My new hat!

Just wanted to share some pics of my new hat, lol.

This is me buying my hat from a hat lady in Wellington. She said it really suits me, lol.

Having some funs with my new hat outside the NZ Pork Board, lol.

Me and my woman with my new hat. Grrrr!!! lol

“25 hours a dayyyyyy…”

I’m watching The Secret of My Success as I write this, trying to concentrate on blogging while some hilarious montage plays along to the old DEKA soundtrack as the bosses wife tries to seduce Michael J. Fox’s currently low-ranking mail-clerk (chik-chika-chika!). I’m guessing that if he taps this, he may not be a mail-clerk for long.

It’s time to make a better fist of this blogging thing. So what better way to do that than just sit-down at the computer and catch up?

Michael J. Fox is such a textbook example of an actor who has glided by on characters that usually seem to be a close approximation of what Michael J. Fox is like in real-life. But he’s also an example of someone so completely likeable that no one really minds. His doe-eyed enthusiasm is so completely unironic but so thoroughly genuine and somehow it works (he also has great timing), so well in fact that it helps you overlook the fact that the Secret of my Success is a relatively puddle-shallow critique of 80s corporate culture and a slightly cheesy romantic-comedy at the same time. I just can’t help but enjoy anything with Michael J. Fox in it. He’s also a gutsy campaigner to cure Parkinson’s disease and a pretty cool guy.

I don’t know if I can tie this tangent back into anything relevant, except that the make-it-to-the-top-on-my-own ethos of this film is heartwarming motivation to take back to my new job; the same job that has seen this blog fall into slight disrepair.

So what’s, uhhh, been going on?

• Since my last blog on the inappropriate fear-mongering on the swine flu bonanza, I’ve been proved gleefully right. Swine flu has slided from common usage, and that same level of panic has been completely absent from follow up coverage. I found this article, where Air New Zealand CEO Rob Fyfe actually suggests that the early confirmation and panic had a detrimental impact on our country. (“I think bringing awareness of the fact that this was moving around the globe was very important,” he said. “I’m just not sure we had to be the poster child for swine flu moving around the world.”)
• The stupid Boston Celtics lost to the Orlando Magic in game seven in the NBA Eastern Conference semi-final. It was pathetic. And also put me in a position in the annual Pick’N'Roll pool where I can finish no better than second. Man. The NBA has proved excellent for inter-workplace debate and an excellent source of sporadic procrastination. I’m busier at work now, so procrastination can only be sporadic.
• I’m going to do a 10km running race at the end of next month. I did my first day of official running training tonight; apparently you’re supposed to run intervals at different levels, speeds and over different times on different nights and mix it up with low intensity longer runs. (Funny how you don’t need to know anything these days thanks to Dr. Google. Ten minutes research… and bang! I’m an expert on building up speed and endurance.) I’m going to run 10km in less than 70 minutes. I’m a horrifically low-speed runner.
• My seventh-week at work, my seventh-week of regular, many times a week shaving. And I still hate it. I miss my beard.

Desperate Housewives.

I’m going about my own business, taking a stroll on an out of the office, work-related sojourn. It is nice. I’m hung-over, but busying myself with small, undemanding tasks is pleasing me. 2pm on an exhausting Wednesday couldn’t be more pleasant.

A full-page Dominion Post ad soon ruins my mood well and good.

“IT’S SWINE FLU.”

Just three small-words in big-text, with even bigger subtext. It first screamed out to me, “panic, run, hide, but first, be a dear and buy this paper will you?”. But then I couldn’t help but feel that there was a touch of glee in there. It is swine flu! Real swine flu; the celebrity flu, straight from Mexican pigs, which we just know that chances are, are about forty times dirtier and rougher than regular pigs, and way more prone to knife-fights and drug violence, with ensuing grittier takes on the common flu virus. The rotting corpse of daily print media gets a break from the solidly dull procession of stories on offer to them for months and months (blah blah blah… Wall Street… blah blah blah… recession… blah… Obama… blah blah climate change…) and can switch it up, stop phoning the “we’re all going to die” panic in for all the other stuff and really go nuts. Get excited people, you’re death just arrived on an Air New Zealand flight!

Newspapers spent months trying to make us scared of bird-flu, which is far deadlier, but bird-flu had to economically disadvantage fear mongering news media by not mutating to facilitate human-to-human spread. So now we have some kind of epidemic that Stuff tells me might just kill more than fifty thousand people in New Zealand alone. Even though the World Health Organisation tells me it has killed just seven. Even if you take the anecdotal outer figure for fatalities, 100 people have died from roughly 1600 Mexican infections. Considering from 400 or so supposed infections in the United States not a single person has yet to croak, and the first confirmed British-sufferer confessed to feeling only mildly under the weather (that last hyperlink has the relevant nugget about five paragraphs in. The guy seems a jackass, even if he is probably… right?) I think we’re going to be okay.

Call me a racist, but you can probably put the higher fatality rate in Mexico down to the really, really awesome Mexican healthcare system, that peasant farmers pay for with the 400 US Dollars they make on average a year. Is there anyone out there that really believes that this is really going to take a chunk out of us?

Disasters are money-making affairs, for drug companies and news media alike. Fear eats at our ability for rational decisions.

Although, after careful consideration and deliberation with my boss, we ratified a swine-flu avoidance plan that involved me taking a twenty from petty cash and going to get some hand sanitiser. I used it twice, it makes my hands smell nice.