2005 entries
Advent Calendar 2005
25th December
Happy Christmas! We hope you have a very happy holiday season. For a downloadable Christmas card, right-click here. But at this time of joy, remember with sadness the loss of our favourite advert character, Lucy Blu, the Yes Car Credit girl, as her company goes into receivership. Never again will she say "Yes! You can!"
3rd December
Our local free paper, the Woking Informer, has a surprisingly down-to-earth advice column called Dear Dilys. But our Dilys appears to have a very bored sub-editor, as all of the headlines this week are song lyrics. So a man lacking in self-confidence is labelled with "Shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you like to". A man who can't forgive his wife's adultery has the headline "Holding back the years". But the best one is from a mum whose daughter has come back from counselling with the demand that people give her more "space". Her mother complains that the girl has to share a bedroom with her brother, so where is she to get this space? "Dear Miriam", replies Dilys, "I imagine your daughter's counsellor means emotional space rather than physical space ... take a step back so that you don't crowd your daughter". And the headline? "Our house is a very very very small house".
2nd December
One of the options for our wedding reception was a hotel and restaurant called 'My Way', which we rejected because the marquee in the back garden backed onto a motorway. It was also on the cheap and cheerful side, with a £12 per head menu of tomato soup, chicken in white sauce, and jelly and ice cream. We were reminded of this when we saw the menu for a Christmas meal we were invited to:
1st December
In the TES last week there was a checklist to see if a child in your class has ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder). Husbands may well want to look at this list to see how closely their wives match the criteria!
Key strategies to use:
30th November
The manual for my new memory stick has obviously been translated from another language, maybe German, probably using a computer program, without getting anyone English to check it. Some bits are pretty amusing, if you like that sort of thing.
29th November
In the Michaelmas Term edition of Oxford Today, the editor reveals the positions of the top colleges based on the numbers of Firsts etc. The data is now provided by colleges, unlike previously where it was compiled unofficially. But under the Data Protection Act, students can now withhold their names from the lists posted in colleges. This would have made Adam's life far less embarrassing when he had to have his Third posted up for all to see.
28th November
Department stores are really diversifying, with Debenhams joining Marks and Spencer in introducing insurance products. I was really taken with the cover provided by M&S Wedding Insurance. Not only does it cover clothes, cars, cake, presents and photos, but it also provides free stress counselling for the bride, groom, and their parents! There are four levels of cover, unsurprisingly called tiers, with the top tier covering marquees for £20,000.
2nd November
Photos from last Friday's MacExpo in London are online at the Apple UK website, and guess who makes a guest appearance. Unfortunately it was taken during one of my sit-down stops where I tidied up my leaflet collection before setting off in search of more free Post-It notes. I didn't have much interest in Microsoft Office for Mac OS X as I already owned it. And I hate photos of the back of my head. But here it is anyway.
25th October
I read today about the concept of a 'maven'. This term has been popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in his self-help book, "The Tipping Point". It means a consumer who is at the forefront of current trends, but also influences their friends to buy things as well. They are prized by marketing organisations and this leads me to ask, why does no one ever ask me? I'm someone who knows something about everything (a possible definition of Renaissance Man), and give advice on mortgages, DVD players, etc. Gladwell claims that mavens are information brokers who have the knowledge and social skills to start epidemics. However, if you do a search on the term'maven', you mainly get lots of people's blogs (just like this one) claiming the maven title for themselves. It's definitely an aspirational role but I can't be bothered to do anything else about it.
21st October
Quackwatch 4: Homeopathy for Farm Animals
This deserves a page to itself - it has to be seen to be believed.
15th October
Another collection of photos from around the country (and even the world): Barbershops
1st September
At long last we can reveal the horror that is the worst theme park, not only in Cyprus, but in the WHOLE WORLD!!!
Not for the fainthearted, it's the OSTRICH WONDERLAND.
8th June
Favourite Chord Sequence of the Month:
The middle 8 in 'Is This The Way To Amarillo'. The words go 'Ain't as half as pretty, as where my baby's at'. The chords go F C Esus4/B E. It's a really clever way of switching from F back to the key of A. Here's a midi of the full song, just right-click and open in new window.
The only other Favourite Chord Sequence that I could find on the web was this from Blink 182:
Mark: "CGAF. It's really good to write melodies to."
Tom: "D Dm B G. It's darker and sadder sounding, it strikes more emotion for me."
19th May
How flattering! Our constant invective against the Daily Mail has paid off, and yesterday and today various people from Associated Newspapers visited the website. Can we expect any legal action, chaps?
18th May
I know no-one will be as excited as me about Casio's new scientific calculator, the FX83ES. It does fancy things with fractions and square roots, before you ask. Even better, the Casio website features a Flash demo of the calculator, which has an image that bears a marked resemblance to yours truly ...
30th March
How can a Peperami have more than 100% meat? A question now answered by our correspondent Peter Scandrett at physics.org: "Because it's a cured meat product, it's reduced in mass - it's lost water - so I guess what they're trying to say is that they started out with more meat than you've actually purchased. It's a bit like tomato ketchup - there's more tomatoes in a bottle of ketchup than the mass of the ketchup would suggest (eg it takes 100g of tomatoes to make 10g of ketchup, or something like that) because it's reduced down. It's a nonsensical way of putting it on the ingredients, but hey. Hope that helps."
12th March
Off to Cyprus for our Easter hols, visiting Adam's brother and sister-in-law. The AA Pocket Guide to Cyprus contains these amazing quotes, most of which are completely true, according to my brother:
"Dusk, which comes at about 20.00 hours, is a time for barbecues, and all over Nicosia kebabs can be smelled."
"Sleep does not come easy to those who imprudently take too much of a late mezethes."
"When arriving without accommodation: on disembarkation ask a taxi driver to take you to a nearby hotel."
"Rules and regulations do not impress the locals. This can lead to a somewhat insouciant attitude to road traffic matters. For instance, Cypriot drivers consider that if you are in your car and reach your destination, you stop and get out regardless of external factors. Red lights in Cyprus do not mean the same to everybody. Foreigners and pretty women can escape charges for traffic offences if they plead ignorance and smile a lot."
"The bite of the Cypriot viper can kill a dog in half an hour."
"Most Cypriots are friendly, and this applies particularly to the male in the Greek part of the island, and sometimes leads to a windfall of attention for visiting females. However, matters rarely seem to get out of hand and normally stay at a superficial level.
"Nevertheless, it would not be unknown for a woman who had, perhaps inadvertently, broadcast her temporary domicile in casual conversation, to receive an unsolicited gift as early as the next day. It might be a well-feathered partridge, or even a generous helping of Soujoukko, dispatched by special emissary (taxi driver) from the High Troodos by a priest of recent acquaintance. Women wishing to avoid this kind of eventuality should display a certain amount of reserve.
"Fortunately, for visiting men, there is as much chance of harassment from the local women as there is of an earthquake."
24th February
For the first time on British television, Adam will be making an appearance that doesn't consist of leering over Simon Mayo's shoulder (on Top of the Pops) or singing in a church choir (on Harry Secombe's Highway). He's the expert on a panel discussion that's being broadcast this week. Unfortunately, it's about Maths teaching, but if you can live with that, here's how to watch the programme:
It's on a new digital TV channel called "Teachers' TV" which is broadcast on Sky 592, FREEVIEW 47, Telewest 240, ntl 803, and HomeChoice 845. The programme lasts 15 minutes and is being broadcast several times each week - exact details are provided by the link below.
You can watch the programme online at http://www.teachers.tv.
16th February
Here's a page of tat, i.e. all the rubbish that I've been stockpiling, presented to you with no further comment.
15th February
So I've been busy with my other website and have been stockpiling things ready for this week's holiday, and what am I going to post first? Yes, it's another piece about the Daily Mail. The saga of Livingstone's insulting comments to an Evening Standard journalist drags on. But he provides some interesting historical background to the Hate-Mail:
"When it was first set up in 1896 its first campaign was against Jewish refugees coming to London from the pogroms. It continued its anti-Semitism in the 1930s, fighting any proposals that Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler should be admitted to this country. The Mail ran stories supporting fascism and Mosley's Blackshirts, and its owner, the 1st Viscount Rothermere, welcomed Hitler's rise. Had Britain lost the war and had the Nazis controlled Britain, Lord Rothermere and his cohorts would have been at the front of the queue of collaborators. The Mail has continued to discriminate against minorities since the war, demonising first Irish immigrants and now asylum seekers. I deplore it and regret it ever existed," he said.
14th February
Tales of the playground 3: In October Ronald McDonald banned all 1,800 students of Wilmslow High School from the local McDonald's branch after they cauesd a melee chucking food about, blocking sinks and toilets and making a complete nuisance of themselves. A spokesman for Cheshire police said: "Five boys were arrested and two 11-year-old boys have been charged with criminal damage." The Wilmslow Express claimed they also set off fire extinguishers and threw milkshakes at cars outside.
One worker at the restaurant who declined to be identified said it was the latest in a long line of attacks involving youngsters from the school. He said: "We've had loads of problems with children from that school. They've trashed the place a couple of times. What they don't realise is what they did could have led to someone being killed. If we had a fire in the restaurant we would not have been able to put it out."
Police are studying CCTV footage of a separate incident at a Tesco Express store nearby, where staff were forced to close the shop early after a gang of 60 youths went "silly."
The Sun had the headline: "Your school's McBanned!" and summed up the story in 7 sentences, none of which had more than 10 words. They used a quote from deputy head Gill Bremner who said: "The students have let down the school, their families and also themselves." which reminds me of the joke about the inflatable boy at the inflatable school who messed around with drawing pins.
13th February:
Quackwatch 3: The following course details were sent to a local school in all seriousness:
Brain-friendly Touch and Movement for Learning: developing body-heart-mind communication
The time has come to lighten the load of learning by expanding our understanding of the consciousness of the mind. It is not only the brain that learns or has consciousness. It is the interconnection of the body, emotions and intellect along with a distinctive sense of self, which gives us infinite ability to focus, to learn, to apply and to create. This is the power of the mind. The day includes:
How we learn: the body, heart and brain as complex processors of sensation, emotion and thought
Building robust neural pathways for language, literacy and learning
Simple therapeutic touch and movement for classroom use
Accessing our creativity: harnessing the right brain's love of metaphor, paradox and imagination
Using all eight senses: through the gap into Einstein's unified field of consciousness
The course is run by Am Whittle, who has been a teacher and lecturer for over 30 years. As a practising physical therapist and NLP practitioner, she designs and delivers courses for teachers and educators who want to enhance their own learning potential and that of their pupils. She is an External Verifier for a major awarding body in the areas of classroom support & complementary health.
recent entries