The empress spoke this morning in haste and has now repented.
Having been at work and been rendered bad tempered by the experience I have returned, reviewed and suffered the following reaction:
You are a stupid cow. It is much simpler than that. Chain the little fuckers to the desk at age five on the understanding that you'll release them at the age of sixteen or when they can recite their multiplication tables 1-12 fluently, which ever comes sooner. Ok. That's the new education policy. Simple, innit?
Wednesday 31 October 2007
Whoops
You'd think things couldn't get worse.
- It is bad enough that the Prime Minister fawns over the Exclusive Brethren and has their Elect Vessel around for tea and cake.
- The election is called and the Christmas Pudding Party's rabid dribbling pours forth mostly over the Fern Friendlies who are in their opinion too busy loving trees and spending far too little time castigating queers, single parents, other bludgers, spongers and druggie fringe elements
- The Libs re-endorse Pastor Peter Something (see an earlier post on the subject of this dreadful little man) or other who wants evolution removed from the science curriculum and 'intelligent' design installed in its place.
- We're denied an adequate sufficiency of time to enjoy the colossal jackass the Mad Monk is making of himself in this campaign (the latest gaffes being to grossly insult a dying man attempting to deliver a petition as part of his asbestos compensation campaign, and turn up half an hour late for a debate with his opposite number then turn around and insult her.)
Little John's been dragged into a row over the League of Rights which is, in essence, a particularly distasteful little collective of holocaust deniers and you should be very grateful if you've never come across them before.
Little John's on record describing this hideous fringe grouping as "a bit anti-semitic". And he's added "Well, everybody knows I have a very strong position on that." No, actually Johnno, I don't know what your strong position is. Would you care to spell it out in clear and unambiguous terms. And further more I can't help but wonder how one can be a bit anti-semitic. Surely either one is, or one isn't. Is there a half-way house for agnostics on the Jewish Question?
Little John's problems arise because he has ties to a fruit loop god-botherer of evangelical hue attached to something calling itself the Catch the Fires Ministries (yes, plural, suggesting there are lots of them).
Little John's pet god-botherer has accepted an invitation extended by the League of Rights to appear on a platform of their creation - and he has appeared with this mob before, so he has form.
Little John can't quite bring himself to say "Its a free country; if one lunatic wants to keep company with other lunatics so much the better for the rest of us. They're all in one place where we can keep an eye on them while we rig up the humane exterminator."
Little John can't quite bring himself to say "Too bloody right. Nalliah's a mate of mine and any mate of his is a mate of mine too. Bring it on if you think you're tough enough."
Little John can't quite bring himself to cut the tawdry fucker Danny (what sort of name is that for a grown up?) Nalliah adrift.
Nalliah has high-level access to government. He has told followers he held a one-on-one meeting with Treasurer Peter Costello on August 9 and Prime Minister Mr Howard the next day - after God told him to "prophetically prepare" Mr Costello as the future prime minister. The Great Smirk himself (not surprisingly, in the circumstances) in on record defending Nalliah. While his office has issued a statement condemning the League he has refused to tell us if he will or will not continue to hold meetings with this Senior Fruit Loop.
And in a delicious twist of fate Blogger's craptacular spell checker which will not accept Nalliah offers Allah is its first alternative. Sweet.
A work in progress
Gordon Brown's made (yet another) attempt to breathe life into the Education, Education, Education rallying cry. No doubt if anything comes of this it will be over-engineered, mis-directed and hideously expensive which is a shame, really, when you think about it.
If I could have any ministerial position, and predicated on the highly unlikely assumption that the funding and authority were in place I'd take the job, I'd take on primary education.
I'd decree that
If I could have any ministerial position, and predicated on the highly unlikely assumption that the funding and authority were in place I'd take the job, I'd take on primary education.
I'd decree that
- each 'year' be broadly made up of children with a birthday between 1st of August and 31st July
- children enter school on September 1 of the August-July year in which they turn 6 and that they spend six (not seven) years in primary education.
- the children entering school for the first time in any given year shall all start school on the same day - which shall be the 1 September or the first Monday thereafter
- the school day should begin at 8:00 am; broadly pre-lunch hours shall be reserved for more academic work while post-lunch hours shall be generally reserved for creativity and PE
- the academic year shall be divided into either three or four terms and no further, ie there shall not be six terms as at present (although they are commonly known as half-terms)
- the stated principle objectives of primary school education shall be centred around socialisation, physical fitness, creativity and basic skills in literacy and numeracy
- during the first two years children shall be read to each day, and the material shall include poetry and plays as well as prose; even in their sixth year children shall be read to for not less than half an hour on one day per week - and by this time they shall be receiving an introduction to major literary works
- all children shall be exposed to music, and musical instruments from their first year, and acquire competence in at least one instrument (even if the much maligned recorder) during the course of the six years
- all children shall be exposed to foreign languages and acquire basic skills in at least one language (even if the much maligned French) during the course of the six years
- all children shall regularly participate in one session of organised competitive team sport per week, one session of gymnastics and other PE as time permits
- each school shall conduct an annual sports day (weather permitting) and there shall be losers as well as winners
- school dinners shall be compulsory; they shall be both nutritious and delivered in a manner designed to encourage the develop social skills in diners
- the academic component of the primary school curriculum shall be centred around English language and mathematics as the essential tools for further learning
- clear and unambiguous emphasis shall be placed on developing sound handwriting technique encompassing neatness and clarity
- English language skills shall be developed through a twin-pronged strategy of supporting creativity within framework of discipline and increasing precision in spelling, grammar, punctuation and syntax
- it shall be possible to exclude disruptive children, bullying children, threatening and violent children and to hold back those who fail by a significant margin to achieve the designated standard required to move 'up a year'
- parents shall be informed once per term of their child's performance or more often as required
No doubt much of this would go down badly with teachers who regard themselves as over burdened by the demands of external agencies. They probably are so I shall, in so far as it is reasonable, dispense with bureaucacy and free up teachers to teach.
The abolition of mid-term breaks will not only release that time for teaching, but also eliminate at a stroke the wholly disruptive down time immediately before and after those breaks.
And no doubt the money question, too, will rear its ugly head. More money put into education today would mean less money having to go into the currently vast social welfare and national health service expenditures in the future, so if money had to be found and taken from somewhere else (say, in what's currently being put into British soldiers fighting other people's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) then it should be looked at as an ethical investment.
Well this policy formulation work is knackering, and I recognise that my work is incomplete but I have plot to search out. This is theme though is one to which I shall return.
Election fever
The good folk of voting age back home probably couldn't agree less but I'm coming rapidly round to the idea that elections should be held more often back home. Once a quarter perhaps? Six weeks for a campaign, six weeks of governance. On off, on off.
The antics that are standard issue electioneering are at least ensuring better some coverage of the great southern land.
For a start someone has decided that not enough people outside Australia are aware that they can watch footage via YouTube of the would-be Prime Minister (Kev) picking his ear and eating the scrapings. This is the sort of publicity money simply can't buy. Clearly the post-modern media mogul is taking Kev very seriously. So the whole story's been taken out and given another run around the block.
The fact that there's an 'Australian Notebook' column in today's paper is merely bandwagon jumping by Old Media from a right of centre stance. Stephen Pollard lays out a complicated case for not underestimating Little John when it would have been simpler to point out that since he hasn't been shot by a silver bullet or had a stake driven through his heart he obviously has a chance in next month's federal election.
The antics that are standard issue electioneering are at least ensuring better some coverage of the great southern land.
For a start someone has decided that not enough people outside Australia are aware that they can watch footage via YouTube of the would-be Prime Minister (Kev) picking his ear and eating the scrapings. This is the sort of publicity money simply can't buy. Clearly the post-modern media mogul is taking Kev very seriously. So the whole story's been taken out and given another run around the block.
The fact that there's an 'Australian Notebook' column in today's paper is merely bandwagon jumping by Old Media from a right of centre stance. Stephen Pollard lays out a complicated case for not underestimating Little John when it would have been simpler to point out that since he hasn't been shot by a silver bullet or had a stake driven through his heart he obviously has a chance in next month's federal election.
Tuesday 30 October 2007
My short attention span
I got bored with measuring his state in Smirnoffs the same night I came up with the idea.
I've given up numbering the days since I last attempted to drown my very many sorrow, though for the record that was Sunday evening last week so we're now nine days or getting a lift through life.
I'm easily bored. The Paper Shuffler attempted to teach me the End of Week duties last Sunday which is why I was at work from such an obscenely early hour. The mystique in which the duties are shrouded make appear daunting. The truth is it is just like every other day of the week, with a little twist and lots more report generating. No one will expect you to have read let alone understood any of it. This is accounting by rote. And still she struggles. Tonight I sat down and wrote out from memory what I could recall of what she'd had me do. Damn fine notes I wrote too. I reckon another training session and I'll have her job nailed.
Or as Bolshie Book Worm put it, don't redesign her job for her all in one go.
There'll be fewer posts than usual during the next four weeks and a couple of days. From November 1 I'm going into self-imposed exile from large chunks of ordinary life. I'm off writing a rather different kind of writing. Only twenty four hour and a half hours of procrastinating to go.
I've given up numbering the days since I last attempted to drown my very many sorrow, though for the record that was Sunday evening last week so we're now nine days or getting a lift through life.
I'm easily bored. The Paper Shuffler attempted to teach me the End of Week duties last Sunday which is why I was at work from such an obscenely early hour. The mystique in which the duties are shrouded make appear daunting. The truth is it is just like every other day of the week, with a little twist and lots more report generating. No one will expect you to have read let alone understood any of it. This is accounting by rote. And still she struggles. Tonight I sat down and wrote out from memory what I could recall of what she'd had me do. Damn fine notes I wrote too. I reckon another training session and I'll have her job nailed.
Or as Bolshie Book Worm put it, don't redesign her job for her all in one go.
There'll be fewer posts than usual during the next four weeks and a couple of days. From November 1 I'm going into self-imposed exile from large chunks of ordinary life. I'm off writing a rather different kind of writing. Only twenty four hour and a half hours of procrastinating to go.
Monday 29 October 2007
Poor boy
The man who managed the Bok to the Rugby World Cup has made abundantly clear his devotion to the Boer cause by not applying for the vacant position of manager of the South Africa Rugby Union national team. By curious coincidence the managed the Poms to the final has not had his position reconfirmed; his far better remunerated position, that is.
Curious
Lewis Hamilton, the little boy who so I'm told very nearly was Top Banana in Petrol Head Nirvana, has announced that because the press and the public make it so difficult for him to pee in English motorway public conveniences and generally spend time in England hanging about with his mates he's going to take up residence quite coincidentally tax advantageous Switzerland, where he'll be able to spend so much more time so much more easily hanging about with his mates and pee without being peered at.
Curious
Curious
Lewis Hamilton, the little boy who so I'm told very nearly was Top Banana in Petrol Head Nirvana, has announced that because the press and the public make it so difficult for him to pee in English motorway public conveniences and generally spend time in England hanging about with his mates he's going to take up residence quite coincidentally tax advantageous Switzerland, where he'll be able to spend so much more time so much more easily hanging about with his mates and pee without being peered at.
Curious
Bloody kids
A year ago or thereabouts, when he started working with us, I regarded him as a man-boy, half grown with some potential, but lots of maturing still to do.
Then he proudly announced that his girlfriend was pregnant and like everyone I struggled to be sure how to take this. He was still a puppy, but eighteen years old; that's old enough to drink, drive, smoke, and be sent to Iraq to shoot people. Difficult under the circumstances, to think it absolutely wrong.
So we all held our peace and thought and were rather touched by the enthusiasm. I had a conversation with him not long before the baby was born; he was unhappy that his girlfriend was so fixed on moving into their own (council) flat NOW rather than continuing to live with his parents and make some long term plans. He seemed to be growing up and sensible to the responsibility he was about to take on.
Then the baby was born and to see him with his son was quite lovely. But the baby was a little ill here, and a little ill there; in hospital a couple of times. One of those things of course. Since then things have happened to make me think quite a bit.
On Friday the newish father was agitated. He'd confided in someone that he'd been playing with his son and 'hurt his arm'. He feared that he might have pulled his shoulder out. The story seemed a little disjointed but I put it down to hearing it at second and even third hand.
Then it turned out the baby had cried through the night and the parents were only now getting around to making a doctor's appointment, and that dad was anxious that his own mother not find out what had happened.
Then it emerged that the incident had happened not the previous night but a couple of days earlier. And the baby was still distressed. And the baby had not seen a doctor.
The baby's now been taken to hospital by his paternal grandmother, finally taking a grip on the situation, and a broken arm has been diagnosed; social services are now involved and no one is entranced by a nineteen year old being a father any more.
Except the problem isn't nineteen year old men becoming fathers. There was a time when nineteen was positively middle-aged in human terms, and there are some parts of the world where even today life expectancy isn't much better than that.
The problem lies in the business of being a teenager. We've deferred adulthood with the relatively modern construct of teenager-dom. Now we're extending the franchise deeper and deeper into our lives. Quite when we're actually required now to grow up is obscured to so the very least, and now it eats into the very thing it had been developed as a buffer for, to shied from encroaching responsibility.
These days no person is obligated to pay his or her own way in the world, to provide for ones self, to be self-sufficient, self disciplined. No one has to grow up, to any extent at any time, and take care of ones self. Being grown up isn't actually about being old enough to drink or drive or smoke or gamble, but sadly the message seems to be that if you can do all those things then you've made it.
Well in 1855 my eighteen year old great great great (G3) grandmother was married in Wiltshire to a bloke from Gloucester she'd been introduced to by her step-mother. The step-mother had been born in Wales and married twice before marrying my ancestor. The second of those two marriages had been to a man from the same village as my great great great grandmother's husband.
With in a year she'd had her first child, by the time they arrived in Australia in 1861 she had three and another on the way. She went on to have a baker's dozen in total, all surviving infancy and childhood, even amid the rough-and-ready conditions of the Ballarat goldfields.
No, there's nothing inherently problematic in early parenthood.
The father of my G3 grandmother was the son of an 'agricultural worker', and his antecedents were entirely in that mold going as far back as is traceable. These were 17the, 18th and 19th century equivalents of medieval peasants, lacking capital or qualifications.
They tended to marry early and breed enthusiastically. His very young mother was illegitimate born and the daughter of a very young woman who herself was illegitimate. The record is unclear earlier than that.
But things didn't turn out too bad in the long run. Or maybe I've just explained an awful lot.
The thing that matters most is that the baby is fine, and he probably will be. Quite how that will happen will become clearer over the course of this week.
Then he proudly announced that his girlfriend was pregnant and like everyone I struggled to be sure how to take this. He was still a puppy, but eighteen years old; that's old enough to drink, drive, smoke, and be sent to Iraq to shoot people. Difficult under the circumstances, to think it absolutely wrong.
So we all held our peace and thought and were rather touched by the enthusiasm. I had a conversation with him not long before the baby was born; he was unhappy that his girlfriend was so fixed on moving into their own (council) flat NOW rather than continuing to live with his parents and make some long term plans. He seemed to be growing up and sensible to the responsibility he was about to take on.
Then the baby was born and to see him with his son was quite lovely. But the baby was a little ill here, and a little ill there; in hospital a couple of times. One of those things of course. Since then things have happened to make me think quite a bit.
On Friday the newish father was agitated. He'd confided in someone that he'd been playing with his son and 'hurt his arm'. He feared that he might have pulled his shoulder out. The story seemed a little disjointed but I put it down to hearing it at second and even third hand.
Then it turned out the baby had cried through the night and the parents were only now getting around to making a doctor's appointment, and that dad was anxious that his own mother not find out what had happened.
Then it emerged that the incident had happened not the previous night but a couple of days earlier. And the baby was still distressed. And the baby had not seen a doctor.
The baby's now been taken to hospital by his paternal grandmother, finally taking a grip on the situation, and a broken arm has been diagnosed; social services are now involved and no one is entranced by a nineteen year old being a father any more.
Except the problem isn't nineteen year old men becoming fathers. There was a time when nineteen was positively middle-aged in human terms, and there are some parts of the world where even today life expectancy isn't much better than that.
The problem lies in the business of being a teenager. We've deferred adulthood with the relatively modern construct of teenager-dom. Now we're extending the franchise deeper and deeper into our lives. Quite when we're actually required now to grow up is obscured to so the very least, and now it eats into the very thing it had been developed as a buffer for, to shied from encroaching responsibility.
These days no person is obligated to pay his or her own way in the world, to provide for ones self, to be self-sufficient, self disciplined. No one has to grow up, to any extent at any time, and take care of ones self. Being grown up isn't actually about being old enough to drink or drive or smoke or gamble, but sadly the message seems to be that if you can do all those things then you've made it.
Well in 1855 my eighteen year old great great great (G3) grandmother was married in Wiltshire to a bloke from Gloucester she'd been introduced to by her step-mother. The step-mother had been born in Wales and married twice before marrying my ancestor. The second of those two marriages had been to a man from the same village as my great great great grandmother's husband.
With in a year she'd had her first child, by the time they arrived in Australia in 1861 she had three and another on the way. She went on to have a baker's dozen in total, all surviving infancy and childhood, even amid the rough-and-ready conditions of the Ballarat goldfields.
No, there's nothing inherently problematic in early parenthood.
The father of my G3 grandmother was the son of an 'agricultural worker', and his antecedents were entirely in that mold going as far back as is traceable. These were 17the, 18th and 19th century equivalents of medieval peasants, lacking capital or qualifications.
They tended to marry early and breed enthusiastically. His very young mother was illegitimate born and the daughter of a very young woman who herself was illegitimate. The record is unclear earlier than that.
But things didn't turn out too bad in the long run. Or maybe I've just explained an awful lot.
The thing that matters most is that the baby is fine, and he probably will be. Quite how that will happen will become clearer over the course of this week.
Pension planning
The ex-head honcho of English cricket is approaching the age at which he will cease to have realistic prospects for making oodles of money. So he's decided to cash in his chips and publish a catalogue of Andrew (Freddy) Flintoff's drunken revels.
Brilliant.
An ex-England rugby captain has woken up and realised that he no longer has any prospect of playing for England (in a Rugby shirt) or any other means of making a living, and has poured scorn over the man who got England against all the odds to the Rugby World Cup final.
Brilliant.
Brilliant.
An ex-England rugby captain has woken up and realised that he no longer has any prospect of playing for England (in a Rugby shirt) or any other means of making a living, and has poured scorn over the man who got England against all the odds to the Rugby World Cup final.
Brilliant.
'Tis the season to be something or other
The Christmas Pudding Party is frantically attempting to recover from having brandy poured over it and the touch paper lit.
The perp is a 21 year old man named Andrew Quah who had secured Christmas Pudding Party endorsement for the west Sydney seat of Reid in the about-to-happen Federal Election.
Belatedly this young man has discovered that not only is he not singing from the same hymn sheet as his co-conspirators but he actually is working with a rather different hymnal. One comprising page after page of the sort of cheap and nasty stuff so readily available at a click of Blogger's craptacular Next Porn button perhaps.
He's not bothering to deny (evidence of his unsuitability for politics) that he might have done something stupid, ended up naked, photographed himself in that state and emailed the evidence to political opponents as a gesture of contempt. He probably didn't first photoshop a micro-penis into the photographs in place of his own dangly bits or post the 'edited' versions to a gay dating web site.
Still it is all good fun, and a Christmas Pudding without the flambe is like ... a political campaign without the sexual smearing and bribery.
The Christmas Pudding Party's Senator Steve Fielding (the Spring of Holly on top) has attempted to counsel the young man who has also admitted looking at porn and now 'disendorsed him' and expelled him. The young man has wished the Christmas Pudding Party well, which proves conclusively how deeply troubled he is.
The perp is a 21 year old man named Andrew Quah who had secured Christmas Pudding Party endorsement for the west Sydney seat of Reid in the about-to-happen Federal Election.
Belatedly this young man has discovered that not only is he not singing from the same hymn sheet as his co-conspirators but he actually is working with a rather different hymnal. One comprising page after page of the sort of cheap and nasty stuff so readily available at a click of Blogger's craptacular Next Porn button perhaps.
He's not bothering to deny (evidence of his unsuitability for politics) that he might have done something stupid, ended up naked, photographed himself in that state and emailed the evidence to political opponents as a gesture of contempt. He probably didn't first photoshop a micro-penis into the photographs in place of his own dangly bits or post the 'edited' versions to a gay dating web site.
Still it is all good fun, and a Christmas Pudding without the flambe is like ... a political campaign without the sexual smearing and bribery.
The Christmas Pudding Party's Senator Steve Fielding (the Spring of Holly on top) has attempted to counsel the young man who has also admitted looking at porn and now 'disendorsed him' and expelled him. The young man has wished the Christmas Pudding Party well, which proves conclusively how deeply troubled he is.
Sunday 28 October 2007
Ew, they're proliferating. Get the bug killer.
The Greens appear actually to be worth voting for. And worth negotiating with.
The Christmas Pudding Party can hardly be said to have been put on the offensive by the prospect of a preference deal involving Labour and The Fern's Best Friend. Offensive is their natural state.
And yet Senator Fielding, who is the Little Sprig of Holly atop the Christmas Pudding, is 'outraged'. It is according to Mr Sprig of Holly outrageous "to think that Kevin Rudd would want to preference the Greens". After all, Mr Sprig demands, "Whether there was a deal or not you've got to ask the question why would Labor want to see the Greens holding the balance of power in Australia?"
Why indeed.
Possibly Labor (or Labour, whatever its just spelling) don't want to be responsible for delivering power over the fate of 20 or so million people, some of whom don't actually want to be steeped in doctrine, wrapped up in pages from the bible and steamed in 'christian' orthodoxy for the remainder of our lives.
Curiously Senator Prig has tacitly acknowledged casting a remarkably wide net when it comes to the murky business of gathering preferences and intimated that he's prepared to screw Pauline Hanson's anti-immigration 'United' Australia Party (but only in the political sense) if it will bolster his chances of holding the balance of power.
Would it actually be safe for me to go home. Would I be able to settle. The place seems to be seething with crackpots and nutcases. The ones who garner media coverage are only the stupid ones the press notice. Its the quiet and ostensibly intelligent ones I'm really afraid of. Peter Costello for example and his slightly less effectively surreptitious side kick the Mad Monk.
The Christmas Pudding Party can hardly be said to have been put on the offensive by the prospect of a preference deal involving Labour and The Fern's Best Friend. Offensive is their natural state.
And yet Senator Fielding, who is the Little Sprig of Holly atop the Christmas Pudding, is 'outraged'. It is according to Mr Sprig of Holly outrageous "to think that Kevin Rudd would want to preference the Greens". After all, Mr Sprig demands, "Whether there was a deal or not you've got to ask the question why would Labor want to see the Greens holding the balance of power in Australia?"
Why indeed.
Possibly Labor (or Labour, whatever its just spelling) don't want to be responsible for delivering power over the fate of 20 or so million people, some of whom don't actually want to be steeped in doctrine, wrapped up in pages from the bible and steamed in 'christian' orthodoxy for the remainder of our lives.
Curiously Senator Prig has tacitly acknowledged casting a remarkably wide net when it comes to the murky business of gathering preferences and intimated that he's prepared to screw Pauline Hanson's anti-immigration 'United' Australia Party (but only in the political sense) if it will bolster his chances of holding the balance of power.
Would it actually be safe for me to go home. Would I be able to settle. The place seems to be seething with crackpots and nutcases. The ones who garner media coverage are only the stupid ones the press notice. Its the quiet and ostensibly intelligent ones I'm really afraid of. Peter Costello for example and his slightly less effectively surreptitious side kick the Mad Monk.
How not to have fun
The only good thing about starting work at 7:00 am on Sunday as I did today is that the clocks went back this weekend and it was really 8:00, or at least it really is as far as my body is for the moment concerned.
No doubt a fortnight hence when I have to repeat the ordeal my body will have adjusted and I will wake up with 'unmitigated grim' lying before me. It is cold and dark, probably wet and windy. The only sensible place on such mornings is beneath the covers with something delectable. Failing that alone's fine once one accustoms oneself.
The mystique in which the work of Sunday is shrouded was to be stripped away for me, I was to be inducted into a small coterie of those with the Knowledge. Did I feel priviledged? It was 7:00 am on Sunday morning and priviledge is most definitely what I was feeling.
On the whole I got through the thing as well as possible. I only flustered the Paper Shuffler on a few occasions. I don't think I left her feeling shrunken or inadequate. I just wish she could believe I would look upon an offer of her job, were it to be extended with the standard issue revulsion usually reserved for all poison chalices.
For that matter I wouldn't accept the DM role were it to suddenly become available. Not for all the money they'd offer me.
The current round of 'Annual' appraisals has resulted in some storms and an awful lot of "I'm not talking to you". Well this place is a kindergarten, after all. The Big Swinging Dick and Yoda were at it for almost two hours yesterday, and not in the way the Dick gets at it with the handmaiden. A few other people are revealing for the first time how completely isolated from reality they are. The most highly improbable people enjoy most 'bringing on younger people'.
In fact some of the creative writing this exercise has generated is deeply, almost horrifyingly creepy. I really don't have the hang of this 'Annual' appraisal lark, at all!
The Big Swinging Dick isn't doing all the appraisals but he is doing a selection from across the staff of 100 or thereabouts. That wasn't why he inflicted himself on us mid-morning. Clearly some of the fall-out from his appraisal of the Bolshie Book Worm has still to land. He snuck in, did the rounds then tore a strip off her, but only after letting plenty of people know his intentions.
Kindergarten.
I now have a big notebook to study. If I were a good girl I wouldn't be wasting everyone's time with this stuff. If I learned all this I wouldn't make mistakes and then I couldn't be criticised and that would make everyone miserable because clearly these people thrive on misery, ineptitude, conflict and whatever that other thing is I can't think of right now.
No doubt a fortnight hence when I have to repeat the ordeal my body will have adjusted and I will wake up with 'unmitigated grim' lying before me. It is cold and dark, probably wet and windy. The only sensible place on such mornings is beneath the covers with something delectable. Failing that alone's fine once one accustoms oneself.
The mystique in which the work of Sunday is shrouded was to be stripped away for me, I was to be inducted into a small coterie of those with the Knowledge. Did I feel priviledged? It was 7:00 am on Sunday morning and priviledge is most definitely what I was feeling.
On the whole I got through the thing as well as possible. I only flustered the Paper Shuffler on a few occasions. I don't think I left her feeling shrunken or inadequate. I just wish she could believe I would look upon an offer of her job, were it to be extended with the standard issue revulsion usually reserved for all poison chalices.
For that matter I wouldn't accept the DM role were it to suddenly become available. Not for all the money they'd offer me.
The current round of 'Annual' appraisals has resulted in some storms and an awful lot of "I'm not talking to you". Well this place is a kindergarten, after all. The Big Swinging Dick and Yoda were at it for almost two hours yesterday, and not in the way the Dick gets at it with the handmaiden. A few other people are revealing for the first time how completely isolated from reality they are. The most highly improbable people enjoy most 'bringing on younger people'.
In fact some of the creative writing this exercise has generated is deeply, almost horrifyingly creepy. I really don't have the hang of this 'Annual' appraisal lark, at all!
The Big Swinging Dick isn't doing all the appraisals but he is doing a selection from across the staff of 100 or thereabouts. That wasn't why he inflicted himself on us mid-morning. Clearly some of the fall-out from his appraisal of the Bolshie Book Worm has still to land. He snuck in, did the rounds then tore a strip off her, but only after letting plenty of people know his intentions.
Kindergarten.
I now have a big notebook to study. If I were a good girl I wouldn't be wasting everyone's time with this stuff. If I learned all this I wouldn't make mistakes and then I couldn't be criticised and that would make everyone miserable because clearly these people thrive on misery, ineptitude, conflict and whatever that other thing is I can't think of right now.
Saturday 27 October 2007
Now I'm in trouble
I'm supposed to be up at the crack of whatever tomorrow morning and I'm still up. I have a headache and I can't sleep and I'm just waiting until its safe to take more painkillers. Tomorrow will be spent in the company of the paper shuffler and the senior frustrated novelist and the bolshie book worm.
If this sounds like fun it isn't too late to trade places.
And I have told SFN a big fat lie. I haven't the heart to tell her that I need another copy of the 'Annual' appraisal form because I wrote the truth on it and now I don't have the heart to make her cry.
Oh what a tangled we we do weave when first we practice to wrap stupid bosses up in the safety of their own self-deception.
If this sounds like fun it isn't too late to trade places.
And I have told SFN a big fat lie. I haven't the heart to tell her that I need another copy of the 'Annual' appraisal form because I wrote the truth on it and now I don't have the heart to make her cry.
Oh what a tangled we we do weave when first we practice to wrap stupid bosses up in the safety of their own self-deception.
Rapid intake of breath
You can probably guess the sort of person who can put the following words on the public record with their own name attached to the utterance: "the theory of evolution is taught as well — in my view regrettably taught in science classes". What you might not get first off is the sort of political party prepared to endorse the fruit bat and be represented by it in an electorate bound to attract a disproportionate amount of media coverage.
On the other side of the globe the Victorian (how aptly named it sometimes seems) division of the Libs are running a certified god botherer in the seat held by the woman who is deputy leader of the opposition. She already holds the seat by a near double figures margin and as pollsters are predicting a win for labour across the board of 'landslide' proportions she's probably allowing herself the luxury of attending to other matters beside the onerous task of retaining her seat.
That said, such electorates are regarded by parties as suitable training grounds (in a rather Darwinian way) for long term prospects. If they don't fail utterly and seek a radically different career path then they actually might be what the party needs and get a less unwinnable as reward at some time in the future.
So what was behind the decision of the Liberal Party of Australia (Victoria Division) to endorse Pastor Peter Curtis as its official candidate in this electorate - and for the second time.
It is a reality of the party's structure that this vile political creature's origins lie in a chintz laden sitting room in a brick veneer home on a quarter acre block in a fringe suburb. A sufficiency of like minded friends and easily influenced other individuals are all that is required to set up a prospective party branch. With acceptance comes access to the local politican at state and federal level, the chance to submit proposals to state council, to send delegates (who might or might not have the opportunity to speak) to state council. Getting to state council is the way to get onto committees and working groups and assemblies and so forth where the party membership thrashes out exactly what it is going to tell the parliamentary wing to think and do.
This is, you will note very, very unlike the machiavellian way in which the other lot go about things as their way results in the unelected union monster holds the labour parliamentarian in its vice-like grip.
From state council, as noted, the sky is the limit. The trick is to be heard. It helps to sound stupid. Sounding truly stupid is memorable. You want people to remember you; they're bound to forget why they remember you so get in touch with your inner idiot, today.
And remember. The world is full of idiots. People who are so idiotic they make you sound clever. Get in touch with your inner idiot and the world is your oyster.
Pasta Peter Curtis, forty year old part-time retailer (which possibly means deputy assistant night manager, shelf stacking, at the local woolies) and assistant pastor in the evangelical Southland Christian Centre is proof of this progress to credibility. And far be it for me to draw attention to the fact that he would in his latter role have access to plenty of biddable, gullible fools to stack his branch with should he care to do so.
That one branch is giving this fruit loop its backing is not in itself sufficient explanation for his status as endorsed candidate. There are other and more onerous qualifications before such credibility is bestowed. Some one, some where within the Exhibition Street labyrinth has declined to intervene, repeatedly.
That the man is certified god bother is in itself sufficient cause to disqualify him in my book. But there are plenty of them about and I can even (just about) bear the self-abusing Ruth Kelly in the cabinet as transport secretary as long as she doesn't do too much media work.
"As a Christian, I do not agree with the idea of homosexuality. That's the reality. I can't put it any other way," And "As a Christian, I don't agree with women in a position of authority. That's the reality. I can't put it any other way"?
"I certainly could never change my views that homosexuality is a perversion, because it is a perversion." (His great x 15 grand father reported once was heard to say "I certainly could never change my views that the world is flat, because it is flat.")
"I'd offer myself as a genuine grassroots candidate who would be delighted to represent them and who would have no favouritism or negative approach to any individual based on their lifestyle. I would love to represent them, I would love to represent anybody," he said. " Er yes, I'm that desperate. I'd love to represent anybody. [If you were gay would you trust this man with what few rights you do have?]
This does matter because the party that is fighting to stay in power at the national level has endorsed this man, and the above ranting is not the worst of it. That came later and here it is.
John Howard should be taken out so some remote place and there stabbed, burned, boiled, castrated, flayed, strangled and left to feed the dingos, just for presiding over the political wing of the party foisting this incredibly dreadful individual on an Australian public, let alone for any of his other crimes and misdemeanors.
Read this and weep that this man (who regrets that evolution is part of the science curriculum) can be regarded as Liberal Party of Australia candidate material:
Now correct me if I'm wrong but surely Mr Vermicelli is actually proof that if it is design, it isn't intelligent. Indeed this seems to be true of most advocates of intelligent design.
On the other side of the globe the Victorian (how aptly named it sometimes seems) division of the Libs are running a certified god botherer in the seat held by the woman who is deputy leader of the opposition. She already holds the seat by a near double figures margin and as pollsters are predicting a win for labour across the board of 'landslide' proportions she's probably allowing herself the luxury of attending to other matters beside the onerous task of retaining her seat.
That said, such electorates are regarded by parties as suitable training grounds (in a rather Darwinian way) for long term prospects. If they don't fail utterly and seek a radically different career path then they actually might be what the party needs and get a less unwinnable as reward at some time in the future.
So what was behind the decision of the Liberal Party of Australia (Victoria Division) to endorse Pastor Peter Curtis as its official candidate in this electorate - and for the second time.
It is a reality of the party's structure that this vile political creature's origins lie in a chintz laden sitting room in a brick veneer home on a quarter acre block in a fringe suburb. A sufficiency of like minded friends and easily influenced other individuals are all that is required to set up a prospective party branch. With acceptance comes access to the local politican at state and federal level, the chance to submit proposals to state council, to send delegates (who might or might not have the opportunity to speak) to state council. Getting to state council is the way to get onto committees and working groups and assemblies and so forth where the party membership thrashes out exactly what it is going to tell the parliamentary wing to think and do.
This is, you will note very, very unlike the machiavellian way in which the other lot go about things as their way results in the unelected union monster holds the labour parliamentarian in its vice-like grip.
From state council, as noted, the sky is the limit. The trick is to be heard. It helps to sound stupid. Sounding truly stupid is memorable. You want people to remember you; they're bound to forget why they remember you so get in touch with your inner idiot, today.
And remember. The world is full of idiots. People who are so idiotic they make you sound clever. Get in touch with your inner idiot and the world is your oyster.
Pasta Peter Curtis, forty year old part-time retailer (which possibly means deputy assistant night manager, shelf stacking, at the local woolies) and assistant pastor in the evangelical Southland Christian Centre is proof of this progress to credibility. And far be it for me to draw attention to the fact that he would in his latter role have access to plenty of biddable, gullible fools to stack his branch with should he care to do so.
That one branch is giving this fruit loop its backing is not in itself sufficient explanation for his status as endorsed candidate. There are other and more onerous qualifications before such credibility is bestowed. Some one, some where within the Exhibition Street labyrinth has declined to intervene, repeatedly.
That the man is certified god bother is in itself sufficient cause to disqualify him in my book. But there are plenty of them about and I can even (just about) bear the self-abusing Ruth Kelly in the cabinet as transport secretary as long as she doesn't do too much media work.
"As a Christian, I do not agree with the idea of homosexuality. That's the reality. I can't put it any other way," And "As a Christian, I don't agree with women in a position of authority. That's the reality. I can't put it any other way"?
"I certainly could never change my views that homosexuality is a perversion, because it is a perversion." (His great x 15 grand father reported once was heard to say "I certainly could never change my views that the world is flat, because it is flat.")
"I'd offer myself as a genuine grassroots candidate who would be delighted to represent them and who would have no favouritism or negative approach to any individual based on their lifestyle. I would love to represent them, I would love to represent anybody," he said. " Er yes, I'm that desperate. I'd love to represent anybody. [If you were gay would you trust this man with what few rights you do have?]
This does matter because the party that is fighting to stay in power at the national level has endorsed this man, and the above ranting is not the worst of it. That came later and here it is.
John Howard should be taken out so some remote place and there stabbed, burned, boiled, castrated, flayed, strangled and left to feed the dingos, just for presiding over the political wing of the party foisting this incredibly dreadful individual on an Australian public, let alone for any of his other crimes and misdemeanors.
Read this and weep that this man (who regrets that evolution is part of the science curriculum) can be regarded as Liberal Party of Australia candidate material:
Facing an uphill battle to defeat Ms Gillard, with Labor holding the seat by a margin of 8.8 per cent, Mr Curtis said he wanted to bring a more Christian focus to politics.
He said that, if elected, he would be urging the Liberal Party to introduce intelligent design to state school science classes. [Intelligent design is an assertion that certain features of the universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, and not by natural selection.]
"I would be very much in favour of intelligent design being taught in public schools," Mr Curtis said. "Just as the theory of evolution is taught as well — in my view regrettably taught in science classes, because I think it's a theory and not a science."
Now correct me if I'm wrong but surely Mr Vermicelli is actually proof that if it is design, it isn't intelligent. Indeed this seems to be true of most advocates of intelligent design.
Hello dear
How are we feeling today? Not too good? Well never mind. Doctor will see you soon.
Now, in the meantime how 'bout I have a quick gander and decide for myself whether you should live or die?
No?
Why ever not?
You can trust me. I'm a nurse.
Frankly the only nurse I'd be prepared to trust to pronounce on my health is one who has requalified as a doctor. And she's a specialist oncologist in research centre these days.
Now, in the meantime how 'bout I have a quick gander and decide for myself whether you should live or die?
No?
Why ever not?
You can trust me. I'm a nurse.
Frankly the only nurse I'd be prepared to trust to pronounce on my health is one who has requalified as a doctor. And she's a specialist oncologist in research centre these days.
An entirely nasty business
That gobby Maltese Terrier ran, as I suspected she would, to Yoda with tales from the crypt. Perhaps not straightforwardly. Perhaps Yoda took the mediteranean temptress to one side and confided 'not knowing what to do about her' and 'why' and the yappy rat let her in on some of what I'd been saying.
Any ho, the upshot was a seriously scary bonding moment, or I think that's what Yoda was attempting. She actually apologised for something, exhibited signs of hurt that I hadn't gone directly to her with my issue and offered assurance of a 'lack of intent'.
Today's best buddy is tomorrow's dart board. Sorry I don't buy it Yoda, but next time you need someone to stand on it is still as likely to be me as anyone else.
Any ho, the upshot was a seriously scary bonding moment, or I think that's what Yoda was attempting. She actually apologised for something, exhibited signs of hurt that I hadn't gone directly to her with my issue and offered assurance of a 'lack of intent'.
Today's best buddy is tomorrow's dart board. Sorry I don't buy it Yoda, but next time you need someone to stand on it is still as likely to be me as anyone else.
Help Required:
It is annual (!) appraisal time. I didn't go through this last year (or the year before) but it nevertheless to be referred to as the Annual Appraisal. I'm slightly puzzled, because when I was a school girl annual implied once per year. But I'm getting on a bit now, so possibly this confusion is just a by-product of that ageing process.
Any ho. I'm struggling so any assistance will be appreciated. (By the way you all flunked the history test, perhaps you'll find this easier as it relies more heavily on creativity and precision and accuracy are inherently non-obligatory - or that's the approach I'm advocating. Perhaps that's where I'm going wrong.)
The section of the form I'm working on is the Appraisal - Self Assessment part.
The first headline is Customer, and the first question is What have I done Well? which I've answered with - not killed even one of them. The second question is What could I improve? and I've put : obviously under the circumstances nothing. Finally, I'm asked my Objectives for this year? and I've set myself the objective of continuing not to kill or disable any customers, what ever the provocation (and get a new job).
I suspect these answers will be regarded as 'flippant'.
The second headline is People (though the guidance notes provide bullet point guidance for this such as attendance and standard of dress, so perhaps this is a sly Initiative Test), and the questions are the same. My answers are: (a) turned up reliably and disguised my contempt for the job and my colleagues, (b) do the above more ostentatiously, (c) convince everyone I both like and respect them (and get a new job).
The third headline is Finance which I'm to understand to mean accuracy, knowledge of policy and awareness of security. Hm. So far (the questions are the same) I've come up with (a) not nicked anything or knowingly over-charged anyone (b) continue not to nick anything and make burnt offerings to the gods* in the hope that some day soon will harmonise the prices on the shelf with the prices charged at the tills and (c) get a new job that pays me a decent wage (or publish something in the meantime).
Headline number four is Operations and that covers process and procedure : right now my answers are (a) worked out loads of shit all on my own because no fucker's been arsed to actually explain anything to me, (b) work out loads more shit all on my own, but not reveal this out of respect for the feelings of those who are paid more than me, and (c) come up with an escape plan that works, or if that fails take the next annual appraisal (in 2010?) less unseriously (promise).
I have a feeling my approach to this whole appraisal business won't go down well with Paper-Shuffler (-in-Chief). She loves her job and this might make her cry.
Any ho. I'm struggling so any assistance will be appreciated. (By the way you all flunked the history test, perhaps you'll find this easier as it relies more heavily on creativity and precision and accuracy are inherently non-obligatory - or that's the approach I'm advocating. Perhaps that's where I'm going wrong.)
The section of the form I'm working on is the Appraisal - Self Assessment part.
The first headline is Customer, and the first question is What have I done Well? which I've answered with - not killed even one of them. The second question is What could I improve? and I've put : obviously under the circumstances nothing. Finally, I'm asked my Objectives for this year? and I've set myself the objective of continuing not to kill or disable any customers, what ever the provocation (and get a new job).
I suspect these answers will be regarded as 'flippant'.
The second headline is People (though the guidance notes provide bullet point guidance for this such as attendance and standard of dress, so perhaps this is a sly Initiative Test), and the questions are the same. My answers are: (a) turned up reliably and disguised my contempt for the job and my colleagues, (b) do the above more ostentatiously, (c) convince everyone I both like and respect them (and get a new job).
The third headline is Finance which I'm to understand to mean accuracy, knowledge of policy and awareness of security. Hm. So far (the questions are the same) I've come up with (a) not nicked anything or knowingly over-charged anyone (b) continue not to nick anything and make burnt offerings to the gods* in the hope that some day soon will harmonise the prices on the shelf with the prices charged at the tills and (c) get a new job that pays me a decent wage (or publish something in the meantime).
Headline number four is Operations and that covers process and procedure : right now my answers are (a) worked out loads of shit all on my own because no fucker's been arsed to actually explain anything to me, (b) work out loads more shit all on my own, but not reveal this out of respect for the feelings of those who are paid more than me, and (c) come up with an escape plan that works, or if that fails take the next annual appraisal (in 2010?) less unseriously (promise).
I have a feeling my approach to this whole appraisal business won't go down well with Paper-Shuffler (-in-Chief). She loves her job and this might make her cry.
WARNING: This post is particularly not worth reading
We do a bit of charity fund raising toward the end of the year: a Pink Day for breast cancer in October and Children in Need the following month. On each occasion the staff are free to throw off the sartorial constraint of our 'uniform' and express themselves - in Pink (obviously) in October and however tangentially according to the designated theme the following month.
Most of the staff throw themselves enthusiastically into the days. Last year's wobbly was only thrown when the monkeys at head office decreed that we WOULD do a third fundraiser with an extavagant theme only after we'd committed to the first two. The only people who were comfortable saying NO were those who say NO to everything; the rest of us were sorry to draw a line anywhere but when staff on minimum wage are shelling out hours of before-tax pay to get themselves kitted out, the third fund raiser was a demand too far and looked like heavy handedness by management too remote for the good of the business.
The residual bad taste in the mouth still lingers. Having done Pink, and gearing up for Children in Need we're all wondering what we're going to be ORDERED to do for some fool's pet charity.
As I'm rather prone to taking my camera with me everywhere (meaning I have a VERY big 'handbag') so I have photographic proof of the trouble some staff went to and the willing shown by those born without the imagination but hearts in the right place.
I also had a photograph of me. I deleted it. That's the upside of being the one to take all (but one) of the photographs, and get to take the camera home before they're transferred anywhere.
Most of the staff throw themselves enthusiastically into the days. Last year's wobbly was only thrown when the monkeys at head office decreed that we WOULD do a third fundraiser with an extavagant theme only after we'd committed to the first two. The only people who were comfortable saying NO were those who say NO to everything; the rest of us were sorry to draw a line anywhere but when staff on minimum wage are shelling out hours of before-tax pay to get themselves kitted out, the third fund raiser was a demand too far and looked like heavy handedness by management too remote for the good of the business.
The residual bad taste in the mouth still lingers. Having done Pink, and gearing up for Children in Need we're all wondering what we're going to be ORDERED to do for some fool's pet charity.
As I'm rather prone to taking my camera with me everywhere (meaning I have a VERY big 'handbag') so I have photographic proof of the trouble some staff went to and the willing shown by those born without the imagination but hearts in the right place.
I also had a photograph of me. I deleted it. That's the upside of being the one to take all (but one) of the photographs, and get to take the camera home before they're transferred anywhere.
Friday 26 October 2007
Doctor Who
It is almost sacrilege to call the Lazarus like BBC sci-fi show into question, but I'm going to. And this will have overtones of 'in the good old days', so don't complain afterwards - you've been warned.
My daughter loves Doctor Who, especially with that sexy young Mr Tennant in the role. Personally I preferred the previous incarnation but one woman's meat is another girl's 'quite old enough to be my father'. I'm getting old and wrinkly and I have a photograph to prove it, but you'll have to wait for that post.
Where was I? Oh yes. The good doctor. Travelling through time and space always to save the human race. Saturday night staple, family camped in front of the television watching relatively wholesome* family entertainment. The series from the sixties and seventies were made on a shoestring, it showed at the time and today they look notoriously creaky. Nevertheless they were and still are loved. Because they were it. The amount of merchandising around the series was minimal. That left us having to savour the actual television program.
My daughter has the books, the magazines, the toys, the posters, the pencil case, the stickers, the DVDs and if we succumbed she could have the wall paper, the games, the curtains, the jigsaw puzzles, the school bag, the bedding, the cushions, the drinking mug, the clothes, the lunch box, the .... it goes on and on and on. This threatens to engulf her in the way the teletubbies once did and after them Thomas, and after him Barbie and after her the ?. I can't remember what came between Barbie and The Doctor. Maybe nothing.
And that's partly my point. For her this is a succession of tidal waves that build and build until she almost drowns, to be saved at the last second only by the momentum building up behind the absolutely latest 'thing'.
I think that the children who are sitting down to Doctor Who in its current incarnation are being deprived of something precious by those who've given them three series now of higher quality acting and production values than were on offer 'in my day' as well as more profound and witty scrips than ever were on offer. The scarcity value in what we had was a significant element in the way we treasured it.
What will she treasure and look back on the way I look back on Doctor Who?
What made me wonder this was news that the second series of Primeval is in the bag. The acting and the scripts are not quite out of the top drawer but this is not dross either, and relatively huge amounts of money and creative talent went in the special effects that were part of making the thing work. She loved it too, and she's been waiting all year for the second series (and she'll have to wait a bit longer too). When it does come round she'll have had all that pleasurable anticipation and know that she'll have to make the most of it while its around.
If she enjoys this second series as much as the first, in the very long run Primeval might come out the winner.
* Its late, I'm tired and this is nothing better than a bit of sarcasm. After all The Doctor got to snog Captain Jack and that Saturday night the entire nation heaved and sighed and muttered "I suppose you expect me to get a bit excited by a bit of mano e mano and frankly its Saturday and I've got better things to do so lets move along shall we".
My daughter loves Doctor Who, especially with that sexy young Mr Tennant in the role. Personally I preferred the previous incarnation but one woman's meat is another girl's 'quite old enough to be my father'. I'm getting old and wrinkly and I have a photograph to prove it, but you'll have to wait for that post.
Where was I? Oh yes. The good doctor. Travelling through time and space always to save the human race. Saturday night staple, family camped in front of the television watching relatively wholesome* family entertainment. The series from the sixties and seventies were made on a shoestring, it showed at the time and today they look notoriously creaky. Nevertheless they were and still are loved. Because they were it. The amount of merchandising around the series was minimal. That left us having to savour the actual television program.
My daughter has the books, the magazines, the toys, the posters, the pencil case, the stickers, the DVDs and if we succumbed she could have the wall paper, the games, the curtains, the jigsaw puzzles, the school bag, the bedding, the cushions, the drinking mug, the clothes, the lunch box, the .... it goes on and on and on. This threatens to engulf her in the way the teletubbies once did and after them Thomas, and after him Barbie and after her the ?. I can't remember what came between Barbie and The Doctor. Maybe nothing.
And that's partly my point. For her this is a succession of tidal waves that build and build until she almost drowns, to be saved at the last second only by the momentum building up behind the absolutely latest 'thing'.
I think that the children who are sitting down to Doctor Who in its current incarnation are being deprived of something precious by those who've given them three series now of higher quality acting and production values than were on offer 'in my day' as well as more profound and witty scrips than ever were on offer. The scarcity value in what we had was a significant element in the way we treasured it.
What will she treasure and look back on the way I look back on Doctor Who?
What made me wonder this was news that the second series of Primeval is in the bag. The acting and the scripts are not quite out of the top drawer but this is not dross either, and relatively huge amounts of money and creative talent went in the special effects that were part of making the thing work. She loved it too, and she's been waiting all year for the second series (and she'll have to wait a bit longer too). When it does come round she'll have had all that pleasurable anticipation and know that she'll have to make the most of it while its around.
If she enjoys this second series as much as the first, in the very long run Primeval might come out the winner.
* Its late, I'm tired and this is nothing better than a bit of sarcasm. After all The Doctor got to snog Captain Jack and that Saturday night the entire nation heaved and sighed and muttered "I suppose you expect me to get a bit excited by a bit of mano e mano and frankly its Saturday and I've got better things to do so lets move along shall we".
Ooh, I did enjoy that
I haven't deployed the word perspicacity in a long time, and it felt good when I did. So good I'm going to do it again. Oh, I already did.
Any ho, Martin Jol's gone. This chap the spurs board has been assiduously and openly courting since at least the 'summer', isn't yet quite ready to step into the breach, but the box has been built (the last nail was driven in, it now emerges by the defeat to Newcastle) so Jol's been shipped out.
Ramos will come to the Lane with a very good reputation, but Spurs are and always have been a team with ideas way above their station - by which I mean the sum total of their resources. Even in London they've only ever intermittently been stronger than third best, and the Hammers have resources Spurs will always lack which make them potential contenders for that third place at a time when first and second are a lock out by Arsenal and Chelsea.
Some people thought the earth would stop spinning if Jose ever left Chelsea. Drogba's staying. The earth still turns on its axis. Jol is already being laid out for this evening's fish 'n' chip wrap.
Hope he lands a good job some time soon.
Any ho, Martin Jol's gone. This chap the spurs board has been assiduously and openly courting since at least the 'summer', isn't yet quite ready to step into the breach, but the box has been built (the last nail was driven in, it now emerges by the defeat to Newcastle) so Jol's been shipped out.
Ramos will come to the Lane with a very good reputation, but Spurs are and always have been a team with ideas way above their station - by which I mean the sum total of their resources. Even in London they've only ever intermittently been stronger than third best, and the Hammers have resources Spurs will always lack which make them potential contenders for that third place at a time when first and second are a lock out by Arsenal and Chelsea.
Some people thought the earth would stop spinning if Jose ever left Chelsea. Drogba's staying. The earth still turns on its axis. Jol is already being laid out for this evening's fish 'n' chip wrap.
Hope he lands a good job some time soon.
Darwin in the workplace
There is absolutely nothing wrong with what is currently going on, apparantly. The Big Swinging Dick is the supreme Darwinian manager - this is pure laissez-faire management. Let 'em loose. Except these are the hounds of hell and while they're sorting themselves out everyone else is buffetted and more or less entirely ineffectual.
The handmaiden will admit that she, the earliest appointee had the benefit of his careful attention during her early days in post and the most thorough grounding in the broadest range of elements of the role.
With each successive appointment the amount of attention he's given to ensuring the appointee is properly equipped to perform the role he expects her to carry out has decreased markedly to the point where the Bolshie Book Worm was essentially given the title and the pay rise and left to work it out as she went. She's learned the scope of her role through curt disciplinary memoranda usually left about for any number of people to read before she gets to it.
Typically she only learns how to do something the correct way after she's done her best and ended up doing things not the way he'd have it.
What makes this worse for her is that to some extent this is nothing more than personal preference (I feel like I've been here, and I probably have).
In the middle there's Yoda. How Yoda secured her promotion is a little mystery. Her strengths such as they are lie in the application of hair dye, bullying and paper shuffling.
She does have one other quality, though, and it is what's kept her in post: a remarkable capacity for shifting the blame. Her instinct for self-preservation is peerless, at least on site.
And so if I had to put money on any particular individual to be the last one standing it would be her.
The handmaiden will admit that she, the earliest appointee had the benefit of his careful attention during her early days in post and the most thorough grounding in the broadest range of elements of the role.
With each successive appointment the amount of attention he's given to ensuring the appointee is properly equipped to perform the role he expects her to carry out has decreased markedly to the point where the Bolshie Book Worm was essentially given the title and the pay rise and left to work it out as she went. She's learned the scope of her role through curt disciplinary memoranda usually left about for any number of people to read before she gets to it.
Typically she only learns how to do something the correct way after she's done her best and ended up doing things not the way he'd have it.
What makes this worse for her is that to some extent this is nothing more than personal preference (I feel like I've been here, and I probably have).
In the middle there's Yoda. How Yoda secured her promotion is a little mystery. Her strengths such as they are lie in the application of hair dye, bullying and paper shuffling.
She does have one other quality, though, and it is what's kept her in post: a remarkable capacity for shifting the blame. Her instinct for self-preservation is peerless, at least on site.
And so if I had to put money on any particular individual to be the last one standing it would be her.
Kev is famous
Kev. got a ref. a few months back after deploying his Big Party Number at an international conference held in Australia apparently for the sole purpose of showcasing Little Johnny - Statesman. This (the Big Party Number) was positioned as a sterling piece of upstagery by a greasy little oik on the make which shows remarkable and hitherto rarely hinted at perspicacity on the subject of Matters Antipodean amongst British journalists.
With the federal election well and truly underway, the first wave ofbribery tax pledgery out in the open, it is time for the Times to cast its piercing gaze over the prospective next Prime Minister of Australia. Well, sort of.
There's a small piece in today's paper: a picture of Kev and a sentence beneath it explaining that Kev is being shown in the act of eating his own ear wax.
Eugh. Still it could be worse. I'd always understood Fat Gordy to be a nail-biter but apparently those nails are in inadvertent consequence of snot eating.
With the federal election well and truly underway, the first wave of
There's a small piece in today's paper: a picture of Kev and a sentence beneath it explaining that Kev is being shown in the act of eating his own ear wax.
Eugh. Still it could be worse. I'd always understood Fat Gordy to be a nail-biter but apparently those nails are in inadvertent consequence of snot eating.
Yet another Yoda thing
Among the many drawbacks of knowing and working with Yoda is an increasing familiarity with the tone and content of the Daily Express. Yoda dines voraciously on an undiluted diet of Diana conspiracies and the McCann saga, and the Daily Express is the conveyor belt for such trash.
Yoda has developed a number of work avoidance strategies. She has a remarkable capacity for trivia and left undirected can happily spend an entire shift worrying over something that makes not one penny's difference to the bottom line provided the effort results in something visible and measurable as an outcome. She'll cheerfully spend at least an hour of her shift on personal matters, when she'd tell tales and engineer the suspension of anyone less senior behaving in the same manner.
Notwithstanding the warning signs about the store that the telephone system of for business calls only she hide away in the warehouse and call all her family of an evening and as noted before she'll send staff off site to run errands for her.
In addition to speculating over the McCann business and worrying about Poor Diana there's what's rivetting on television to be gone over - a particular favourite is Strictly Come Mincing, but pretty much anything involving minor celebrities will do.
The next thing to do before getting on with any actual work is go over every minor illness and ailment she, her mother, and her husband are currently suffering from, with side references on slow days to something or other her strapping once nearly was seriously ill with. Grand daughter progress report has to be filed and if someone she likes is in the office their ailments, and those of their family must be raked over. This is hard work, and requires time to do properly. On a good day that can take Yoda right up to the time it is safe for her to hide out in the warehouse.
If really pushed she'll put out kitchen roll. That's her speciality on the shop floor. Kitchen towel and loo roll. When it comes to hard yards on the shop floor there's nobody like Yoda, especially down the paper products aisle.
Yoda has developed a number of work avoidance strategies. She has a remarkable capacity for trivia and left undirected can happily spend an entire shift worrying over something that makes not one penny's difference to the bottom line provided the effort results in something visible and measurable as an outcome. She'll cheerfully spend at least an hour of her shift on personal matters, when she'd tell tales and engineer the suspension of anyone less senior behaving in the same manner.
Notwithstanding the warning signs about the store that the telephone system of for business calls only she hide away in the warehouse and call all her family of an evening and as noted before she'll send staff off site to run errands for her.
In addition to speculating over the McCann business and worrying about Poor Diana there's what's rivetting on television to be gone over - a particular favourite is Strictly Come Mincing, but pretty much anything involving minor celebrities will do.
The next thing to do before getting on with any actual work is go over every minor illness and ailment she, her mother, and her husband are currently suffering from, with side references on slow days to something or other her strapping once nearly was seriously ill with. Grand daughter progress report has to be filed and if someone she likes is in the office their ailments, and those of their family must be raked over. This is hard work, and requires time to do properly. On a good day that can take Yoda right up to the time it is safe for her to hide out in the warehouse.
If really pushed she'll put out kitchen roll. That's her speciality on the shop floor. Kitchen towel and loo roll. When it comes to hard yards on the shop floor there's nobody like Yoda, especially down the paper products aisle.
Operation Rumball
This is rumball season. The secret to good rumballs is lots of rum. And so when I'm making them in sub-industrial quantities I use own-brand navy rum. The basic model uses wheat based biscuit powder, coconut, cocoa powder and condensed milk. But the key is the rum. You know you've put too much in when mixture gives off fumes, and when children eat one and fall asleep.
Stage one of the first batch is complete. The mixture is in the fridge. Does no one understand that I'm committed to something other than feeding faces, washing, ironing, dusting, vacuuming, and so forth from next week?
Stage one of the first batch is complete. The mixture is in the fridge. Does no one understand that I'm committed to something other than feeding faces, washing, ironing, dusting, vacuuming, and so forth from next week?
Thursday 25 October 2007
On hating Christmas (again)
It is that time of year, again. The central heating is on (did I admit I blinked first? I have now.) The air is cold, the cat is bad tempered, the Slug is drunk, and shop is over-full (of crap you'll only buy on the promise of a skin full of half price pre-made mulled wine), prices are up, essentials are down and everyone is fed up with absolutely everyone else.
At the best of times we can't manage a price change over smoothly, but since the guru was, er, retired following a restructure things have frankly gone to hell in a hand cart. The Dodo given the job of filling Guru's boots was not given training, has no initiative and less gumption. Today when we phoned to ask why after the best part of a week such a large proportion of the offer lines are sitting in the warehouse because they're mis-priced he burst into tears.
So now we feel like a coven. More heavy sighing.
To make ourselves feel better we snipe at one another. We snipe at the shop floor staff. They snipe back. Sue goes off her trolly; she and the Maltese Terrier have a slanging match that was probably heard all over town let alone the store itself.
The customers get into the spirit of the season. The 'english' gene drives me insane and the english to an wholly irrational fear of being seen to be civil to anyone providing service. In the english mind service = servitude. Therefore, for the english, there is no honour in providing service.
So on the one hand the english generally cannot bring themselves to provide good service, as though honour bound to do the least possible as a subversive show of independence. On the other hand they cannot bring themselves to receive good service, for fear of being seen by others to have voluntarily sunk to the same level as those providing it.
This is all very tedious to an outsider, until you find yourself confronted by a surly vindictive shop worker; but bear in mind the kind of customer he or she is most familiar with.
The closer we get to christmas the more excessive this seems to get, as though the fuel of consumption desperation aggravates the general condition of englishness. We're not quite at the 'trollies at ten paces' stage yet, but it is still October. No adjudications have yet been required over ownership of the last pot of brandy butter.
We've all these seasonal delights to come. I have hateful stuck here in the freezing cold away from family who hate me anyway for being here dramas to come. No cards because I live here rather than there as though this is something I want and have done to up upset them.
I'm miserable already.
How many days until this whole bloody awful business is over for another year?
PS That's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. After last night's stupid unwelcome offering of mulled wine he's shown some sensitivity tonight and taken himself off. So I'm going for my longest stretch in months tomorrow night. Why though, is it, I've woken up with a really thick head the past two mornings. That just isn't fair when I'm being such a good girl!
At the best of times we can't manage a price change over smoothly, but since the guru was, er, retired following a restructure things have frankly gone to hell in a hand cart. The Dodo given the job of filling Guru's boots was not given training, has no initiative and less gumption. Today when we phoned to ask why after the best part of a week such a large proportion of the offer lines are sitting in the warehouse because they're mis-priced he burst into tears.
So now we feel like a coven. More heavy sighing.
To make ourselves feel better we snipe at one another. We snipe at the shop floor staff. They snipe back. Sue goes off her trolly; she and the Maltese Terrier have a slanging match that was probably heard all over town let alone the store itself.
The customers get into the spirit of the season. The 'english' gene drives me insane and the english to an wholly irrational fear of being seen to be civil to anyone providing service. In the english mind service = servitude. Therefore, for the english, there is no honour in providing service.
So on the one hand the english generally cannot bring themselves to provide good service, as though honour bound to do the least possible as a subversive show of independence. On the other hand they cannot bring themselves to receive good service, for fear of being seen by others to have voluntarily sunk to the same level as those providing it.
This is all very tedious to an outsider, until you find yourself confronted by a surly vindictive shop worker; but bear in mind the kind of customer he or she is most familiar with.
The closer we get to christmas the more excessive this seems to get, as though the fuel of consumption desperation aggravates the general condition of englishness. We're not quite at the 'trollies at ten paces' stage yet, but it is still October. No adjudications have yet been required over ownership of the last pot of brandy butter.
We've all these seasonal delights to come. I have hateful stuck here in the freezing cold away from family who hate me anyway for being here dramas to come. No cards because I live here rather than there as though this is something I want and have done to up upset them.
I'm miserable already.
How many days until this whole bloody awful business is over for another year?
PS That's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. After last night's stupid unwelcome offering of mulled wine he's shown some sensitivity tonight and taken himself off. So I'm going for my longest stretch in months tomorrow night. Why though, is it, I've woken up with a really thick head the past two mornings. That just isn't fair when I'm being such a good girl!
Yet another phenomenon
The 'Drover's Dog' election is part of the Australian electoral lexicon. It is the unlosable election. One of these took place in 1972 to replace the clapped out liberal government with something different. Labour's campaign slogan was "It's time" and no sentient being required any elaboration. As its reward for agreeing that it was indeed time Australia got Gough Witlam, his even more extraordinary wife and Jim Cairns.
The phrase was coined, however, in 1983 when deployed in bitterness by Bill Hayden to describe the election that would take place on March 5th that year.
In the mean time the liberals led by Malcolm Fraser had recovered power after Gough Witlam was sacked by the Governor-General on November 11th 1975; circumstances still contentious today.
Fraser's governement had run its course by 1983 and looked in its turn entirely bankrupt. Bill Hayden had already begun his long trek from fairly wide left of centre to where he today stands in the political landscape as a rather antidiluvialist fiscal conservative monarchist. But he'd failed to convince the men who have always run the Labour party (at this time the NSW right-wing machine) entirely of his ability to lead the party to an election victory an impression that was compounded by failure to win a by-election.
The signs being deemed by this failure to be inpropitious the machine swung into action. It had at its disposal a political gem. As ACTU president that infamous Rhodes Scholar, serial philanderer and all-round drunk Bob Hawke had acquired a reputation as a fixer by dint of doing absolutely nothing. The trick he'd mastered was to wait in the wings while disputing parties ground themselves and each other to a state of exhaustion; at which point Hawke would glide gracefully to centre stage and magically broker precisely the sort of agreement all parties were desperate for anyway.
Hawke was no longer a political agent on the fringes; he'd been elected to parliament in the previous election and was quite nakedly and gleefully engineering Hayden's departure. The machine were perfectly amenable, considering Hawke a better bet as Labour leader for securing long term power.
And so the trigger was pulled one morning in February 1983; Hayden resigned before being butchered. But even before Hayden's obituary could be delivered Fraser had already the same morning (and oblivious to events in the Labour party) called on the Governor General as the necessary first step in calling an election.
Hayden delivered his judgement on the election in full bitter awareness that had he held off just a few hours he would have led the party into it. As a kind of revenge he continued his journey ever right-ward.
The next time I had the opportunity to witness a Drover's Dog election at close quarters was in May 1997 and here in the UK. It was the election at which the British delivered the final coup de grace on the long Tory period in office that had begun with Maggie's triumphal arrival.
They were so desperate to see the back of John Major and the whole tawdry shower surrounding him they were prepared to buy the pitch of Tony Blair without even asking to see the price tag.
Something like that atmosphere seems to surround the federal election underway in Australia. So eager to shuffle Howard off his perch they're prepared to sanction the oily little oik that is Kev. Rudd, persistent god-botherer, busy body, sleeze bag, crock and control freak.
Right now the Exclusive Bretheren (know much about them? thought not) only have the run of the PM's office. The prospect of them having grubby mitts on the levers of power - while proscribing direct participation in the electoral process by sect members - should be deeply scary. What is it about Australians that they should be able to sleep walk towards this disaster. And if Howard isn't replaced by the Great Smirk, will it be the Mad Monk instead?
'Home' is a chimera; and it slips further from reach each day, or so it seems.
The phrase was coined, however, in 1983 when deployed in bitterness by Bill Hayden to describe the election that would take place on March 5th that year.
In the mean time the liberals led by Malcolm Fraser had recovered power after Gough Witlam was sacked by the Governor-General on November 11th 1975; circumstances still contentious today.
Fraser's governement had run its course by 1983 and looked in its turn entirely bankrupt. Bill Hayden had already begun his long trek from fairly wide left of centre to where he today stands in the political landscape as a rather antidiluvialist fiscal conservative monarchist. But he'd failed to convince the men who have always run the Labour party (at this time the NSW right-wing machine) entirely of his ability to lead the party to an election victory an impression that was compounded by failure to win a by-election.
The signs being deemed by this failure to be inpropitious the machine swung into action. It had at its disposal a political gem. As ACTU president that infamous Rhodes Scholar, serial philanderer and all-round drunk Bob Hawke had acquired a reputation as a fixer by dint of doing absolutely nothing. The trick he'd mastered was to wait in the wings while disputing parties ground themselves and each other to a state of exhaustion; at which point Hawke would glide gracefully to centre stage and magically broker precisely the sort of agreement all parties were desperate for anyway.
Hawke was no longer a political agent on the fringes; he'd been elected to parliament in the previous election and was quite nakedly and gleefully engineering Hayden's departure. The machine were perfectly amenable, considering Hawke a better bet as Labour leader for securing long term power.
And so the trigger was pulled one morning in February 1983; Hayden resigned before being butchered. But even before Hayden's obituary could be delivered Fraser had already the same morning (and oblivious to events in the Labour party) called on the Governor General as the necessary first step in calling an election.
Hayden delivered his judgement on the election in full bitter awareness that had he held off just a few hours he would have led the party into it. As a kind of revenge he continued his journey ever right-ward.
The next time I had the opportunity to witness a Drover's Dog election at close quarters was in May 1997 and here in the UK. It was the election at which the British delivered the final coup de grace on the long Tory period in office that had begun with Maggie's triumphal arrival.
They were so desperate to see the back of John Major and the whole tawdry shower surrounding him they were prepared to buy the pitch of Tony Blair without even asking to see the price tag.
Something like that atmosphere seems to surround the federal election underway in Australia. So eager to shuffle Howard off his perch they're prepared to sanction the oily little oik that is Kev. Rudd, persistent god-botherer, busy body, sleeze bag, crock and control freak.
Right now the Exclusive Bretheren (know much about them? thought not) only have the run of the PM's office. The prospect of them having grubby mitts on the levers of power - while proscribing direct participation in the electoral process by sect members - should be deeply scary. What is it about Australians that they should be able to sleep walk towards this disaster. And if Howard isn't replaced by the Great Smirk, will it be the Mad Monk instead?
'Home' is a chimera; and it slips further from reach each day, or so it seems.
If you are a life-long Liverpool supporter are you comforted that the newish owner of your club has come out and said that the (management) credentials of your club's manager should be 'unquestioned'. Really? Ever? Intriguing.
Personally, I suspect Senor Benitez of suffering a fairly crippling mid-life crisis. I just hope it continues for a good long time, given his security of tenure.
Personally, I suspect Senor Benitez of suffering a fairly crippling mid-life crisis. I just hope it continues for a good long time, given his security of tenure.
Wednesday 24 October 2007
In the good old days
This is the latest in an occasional series of practice Bonkers Old Woman in Purple Dress Posts. Tonight I've been provoked by a young man on the British Broadcasting Corporation wireless broadcast service, clearly ignorant, attempting to pronounce the name of a Pacific island nation state and coming out with Thai-hiti. Thankfully he made no attempt at Tahiti's capital; we might still be attempting to divine the place to which he was making reference.
Oh dear, oh dear.
In the good old days The BBC employed an army of young men (and women before they married and retired to keep house and raise children) who developed, supplied and policed correct pronunciation in virtually every conceivable language.
Those were the days.
PS: I gave this wanker the benefit of the doubt, thinking he might realise the mistake and correct himself at the first opportunity. He's just repeated Thai-hiti so me, I name names. This tosser's name is Tim Lovegodjoy, for the record. To add to the general ignominy in which he seems to determined to cloak himself he's just responded "who?" to his colleague's "Vanuatu". However much this man's paid is too much of my tax and licence fee.
Oh dear, oh dear.
In the good old days The BBC employed an army of young men (and women before they married and retired to keep house and raise children) who developed, supplied and policed correct pronunciation in virtually every conceivable language.
Those were the days.
PS: I gave this wanker the benefit of the doubt, thinking he might realise the mistake and correct himself at the first opportunity. He's just repeated Thai-hiti so me, I name names. This tosser's name is Tim Love
Happy days
So now I know what a beatific smile looks like ... it looks like the soppy, spaced out expression on the face of Senior Frustrated Novelist. She's off and for the last three weeks of her time with us she's going to endure torment from Yoda, miserable customers, cretinous head office folk, unreliable suppliers, decrepit technology, thieves, incontinent children, fractious management and nit-pickery from the Paper-Shuffler-in-Chief and absolutely none of it will disturb her.
And for this she's going to be paid about 50% more than she earns at present, with benefits added on.
You might be thinking that the exit interview will be quite brief. You'd be wrong. Exit interviews might lead to challenges being laid down and that would make everyone's life even more uncomfortable than it already is (see above) and no body can face that so, no exit interview at all.
The Big Swinging Dick was in fine fettle to day which possibly means that his errant wife has returned to the fold. If only he'd binned the Daily Express and read a real newspaper, or better yet had a chat with a french man (say Sarko) he might understand that a much needed wife's return is a mixed blessing at best and a recipe for nothing other than continued domestic discord in all probability.
And for this she's going to be paid about 50% more than she earns at present, with benefits added on.
You might be thinking that the exit interview will be quite brief. You'd be wrong. Exit interviews might lead to challenges being laid down and that would make everyone's life even more uncomfortable than it already is (see above) and no body can face that so, no exit interview at all.
The Big Swinging Dick was in fine fettle to day which possibly means that his errant wife has returned to the fold. If only he'd binned the Daily Express and read a real newspaper, or better yet had a chat with a french man (say Sarko) he might understand that a much needed wife's return is a mixed blessing at best and a recipe for nothing other than continued domestic discord in all probability.
Painful truth
Might otherwise have missed this one but the Beeb can be relied upon to keep me abreast of crucial news emanating from 'back home', such as this story. I'm not making it up, honest and to prove it the story is lifted from The Age, the least disreputable Victorian rag; and frankly the story is a bit of a hoot and light relief after the previous post:
Apart from bringing to mind that scene involving ping pong balls in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert I think it must be said that since Perth is the most remote Capital city in the world (or so residents will have it) and the place where these shocking events took place is a deal further from civilisation than that the people who live there deserve a medal and the police who are essentially employed to deal with matters arising when people who can't cope with the isolation go bonkers and start attempting to get off with kangaroos and other wildlife need to get a better perspective.
As to how much envy is involved, well that's another question. I wouldn't like to attempt to do this. The very idea makes my eyes water.
Showing patrons she could crush beer cans between her exposed breasts has cost a West Australian barmaid $1,000.
Hanging spoons on the barmaid's nipples also cost one of her co-workers $500, while their bar manager was fined $1,000 for failing to stop the pair, police said in a statement.Luana De Faveri, 31, was fined $1,000 in the Mandurah Magistrates Court on Wednesday after pleading guilty to two breaches of Licence Conditions under the Liquor Control Act.
Police said in June this year, De Faveri twice exposed her breasts to patrons in the Premier Hotel in Pinjarra, 87km south of Perth. "She was alleged to have also crushed beer cans between her breasts during one of the offences," police said.
Another bar worker, Tracey Amanda Leslie, 43, was fined $500 after pleading guilty to assisting the commission of a breach of the act by helping hang spoons from De Faver's nipples.
The pub manager, Roy Williams, 43, was fined $1,000 after pleading guilty to a breach of the act by failing to stop the women's behaviour.
Superintendent David Parkinson of the Peel Police District said: "It sends a clear message to all licensees in Peel that we will not tolerate this type of behaviour in our licensed premises."
Apart from bringing to mind that scene involving ping pong balls in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert I think it must be said that since Perth is the most remote Capital city in the world (or so residents will have it) and the place where these shocking events took place is a deal further from civilisation than that the people who live there deserve a medal and the police who are essentially employed to deal with matters arising when people who can't cope with the isolation go bonkers and start attempting to get off with kangaroos and other wildlife need to get a better perspective.
As to how much envy is involved, well that's another question. I wouldn't like to attempt to do this. The very idea makes my eyes water.
Wrong, wrong, wrong
I'm not particularly well equipped for wading through complex moral and philosophical mires but what the hell I'm going to have my while this is still a reasonably free-speech medium: the decision not to even countenance a review of the current legal maximum term at which an abortion can be performed strikes me as simple criminal irresponsibility particularly as the grounds for this seem to be that there's no reason to consider lowering the age from 24 weeks when the survival rate for babies born at 23 weeks isn't showing a significant improvement.
I guess I'm just becoming increasingly sensitive to this as my chances of having another baby gallop off towards the distant hills beyond which they'll be out of sight and irretrieveable.
There are unquestionably circumstances in which a woman can get to 24 weeks without being aware she's pregnant. Yes, there are.
But when that unborn is not just 'potentially' viable but where its chances of surviving and even thriving are very real what possible just cause can there be for killing him or her.
I've sympathy with the woman who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant; realising that plans however trivial or important are about to be overturned by what ever cause is a potential cause of distress. But a lot worse things can happen. Some of them probably will, and if you can't cope with this, how will you cope with them?
If you're that much of a loss when it comes to dealing the shit life can dish up, perhaps its you who should be terminated, and not your unwanted child.
Would a tightening of the abortion law lead to an increase in 'back street' abortions? Well, maybe. After all a law proscribing homicide pretty consistently in place down through the ages hasn't got in the way of people killing one another, but no rational or credible individual to my knowledge has ever argued for the abolition.
I'm not a pro-life fruit cake. Abortion happens, always will and I think on balance it better to facilitate this in safe (sanitary, skilled) conditions than otherwise. I also happen to feel increasingly powerfully the necessity for clear blue water between the shortest viable term based on current reliable medical evidence and the maximum termination term and absolutely not an overlap between the two.
Morally ambiguous? Yes. Pragmatic and workable. Yes. Painful. That's life.
I guess I'm just becoming increasingly sensitive to this as my chances of having another baby gallop off towards the distant hills beyond which they'll be out of sight and irretrieveable.
There are unquestionably circumstances in which a woman can get to 24 weeks without being aware she's pregnant. Yes, there are.
But when that unborn is not just 'potentially' viable but where its chances of surviving and even thriving are very real what possible just cause can there be for killing him or her.
I've sympathy with the woman who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant; realising that plans however trivial or important are about to be overturned by what ever cause is a potential cause of distress. But a lot worse things can happen. Some of them probably will, and if you can't cope with this, how will you cope with them?
If you're that much of a loss when it comes to dealing the shit life can dish up, perhaps its you who should be terminated, and not your unwanted child.
Would a tightening of the abortion law lead to an increase in 'back street' abortions? Well, maybe. After all a law proscribing homicide pretty consistently in place down through the ages hasn't got in the way of people killing one another, but no rational or credible individual to my knowledge has ever argued for the abolition.
I'm not a pro-life fruit cake. Abortion happens, always will and I think on balance it better to facilitate this in safe (sanitary, skilled) conditions than otherwise. I also happen to feel increasingly powerfully the necessity for clear blue water between the shortest viable term based on current reliable medical evidence and the maximum termination term and absolutely not an overlap between the two.
Morally ambiguous? Yes. Pragmatic and workable. Yes. Painful. That's life.
I Want To Cry
News yesterday, today on the front of the papers that this government, in office for over a decade has now concocted a new way of ruining people's lives: for the next seven years the children of this country are to become involved - on an entirely involuntary basis - in (yet another) educational experiment. This is Suck it and See policy making on the fly the victims of which will be children who are the age my daughter is now, which means my daughter. The escape hatch is jammed closed and the price she pays just gets higher and higher.
I have no confidence whatsoever in this administration.
And it is hardly heartening that the colossal drip Michael Gove who is (Tory) shadow spokesthingummy for Education has pooh-poohed the proposed expansion of diplomas into more academic areas of 'study' on the entirely fatuous grounds that the new diploma in academic areas would undermine traditional qualifications. Well, doh!
This is primary school playground debate on the subject of secondary education and that's hardly heartening.
What's heart breaking though is that the Tories have since this government was first elected been at the head of the annual stampede to protest the perceived corruption of the 'gold standard' A Level qualification and the general dumbing down of standards in education.
In life, in general, one can't have it 'both ways' but Michael Gove at least seems determined die a political death trying to.
I have no confidence whatsoever in this administration.
And it is hardly heartening that the colossal drip Michael Gove who is (Tory) shadow spokesthingummy for Education has pooh-poohed the proposed expansion of diplomas into more academic areas of 'study' on the entirely fatuous grounds that the new diploma in academic areas would undermine traditional qualifications. Well, doh!
This is primary school playground debate on the subject of secondary education and that's hardly heartening.
What's heart breaking though is that the Tories have since this government was first elected been at the head of the annual stampede to protest the perceived corruption of the 'gold standard' A Level qualification and the general dumbing down of standards in education.
In life, in general, one can't have it 'both ways' but Michael Gove at least seems determined die a political death trying to.
Tuesday 23 October 2007
Well it is my business
The unions have won a victory over the workers' enemy: business. When it comes to 'biting the hand that feeds' nothing beats a union employee. Sadly I've not succeeded in tracking down a transcript of the radio interview that provoked me into making that opening. Somewhere out in the ether is news of a decision to further shield employees from the effects of rational decision making by business owners.
The case for bringing back News at 10
It is simple really. Somewhere in the house there's a piece of video tape, the piece on it runs for just a few minutes. It was made back in October 1994, at Blackpool, in the Winter Garden. ITV had a stand there, a mock up of their news studio and anyone willing to make a phool of him or herself could line up to be filmed reading three short stories including the famous 'And finally...' or whatever the catch phrase was.
And until the News at 10 comes back there's no point showing that tape of this particular phool to the Offspring.
And until the News at 10 comes back there's no point showing that tape of this particular phool to the Offspring.
Monday 22 October 2007
It wasn't supposed to be like this
As football men go Martin Jol might be a bit of an ugly-buggly but he's never succeeded in arousing anything like contempt in me.
So Newcastle United putting him out of work wasn't part of the script, but tonight's result must be one of the very last nails to be driven into the coffin in which he'll be shipped out of White Hart Lane. I can't see even a good run from here saving him; after a time these things become a self-fulfilling prophecy and it seems to me that time has now been reached and passed.
So Newcastle United putting him out of work wasn't part of the script, but tonight's result must be one of the very last nails to be driven into the coffin in which he'll be shipped out of White Hart Lane. I can't see even a good run from here saving him; after a time these things become a self-fulfilling prophecy and it seems to me that time has now been reached and passed.
Smug and self-satisfied
The Slug retired from the lists early today and not actually at the reeling stage of inebriation. But as he did so he asked me, completely out of the blue, if I'd like some mulled wine. I said no, he said 'oh' and then went on his way. Now I don't like to believe my own usually quite flippant conspiracy theories but what on earth was that about.
I mean ... well, I mean, what was that all about. Why? Do we even have any. Why would he do that if he's on his way to bed. What, oh what was that all about.
Going out for an indian yesterday postponed clambering back aboard but it has proved surprisingly easy to do, today. It certainly caught him on the hop. How enjoyable was that.
I mean ... well, I mean, what was that all about. Why? Do we even have any. Why would he do that if he's on his way to bed. What, oh what was that all about.
Going out for an indian yesterday postponed clambering back aboard but it has proved surprisingly easy to do, today. It certainly caught him on the hop. How enjoyable was that.
Will the second last person
to leave the building please remember to switch off the lights.
Yoda will be too panic stricken to do so, and we mustn't squander all that electricity. The emergency lighting will kick in and she's used to blundering about in the dark anyway.
And while we're on the subject of Yoda, and meandering around to the actual point of this post, news has reached me that the nearest thing we have to a creative soul is about to check out for the last time. Senior Frustrated Novelist has cashed in her tokens and is off to join a utility (or her script has been accepted and she's about to become marginally less non-famous than me).
I've only heard this indirectly and I can hardly wait to go in to work on Wednesday and get the Paper-Shuffler-in-Chief's panic stricken take on this turn up for the books. I rather suspect that the general assumption about the place has been that SFN has been too depressed to do anything constructive such as secure alternative employment. In trading on that assumption they've left themselves stranded up that creek with a broken paddle.
A sensible bunch would set themselves to the necessary task of mending that paddle. This bunch are not sensible. What they'll do next is get into a wrangle about matters peripheral - things that are not entirely irrelevant but also not of vital and immediate importance. When they've exhausted themselves they'll not have addressed either of the two critical issues and they might find that in the squabble some one's knocked the not completely useless paddle overboard.
So now they're up that creek without any means of propulsion whatsoever. A girl can dream. A girl can also flog her CV about. Low pay and members of the management team who are either decrepit and bullying or malicious and incompetent; deal with those things and it just might come to pass that staff retention improves.
Yoda will be too panic stricken to do so, and we mustn't squander all that electricity. The emergency lighting will kick in and she's used to blundering about in the dark anyway.
And while we're on the subject of Yoda, and meandering around to the actual point of this post, news has reached me that the nearest thing we have to a creative soul is about to check out for the last time. Senior Frustrated Novelist has cashed in her tokens and is off to join a utility (or her script has been accepted and she's about to become marginally less non-famous than me).
I've only heard this indirectly and I can hardly wait to go in to work on Wednesday and get the Paper-Shuffler-in-Chief's panic stricken take on this turn up for the books. I rather suspect that the general assumption about the place has been that SFN has been too depressed to do anything constructive such as secure alternative employment. In trading on that assumption they've left themselves stranded up that creek with a broken paddle.
A sensible bunch would set themselves to the necessary task of mending that paddle. This bunch are not sensible. What they'll do next is get into a wrangle about matters peripheral - things that are not entirely irrelevant but also not of vital and immediate importance. When they've exhausted themselves they'll not have addressed either of the two critical issues and they might find that in the squabble some one's knocked the not completely useless paddle overboard.
So now they're up that creek without any means of propulsion whatsoever. A girl can dream. A girl can also flog her CV about. Low pay and members of the management team who are either decrepit and bullying or malicious and incompetent; deal with those things and it just might come to pass that staff retention improves.
Personally
Personally I couldn't give a stuff about the extent to which the UK is to be subsumed into the greater EU. I'm bailing out at the earliest available opportunity. Sayonara suckers.
But in the meantime I'm stuck with Fat Gordy's bullying. He's on his hind legs before parliament making a statement to the house attempting to explain why there's no obligation to stick to the manifesto pledge of a referendum. The referendum commitment related to the dead EU constitution and as far as Gordy's concerned now it is called a Treaty and not a Constitution, and because the nasty, overtly pan-nationalistic and politically incendiary "flag and anthem" aspects of the late, unlamented document have been excised all's well and the people can sleep sound in their beds at night secure in the knowledge that Fat Gordy's on the case.
Promises, promises.
Whatever the document might be called further institutional changes, many of which the UK will not be able to duck out of, are inevitable. "Even when it is a constitution in other countries it isn't a constitution in the UK". Oh, please. How stupid do you think the voters are?
Blather about opt outs and red lines? This is the continuation of the Euro-March and absolutely the only good news on that front in the past 48 hours is that one half of the hideous double act that has been running Poland round and round in ever decreasing circles of absurdity and ridicule has been skewered, as an adequate sufficiency of morbidly christian Poles came to their senses long enough to elect someone with a greater interest in administration than moralising.
But in the meantime I'm stuck with Fat Gordy's bullying. He's on his hind legs before parliament making a statement to the house attempting to explain why there's no obligation to stick to the manifesto pledge of a referendum. The referendum commitment related to the dead EU constitution and as far as Gordy's concerned now it is called a Treaty and not a Constitution, and because the nasty, overtly pan-nationalistic and politically incendiary "flag and anthem" aspects of the late, unlamented document have been excised all's well and the people can sleep sound in their beds at night secure in the knowledge that Fat Gordy's on the case.
Promises, promises.
Whatever the document might be called further institutional changes, many of which the UK will not be able to duck out of, are inevitable. "Even when it is a constitution in other countries it isn't a constitution in the UK". Oh, please. How stupid do you think the voters are?
Blather about opt outs and red lines? This is the continuation of the Euro-March and absolutely the only good news on that front in the past 48 hours is that one half of the hideous double act that has been running Poland round and round in ever decreasing circles of absurdity and ridicule has been skewered, as an adequate sufficiency of morbidly christian Poles came to their senses long enough to elect someone with a greater interest in administration than moralising.
Salvation
Fortuitous happenstance: I tidy and what should turn up but the letter from the council inducting me into the club of Green Waste Collection subscribers.
I admitted some time ago to having lost track of this letter and being unable to remember when exactly we shall switch from weekly to fortnightly collection. Happily I've got the small print of the terms and conditions to read at my leisure and lose once again: against the chance of that latter eventuality I posting herein the key terms and conditions:
But why, oh why couldn't they just say so? This document by the way, has been 'updated' so some one has had a chance to re-write the bits that required an overhaul.
I admitted some time ago to having lost track of this letter and being unable to remember when exactly we shall switch from weekly to fortnightly collection. Happily I've got the small print of the terms and conditions to read at my leisure and lose once again: against the chance of that latter eventuality I posting herein the key terms and conditions:
Garden waste bins will be collected weekly from the first week in April to the last week in November and during March and fortnightly during December, January and February.I've read that sentence and I cannot construct any valid interpretation other than that the council will run a weekly collection service from the start of March to the end of November and then a fortnightly service across the winter months of December, January and February.
But why, oh why couldn't they just say so? This document by the way, has been 'updated' so some one has had a chance to re-write the bits that required an overhaul.
Masochism special
I hate Christmas for a number of reasons and on many levels. Most of the reasons are connected with dismay at my situation and the hatred works at many levels of my being. That presumably is why every year, without exception, I put myself through something I've just begun this morning which is the task of putting the house in order so that the tree and the decorations can go up, the dining room can be dressed for the occasion and that we do the whole formal meal with every conceivable trimming thing. For the three of us. Never mind that I have no family with me, that I hate being here. That being the three of us locked for the 'festive' holiday in this danse macabre of Cluedo, Zulu, Mah Jongg and turkey.
Today I started gathering together and bagging up the accumulated detritus of this year now drawing to a close.
I picked up some cardboard boxes from the supermarket last Friday and I'm putting into them the things now best set to one side until the end of December. Soon it will be time to fetch down from the loft the cases of decorations to fish through them for those bits and pieces still presentable enough to be pressed into use again.
Oh, how I hate this.
Today I started gathering together and bagging up the accumulated detritus of this year now drawing to a close.
I picked up some cardboard boxes from the supermarket last Friday and I'm putting into them the things now best set to one side until the end of December. Soon it will be time to fetch down from the loft the cases of decorations to fish through them for those bits and pieces still presentable enough to be pressed into use again.
Oh, how I hate this.
Fat Brat
I'm not particularly well acquainted with the Fat Brats issue; it crops up from time to time with bored journalists and low ranking politicians on the make collude to bring the issue into the harsh light of day. It crops up here, it crops up back home, it crops up usually in the context of coming a distant second to the US of A in the Fat Stakes.
It even crops up in France but there usually in the context of Imperial America's malign influence and specifically the spread of Macdonalds, the rise of the anglo-saxon work 'ethic', the invention of the microwave oven and the appearance of ready 'meals' on the shelves of expedient supermarkets. There fat is only a side dish at a banquet of cultural collapse accompanied by wailing, hand wringing and the gnashing of teeth. Then they turn around and elect Sarko, which just proves that there's absolutely no point whatsoever in attempting to understand the French.
We've got her to almost ten years of age without having even the slightest reason to be concerned about her weight. She's neither an anaemic-looking stick insect nor plausible double for a beached whale but rather something balanced well between those two extremes.
In fact, I can only think of one truly and clearly damagingly obese child at her school. He's so grotesquely overweight he cannot walk properly. Such is the quantity of blubber in which his short thighs are enveloped he can only propel himself forward by swinging each leg round. This gait is often characterise as a waddle, but I suspect it is physiologically more destructive than that.
He has a younger sibling, but that child is yet to emerge from the push chair and it isn't yet possible to tell whether this child is going the way of its brother. I've never seen a man with the mother or the children and they lives in social housing. I have seen her in the convenience store late at night (and by that I mean at 10pm or later) being dragged about the place by her older child. I've seen them in the morning making their way to school on foot. I've seen her walking him home at night.
I almost never see him without food in his mouth and that food is inevitably highly processes, full of chemicals and lacking almost entirely nutritional value. I'm trying to think how many years now I've been watching them, and I'm guesstimating four. In those years he has bloated and become increasingly bullying towards his mother who is quite sweet-faced if manifestly inept. He lumbers along beside her, intermittently wheezing and demanding. Before he's ten he'll be a veritable monster unless someone intervenes to detoxify him, educate his mother and possibly pshyco-analyse her out of whatever is driving her to kill her child.
Why should we support the state intervening? Because the state already does. The state intervened the minute it allowed this young woman to leave formal education without any life skills, when it allowed her to believe she could procreate without any responsibility for that act, when it provided her with money and goods in kind to support her in that belief, when it provided medical care for life on demand and free of all obvious cost to the end user.
When the state creates monsters by creating an environment in which they can emerge and thrive then it is reasonble to expect the state to clean up its mess. So why do I want to rip the entire edifice of welfare down and leave people like this to drown?
It even crops up in France but there usually in the context of Imperial America's malign influence and specifically the spread of Macdonalds, the rise of the anglo-saxon work 'ethic', the invention of the microwave oven and the appearance of ready 'meals' on the shelves of expedient supermarkets. There fat is only a side dish at a banquet of cultural collapse accompanied by wailing, hand wringing and the gnashing of teeth. Then they turn around and elect Sarko, which just proves that there's absolutely no point whatsoever in attempting to understand the French.
We've got her to almost ten years of age without having even the slightest reason to be concerned about her weight. She's neither an anaemic-looking stick insect nor plausible double for a beached whale but rather something balanced well between those two extremes.
In fact, I can only think of one truly and clearly damagingly obese child at her school. He's so grotesquely overweight he cannot walk properly. Such is the quantity of blubber in which his short thighs are enveloped he can only propel himself forward by swinging each leg round. This gait is often characterise as a waddle, but I suspect it is physiologically more destructive than that.
He has a younger sibling, but that child is yet to emerge from the push chair and it isn't yet possible to tell whether this child is going the way of its brother. I've never seen a man with the mother or the children and they lives in social housing. I have seen her in the convenience store late at night (and by that I mean at 10pm or later) being dragged about the place by her older child. I've seen them in the morning making their way to school on foot. I've seen her walking him home at night.
I almost never see him without food in his mouth and that food is inevitably highly processes, full of chemicals and lacking almost entirely nutritional value. I'm trying to think how many years now I've been watching them, and I'm guesstimating four. In those years he has bloated and become increasingly bullying towards his mother who is quite sweet-faced if manifestly inept. He lumbers along beside her, intermittently wheezing and demanding. Before he's ten he'll be a veritable monster unless someone intervenes to detoxify him, educate his mother and possibly pshyco-analyse her out of whatever is driving her to kill her child.
Why should we support the state intervening? Because the state already does. The state intervened the minute it allowed this young woman to leave formal education without any life skills, when it allowed her to believe she could procreate without any responsibility for that act, when it provided her with money and goods in kind to support her in that belief, when it provided medical care for life on demand and free of all obvious cost to the end user.
When the state creates monsters by creating an environment in which they can emerge and thrive then it is reasonble to expect the state to clean up its mess. So why do I want to rip the entire edifice of welfare down and leave people like this to drown?
Sunday 21 October 2007
Well wasn't that lucky
Indolence has its own rewards and very occasionally they're more than worth all the effort involved in not actually doing anything.
And now it emerges that it might just have been was well I preferred admiring the curiously well tanned torso of Richard Armitage over the dubious delights of the Grand Prix finale and the calamitous turn for the unreliable Lewis Hamilton's little non-red caboose has taken in recent weeks: so calamitous that he managed to lose the title to a blond bloke with absolutely the most monotonous delivery I've ever had the misfortune to hear.
Any hoo, a petrol temperature related possible infraction of the elaborate rules of the 'sport' has opened up the possibility of disqualification of up to three vehicles that finished ahead of the little non-red caboose - and if that were to happen Lewis would secure he needs to wrest the title from this boring blond man and give the world a boring non-blond manlet as title holder.
Do I sound like I care a great deal about any of this?
PS As far as I can determine from a cursory examination of the back pages the results were not overturned and Little Lewis ended up losing the title to the boring blond with too many 'k's in his name.
And now it emerges that it might just have been was well I preferred admiring the curiously well tanned torso of Richard Armitage over the dubious delights of the Grand Prix finale and the calamitous turn for the unreliable Lewis Hamilton's little non-red caboose has taken in recent weeks: so calamitous that he managed to lose the title to a blond bloke with absolutely the most monotonous delivery I've ever had the misfortune to hear.
Any hoo, a petrol temperature related possible infraction of the elaborate rules of the 'sport' has opened up the possibility of disqualification of up to three vehicles that finished ahead of the little non-red caboose - and if that were to happen Lewis would secure he needs to wrest the title from this boring blond man and give the world a boring non-blond manlet as title holder.
Do I sound like I care a great deal about any of this?
PS As far as I can determine from a cursory examination of the back pages the results were not overturned and Little Lewis ended up losing the title to the boring blond with too many 'k's in his name.
Wierd moments of our time.
Between about three and five yesterday afternoon we had not one but a string of underage operators on. This is a colossal bother for absolutely everyone: me, the operator, the customers, the trading standards stooges...
It is no wonder businesses such as ours are disinclined to offer work to under-age applicants, and at least one no longer will take them on as operators. This looks like age discrimination but it is in fact a pragmatic business decision. At many levels under-age employees are a great nuisance and frankly overall they're more trouble than they're worth; the draw backs of having someone 16 or 17 on a check-out are just one aspect of this.
Time and time again, and whenever I'm not advocating setting up a have-all-you-think-you-can-handle stall outside to supply those not yet 18 with as much booze as they want free of charge, I've proposed an in-house 'off-licence' entirely separate from the main store, staffed only by mature employees, subject to entry restrictions akin to those of a public house, covered by genuinely effective security both to prevent under-age entry and theft.
No-one listens, or rather they do and then they dismiss the idea on the grounds that the customers won't like it. The customers don't like being asked to prove they're old enough to purchase age restricted products, the customers don't like having to queue, the customers don't like it when the card payment system falls over (a frequent occurrence). The list of things the customers don't like is long, but except when it comes to making changes to emphatically deal with the theft-and-under-age-drinking issue we're Grade A wimps.
And yet yesterday afternoon we, which is to say the disgruntled customers and I, were able to bond over a conspiratorial nudge-nudge. Oops, there goes another bottle of wine into my trolley; slap me now and get it over and done with and save me from myself. The situation was not so much absurd as it was surreal when the general bonding session over 'middle-class excess' extended to a shared moment by a monstrous Torygraph buyer and a Hippy-freak Guardianista. Weird
It is no wonder businesses such as ours are disinclined to offer work to under-age applicants, and at least one no longer will take them on as operators. This looks like age discrimination but it is in fact a pragmatic business decision. At many levels under-age employees are a great nuisance and frankly overall they're more trouble than they're worth; the draw backs of having someone 16 or 17 on a check-out are just one aspect of this.
Time and time again, and whenever I'm not advocating setting up a have-all-you-think-you-can-handle stall outside to supply those not yet 18 with as much booze as they want free of charge, I've proposed an in-house 'off-licence' entirely separate from the main store, staffed only by mature employees, subject to entry restrictions akin to those of a public house, covered by genuinely effective security both to prevent under-age entry and theft.
No-one listens, or rather they do and then they dismiss the idea on the grounds that the customers won't like it. The customers don't like being asked to prove they're old enough to purchase age restricted products, the customers don't like having to queue, the customers don't like it when the card payment system falls over (a frequent occurrence). The list of things the customers don't like is long, but except when it comes to making changes to emphatically deal with the theft-and-under-age-drinking issue we're Grade A wimps.
And yet yesterday afternoon we, which is to say the disgruntled customers and I, were able to bond over a conspiratorial nudge-nudge. Oops, there goes another bottle of wine into my trolley; slap me now and get it over and done with and save me from myself. The situation was not so much absurd as it was surreal when the general bonding session over 'middle-class excess' extended to a shared moment by a monstrous Torygraph buyer and a Hippy-freak Guardianista. Weird
one last thing
But first a note that we'll be attempting again to do the whole 'Indian' thing this evening though not before I've sat through Richard Armitage topless. I've made it clear that I'm not budging until I've had a gander, though I'll probably be disappointed. My standards are absurdly high and my expectations are rather inflated too. This does also mean that there's no prospect of me clambering back aboard that lumbering primitive vehicle today.
I'm still tidying up the labels, having got a bit carried away to be quite honest and making rather a mess of things in the way a child let loose in a sweet shop will make itself sick and end up making a mess over things.
And I noticed that I hadn't followed up on the whole market economics, price fixing observation thing.
This was not the morning to be dredging from the archives what I've retained by way of neoclassical arguments against and my non-marxist observations on the benefits to consumer of collusion which unquestionably happens in the UK drink market.
I'm suspending all efforts on this front in favour of something at which in this state I'm likely to be at least partially effectual - breathing in and out, for example.
I'm still tidying up the labels, having got a bit carried away to be quite honest and making rather a mess of things in the way a child let loose in a sweet shop will make itself sick and end up making a mess over things.
And I noticed that I hadn't followed up on the whole market economics, price fixing observation thing.
This was not the morning to be dredging from the archives what I've retained by way of neoclassical arguments against and my non-marxist observations on the benefits to consumer of collusion which unquestionably happens in the UK drink market.
I'm suspending all efforts on this front in favour of something at which in this state I'm likely to be at least partially effectual - breathing in and out, for example.
Ouch, that hurt
Landed rather heavily last night, and I was too busy being rude to admit as much, but candidly it was a several Mandela landing, but since that isn't actually what I was imbibing I suffered none of the worst consequences - just a moderate lassitude and a craving for bacon, sausages and eggs on muffins.
Well that was a whole four dry nights. Not a record but not bad going either.
Well that was a whole four dry nights. Not a record but not bad going either.
now here's a thought
He might strain himself. Chance would be a fine thing.
The green bin due to be filled, the garden carpeted with fallen leaves. Bright crisp winter's day, ground rather heavy under foot but other wise quite perfect. A few hardy (!) butterflies, red emperors, in the garden still, a job of work to be done, raking and gathering.
And he did help. Honest. He came along, heroically, at the eleventh hour and managed to fit a couple of handfuls of leaves in. Thank you. Hope you didn't hurt anything in the process.
Here's the thing though. For the second time this year I've found dog crap in our garden. We don't have a dog. A charmless neighbor is allowing its mutt loose in our garden. When I find out who it is I'm flinging that dog crap back.
The green bin due to be filled, the garden carpeted with fallen leaves. Bright crisp winter's day, ground rather heavy under foot but other wise quite perfect. A few hardy (!) butterflies, red emperors, in the garden still, a job of work to be done, raking and gathering.
And he did help. Honest. He came along, heroically, at the eleventh hour and managed to fit a couple of handfuls of leaves in. Thank you. Hope you didn't hurt anything in the process.
Here's the thing though. For the second time this year I've found dog crap in our garden. We don't have a dog. A charmless neighbor is allowing its mutt loose in our garden. When I find out who it is I'm flinging that dog crap back.
Saturday 20 October 2007
What a picture
Poor little Jonny's face. All England had, and not enough to beat the Bok on the night. A face like a thunder cloud. Everyone else looked dejected or, to deploy the adjective de nos jour, 'gutted'. But Jonny looked livid. Livid at himself, at the pitch, the balls, the posts, the lines, the refs, the video judge, the other 14, the bench, the remainder of the squad (probably poor old Josh), the management and support, the media, the spectators, the stadium staff, the French nation, the Bok in their entirety, the Gods of Rugby, but probably most of all himself. He tried to pout and he tried to look inconsolable. Every time he relaxed for a second he looked like he wanted to rip the heads off kittens.
And he wasn't, actually, all England had.
And he wasn't, actually, all England had.
Where's the upside in this?
England weren't supposed to progress beyond the quarter-final but they did. They played above themselves, and at times out of their skins and, ultimately beyond the level dictated by skill.
Like the inadequate Australian squad they should have departed as losing semi-finalists; neither squad has gone forward since the 2003 World Cup and that the finalists in that tournament should play off for third place, given that, would have been entirely fitting.
So why did England fall at the final hurdle? Well quality told in the final analysis. England looked to have been outclassed across the pitch and in every phase which is not something one might have gleaned from the hysterical 'expert' commentary of Matt Dawson.
I was tempted to kick off by declaring that the question first asked four years ago* had finally been answered with an emphatic YES, but that is only part of the story. England can't progress, though, until Jonny retires. The other fourteen men on the pitch are too conscious of his presence and I suspect they're limited by that awareness, which is of course a bitter irony since he is the consummate professional and the ultimate team man.
And yet ... who is the man among them to run in breath taking tries? Is there a man among them who would do it but for the obsession with penalties and drop goals? If he's there, among them, he was keeping himself very quiet during this tournament. England's point average through the course of the tournament was the lowest of all finalists in the history of the World cup and that's an unadjusted average taking no account of the expansion of the tournament to incorporate lesser rugby playing nations such as Namibia and Portugal.
There's something lacking at the middle of the England squad.
That's why they lost. They were inadequate.
The neutral supporter was the loser tonight. The game as a spectacle was something other than riveting. I couldn't help but think that a more fitting final would have involved the Kiwis or the French themselves, notwithstanding the extraordinary ability of the Kiwis who undoubtedly play consistently the best rugby any where, any time, except for those eight weeks every four years wherein the World Cup is staged.
On a related note my vote is for maintaining the 20 team competition rather than reverting to the 16 team format. The progress currently being made of the Argentina team in the face of inexcusable opposition by the 'big' nations of the European Six Nations and the Southern hemisphere Tri-Nations and the ineffectual blustering of the IRB hints at a glorious future for the game.
And so we have to look for the silver lining to this cloud. It isn't in the bragging rights now held by the Bok. Sadly there'll be no cheerfully squiffy toffs on 606 tonight and no Matt Dawson struggling to sound enthusiastic while in the grip of a raging hangover tomorrow morning. If I do spot that silver lining I'll let you know.
I guess it might lie in the fact that four years from now we'll all get to snigger as the Kiwis choke in front of a home crowd. I'm enjoying that thought already.
* that question was, of course, "Is that all you've got"
Like the inadequate Australian squad they should have departed as losing semi-finalists; neither squad has gone forward since the 2003 World Cup and that the finalists in that tournament should play off for third place, given that, would have been entirely fitting.
So why did England fall at the final hurdle? Well quality told in the final analysis. England looked to have been outclassed across the pitch and in every phase which is not something one might have gleaned from the hysterical 'expert' commentary of Matt Dawson.
I was tempted to kick off by declaring that the question first asked four years ago* had finally been answered with an emphatic YES, but that is only part of the story. England can't progress, though, until Jonny retires. The other fourteen men on the pitch are too conscious of his presence and I suspect they're limited by that awareness, which is of course a bitter irony since he is the consummate professional and the ultimate team man.
And yet ... who is the man among them to run in breath taking tries? Is there a man among them who would do it but for the obsession with penalties and drop goals? If he's there, among them, he was keeping himself very quiet during this tournament. England's point average through the course of the tournament was the lowest of all finalists in the history of the World cup and that's an unadjusted average taking no account of the expansion of the tournament to incorporate lesser rugby playing nations such as Namibia and Portugal.
There's something lacking at the middle of the England squad.
That's why they lost. They were inadequate.
The neutral supporter was the loser tonight. The game as a spectacle was something other than riveting. I couldn't help but think that a more fitting final would have involved the Kiwis or the French themselves, notwithstanding the extraordinary ability of the Kiwis who undoubtedly play consistently the best rugby any where, any time, except for those eight weeks every four years wherein the World Cup is staged.
On a related note my vote is for maintaining the 20 team competition rather than reverting to the 16 team format. The progress currently being made of the Argentina team in the face of inexcusable opposition by the 'big' nations of the European Six Nations and the Southern hemisphere Tri-Nations and the ineffectual blustering of the IRB hints at a glorious future for the game.
And so we have to look for the silver lining to this cloud. It isn't in the bragging rights now held by the Bok. Sadly there'll be no cheerfully squiffy toffs on 606 tonight and no Matt Dawson struggling to sound enthusiastic while in the grip of a raging hangover tomorrow morning. If I do spot that silver lining I'll let you know.
I guess it might lie in the fact that four years from now we'll all get to snigger as the Kiwis choke in front of a home crowd. I'm enjoying that thought already.
* that question was, of course, "Is that all you've got"
Friday 19 October 2007
Sodding bloody half term rant
I just had to get that off my chest and have expended all my energies.
I have just time before tottering off to bed to note that the Pumas dined out on roast chook tonight. Congratulations on a splendid showing by the South American contingent and on a splendidly well hosted tournament. It is, in a way, a shame that you had to depart in this manner but as you yourselves would say C'est la guerre!
The time will come for me to reflect on tomorrow night's events; which might lead to a sorrowful acknowledgement that the Webb Ellis trophy is in Boer hands or might result in other than wry observations on the nature of English histrionics and unfettered jingoism (duly amplified by the atrocious performance of the round ball hooligan sporting fringe mid-week).
I was also intending to provide a piece in my own style reflecting on market economics, cartel, price fixing and access to the innermost thoughts of the average British alcopop consumer. You'll have to wait for that gem, I'm afraid.
I have just time before tottering off to bed to note that the Pumas dined out on roast chook tonight. Congratulations on a splendid showing by the South American contingent and on a splendidly well hosted tournament. It is, in a way, a shame that you had to depart in this manner but as you yourselves would say C'est la guerre!
The time will come for me to reflect on tomorrow night's events; which might lead to a sorrowful acknowledgement that the Webb Ellis trophy is in Boer hands or might result in other than wry observations on the nature of English histrionics and unfettered jingoism (duly amplified by the atrocious performance of the round ball hooligan sporting fringe mid-week).
I was also intending to provide a piece in my own style reflecting on market economics, cartel, price fixing and access to the innermost thoughts of the average British alcopop consumer. You'll have to wait for that gem, I'm afraid.
A word in your ear if I may
Are you a school teacher stuck in a monstrous traffic jam on the way to the airport to catch the plane that will take you to sunnier or more interesting parts for the duration of this forthcoming 'half-term' holiday?
If so, good. And I hope your uber-expensive holiday turns out to be a miserable week from beginning to end.
May your flight be over crowded and delayed five hours at take off. May your airline send your baggage to the wrong continent and your tour operator fail to provide a courtesy coach for you at the other end of your flight. May you find yourself staying in a cockroach infested partial development on a building site within sight but not walking distance of a beach, with an algae encrusted swimming pool, surly staff who insist on talking foreign, pour drinks over you at any opportunity, spit in your food as they carry it to the table and then stand at your elbow until you tip them.
I hope your mattress is made of concrete and your walls are made of cardboard. I hope you discover that the roof leaks, during an unseasonal torrential downpour, and find rabid bats roost in your (communal) bathroom.
May you suffer influenza and dysentery then find yourself the lust object of a deranged 7ft tall transsexual nurse.
Apart from that, have a nice time.
Don't forget to write; just a few words on the back of a post card will do. I'm the woman at home teaching my child maths while you're away in some hopefully rat infested holiday spot or other. When you come back to 'work' do try to get the children back into 'school' mode and up to speed within a fortnight of school's resumption.
After all there are not that many weeks until the end of this term and the two week holiday they have over Christmas and New Year, not including the winding-down period during which they learn nausea-inducing nerve jangling ditties mistakenly referred to as Modern Christmas Carols and carry out other pointless winding down type and strictly non-educational activities.
And let us not lose sight of the fact that once they do return at the start of the New Year there will be all the post-Present receiving excitement to wean them off before you can settle them back into a receptive frame of mind; do try to accomplish that well ahead of the essential pre-half-term winding down period so that they are all in the right mood to enjoy their holiday totally and so need a good week or so to get back into stride for the second half of the term.
Are you beginning to get my point yet?
These next five terms are crucial and you're having a lousy holiday on the Costa del Rodent, or so I hope.
Love and Kisses, Hen
PS sorry to harp on about this but, would you believe it: blogger's spell checker might not recognise Sri Lanka but it has not problems with Transsexual. How frightfully er, something or other that is.
If so, good. And I hope your uber-expensive holiday turns out to be a miserable week from beginning to end.
May your flight be over crowded and delayed five hours at take off. May your airline send your baggage to the wrong continent and your tour operator fail to provide a courtesy coach for you at the other end of your flight. May you find yourself staying in a cockroach infested partial development on a building site within sight but not walking distance of a beach, with an algae encrusted swimming pool, surly staff who insist on talking foreign, pour drinks over you at any opportunity, spit in your food as they carry it to the table and then stand at your elbow until you tip them.
I hope your mattress is made of concrete and your walls are made of cardboard. I hope you discover that the roof leaks, during an unseasonal torrential downpour, and find rabid bats roost in your (communal) bathroom.
May you suffer influenza and dysentery then find yourself the lust object of a deranged 7ft tall transsexual nurse.
Apart from that, have a nice time.
Don't forget to write; just a few words on the back of a post card will do. I'm the woman at home teaching my child maths while you're away in some hopefully rat infested holiday spot or other. When you come back to 'work' do try to get the children back into 'school' mode and up to speed within a fortnight of school's resumption.
After all there are not that many weeks until the end of this term and the two week holiday they have over Christmas and New Year, not including the winding-down period during which they learn nausea-inducing nerve jangling ditties mistakenly referred to as Modern Christmas Carols and carry out other pointless winding down type and strictly non-educational activities.
And let us not lose sight of the fact that once they do return at the start of the New Year there will be all the post-Present receiving excitement to wean them off before you can settle them back into a receptive frame of mind; do try to accomplish that well ahead of the essential pre-half-term winding down period so that they are all in the right mood to enjoy their holiday totally and so need a good week or so to get back into stride for the second half of the term.
Are you beginning to get my point yet?
These next five terms are crucial and you're having a lousy holiday on the Costa del Rodent, or so I hope.
Love and Kisses, Hen
PS sorry to harp on about this but, would you believe it: blogger's spell checker might not recognise Sri Lanka but it has not problems with Transsexual. How frightfully er, something or other that is.
Don't understand moment
Mick Hume has a piece in today's paper on the subject of middle-class drinking, which is a matter quite close to my heart and the subject of the government's current search for a punch-bag.
Or perhaps quite reasonably the government's decided it is tactically non-astute to continue bashing the feckless underclasses when it is the welfare dependent who are most likely to vote for them if they can be drawn away from the telly long enough to actually participate in the electoral process.
On the other hand every government needs an villain and what could be more appealing to Gordy's rabid socialist uber-control freakery than the BMW driving classes of prosperous and leafy south-england.
If we'd all sober up and down shift then the level playing field could be achieved without the feckless having to shift themselves to actually do anything of their own accord and on their own behalf.
So it was perfectly reasonable in my opinion for Hume to take a swipe at the demonising of the non-sober middle-classes.
What puzzled me was his reference to speeding on the M25 (admittedly the wrong way). Everyone knows the M25 the ring 'road' that runs around London's outskirts is a glorified parking lot. Perhaps Mick's hard up and needs to be called back to provide another paid piece by way of explaination.
Or perhaps quite reasonably the government's decided it is tactically non-astute to continue bashing the feckless underclasses when it is the welfare dependent who are most likely to vote for them if they can be drawn away from the telly long enough to actually participate in the electoral process.
On the other hand every government needs an villain and what could be more appealing to Gordy's rabid socialist uber-control freakery than the BMW driving classes of prosperous and leafy south-england.
If we'd all sober up and down shift then the level playing field could be achieved without the feckless having to shift themselves to actually do anything of their own accord and on their own behalf.
So it was perfectly reasonable in my opinion for Hume to take a swipe at the demonising of the non-sober middle-classes.
What puzzled me was his reference to speeding on the M25 (admittedly the wrong way). Everyone knows the M25 the ring 'road' that runs around London's outskirts is a glorified parking lot. Perhaps Mick's hard up and needs to be called back to provide another paid piece by way of explaination.
Have attitude, will travel
And the distance travelled will reflect the amount of attitude.
And when it is the sort of attitude displayed by the England cricket selectors, then that metaphorical distance travelled won't be great. I know they're 'only' playing Sri Lanka, non-Titans of the international cricket (five day) scene, but this is an away series and England could do with a heartening display of Winning and yet ...
The England selectors have:
awarded Andrew Strauss a central contract then told him not to bother packing his bags
picked a squad that includes a lot of youngsters who qualify on the grounds of having performed 'well' in recent One Day Internationals.
included Phil Mustard as a reward for having made a 'satisfactory impression'
What a muddled message. No wonder the selectors have overlooked the claims of Ramprakash for a place in the squad; he'd hardly sit comfortably in the midst of this overwhelming mediocrity and inexperience.
PS: this effing Spell checker can't even recognise Sri Lanka. What am I supposed to do? Call the place Ceylon? Grr
And when it is the sort of attitude displayed by the England cricket selectors, then that metaphorical distance travelled won't be great. I know they're 'only' playing Sri Lanka, non-Titans of the international cricket (five day) scene, but this is an away series and England could do with a heartening display of Winning and yet ...
The England selectors have:
awarded Andrew Strauss a central contract then told him not to bother packing his bags
picked a squad that includes a lot of youngsters who qualify on the grounds of having performed 'well' in recent One Day Internationals.
included Phil Mustard as a reward for having made a 'satisfactory impression'
What a muddled message. No wonder the selectors have overlooked the claims of Ramprakash for a place in the squad; he'd hardly sit comfortably in the midst of this overwhelming mediocrity and inexperience.
PS: this effing Spell checker can't even recognise Sri Lanka. What am I supposed to do? Call the place Ceylon? Grr
Thursday 18 October 2007
That apology, in full
Whoops, I did it this time.
I must admit I thought it odd to see Mrs Batty driving away from the school in her 5-series BMW as I approached the gates on the hoof.
I met up with the Slug and we proceeded in formation to the hall in which the Parent Teacher meetings were being conducted. The offspring accompanied us that far, pointed out her teacher and then scarpered to the IT room.
Mrs Batty might be bonkers but she isn't my daughter's teacher as it happens. Oh dear. Well at least I don't have to tip toe around the bonkers Doris any longer. My daughter's teacher is, as it happens a rather pleasant woman and I'm not just saying that because she said positive things about my darling. She also appeared to be listening to what we had to say and has offered a more extensive meeting after half-term by which time she'll have the results of the tests she's been conducting on the little dears this week.
So grovelling and unreserved apology. Hats off, too.
If I seem good humoured it is because the Slug took itself off to bed early and left me in peace actually to eat something. Also this is another sauce free night, which is three on the trot which is excellent. The same can't be said for him judging by the way he collapsed against the cooker while making his way through the kitchen and up to bed: that was, to my trained eye, a half bottle of Chivas Regal grade lurch.
Except he drinks vodka when he isn't drinking cheap cider, or cheap wine or cheap super brew.
So in honour of a well known label, though not one he frequently squanders money on I shall start to grade his lurches. It could take me some time to accurately calibrate this, bear with me: I'll start by calling this a Full Smirnoff. We shall see where this takes me. But in all likelihood I'll get bored quite quickly and drop the whole idea.
Until then : bottoms up!
I must admit I thought it odd to see Mrs Batty driving away from the school in her 5-series BMW as I approached the gates on the hoof.
I met up with the Slug and we proceeded in formation to the hall in which the Parent Teacher meetings were being conducted. The offspring accompanied us that far, pointed out her teacher and then scarpered to the IT room.
Mrs Batty might be bonkers but she isn't my daughter's teacher as it happens. Oh dear. Well at least I don't have to tip toe around the bonkers Doris any longer. My daughter's teacher is, as it happens a rather pleasant woman and I'm not just saying that because she said positive things about my darling. She also appeared to be listening to what we had to say and has offered a more extensive meeting after half-term by which time she'll have the results of the tests she's been conducting on the little dears this week.
So grovelling and unreserved apology. Hats off, too.
If I seem good humoured it is because the Slug took itself off to bed early and left me in peace actually to eat something. Also this is another sauce free night, which is three on the trot which is excellent. The same can't be said for him judging by the way he collapsed against the cooker while making his way through the kitchen and up to bed: that was, to my trained eye, a half bottle of Chivas Regal grade lurch.
Except he drinks vodka when he isn't drinking cheap cider, or cheap wine or cheap super brew.
So in honour of a well known label, though not one he frequently squanders money on I shall start to grade his lurches. It could take me some time to accurately calibrate this, bear with me: I'll start by calling this a Full Smirnoff. We shall see where this takes me. But in all likelihood I'll get bored quite quickly and drop the whole idea.
Until then : bottoms up!
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