blogging it real

Stupid fucking webmarshal is blocking my ability to slack.

I can't help but have noticed that without access to hotmail, gmail, norightturn or trademe my productivity has increased, oh by about say, one million per cent.

It seems webmarshal only blocks the most popular sites yet strangely -- bloggingitreal is not off limits.

Speaking of strange, there's been a few things lately that I've found odd.

1) At the corner of Bond Street and New North Road in Kingsland is the large "take another look at intersections" billboard, from the Land Transport Safety Authority, warning motorists about the dangers of turning at intersections.

That intersection is governed by lights...you wait for the green and proceed.

Way to go to target your campaign advertising at irrelevant intersections.

2) Got a work e-mail this week saying "sorry, the assertiveness skills workshop is now full".

Please god, tell me that there's somebody out there besides me that finds that funny.

3) Stop press: George Bush said shit.....................................................who gives a fuck?

4) What I've learned from the international news lately is that while the state of Israel is allowed to take prisoners - Palestine and Lebanon are not.

When they dare do the same as the Israeli's they are slaughtered in their hundreds.

How lucky were new Zealanders then not to be bombed and murdered by those pricks when we arrested these Israeli spies who were stealing the identities of Kiwis?

The prime minister of New Zealand angrily denounced Israel and imposed diplomatic sanctions on it after two suspected Mossad agents were jailed for six months for trying on false grounds to obtain a New Zealand passport.
The plot, which involved obtaining a passport in the name of a tetraplegic man who had not spoken in years, provoked a furious reaction yesterday.
"The breach of New Zealand laws and sovereignty by agents of the Israeli government has seriously strained our relationship with Israel," said the prime minister, Helen Clark.
"This type of behaviour is unacceptable internationally by any country. It is a sorry indictment of Israel that it has again taken such actions against a country with which it has friendly relations."

Anyone aware of what action our Government is taking over the bombardment of Lebanon?

The government "expressed concern" after Israel started starving civilians and generally terrorising Gaza and arrested the democratically elected leaders of Palestine (how gallant) but can't find any reaction so far to the murder of 250 Lebanese civilians.

The Sunday Star-Times is sending roving reporter Jon Stephenson to the frontline!

5) I wouldn't say I know him well but I've had a few beers with journalist Matt Nippert and he seems a pretty decent guy, so I thought it sucked when I read this last week.

In the days leading up to this wardrobe disaster, I had taken to fortifying my usual breakfast of coffee and cigarettes with the undeniably healthy trio of orange juice, bananas and yoghurt. However, with fatigue and headaches steadily compounding, I had been driven from my normally stoic “she’ll be right” reverie to seek out the medical profession – a nurse – for the first time in a year.
That night, I slept the satisfied sleep of the self-righteous and – as it turns out – the deep sleep of the dangerously anaemic. My telephone rang at the unseemly hour of 8.55am. It was the nurse, who had my blood test results in front of her. “Don’t move, “ she said. “We’re sending an ambulance.”
Chest scans had revealed that my lungs looked like those of “a 40-year-old hobo with HIV”. My kidneys had already sustained permanent damage and were in danger of collapsing.
In hospital, it is far better to be a zebra than a mule (no fewer than eight specialists offered exotic theories as to what ailed me), but I suspect that both look the same coming out of a glue factory.
Modern medicine has yet to design a pleasant medical procedure and local anaesthetic is a half-measure at best. One afternoon at St Lukes stretched into five nights in an isolation ward.
Diagnosis, when it finally came, sounded like a high-class knacker’s yard: Goodpasture’s Syndrome. My antibodies were attacking my internal organs. Cases develop at the rate of one in every two million. Half my kidneys were gone for good, but with drugs for Africa and a fortnight hooked up to a blood-spinning machine (based on a milk pasteuriser), the rest might be saved.
For the unwell, Google is a Pandora’s box. Confined to my hospital bed, I used a purloined wireless internet connection to make a search. The first result told me that: “The majority of cases progress rapidly to end-stage renal failure.” (From this point on, I limited internet use in my hospital room to productive purposes, such as pirating recent episodes of The Sopranos and South Park.)

6) I was listening, briefly, to Radio Sport this morning, and in the unending pre-match analysis/guesstimates/hype before tomorrow's rugby test I heard the host say, that because the South African's had been written off by the public, it was a lose/lose match for the All Blacks.

Perhaps the TAB better revise its odds?