Fly me to the moon …

Bet that song is getting a lot of air time today. I was very aptly in a seventh form (year 13) physics class when the announcement came over the airwaves. Later that day or the next we watched the flickering images on our black and white TV. I was at Northcote College winding up for the mid-year exams.

It was a good year. In early March, I broke the school senior one mile record. A record I still hold as things went metric shortly afterwards. I was president of the Northcote College debating society which met in the school hall on Friday evenings because numbers, which were well over 100 on the nights of big debates, forced us out of the music room we had inhabited in previous years.

I was also the school senior public speaking champion as I had been the previous year, and once again took part in the school drama production. I earned a school blues for sport and a gold award for contributions to the cultural side of things. Finally, I gained a university bursary.

Yet that great possibility of space travel we dreamt of on that day in 1969 has simply not been fulfilled. We seem to have lost that sense of destiny and swapped a universal adventure for the titillation of a trinket at the local shopping mall. The images from forty years ago simply serve to remind us that as a planet we have horribly lost our way.

That's why the lady is a champ.....

Just be darn careful who you call obese when you swing your BMI around boy!

One so-called measure of obesity is BMI or Body-Mass-Index. This is discovered by calculating weight (kg) divided by height squared (m^2)

Valerie Vili, Nu Zulun’s Olympic gold medal winning shot putter, is 6-4 and 267 lbs.

In metrics that is 1.93 m and 121.1 kg
Now do the calculation folks
(121.1) divided by (1.93)^2 = 32.5 (check it on this calculator for feet and pounds)

Now according to the BMI ratings, Valerie Vili is obese! Over 30 is obese.

Folks, I have seen Valerie working out at the track – and one thing she is not – obese. The woman is a superb athlete in every sense of the word. The weight she carries is just about all muscle. She is agile, fast, extremely strong, and fit.

I suspect with this shot, even the Chinese would like to claim her as one of their own!

It immoral, its illegal or it makes you fat …

Nu Zulun– 3rd in the OECD (30 country) obesity steaks (oops – a bit Freudian). The chips are really down for Nu Zulun’s health outlook. It appears the obesity has been mushrooming in the country. Indeed, obesity wise we appear to really be in the soup.

Mind you I don’t believe the half-baked statistics. I take them with a grain of salt insofar as the reporting of some countries is not worth a hill of beans.

However, to bring this level of obesity down is going to be no piece of cake.

Enough already!

26.5% of Nu Zulun adults obese. Break this down by ethnicity.
41.7% of Maori adults
63.7% of Pasifika adults

Some are calling for a tax on junk food. The first thing tackled should be air travel! I weigh in at an enormous 69 kg and with my 20 kg of luggage, things are up to uuum er (get that calculator out) 89kg. Obese Tony weighs in at 147 kg and with his 20 kg of luggage (where’s that calculator – somewhere hidden among folds of flesh) things are up to 167. Yet we both pay the same for our ticket.

Now folks, that ain’t fair.

My head was down, my heart was turning a round ...

I can’t tell you just how many emails I get telling me I am so famous I should go on their who’s who. Strathmore’s who’s who was the latest today. Now there is of course such a thing. However it was not Strathmore’s that emailed me. It was some phisher hiding, lurking, prowling ….wanting me to login to their fake login page.

Trouble is my colleague in the office seems to be very bit as famous as me – he gets them too. So far my ego has remained intact and I have not succumbed to these phishing exploits.

Yet there are souls who fall for these who’s who scams. The appeal to vanity is a strong one especially if the one appealed to has a rather fragile sense of self. In spite of warnings people are still prepared to yield up sensitive information and even passwords for the stroking of their ego.

But I am famous. My name featured in the NZ Herald sports section this week. I was in the winning team at the Harry Kerr Centennial 50 km walk relay (5 x 10 km) held at Mount Smart Stadium on a somewhat wet and windy July 5th. I had the third leg and walked with all the finesse and speed of a custard tart. It was not one of my better performances. The wind was howling down the back straight and the Mount Smart track is not kind at the best of times. The photo shows me about to overtake the opposition.

I was the slowest in my team - however had there been five of me, we would have still won by a good margin.

For winning the Harry Kerr Centennial Relay, we each received a bronze replica the the original medal Harry Kerr won at the 1908 London Olympic games. We also got a large certificate which is modelled on the original diploma awarded to Harry Kerr at those Olympics. The race was held in conjunction with the the Race Walking New Zealand 5 x 10,000m Track Walk Relay Championship 2009. So we all got an additional gold medal for being first in that event. So 2009 has been a medal winning year for me.

Goodness gracious great balls of fire...

I have been watching Wimbledon and getting increasingly irritated by screaming female players. Many release ear-piercing shrieks when they hit the ball. The guys don’t do it – to their everlasting credit.

Now some enjoy hearing the women shriek – they find it somehow arousing. Well, I find it plain annoying. Mind you, there are other sports where people grunt and squeak. The shot putt and discus are two examples from track and field. Then there is weightlifting. Strangely, it is absent from boxing.

Imagine if it crept into women’s golf!

Apparently at least one female tennis player is ranking over 100 decibels. Do they play better as a result of screaming? I think not. However, some of the greats do scream - Serena Williams for one.

Here’s hoping they ban it. I like the sound of racquet on ball.

Smoke gets in your eyes ….

Not being a parent, I won’t enter the debate on the merits or lack of a so-called light smack. However, being a linguist, I will enter the debate on the wording of the so-called referendum coming up.

Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?

You would have to be pretty thick not to see that you can drive several truckloads of manure through this loaded wording.

Consider if you will, alternative versions:

Should a smack as part of bad parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?

Somewhat loaded the other way don’t you think?

So at least a more neutral version might have been selected

Should a smack as part of parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?

Well one could go on: but the wording as it stands is simply untenable.

Secondly, the information we have been given from the Elections people does not tell us the alternatives. Is don’t know included? Or is it a yes/no affair?

However, it does appear from the the elections website that it is simply a yes/no affair. A serious flaw.

Well, what we have in the end is $9,000,000 up in smoke.

I am on top of the world looking down on creation …..

I was sitting on the bus this morning and watching the world unfold in the same way it does every weekday morning. It was like watching a movie and I felt quite separated from it all – even seeing my own sitting on the bus as part of the movie. It was a delightful moment of detachment – of sheer objectivity. I couldn’t help but laugh and found it hard to wipe the smile off my face.

The question that came to me … where will this all be … 50 years from now? The fact is we tend to take life far too seriously. A lot of things are necessary but hardly any are important.

At their deeper levels many of the great world religions speak of the impermanence of things. Paul in 2nd Corinthians speaks of the “form of the world passing away”. Likewise, John in his second letter says “the world with its cravings is passing away”. The Buddha is reported to have taught the transitory nature of the world. I think both Paul and John’s words can be taken to mean not only a final passing away of the world but also a constant passing away at every level. Quantum physics points to the impermanent and uncertain nature of things at the micro-level. The positions of electron afterall can only be given as probabilities.

The problem then is being sucked in to the illusion of stability and permanence. Clinging to stuff that by its very nature cannot last. The challenge is (as always) to let go and let God. It is a call to transcend the world and see things for what they really are – necessary for the moment, but unimportant, in that they cannot last. Jesus put it this way… “you are in the world, but not of it … ”

May there be many more moments of detachment that bring a real belly-laugh in the midst of the “turmoil” of life.

When you walk through the storm ….

It was a relay executed through the most horrendous of Wellington storms – that relay I spoke of just yesterday…

Thousands have texted me. Tens of thousands have emailed. They want to see the team that won the great Ekiden walk relay and sealed the New Zealand Championships. It was, I must confess a glorious combination of youth and experience as you can plainly see. It was a team that combined all the greatest human attributes: speed, courage, tenacity, canniness, beauty , a common sense of decency and an enormous appetite for subway sandwiches:

The story of this glorious relay shall the good person teach his son or daughter;

And race walking shall ne'er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,
… But we in it shall be remember'd;

We few, we happy few, we band of walkers;

For he to-day that walks with me

Shall be my teammate, be he ne'er so vile,

This (relay) shall gentle his condition:

And gentle (persons) in England now a-bed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their (person)hoods cheap

whiles any speaks

That walked with us upon (the Ekiden relay).

So you see it is true after all!!

Some things that happened for the first time seem to be happening again ….

Diseases that have happened before are happening again. Only now in the early 21st century, they are named and monitored. They scientifically assessed. Their DNA is stripped naked. Data is amassed and analysed. Statistics are produced. Panic-ridden parameters are presented. Infectious vectors are plotted. It is Swine flu - the second coming. Its algorithm has been plotted. This time the flu has been named and shamed. A massive illusion of control has been created. The question remains: in what way is this flu any worse than the myriad of flues (or is it flus) that have past our way in years gone by? Yes, there have been exceptions (1918). But there seems to be nothing about this current strain that is causing people to die in their droves. Indeed, aside from Mexico, the death rate is surprisingly low for a flu pandemic.

One has to ask: what other agendas are at work? What regulatory controls and surveillance mechanisms will arise to further empower the increased governance of ordinary folk? I am not usually inclined towards conspiracy theory. But, you know sometimes I wonder ….

And the drug companies – could this be big bucks or what? Now guys how shall we ditch that maasive stockplie of Tamiflu?

Walking my baby back home ....torn between two lovers!!!

It was the National Race Walking Road Relay Championship. It was the Ekiden Relay held in Lower Hutt on May 24th. Yours truly was in the winning team: Racewalking Auckland (A Team). Chuffed was I to get a lovely medal. Chuffed also was my Mum in the Rest Home to see her boy-child (one of two) finally achieving something in his athletic career. She did really break into a chorus of “Walking my baby back home…”

The relay was held on a sublimely awful Wellington day. Planes had been turned back at the Airport. Our team barely arrived in-tacked in the capital to lay their all on the line for the dear old club.

However I did walk twice that day - for i am a walker with multiple personalities.
At 10 am I donned the blue uniform of Racewalking Auckland and did my thing over 7.2 km.

Later, I donned the black uniform of my beloved Calliope and did my thing again over 5 km.

By the finish I was indeed a spent force.