Compiling the best reading of the week from your friendly local website.
Alex Casey: Good news: The Chiefs scandal didn’t really even happen!!!
“As has been observed on Twitter, The Chiefs are hugely embarrassed and disappointed about all the nothing that happened. They hope to rebuild from all the nothing to make a… something… but not before addressing all this nothing head-on.”
David Farrier: The incredibly weird tale behind the Bashford Antiques clamping story
“Now technically, Bashford Antiques can clamp. They can do pretty much whatever they want to do to cars on their property.
They can, for example:
- Cover the cars in chocolate sauce
- Take a big poo on the bonnet
- Tow them
- Clamp them
Thing is, I found myself not really caring about the act of clamping itself… I was more curious about who was doing the clamping.”
Katie Parker: Let me be your ruler: The impatient ambition of Chloe Swarbrick
“Chloe Swarbrick, in person, is professional, earnest and engaging. She talks quickly and persuasively, holds your gaze confidently with her clear pale green eyes and gesticulates like a military strategist. She’s genuine. She’s eloquent. And she’s clearly slightly exasperated.”
Hayden Donnell and David Farrier: WTF is going on at Bashford Antiques part two – a mysterious Organ
“Though he’s older and less well-groomed, the goatee still adorns his face. It’s unmistakable.
It’s the goatee of the man clamping cars in Ponsonby; the goatee of former Prince Michael Organe-Schirinski, ex-Count Michael Andrassy-Organe.
The goatee of Michael Daniel Albert Organ.”
Duncan Greive: Shock: Media currently hosting world’s first non-racist immigration debate
“Riding round in a ’36 Dodge, he spied the man walking down Mt Eden Rd, and yelled ‘look Grandpa, it’s a n*****’. His grandfather pulled over, and immediately admonished him. It’s an extraordinary anecdote, revealing the casual racism of the child and the kind of socially liberal values this country has managed to display often enough that – despite equally frequent threads of ugly racism – we should always start from a position of hoping we can restrain our worst instincts and have a grown up debate that doesn’t get gross.”
Kelly Dennett: The Monday Surrey Hotel Residency Award Report: Kelly Dennett on writing about an unsolved murder
“In January this year I said to my partner how much I’d enjoyed Steve Braunias’ The Scene of the Crime and how I wished I could do something like it. As a court reporter I had no shortage of interesting stories to write about, but none of them clung to me the way Jane Furlong’s story did.
Jane disappeared off Auckland’s Karangahape Road in 1993. At the time she was working as a prostitute and police initially thought she’d run away. The more time that went by, the more questions remained about what happened to her.”
Hayden Donnell: A Spinoff inquiry into NZ Rugby’s Chiefs inquiry
“When a woman admits she was drunk during a sexual assault, we question the worth of her testimony, and often dismiss it as unreliable.
It doesn’t seem men have the same problem.
Even though the Chiefs players directly involved in this incident were, by their own admission, totally trashed, their testimony seems to have been given more weight than the sober testimony of two women who say they were abused.”
Toby Manhire: Seven high-level findings from the RNZ/AUT Auckland mayoral debate
“It’s tricky deciding who to include in these debates. But wouldn’t it have been interesting to get the precocious Chloe Swarbrick along? It might have put pressure from a different direction on this lot. Another local body politics neophyte, Bill Ralston, reckons so. Unless there’s a similarly named Chloe involved…”
Scotty Stevenson: The only decent game of rugby at Waikato Stadium this weekend
“There is a stigma attached to the women’s game – that the players are lacking in skill and pace when compared to the men. Certainly the game may not be played at the same breakneck speed, but anyone who was on hand to watch both matches will tell you this: these wahine showed more accuracy and awareness of the treacherous conditions than the men who played after them did. Perhaps if the men took time to watch, they may have learned something.”
River Lin: Her Warship abides: a day with the unsinkable would-be mayor, Penny Bright
“Bright spends the first half periodically nudging me, smiling and reciting paragraphs of an obscure government act from 1956 which are far too long to meet the criteria for Things Which Should Be Whispered. The second half is spent making her rounds across the room as she joins the audience in heckling the councillors seated at the round table in front of her.
I spend the entire meeting wishing I could leave for the bathroom and never come back.”