Dixon himself said no one would make a cent from the release of the video. He obviously doesn't know how newspaper circulation works.
But he also needs to be more specific. Even the greenest tabloid lizard knows that you don't pay sources in cash but in travel, appliances and consumables.
The last person to be bothered by any of this would be Tindall. Britain now has more CCTVs than it has people who have been on Antiques Roadshow. As the wall-to-wall footage of the recent nationwide riots has proved, there are cameras everywhere. Even someone who earns his living playing rugby couldn't have failed to notice that a Queenstown bar is a public place, so he can't have been terribly concerned by other people seeing what he was doing.
Many people will have found Tindall's actions troubling because a man in his position is meant to be a role model. Even Dixon appears to have fallen for this notion. Perhaps if anything good is to come out of the affair, it will be an end to this. Between their diva antics, loyalty to the highest bidder and verbal skills of a glove puppet, it's hard to see much worth admiring, though I'll grant you most have excellent hand-eye co-ordination.
Tindall is connected by marriage to England's royal family. Given the off-field behaviour of many of the Windsors in recent decades, his mild bar-room shenanigans down south must make him a dead cert for the Good Conduct Award at the family's annual prize-giving ceremony this Christmas.
SEX EDUCATION
Sex education has been compulsory in schools for many years. The option for parents to have their children excluded from such classes has been around for about as long. School boards are also charged with putting their schools' sex-education policy and programmes up for discussion every two years.
So parents have little justification for getting their panties in a twist over reports of some extreme examples of Sex Ed Gone Bad. It's a parent's responsibility to find out what their kids are being taught. Just ask them. It takes about 5 minutes per subject, slightly longer for media studies. The complaining parents in this case are those likeliest to have poor communication with their kids.
The reaction also suggests short parental memories. You can guarantee that for all the grisly and ghastly details about sex that kids hear in class, they will have already heard grislier and ghastlier from their peers out of class. It was ever thus.
Brave Amber-Leigh Erasmus fronted this week to talk about her experience of sex education at school. She first had sex at 14 and is pregnant at 17, thanks to a drunken encounter on New Year's Eve. Her story proves the sad truth that sex education doesn't get girls pregnant. Boys acting irresponsibly and alcohol make girls pregnant.
BIG PHALLIC SCULPTURE
Apart from the odd rash of couch-burning, nothing much happens in Dunedin that could fall under any definition of controversy.
So the brouhaha over artist Rachel Rakena's RWC tribute sculpture, Haka Peepshow, is shaping up to be the biggest scandal since William Larnach topped himself in 1898.
The key concern is that the big, black sculpture is unmistakably and unambiguously phallic. That would be why Rakena said on TV, with a face as straight as that of a farmer saying the price of milk isn't too high, that when she began work on it she "thought long and hard". Honestly, you couldn't make this stuff up.
