Category Archives: News and politics

Nepotism

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13°C, same…

United States of Europe:
Eurovision Song contest: a contest to find the worst music in Europe. It’s justified with pseudo-arty words like "kitsch", "camp" but worthless pap would be better. It relies on a voting system that’s full of corruption and nepotism.
 
May as well watch Dr. Who though.

Apologies- to whom?

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22°C,

Bristol: apparently there is a move in the City of Bristol to apologise for its involvement in the slave trade 200 years ago. >BBC<. The collective guilt is the cause of place-name changes, and a citywide debate. I’m puzzled- who are they going to apologise to? They can’t apologise to black americans because none of them are near relatives of those traded, remember this all happened 200 years ago. They can’t apologise to black Africans because it was their distant ancestors who were selling the slaves that were transported on Bristol merchantmen to be sold in the USA (to be). They can’t go on changing the place-names amd smoothing over history because it becomes a whitewash, deleting history seems a dangerous road for a (democratic) country to go down. they can’t even make policies based on the fear of offending someone because there is no-one left alive who is directly affected by the slave-trade.
 
Drawing: Drawing from photos is fiendishly difficult. Drawing from small pictures is a magnitude harder. Actually drawing is never hard- I really mean "difficult". We get our students to draw from photos- surely a form of madness if they want to make interesting pictures. there is something very unnatural about the picture recording a person’t image over a 1/125th of a second. Drawings made over up to an hour contain study of a person with much more about they way they animate their body language and facial expressions.
 
Of course if you want to make a drawing of a photograph they that’s another matter…

Mostly harmless

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15°C, damn thermometer isn’t working,

England is….
It comes from the Rough guide
as does:"overweight, alcopop-swilling, sex-and-celebrity obsessed television addicts"
Don’t know about the alopop…but 25% of UK children are overweight. The rest seems right, including all the nice stuff they said about us. Why Stonehenge gets so much attention I don’t know. I don’t think anyone who’s visited the place can fail to be at least a bit dissappointed. I am uncomfortable about English people being judged on londoners- surely the most unfriendly community in the world.

Cherie’s hair

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Here is a picture of hair that cost £7,700 a month,(read the link).

 
The Labour Party’s justification:
"So what?..we won the election."
OK so let’s play a wordgame, I’ll start off with
Decadent, corrupt, self-indulgent, wasteful, conceited, vain.
your turn…

Unison

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12°C, sun then rain
Strike: that closed many schools, not ours though. It looks like a dispite that has valid points on both sides if reporting is to be believed. On the strikers hand- they are angry that in effect the promise that they will bea able to retire at 60 years if they have worked long enough is being withdrawn. On the other- as many parts of industry are rasing their retirement age to 70, there seems to be some resentment that the puplic sector is sustainting an early age in an era where people are living much longer. Private sector workers have even included that they, in effect produce the wealth that public sector workers earn through taxes.
Our school is barely affected by this action.

Orange night: interesting evening; quite a stormy day, heavy rain and strong-ish winds but all is still now. Out with the dogs the sky is like a roof. Or at least like a ceiling, a very high one like a Cathederal. Clouds are clearly visible- lit up by sodium streetlights. There are dark lanes up there, where the clouds overlay the surrounding farmland. Then there are islands of light in the cloudbase, one above Burntwood town, another Whittington and Sutton Coldfield is there in the inverted map in the clouds.

Nine horses!

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1°C, more sleet.
A horse called "War of Attrition" won the Cheltenham Gold cup today. A co-incidence because of what happend yesterday it seems. Six horses died in racing yesterday- three in one race. I first heard of this on breakfast TV. It’s strange how pathos and tragedy seem to hit more at that hour of the day than if we hear the news later on.
What an unbearable thought- it seem like a violation of innocence. Horses put absolute trust in their owners/trainers, they live together for years and race for the excitement. A trust builds up as in any relationship  Now they are dead. One death was shown on breakfast TV news. The horse fell over a fence and tumbled and tumbled over, body limp & separate from rider. Ragdoll.
"Animal rights group Animal Aid called for the public to boycott the meeting and suggested that Prince Charles and his wife Camilla should stay away on Friday "out of respect for the horses that have died".
 I can’t imagine much is going to be done about it though. A sad day indeed.

Sticking plaster

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2°C, snow nearby, but not here.

Litigation culture: We are hamstrung by lawyers.We have to stop pupils throwing snowballs as it’s a breach of health & safety regulations. If I want to take an art class acrross the road to the park, I need to send letters of consent home and produce a risk assessment. If the pupils forget the signed consent letter- they can’t go.
But look here: BBC Sticking-plaster story.
Note this bit that emphasises the ridiculous:

But Emily’s father Kevan, 39, criticised the guidelines.
He said: "The whole saga is absolutely ridiculous. My daughter had a tiny cut and I just cannot see the reason why a plaster couldn’t be put on her finger by the staff.

If it’s a tiny cut – then why does she need a sticking plater? What do plasters actually do? My advice on the matter is- if you want your cut to heal more quickly, then don’t put a plaster on it. If it’s more use as some kind of comfort blanket – then that’s another issue.

In a smiliar vein, we aren’t allowed to give out paracetamol to pupils in school either. Most kids who want it because they have a headache, they mostly have a headache because their main intake of fluids is sugary "pop". The solution? Drink water?

Creationism: BBC ( again), It looks like some (christians) want to replace a theory that has some holes in its evidence with another theory that has no evidence to support it at all. Similarly, I was talking to a y8 pupil this week who was convinced that Astrology is for real. I know that teenagers can be remarkably naïve, but the worrying thing about this variety of misunderstanding is that quite a few adults believe it too. Luckily the move here ( from OCR) is that scientists will have to discuss creationism- they are however in the best position to refute such mythology. I hope they can learn from the astrology fiasco. When they have done that can we put God onto their syllabus too?

Blair and God.

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3.5°C. bright
Tony Blair’s gettinga grilling form something he didn’t say today. BBC. The whole story is full of misquotes and wanton ignorance. He said:
"If you believe in God (the judgement) is made by God."

when talking about the decision to go to war in Iraq; said on the Parkinson show.

This is where it gets silly:

"Are we really seeing over 100 coffins coming back (to the UK) because God told him (Mr Blair) to go to war?"

And:

Rose Gentle, whose son Gordon was killed in Basra in 2004, said: "A good Christian wouldn’t be for this war.

No Christian can be infavour of any war- it’s built into their religion (see the 10 Commandments). They are by definition- pacifists.

But anyway, TB didn’t say his descision was swayed by God, it was a reference to judgement afterwards. Well, you’ve had our judgement, that hasn’t changed since before the war- Tony you are a liar and were judged so at the time.

The strangest part of this story is the time spent on misunderstanding what he actually did say.