Over the last two days there’ve been two news stories about some truly incredibly bad driving – they really do have to be seen to be believed.

First there’s the story of the person caught driving to the garage – with their bonnet up in front of the windscreen. How they were able to see at all is beyond me.

And then there’s the one (with video footage) of the truck driver pushing a car along the motorway. Not just pushing – the car is sideways-on, and the entire thing is happening in the outside lane. I didn’t think truck drivers were even allowed to use the outside lane…

Gob-smacking.

A few days ago I noticed that a certain hate-filled hypocritical shitrag had a big story about how shocking the latest Lady Gaga video is. And then goes on to have screenshots in the story of all the pieces of the video for Telephone that people should be shocked or offended by.

Anyway, now it’s time to make your own mind up, as the video for Telephone is available online.  Choose for yourself, not based on what the hate-rag says.

Two stories in the same day…  [UPDATED : OK, as Andy C points out in the comments, they weren't on the same day, just one linked from the other, and I can't read...]

Number One : Jon Venables, one of the two who killed James Bulger, is taken back to prison “for breaching the terms of his licence”. People are surprised, one quote being

“He could have been recalled on licence if he committed an offence, it could be that he returned to Merseyside, it could be he might have approached the family. There is no evidence so far that he did any of these things.”

Number Two : Denise Fergus, the mother of James Bulger, tells how she found Robert Thompson, the other one who killed James Bulger, and stood within twenty feet of him, although she couldn’t confront him.

Mrs Fergus said it was now her aim to find Venables and track him down in the same way.

I wonder if there’s a connection? Particularly if the News of the World is in on the act/witchhunt…

Am I the only one that thinks both John Terry and Wayne Bridge need to grow the hell up?

To me – and I’ll be the first to admit I’m not a great team-player, and don’t give a tin shit about football in general – Bridge’s stepping down from the England team (and thus international football) is a self-destructive dummy-chuck of weapons-grade proportions.

And besides, why on earth does Bridge (and/or the media in general) think Bridge has got any fucking right whatsoever to throw a strop about who his ex-girlfriend decided to be with once they’d split up?  Let alone do the full petted-lip and “taking my ball in” strop about it. In the same perspective, what right has Bridge got to throw a strop about who John Terry decides to shag?

I must have missed something relevant in this entire farce, because it seems to me that this is all the kind of thing that most people got over in secondary school.

In yet another “Well that’s not really news, is it?” moment, the Food Standards Agency have said that – shock, horror – food in cinemas isn’t all that healthy. Who’d have thought.

The nutrition watchdog is concerned about the portion sizes of cinema snacks which are often high in fat, sugar or salt

So popcorn, being served in either salted or sweet ‘flavours’ – amazingly that might be high in fat and sugar or salt. What a revelation.  Next they’ll be telling me that those hotdog things aren’t good for you either…

Via Margo and Phiala I came across this story about literacy in Americans, which says that in America someone reading 4-9 books a year is classified as an  ‘avid’ reader, and that 1 in 4 [American] people read no books at all. As Margo says, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen similar figures for reading / book buying habits here, too although I can’t currently find a link or evidence of it.

As with Margo, I can’t really recall a time in my life that didn’t have books. My parents read stories to me every night, and that’s where I started learning to read, by learning the patterns the words made and linking them to the sounds they made as my parents read them. I was more than able to read by the time I started school, and I’ve been reading ever since.

I don’t have anywhere near as many books as I used to – if I’d kept all of them over the years, I could probably stock a decent-sized library. Even so, I’ve probably got around four to five hundred books all told, and they’re all the ones I’ll go back to and read more than once.  Additionally I’m a regular visitor to the local library – on Herself’s persuasion, admitterdly – but normally get through about 10-20 books a month just through that. If I see books I want to read now – particularly new ones or new authors – I try to get them through the library rather than buying them outright as an experiment, which is what I used to do.

I can hardly even imagine only reading even 9 books a year. I mean really? One book every six weeks? Jesus.

Just as a current example, this week I’ve read (or am currently reading)

1. Steel Beach by John Varley (in the car, reading at lunchtimes)
2. The Shift by George Foy(also in the car, finished this week before starting Steel Beach)
3. Dead and Gone by Andrew Vachss (at home, in the bedroom)
4. Missing by Chris Mooney (also at home)
5. Spider by Michael Morley (really really crap)
6. The werewolf’s guide to life : a manual for the newly bitten by Duncan Ritch
7. Left Hand of God by Paul Hoffmann (just about to start)

And that’s a quiet/slow week where I’ve been doing a ton of work as well. Even so, that puts me near the top end of the American average book level for the year within a week.  I don’t honestly know how many books I read a year – on that level, it must be a couple of hundred per year.

But more to the point, if that’s my reading level, and the average number of books read per year in the UK is (hey, let’s be charitable) 20 then that still means there’s a whole bundle of people at the other end of the scale who are reading maybe one book a year, or less. And to me that’s really quite scary.