Swine Flu

Well Swine Flu seems to be the talk at the moment so I thought I would put my two cents in. It has made it to New Zealand, and the media are having a field day. I was watching the news today (yesterday) and they had statistics up. Their statistics for New Zealand cases were 136 suspected cases and 401 people under quarantine and taking Tamiflu who had contact with people suspected to have it. The thing is they failed to mention is the numbers of probable and confirmed cases of Swine Flu. 4 confirmed and 12 probable. Doesn't seem like much does it? Because it's not.

Living In NZ

I live in New Zealand obviously. I have always lived here; actually I’ve never left the place. So I’m going to share the upsides and the downsides of living in New Zealand. I should know them... I’ve lived here for 18 years.

Let’s start with the downsides, bad first. That way I finish feeling good about my country.

The problem with living in New Zealand is we get almost everything last, from movies to new products. I could be talking about an episode of a program from America. A typical conversation between me and an American:

Me: “Hey, did you see that new episode of Mythbusters where goes on to describe the show”

American: “That was four episodes ago man, what do you live under a rock?”

The funny thing is, I sort of do live under a rock. A rather big one at that, it’s so big it has a name. It’s called Earth.

I mean the only things we get first are daylight and anything Peter Jackson spits out! Not dissing Peter Jackson or anything like that, but let’s face it. We can only brag about the Lord of the Rings for so long before no-one really cares anymore, and what’s the point of being a day ahead of America if we still get everything last? Honestly we don’t even get Flight of the Concords first, and they come from New Zealand! Of course our TV companies are a bunch of stinges that didn’t fund them. Bet they’re feeling crap right about now.

Depending of the reception of this I’ll keep going on the pros and cons of NZ in future posts.