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Roger Rabbits with |
They’re not stories that would bring down a government. Nor are they life or death stories.
They’re just some of the stories of 2024 that touched us, titillated us, made us laugh, made us wonder, surprised us, excited us.
So let’s celebrate a year that’s nearly cooked.
The Steamers
A geothermal rugby team running at 100 degrees Celsius, boiling point. Did we miss an opportunity – like parading them through town on an open top double-decker, like giving them freedom of the city?
We’ve also discovered a much better metric to measure the Steamers’ season than the 7 wins, 3 losses, 350 points for and 238 against record. They’re just numbers. I’m talking about their love rating. By season’s end you couldn’t buy Steamers’ merchandise for love nor money.
The union was cleaned out – nothing left, zilch in any shape or size, until April or May next year. Blame Richard Watt.
Bouncy Pork
We venture just beyond The Weekend Sun circulation area, by about 10,000km, to welcome Moo Deng, which roughly translates to Bouncy Pork.
She’s that 6kg of roly-poly, deadest ugliness, but at the same time adorable celebrity pygmy hippo born in a Thai zoo.
Of course we could have found a local rescue dog, parrot or donkey to celebrate – but they wouldn’t have caused the same collective, global “ooooh” of cuteness that Moo Deng generated when she arrived in July.
Moo Deng spends her days splashing and eating grass, living the mini hippo life, and pulling 20,000 visitors a day.
Jam sandwiches
Hewletts Rd traffic jam sandwiches. We sit there morning and night, bumper-to-bumper, as chunks of our lives disappear into the ether.
And that got us pondering the dynamics of a traffic jam. If we squeeze into the traffic, it’ll force people behind to make room, adding a few seconds to their journey.
Add up those tiny individual amounts across hundreds/thousands of motorists and that’s the reason peak hour traffic can reduce from 80km/hr to perhaps 30km/h.
When monetised it could give a city such as Auckland $1 billion a year. Now do you own math. Add up all the extra time you waste on Hewletts Rd at peak time each week and see how much of your life has been blown out the exhaust pipe.
Eureka moment (of sorts)
How many of us assumed that Tauranga Mayor Mahé Drysdale’s name was either Māori or Polynesian?
I always delighted in my misunderstanding that some enlightened, socially progressive parents had blessed this Pākehā boy with an exotic Māori name. Loved it.
For the unschooled, like me, he is named for the largest island of the Seychelles archipelago which his parents visited before he was born.
I think I confused an ‘accent ague’, an acute, for a macron – not easily done. Just something this ‘doofus’, and I expect others, learned in 2024.
‘Whoops’ of the year
We can guess how that phone call went. “Sorry boss, I’ve just sunk your $147 million naval research ship. Can you come pick us up?”
The Royal New Zealand Navy made a right Royal stuff up, losing HMNZS Manawanui without a shot being fired, it’s worst peacetime accident. ‘Manawanui’ means steadfast, stout-hearted, staunch and dogged, but all that meant little the day the ship grounded on a reef off Samoa and sank.
Seems autopilot should have been ‘off’ and autopilot was ‘on’. The country was left red-faced as the story of our Navy sinking itself resonated around the world.
‘Sorry, we were wrong’
Remember the caterwauling, the terminal moaning, when it was decided parked up cars wasn’t the best use of premium land on Tauranga’s waterfront.
The land was turned back over to people again; people swimming, playing, enjoying. A great call! Remember the other wave of penny-pinching angst when the commissioners kick-started the Civic Precinct,
The heartbeat of Te Papa? Today there are cranes and concrete trucks and wall-to-wall chippies downtown. There’s a great feel. The heart is pumping again. Good things happened in this city in 2024.
What the Hell?
In 2003 a Wellington music producer lost a security swipe card. It was found 13 years later, not in Wellington but by divers, under 2m of ice on the sea floor at Cape Evans, about 20km north of Scott Base in Antarctica.
About 4000km from where it was lost. A scientist mapped out a possible itinerary for the card, and taking into account wind, tides, currents and other variables, the journey should have taken about 1000 years.
The security swipe sat in a box in Wellington for about eight years before being returned to the musician just recently. What the hell?
Your favourite story of 2024? Any ideas? We may revisit in the New Year. Email: hunter.wells@nzme.co.nz
