four different groups of volunteers out for four weeks and I’ve gotten a chance to find out a little bit about their motivations.  They’ve come from Korea, the US, England, Ireland, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland and Austria and the common denominator is that they all want to do something positive for the world and be part of something bigger than themselves.  Some of them don’t even take time before or after to do touristy things–their entire visit here is spent working.  

The amazing thing is what happens at the end of each week.  They have spent the week outside of their comfort zones doing demanding physical work under difficult conditions and the result is that they feel newly empowered and keep thanking us for giving them the opportunity.

I don’t know how representative of their generation these young adults are, but it’s a breath of fresh air to meet people who are altruistic, energetic and see the world as a bigger place than Facebook.  You can see all of the contributions the different groups of Conservation Volunteers have made by checking out the What’s New section of the CUE Haven web site.  

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Posted in I Learn Something New--Jul 19

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They’re At It Again!

Posted on July 2, 2011 | 18 Comments

You remember our friends over at Beautiful People? They are the dating site that only accepts beautiful people. Acceptance of prospective members is contingent on them being voted sufficiently beautiful by the existing membership.

They made news a while ago when they whacked about 5,000 members who had posted updated pictures of themselves. Based on those pictures, the arbiters of beauty decided that the members in question had put on too much weight to justify continued status as beautiful people. The founder of the site famously pointed out, “letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model.”

A few months later, the site made news when they decided to diversify and set up a sperm and egg bank which would be a repository of beautiful DNA. They had a moral dilemma when the question of whether non-members (i.e., ugly people) would be able to access the repository. In a move which was undeniably a big step forward for the human race, the same guy this time famously said, “Initially, we hesitated to widen the offering to non-beautiful people. But everyone — including ugly people — would like to bring good-looking children into the world, and we can’t be selfish with our attractive gene pool.”

Well in spite of them clearly being altruistic, they have run into a small problem. Somebody hacked into their system and disabled the module that makes the yes/no decision after the members have voted on a potential new member. As a result, 30,000 people were erroneously accepted into the Beautiful People fold!

Talk about a cruel hoax. Imagine being accepted into the rarefied world of Beautiful People one day and the next day being turfed out. Because of a computer glitch!

The problem was discovered in two ways. First, someone in management noticed that the acceptance rate was running at an unheard of 100%. Second, and more heart-warmingly, there was a raft of complaints from the existing members who, upon seeing the pictures of their new colleagues, complained about eroding standards.

All 30,000 people have been summarily removed from the rolls. Not only has their membership fee been cheerfully refunded, they have also been offered free counselling to help them deal with the emotional trauma. According to the article I read, 400 people have taken advantage of that offer.

The people who were delisted have also been given the option of re-applying to see if they are, in fact, beautiful after all.

No one knows exactly what caused the problem. The Beautiful People management claim it was a computer virus, and are calling it, no surprise here, the Shrek Virus. But computer experts say there is no known computer virus that would be so selective. They suspect either a disgruntled person who had previously been rejected or more likely a disgruntled employee, hard as it is to believe that the people running Beautiful People could have rubbed someone the wrong way. After all, the founder claimed to be “very sorry” and sympathized with the losers “who believed, albeit for a short time, that they were beautiful.”

As scary as that statement is, what is scarier is that 400 people needed counselling because they believed it.

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Posted in They're At It Again--Jul 2

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