[l'élection] en larmes, en lambeaux

Cliquez!

Nicolas Sarkozy est le candidat pour qui les frais de campagne ont été les plus élevés. Ségolène Royal arrive en deuxième position. Nicolas Sarkozy a dépensé exactement 21.038.891euros, selon le chiffre publié aujourd’hui au Journal officiel. La candidate du parti socialiste a, elle, investi 20.712.043 euros.

[coffee] a good start with new clients

Tea - I know how to prepare it and haven't had any complaints from clients - yet.

Coffee - that's another matter.

Too many during the working day are happy enough to serve from the machine or horror of horrors, even instant. They'll say it's the best instant but it's still instant. There's nothing more designed to make a client feel special than a rich [not necessarily strong], slightly frothy coffee, personally prepared.

Even if it's your secretary who prepares it, it's still personally done and that's the key to the whole matter - time and trouble was taken over this small matter - it goes a long way in business. And what you serve the coffee in and with what is just as important.

Forget the piddly little cups unless it's Turkish and forget mugs because they're a little insulting unless their special mugs. You should have a good tray as well because the serving is part of the whole experience.

My friend has three things going for him, apart from his clear expertise in his field - he's a "looker" [and the ladies find that especially nice], a "charmer" [which everyone likes] plus one more thing:

His coffee is the best in the city and yesterday he gave me a Master Class. Here is his advice. It will sound simple and obvious to you but it wasn't to me and you can't skip any point:

1] Buy finely ground coffee to taste - you probably can't get it that fine yourself;

2] The essential is that it be fresh. This is the biggest issue and if you're only an occasional drinker of coffee - the crux of the matter. Perhaps you and your friend can split a 250g pack each time and then you consume at twice the rate;

3] Have a supply of good, fresh "slivki" [cream]. Forget milk now - it must be cream and it must be the best. Having said that, the long life cream is the next best thing and it will give you two months in the refrigerator;

4] Buy little packs of cinnamon;

5] In an empty coffee tin, put in around 200g of coffee from the pack and one or two heaped teaspoons of cinnamon [no more] and thoroughly mix - the cinnamon must run right through the mix;

6] Select two cups which you yourself find ultra-pleasant to drink coffee from, remembering that it's better in a deeper cup, as there is sediment at the bottom of the cup and put one to two teaspoons of the mix in;

7] Wait till the water [from the bought bottles - not mineral water] is off the boil again [30 seconds] and then pour up to a finger below the top;

8] Open the cream pack and top the cups up with half a finger of cream and lightly whisk the top 3cm of the water;

9] Let it sit for a minute to let everything settle down and then serve with the appropriate dark chocs;

10] Seal everything and store the coffee in a cupboard, never in the fridge.

Again, the key is "personally prepared" and making the client feel special, no matter who he/she is.

Here is an entirely different take on the matter.

[super-duper photo quiz] numero duo

Click photo to zoom. Clues below:

All numbering left to right by row. Needed:

1] Real name and the film which made her famous;

2] Their screen names;

3] Name and the long Vietnam song;

4] Name and first mega-hit;

5] Name and this film;

6] Name and which religion;

7] Name and her Bond film;

8] Name and his Bond film;

9] Group and lead singer;

10] Name and country.

Answers at the end of the link.

[plagiarism] and attribution

Former U.S. senator and current president of the University of Colorado, Hank Brown's firing of University of Colorado Ethnic Studies Professor Ward Churchill followed a number of panels':

"two year's of investigations, to unanimously find a pattern of serious, deliberate and repeated research misconduct that fell below minimum standards of professional integrity. The panels found that Mr. Churchill rewrote history to fit his own theories. Ward Churchill claimed that he was singled out for his free speech."

In an excellent earlier article by Simon Caterson of the Melbourne Age, from November 20, 2004, the thorny question of plagiarism was scrutinized in some detail:

The offence committed by Australia's best-known plagiarist, the former Monash University vice-chancellor David Robinson, was not to borrow heavily from authorities in his work, but to fail to acknowledge every part of his work that was not original.

Robinson was forced to quit his post in 2002 after allegations of misappropriation dating back to the late 1970s and early 1980s were aired in a British newspaper.

I've just discussed this with one of the Russian girls who cleans my flat [another issue] a short time ago and she didn't know the word, even in Russian. When I explained and asked if students did this, knowing full well they did, she smiled and said, "Of course."

The accusation of plagiarism is in itself so rampant that one wonders what constitutes it and what doesn't. Simon Caterson cites:

Recent scandals in the United States involving disgraced journalists, such as former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, involved plagiarism as well as outright fabrication.

Joshua Green recounts [that] Senator Joe Biden was accused by … Governor Michael Dukakis, of plagiarising parts of a speech by the British Labour leader, Neil Kinnock. Further investigation disclosed that Biden had not only misappropriated the speech, but exaggerated his academic qualifications. As a prospective presidential candidate, Biden was finished.

The list goes on and on:

The Times Literary Supplement aired an allegation that Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was not quite the singular masterpiece it had appeared to be. It was known that Lolita was based on a novella called The Enchanter, but no one would think less of Nabokov for plagiarising his own work.

Enter the scholar Michael Maar, who uncovered a 1916 short story entitled Lolita, by a forgotten German writer named Heinz von Lichberg.

And:

Expatriate art critic Robert Hughes was accused of plagiarising the work of another art critic, Patricia Macdonald. Hughes promptly apologised: "To my embarrassment I seem to have cannibalised it, but it was entirely unconscious."

Welshcakes Limoncello gently raised the question with me about copyright on photos, which is a slightly different and yet in some ways a related issue. So let's get down to it.

I consider plagiarism must be deliberate or at least very, very careless.

Many students here lift whole passages from the internet and download them into their research papers, not mentioning one thing about their sources. You'd be drummed out for that in the west. Quoting anything at all unattributed, unless it is so well known there's no dispute, is another example.

Failing to include footnotes or including a "further reading" list at the end, hoping it will be assumed that all these books were read, is another example.

Where one problem comes in is with, say, Wiki. Everyone uses it. If a photo is posted with no attribution, that's where it came from. Many will say that's not good enough and even if you do link, is that enough?

Or the linking problem itself. Should every utterance by someone else be linked or can it just be mentioned as a hat tip? Or can the person just be mentioned in the passage?

And what about Robert Hughes' "unconscious cannabalism"? How many times have you written something quite witty you vaguely remember but it turns out to be someone else's quote? How many times have you written something all your own, an original thought from your own mind and horror of horrors, it appears someone else said it earlier [nothing new under the sun]?

Food for thought.

[Click here for this blog's policy on posts.]

[spam] finally have one

There's a low-life called "knicks" who has been spamming me for the past few days. You'll see this person's spam every so often on various posts and when I see it, I delete it. I'm sure I don't need to warn readers not to hit the site he wants you to.

I wonder what the hell he gets out of this. I never go to his supposed site, I trust you don't so I don't see what he gains. Perhaps he wants me to put word verification back on or moderation. I'm not gonna. I'm just going to delete him.

[municipal officers] brain scans called for

Wastage, sheer wastage. Apoplexy. I need to calm down enough to explain.

I live on a six lane highway and to give the town planners credit, it is neither noisy nor excessively dirty. There are trees down the centre and on either side. Pretty. But people have to cross that road and there are no crossing points, no lights, nothing.

So we take our chances. Because of the traffic light configuration half a kilometre away in either direction, the traffic comes in waves and if one is patient, crossing is no big deal. Noone steps on the grass as there are a number of regular, well worn paths which serve well.

Question - how much would one of those wrought iron fence sections cost? $100? I've just been on our median strip now and they've sunk holes for pouring concrete today and I estimate they have about 2 or 3000 of these fence sections lying on the grass down the length of the road on either side of the median strip.

Purpose? To stop residents crossing. Ostensibly to protect the grass and trees. To stop older residents getting hit by cars and killed.

Guess what? It's going to stop no one. We MUST cross to get to the carparks and bus stops. People will continue to cross and here's the thing - they must now negotiate waist high fences instead of being able to step onto the pathway as before. Can you imagine the mayhem this winter on the slipepry icy roads?

This is going to leave people, especially the older ones, vulnerable to speeding traffic and will cause injuries from falling and the biggie of them all - leave anyone who crosses vulnerable to fines for crossing there instead of walking the half kilometre to the traffic lights and then half a kilometre back again on the other side.

By putting up these fences at an estimated $250 000, they will recoup it from fines from residents and from taxpayers over the next ten years. This also means police deployed to keep an eye on recalcitrant residents.

And for what? For what? Why bother in the first place? Isn't this typical of authority everywhere:

1] No concern whatsoever for the ordinary resident;

2] Half-arsed, super expensive solution to a non-existent problem when the real problems go untouched;

3] The ordinary resident pays through the nose for the inefficiency of the authorities;

4] Rather than the residents having the municipal authorities working for them, the latter see themselves as somehow a governing body to impose their own will on the very people who ostensibly elected them;

5] The lifestyle well-being index drops another five points and makes modern city living just that little bit more unbearable.

I did not order these barricades to be bought. I demand a brainscan be done on all municipal authorities and officers to ascertain the cause of the blockage. You are not "bosses" of us in any shape or form. We are the bosses - the taxpayers. You are just paid, elected officials doing your job for as long as we pay our taxes and deem that the job you're doing is satisfactory.

That's all.