Anything, Anywhere But Under Sufferance

Dear Mr Gove, I'd like to thank you. No really, I would. In amongst all the condemnation and angst-filled ire that has come your way in recent weeks due to you starting on the long road to privatising state education your education reforms, you have provided something that the country has long needed. A scapegoat. In amongst all your crass, nonsensical and emotive verbal outpourings about how the "poor and needy single parents" will be the ones who suffer most from the forthcoming teacher strike (these are the same single mothers & fathers who you slashed 8.5% off their total income via the last budget, so your concern didn't spread to actually making them any better off did it? http://www.totallymoney.com/news/index.php/2011/06/lone-mothers-bearing-the-brunt-of-cuts/) you have attempted to put teachers in an invidious position. Forcing them to bear the brunt of parental ire, accusing them of not having the children's best interests at heart, accusing the...

It's been depressing of late hasn't it? I mean North Africa's going to pot, as are parts of the Middle East. Japan and China and the two Korea's seem to be gearing up for a bit of feuding, we're busy sending troops to every corner of the globe which has oil (so, Tunisia, Syria & Co can sort themselves out, but Libya we're in like a shot, same as Iraq. I am betting Cameron and co are hoping Venezuela start a revolution soon so they can make a big humanitarian effort over there to). We've had Tornadoes in America, Tsunami's in Japan, unemployment is up, the wonderful equal policies of "we're all in this together" have surprisingly translated into "let the poor masses pay and the rich get wealthier". Who'd have thought that under a Tory led government, eh? So we've had thousands of public sector workers jobs shelved, being told that the private sector will fill the gap. Only nobody seems to have told the private sec...

Top Stories As a child, I was intrigued by ‘the mysterious’ and that curiosity has never left me. I have tonnes of books right here next to me now on all kinds of mysterious topics. Ghosts, UFO’s, Monsters etc. What started this interest was a story my mum told me about our old house, which she said was haunted. She says one night, she went to bed and my dad was working nights. She was fast asleep when the alarm clock went off at some stupid hour o’clock. This was odd as it was always set to 5am for my dad to get up for work and it had also been set to the radio, rather than the beeper. Thinking nothing of it, she clicked it off and went back to sleep. Reset the alarm the next morning and had a moan at my dad for messing it up. He said he hadn’t touched it and as usual, me or my brother got the blame. A week or so later, my mum was downstairs in the early hours making herself a drink as she could not sleep. Oddly enough it was about the same time as the alarm had woken her a few ...

I rather like this image, it is a visual description of just one portion of the internet. I think it's rather beautiful and almost ethereal. Strange really when you consider that the vast number of people on this are using the internet to tweet that they've just taken a dump or are watching cats fall comically into swimming pools. Today, we tackle the internet. It probably wasn't in the minds of the scholars at Stanford University first began to develop the groundwork for what would become the Internet, that their creation would not only be arguably the most important in modern society, but that for many the epitome of it would be to spend the day watching hedgehogs learn to ride a bicycle. A lot of debate on the internet is on whether it is a good thing or a bad thing. This is rather a facile and pointless argument. It is like arguing whether humankind is a good or bad thing, or religion is a good or bad thing. There are plus and minuses to every facet of human life. On pl...

It's been a few years since I spent most of my day watching my children grow from young babies into toddlers and taking the first tentative steps into school. During that period, although I still worked, for a large part of the day I was a house-husband and spent a lot of my time trying to understand what children today see in the television programmes that educational psychologists have decided are best for them. Take Tellytubbies. Four a-sexual, monitor-bellied conduits of video, who live together in a big house with a rampant vacuum cleaner and who's daily diet consists either of tubby toast (which is fine) or tubby-tustard (which has since become a euphemism for various bodily outpourings, enough to make Ben Dover blush). Now if that didn't emotionally scar your children, then todays offerings most certainly will. Have you seen "In the Night Garden?" Honestly, Lewis Carroll, even in his most doped up days, would have looked at this and gone "Sorry man, I ...

Frankie Boyle's comments have sparked some debate this week. If you don't know the story, then the ginger haired lovechild of a Proclaimer and Rasputin, who nose seems to extort an inordinate gravitational pull on his features, decided that Katie Price's disabled child Harvey was a good topic for a joke or two on his Tramadol Nights TV show. So, its come to this has it? Accusing disabled children of attempting to rape their mother, to get a laugh? This is no "Pro Katie & Peter" rant, believe me, that sycophantic, silicone induced tart gets a lot of what she deserves, but I don't think any parent, regardless of who they are should be forced to listen to someone doing that, for entertainment purposes only. Boyle however won't care. His argument will be, if it is funny it is funny. Tough. Don't listen if you don't want to. Its hard to argue against that. Censorship in comedy doesn't work. The best comedy is edgy, funny and hard hitting. Howeve...

Whisper it quietly, but Atheism is so last year. You can barely pick up a Sunday supplement these days without the book review section containing some polemic against religion. Dawkins, Hitchens and co's swelling ranks of non-believers have found a voice and an audience but, by God (or not), they just won't shut up will they? Every review of anything literary that analyses the question of religion or belief always ends up with some cautionary tale of the dangers of aggressive atheism. These deranged psychopaths with their out-of-the-box non-beliefs, stating their points of view in a VERY agitated manner! Well, that is not just the done thing is it! Let's stick a Fatwah on their heads. Indeed reading these reviews makes enjoyable reading for the utter banality of it all. Rather than take issue with the points raised, the issue now seems to be to take issue with how the point is raised. Yeah, we know you think God doesn't exist, but do you have to be so rude about it...