Saturday, September 13, 2008

[bikinis] and governing bodies

Fabrizio Rossini, press officer for the Federation Internationale de Volleyball, which officially governs Olympic volleyball, said most female beach volleyball players prefer the bikinis. "It's a very tough sport."

Olympic bronze medallist Holly McPeak, 39, said about one piece costumes: "When you dive, the sand goes down the top and collects in the bottom."

My question is more about why the French get to run international sport in the first place - Fédération Internationale de Football Association, Fédération Internationale de Basketball, Union Cycliste Internationale, Fédération Équestre Internationale, Fédération Internationale d'Escrime, Fédération Internationale de Gymnastique, Fédération Internationale des Sociétés d'Aviron, Union Internationale de Pentathlon Moderne, Fédération internationale de Natation, Fédération Internationale de Volleyball and the Fédération Internationale des Luttes Associées, before we even start looking at winter sport.

I mean, who appointed them? Did we all say, "Go ahead, Pierre - we can't set up governing bodies ourselves," and then let them go ahead and institute them? The Americans are known for turning any championships in the U.S.A. into World Championships but the French seem to have this penchant for setting up governing bodies.

[supper] just add sausages or corned beef




Friday, September 12, 2008

[guilty] or not guilty

The task is simple, the answers not so simple. Not a quiz but an opinion poll. The question is:

Were these people really guilty or not?









Rocky and the Rainbow Bridge


Rocky and the Rainbow Bridge

"I've larked about with Rocky lots of times in the park and he's fab! We chase each other and have a ball... I'm glad he's not off to Rainbow Bridge just yet... I'd miss him!
Jezbo, Hull
commented on 12-Sep-2008 11:41
".

I Googled the Rainbow Bridge and found this enchanting poem.


The Rainbow Bridge (audio and visual version).

[trips abroad] fraught business today


I used to run holidays for our school groups in the 90s and it's clear the situation has changed:

A statement on the XL group's website said: "The company's entered into administration having suffered as a result of volatile fuel prices, the economic downturn, and were unable to obtain further funding."

Bob Atkinson, of the price comparison website Travel Supermarket said XL's troubles would be a blow for the travel trade. He said: "They are a very large operator and this will send serious shock waves through the industry."

When I was involved in a lot of travel, Britain was known for its many tour firms which catered for schools, as well as the "bucket shops" where one could find a good flight to Australia for £650, as against the major airlines' £1950. All this appears to have gone by the board now.

Operators still seem to be in business and the prices look quite reasonable, all told but there is difficulties these days, including safety and litigation.

The Norfolk Blogger ran a piece on this in 2006, giving some sound reasons why teachers just won't touch these trips any more. In addition, there is the nature of the teenager in the school now and the changing culture in which he/she is growing up. The IPPR report was given the Daily Mail treatment but much of it still holds water.

Incidents I recall from two trips in the past:

There was a primary age child in our party and she was skiing towards the base of the hill where the piste narrowed to a little footbridge. The way we worked it was that one leader would ski up and down any hill where we knew our kids were and this gave them some freedom of movement but not a lot.

On this particular afternoon, I was just approaching her from further up the hill, shouting for her to get off the bridge, when two Germans [as we found out later] shot past and went straight across that bridge, knocking the girl over the parapet, into the shallow gully. She and I were lucky in that she was a tough little lady and it was the shock more than anything but still - it illustrates the problem.

Another was when one of our leaders who lacked confidence agreed to go down a blue slope with me and it was a case of snowploughing ahead of her, then stopping and waiting for her to ski across, then turning and repeating to the other side and so on. She became progressively happier about it as she went and so it continued until suddenly she lost all confidence, her skis turned down the hill, she panicked and took a tumble, falling awkwardly and injuring her leg, which put her out of the trip. This put a dampener on everything.

Imagine that today.

[survey] please answer six questions

You might notice the survey of this blog at the top of the left sidebar, with the pic of the puzzled chap.

Please, if you can spare a few minutes [and some have already done so] take the time to click answers to the six multiple choice questions. There is a panel to comment as well if you wish.

This would help me immensely and I notice that the last one I ran was a year ago now, so time flies.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

[911] remembered

[thought for the day] thursday evening


Courtesy of Bob G:

"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."

[G.K. Chesterton]

[ethnicity] the extremes of the food spectrum


Ethnicity is an interesting concept. Seems to me it's more of a sliding scale than a finite division - more like one of those colour spectra you get in net programmes where there is a circle of varying colours but all tend to the same colour towards the middle, whereas at the extremities they are very pronounced indeed.

You can apply this to accents. My accent is a mix of ethnicities but tends to the centre, not being extreme one way or the other, whereas my father's was distinctly Yorkshire and never changed over the years.

Similar thing with food tastes. Most of us have international tastes but when we get into the extremes of each country, it takes some getting used to. Escargots spring to mind, as do Australian witchety grubs. The British aren't exempt from extremities when you find the following atrocities being eaten:

1. Black pudding - sausage made by cooking blood with a filler until it is thick enough to congeal when cooled.

2. White pudding - similar to black pudding, but does not include blood. Consequently, it consists of pork meat and fat, suet, bread, and oatmeal formed into the shape of a large sausage.

3. Haggis - sheep's 'pluck' (heart, liver and lungs), minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and traditionally boiled in the animal's stomach for approximately three hours.

4. Whitebait - Whitebait are tender and edible. The entire fish is eaten including head, fins and gut but typically each 'bait' is only 25-50 mm in length and about 3 mm in cross section.

The nauseating part of the last one is that you eat the head 'n all. Ugggh! Other things to gag on are oysters, calamari and all other slimy or offal type foods.

Hope you're not reading this around dinner time.

[virginity] a market commodity

Concerning this girl who is auctioning her virginity:
The woman, who has earned a bachelor degree in women's studies and now wants to start a master's degree in marriage and family therapy, is hoping the bidding will hit $1 million.
Marriage and family therapy? Hmmm. Also, who would pay that sort of cash in the first place in a supply soaked market? And lastly - though I took a basic course in Female Anatomy 101, I wonder how she plans to establish ... well ... if she ... well ... best leave this now.

Think I'll offer up my virginity for £99.99.

Any takers?

[invest] in the merry-go-round

Think I converted mine just in time.

And yet there is this.

What should one invest in if one had more than a hundred or two?

[lhc] to serve man ... a cookbook


Been on the first jog around the blogs today and certain things became apparent in the public and blogger perception of the non-event.

May I put it this way?

If I had a multi-billion project under way and public perception was a very large factor in its continuation, if I had quite a few round table partners and they had certain expectations of a return on their investment, if I had subscribed, long ago, to a game plan for Europe and beyond, along with many others, then I'd manage the release of the information to the press through carefully selected channels.

Where I couldn't control this, I'd make sure the project began inauspiciously, innocuously, just a zap around the complex and no doomsday whatsoever. The more ambitious parts of the project would perhaps not form part of the press releases to my more sympathetic journalists and media icons and would not be scheduled for some weeks.

This would be a very cynical approach, I confess, relying, as it does, on the first premise that "if it hasn't happened today, it ain't gonna happen" and on the second premise that "the public needs its news here and now, after which it loses interest".

Of course there is no cynicism in this project whatsoever, just good old science and altruism. It's all to serve man.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

[thermopylae] near naked men with swords


Just finished watching "300" and decided to do a Gracchi here. Now I realize this battle has been much on your minds lately so it's time to rush you the post-mortem.

You know, of course, that the Chili Con Carne Festival had almost cost the Battle of Marathon, when the Spartans couldn't leave home and arrived late and now, when Xanadu decided to try his luck one more time by building some ridiculous bridge called Hell's Pont, which he then ordered beaten with sticks, the Spartans were forbidden to travel and so the free world had a little problem on its hands.

Not to worry.

King Leonardo [da Vinci] gathered a bodyguard of 300 interestingly dressed men and had a cunning plan. He'd defend the pass of Thermalundies, which was only 20 men wide and so could rest his rear end and generally get into the blood, gore and slaughter thing up front, piling the Persian bodies sky high in a wall.
Nice people.

They fought really well, the Geeks, forming their shields into a Phallus and preventing the assault from hurting them but then the deformed Eponymous Tracheotomy betrayed them to Xanadu by showing him a back passage behind the Geeks and that was the end of the ball game.

The Geeks did go down after that, initially at least but Xanadu who, as a God-warrior king-type, proved himself no sailor, lost his fleet and the conquest of Europe was over.

There were some great lines in this saga and an awful lot of rhetoric. When Leonardo was asked by his wife the Gorgon what she should do while he was away, he said, "Marry a good man," and when asked to lay down his arms, he answered, "Come and get them." When told that the Persian arrows would "block out the sun", he answered, "we shall fight in the shade."

You have to admire his sense of humour really.

Pot of chili sauce for the Con Carne Festival


[prosecuted] for saving a life


You're probably sick to death of reading of the latest bureaucratic turn of the screw but we were talking about getting authorization and clearance for this and that.

Currently renewing my driving licence and doing other little ID things, we were discussing a hypothetical question of what you'd do if you were not certified in a critical situation, e.g. a Health and Safety issue.

There was a real case, some time back, of an ambulance driver in this situation and this one about the coastguard is getting closer and this one is even even closer but this is the scenario we were thinking of:

Imagine you were at your local swimming baths and a regular swimmer sees a child in difficulty at the bottom of the pool. There are a handful of locals around but the pool attendant is up the stairs at this second and as the swimmer knows, pools are noisy and the attendant is out of range. The swimmer is not technically qualified [lifesaving certificate long out of date] but he realizes that the action needs to be fast.

He gets the nearest person to go [walking, not running] and get the attendant, he calls out if anyone's a qualified lifesaver but no one's listening, of course. He jumps in and remembering his lifesaving drill when he was a kid, he manages to get her up to the surface, just as the pool attendant takes over.

He's prosecuted for assuming duties he's no longer qualified for and has to face up to the local magistrate.

Would you have dived in like that or would you have done it differently?

[middle-east update] a peace of sorts


Just to bring us up to speed on the Middle-East, the most recent news I could get was August 26th:

Occasional rocket attacks from the Palestinian enclave, controlled by radical group Hamas, have continued despite a ceasefire agreed on in June. Israel usually responds by shutting border crossings with Gaza, and preventing humanitarian supplies to the region, home to 1.5 million people.

Other news collected in passing:

Israel is developing, by means of visas and passes, a separation of the two states on the West Bank and Gaza, involving three month time periods for travel, the necessity to be married and to be working for humanitarian causes.

... and:

The PRC said the rockets it displayed recently are but a drop in an ocean of surprises in store for Israel should it attempt to reoccupy Gaza, from which it withdrew in 2005. "We have been under siege for the last two years," said Ibrahim Dahman, the only militant who allowed his face to be videotaped, since he already is wanted by Israel. "The only thing left is for them to invade and kill us."

However, all is not well in Iran:

Teheran's former nuclear negotiator Hasan Rowhani said that Ahmadinejad's policies have done more harm than good in his three years in office, adding that the hard-line leader missed out on "golden" opportunities to develop the Persian state.

Speaking to a meeting of the Moderation and Development Party on Monday, Rowani singled out Iran's high inflation - a fact despite huge oil revenues.

He said Ahmadinejad failed to privatize the economy as required under the constitution and didn't use opportunities at the international level to improve Iran's global standing.

Apart from that, the nuclear issue in Iraq and Olmert's corruption charges seem to be the main news.

All in all, in Middle-Eastern terms, it's non-news just now. For how long? And the big question - why won't the Arab states just let Israel be as a nation? Naive question in one sense but fundamental in another.

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

[business wear] on the tube in this gear

Oh yeah!

This is a must for going for job interviews. Throw away your ASDA George outfits with the variegated stitching and get into this, man.

There's a nice little pink number too if you'd prefer. Sensible wear for sensible people. I can see our fellow bloggers in it now.

[around bloghounds today] the people are hurting

Richard Havers:

It's about fairness and unfairness. It's about providing support to those who played by the rules but are struggling with rising prices. It's about making sure that a fair chance is provided to all.

Andrew Allison:

Like many of you I am sick and tired of being described as a racist the moment I bring up the subject of immigration. Articulate some views about gay adoptions that do not go along with the liberal consensus, and you are described as a homophobe and are squeezed out of the debate. If you don't go along with the jolly view that everything is wonderful in EU land, and you are a bigoted, little Englander. Politics has gone from the grassroots and is ruled centrally.

Sackerson:

All I'm looking for is a FISCAL conservative... And by the way, whatever happened to "moral suasion"? Why does everything have to be banned or compulsory? ... And maybe US demographics, like here in Britain, would be very different if the slaughter of the innocents hadn't happened - but we are all bending under the weight of a thousand daily coercions.

Cassandra:

With Palin we say, "pray (...) that there is a plan, and that plan is God's plan." That would be far much more attractive than the "world historical events" cabal who pretend their machinations are Acts of God, while they are actually thought up and steered by their own One World Totalitarian Collective agenda.

Daily Referendum:

Before I go any further I want to point out that neither Harry (to my knowledge) or I are raving anti Muslim loons. I am however worried that we could be running two very different systems of law. We have a system of law in this country and it should apply to every citizen regardless of race, colour, sex or religion. This story is running in the Sunday Mercury.

Debacle:

Having given up trying to have any decent, normal, honest, straightforward dialogue with public bodies, the obvious thing to do - apart from exiting the planet - was to write. The vital importance of keeping good records became obvious: these public bodies are exceptionally skilled at obfuscating and distorting and sending you off on wild goose chases and round and round the roundabout that, without a clear record, they can also send you round the bend. I reckoned that I may as well share it all publicly.

[implosion] might not be such a bad idea

When the experiment begins soon after 9 a.m. (0700 GMT) on September 10, disaster scenarists will have little to work on. In the first tests, a particle beam will be shot all the way around the LHC channel in just one direction. If all goes well, collisions might be tried within the coming weeks, but at low intensity. Any bangs at this stage, said one CERN researcher, "will be little ones."

Right. I don't actually believe Europe is going to implode from this thing and yet did anyone see Terminator 3, with Skynet?

Different thing of course. isn't it? That one was about machines becoming sentient. OK, what about Deep Blue Sea? Saffron Burrows represents all that we love to hate - a know-all scientist who puts the experiment and funding before human lives, so much so that they had to redo the end of the film:

In the film's original cut, McAlester [Burrows] lived, but test audiences made it clear how much they disliked the character (going so far as to shout "Die, bitch!" at the screen) as her actions had caused all that had gone wrong. Thus, the decision was made to re-shoot the ending so that her character died.

The Mummy series springs to mind in this context as well. By the way, does anyone know Saffron Burrows' real life persona - interesting. Read her mini-biography.

Real life is a bit as if we're all living in some giant progressive tragedy where we know who the baddies are and the supposed goodies [humanity] and it all inevitably occurs, despite warnings. Doom and gloom soothsayers are labelled, mocked and vilified, then it all happens and the scientist supposedly says, as Woodrow Wilson did, "What have I done? What have I done?"

Does anyone know of one of these experiments where it actually ... er .. worked and brought peace, love and really good things to humanity?

Monday, September 08, 2008

[birmingham] and stephane dion

The beauty of Birmingham

How well do you speak English?

Canada's main opposition leader Stephane Dion says his biggest handicap as he campaigns for votes in the country's snap elections is his difficulty communicating in English, which he blamed on a "hearing problem." "I have a hearing problem and it may be linked to that," the Liberal leader said in an interview with the Globe and Mail newspaper. "I have difficulty to isolate sounds," he said. "It may explain the fact that the music of the language is difficult for me to catch."

Question - should that be "to isolate", "in isolating" or should another construction have been utilized? No matter.

Speaking of Brummies, we were discussing them today and the question arose of their accent. "Oh, they're much improved now," my friend corrected me.

"Well that's nice to hear," I replied. "I always considered that my strangulated accent was not the worst accent in the British Isles but now I see that it is."

'Yes, it's much improved now, Birmingham," he continued. "They've done the city centre up quite nicely, in fact."

You'd have to agree with that. Look at how spic and span those canal boats in the picture [above] look. I've just had the most brilliant idea how to overcome my current job flow crisis - set up a Birmingham Narrowboat Holiday Company, funded by Northern Rock.

[raschida dati] did nick do the deed

Lowering the tone on a drizzly Monday morning, Paris has this today:

The rumour that the unmarried minister — noted for her closeness to President Nicolas Sarkozy — was pregnant began, as rumours tend to do in France, quietly, over lunch tables and in the gilded salons of the establishment. Naturally, not a word of conjecture was allowed to soil the pages of the daily prints, for to do so would be to deprive the French public of its cherished right to be told as little as possible about the private lives of its politicians.

Which of these most closely approximated your reaction?

1. Who cares when there are poverty and all sorts of other bad things about;

2. Thataboy, Nick, you son-of-a-gun;

3. The man needs castrating to stop him rutting;

4. Poor Carla, poor, poor dear;

5. Could have been anyone - not just Sarko;

6. Sigh

7. Other?

[resource deployment] outer space or poverty

Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva

Interesting, if not predictable, that Sir David King should say that the most brilliant minds should be directed to solving Earth's greatest challenges, such as climate change ... and that less time and money is spent on endeavours such as space exploration and particle physics.

The thrust was that the best minds should concentrate on solving climate change and presumably starvation in Africa and so on. He mentioned seemingly spurious but highly expensive research on such things as the Large Hadron Collider, with a spin-off, for example, being Tim Berners Lee's world wide web.

Surely that was worth the money?

Where do we start? It's the old "should we go to the moon when people are starving" argument all over again. We're all caught in an impasse. Governments and corporations can allocate billions on ostensibly innocent programmes like nuclear fission and the results are history. Certain groups get their hands on the best science and the result is destructive.

So it's all very well Sir David King saying that but the whole thing is geared in such a way that the money can buy the best researchers and the goal is not necessarily always philanthropic.

The argument then goes - well, the warmongers are at the controls, therefore we need to up our own research in mass destruction and conventional weaponry to offer an effective deterrent to them. Billions are poured in which might have been used to house the homeless and retrain them in new skills or to provide for single mums.

This blog doesn't necessarily accept that line holus bolus and the welfare fraud is staggering and yet I'm not far off that position myself of being homeless, jobless and on the street.

Turning the attention to allocation of funds by local councils, do they spend two million on a sculpture in the town square, in the interests of civic pride and everything looking lovely or do they allocate it to revamping housing and providing local services such as bin collection?

Is there some sort of compromise position perhaps?

Sunday, September 07, 2008

[body clock] perceptions and priorities


Have you ever thought how vital the little things are in life, such as priorities, preferences and even body clocks?

If we were to go out for supper and had pizzas, it wouldn't matter in the least if you had chicken and mushrooms and I had salami and peppers but if it was a case of sleeping in the same room later, then you might want the window closed and I might want it opened.

Then we really do have a problem because a compromise here is going to leave both irritable.

If I'm the type who shuts up shop around 11.30 p.m. and wants to go to bed and read but you're the type who sees 11.30 p.m. as the signal to wheel out all the makings of a sumptuous feast each and every night which takes two and a half hours to prepare and a half hour to clean up after that and if you expect scintillating conversation from a non-night owl and you don't get it, then there's going to be trouble somewhere down the line.

And when you're fast asleep till midday and I've been up and about since 5 a.m., that's seven hours of non-communication time. So, 17 hours later with each respectively, when we wish to shut down our systems - me at 9 p.m. and you at 4 a.m., we're not going to be in accord.

And if you need two or three hour snatches of sleep and I need a good solid 8 hours anyway, otherwise I can't face the next day, again we're heading for a fall.

And if we're in the car and you say we need to go to Naff Naff [true story, this] and I want to eat because it's 2 p.m. and you say well can't you wait just a while [which is code for let's shop for four hours] and I say you'll get much better results from me if you let me eat now and you throw the hands in the air because I'm the one actually at the wheel and I put up with the scowls for the twenty minutes I take to have the soup and caesar salad whilst you pick at a salad and if we then go shopping for four hours as promised, then this is going to become quite wearing for both parties.

And when you waste money on shoes, the most expensive cosmetics you can find and a new dress when we are at an economically difficult time but you say I wasted money on a Macintosh when a little PC would have done just as well, the makings of rebellion are in the air.

And when you say that for someone so supposedly energetic, I'm so passive and pedestrian at times and I say I just want the quiet life when you want action and really exciting things, and when you want to fight because you feel better afterwards but I detest fighting over nothing, we really can't stay under the same roof unless something seriously alters.

However ...

When we find that we basically have the same ideas on sleep, priorities, economizing, romance, movies, basic directions and are able to compromise, then the result is tranquillity and that is what I have found. The energy surges back, things become possible again and hope springs anew.

[debate] do we finally have some on ths blog

There is actually some debate going on at this time, on a post which has been lost in the flurry of posts in the past two days. You might like to go back and look at the comments section again.