I swore on my dog's grave that I would never write a word about the America's Cup, but most rational thinkers would agree some bad decisions were made on board as 8-1 turned into 8-9.
Not that I give a rat's bottom, but Team New Zealand doesn't have a mortgage on bad decisions.
Consider for example the extraordinarily woeful decision our government made in 1945 allowing German aircraft parts into Hamilton.
Whatever were they thinking? Hamilton didn't need aircraft parts.
Nor did New Zealand.
Why fly?
At what point did horses become unacceptable as public transport?
We all now know the result of this gubernatural gaff. German wasps came in with those aircraft parts, and the rest is history.
Or, to be scientifically correct, histaminey.
Did you know some parts of New Zealand, like the forests up near Nelson, have the highest density of wasps in the world?
I loathe wasps.
I am probably allergic to them though I have never been stung, sometimes you just know these things.
With my compromised immune system, were a wasp to merely take its sting out of its holster and look my way, I would turn into a pile of potato peelings.
I am more terrified of wasps than I am of tarantulas.
Oh bollocks, I hear you scoff, pull the other one.
Wrong.
If you are not eating food right now, I suggest you watch this video of a wasp stinging, paralysing and then killing a tarantula six times its size, eventually hauling the carcass into a burrow, where it will be stored for a week's feasting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhpQYuU2l0M
What do you think now?
I tell you, these things - what are they, they are far more than insects, birds?, they do fly, yes, let's call them birds - these BIRDS are not only killers, but they have no ecosystemic use whatsoever.
They were accidentally introduced here for no purpose, like tofu.
And they maim, destroy, frighten and kill.
Well, kill?
Statistics, from biosecurity wallahs claim there are only two wasp or bee deaths every three years in New Zealand.
This is obviously nonsense.
If a wasp flies up my leg inside my trousers on a day when I have quixotically decided not to don underwear, and it stings me on the fong 12 times and I die from a heart attack, as would any rational man, is this recorded as a wasp death?
No, it is cardiac arrest.
If I am driving up the Skippers Canyon road, and yes, I don't drive, but let's not split hairs, we're trying to make a point here, and a wasp flies in through the window and stings me 23 times in my one good working eye and I plunge to my death hundreds of metres below, is this a wasp death?
No, it's a traffic accident.
I'll warrant there are thousands of wasp deaths in New Zealand every year.
Statistics, as usual, are bunkum and plod. Wasps not only kill, they completely change people's lives.
Take last week, when a close friend, I shall call her Floyd to completely cloak her in anonymity, was coming by for high tea.
Floyd is white-knuckle terrified of wasps, and before she arrived, I noticed a wasp the size of a sparrow strafing the dining-room window.
Our Black Death spray can was empty, so I tried to kill it with the Film Festival Catalogue from atop a wobbly chair, my life in the balance because I have no balance.
After 10 minutes of wild swipes and maybe the occasional contact, who would ever know, I am nearly blind, and I was shaking like a leaf on a tree, I climbed down and went to a nearby store that wasn't a supermarket and bought a $3.95 can of Black Death for $16.95.
It took most of the can to bring the wasp down to ground level, where I beat its groggy body to a slow death with hundreds of whangs from the Film Festival Catalogue.
One wasp.
Thirty minutes, almost a loss of life, and $16.95.
The 1945 Government (Labour) has a lot to answer for.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
