[Христос воскресе!] Воистину воскресе!

For Saturday evening:

Missale Romanum [not the complete text]:

Exultet iam angelica turba caelorum:exultent divina mysteria:et pro tanti Regis victoria tuba insonet salutaris. Gaudeat et tellus tantis irradiata fulgoribus:et, aeterni Regis splendore illustrata,totius orbis se sentiat amisisse caliginem.

Laetetur et mater Ecclesia,tanti luminis adornata fulgoribus:et magnis populorum vocibus haec aula resultet. Quapropter astantes vos, fratres carissimi,ad tam miram huius sancti luminis claritatem,una mecum, quaeso,Dei omnipotentis misericordiam invocate.

Ut, qui me non meis meritisintra Levitarum numerum dignatus est aggregare,luminis sui claritatem infundens,cerei huius laudem implere perficiat. Flammas eius lucifer matutinus inveniat:Ille, inquam, lucifer, qui nescit occasum:Christus Filius tuus,qui, regressus ab inferis, humano generi serenus illuxit,et vivit et regnat in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

May peace find you this day, tomorrow and henceforth every day.

For Sunday morning:

Послание Патриарха Московского и Всея Руси Алексия II

к верующим:

"От всего сердца поздравляю вас, возлюбленные архипастыри, отцы, братья и сестры, с праздником Светлого Христова Воскресения! Шлю пасхальные приветствия всем православным христианам, сущим "от конец даже до конец вселенныя".

Спешу разделить радость Святой Пасхи с каждым, кто исповедует Христа Воскресшего, и со всеми людьми, жить среди которых судил нам Господь. Радость, мир, благодатную помощь Свою в добрых делах да дарует всем вам, дорогие мои, Восставший из гроба Спаситель мира!"

Христос воскресе! Воистину воскресе Христос! Jesus the Christ is Risen!

From the Missale Romanum:

The power of this holy night dispels all evil, washes guilt away, restores lost innocence, brings mourners joy; it casts out hatred, brings us peace, and humbles earthly pride. Night truly blessed when heaven is wedded to earth and man is reconciled with God! Christ, that Morning Star, who came back from the dead, and shed his peaceful light on all mankind, your Son, who lives and reigns for ever and ever.

To all out there, have a peaceful night and rest assured all good things will come to those with good hearts. This blog now signs off until tomorrow.

[blogfocus saturday] motley crew

1 The Wife in the North shows why she's attracted a large readership in a short space in time:

It was a bad day and the reason I know there is a God is because I have lost the car keys. Usually my husband loses the car keys. And after everything I said about him persistently letting the car run out of petrol. All I spend when that happens is time and an impressive amount of bad language. Replacing the car keys is going to cost more than £1,200. (I should actually say "car key" because obviously we do not have a spare. Why would we have a spare? It is not like we are ever going to lose it. )

It is going to cost this huge amount of money because you have to reprogramme the car's "brain" and "send away". Who knew the car had a brain? I find the fact that the car has a brain almost as worrying as the fact mine is missing along with the car key. I would so love to blame the children.

2 Dr. Michelle Tempest asks if the spindoctors have spun the doctors:

It has been said that doctors are not very politically savvy as professional group. However, when the government announced their ‘Modernising Medical Careers review result’ exactly 24 hours before the long Easter weekend, I heard many doctors asking about 'a good day to bury bad news' and 'the political theory of spin'. After all, the day before a long weekend is inevitably extra busy in any job; and especially so in hospitals, as patients get reviewed prior to a bank holiday. News releases about work have a tendency to lose impetus as people relax with family over the long weekend.

3 I just had to include my old friend the Flying Rodent once again:

It's one of the most commonly asked questions in modern politics, but one that is worth revisiting often - whatever happened to the Lift? While the nation has changed radically due to globalisation, privatisation and streamlined capitalism, the Lift has been unable to advance. It remains trapped, capable of rising and falling, but never of going forward.

The problem is plain to see - the Lift lacks inclusiveness, with little room for manoeuvre within its narrow confines. One could wait expectantly for decades for an innovative suggestion, but the Lift has nothing to offer but the same simplistic formulations that it has offered since Attlee was a boy.

4 Heather Yaxley shows that PC afflicts even her own PR profession:

Watson highlights the problem of promoting best practice examples of public relations by including measures of advertising value equivalent

[AVE, for the uninitiated involves calculating the worth of editorial coverage generated in PR campaigns against the cost to buy it as advertising - plus usually a factor multiplier to reflect editorial’s greater credibility.]

It is a ridiculous measure since the worth of advertising isn’t what you pay for it, but whether it delivers any enquiries, sales or other measurable outcome. Surely then assessment of editorial coverage should also be outcome-related.

5 Colin Campbell addresses that most terrible of afflictions and the particular Australia conditions conducive to it:

We have friends here in Australia, who have cancers dug out of their bodies regularly after a youth of sun over exposure. Australians are generally very cautious about this. Our kids always wear sunscreen and hats. Even on overcast days, the ozone rating can be extreme. I used to be more keen to get a tan when I was in Scotland. Now I don't care so much.

6 Just quietly, I don't fancy getting on the wrong side of Trixy. Here she finally lets loose on an iniquitous anomaly over the same issue of cancer and how it's addressed:

Anyway, Cllr Gavin Ayling left a comment saying: Maybe we should wait for the result before slinging mud at the party who was doing the employing? Maybe ... And I didn't write another word about it.

However, now that I know that the Tories have lost their case and the cancer suffering lady in question, who has been told by doctors that she does not have long to live, has been awarded J40,000 damages for her unfair dismissal, the other side have to pay costs.

So, especially in light of how the Tories rubbed their hands with glee in the case of the UKIP being blackmailed by a man with plastic knees, who completely made the story up, I am going to do the same to the Tories.

7 The Select Society's Cleanthes touches on the Iran Hostage Crisis:

If we trust the other guy, then [we] can reach an agreement about who is in the wrong and why. In which case, you aren’t offering concessions - you are making amends. If you don’t and you can’t, the concessions are meaningless and may even be counterproductive.

We will not increase our stock of trust with the Iranians however this dispute is resolved. We can only increase our stock of trust in other dealings with them that are not forced upon us as a result of a dispute. In the context of avoiding a war between the UK and Iran, the work has to be done elsewhere.

8 Which leaves Wolfie to add one final comment about said conflict:

So another round of the Great Game draws to a close but the good news is that in this round nobody got hurt and its a win-win situation, unless you are an Iranian dreaming of regime change of course.

So Happy Easter everyone and enjoy the holiday break.

May I add my own best wishes to you for a lovely last half of the break.

[business lunacy] cautionary tales [2]

How not to run a business.

The Dismaying Dilemma of the Diminishing Doughnut

His name was Gerlach. I remember him well.

He’d taken over the general goods/fast food store on the waterfront at the beachside resort which picked up the holidaying and camping crowd coming down from the city, especially in the evening when families and lovers went strolling along the promenade.

Under the previous owners, we had, up one end of the long, rectangular shop, three absolute winners – by the glass shop window on the left, a long conveyor belt doughnut machine which children insisted their parents stop by, watch, then come in and buy from. In the centre were the best fish ’n chips, prepared by a bevy of gorgeous gals and to the right was awkward me, tending the hamburger conveyor belt.

You might have seen these machines – meat patties, eggs, tomato and so on on the top tier, each in its own little metal pan, bun halves on the lower. Customers would stand and watch their own personal burgers coming to fruition. Our little trick with the regulars was to look left and right to see the owner wasn’t watching, then slip a little extra into the pans. Naturally, it had all been costed beforehand.

Another of our tricks was to crack an egg in each hand simultaneously, then break them into the pans without touching the contents and without bits of shell.

But the fish was the real winner. There was a local chap who came in late at night and did all the filleting and crumbing and those fish were out of the bay that evening. Naturally, the chippy girls did a roaring trade, plus we were just a little dearer than most, which had a reverse psychological effect. Those were the good ole days.

Then Gerlach came and bought the business.

First to be hit was the doughnut machine. He had a mechanic in to adjust the nozzle which dropped the dough into the conveyor – made it narrower, in other words. Less doughnut.

Customers commented.

Next he turned to the chippies and told them to put in less chips with each serve, then introduced a scoop which made the process girl-proof. I was castigated for giving too much in my corner and being wasteful. Then he sacked the doughnut girl and the chippie girls were reduced to two, one having to double up with the doughnuts.

Next the girl was instructed to sugar and cinnamonize one side only. Then the cinnamon was dropped. Sales halved. The girl was getting peeved about having to run both sections, she got uppity about it with Gerlach and stormed out.

Next the fish changed. It really did. No longer crumbed and battered, it was now thinly battered and of a lesser quality. Seems that the old chap, the local, had told Gerlach where he could put the proverbial filleting knife and had also stormed out, spreading the word round the local community.

Gerlach retreated into his shell and a sullen tone came over the shop. Girls at the other end started working to regulation, chewing gum on the job and getting sacked and the worst sort replaced them, the ‘whadda-U-want’ type. The shop fell away and there was still half the summer to go.

At this point, due to our disobedience, we still had some custom and a travelling poultry vendor took it into her head that she liked the service I’d given and she gave me a whole frozen turkey. What was a young man to do with a whole frozen turkey?

I consulted my father who came over to Gerlach with me and asked if we could store it in the freezer for a few days until my father returned to the city to work.

‘No.’

‘Pardon?’

‘No. Not unless you share half of it with me,’ was Gerlach’s reply. My father used somewhat intemperate language, to which Gerlach replied, possibly within his rights, ‘You only got that turkey on account of my business. Half is mine.’

We were forced to acquiesce.

The last straw was when the doughnut machine was switched off on the grounds of using too much power and was only to be switched on if there were more than three customers wanting doughnuts. This meant they’d need to wait 15 minutes for the coagulated yellow scum to warm up to 80% optimum to ‘sort of’ make doughnuts from dough which had sat in the funnel half the day.

The shop closed near the end of summer.

[true history] not some milksop concoction

Melanie Phillips addresses a very simple issue:

[A] report funded by the Department for Education and Skills said:

‘Teachers and schools avoid emotive and controversial history for a variety of reasons, some of which are well-intentioned. Staff may wish to avoid causing offence or appearing insensitive to individuals or groups in their classes. In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship.’

This is the multi-cultural do-goodism which has a noble basis but an impossible implementation. Let's face it, any normal, reasonable citizen is going to be friendly, rather than antagonistic to another person he meets.

Would you seriously refuse to shake a black man's hand or talk to a Chinese?

However, there is a simple principle involved here. Britain is Britain, with a Judaeo-Christian tradition and that's that. Therefore, schools should reflect that, using the texts which have been built up over the centuries, warts and all. It's our true history. How can I put it more simply?

It happened.

Therefore, no amount of revisionist rewriting to make it more feminine, homosexual or ethnic friendly is going to alter one jot of what happened. Christmas is Christmas, Easter is Easter and that's that. If we want to celebrate Ramadan or Hanukah in schools, which we did when I was teaching, then these were additional celebrations.

Additional.

What they in no way comprised was some sort of hotch-potch winterval construction with neither basis nor authenticity beyond the vaguely altruistic feeling of school teachers. This lukewarm all-inclusive nonsense is total balderdash.

Particularly when it is not all-inclusive at all but very strongly excludes the Christian tradition and pushes homosexuality as equal in status and value to the norm. This is a serious case of induced curricular imbalance.

As a former head, parents from overseas sent their children to our school [and many others, of course] precisely because we were British and that image they had in their minds had absolutely zero to do with some sort of Brito-Nigerian-Jamaican-Feministic-Homosexual Federation.

I mean - seriously, what is this insanity? Do you really think people visit, seeking some watered-down pseudo-post-modernist Britain?

Yes, be accepting of other ethnicities and by so doing, show the heights our own has reached.

Yes, frown sternly at those who would vilify others but don't damn well try to legislate for it.

Yes, realize there will be homosexuals who have their own lives but don't shove it down our throats or our children's.

Yes, get a bit of reason, a bit of common sense back into what's going on in schools and classrooms.

For goodness sake, let's wake up from this madness and honour our roots, our achievements and create a future which honours our past but looks forward at the same time.

[human energy] most powerful force known to man

Margaret Thatcher famously said:

There is no such thing as Society. There are individual men and women and there are families. [October 31st, 1987, Woman's Own]

If that is so, then there is a great deal of simple cleverness behind the exhortation to:

# 'love your fellow man' and to

# 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'.

Clearly that's an impossible task for the bulk of us but there is a compromise position which works:

# If every person, when he or she goes out for the day, decides to do just one act of kindness that day to someone neither family nor friend, the exponential power behind that would transform society.

# If every person would forgive another just once in the week, rather than pursuing a dispute or a point-scoring exercise, the energy and nerve savings would be astronomical.

# If every person would select the issues on which he or she'll fight to the death, rather than fight every little slight and every little injustice done to him or her, the mental health benefits would be enormous. In my eyes, this is the real philosophy behind 'turn the other cheek'.

Very simple, very do-able and look at the alternative:

Long running, protracted disputes which become old grievances, which inevitably lead to bitterness, poor health and a jaundiced view of humanity and sap the very life out of us and age us before our time.

Better the first idea.

[blogfocus] the idea behind it

The name: it needed to be snappy and to reflect the purpose.

The purpose: to present a paragraph from:

# as wide a range of blogs as possible;

# themed as much as possible;

# mixing known and unknown blogs in a pleasing combination;

The scope: from all over the world, not necessarily Britblog nor Scottish Blog but from everywhere.

Political philosophy: absolutely none, except that the entries must be interesting in themselves, thought proking or both.

Frequency: strangely, when it was twice a week, it took four times as long. This was because a combination of Blogger, my system and my low RAM meant that the post template baulked when the links exceeded 10 and the formatting was done more than twice. Soemtimes the whole post had to be redone.

With the new 3 times a week format, it actually reduces the amount of overall time in the week on Blogfocus by about 40%.

When: it appears on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday evenings, usually around early evening, British time.

Limitations: Obviously there are limitations when one man gathers and collates. I'm always on the lookout for the fresh and quirky, which is the idea behind my own blog and so the Blogfocus fails to be a serious political tome or a home-handywoman's guide. It falls somewhere in between.

Growth: the readership depends on:

# the range of blogs presented and people who view it;

# people who link to it;

# my e-mailing people about it.

E-mailing: this was taking up more and more time, time I should have been visiting people's blogs instead, given limits to overall net time. On the other hand, people liked being individually e-mailed [I never bulk mail] and were more likely to link me, so it's a no win situation. I have to find a solution to this.

Request: to link the Focus. Of course. Only through this will people know about Blogfocus and the range of blogs will expand. When Chris Dillow, Westminster Wisdom, Mr Eugenides, Devil's Kitchen and other good souls link, the number of blogs exponentially increases.

Regrets: few. Maybe that Tim Worstall rarely mentions the Blogfocus.

What's the point? We all surf other blogs but first we must know about them. There are many community schemes going and Blogfocus is just one which expands your blogbase in a less onerous way.