Dog Gone Madness

A New Zealand man is recovering from surgery after being shot in the buttock by his dog.
Police believe the animal stood on the trigger of a .22 bolt-action rifle (pictured) in a freak accident.The dog's 40-year-old owner was getting into the rear seat of a four-wheel drive vehicle with the rifle next to him when the animal jumped in.
He was among a group of four people who had slaughtered a pig at Te Kopuru, 90 miles northwest of Auckland on New Zealand's North Island.
The group told police they had thought the gun, which in fact contained five shells, was unloaded.
Mark Going, a St John Ambulance manager, said paramedics who attended were told the rifle had been fired through the seat, lodging a bullet in the man's left buttock.
The victim, who was in extreme pain, was airlifted by rescue helicopter to Whangarei Hospital where surgeons removed the bullet.
He was in a stable condition in hospital on Tuesday.
The owner has not been named, neither has the breed of dog.
Senior Constable Ian Anderson, of nearby Dargaville, said the victim was lucky not to have been more seriously hurt.

Kiwi Course

It is often the butt of jokes, but for migrants starting a new life in New Zealand, getting to grips with the Kiwi accent is no laughing matter.

The flattened vowel, which turns "fish and chips" into "fush en chups", and a host of colourful colloquialisms can make communicating in Kiwi vastly different to speaking any other kind of English. Now, in an attempt to make the transition easier, puzzled new arrivals are being offered a course in how to understand the "kay-weay eksent".(kivi accent)

The Auckland Regional Migrant Services Charitable Trust, which helps migrants settle in New Zealand and find work, has set up the classes to help foreigners "understand the Kiwi accent and use of English".
Nazli Effendi, who created the course, said several aspects of New Zealand communication flummoxed newcomers.

"One of the things that migrants identify as being difficult is the speed at which New Zealanders speak," she told stuff.co.nz "The way New Zealanders pronounce their vowel sounds is also very different."

As well as decoding a heavy Kiwi accent, the course focuses on phrases that could be confusing to anyone coming to the country, not just non-English speakers.

"There are some English words which have a different meaning in New Zealand," she said."For example, 'crook' in New Zealand means sick, not a thief. I'm a South African, native-English speaker and I didn't understand that one!"
Trust director Mary Dawson said the course was aimed at highly skilled migrants "to ensure they obtain employment relevant to their skills".
New Zealanders are notoriously touchy about their accents, but like to poke fun at the accents of their Australian neighbours, who they accuse of sounding like the late crocodile hunter Steve Irwin.
A distinct New Zealand variant of the English language has been in existence since the last 19th century, when English novelist Frank Arthur Swinnerton described it as a "carefully modulated murmur."
From the beginning of the British settlement on the islands, a new dialect began to form by adopting Maori words to describe the different flora and fauna of New Zealand, for which English did not have any words of its own.
 
 
Why don't you  learn the language of the Kiwis and speak like a local with A Dictionary of the New Zealand Language, and a Concise Grammar from Amazon.com

Outnumbered

New Zealanders have long endured jokes about being outnumbered 20 to-1 by sheep, but it seems the population has a new farm animal majority to worry about: cows. A record 5.8 million dairy cattle were counted in the year ended June 2009, Statistics New Zealand said that's more than one animal for each of the country's 4.3 million citizens. The dairy herd's expansion was due to the conversion of sheep and other farms to the more lucrative dairy industry and to the growth in the number of milking cows in existing herds. In 2009, it had fewer than eight sheep per person.