This is so completely cool!

Where did the computer go?
Check out the tasty new iMac G5!

From The Register:

Count Dracula had better watch his back - the Romanians have opened a Jedi Academy and it can only be a matter of time before graduates are working their way through Transylvania at weekends, smiting the undead with their light sabres, between bouts of trading collectibles and arguing as to whether The Phantom Menace was merely the worse Star Wars film or actually the worse film ever made.

The academy is apparently the brainchild of Adrian Pavel, one of the founders of Romania's Star Wars Club — which now numbers 1,000 members and encompasses journalists, doctors, management, academics, lawyers and even politicians.

We say apparently, because this announcement is from Romanian tabloid Libertatea which is printed in, well, Romanian - as is the local custom.

We're pretty certain, though, that wannabe Jedis have to complete a 100-poser questionnaire in 24 hours in order to gain entry to the academy. Readers who fancy brushing upon their Romanian, flexing their Star Wars trivia muscles and then proving themselves in the eternal struggle between good and evil can register here.

Arnie The Governator is planning a vast car boot sale to get rid of all the state's surplus property.

David Dickinson rumoured to be "Wetting himself".

Another one from the "Oddly enough" files:

A student is being prosecuted for deliberately blocking a toilet...

(Actually I have some sympathy for him as he has IBS, same as me)

Happy birthday to this prince of desserts! Yes, strange as it may seem, this is the centenery of the humble Banana Split. Click on the pic to read about the inventor.

Made for each other: Katie Boring marries Nathan Bland

Kudos to the Demon Internet executive who decided their helpdesk number should end in 666!

OK, I might not have mentioned this before, but I'm an advocate of renewable energy. I'd actually love to take my house off the national grid and produce our own power. Last time I looked though, it would take almost ten years for a viable system to start paying for itself.

With an oil crisis looming, and no sign of the middle east settling down any time soon, companies around the world are finally taking renewable sources of energy seriously. This report on harnessing wave-power is interesting.

Closer to home, here's a few links I've had lying around for a bit:

• The Rainbow Trading Posts's online booklet catalogue: Full of instructions for building small-scale environmentally friendly projects, including a wind-powered battery charger and a welding kit using car parts.

• The FINCA Forum: Really for people trying to live the simple life in Spain and Portugal, but it's got a good section on self sufficiency, including this article on how to make a wind turbine out of an alternator and an advertising board.

• The news section of the National Energy Foundation's website: Especially this article on how most of our homes could be heated from our back gardens.

• And a place I'm dying to visit, the Centre for Alterative Technology in Machynlleth.

OK, it had to happen:

Ladies and gentlemen, the hamster powered nightlight!

Want one! Want one! Want one!

(click on the pic for details)

Here's an article I wrote for the Times Educational Supplement Online a couple of years ago. I just discovered it when doing the narcissistic google search for my name. It turned up on a teaching resource site All I can imagine is that it struck a nerve. Quite chuffed about that!

In my second year of Senior school, I remember one of my teachers telling us that he would be teaching differently from then on, that we would be given “Occasional Days” off, on an occasional Monday so that the new system of examinations, GCSE’s could be prepared for. I remember a very real shift in the emphasis of their teaching from rote repetition of facts and figures, from the practised and somewhat staid imparting of rules, to a more hectic, unfamiliar Hands-On approach, which was most evident in my English and Science lessons. At that point, I’d had two years of schooling under the GCE system and had done well. My Junior schooling had prepared me well for the “Big School” and I felt content under the system that had, for 30 years or so, been the recognised system: you got your O levels, if you were lucky or clever enough, you went on to A levels and eventually on to a Degree, though at the age of 14, I had trouble imagining getting into College, let alone the hallowed halls of University.

Then one day, I think in the Summer term of my Second year, June 1986, we were told the news that would in turns elate and frustrate us, that we would be the second year of students to sit the new style GCSE exams. I admit at the time I didn’t like the name and couldn’t see the point in restructuring the whole system - I couldn’t see the reason for altering a proven, worthwhile and respected qualification. Teachers from then on, especially in the first year of the new curriculum, became more and more hectic in their preparations, in their teaching style. Well loved methods of teaching were abandoned in favour of hastily prepared “Question and answer” type sessions where we were expected to read a passage and debate it, while we had been made aware that the teacher would be grading us on our participation. For a shy, mildly spoken 14-15 year-old, it became apparent that his grades would fall in favour of the loudmouthed, show-offish, bully types. It became a regular occurrence for us to receive letters at morning registration time telling us that we had a one-day holiday the following Monday for the purposes of Teacher Training, something that in two years, and I suspect for a good few years previously, had been all but unheard-of, especially in our modestly sized, 400 strong school in the suburbs of Birmingham.

Maths lessons became, conversely, less “Hands-On”, with teachers doling out new handbooks as we shuffled into the room and slouching at their desk while we performed three months of trigonometry, three months of fraction work, three months of calculus and – horror of horrors – three months of differential equations. While their professionalism could never be brought into question, their love of the job began to waver noticeably.

It was difficult to see how much this change altered the attitudes and enthusiasm of the teaching staff from our point of view, 96 teenage hormone packed boys who became increasingly aware of their position as government Guinea Pigs, perhaps more so than the year above us, who would be the first to sit these exams, because we would be the first year to be taught the new syllabus from their “Options” onwards, when, in the opinion of our school, the teaching really began, we would be the first year where results would be compared to other GCSE results, where league tables of schools were already being discussed in Whitehall, where we would go into the workplace facing the aftermath of the confusion over this new system, no longer GCE A-C, or CSE 1-5 but this baffling A-G scoring system, where one would be faced with the daunting and enviable task of explaining to recruiting staff, heads of departments and recruitment consultants that it wasn’t a CSE C grade, which was rather bad, but it was a G-CSE C grade which amounted to a GCE pass. This is something we all had to contemplate, and we were not getting reassurances we needed from Government that these results, our final grades would be worthwhile qualifications that would be taken seriously by employers after school, and indeed a certain number of my friends and peers did face discouraging results after gaining good exam scores, as employers simply did not accept the calibre of the new system.

As the years droned by, “Occasional Days” or “Baker Days” after Education Secretary Kenneth Baker under whom the GCSE’s were established and implemented became more and more frequent. Occurring at least once a month, and followed each time by newly despondent haggard looks on our teacher’s faces. After two and a half years teaching us Physics, one of our teachers went so far as to leave on health grounds, to be replaced by a wonderful inner-city teacher who taught us the entire syllabus in three months and saved at least one class from failure. It was obvious that this man was not coping with the change in emphasis and the undermining of his subject, one that he’d taught, presumably for at least two decades. It was only two years after his departure that we began to see the integration and further denigration of the sciences and “Dual Certification” introduced, whereby the study of Physics, Electronics, English and Biology became, instead of separate, specialised subjects, one general and unsatisfying mess of a subject, with chameleon-esque course titles which would baffle parents for years to come.

Our mock exams approached with trepidation not just from us but our teachers. This would be the first time they would be able to prepare a group of students thoroughly for the tests ahead, and we were aware of it. An undercurrent of dissatisfaction and “make-do” was obvious as we sat cobbled together pieces of previous exam papers in an attempt, with only one year’s experience, to prepare us for the exams we would sit in one month’s time, then again “for real” in another six months.

My grades eventually arrived, whilst I was on holiday, in late August. To my dismay, and over a background of tumultuous praise and, I suppose Politicians Spin that the GCSE’s had again shown an improved standard of excellence, with 85% or some such number attaining some grade or other under the new exam structure, I learned that I had only gained three usable grades, and had, for some unfathomable reason, failed Maths by one grade (But it was all right, I had passed ALL my GCSE’s, albeit with four D’s (CSE grade 2) and a mortifying G (CSE grade 5)), so there followed the inevitable and rather easy Resit Year at Sixth Form College, where I quite satisfyingly breezed to a C in Maths and to a B in French, a subject I was new to and at which none of my year at Senior School had gained more than a C. Armed with my five good GCSE’s (GCE’s) I discovered that these qualifications bore far less weight than they did a year previously, as the country had hit yet another depression and jobs were not just scarce but unbelievably rare, with one source quoting that at least 200 people were applying for each and every job on the market, with even slightly imperfect applications and Curricula Vitas becoming bin-fodder without so much as a second glance. It was an employers’ market and there was no place for a shy 17 year old with a vast naiveté of the world of work.

So I sat A levels.

Meanwhile, my younger sister began studying and sitting her GCSE’s some three years after me. By then more Training Days were being sat, Maths teaching had joined the ranks of the ridiculous with coursework being set and agonised over by teachers and pupils who together couldn’t figure out what the coursework was supposed to achieve. I remember sitting with friends of mine who had been set Maths coursework, which involved dividing a field of sheep into units with certain lengths of fencing, and having read the aims of the coursework, and the instructions, coming away truly and thoroughly baffled, with no more clue of how to proceed than, I had been informed, the teacher had.

Shortly after completing my A levels, I fund myself, like so many others at the time, on the dole. Collecting my Income Support, once a fortnight and waiting the three months until the dull and pointless Restart Interview, where you would be coached, finally, on how to construct a C.V. that someone might actually read. A job did come to me through the Interview, albeit a month of Temping for an insurance firm that believed that Asbestos was a healthy atmosphere to keep its workers in.

As can be imagined, between the ages of 20 and 25, heavily involved with clubs, pubs, girlfriends and bedsits, my knowledge of the secondary education system becomes somewhat diminished, and the tidbits I have gleaned in that time lead me to believe that Teacher Training days became a fortnightly event, even occurring once a week. That new schemes, incentives and pressures were being piled, almost weekly on already emotionally and professionally bruised teachers. It became a recurring news headline that once again the Government planned a review and alteration to the system of teaching one subject or another. Each time, as in my school days, there would be images of haggard teachers, buckling under the strain of having to rethink their lesson plans to fit in with new practises and guidelines as handed down from the great LEA in the sky. From 1986, teachers have not been left alone, the profession becoming more and more about paperwork and meetings and less and less about teaching and providing social skills. Good teachers these days have to surf waves of red tape and tiptoe around international childrens’ rights laws, to the extent that a teacher has become barely more than a target and not the figure of respect that they need to be in order to do their jobs.

These days a teachers lot is certainly not a happy one, with danger and inco-operation classroom norms. Traditional methods of controlling a classroom, including the ability to exclude disruptive students are being frowned upon from the ultra-PC powers that be. Teachers have also to learn to tread the ever-shifting sands of the curriculum changes, new memos and edicts being forced on overworked staff on a far too regular basis. Teaching is definitely NOT the career it used to be.

So why do I want to follow that career? Why in gods name would I want to be subjected to the demoralising undermining of my hard-won respect? Why would I want to force unwanted knowledge down uncaring gullets? Why would I want to sit up for ¾ of the night revising class schedules and re-marking term papers in accordance with the guideline memo from the EU that got Emailed to me during Eastenders? Why would I want to be complaining to the unions once a week about how I can’t do my job under these conditions, that I need more money for the work I’m expected to do, that I’ve destroyed my social life, for no reward so that a bunch of the ungrateful children can trampoline or play football until 8 at night? Does job satisfaction really take any part in a modern, 21st century Teachers working life?

The answer is, of course that I have no idea. Education is the one job I have any protracted experience of. Education is the one job I feel that I could make a difference in. Education, teaching is the one area of skill where I feel that I have any aptitude at all. I’ve given short lectures, successfully. I’ve given practical demonstrations and helped difficult students to understand simple problems. I’ve sat in a classroom and had nothing to do because my opening comments have been good enough to settle the class down to a productive and satisfying day’s work. I’ve made class schedules and kept to them. I’ve been a teacher, even for the shortest while and I know I enjoyed it, I know I can do it and I know I can be good at it. I also know it’s the only damn job I have any chance of being any good at.

Also, I want to make a difference to the education system. A bold statement indeed. I want to make Whitehall sit up and take notice of the plight of our profession. I want a better working life for these hardworking, underpaid punchbags that we call teachers. For many years, since the introduction of the GCSE system it has been obvious to me that the revisions being constantly made to the curriculum, that each fine tune and re-working makes teachers jobs more and more difficult, that it is becoming glaringly obvious that any system that has so many flaws in it as to need constant reappraisal is not fit to be taught to our youth. At least that is what non-participants would surmise. That is what the outsider must be thinking – there’s something wrong if the system needs constant revision.

This is simply not the case. GCSEs DO work, and they work well, just as they are. It’s true that the education system pre-1986 was in a rut; it’s true that the teaching styles used for O levels were outdated and were in need of an overhaul. But 15 years of constant overhaul has murdered the profession to the point where the government has to offer sweeteners and higher education incentives to would-be teachers. Disillusionment, the undermining of and inability to enforce discipline and the constant monitoring and revision of the education system and of individual syllabuses are the major causes of teacher dissatisfaction at this moment in time. So my message to the powers that be, a simple message that would have profound affects on the working lives of the teachers and the learning lives of the students, is this:

Stop analysing.

Another study of how the subject can be taught is simply not needed. One thing we MUST learn from O level days is that the longer we stay with a certain system, the better teachers get at teaching it, the better the students get taught and the more confident teachers get. Confidence is at an all-time low, faith in the system is at an all-time low, and it can all stop, it can all be turned around if you just stop mucking about with the curriculum. Once a decade is fine. Once every five years is perhaps more reasonable. Once a year or once a month is shattering the profession. Let the poor sods do their job and stop lumbering them with more and more rules to adhere to, stop thrusting new angles and new goals at them, stop introducing new exams and new streaming methods. Let these people do their jobs.

To the supposed New Government, I would say this: Get the beaurocrats out of the classroom and let the Teachers teach.

Mark "lost in the desert" Thatcher has been accused of trying to take over Equatorial Guinea.

Equatorial Guinea has responded, saying "We're not that desperate, thanks"

Tell me it's not true!

Star Wars creator George Lucas could be poised to make three sequels to the original space opera trilogy, according to insiders at Lucasfilm.

According to fan site Theforce.net, employees at Lucas's company Industrial Light and Magic have all been made to sign non-disclosure agreements to promise not to talk about the possibility of episode's seven, eight and nine being made.

Now industry insiders are predicting the director will make the follow-ups, which pick up where 1983's Return of the Jedi left off, despite insisting he would never be lured into filming them.

A posting on the site says, "You didn't hear this from me, but you might be curious as to why everyone at ILM just signed NDA's saying that they will not discuss Star Wars episodes 7, 8, or 9.

"Since they're not being made, why the NDA's? Of course, since when has Lucas been consistent?"

This is my mum:

When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple

with a red hat that doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

and satin candles, and say we've no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I am tired

and gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

and run my stick along the public railings

and make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

and pick the flowers in other people's gardens

and learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

and eat three pounds of sausages at a go

or only bread and pickles for a week

and hoard pens and pencils and beer nuts and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

and pay our rent and not swear in the street

and set a good example for the children.

We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?

So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised

When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

(Jenny Joseph, 1961)

Get this: Eight pixels cost Microsoft millions!

Just when the antitrust case went in sleeping mode, Microsoft managed to get into yet another fiasco. This time the software giant is hit by information misrepresentation or shall we say goof up.

The lack of multicultural savvy attitude cost the software giant millions of dollars.

Microsoft products have been banned in some of the biggest markets, including India because of eight wrongly colored pixels, a bad choice of music and a bad English-to-Spanish dictionary.

Tom Edwards, head of Microsoft's geopolitical strategy team told a conference in Glasgow, how one of the biggest companies in the world managed to offend one of the biggest countries in the world with a software slip-up, CNet Asia reported.

When coloring in 800,000 pixels on a map of India, Microsoft colored eight of them a different shade of green to represent the disputed Kashmiri territory. The difference in greens meant Kashmir was shown as non-Indian, and the product was promptly banned in India. Microsoft was left to recall all 200,000 copies of the offending Windows 95 operating system software to try and heal the diplomatic wounds. "It cost millions," Edwards said.

If this was not enough, Microsoft used chanting of the Koran used as a soundtrack for a computer game, which led to great offence to the Saudi Arabia government. The company later issued a new version of the game without the chanting, while keeping the previous editions in circulation because US staff thought the slip wouldn't be spotted, but the Saudi government banned the game and demanded an apology. The game was then withdrawn.

The software giant managed to further offend the Saudis by creating another game in which Muslim warriors turned churches into mosques. That game was also withdrawn.

Microsoft has also managed to upset women and entire countries. A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between "not specified," "male" or "bitch," because of an unfortunate error in translation.

Microsoft has also seen its unfortunate style of diplomacy have an effect in Korea, Kurdistan, Uruguay and to China--where a cartographical dispute saw Chinese employees hauled in front of the government.

Edwards said that staff members are now sent on geography courses to try to avoid such mishaps. "Some of our employees, however bright they may be, have only a hazy idea about the rest of the world," he said.

Letdown of the weekend:

Jeepers Creepers

I had been sort of looking forward to having a look at this film. I normally can't bear horror flicks, having watched far too many "the making of..." documentaries to take any of them seriously. But I'd given myself a task of at least giving the benefit of the doubt to the recent revival of the genre with films like "Urban Legend", "Scream" and the like. I quite like a few of them, even.

But this film...

I spent the whole time ranting at the screen. The leading male has a facial range equal only to Keanu Reeves - that is, one expression. The girl, while displaying some redeeming qualities is not much more than a cliche. There's the usual self referential in-jokes and something at the end that the reviewers on IMDB seem to think is a shocking twist. I was reading the titles waiting for the twist to appear. I mean, what kinda twist is this: "Buffy"-extra-monster-bloke sniffs both siblings, "buffy"-extra-monster-bloke chooses the lad, "buffy"-extra-monster-bloke flys off and kills the lad. What did I miss? It was funnily ironic that this guy's one expression was wide-eyed cartoon horror and he ends up with big gaping holes where those eyes used to be.

Although not quite as bad as Ven Helsing, this film is a terrible failiure.

Biggest Waste of Bandwidth this Weekend:

School of Rock

God I tried to like it. Anyone who's watched "Spinal Tap" is probably supposed to adore this film. Well, I didn't and I make no apologies. Jack Black, the lead singer of Tenacious D and the lead in the film comes across as nothing more than a sad loser desparately trying to "keep the dream alive" despite being - let's face it - delusional and embarrasing.

The feeble attempts at a morality tale fell thoroughly flat, the abortive semi-romance with the headmistress of the school felt like an embarrassed nod to the hollywood executives demands for "something for the chicks" and the whole central plot seemed heavily false and forced.

This is a film which simply does not satisfy. I caught myself huffing impatiently as laboured scene after laboured scene was scraped over my retinae. Like the music, it's not big and it's not clever. While I like Tenacious D's music, I do hope Jack Black doesn't get back to the silver screen again.

I've been downloading a few albums I've been fascinated by but never got around to buying today:

• Led Zep's greatest hits
• Cream's greatest hits
• Nirvana's back catalogue
• Pantera's back catalogue
• Three volumes of Air Guitar classics

Now, my Missus and I have a game we play with compilations, which basically involves me trying to name tracks from the first few bars. I did wonderfully well on the 80's collections we got recently and reasonably well on the Air Guitar albums, but it got me thinking, what if I'd been born ten or twenty years earlier and gone through my formative years in the 60's or 70's? What music would I have been into?

Well, I know I would have loved the Beatles for a start - the psychedelic stuff of their later period for sure. I like Aerosmith's 70's tunes nad I've always had a weak spot for Dylan, Hendrix and Marley. On the other hand, I love Motorhead and Rush. On the whole though, I think I'd have been a hippy.

Queuing up Led Zep and Cream in Winamp, I skipped quickly through the Led Zep classics - Kashmir, Whole Lotta Love, Dazed and Confused, Immigrant song (I avoided Stairway to heaven), but sat entranced through Cream's sublime sound. Clapton surely is a god.

Yeah, I would have been a hippy - until 1976, then it would have been punk time. After that? Well, it's gotta be rock, heavy metal and grunge. All this interspersed with healthy doses of live jazz and good ol' chicago blues.

Yep, that's me. Contradictions all over the place.

(For the record, we have about three and a half weeks of continuous music on our computer, two and a half days of which is bloody christmas music. Now I know at least two people who are reading this and thinking "is that all?" Well to you I say "Yep, and I'm happy with it")

Finally finished "Billy"

It's been a while since I read a book that made me think about my outlook on life. Am I really so comfortable with myself? Is this, the sum total of who I am and who I always will be, this package of flesh bone and mind, is this the thing I'm pleased to have ended up with?

Yes.

I have something in common with Billy Connolly. He too would love to be a travelling hobo, carrying his world on his back, living on his wits and the goodwill of humanity. I dream of just walking out on all this, of following my heart and disappearing. The Australians call it "going walkabout".

There's a little story in one of my Doctor Who novels, about a travelling man who keeps scraps of paper in his pocket with pieces of his name written on them. Now and again, he invites people to join his journey and gives one of these scraps, a part of his name, so that they might be changed by it when they leave him and carry on their own journeys.

When all the little pieces of paper are gone, the little wandering man knows he will fade away, but he doesn't mind because all those parts of himself he left with those people he's met along his path keep his essence alive in some small way.

It's just a little silly metaphor in the book, relating to how the Doctor makes an impression on the companions who share his adventures, but I loved that little story. It kinda spoke to me about my own hopes and ambitions. I hope I've had an influence on the people I've met along the way. I hope someone I've touched comes away a little richer for the experience.

I think that's the greatest compliment I could be paid, that I'd changed someone's life.

That's why it's so important that I do a good job raising my children. It's my job to mould their small lives, to write their future to an extent, to armour them for the battles ahead but also to help them recognise the joy of living.

It's not entirely satisfying to know I'm third on Yahoo's results when searching for "pictures of diseased genitals"

And let's all join hands in shouting out a big ICK! To the person from Toronto who came here after doing that very search.

Hope you found what you were looking for...or not...

Yes, I know it's late.

I've got insomnia thanks to my latest attack of gout* and a desire to finish "Billy".

Tonight we listened to a recording of one of his Albert Hall concerts, and I have to say, listening to his stories when knowing the background to them and knowing the context, what else is going on in hs life at the time gives a far more profound edge to his performance. There's a new respect for him, now I know the hardship he's faced.

Billy Connolly will never fail to bring out a true aching laugh, but now also, in his more introspective moments, like we see in his "World Tour of Scotland", he'll also manage to bring a lump to the ol' hedgewitch's throat.

--
* - Quick shout out to the Lloyd's Pharmacy at the Fox & Goose, who originally stiffed me for 38 gout tablets, but saw me right in ten seconds flat. Cheers!

Not much going on at the moment, so to fill a gap, here's a list of the world's 100 most powerful women.

Who would have thought that just three miles from our house is a hotbed of Terrorism and Illegal Immigrants?

OK, the illegal immigrants I find easy to believe, but terrorism?

*** UPDATE ***

OK, so the actual target house is only two houses away from where friends of ours live. They looked out the bedroom window when they heard a scuffle to see police with automatic weapons storming the place. Our mate Mike is on the reports, being interviewed by the BBC and Independant news.

Very good, and just a little scary. They only moved in a few weeks back. Good choice guys!

The cameraman who filmed The Blair Witch Project has been killed in a plane crash in Florida.

The report says he'd worked on over 30 other independant films, and dies at the age of 35, only 4 years older than me.

I really liked Blair Witch - I didn't think it lived up to it's hype, mainly because I'd never been duped into thinking it was real, but the cinematography was astounding. The man did a great job on that film and I hope to see more of his stuff one day.

A sad loss of a growing talent.

I like it!

Ad-free blogging is here thanks to the New Blogger Navbar

It comes in blue, tan, black or silver and is very cool.

Just ignore the "Go to next blog" button when you get here.

I used to write the odd poem or two. I have a notebook that's full of synopses for stories I'll probably never write. I have the first 10,000 words of a novel I always meant to write.

Yesterday I came up with the first poem I've written in ages. It's about my childhood:

Tap, tap tap tap
Thud....Thud...Thud
"Did you see that thing on the news yesterday?"
BAM

and that's all I'm saying about that.

Just a quick head-up for some huge spoilers for the next Harry Potter book

And as a followup, let me offer wry thanks to google for lumping me with some BiPolar Disorder self help course, and the "Ultimate Personality Test".

OK, OK, you got me too...

Twins rowing in their blogs here and here.

Now, as I know these people, I could start going on in a similar vein about blogs being weapons of mass distraction or somesuch.

But instead, I'm just going to point them at Google's excellent and hilarious contextual advertising. One brother has US election and Toy company ads, and the other has Charity and Disabled Organisation ads.

Thank you google for your accurate and frankly rather funny appraisal of the whole event.

It's late, and I really wish I'd seen those posts a lot earlier!

Are you a trekkie?

Are you bored?

Try this.

We live in a world where innocent tourists die in a coach crash and a convicted rapist wins £7,000,000 on the Lottery.

I'm not as disgusted as I might be at the latter story. It's more a case of...well...despair really. Here I am, doing my best to raise my kids well, doing all the work in helping my partner strugle out of disabling depression, working my backside off when I get to work at all, wondering from week to week how we can find the money to cover all our expenses, watching the red letters come through the door each and every day, but twice a week I watch those balls get chosen and twice a week my fantasies of buying a farm and opening it as a campsite, setting up trust funds for the kids and working out both our families financial problems evaporate as we match less than two numbers.

I mean, where's the justice? We have a hard life - granted not as hard as some, but much harder than others, so when do we get a break? When do we get the well deserved rest? There's a millionaire rapist in prison while we go without.

When's it our turn?

Okay, I know this looks like a joke, and believe me I checked the date, but you have to believe me, this is really happening:

A US University research group is using common inkjet printers to print BIO-ORGANIC material!

Flesh!

Heart tissue!

Bone tissue!

I'm still not sure I believe it, but Canon is already hard at work trying to PRINT actual ORGANS!

Read the report here.

Dear God, have a look at this

It's the "educational Philosophy" behind Boohbah, the ITV equivalent of Teletubbies.

They look like furry foreskins and the show is frankly the freakiest thing I've seen in a good while. And I watch Cbeebies every day!

The message this "Philosophy" imparts is that everything can be learned through dance.

Dance can teach you maths, increase your language skills and - most controversially - involve you in activity.

Well, if I'd only known before! Does that mean I'm retarded because I can't dance?

*sigh*

One thing is beginning to really get my back up - not realy a hissing, spitting, kill-someone kind of rage, but more like the jar your spine gets when you go over a speed bump:

It's this American custom:

"The dollar hovered uneasily at lower levels versus the euro and yen Monday after weaker than expected U.S. jobs data Friday sent it spinning to its biggest one-day loss..."

"top weekend movie with $24.4 million, according to studio estimates Sunday."

"Jeff Gordon couldn't wait to kiss the bricks Sunday"

Gaah!

It's that stubborn refusal to separate the day from the event with either a word or a comma. "Euro and Yen Monday" - that's a title, not a timing. "Euro and Yen ON monday, or "Euro and Yen, Monday" scans so much better!

As a rule, I couldn't care less about grammatical abberations - languag's first duty is communication, and if the meaning is successfully communicated, the choice of words is up to you. But this one thing, as I read a lot of US-based news reports, is really beginning to rankle.

This place is five minutes walk from where i live




And to prove it, I'll post some pictures of it and the other building, the wonderful "Saracen's Head".

It's in the middle of a graveyard and for years i assumed it was the Gravekeeper's Lodge. It is however a five hundred year old grammar school which has just won £3.6 million in the BBC's Restoration series. Now, at first glance this show seems a bit harsh: There were some beautiful buildings in the competition and many of them are incredibly worthy of saving, so to imagine that these buildings get immediately bulldozed as a result of losing the show is quite distressing.

Luckily this isn't the case. The publicity of being on the show has raised the profile of all the contenders. On the final show last night, most of the contenders, when asked how much money they'd need said "We've got most of what we need". So this show and the public exposure it's lent the contenders is a priceless champion in the fight to preserve our rich heritage.

I'm melting!

According to the EVIL clock in our living room, it's been over 27 celcius in the house for three days now.

OK, there's places in the world that would pray for it to be that cold, but here in Birmingham we're just not used to it.

It's been to hard to sleep, got four hours last nigth, which is about all I've had for about a week. I'm officially exhausted and the kids are running rings around me.

So I'm letting them run riot and get nice and burned outside while I upload a video of them at a funfair that happened around here over last weekend. Check the Clan on Camera site for that and other vids, optimised for Dialup connections.

Now how about this for a good idea?

Clear solar panels.

Not satisfied with providing solar electricity, it can act as a regular projection screen too, so you can turn your office into a powerhouse by day and a cinema at night. I'm impressed!

I'm a day late but Happy Lammas!

Also known as Lughnassadh, this is what the Byzant Scriptorium has to say about it:

The autumn season contains three harvests, and Lughnassadh is the first of these, the time when the first corn harvest is cut. Lughnassadh is named after Lugh (pronounced 'loo'), a Celtic deity of light and wisdom. At Lughnassadh, bread from the first harvest was eaten in thanks, and this tradition was continued in the Christian church's Lammas ('loaf-mass') service, where the first loaf would be blessed at mass.

In terms of the Goddess cycle, Lughnassadh is sometimes considered as the time of transformation of the Goddess into her aspect as pregnant Earth Mother. The God is getting weaker as the days grow shorter, but his rebirth is assured as he is also present as the Goddess's unborn child. Though the God is often considered as dying at Samhain, there is a sacrificial aspect to Lughnassadh, with the Corn King being cut down to be transformed into the life-giving fruits of the harvest and resurrected as the new crop the following year. Deities and symbols associated with agriculture and harvest are all appropriate for Lughnassadh, and a symbolic eating of bread is often an important part of celebrations at this time of year.

Lughnasadh is a time to take stock and be thankful for what we have and what we have achieved. It is a time for sharing and appreciation, a time to consider our situation and learn the lessons of the ways in which we have reaped what we have sown, for good or for ill. It is also an auspicious time for deciding how to get the most from ongoing situations or projects, and how to bring more negative influences to an end.

Well, I'm definitely spending some time taking stock of my life, and what I see is relatively good.

Wahey! More than 1,000 people have graced this little corner of the interweb, and it just so happens that I know the person who was the 1,000th visitor...

So everyone head over to Mark's Blog to congratulate him!

And a big "Hello" to the latest subscriber to the Hedgewitch mailing list!

Yes! It's personality test time again!

The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Third Level of Hell!
Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Level	Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)	Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)	Low
Level 2 (Lustful)	High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)	High
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)	Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)	Moderate
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)	High
Level 7 (Violent)	High
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)	High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)	High

Take the Dante's Inferno Hell Test

Just added some stuff to the Yahoo group and added a google search box to the site. Nothing interesting, just stuff I've meant to do fro a while.

Bit of an update on the Clan on Camera site too.

Smash 'em, boil 'em, crush 'em, nail 'em to a tree, give 'em to your kids, digital memory cards just keep on going!

Get this: My results from the Neuroses-o-matic!

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid:	Low
Schizoid:	Low
Schizotypal:	Low
Antisocial:	Low
Borderline:	Low
Histrionic:	Low
Narcissistic:	Moderate
Avoidant:	Low
Dependent:	Low
Obsessive-Compulsive:	Low
-- Personality Disorder Test - Take It! --

(Taken from Mark's Blog)

Moderate Narcissist huh? Funny!