What to do when being sick at home?

I am sick and bored...I am not the most patient person, so sitting still is rather annoying after a while. To look at the bright side of it all, it is the time of the Olympic Games and I have managed to watch a lot of it.

New Zealand has done very well so far with Gold in rowing and short putt and silver and bronze medals in cycling, triathlon, and more rowing. I have never really cared much about rowing but it was very exciting when the Evers-Swindell sisters won with a hundred of a second.

It is harder to follow the successes of Sweden. I caught a glimpse of the girls beating Germany in handball, but apart from that, I have had to rely on DN's website (Swedish news).

I have also had time to listen to the news a fair bit. Here in New Zealand, it is election time, but the weird thing is that there is no date determined yet. It is likely to be in November sometime. I think not knowing the election date makes kiwis caring even less about politics.
Helen Clark looking convinced...



Currently Labour is in charge of the country with Helen Clark as the front man (she has a voice like a man anyway:-). The polls indicate that the right wing National Party is in the lead. So far there have been no real election debates and many of the parties (especially National) haven't even made all their policies official. Most kiwis seems to be content with simply having John Key's (National's leader) promise to support a prosperous economy. Aha??? Sounds good, but how?? This is annoying me.

John Key dodging questions about National's plans.


In general kiwis don't like discussing politics. It is certainly not a topic which is hot around the coffee table. The news coverage here is very poor, especially Christchurch's local "The Press" where the world section often consists of one page of which some celebrity news takes up half of the space. There is not much worth noting in the world anyway, is there?? I am happy that we at least get some European news updates with the weekly Guardian.

While I am having a good time complaining about the standard of journalism here, I can also mention that despite having a whole hour of news at 6pm, they don't get much of substance across. The first 5 min introduces the latest about the rugby (of which they during the last 20 min go more into details,), followed by 5-10 min regional news about some draught, flooding or storm event in New Zealand with long interviews with whinging farmers, 5 min about some crime committed in South Auckland, if anyone happens to have died, they usually spend a few minutes explaining what a great family person and true Christian he/she was. If you are lucky, they may squeeze in a few minutes about some news from abroad, for example from Australia. In the Olympic games, it appears from the coverage here that there are only two countries competing: New Zealand and Australia.

Hrm, didn't that make 60 min? It depends that there are shitloads with bad ads in between all the sensational news.

Ok, that's enough ranting. Time to go to bed I think...:-)