Larceny

On a different tack, I’m fascinated by the story of the secretary who allegedly embezzled £4million from her employer, Goldman Sachs. The money was transferred from the personal accounts of three bankers with Goldman Sachs – and they didn’t even notice, until she’d been caught. I know the saying about having “more money than sense”, but this really takes the piss. One transfer – the largest – was for £2.25million. How the hell do you not notice an amount like that?

She was being paid £42,000 – so how come no-one noticed that she was buying a £650,000 house in Cyprus, or that she owned a powerboat, and spent £300,000 on Cartier jewellery? Another utterly bizarre story, ably showing how the other half lives.

Apathy

Yes, I’m slow on the uptake with this one – it really hadn’t entered my consciousness ’til yesterday, and then it fell right back out again. So, what I’m wondering is who actually gives a flying donkey-dollop whether John Leslie and his partner were involved in group sex? I certainly don’t – so long as all the people were consenting partners, then it’s about as newsworthy as someone taking a shit.

I see even less point in sacking his partner from her ad hoc TV presenting slot. Does the fact that she gets involved in this kind of thing affect her reporting ability? Or her objectivity? No. (Well, unless she’s feigning shock at orgies in Little Britain Middle England or something) So – and I’m really intrigued by this – who cares?

Priorities

The BBC today has a story about the Russian army salvaging barrels of beer from a frozen river. The truck carrying the barrels had come off the road and toppled into the River Irtysh near Omsk – the driver managed to escape, but the truck sank.

In all it took six divers, ten men with electric saws – and a tank. They managed to get the beer kegs, and then the rope snapped, so the truck sank back again.

Now that’s what I call priorities. *Grin*

Litrucy

via Gert, the BBC’s site has a story about pupils having difficulty with spelling – which includes a small test. (And yes, I did get eight out of eight, but that’s beside the point.) Personally, I find that it’s an incredibly sad state of affairs when 60% of the sample tested couldn’t spell “effortless” or “knowledge” correctly. It’s sad – but it’s not a surprise.

At school, my year were the first to take the GCSE. In primary school, we had a more “traditional” education, with weekly spelling tests, and numeracy/maths tests. Unfortunately, we didn’t learn the times tables by rote, and as a result I still have to work it out rather than instantly knowing. But when it came to English, and literacy, the theory was that if it wasn’t correct, it wasn’t acceptable.

Since then, the education system has headed for a more relaxed route, where “it doesn’t matter how it’s spelled/presented, it’s the way the thoughts are formed that counts” – and results like those in the BBC story are finally revealing the flaw in that. Unless we wish to end up with a two-tier system, the literati and the illiterati, then there seems to be a need for the education system to change the philosophy of the last decade or so, and return to an emphasis on literacy. To my mind, it’s an essential – I’ve no desire to see a society where it’s frowned upon to be literate, nor one where everything becomes pictographic in order for those who can’t read/write to still be able to operate machinery etc.

In many ways, I feel that computers haven’t helped with regard to literacy. MS Windows uses pictograms as a reference point, rather than words. Spellcheckers mean that people don’t need to spell correctly – instead they can just press F7 and voila, everything’s done. (Of course, it’s still occasionally fun to play “fowl up the spellchequer”, because they’re still unable to cope with context – but you’ve got to be literate to understand that particular amusement) So why bother learning to spell, when machines can correct it all anyway?

I was lucky – both my parents are intensely literate, and in fact I was reading way before school age. They instilled in me a love of both words and literature, and an understanding that being literate was a good thing, that it would enable me to express all of my ideas, as well as allowing more (metaphorical) doors to be open than would be available if I couldn’t spell/punctuate/write. Maybe that makes them elitists, or intelligentsia, but I don’t honestly care – they opened those metaphorical doors, and it’s been up to me whether they have stayed open or not. But not one opportunity has ever been closed to me by way of a lack of literacy.

All of d4d™, no matter how vile and vituperative it may be, is at least literate. The ideas come through although some, as over the weekend, may end up being more visual than literal now. Would the same be true in ten/fifteen years’ time, if I were just now coming to the end of the basic educational period?

Caffeine

Amazingly, the reduction in caffeine intake is still working pretty well. I’ve said before that caffeine is really the only remaining addiction or habit in my life, so it’s good to see that cutting it down is working out for now. I’ve even managed to avoid most of the vile headaches that normally are part of the reduction process. So all things considered, it’s pretty optimistic. The other part of it is to be drinking more water – and that’s going OK too.

The weekend meant I didn’t drink as much water as I perhaps should have done, but still, I’m trying to keep the intake up on what it was. But today I’m back at work with a 2l bottle of water, so even if I manage 5 days out of 7, I’ll be happy with that. Now I just need to get myself motivated for going to the gym more again…

Time Flies

I was just reading this story in the BBC about the New Cross fire – I really can’t believe that it’s now 23 years ago. I was 10 at the time, but can still remember reading about the fire, which killed 14 people during a birthday party.

It’s always been a suspicious fire, so it’ll be interesting to see what the new inquest makes of things. After 20+ years of asking for it, it was finally approved back in 2002. The BBC also has a link to the original story as well as an overview of the entire thing.

Walking the Dead

As well as a few other things today, I ended up going for a walk (about two to three miles all told) to the Phillips Park, and then to the cemetery there. I used to live closer to this area, and even wandered through the street I used to live on – the first house I moved to here in Manchester, nearly five years ago. Considering how close it is to several major roads, I find it amazing just how peaceful and quiet it is. Well, except for the bone-idle fuckheads who insist on driving through the graveyard to the right area. But there we go – anything with people in it will always have something for bone-idle morons to chuff up.

Unfortunately, in this particular cemetery the morons have had the chance to play with other things too. Because of the area covered by the cemetery, it’s divided into several denominations, including Catholic, Protestant – and Jewish.

Every single marker and memorial in that Jewish section has been knocked over, broken, and just generally vandalised. It’s a deeply saddening, infuriating sight – thankfully there’s no graffiti to add icing to the cake, but all the same, it’s just intensely depressing, to see these stones and memorials broken and destroyed simply because of the faith behind them. I’ve taken several photographs there today, and they’re now online here… But in the meantime – just what the fuck is the point of vandalising gravestones like that?

Manchester has had a Jewish community since 1740, for crying out loud – it’s not like there’s even some shite excuse about being illegal immigrants. It’s just bigotry because of religion – and I’m willing to lay money that the wankers that have been big and brave enough to kick over gravestones don’t even know what Judaism’s all about. I admit – I don’t know either. I’ve never read the Talmud, nor been inside a synagogue. But that doesn’t mean I’m biased against anyone, just on the basis of their beliefs. It’s beyond me, this ability of people to hate others just for not conforming to their concept of what is “right”.

I’m sorry, I’m being slightly incoherent here – this set of photos, particularly the one above, just keeps on hitting me. It’s not fun, not in the slightest. And yet there’s nothing I can do. Frustrating doesn’t even come into it.