What Burns my Toast

Is indeed our often malfunctioning toaster which seems to either warm up bread or turn it to carbonised remains.However I got bugged by something last week and its taken literally days of making guttaral sounds and fist shaking, not to mention being distracted by shiny objects and falling asleep, to properly articulate it.A recent survey foudn that Denmark was the place which had teh happyest residents. The Danes site a well maintained, intergated and reliable public transport, a very good national health service, a good welfare state, clean streets and politicians who are apparently free from corruption and seem to have the interests of the people be the reasons. Naturally this was recieved by those in other countries looking at what denmark does well, such as high taxation but with tangiable, visible results as opposed to politicians trying to make "Legacys" like the dome and the london Olympics. Well actually they didn't. Instead they decided that Danes have Lower expectations of life.This sort of thing is a real bugbear for me. From where I'm sitting (in an office, sometimes on a chair at home, on select occasions sitting on my balcony sipping an expresso) we shoudl be taking most of our policy and lifesyle queues from Europe, particulalry scandinavian countries, and not from the US. Take drinking, there are talks to stop underage drinking by increasing the drinking age to 21 as it is in the US. Lets compare, we do have a drinking culture, but if the 12 and unders can get alcohol with a leagal age of 18 I fail to see how an increase to 21 will improve matters. Also, take france, the legal age is 12 and wine is generally served to all ages at meals. France has very few alcohol related health problems and low rates of alcoholism and alcohol related violence. The US has a legal age of 21 and has high rates of all three. So who do we emulate, the US. The same for sex education (Just take whatever they do in scandinavian countries and o it here because it works) and forign policy.In personal matters, due to my university graduate skils being once again called on to set up a projector and press the "Next" button on powerPoint, and with our weekly meeting becoming a vast gargantuan all day affair, college and a friday in a meeting looking at holes, I have 1 usable day of work this week. My approach to this, work is already late, it can't get later.Oh.