Newsround

It’s kind of slow season over here in the news department and if it’s not: Wolves run rampage in the Alps, followed by images of the concerned faces of many lopsided farmers and corpses of fluffy sheep then it’s scenes of utter destruction as more rivers break their banks in the UK. So these articles caught my eye:

Flirting and Fornication tells of the runaway success of the online dating site Meetic. Did you know for instance that it was French? I didn’t. Did you also know that:

In France alone, 5 million people spend precious hours chatting every day, flirting, meeting and fornicating with perfect strangers.

No, moi non plus, but what I was more interested in was that last year their profits rose by 70% to £18m, kind of makes you wish that you had thought of it first hey? On the down side this 25 year old Parisian had this to say (just imagine the accent):

"I have no more time to waste trying to charm girls in cafes ... the process is too long and too arduous.. With Meetic ... I often score on the first date. Not long ago, when I was a teenager, girls kept me salivating for weeks. Forget it."

Do you think someone should tell him he’s going to end up a 35 year old single man?

Sex discrimination rife and equality will take generations, says axed commission, is pretty much what it says it’s about.
20% of MPs are women and it will take 195 years to close the gap.
40% of women have less pension than men and it will take 45 years to close that gap.
38% of women earn less in full time jobs than men and that gap will take 25 years to close.
17% of women earn less in part time jobs and it will take 20 years to close the gap.
The Equal Opportunities Commission goes on to say:

‘...we are living with the consequences of an unfinished social revolution. We are still faced with many workplaces, institutions and services designed for an age when women stayed at home. In other areas of modern life, inequality underpins life and death issues. For example, every month seven women are killed by their partner or ex-partner.’

If that is too depressing for you then my suggestion is that you stock up on your winter woollies and move to Finland. When I was studying a few years ago I read an article about high achieving women there. Throughout their lives they had grown up with a sense of egalitarianism and that all their achievements were valued. It was these two things which differentiated them from their other western counterparts. Also as a link to the next article, Finland is one of the cleanest countries (if not the cleanest) regarding carbon emissions.

Ethical shopping is just another way of showing how rich you are is an interesting look at man’s obsession with shopping. But as Monibot says: No political challenge can be met by shopping. The rest of the article is quite interesting too, I didn’t know that you could get recycled biros for a start. His website also seems to be full of interesting little gems too.

Lastly this review caught my eye:

The Simpsons movie gives you everything you could possibly want, and maybe it's a victim of its own gargantuan accomplishment. Eighty-five minutes is not long enough to do justice to 17 years of comedy genius. It's still great stuff.

Peter Bradshaw gushes. I think he wants us to go see it.

Dead good innit?

I managed to put my copy of the Deathly Hallows down for a few hours to pop along to the Other Writers' Group yesterday afternoon. During the worst moments of last term, this was one of the things that I was looking forward to doing on a Saturday afternoon.

At the beginning of the session we were asked to introduce ourselves (sigh) and say what books we like reading (sigh). I hate the fact that when you get groups of people together you have to do these faux getting to know you bits. After all, you are about to read out a piece of your own writing which can reveal far more about yourself then any glib comment you make about what you're reading. Still, that's not the point, I'm getting there. Later in the bar one of the members asked me if I had read Rimbaud, to which I replied: No. In retrospect I now realise that I what I should have answered is: Of course not, he's dead. I'm looking at my bookshelves and what I read and it seems that I don't read very many dead writers. In fact the last dead writer I read was Kurt Vonnegut and only because he shuffled off this mortal coil before I had finished reading his book.

I suppose that the logical beginning of this train of thought began when I read about David Lassman who rewrote the works of Jane Austen, changing a few names here and there and then sent them to various publishing houses to see if she would get published nowadays. Unfortunately for Jane, she was universally rejected, but only one publishing house recognised the work as Austen's in the first place. So how well would you do? Try this wee little quiz here. I got a pathetic 4 which is not bad considering I've never read Jane Austen (cos she's dead ain't she?), but I feel a hefty pile coming my way; I mentioned this gap in my literary canon to Claire.

Bulk Mail

BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Ugh ugh gurrnuuh ugh ugh "Hello," said in very sleepy voice.
"Hello it's your postlady, you have a parcel," said in the bright spritely voice of one who has been up for hours.
Oh! Oh! Oh! Much spinning and frantic throwing on of clothes. Oh that's inside out, never mind. Oh!Oh! Skip, skip, skip. oh! Oh! Ooooohhhh!! Out the door, across the courtyard, open the door, jar arm badly as I try to open other door which is locked. Press the button you fool I can see written across the beatific features of the postie. I press the button, reach out my hand, say thank you and...

OH MY GOD I'VE GOT IT!!!

RRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrip.

Oh look at it!


Oooh let's look at it some more.

I've now owned Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for just under an hour. Normally I would be on page 55 by now. It's just that if I start it ... well, I'll finish it, and once it's finished, well it's finished.

Junk Mail

This morning I got two e mails; one was from Amazon telling me that Colissimo were going to deliver my copy of Harry Potter to my door tomorrow morning without fail. Yeah, well if I don’t blog tomorrow you’ll know that pigs have finally flown. I have a very distinctive memory of visiting a Colissimo office on the other side of town. I sat in the office for a very long time while I imagined that the guy who had trundled off to look for my plane tickets had disappeared into the sorting office to rifle through a mountain of mail that was just casually tossed on the ground; moving one parcel could cause an avalanche of legal documents. Like I say I imagined this and finally I did get my plane tickets and I did go on holiday very early the next morning.

The other e mail was from Live Earth. I used their carbon calculator a few weeks ago and have been bombarded by e mails from them ever since. I don’t like e mails like this, they annoy me. I know that I did something on their stupid site weeks ago and I don’t need to be reminded every few days. All the same I clicked on something on their stupid site and discovered this: every now and again the O in the corner of the screen turns into SOS. This stands for SAVE OUR SELVES. Is it just me, or does anyone have a problem with this? Isn’t that just a little ... selfish? Do we ignore the ring necked possums whose habitats we’ve destroyed? Wasn’t it saving our selves that got us into this mess in the first place?

So I suppose that already being a bit niggled by this site I was looking for stuff to annoy me. It didn’t take very long to find it though. Right there on the other side of the header are the corporate sponsors of Live Earth: smart, Philips and MSN. Yes! smart who make those rinky dink cars that tell the world it’s alright to have only one person in the car and that pedestrian crossings are for parking on. I hate them, I really do, but now I hate them even more. Listen to this crap:

Why should people spend more money on gas than on the milk they carry home? The smart fortwo cdi (diesel version) is the only car that gets 60 miles per gallon! That not only saves money, it also saves our environment.

Oh, but if that’s not enough, get this:

smart helps tackle this global challenge by taking action and retaining the fun factor in driving.

The only way I can finish is by saying that I am flabbergasted by the hypocrisy of this. I’m thinking of writing them a letter asking them what was the criteria for the choice of their corporate sponsors, but in the end I don’t know. There’s a part of me that says that some of what Live Earth is doing is good: it’s a big event, it’s brash, it’s spreading awareness, but it’s being done in such a clumsy way that even the Daily Mail can pick a million faults in it and I really hate it when I agree with that trashy newspaper. Do we have to dumb down the message to spread it?

Another wee bit of writing...

Just a wee snippet of Part III today.

Lunchtime, Mark thought happily snapping his bag shut. “See you in an hour,” he trilled to no one in particular.

Read the rest here.

Scary Biscuits

When I was about thirteen I went through a phase of reading ‘horror’. I ploughed through Stephen King and Clive Barker novels like there was no tomorrow and generally they scared the crap out of me. And then I don’t know whether I stopped because I learnt the formula or whether I just got fed up with being scared, but to this day I haven’t picked up another ‘horror’ book and I’m hard pushed to go and see a ‘horror’ movie (although I have to say I just didn’t find the Blair Witch Project scary).

The book I am reading at the moment is about a world gone rampant. The characters are extraordinary and varied, but the main protagonists are hell bent on destruction. As I read of their catalogue of horrors each night I go to sleep with a deep feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. It’s not that the book is predictable, far from it, it’s just there can only be one ending: Apocalypse.

So how comes I find myself reading the scariest book since ‘The Thief of Always’? Well I may have mentioned this before, but I’m reading ‘The Weather Makers’ by Tim Flannery. I think the type of books he usually writes are light hearted romps into the world of Natural Science and his native land of Australia. This; however, is terrifying. Yeah, he might talk about ‘diddle’ penguins and Species C that hasn’t even been named yet, but in the next sentence he explains very carefully why they are all going to DIE. Before we make this planet completely uninhabitable we are going to become a very uniform, hot, boring place and the word diversity will become a word from yesteryear. I’m only a third of a way through it and I really do want to get to the ‘...what we can do about it’ bit, but in the meantime, here are some of my thoughts (which I may already have mentioned here):

• Change to a Green Energy company. France has finally taken the energy monopoly away from EDF and GDF and companies like Enercoop produce energy using only sustainable/renewable energy sources.
• Walk/cycle/take a bus/metro. In fact please do the first three so that I’m not so cramped on the metro.
• Do you have to take that plane? Could you let the train take the strain?
• Recycle
• Do an audit at work. How many people turn off their computers when they are away for more than five minutes? And lights? (OK lights are a tricky one. If you use fluorescent ones, it’s actually more energy efficient to leave them on, otherwise turn them off. Also in this climate of Global Warming light creates heat, so leaving lights off means you are a wee bit cooler and don’t need so much air con).

I know that the green lobby can come across as evangelical, but we don’t have much time left. Read the book, you’ll see for yourself.