Food is better than sex

.. that was just to get your attention and it seems to have worked.

Just wanted to share with you that I had a lovely lamb madras today for lunch. Along with the garlic naan it was the dogs bollocks!

If you are from Türkiye and you understood that then ConGrAtUlAtIoNs :)

What a horrible country New Zealand is becoming

Unlike most nations we've managed to avoid arming our regular police force… until now. NZ Police cars will now have a stash of various firearms in the boot - available at a moments notice. 

It's a clear indication of which direction a once largely peaceful nation is heading.

That being said it's worth noting that the police are still reluctant to use them.

And… we remain number two in the world peace rankings.

Which all leads me to believe I've used the wrong heading for this commentary. It should read "What a horrible nation…" because after all it's still the most beautiful country in the world - n'est-ce pas?

Remember when you were young…?

… and observing  your parents reading the newspaper you thought they were naff? I mean what could be more boring than reading a newspaper?

Some 20+ years later I'm sitting in the lounge on a very rainy New Years Eve reading the New Zealand Herald. Since my time in the UK, where I read The Times (a beast of a paper compared to the tiny Herald), I've garnered a love for the weekend paper. Mainly because as well as giving a summary of the news it tends to tell a few 'human interest' stories as well.

It's something I miss in Turkey and especially so as the English translation of the Turkish news is heavily oriented towards politics. In addition, something I find mildly amusing is that the 97% Muslim readership newspaper has without fail had a scantily clad woman (not wearing much) on their home page, yet she is absent from the English version!

Moving from newspapers to television for a second... At first I enjoyed TV One's daily end of news reports on Good Sorts (people who do good things in the community). Then I became bored with it - this was all when I was living in New Zealand. Now on my return I'm proud that we at least have Good Sorts as a regular feature on the daily news which, let's face it, in every country in the world is dominated by bad news.

This leads directly to what I was reading in the newspaper this morning which is the New Years Honours (British honours system).

Whether you are a Royalist (kral taraftarı) or not it's still great to read that there are many people out there doing good works. I confess to thinking that the granting of honours has become over zealous (ateşli) in the last few decades and the pessimist (karamsar) inside of me can't help but think it's just to promote the flagging interest (ikaz davranışı) in the Royals.

Either way it's great to hear the good news and it's often inspiring too.