Travel: We have booked and paid the deposit for a trip to Dubai (2 days) Turkey (14 day tour) and St. Petersburg to Moscow river trip (12 days) next year.
Also we have used our Air Points to fly to Perth this year. What a mess with Qantas Air Points. You can't book together unless the cards are linked. Why didn't they do this 10 years ago when we opened the account? Then we find you can't transfer more than 100,000 points!! Luckily we had the points to book on one card, which we did.
Who makes these idiotic rules. People who are on tens of thousands a year.
The Quake: A friends daughter who has a young (about 6 months) son left the city and flew to Wellington so they could get some sleep. You would have thought it would have been the other way around with us being the Shaky City. It was ironic that about a week or two prior to the quake the Mayors competitor for the job, Jim Anderton (the would be part time MP) said it would take a 'seismic shift' to get him elected.
More Lunacy: The lunatics are everywhere. In Wales as a guy went past a Scientology centre he 'twitted' a comment that they were stupid. The Scientolgists complained and he is now being investigated for not showing respect for their 'religion'. As he said if it is obvious lunacy why should you not be able to say so. Meantime in the US another nut, a so called 'Pastor" with a church of around 50 followers, threatened to burn the Koran. Instead of ignoring it the news media, people like the President, the Pope and all the Muslims get upset. The population of the US is over 300 milion - he has 50 people. It is not news.
But again it shows the Islamic religion up as intolerant - they should just ignore it as we would ignore any small group of idiots who wanted to burn the Bible. On TV1 Paul Henry said as a generalisation the Muslims are intolerant. He is right.
University's: Cambridge has now moved to displace Harvard as the top. The top 10 are 6 US 4 UK. We have moved down the list and the heads of ours compare us to Queensland where they spend nearly double on higher eduaction. NZ spends 51% on tertitiary education against the OECD average of 81%. So our Uni's were surprised we weren't lower. Auckland came 68th as our top one.
Not a surprise that the best are from the Anglo nations.
University of Cambridge, UK
Harvard University, USA
Yale University, USA
University College London, UK
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
University of Oxford, UK
Imperial College London, UK
The University of Chicago, USA
California Institute of Technology, USA
Princeton University, USA
