A grim outlook

Reading the paper on the way home from work yesterday was just freaking depressing. All doom and gloom, double-dip recession, excessive government spending, the Eurozone, North Korea, shops closing their doors. 

It seems the media want to terrify us into believing the worst for 2012. I ended up leaving my 20 minute train journey feeling utterly despondent. 

But then I got home, and I busied myself by doing 2 loads of washing, changing my sheets, wrapping some last minute presents, shaving my legs and cooking pasta. It's a well prove fact that doing things and the old "keep calm and carry on" mentality is an excellent distraction from the woes of society. 

Protecting Your Family Honour? More Like Burying It Alive…

As you know readers, I am not often political, and do not often give my views on things like human rights.

But today I read an article (read here) that made my already flu-ish stomach churn even more. 

In Turkey, a 16 year old girl by the name of Medine Memi was buried alive in an “honour killing” because she made friends with boys.  To quote an expert "The autopsy result is blood-curdling. According to our findings, the girl, who had no bruises on her body and no sign of narcotics or poison in her blood, was alive and fully conscious when she was buried.” 

In general I am respectful of other cultures.  I appreciate that we are different and I love to travel and see how people do things in other places.  Turkey, in fact was one of my favourite countries that I have so far seen.  Even when something goes against my beliefs, I will still try and see their side of it.

But quite frankly, I thank the Lord that I was not born in a country where my family would murder me for talking to a strange man.  Where friendship with men brings dishonour to your family.  I’m sorry, I thought brutally abusing and murdering your own child brings dishonour aplenty to the family name.

I studied human rights as part of my International Business degree whilst at University and I remember reading about the many atrocities against women under the extreme Sharia Law.  And I am ashamed to say that for the most part I have put it out of my mind. 

Frequent readers will know that I am not a feminist, that I like traditional roles for women and that I can’t stand girls nights out. But my opinions and perspective comes from a middle-class western background where women, for the most part, do have equal standing amongst men.  But I would gladly endure a thousand girls night outs to see this injustice to women stop. 

Only In America

I very much enjoy reading my RSS feeds.  My favourite is the weird news stories subscription I have through news.com.au.  Today I laughed at out loud at someone else's misfortune and thought to myself “Only in America”.

Apparently a woman in New York is suing a Scandinavian themed Manhattan restaurant because A stuffed moose fell on her.

I do not get the fascination with American’s suing people.  Whatever happened to “Shit Happens?”.  Sometime life just wants to take the piss and drop a 68 kilo Moose on your head. 

The woman is claiming that she lost cognitive skills, suffered neck pain, dizziness, anxiety and embarrassment.  What a load of codswallop.  She got a bump on the head, which would have knocked her around a bit for a day or two.  Suing for embarrassment?  Well in that case I better go and sue the street, because it made me fall over the other day.  Oh and I better sue the wind for blowing my skirt up so everyone could see my novelty “Hello Sailor!” knickers.

This was an ACCIDENT.  And if Americans want to improve their global reputation they should quit suing each other over such menial things, then we’d have one less thing to laugh about.