[april first] eleven - three

[open road] the power of youth

At the wheel sat a young man, his hair blown back by the wind. In the blaze of the evening light he looked, not a man, but a young God, a Hero God out of some Northern Saga... It was a fantastic moment. Afterwards, more than one of those present remembered that moment.

- from “10 Little Niggers”, 1939

[light blogging] a few things on the mind

Having to sort out some real life issues today and tomorrow and given that I have no internet access on the weekend, blogging is going to be light. Another factor is that the books are done but they need to be read for the first time from beginning to end for continuity. That's the weekend task.

So it might be one post every few days until Tuesday. Sorry. After that, they'll hopefully proliferate.

[children] not a good time to grow up in britain

He just keeps coming up with these topics.

This time, it's about the teacher who was suspended for filming pupil misbehaviour and supplying it for a documentary:

Note what the court criticised her for and what it suspended her teaching licence for. Ms Dolan, who also exposed apparent attempts to dupe Ofsted inspectors,..


Still it’s no biggy duping Ofsted, as any reasonable person not a raving fascist Tory would have thought, and so on to the thing that hurts; really huts, a liberal’s sensibilities. …breached the trust of pupils and abused her position. Now she didn’t film them naked, or name them (if the clip is representative), and all she did was blur out their faces and watch them monkeying about.

She states that this behaviour was typical of 14 out of 16 schools she taught in.

So what ‘trust’ did she betray; the trust so tenderly placed by innocent little children into her unscrupulous hands? The trust not to show them running about and shouting and leaping on desks and preventing any learning from going on?

Now that indirectly tunes in with what I wanted to blog about today - what's happening to our children. My mate and I were discussing this and he said that whereas in our own childhood, we were on our bikes, playing in the street or going up to the woods, seeing a slice of life along the way and thrown onto our own resources, kids now fall into two categories:

1. Those whom mum and dad want to tie to the apron strings and protect at all costs, in line with Gordo's vision for Britain. This is a result of the paedo hysteria and the beserk Health and Safety rules which don't let you even use certain colours in paints because they'll harm the eyes;

2. Chavs on the street.

Just as the middle-class is dividing into the new euro-serfs and those who've joined the haughty rich [or would like to], so kids are being subdivided into classes.

Is there any chance we'll ever get back to some sort of sanity in the upbringing and education of children and if so, when? After the current crop are well and truly destroyed within?

[ebook readers] are they the future

Now this one is interesting to me, particularly with my book finished and ready to post. Just how effective are readers anyway?

Frstapr noted that all current ebook readers are aimed at the dextrous adult market. They have tiny buttons, tinier memory cards (the txtr will use pin sized micro-SD cards) and many of them seem to require bizarre gestures to do things like turn a page. And if you get the gesture wrong you turn two pages or exit the book or something. Furthermore they are notoriously fragile - a trawl of the mobileread forums will turn up any number of stories of expensive ebook readers with cracked screens and other defects.

L'Ombre goes into the latest developments.

[antidisestablishmentarianism] misses the real issue

Toque brings up an interesting one:

The latest CEP press release tackles the Church of England’s inclination towards ignoring England’s national day. Hostility towards the concept of Englishness runs very deep within the UK Government and Establishment to which the bishops belong.

This is because all major institutions are white anted at the top. An archbishop is a closet spokesman for Them. You say, 'Rubbish.' I reply, 'Why not?' If you are pushing your agenda for a world currency, European bloc and a restructured economy, the organs of spirituality, education, law, medicine et al are all going to be infiltrated.

Read Sonus in the sidebar.

[international currency] what chance

Interesting report in Pravda:

US President Barack Obama has publicly opposed Russia’s initiative for the first time during his presidency. Obama rejected Russia’s idea to replace the dollar with a new international currency, which immediately led to the growth of the US dollar on the international financial market.

Russia put forward a suggestion to the IMF to look into the opportunity to create a supernational reserve currency which would be issued by international financial institutions. Russia also suggested a diversification of the currency structure of reserves, operations of national banks and international financial organizations.

Many countries, including Iran, China, Kazakhstan and several Arab states, supported Russia’s idea to replace the dollar with a new currency. The governments of those countries believe that the doubtful dollar settlement in the oil industry will soon become a matter of the past.

Now what's happening with the rouble and does Russia mean the Euro or the world currency currently being mooted?

[thought for the day] the love of conflict

“Well,” said Mr Satterthwaite slowly, “you see, I've known a good many young men, and these emotional scenes upset them very much.

Women now, can go through a scene like that and feel positively better for it afterwards. It acts like a safety valve for them, steadies their nerves down and all that. But I can see this young man going away with his head in a whirl, sick and miserable …”

[anomalies] the pain of correcting them

We were discussing the ridiculous moment where the small craft is caught between James Bond's transport plane and the rocky terrain. It just wouldn't happen like that.

This is also the reason that the editing of my texts has been such a pain.

Example. There is a character, Hugh who made a promise to a woman, Genevieve and then she disappeared off the scene. Meanwhile, a second woman, Nicolette, who has a boyfriend in a town, Melun, south of Paris, has ideas about this Hugh. Genevieve returns and the only solution is to introduce her to the boyfriend in Melun [although other things come in to complicate this].

Trouble was, they all grew up in Melun and so the odds were they might know one another anyway. Also, the two women are best friends and so he would most likely have been mentioned quite often. So it's an unlikely scenario to have to be introduced.

This involves going back and redoing the plot, which then affects action further down the line which depends on them being introduced and not having known each other and so on and so on and so on.

This is not the same as gaffs, of course, which can be deliberately left in. Do you recall, in The Bourne Ultimatum, how when he limps at the end, it's on a different leg to earlier?

My mate speaks of 'suspending disbelief' during the film or book in order to follow the action through to its conclusion. If you see the glaring anomaly during the action, you can be so annoyed you'll stop watching or reading.

People say you need to suspend disbelief anyway with Bond but there are some things right OTT which you can accept and some which are minor technicalities which annoy.

[wisdom] does it require humility

Pisces wrote:

Day by day I became more and more dumbfounded by his philosophical offerings. I kept trying to put my finger on exactly what is was that I found so exasperating. It wasn’t just the emptiness of his daily aphorisms or even the messianic air that fills his blogspace like the smell of farts captured in an airtight room, it was the air of deep respect that the man seems to hold for his own wisdom.

Oblique comments like this make one stop and self-examine, 'Am I like that? For that matter, are you?'