Saturday, January 31, 2009

[shakespearean insults] time for some more


You’re probably wondering how to adequately express your contempt for the incompetents above so it’s time to revisit the world of the bard. Try these for size:

Methink'st thou art a general offence and every man should beat thee. Taken from: All's Well That Ends Well

Away, you bottle-ale rascal, you filthy bung, away! Taken from: Henry IV, part 2

Thou mewling dizzy-eyed flirt-gill! You are a fishmonger. Taken from: Hamlet

Thou art only mark'd for hot vengeance and the rod of heaven. Taken from: Henry IV, part I

Thou reeky clapper-clawed gudgeon!

This one would not make the cut for ingenuity but I like it for its simplicity:

In civility thou seem'st so empty. Taken from: As You Like It

[grammar corner] lay and lie

Lie detector


Lay or Lie?


• Lay means "to place something down." It is something you do to something else. It is a transitive verb.
lay – laid – laid - laying
• Lie [1] means "to recline" or "be placed." It does not act on anything or anyone else. It is an intransitive verb.
lie – lay – lain - lying
• Lie [2] means "to tell an untruth" or "to tell a lie". It does not act on anything or anyone else. It is an intransitive verb.
lie – lied – lied - lying
• Layed is a misspelling and does not exist. Use laid instead.

Which is the correct variant in each case?

1. You’ve been lying/laying on that bed all day!
2. She lied/laid to me about how much money she’d spent.
3. Whenever chickens lay/lie eggs, we eat.
4. He has lied/lie to you from the very first day.
5. He lay/laid on the bed and thought about his life.
6. Are you going to lie/lay on that bed all day?
7. Having laid/layed the books on the table, he sat down.
8. Having laid/lain in bed all day, he decided finally to get up.
9. By lying/laying the baby on the bed, she would have her hands free.
10. He has been laying/lying to you about his second wife.
11. Having laid/layed the baby on the bed, she had her hands free.
12. Do not lay/lie to me about the crime you committed!

Answers next posting day.

Friday, January 30, 2009

[geography] can you name the area


Question 1 [1 point]

Which country [nation] is this?

Answer

Trick question - the country, England, doesn't officially exist.

Question 2 [5 points]

Can you name the specific area where this is?

Answer

Oxendale and Crinkle Crags

[where are they now] an occasional series

So … er … where is he now?

I’m talking about the Iraqi Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf. Can anyone forget such classic lines as:

"My feelings - as usual - we will slaughter them all. G-d will roast their stomachs in hell at the hands of Iraqis."

"We are not afraid of the Americans. Allah has condemned them. They are stupid. They are stupid" (dramatic pause) "and they are condemned."

"They tried to bring a small number of tanks and personnel carriers in through al-Durah but they were surrounded and most of their infidels had their throats cut."

"They are trying to fool you. They’re not at the airport. They are showing any old pictures of buildings. And they even went into the VIP section at the airport, just because Saddam Hussein may have sat in such and such a chair or slept in such and such a bed. They are stupid!"

About Bush: "the insane little dwarf Bush" About Bush and Rumsfeld: "Those only deserve to be hit with shoes."

Anyone know where he is? Perhaps he’s no a shoe salesman in Cincinatti.

[letter from britain] for those who would venture here


This is a letter which I'm sending to my friend who is coming over from Russia for a visit and who plans to come north to see me. It's had the personal bits taken out but the substance remains. I had to write as accurately as I could. Thought you might like to correct me on some points where I've gone astray:

London and Britain

These are two different things, like Moscow and Russia. An example is the minimum wage in London [about £7.40 an hour] and in the rest of Britain [about £5.70]. £1 is about 49.4 roubles.

Costs

The major cost for you will be fares and food. For a short distance of about 200km you can pay up to £125. The cost of fares is unbelievable. However, at a certain hour of a certain day, if you reserve, you can have that journey for £9. You just have to know.

So, there is no such thing as jumping on a train or long route bus. You have to go into a big train station or bus station or use the internet and find the best fare. Example is when I went from London to a place on the coast. They wanted £42 for that but the woman beside me paid £9 because she had booked that journey two weeks before.

A sandwich in a pack will be about £3. A coffee will be £1.90. If you go to a pub and have a few drinks and something to eat, like in Russia, you’ll pay about £25. A piece of ordinary meat to eat is about £8.

However, the locals know the way to shop and it is not in the markets – there are almost no markets and what they have is not quality. You need to go to ASDA, Aldi, Tescos or one of the big stores and they have specials. For example, a box of Maltesers can cost £1.70 in a normal shop but £1 in a supermarket.

I bought myself a pair of winter boots. In most shops - £78 but I found them for £20. If you don’t look around, you will lose all your money fast and for no good reason.

Credit cards are big and used for everything but it is possible to use just cash as a tourist, if you go to the office which sells things.

Complex to find anything

On a map, it looks a small country but it is like the circuit board of a television or computer – complex roads everywhere, little lanes crossing each other and impossible to find.

In Russia, if I give you an address to find, the problem is no street signs and some roads are just tracks but the roads can be found. The problem then is the numbering of the houses. In Britain, you’ll just not find anywhere without a map because roads change names and they make new routes to what is on the map.

Many people use the internet to plan a journey. You write in where you start and where you want to go and it does it for you.

The tourist just does not understand how many people are actually in such a small space. Britain is organized with a lot of green areas with no people, beautiful from the train and then towns small and dense with thousands of people in a little area.

Everything is closed. For example, in Russia, you can sell things from the side of the road [like the grandmothers]. Here, that is a crime and so you are caught in a road system where you can not stop, there are no places where people are just selling and you end up in a specially built area where each of the shops pays a large amount of money to be there and they have a monopoly.

An example is someone playing music on the footpath. Looks like he just sat down and did that but no – he paid a fee and is allowed to sit there for two hours, twice a week.

Almost anything you want to do here is criminal, even little things like where you walk and what you say. You have to be careful not to criticize anyone because it is a crime. Nasty people see law suits [sudyebni protsess] as a way to get money in this economic depression. Be careful.

Closed society

You’re not looking for work here but it is almost impossible unless you have a local qualification [NVQ] on top of the normal qualification you have. With mass unemployment here and firms closing every day, employers are able to ask outrageous things from someone wanting work. That’s why so many are unemployed and it is almost normal now.

If you don’t know someone, you can survive if you have money but you will be paying top rate. In this country you have to know someone to avoid paying huge money for things.

Danger

The country is so demoralized now and a new underclass has developed of young people called chavs – unemployed, can’t get work, living on government benefits, drugs, crime. If you look expensive, you are a target.

The way to go anywhere is to be in busy places in the main street [not side roads] and use major rail and bus stations. Be with someone when you go and have someone at the other end.

Advice

My advice is to try to look ordinary, plan everything from journeys to purchases of even simple things, understand that everything takes time or else money [one or the other] and make sure your phone is working.

My place

My place is so unusual. It is an old mansion converted to flats near the sea. They are currently rebuilding and renovating flats and there is builder’s rubbish everywhere, dust and so on. I think I have one of the best flats in it.

The flat itself is compact, clean, newly painted, the central heating is lovely [and this is not so with all lower end houses], hot and cold water [clean water too – no need for filters], the carpet is wall to wall, new and clean and the kitchenette is modern. The view is lovely of the sea and right now there is a ship just a short way from me out there.

Trouble is, as I said, it’s a closed society and there is a barrier stopping you going near it. Instead, there is a lovely path but it leads around to a restaurant where they want to force you to buy a meal.

Two good things here are the automatic washing machine for your clothes and an iron. I know you need these and you can use them all the time so don’t worry about being clean. The bath is good too.

The down side of my flat. The only real down side is that there is nothing in it. I have one blow up double airbed [very comfortable, by the way – things are quality over here] and a winter weight king-sized duvet. It is SO warm at night. Today I’m going to buy a sheet for the bed and a duvet cover.

I am so poor that I have to think whether to buy either a knife to cut things with or else a chair. I only bought a super-duper can opener yesterday. I plan my meals carefully, using a can of meat, grechka and cabbage or else there is a nice tuna and Mediterranean salad in a tub. Plenty of tea and coffee though.

I have had £5 in my pocket and it has lasted from last Thursday until now.

Shopping

This is the positive side where I live. Very close is a shopping centre with huge supermarket, called ASDA, an arcade and other things [enough for most days].

However, some kilometres away is a giant shopping complex with boutiques, stores, McDonalds and all the food places, GAP and so on. People come from everywhere to go there.

My problem, as I said, is not that there is nothing to buy – there’s plenty. It is only the money – I can’t afford it.

Address

There is a good reason I don’t give my address on the internet and that is because it is hacked. People can get in and see what is in my emails and I have enemies. So I’m posting my address to XXXX today and she will send it to you. Please don’t ever put it in an email to me.

Summary

It sounds bad from reading the words above but you will be fine. Get to XXXX’s and then she’ll get you to the main station and you’ll come to one of two towns I’ll give you [not on the internet – I’ll send to her]. I'll get you from there.

I’m alive, warm and comfortable and eating not badly. My friend has lent me a bicycle so I get around and get some exercise.

Get here – I really want to see you.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

[cat and mouse] add your own caption

[writing technique] you may or may not agree

One happy spin-off from having no internet is the chance to rework the three novels and much of the weekend was spent doing that. Writers might be interested in skimming through this post to see if it’s what they do and they might offer some helpful tips for me.

The greatest problem with a partly autobiographical novel is the fan fiction trap or to be more specific, the Mary Sue trap. Either the main character is so outrageously immune to bullets, poor shooting, being wrong or else he/she always comes through in the end, in the face of almost insurmountable odds, that the thing is a bore.

The Andromeda series fell into that trap when it became a super-hero vehicle instead of a good series. The trouble with the Russian section of my novels is that those things really did happen but they read, in a novel, particularly badly and so it was necessary to at least split the main character into two people and the main girl into two as well.

The next step was, rather than having two superheroes coming at you, for each to have realistic foibles and not to have things always working out well in the end.

Three decisions may or may not have been wrong.

Firstly, I went with a plethora of characters, each filled out at least to an extent and last count there were 58 of them, some with similar sounding names [Sean’s criticism].

Secondly, the books are written in the third person, rather than the autobiographical first person.

Thirdly, where many novelists run sub-plots as separate chapters, e.g. Tolkien and some run them interwoven, jumping from scene to scene, I’ve taken the risk of organizing the twenty five or so chapters in each of the three books to be about fifteen pages long and within each chapter are sub-chapters, marked with Roman numerals, which are both irregular in length and jump from one sub plot to another.

There are usually three subplots going on at any one time, each converging in some way, somewhere down the track.

The number one problem is to mute the main character sufficiently so that his sub-plot does not occupy, say, three pages while another character’s troubles occupy half or three quarters of a page.

On the other hand, one mustn’t mute the main character to the point of blandness and that’s definitely an issue with one of the two protagonists, Marc, for whom I’m having difficulty making him genuinely attractive to women and men. I’d like him to be more attractive than the main character – he’s certainly adept in what he does.

The difficulty with the main character now is that he never seems to actually do anything but is usually around when things are being done, usually by the women around him who are the main agents in moving the plot forward.

I don’t think the feminists will have any criticism of the characterization from this perspective. He occasionally provides an insight which has moderate impact. He seems a bit passive to me, with bouts of craziness but he has a modicum of wisdom, born of experience.

Another issue is which characters last throughout the book and which come and go. In the novel’s original form, one man and one woman went right through. Now it will most likely be so but the two who go right through do not become an item until the second book.

Finally, do the characters grow as people, [the Robinson Crusoe motif] and how do they grow as people? Three novels is a long time to make people grow. The way around it, of course, is two steps forward and one step back.

Anyway, I’d appreciate your thoughts on writing.

[ho hum] learning from the beeb

Check this one out:

It is to be presented by Rageh Omaar, a black Somalian Muslim.

Would it have been too much to expect a British TV company like Channel 4 to perhaps show things from a white Christian point of view - being that the Crusaders were white Christians?

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

[today's recipe] prepare and enjoy


A friend of mine intensely dislikes my food posts and the French in equal proportions. This post is dedicated to him.


Pappardelles au saumon fumé

Ingrédients :
300g de parppardelles
200g de saumon fumé
40g de beurre
2 Cs d'huile d'olive
1 bouquet d'aneth
1 pincée de piment séché
50g de parmesan râpé
sel

Recette :

Dans une assiette, taillez les tranches de saumon en lanières d'1cm de large. Mélangez-les avec l'aneth ciselé, le piment et l'huile d'olive.
Dans un faitout, faites cuire les pâtes dans de l'eau salée.
Egouttez les pâtes, remettez-les dans le faitout.
Ajoutez le beurre en parcelles et remuez sur feu très doux jusqu'à ce qu'il soit fondu.
Incorporez les lanières de saumon et leur huile de marinade. Mélangez délicatement. Couvrez et laissez reposer 2 minutes afin que le saumon fumé tiédisse doucement.
Servez avec le parmesan râpé


Conseils :

Les parppadelles sont des pâtes larges et fines, faites les cuire croquantes et remuez-les délicatement
afin que le saumon tiédisse doucement.
Servez avec le parmessan râpé.
Boisson conseillée : pinot noir ou blanc d'Alsace

Mon commentaire :

Ajoutez cette recette à votre carnet pour ajouter votre commentaire personnel !

Enjoy!

[teachers] love them or loathe them


When I met my first wife, she was hanging about in the company of engineers, an earthy bunch who generally called a spade a spade.

Let me tell an anecdote. She’d apparently been rabbiting on about me and how they’d now have to get a king sized bed in. I walked into the after work bar where she’d been holding forth and one of her colleagues proclaimed, ‘Nah, a double will be more than enough.’

One job group they didn’t have much time for was teachers, of which I was one. Their criticisms of teachers ranged from inflated sense of importance and being ‘lefties’ to teachers’ opinions so simplistic and amateurish that they weren’t worth heeding. And all those holidays!

Holidays

In a society where the politics of envy is the prevailing philosophy, teachers’ holidays were a never ending bone of contention and reached ridiculous proportions when they were made to come in and ‘work’ during school holidays.

For a start, any teacher worth his [her] salt is going to spend a substantial portion of that time preparing for the new term, cleaning the classroom, arranging things, photocopying, ordering in and so forth. It doesn’t need a prescriptive regulation to achieve that.

For any forty minute lesson, a good teacher devotes another fifteen to twenty in preparation and this used to be drummed in to student teachers by their teacher trainers.

So, back to those holidays, what you had were staff sitting around creating work, to make them look occupied, when their preparation had already been done, they were substantially ready and for what? To assuage a section of the community with absolutely no idea, which perceived all teachers to be on a cushy number.

Usual criticisms

Don’t get me wrong – lazy teachers are the bane of any head teacher’s existence plus their habit of only being able to see the micro-world of their own classroom, rather than the big picture. Such people also tend to be squabblers over unimportant matters, not unlike the children they teach.

One of the greatest criticisms of teachers is that they’re not in the real world. It generally helps if they have families, IMHO but that’s no guarantee of realistic approaches to life which they pass on to children and the number of times my staff had parent-teacher interviews and were insisting on their classroom rules at the expense of common sense were too numerous to mention.

A lot of this came from the political views of the teaching profession. In a job where the key components in classroom management are compassion and good order, these dovetail neatly with the socialist view of the compassionate society, while free enterprise and initiative can be seen as dangerously subversive.

Preparation and example

The criticism that teachers are lazy because they work such short hours is total hogwash. In any profession you’re going to get the lazy who come to lessons on time or even a few minutes late, [a big no-no in teaching, when you should be there ten minutes early to set up].

One of the best tests of this was the use of cassette players. The teacher rushed in five minutes late, noisy children sitting around aimlessly and then started to cue the cassette to its place, nothing set up on screen, discs not in place and feeling under pressure.

On the other hand, walk into a good teacher’s room and she [he] is there when the first children arrive, probably setting things up round the room, notes are at hand and she can share a joke with the child and listen to his/her latest news.

Discipline

At a seminar I once attended, one young teacher asked about discipline and my little contribution was that the best way to maintain discipline was firstly not to worry about it, to make it a low priority on your list. It also helped if you knew your material back to front, were well prepared, had set up the materials and you didn’t see the child or the parent as an adversary to be negotiated or contained.

At university, my best lessons were the speech practice topics where I had very little immediate control at all, everyone was deep in argument, gesticulating and haranguing and it would have taken ten minutes to quieten them all down. Better to let it run its course.

In the end, one of the most helpful things for discipline was simply to care. If the kid knew you really liked him, it made it so much easier but better was to only say no when it was absolutely necessary. How many people say no automatically without reasoning why? ‘Well, it’s the rule, isn’t it?’ Why is it the rule in the first place?

Saying no

There’s not a lot of difference between the home and the classroom in this.

A friend of mine has no problem with discipline at all but his wife has constant trouble.

Her approach is to threaten and say, ‘If you do that again ..’ Then next time she says, ‘If you do that again …’ When she does give punishments, she hasn’t the heart to carry them through and they know they can always get round her.

The result is ongoing discipline trouble and stress.

He has a different approach. If he says no, then it’s no. It never alters, even if he hasn’t the heart to impose the penalty. ‘You step across this line and you don’t get this treat.’ The kid steps across the line and she doesn’t get the treat. Never has, never will.

He has no discipline trouble at all and he compensates for that with good humour and treats, within certain boundaries.

In teaching, the golden rule is never to threaten anything, never employ the term “if”, unless you’re prepared to go through with it.

Example: One girl who hardly ever attended at university turned up one day and from the beginning, she showed not the slightest intention of getting into the topic. Instead, she sat there, looking down at her feet and making little dance movements with them.

That was one thing but the moment she started trying to engage the attention of those in the group with the lowest attention spans, I stepped in. ‘Go,’ I said. ‘What? What have I done?’ she appealed to the group as a whole. I opened the door and waited five to seven minutes till she’d gone, her last words threats to sue me.

Then I got back to the lesson, apologizing to the group for the scene.

Educational fads

This one has been saved for last and it’s my pet hate.

There’s a staff of teachers discussing which English textbook to use next year – Streetwise, Opportunities, Knockout? For better or worse, a book is adopted and immediately half those teachers appear in the staffroom at breaks, muttering out loud, hands flailing, ‘Oh I can’t use this text – it’s impossible.’

Still, it’s adopted and the parents are slugged for the cost of the textbook, the workbook, the exam maximizer, the cassettes and the study guide. They’re told it’s the latest thing in education, the ants’ pants.

For two years, all is well but then a new intake of staff doesn’t like this book imposed on them and the rumblings become a chorus of dissent so the whole process begins again in the name of progress and hey presto, a brand new textbook is now adopted and parents are slugged yet again.

Next year it starts all over again when some new educational fad comes into vogue, some academic from Canada or Australia having written in a journal that the latest research indicates that children should learn a different way.

Welcome to the prevailing state of education.

[interim report] for those who wish to know

This marks one week in the new flat and how’s the report card?

It’s a lovely flat, carpeted and centrally heated, with piping hot water and clean cold water but of course, it’s so empty to look at, with no drapes as yet and virtually no furniture.

The main room, with its vaulted ceiling, is quite chic really and the more ordinary bedroom does the job. Newly rebuilt, the paintwork and carpets are all new, spick and span and the kitchenette is modern.

I’ve come to a decision – I’m not getting a fridge for a long time. It’s been one week using semi-skilled milk powder, tuna lunches, fruit and vegetables with one piece of fresh meat bought daily and the gas takes care of the cooking. So the microwave is also postponed.

Perhaps the main thing going for this place is its aspect, the panorama it looks out on. Down near the sea, it has a view of a marina on one side and well, the sea, on the other. Passing ships provide a constant backdrop and it’s possible to go down and visit them from a short distance, if that’s your wont.

Let’s not dwell on the fact that I might be unceremoniously booted out tomorrow if my circumstances suddenly change, which they may well do and instead, let’s pretend I’m going to be in here for some time, even finding fulfilling employment.

Truth is, it could be a lot worse than it currently is.

By the way, I really like the pay-as-you-go electricity with the readily readable meter. I’ve worked out that, with the heating on almost full time and with the other drains on power, I’m using 74.4 pence of electricity per 24 hours. How does that compare to you?

By the way way, did I ever write to you how much I love my Mac Tiger? This has to be the best computer I’ve ever used.