Honda

Is the biggest-selling brand of motorcycle in Australia. Third quarter 2010 sales total: 15446. Which is roughly 5000 per month. Compare that to yesterday's figure for the leading brand in NZ. I know Australia is bigger, but it's certainly not that much bigger.

I suspect dirtbikes might not be included in the NZ figure, but are included in the Aus figures or something like that.

Suzuki

Is the most popular brand of motorcycle in NZ... according to this. But then again, that's based off a monthly value, with a total of 56 Suzuki sales in the entire country. I guess it's a small market.

0 posts

Have been posted here in the last month. I guess I've run out of random statistics for now and maybe I should rename this blog g-s-o-t-m or something similar (insert "month" or "millenium" depending how charitable you feel)

140000 lambs per day

that's how many are born each day around this time of year, just in Otago and Southland, according to this article, which sounds about right considering the number of sheep around there. Putting the numbers like that makes for a pretty astounding figure!

1 day in the last two weeks

did not get at least 1mm of rain. This is in Ruakura, Hamilton (the closest weather station). I'm now thoroughly sick of the rain...

Since the beginning of August, i.e. 51 days, there have only been 12 days without rain. That doesn't sound all that bad at first, but it does mean more than 3 out of every 4 days has been raining.

Rainfall variability...

I know, I'm back to the weather. That's life.

Hamilton, in general, is pretty much guaranteed to have a wet winter - that's just the way it is. Rainfall really is quite reliable here: between 1990 and 2010, the lowest monthly rainfall in June was 86mm in 2005, the highest 222mm this year. In other words, June will always be wet. You can register with NIWA if you're really keen!

Brisbane on the other hand, as with most of Australia, tends to have rather variable rainfall year to year. In just the last 10 years, the total rainfall in June has varied between 6mm this year to 121mm in 2008. Interestingly though, Brisbane's total rainfall tends to roughly even out - the lowest annual rainfall in the last 10 years was 652mm in 2007, the highest 1240mm in 2008, which isn't an extreme variation like the monthly totals can be. Numbers from BOM

85200 cars...

were stolen in Australia last year. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it.

Source: ABS (again!)