[tuesday laugh] today's comic lines

Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!!!

Oh this is absolutely classic:

Meredith Whitney lifts Wall Street after urging clients to buy Goldman Sachs

Ms Pretty urges all those who lost out to buy the [alleged] profiteer's and [alleged] in-trader's stocks to do what? To buoy the market? Ah, I see - the new, post-crisis Goldman Sachs market.

How many billion people can see through this? The best part though is that the Telegraph reports it as "Goldman Buoys Markets", i.e. a fait accompli, already done, over with.

Here's another one to have you rolling on the floor:

Sotomayor vows impartiality if confirmed to the court.

"Honestly, I'll take back all [alleged] racist remarks and never do it again, truly ruly, please believe me [flutters eyes beguilingly]."
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[village idiot] more than a radio game

Of a Friday, I usually cycle the few kilometres to a nearby town and sell my soul to McDonalds, just to take in the local atmosphere.

Today, the girl got everything wrong and apologized, ‘Hang-over, yer know, luv.’

Oh well, that makes it all right then. Don’t give it another thought, dearest. Over the tannoy came the sounds of a local radio show – Village Idiot. Why anyone would wish to go on such a show or be labelled an idiot beats me. Perhaps I am an idiot, I’m too stupid to know but I wouldn’t go on a show to prove I was. I’d open a blog instead.

No matter.

‘Now, Pam, can you tell us what was the name of the book about a society gone wrong, by George Orwell?’

Silence.

The host continued. ‘It was the name of a year and not all that long ago.’

‘Er … 1964?’

‘Let’s go over to David. Any idea?’

‘Er … 1981?’

‘No, it was, in fact, Nineteen Eighty Four. Right. Ken Dodd. What was …’ A question followed about the worthy Dodd, Pam getting the answer straight off.

‘Right,’ said our host, ‘it all comes down to one last question. What followed was something about an East Enders character which, with unerring accuracy, David got right.

It’s a rash generalization to blame the dumbing down of education and I do take the point that a person can’t know everything. Why, there are things on the topic of This Blog I couldn’t answer. ‘In what month did Higham post an article on …?’

‘Er … no idea.’

I suppose East Enders is the most important topic in everyone’s mind, apart from Beckam and Brangelina. I suppose such people live happy and fulfilling lives, free from the vicissitudes of General Knowledge cluttering up the recesses of their already cluttered minds.

Yet am I wrong in thinking that a certain knowledge of the world is a good thing and perhaps should be taught in schools? Am I wrong in thinking that you should reasonably be expected to know at least two of the Seven Wonders of the World?

Don’t get me wrong – I run quizzes on this blog which I couldn’t expect more than 10% of the populace to know, so don’t judge yourself by that. Judge yourself by this:

Here’s a quiz which I’d expect any school leaver to get 5/5 on. I’d expect a street sweeper to get 3/5:

1. Excluding Antarctica, Australia and Greenland and counting the huge land mass from Portugal to China as two separate continents [which we won’t argue about for now] and excluding sub-continents, how many continents are there?

2. Which female Australian-expat harpie, from the 60s, wrote The Female Eunuch?

3. How many millimetres are there in a decametre [can also be spelt [or spelled] with a ‘k’]?

4. Which is the longest river complex in northern America?

5. In the 1800s, what was the object of the mass movement of people to the Yukon, to Ballarat in Australia and to other places? What was being sought?

Let’s not get pernickety about the questions. The broad answers are what are required.

Answers

5, Germaine Greer, 10 000, Mississippi/Missouri, gold

[eyewatch 1227] how stupid are people these days

In Private Eye this fortnight, apart from the Jamaicans stealing beaches for the construction industry [p16], the one which grabbed my attention was about David Lammy MP, on Celebrity Mastermind [p9].

Asked, "What was the married name of Marie and Pierre, winners of the 1903 Nobel prize for the discovery of radiation?" Lammy answered, er, "Antoinette," and went on to say that Henry VII succeeded Henry VIII, Leicester is a famous English blue cheese and replied with other gems. However, he did know about Opray Winfrey and William Hague's 13 pints of beer.

There is great danger in lambasting the Dumb - just because half the population is dumber than you, half of it might be brighter than you too. Bill Bryson recognized this principle in his Notes from a Big Country and yet ... and yet ...

There really does seem to be an awful lot of ignorance about these days and inevitably it must come down to, not only what is being taught in schools but the whole curriculum and methodology, combined with the breakdown of society. Easy to use the old "in my day" preface to any remark but you know, it's true.

My occasional quizzes here were not what I should have thought fiendishly difficult although I'm sure you could have constructed one on feminism, reality TV and the Beckams which I would have failed miserably. All of which brings us to the question of which knowledge we value.

Surely there is a base level of memorable facts and figures which one would expect the average bear to have a working knowledge of and if not, why not? Try these five and see how you go:

1. Name any three of the seven ancient wonders of the world;
2. Which substances are represented by NaCl and H2CO4?
3. Name any revered American baseball babe and a perfect 10 from the Montreal Olympics;
4. How many are a baker's dozen, a score and a gross respectively?
5. What is the difference between "respectively" and respectfully"?

It's not the intention of this blog to put anyone down because you could hit back with myriad things I don't know and yet the general ignorance about in this day and age seems a little more than the imaginings of a jaded ex-academic and way above any statistically acceptable level.

By the way, is "myriad" used in singular or plural and what number does it originally refer to?

[stupidity] some people never learn

How's this for stupidity?

A guy breaks a glass in his kitchen and the bits go under the table. He doesn't pick any of the bits up because he's in the middle of some project and then he just forgets until late evening. Barefooted, he then goes to the kitchen for a coffee.

He's still extracting bits next morning.

Just before he goes to work, the jug containing the bit of Christmas tree the love of his life brought him and which was adorned with metal plasticky type baubles - the whole thing decides to fall from the window sill to the kitchen floor and bits of metally plastic go everywhere.

No time, he has to go to work.

Comes home, kicks off shoes and takes off socks - yes, you've got it - goes into the kitchen to put the kettle on. He's still extracting bits this morning.

Yes - it is me. This guy needs training wheels and a nanny!

[stupidity] a second look

Not Juliet

When I wrote the post on stupidity, Mopsa made it into a gender issue and asked that I even the score. I asked the sweet lass, in turn, to point me in the right direction but sadly, on this she went quiet. Thank goodness for Juliet, who has finally provided me with the material:

I can't believe the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres has somehow found it appropriate to open his sermon during the otherwise beautiful memorial service for Princess Diana by yelling the words, "Who's cheating?!"

Read the rest here.

We love Mopsa

[stupidity] there's a little bit in each of us

The thing with stupidity is that there is always someone looking down on you, thinking you are just so limited, at the same time that you're having a good laugh at some other klutz.

It's a dangerous occupation.

However, Bill Bryson [Notes from a Big Country, Black Swan, 1998] is right when he says there's an awful lot of it about. Maybe it's the dumbing down of education, maybe it's the high-death diet the west eats, maybe it's the water. I think it has something to do with clubbing.

See what you think as I hand over here to Bryson:

Here, for instance, is the actress Brooke Shields, without any help from grown-ups, explaining to an interviewer why you shouldn't smoke: 'Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life.'

Well said, Brooke.

Bryson was a little before Denise's time but I'm sure she would have earned an honourable mention.

And here is the singer Mariah Carey getting to the heart of Third World troubles: 'Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.'

Whatever is the stage beyond the mind boggling is the stage I reach each time I read that quotation.

It takes the form over here of swaggering about, nodding sagely and mocking gutturally whilst gesticulating with flailing arms and highlights the most pressing need for the truly stupid - the need to find someone even more stupid than themselves.

And yet, one can't help but feel that they're happy in their wild animal luxury and one last thing - we are, none of us, getting any younger and intellect … well … well it does sort of drop off, you know.

I think that's what I was trying to say.

The flooding was preventable

Floods damage homes and were preventable

As I dragged myself from my bed this morning, after the carnage that was the FOREST-sponsored dinner at the Savoy this morning, I wondered what on earth I could compose for 18 Doughty Street this morning. Luckily, a topic leapt out at me, top of the BBC News page.

“Three people have died and thousands have been forced from their homes after severe flooding hit England and Wales.

About 900 people are using emergency shelters in Sheffield, and dozens more were evacuated across Lincolnshire, Shropshire and Nottinghamshire.”

These floods—and the accompanying homelessness, damage and loss of life—are, of course, a terrible event but what makes them even more unpalatable is that they were preventable.

The current issue of Private Eye highlights the underfunding of the flood defences by the government. In 2004, the National Assessment of Defence Needs and Cost for Flood and Coastal Erosion Management pointed out that funding plans fell short by £700 million over the next ten years.

Last week, the NAO produced a report showing that the Environment Agency had not met its targets and that 63% of England's flood defences were inadequate. In fact, the agency says that it needs another £150 million a year, from the government, to meet the targets.

So what? It's hardly a surprise is it? Gordon Brown, the Gobblin' King, has been spending our money like water on his pet projects, whilst other necessary projects have been neglected. But it gets worse than that.

The Environment Agency's budget is controlled by DEFRA (David Miliband's department) which has had its woes recently. The biggest problem it has had is over the Rural Farm Payments shambles; its failure to pay out the money within the allotted timeframe has incurred massive fines from Brussels.

These fines are currently running at £350 million and, even worse, Brown has absolutely refused to find the money from the Treasury coffers and has demanded that DEFRA find it from their own budget. This can mean only one thing: cuts.

Sure enough, DEFRA looked around to see where it could make savings; and the Environment Agency was one of the first to feel the pinch. £15 million has been cut from its budget which was already, as highlighted by the agency and the NAO, far too low to start with.

As a result, projects have had to be put on hold and flood defences neglected. And, sure enough, we now see the inevitable consequences of this policy; huge insurance costs, wrecked homes and dead people.

No doubt, in casting around for something else to blame, David Miliband will make dire prognostications concerning “climate change”, but make no mistake: these deaths are a direct result of DEFRA's incompetence and poor government spending priorities.

Cross-posted at 18DoughtyStreet.

[stupid people] revel in their cleverness

When I was in first year university, I'd sit at the back of the room with two mates and pretend to make fun of the lecturer who was one of those very brittle characters who took herself oh so seriously.

One day she'd had enough and one of the other lecturers, whom most students liked, took me aside and asked what I'd done to anger Nina so much that she'd stormed into the staffroom, throwing her bag at a chair and starting to mouth obscenities.

She got her revenge later by demanding that I seek psychological counselling - from her [she taught psychology]. She asked why I always took a contrary position to her and tried to argue with her superior knowledge, why I had such hate in me.

Still I didn't learn.

The following year I fooled around in politics tutorials, feeling I'd pass politics easily [I'd had 90% at school]. The tutor was an entirely different kettle of fish. He never said one word but at the end of the year, asked me where my assignments were.

There weren't any. He gave me till Friday afternoon.

Suddenly I realized the pickle I was in. I begged him to let me do them in "point form" and he never replied. I spent all evening at the uni library four nights running and wrote at breakneck speed, finally finishing the last one on Friday around 3 p.m.

Still time to get them to him. He wasn't there in his room. The bstd had gone home early. Still, I left them on his desk and as there was no exam, just course work, I thought I was home and hosed.

The day of the posting of results came and in two key subjects, failure was out. One of those was politics. He'd failed me and had not even graded them, on the grounds that they didn't fulfil the instructions, as given in the faculty guidebook.

That was the day I learnt that people don't like the p--s being taken out of them. They tend to store it up and it comes out later. Mild-mannered people become quietly vindictive and bide their time.

They get you later, sometimes much later and the quiet ones who don't rant and rave are the most dangerous.

[ferry disaster] yet again

You wouldn't credit it.

You read about the Indonesian ferry fire last Thursday and yesterday, fishermen and navy officers recovered the bodies of 22 people killed in the fire. Journalists and cameramen were everywhere.

Then, a few hours after the last body was recovered, the ship sank with 16 people still on board. A cameraman was killed, while another and two police officers were missing. Four people were seriously injured.

"It happened so quickly," Lt.-Col. Hendra Pakan told The Associated Press. "The ship almost completely disappeared into the sea."