The Black Caps have a choice: learn from Bob Blair or pull up stumps and come back home

The 1953–54 New Zealand cricket team in South Africa. R.W. (Bob) Blair is the last player on the right in the second row. Bert Sutcliffe is third from the right, sitting down.

No disrespect to Alan Donald.

But maybe we sent the wrong bloke to the Cricket World Cup to coach our bowlers.

We should have sent Bob Blair.

The tossers who ponce beneath the title “Black Caps” doubtless are learning much from Donald’s coaching.

Actually, they probably could learn much from the coaching skills of Alf’s seven-year-old grand-daughter, who performed admirably as a bowler (albeit under-arm) in a match at the beach at the weekend.

Mrs Grumble is getting to grips with the thought she might cash in on glamourous grannies

Dunno about her teeth, but the rest of her is in good nick.

Grannies of the world, unite.

It seems you no longer are expected to sit in rocking chairs in your shawls, darning the family socks, knitting booties for the grandkids, or whatever.

The modern grandma is having none of that and – to the contrary – is showing off the fact she is sexy and active.

This is uplifting news for that generation of sheilas who have got to an age where uplift is essential, unless they have had a surgeon tuck things up for them.

Do you fancy trying out this wee trick to get yourself a bit of rumpy-pumpy?

If he offers you a wee dram, make sure it's not 100% wee.

Male Capuchin monkeys wash in their own pee to try to pull the sheilas.

Or so Alf reads today in his Telegraph.

This is troubling.

It causes Alf to seriously question Darwinian theories that would have splendid blokes like him trace their lineage back to apes.

That no doubt is true of Labour and Green Party supporters.

But it can’t possibly be true of true-blue Nats, who clearly originate from a profoundly superior species.

Mind you, Alf has read about a few blokes who drank or drink their own pee – Gandhi, Jim Morrison, John Lennon, Keith Richards and Steve McQueen (who, it is said, in the last stages of cancer, survived solely on a diet of urine and boiled alligator skin prescribed by his Mexican doctors).

We should not be surprised to find that most of them are dead.

If an iceberg can calve, will the genetic engineers become involved in future calvings?

So what does the picture above have in common with the picture below?

We live and learn, as they say.

Alf has just learned that calving can happen in places other than dairy farms.

He did know it can happen at research centres, where genetic engineers do their thing, and it can happen in the ocean, when whales give birth.

But that’s not all…

Besides the quake, there’s news about the foreshore furore, charitable fund-raising and PSA pique

The NZ public is understandably focused on the disastrous earthquake and its aftermath in Christchurch. The media is appropriately focused there, too.

Some important bits of news accordingly might escape public attention.

In the last hour or so, for example, Scoop posted a summary of Māori submissions on the Marine and Coastal Bill was released.

This is a summary of the 72 submissions received by the Māori Affairs Select Committee from marae, hapū, iwi, Māori land owners, organisations and collectives. It does not include those submissions made by Māori individuals. It has been prepared by a collective of concerned people, Kaitiaki o te Takutai, who wanted to know what hapū and iwi said about the Marine and Coastal Bill. It is our hope that their voices will be listened to.

The important thing is that all submitters said they were opposed to the Foreshore Seabed Act 2004 and supported its repeal.

The Christchurch earthquake: David Farrar has summed things up sadly but succinctly

The death toll is now thought to be around 65. Words are inadequate.

That’s how David Farrar summed up his record of today’s tragic events in and around Christchurch earlier this evening.

DF is in Australia. But he has been keeping an eye on the day’s events on telly and Alf does not intend to try to add to his succinct summation of what has happened.

Finance Minister Bill English has just said at a press conference in Wellington that the death toll is likely to rise. He is urging people to get out of the severely shaken city’s central business district.

Unknown numbers of people remain trapped in rubble.

It is a sad day for the city and for the country.

The Vikings have gone soft but the smart ones know how to keep sheilas in their place

But the best of them do it better in the bedroom than the boardroom.

Alf has been reading a fascinating report about a mob of sheilas known among Norwegian cynics as the “golden skirts”.

They are an elite group of 70 women in the Scandinavian nation who occupy more than 300 seats on corporate boards.

An article in The Observer says it’s equality, of a sort, but an imperfect kind of diversity.

It has come about because of silly laws that have set a quota for women, in defiance of Alf’s firm belief that business is for blokes; a sheila’s place is at home cooking the meals, doing the dishes and the washing, and so on.

Alf admires a good woman with prowess in the bedroom.

But in the boardroom – nah.

The Vikings – once feared as practitioners of rape and pillage – have lost a lot of brownie points for going soft on this one.

Yes, Hone could be a minister and given the job of sending malcontents back home

Maybe a Maori flag should look a bit more like this.

Alf has more in common with the stroppy Hone Harawira than he had imagined.

Hone – it transpires – wanted to become a minister when the Maori Party first went into coalition with National in 2008.

Alf wanted to be one too.

But whereas Alf has made plain his thwarted ambition from time to time in this blog, Hone hasn’t made much noise about his disappointment, although he makes a great deal of noise about all sorts of other things.

Now his ministerial aspirations have been flushed into the open by the leaking of a confidential statement by Hone’s caucus colleague, Te Ururoa Flavell.

The outfit that hates poor people alas has just lost NZ’s first-ever Sikh MP from its membership

Life is a matter of making the right choices.

Alf is somewhat astonished to learn that Kanwaljit Singh Bakshi, the first Sikh to be elected to our Parliament, is backing away from giving folks the impression he might regard beneficiaries as “freeloaders”.

Alf’s astonishment is that many citizens similarly have a dim view of beneficiaries.

And so they would be sympathetic about his membership – but only until Friday – of the Facebook group “I hate poor people”.

It seems he had been signed up to the group since 2009.

The group has 398 members, according to the Sunday Star-Times.

This makes it a somewhat sad little outfit, woefully lacking in good organising skills, bearning in mind it was set up to express displeasure at those on benefits and low incomes.

Alf reckons he could whip up 398 new members in a 30-minute stroll through a suburb like Remuera or Khandallah.

Oh look – $12.5m spent on a boat shed, but one of the boats is too bloody big

The farce of Welllington’s Maori boat shed gets more hilarious by the day.

It’s the shed Wellington ratepayers overwhelmingly did not want to fund.

The council’s spending – remember? – disregarded a poll that showed 84 per cent of respondents opposed the expenditure and said it was “outrageous.”

Oh, and it’s the shed that has cost taxpayers millions of dollars, too.

And it’s the shed that was opened with lots of Maori ceremony, but with ceremonial waka shipped in from somewhere elsewhere in the country because one bunch of Wellington Maori wouldn’t surrender the local ceremonial waka to another bunch of Wellington Maori on the other side of the harbour.

As if that wasn’t farce enough, it’s a shed designed to house two waka but (as we learn today) it is not big enough to house one of them.