Latest news with #TheLastWord
Otago Daily Times
a day ago
- Sport
- Otago Daily Times
Celebrate this test before it's too late
Test week! That is how we used to feel about it, anyway. In ye olden days, before The Last Word got weary and literally everything about the world got worse, the build-up to an All Blacks test in Dunedin genuinely deserved an exclamation mark. There was no ludicrous clash between club and international rugby, so both home and visiting teams were at full strength. Both teams would also — ALWAYS — arrive in Dunedin on the preceding Sunday, and do public trainings and be out and about in the city, which really helped the buzz grow. From tent villages at Bathgate Park to shops (with plenty of carparking) competing with one another to ''black out'' in greater style, there was such an incredible atmosphere here that many argued Dunedin was the best place to have an All Blacks test. It is a little different now, and without sounding too cynical, the changes have not been for the better. Let me stress that an All Blacks test is still brilliant, still far and away the biggest sports event we can hold, and we should be grateful Dunedin gets one most years. But the All Blacks do not arrive in our city until Tuesday night, the French do not even bother to come here until Thursday night, and there is not the slightest sign of rugby test buzz in town, and that makes me a little sad. International void While I am really winding up my levels of bitterness — note to self: must embrace positivity more — here is another thought. Two things each year are guaranteed to make my heart sink briefly, but it appears they cause mostly shrugged shoulders around Otago. The Silver Ferns announce their home schedule, and Dunedin is not part of it; and New Zealand Cricket reveals its schedule and the University Oval misses out on a test again. Let's get out and march in the streets over this appalling development. Dunedin has not hosted a Silver Ferns test since 2008 — the one before that was in 1998, when your man was in his first year at this fine newspaper — and the Black Caps have not played a test here since 2017. International hockey has not been seen in the city since 2007, the Tall Blacks have not played here since 2006 and the Tall Ferns since 2007, and the Kiwis test here in 2014 was the first in 86 years. The All Whites broke a 25-year drought when they played in Dunedin in 2013, though the city has seen top-level football thanks to the Fifa Women's World Cup in 2023 and the Under-20 World Cup in 2015. New Zealand Rugby, for its faults, still appears to value Dunedin as a venue — that cracking stadium helps — with the All Blacks coming most years, and the Black Ferns playing here just two years ago. A word of warning, though. Christchurch will open its fancy new house next year. The All Blacks now regularly play a ''home'' test overseas. And with an old-school tour of South Africa coming next year, and the World Cup the year after, there will be fewer home tests. Is it possible this French test will be the last time we see the All Blacks in Dunedin until 2028? Grudging acknowledgement The Crusaders are Super Rugby champions again. How wonderful for their long-suffering fans. Seriously, Chiefs: you had one job! Bazball again That was another stunning effort by the English cricketers as they chased 371 in the final innings to take a 1-0 lead in the test series against India. Hat tip to Michael Wagener, one of the cricket tragics I follow on X, for this outstanding snippet of information. He says that, in 148 years of test cricket, there have been just eight instances of a team chasing down a score of 250-plus to win a test while maintaining a run rate of better than 4.5 runs per over. Five of those eight chases have come from England since our Brendon McCullum became their coach. Plucky little amateurs This was the point when I assumed I would be mentioning Auckland City getting destroyed again, and mocking their presence at the bloated Club World Cup. My bad! It is legitimately amazing that New Zealand's battlers at the Fifa tournament managed to draw with Argentine powerhouses Boca Juniors. Bravo, lads. That lad again Sprint sensation Gout Gout continued his rapid rise by smashing the Australian 200m record in the Czech Republic earlier this week. The 17-year-old Usain Bolt Mark II clocked a sizzling 20.02sec. Only a matter of time before he is challenging Bolt's legacy. Birthday of the week Adolfo Carlos Julio Schwelm-Cruz would have been 102 today. Heck of a name, obviously. But the most interesting thing about the Argentine racing driver is that he was given a single race in a Formula One car, at his home nation's Grand Prix in 1953. One race! Even Red Bull gave Liam Lawson more than that.
Extra.ie
3 days ago
- Politics
- Extra.ie
Frances Black rules herself out of the presidential race
Senator Frances Black has ruled herself out of the running to become the country's next president. The Independent politician was flagged as a potential candidate for Áras an Uachtaráin for an alliance of left-leaning parties late last year. Ms Black previously said that she had been approached to enter discussions about the prospect of contesting November's election. Senator Frances Black. Pic: Sasko Lazarov/ However, in an interview earlier this week, she stated that she had received no official offers, leading her to conclude that she would not run. The former singer told The Last Word with Matt Cooper on Today FM: 'I'm ruling myself out of the presidency for sure. I had conversations with people at the start of the year, around this, around the smaller opposition parties, and I haven't heard anything.' The Dublin-based senator described the presidential election campaign as a 'bloodbath', adding: 'I've said it before, you'd want to be a very brave person to go into the presidential election.' Ms Black also cited her work on the Occupied Territories Bill, stating: 'I have too much work to do, particularly on this Bill.
Sydney Morning Herald
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
The books I loved as a teen have dated, but they got one thing right
Before I discovered teen romance novels in the early 1980s, I wrote my own version of unrequited love in my red vinyl-covered diary about an older boy who went to the private school up the road. While I was still wearing skinny jeans and a pale pink Esprit jumper to primary school, he had graduated to grey flannel shorts, a pale grey shirt and a grey blazer with the arms pushed up. You'd think dressing entirely in grey would have dampened his look, but somehow it didn't. With golden curls and a flashing smile that I'd only witnessed from a distance, he was perfect teen magazine material. He never spoke to me directly, but his brother and I had been friends when we were little, and his mother had named her prize cow after me, a fact I found both strangely flattering and deeply embarrassing. Around the time I developed my crush, I discovered the Sweet Dreams book series. If it was the sealed monthly Dolly Doctor column that taught me all I needed to know about sex, it was Sweet Dreams and later, Sweet Valley High that taught me all I needed to know about love. Sure, it was the sort of love that only 16-year-old American girls with flawless skin, perfect hair and eyes that sparkled ever experienced, but I was happy to pretend. And pretend I did. Writing about all the ways my crush would save me when the horse I was riding in the bush bucked me off. The fact that I didn't own a horse, or ever ride alone in the bush, didn't deter my fantasy life. The first Sweet Dreams book was published in 1981, and I found it a year or so later in the mobile library van. Called P.S. I Love You, it's the only title in the 233-book series without a happy ending, making it my favourite. Romance was one thing, but sobbing over the impossibility of romance was even better. The story of 16-year-old Mariah, who is dragged unwillingly to Palm Springs for the summer with her single mother and younger sister, was a heady read for a 12-year-old. Mariah is openly scathing of the rich families in Palm Springs until she meets the boy next door, who happens to be loaded, lovely and dying. This book cemented my obsession with romance, while also making me terrified that the boy of my dreams would discover a cancerous lump in his neck, too. The Sweet Dreams books were mostly standalone romances, written by different American authors. The covers used portrait photographs of teenage girls who I wanted to look like but never did, including Courteney Cox on the cover of The Last Word. The protagonists were always beautiful, and the teenage boys they fell for equally so. And if the girls didn't start out that way, then they quickly transformed, losing any necessary weight and overcoming their shyness. These worlds excluded anyone who wasn't the right size, race or look. By the time the Sweet Valley High series appeared two years later, I'd moved onto another crush. One who actually knew my name. We were in the same class and I used his library card when I wanted to borrow more romance books than I was allowed. We didn't really talk, but I did practise writing his name over and over again in my best bubble writing. Written by Francine Pascal and her army of ghostwriters, the Sweet Valley High series became a sort of bible for my generation. Sure, the protagonists were 'perfect size six' identical twins with 'sun-streaked blonde hair' and 'blue-green eyes the colour of the ocean' who shared a Jeep and lived in a mansion, but we still managed to see ourselves in Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield. Jessica was the impulsive and reckless twin, who frequently made questionable choices, while Elizabeth was older (by four minutes) wiser, more reserved and born with a conscience. Where the Sweet Dreams series was almost entirely focused on finding love, Sweet Valley High attempted something slightly different. Crushes, boys and romance were still at the centre, but the books also delved into the minutiae of high school life. And while Sweet Valley High School was nothing like my outer-suburban school, we did share many of the same concerns. We gossiped over break-ups, traded crushes, drank underage at parties, fought and made up with friends and talked about love like there was nothing else to talk about. Nothing was out of bounds for the writers of Sweet Valley High. Conceived like a soap opera, the books tackled everything from kidnapping to cults, cocaine deaths to comas, paralysis to underage drinking, and I loved it all. Sadly, none of the boys I had crushes on while I was reading Sweet Dreams or Sweet Valley High seemed to feel the same. Or if they did, their feelings remained as buried as mine. But the books gave me company while I was trying to work out how to behave and how to feel, at a time when hormones were wreaking havoc. Remembering what reading romance books meant to me when I was 12 and 13, I decided to write my own version of a romantic comedy for younger readers. I've published many books for readers aged 11-plus, but mostly they have been stories tinged with sadness, and I wanted to write something hopeful and gentle. For research, I reread some of the titles in both series. P.S. I Love You no longer made me cry, but the horror of Elizabeth's diary being stolen by a boy at school and used against her in The Stolen Diary did make me check my teenage diary was still hidden away. The books haven't aged particularly well – it was the height of diet culture in the 1980s, after all. But what they did do, and what I suspect I, and millions of others responded to, was to centre the importance of taking a teenager's emotions seriously. So often we dismiss the young as having foolish crushes or feelings that aren't worthy of conversation, but I still remember how I felt about that boy in his grey school uniform and how I longed for him to see me. Loading My new book is not angst-ridden like a Sweet Dream s romance, or soapie like a Sweet Valley High. It is the story of dual protagonists, Sonny and Tess, both nearly 14, who meet outside a fish and chip shop, and develop a mutual crush. It was important to me to write both perspectives, in a way to counter the absence of a boy's voice in the books that educated me as a teen. I want my young readers to see that we all have messy and confusing feelings when love strikes, and that it's not up to a boy to rescue a girl when her horse bucks her off in the bush, but that the girl can do rescuing too.
The Age
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
The books I loved as a teen have dated, but they got one thing right
Before I discovered teen romance novels in the early 1980s, I wrote my own version of unrequited love in my red vinyl-covered diary about an older boy who went to the private school up the road. While I was still wearing skinny jeans and a pale pink Esprit jumper to primary school, he had graduated to grey flannel shorts, a pale grey shirt and a grey blazer with the arms pushed up. You'd think dressing entirely in grey would have dampened his look, but somehow it didn't. With golden curls and a flashing smile that I'd only witnessed from a distance, he was perfect teen magazine material. He never spoke to me directly, but his brother and I had been friends when we were little, and his mother had named her prize cow after me, a fact I found both strangely flattering and deeply embarrassing. Around the time I developed my crush, I discovered the Sweet Dreams book series. If it was the sealed monthly Dolly Doctor column that taught me all I needed to know about sex, it was Sweet Dreams and later, Sweet Valley High that taught me all I needed to know about love. Sure, it was the sort of love that only 16-year-old American girls with flawless skin, perfect hair and eyes that sparkled ever experienced, but I was happy to pretend. And pretend I did. Writing about all the ways my crush would save me when the horse I was riding in the bush bucked me off. The fact that I didn't own a horse, or ever ride alone in the bush, didn't deter my fantasy life. The first Sweet Dreams book was published in 1981, and I found it a year or so later in the mobile library van. Called P.S. I Love You, it's the only title in the 233-book series without a happy ending, making it my favourite. Romance was one thing, but sobbing over the impossibility of romance was even better. The story of 16-year-old Mariah, who is dragged unwillingly to Palm Springs for the summer with her single mother and younger sister, was a heady read for a 12-year-old. Mariah is openly scathing of the rich families in Palm Springs until she meets the boy next door, who happens to be loaded, lovely and dying. This book cemented my obsession with romance, while also making me terrified that the boy of my dreams would discover a cancerous lump in his neck, too. The Sweet Dreams books were mostly standalone romances, written by different American authors. The covers used portrait photographs of teenage girls who I wanted to look like but never did, including Courteney Cox on the cover of The Last Word. The protagonists were always beautiful, and the teenage boys they fell for equally so. And if the girls didn't start out that way, then they quickly transformed, losing any necessary weight and overcoming their shyness. These worlds excluded anyone who wasn't the right size, race or look. By the time the Sweet Valley High series appeared two years later, I'd moved onto another crush. One who actually knew my name. We were in the same class and I used his library card when I wanted to borrow more romance books than I was allowed. We didn't really talk, but I did practise writing his name over and over again in my best bubble writing. Written by Francine Pascal and her army of ghostwriters, the Sweet Valley High series became a sort of bible for my generation. Sure, the protagonists were 'perfect size six' identical twins with 'sun-streaked blonde hair' and 'blue-green eyes the colour of the ocean' who shared a Jeep and lived in a mansion, but we still managed to see ourselves in Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield. Jessica was the impulsive and reckless twin, who frequently made questionable choices, while Elizabeth was older (by four minutes) wiser, more reserved and born with a conscience. Where the Sweet Dreams series was almost entirely focused on finding love, Sweet Valley High attempted something slightly different. Crushes, boys and romance were still at the centre, but the books also delved into the minutiae of high school life. And while Sweet Valley High School was nothing like my outer-suburban school, we did share many of the same concerns. We gossiped over break-ups, traded crushes, drank underage at parties, fought and made up with friends and talked about love like there was nothing else to talk about. Nothing was out of bounds for the writers of Sweet Valley High. Conceived like a soap opera, the books tackled everything from kidnapping to cults, cocaine deaths to comas, paralysis to underage drinking, and I loved it all. Sadly, none of the boys I had crushes on while I was reading Sweet Dreams or Sweet Valley High seemed to feel the same. Or if they did, their feelings remained as buried as mine. But the books gave me company while I was trying to work out how to behave and how to feel, at a time when hormones were wreaking havoc. Remembering what reading romance books meant to me when I was 12 and 13, I decided to write my own version of a romantic comedy for younger readers. I've published many books for readers aged 11-plus, but mostly they have been stories tinged with sadness, and I wanted to write something hopeful and gentle. For research, I reread some of the titles in both series. P.S. I Love You no longer made me cry, but the horror of Elizabeth's diary being stolen by a boy at school and used against her in The Stolen Diary did make me check my teenage diary was still hidden away. The books haven't aged particularly well – it was the height of diet culture in the 1980s, after all. But what they did do, and what I suspect I, and millions of others responded to, was to centre the importance of taking a teenager's emotions seriously. So often we dismiss the young as having foolish crushes or feelings that aren't worthy of conversation, but I still remember how I felt about that boy in his grey school uniform and how I longed for him to see me. Loading My new book is not angst-ridden like a Sweet Dream s romance, or soapie like a Sweet Valley High. It is the story of dual protagonists, Sonny and Tess, both nearly 14, who meet outside a fish and chip shop, and develop a mutual crush. It was important to me to write both perspectives, in a way to counter the absence of a boy's voice in the books that educated me as a teen. I want my young readers to see that we all have messy and confusing feelings when love strikes, and that it's not up to a boy to rescue a girl when her horse bucks her off in the bush, but that the girl can do rescuing too.
NDTV
4 days ago
- Politics
- NDTV
Truce Tumbles, Will Iran-Israel Hold Ceasefire?
The 12-day war between Israel and Iran has come to a tentative truce, and the geopolitical chessboard has been dramatically reshuffled. On this edition of The Last Word, we break down 3 key aspects of Iran-Israel conflict, starting with, 'Who gained what in this high-stakes game?', 'How Netanyahu's legacy will be reshaped by war?' & 'What's next with Khamenei'? What the full show only on NDTV.
