New Year Promise
Taking a look at recent, positive, uplifting, news stories and yarns, from New Zealand and all around the world, to bring a smile and a bit of cheer.
As 2024 draws to a close it’s time to both look back and to look forward. New Year is that special time where we take stock, reflect, make plans, and hope for better in the coming year.
Without a doubt the past 12 months have been economically challenging for most Kiwis. As the year progressed, signs that the economy may well improve gave hope that recession, inflation, and high living costs were easing. As we move toward 2025 there is muted optimism that the coming year will be better than the last.
On a personal level, New Years is a time to celebrate and rejoice: to think back on all the things that have happened to us, those we know, and those we cherish in the previous year. Often the night is a reason to party and indulge with those we care about and to raise a glass at midnight to the dawning year.
5 stars – the promise of a coming year, as we tip our hat to the last, is the perfect reason to celebrate.
Kiwi football teams making mark
We now have two New Zealand football teams competing in the Australian A-League – with the newest entrant off to a blazing start, topping the league after nine games. Auckland FC has hit the ground running, currently topping the league, and generated an admirable support base in the City of Sales, whilst the Wellington Phoenix are a well established team that has earned huge respect since its founding in 2007.
Football, or soccer, has a storied past in New Zealand. Many will still remember the nail biting qualifying games for the 1982 World Cup in Spain, as well as being unbeaten at the 2010 World Cup. Three draws was impressive enough but not enough to advance to the knockout stages. The Football Ferns have also gone from strength to strength. Both our men’s and women’s national teams have done us proud on the international stage.
With a lot of the season to go it will be interesting to see how Auckland and Wellington fare. Their performances are growing the numbers of kids playing here and that’s a great thing. Long may it continue!
5 stars – as a sports mad nation, it’s great to see us competing at a high level, playing the world’s most popular sport.
Scientist foresaw our modern world – a century ago
We tend to be rather fascinated by predictions and foretellings of what the world may look like in the coming years, centuries, or millenia. After all, the science fiction of previous decades sometimes ends up being very close to contemporary reality and Nostradamus knocked it out of the park with a good number of his musings nearly 500 years ago.
Itn has been revealed recently that a UK scientist and inventor got very close to the mark with his predictions form a century ago,
“When the scientist and inventor Prof Archibald Montgomery Low predicted ‘a day in the life of a man of the future’ one century ago, his prophecies were sometimes dismissed as ‘ruthlessly imaginative’.
“They included, reported the London Daily News in 1925, ‘such horrors’ as being woken by radio alarm clock; communications ‘by personal radio set’; breakfasting ‘with loudspeaker news and television glimpses of events’; shopping by moving stairways and moving pavements.
“In 1925, he predicted how home loudspeakers and a ‘television machine’ would replace ‘the picture paper’ – or newspapers – for information and on demand entertainment; access to global broadcasting at the press of a button; and the use of secret cameras and listening devices to catch criminals. He foresaw the use of moving pavements and stairs, essentially the escalators and travelators of today, as well as ‘automatic telephones’ with the benefit of getting the right number every time, as opposed to the 1920s rotary dial phones.” (Source: “Scientist’s ‘ruthlessly imaginative’ 1925 predictions for the future come true – mostly,” by Caroline Davies, 29 December, www.guardian.com).
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