KEY POINTS:
No need to ask "What's on the menu?" at the Tuck Shop of Despair. There's always plenty to sample. This week, for instance, we could nibble on the Fiji bun-gle, particularly the lamentable diet now being promoted by Commodore Boney Moroney and his coup klutz clan: ARMY BANS GREENS.
Alternatively, we could chew over these oddly adulterous Dalai-ances with the Lama - "No cameras please! I don't want my Chinese Free Trade Agreement to see us!" - to decide whether its the furtiveness or the feebleness of it all ("Yes! We did meet. But not officially.") that leaves such a nasty taste in the mouth.
Then again, if that's considered junk food, we could try the Immigration Hot Potch. Not the most popular of dishes, indeed, regarded as indigestible by many, including those who insist you'd have to be Oliver Twisted to ask for "More", immigration nevertheless appears to be a staple part of our modern diet.
Strangely, while condemnation is regularly ladled out, no one's proposed the obvious alternative recipe.
If us "ordinary Kiwis" don't want more "foreigners" coming in and buying all the houses etc, the solution is entirely in our own glands. We just have more children! End of story.
But we won't. Not for a while. The notion of incentivising birth finds no favour with the first-generation feminists currently in charge. Unaware how quickly their philosophical empire is crumbling, these ardent souls would rather exploit the fecundity of others than promote the fertility of their own.
Eventually, of course, the rich world will run out of poor people to import and governments will have to put the boom back into baby, but not yet. Best let that one simmer for a while and hoe into something more immediate - and inspiring.
In less that 48 hours, the mighty Men in Black will Adidash on to the field in Durban, determined to whup the Boks. And we hope they will. New Zealanders need a victory in which we can all exult. And while some predict it will come in Valencia, rumour also has it that Mr Berty Relli and his Zurich metrognomes have concocted a "rocket ship" (complete with cunning keel), so a gallant second may be the best we can expect.
Not so with the ABs! Our faith in them is resolute. Losing is not an option. On Sunday morning or at the World Cup in November, when we confidently anticipate the world will really get a taste of Kiwi.
Trouble is, they may get too much. As the three Tests already played this year make abundantly clear, the pre-match fanfare now takes nearly as long as the first half!
Having waded through the sonorous rendition of our all-new, multicultural anthem, plus their ditty (whatever it might be), then the haka with or without severed jugulars it's damned near time for a Nana nap!
No matter that no one sings the first verse except for a few teachers and social workers who are probably at the game under duress.
Or that the crowd's sullen silence is likely a form a protest, made even more obvious by everyone bursting into lusty voice when God of Nations comes round.
What matters is that the gummint decided some years ago we had to have a multicultural anthem, and cunningly used a financial carrot to get one.
"If you don't do our new version," they told the nations sports bodies, "we'll review your funding."
Faced with an imminent fiscal shortfall of the catastrophic kind, our sporting heroes did the sensible thing and meekly complied.
Alas, our social reformers were so intent on making Outer Roa a Woodstock-on-Sea that they failed to critically examine that which they were changing.
Any anthem is the great-grandchild of a battle hymn. It's the national version of a tribal chant, originally intended to inflame your chaps and scare the b@%*&s out of theirs! That's why anthems are so popular in times of war.
Heck, if they'd been clever enough to write some words, even the Scots would've had one, thereby sparing themselves the indignity of raising their kilts and baring their bottoms, to the great delight of all those English public schoolboys with whom they had regular tussles.
Given these antecedents, its no surprise that anthems have become an essential part of grand occasions like rugby tests. Provided the lyrics and tune are halfway decent, an anthem is the ideal way to stir the blood and whip up patriotic fervour.
Unless you prefer a haka. Which is, by any measure, exactly the same thing! Created for the same reasons - to arouse your side and terrify theirs - and performed in the same circumstances, the haka is a Polynesian anthem.
So the gummint didn't need to change anything. We already had a perfectly acceptable multicultural beginning to our most significant sporting battles: a European anthem and a Polynesian anthem. As long as we had the latter there was no need to change the former.
Rugby had already solved the problem. There was no need for any well-intentioned middle-class meddling. Which doesn't mean the urge to meddle will be like the Dalai Lama and go away.
But assuming somebody in Wellington has a scintilla of sense, they might decide before November that if we really want to be multicultural and save a bit of time, it would be a blessed relief if the All Blacks just did things the old-fashioned way!
