It’s a sad day when things get hot for a party leader for being questioned in a sauna

Couldn’t this have been filmed by the Fox bunch?

Sir John Kirwan – gone as coach of the Blues and Alf did nicely, thank you, on some punts with his mates.

Next?

Alf is tempted to put some money on Colin Craig being a goner fairly soon.

Mind you, he has not been given any inside tips on this matter.

He is reliant on the news media and is bound to say this means he is listening to journalists,and journalists are at the bottom of the pecking order when it comes to public trust.

For what it’s worth, therefore, consider this:

On yer bike? No, that’s to be hostile to motorists – it’s better to go walking instead

Here’s a good reason for sticking to the motor car.

Alf thinks the merits of the motor car are easily demonstrated.

First, greenies  are fond of bicycling and disparaging of vehicles that emit greenhouse gases without explaining the miracle by which cyclists don’t emit such gases.

Second, he has seen Trevor Mallard on a bike and it is not a pretty sight.

Accordingly Alf has no urge to sympathise with  Alex Mann, the bloke whose champions say made a legitimate choice when he decided to travel by bicycle on the day a police officer fined him for impeding traffic.

As one of his defenders has argued: 

Hold your hat on, Dover – those kauri logs (carved or otherwise) are nice little earners for the economy

Alf is a bit bemused about this kauri carry-on.

Here’s how he sees it: enterprising people are doing Northland a favour by ridding its swamps of kauri.

But Dover Samuels, one of the region’s prominent citizens, is hollering for a halt to the clean-up, which – for good measure – is earning good export dollars.

These logs have been lying in the swamps for many, many years.

Now that someone is making a buck from them, Dover recognises them as a treasure and the export of them as “plunder”.

Obviously he disapproves of this treasure being turned into cash (although maybe he would be tempted to change his mind if he was given a slice of the action).

Wellington Regional Council clobbers ratepayers with near-10pc rates rise – so why just one “no” vote?

Alf is disinclined, usually, to see much good in the political decisions of lefties

But he was pleasantly surprised to find Paul Swain doing the right thing by hard-pressed ratepayers in the Wellington Regional Council’s domain, which reaches over the Rimutakas and into the Wairarapa.

Swain has voted against a rates hike of almost 10 per cent but was something of a Lone Ranger on this matter.

The rest of the council voted for the rates rise and $550,000 of funding for the Capital Connection to be written into Greater Wellington Regional Council’s long-term budget.

Here’s how Stuff reports on the matter:

Sorry, Sonny, but the Auditor-General won’t be apologising for her whanau ora criticism

Hmm .. the rest of the money must be back with the administrators. 

Uh, oh. That’s not like Lyn, Alf thought when he heard she had agreed to do some apologising.

He is sure she would apologise if she got something wrong, of course.

But she wouldn’t be saying sorry – surely – just because somebody had been offended by something she said.

In this case it sounded like the apology indeed was about to be delivered because somebody had taken offence.

The Lyn being talked about in this post is Lyn Provost, Auditor-General and someone with whom Alf has a nodding acquaintance.

The offended party is Sonny Tau, who apparently was affronted by comments she made when criticising the amount of Whanau Ora funding spent on administration.

For Pete’s sake, did those Christopher Lee scenes really have to be scrapped?

Many newspapers reported that Wellington movie big-shot Peter Jackson had led the tributes to Sir Christopher Lee, who died last Sunday at the age of 93.

Among them is this report from The Guardian, which quoted from Jackson’t Facebook page:

Grant Robertson goes future-gazing for dairy farmers (and is gloomy) while Our Bill fluffs his percentages

Look out for this during arguments about dairying..

It’s not too often Alf has to worry about his mate Bill English.

But he did wriggle somewhat uncomfortably today when it sounded suspiciously as if Bill was getting into the soothsaying business.

Labour’s Grant Robertson most certainly was doing it.

But Alf is not surprised to hear that lefties have been desperately poking sticks into chicken entrails or some such to try to read the future, then have emerged to proclaim that the future is looking grimmer than the Government is willing to acknowledge.

Praise be, The Basin has been spared the contamination from a titanic turd

The NZTA feared the turd might soon be spread around this…

There’s an opening for him at NZTA.

Alf can only imagine – with a profound sense of wonderment – the size of a turd that delayed the opening of a road tunnel in the capital city this morning.

This leads in turn to conjecture about the size of the bloke who deposited the turd and the nature of his dietary demands.

Alas, the proportions of the turd are not specifically stated in this report at Stuff.

Indeed, it might have been more splatter than solid matter.

Whatever, its volume must have been gargantuan if the time taken to clean up serves as a guide.

Another British judge does the right thing by bringing cultural attitudes to discipline into account

For a moment – maybe two or three moments – Alf was struggling to suppress his feelings of outrage.

A High Court judge in Britain had said immigrant parents should be allowed to slap and hit their children when they are new arrivals in Britain.

Nothing wrong with the slapping of children in Alf’s value system.

It’s the discrimination on cultural grounds that was upsetting (but only until second thoughts kicked in):

But what happens if one must relieve oneself in the lift before the prayers have been answered?

So which one is going up?

A matter of great curiosity to Alf has gone unanswered in the reports he has read.

It’s the delicate matter of how much waste had to be cleaned out after two nuns were trapped for three days in a lift in Italy.

Or did they pray enough to reduce their ones and twos to zero?

Bloody media never get down to this sort of nitty-gritty.

It transpires that one of the pair was a Kiwi nun.

She prayed – apparently – until the pair were eventually rescued by a cleaner.

This prompts the indelicate observation that The Almighty wasn’t in a hurry to respond to their prayers, if the cleaner didn’t turn up for three days.

Perhaps more fascinating, Alf would like to know if the nuns had done something to offend Him that caused the lift to stop with the pair inside in the first place.