Bridge and Terry

Posted: Mon 1 March, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, News, People, Stupidity, Thoughts | 2 Comments »

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.

Litrucy

Posted: Sat 27 February, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: 1BEM, Domestic, Education, Literacy, News, People, Thoughts | Leave a comment »

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.

Quiz Night

Posted: Sat 27 February, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Domestic, Norfolk, People, Sociable | Leave a comment »

Last night we went off to another quiz, this time in benefit of Dereham Operatic Society. It was a quiz night with fish-and-chips, and turned out to be quite a fun night all told.

In the end we came second (well, joint second although we’re not quite sure how) and had a lot of fun – along with a fair amount of alcohol for the non-drivers.

The query about coming second was/is because the other team with the same score were right next to us – and we’d scored their sheets, so we’re pretty damn sure that they did worse than us. It’s not something worth protesting – we’ve seen that happen in other quizzes, and know that our reaction is always “What a bunch of tosspots – it’s not that serious!”.

Even with that minor doubt on the scores though, it was a fun night.

Blindsided

Posted: Mon 22 February, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Driving, People, Weather | 2 Comments »

This morning the weather while driving was truly fucking foul – icy, heavyish snowfall (heavy for the UK anyway) and a few dollops of fog to just top it off.

And yet still there was a significant percentage of drivers who didn’t have any lights on whatsoever. Well into double figures during my drive this morning. There were even more with only one working headlight, but at least they had one light working.

I simply don’t understand the logic that says “I don’t need to use lights”, although I suppose it’s something similar to the entire “Problem [x] will never happen to me”. I just think it’s another example of where people really should be done more regularly for driving without due care and attention.

Stinky

Posted: Fri 19 February, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: News, People, Travel | Leave a comment »

How smelly do you reckon someone needs to be in order to get thrown off a flight?

“People were just mumbling and staring at him,” said a woman who sat near the man, according to The Guardian, a newspaper in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, where the flight originated on February 6. It was a very uncomfortable situation, she added.

Another passenger described the smell as “brutal.”

Pretty damn smelly, I’d suggest…

Handling Disappointment

Posted: Thu 11 February, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Business, Cynicism, Education, People, Thoughts, Work-related | 3 Comments »

According to the BBC today, a school in Somerset has banned Valentine’s Day cards. Not because they’re an over-priced over-commercialised bit of tat that means fuck-all except bigger profits for Clinton Fuckbag Cards (to give them their full stock-exchange title) and their ilk. Oh no, it’s so the little darlings the “emotional trauma” of being rejected if they don’t get a card.

Somewhere along the way, we seem to have become so paranoid about how children deal with failure, they now have no idea at all what to do when failure does happen.

I think it started with the introduction of GCSE exams, where all the grades were a “pass”. (glossing slightly over the “X” and “U” grades – they were still a grade, even if it was one that marked you as having not completed the course) Then there was all the rubbish about not having sports day in some schools, because it was ‘harmful’ to the little bastards if they lost a race.

Where I work we’re beginning to see the results of this generation’s inability to deal with failure. We’ve recently been interviewing people for jobs, and it’s really surprising how many of them just walk in expecting to get the job – no preparation, not dressing for the interview, no experience in the area, and still expecting to just walk in and get the job simply for being able to walk in through the door.

This vogue for not letting children fail is incredibly damaging – part of life is about dealing with failure, of how to handle not being perfect. I don’t know why or how it came about that failure was a bad thing – but I do hope that it’s a trend that gets reversed before too much longer.

Tower Block of Commons

Posted: Mon 8 February, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic, People, Thoughts | 1 Comment »

I’ve been watching the new Channel 4 series “Tower Block of Commons“, where politicians leave their homes and move into council estates across the country, to see the reality of the resident’s lives.

It’s not bad, as these things go, although obviously there’s some aspects that are pretty “Made for TV”. Personally I think that MPs should live in among their constituents – not necessarily in council houses, but certainly in “standard” accommodation for each ward/district/whatever. After all, how can you represent the people of your district if you don’t know what their living standards are truly like?

I also find that the priorities of the families the politicians live with are fascinating – in some cases they’ve got no carpets, live on the absolute cheapest food and so on, but still have what looks to be Sky+ boxes and widescreen TVs. There’s also the families where they’ve got the kids and so on, living on benefits, but somehow still manage to get methadone and the like.

It’s interesting to watch, in a similar way to Secret Millionaire and other programmes of a similar ilk, but still leaves you with that “made for TV” cynicism…

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