Incredible: Having trouble believing this story: BBC. A fox attacks two sleeping children in London. The response is as difficult to believe as the original story. Apparently they trapped a fox in the garden later in the day and shot it. Is this supposed to be some kind of justice, or are they taking revenge out on a whole species?
Imagine- someone burgles your house, so the police will stop the next bloke passing your front door and imprison him awaiting the firing squad in the morning. Doesn’t matter that there is no known connection between the perpetrator and the suspect, why bother finding evidence beyond the location, let’s just kill something. That’ll appease the locals, they’ll be baying for blood. Perhaps it’s a Tory ward, they’ve always liked killing foxes, no matter how cruelly.

British Govt. have apologised for a joke press release suggesting the Pope branded condoms. I think it’s appalling too, the marketing men will really struggle to sell "Holy Condoms". The upside of the story is that has been demonstrated that a large organisation can apologise for a mistake when it’s still fresh. The Catholic Church could learn from this- they waited fifty years to apologise for their part in the Holocaust. There are numerous other apologies that were either too late, or not been issued yet (Crusades, Inquisition, death threats against Galileo when he discovered moons around Jupiter). Presumably there are thousands of other death threats issued by the Catholic Church that have not been mentioned yet, never mind the millions of actual killings they have sanctioned over the centuries. Did anyone mention child abuse?

It’s okay Rosie: no insurance required after last week’s report from the Gov’t. They wanted all dog owners to pay for compulsory 3rd party dog insurance. It fell over when it became obvious that the breeds that need insurance are already banned under UK law. BBC

The media are full to the brim with Michael Jackson ‘news’. They all use epithets, the "King Of Pop". It takes me back to my childhood. When Elvis Presly died, I really thought "great, we won’t have to listen to his music any more". How very, very wrong was I?
His musical sales were, it almost goes without saying, enormous. It’s the way that he is perceived by the media and fans that I am interested in. Maybe it tells us something of the world that we live in today.
Who was he: pop-megastar, damaged personality, media-misinformation icon, multi-millionaire, plastic surgery disaster area, musician, dancer,  trans-racial icon, child-molester?

No doubt there will be film companys setting up now to put the story onto the big screen. They’ll have to wait while the CGI animatronics are rendered though. There aren’t any human beings that could fill the role, nor do the morphing from black youth to distorted white mannequin. What is that little button between his eyes and mouth anyway? Could he actually draw air through it?
What really puzzles me is that black commentators don’t seem at all perturbed by a famous black man who has used a chunk of his wealth to surgically remove traces of his racial origins.
The Catholic Church must be looking on with some envy; the public seem to have been paid off when he got away with the child-abuse allegations a few years ago. Will the Pope be able to pull off the same stunt?
Probably.

Is this how justice works: See BBC This woman has been charged, her picture published in the media and she’s been attacked on her journey to court by the mob. But hold on a minute- what if.. just what if she’s innocent? It doesn’t seem right to expose her to the mob (newspapers+ chavs) when she could possibly he a victim of mistaken identity. Miscarriages of justice are not rare in England.

A6 sketch, copied from another in my lesson planner.

Rape of a two-year old: I have a really uneasy feeling about this story. I sense the faint scent of a miscarriage of justice: the evidence of a three year old child seems very weak to me- not the actual evidence itself, I haven’t seen that> The problem lies with the notion of taking evidence of such a young child so seriously. I teach 11-18 year olds at work each day, and a number of them have trouble forming sentences that convey what they mean. Let’s wait and see.

SATs boycot: go for it! I’m even tempted to agree with the usually belligerent NUT on this one. SATs are of no use to children, nor to their teachers- it’s a measure of schools for league tables. No benefit then, only loads of stressed children and anxious parents who have been duped by this practice. Okay, yes it may be illegal to boycot the tests, but it’s immoral to conduct them in my view.

Fritillaria: don’t you just love these little characters, go and sit to watch them in a light breeze.
There is not other occurrence of chessboard patterns in nature, purportedly.

News: Viruses are able to turn people bonkers: Guardian. It seems that self-replicating semi-crystalline proteins can seriously damage rationalism. We now have a couple of people here in Britain with H1N1, they have mild symptoms and will recover in a few days. Contrast that with the thousands who die from ‘flu every year in this country under normal circumstances anyway.. Even in Mexico, it seem that we don’t know whether the pig flu killed those hundreds of people or did they have the flu and die of something else. The statistics just don’t exist to answer that one. I’m prepared to listen to Dr. Rosemary Leonard, she sounds like the sensible one.

This house remains calm.

Turned back: returned home this morning before arriving at work. I had to abandon the cycle ride, the ice was threatening to turn the world on its side and wallop my head. That can’t happen in the car, so I drove.

Web censorship: no, we don’t live in a free country. The whole Wikipedia fiasco is important not because the IPSs censored an image, it’s because they censored a web-page. that doesn’t happen widely outside China and North Korea. It’s the debate, ideas and beliefs that are important, we can manage without the stupid album art picture. This is important, the band concerned are not in my opinion, they are macho, arrogant rubbish. An acceptable compromise would be to censor the image, ISPs can do that, but they didn’t in this instance. They have since withdrawn the block.