Bear-Trap

I started writing an entry on Friday but it never went anywhere. I can't believe how little I write here these days. We are however entering the second half of the month which does mean I have more time to waste at the office. I will attempt to apply this time to writing the odd entry.

The dragon is taking driving lessons. Poor girl is scared of British roads. I don't understand why. She has ridden an alarmingly unsafe scooter around the streets of Taipei for years. That's dangerous, like dangling your wedding tackle in a bear-trap and tossing rocks at the release mechanism. She also has a car licence for Taiwan, though she hasn't driven for years. She doesn't like driving on the left though, or roundabouts, which is unfortunate since Swindon is the roundabout capital of the world.

My knee is going down again. I can't remember if I wrote this already. I went to have the stitches out last week and the doctor decided that I had an infection. It was warm and swollen. They gave me antibiotics and it has started to go down again. In fact it almost looks normal again now. It's still a little warm however.

Did you see Derren Brown predicting the lottery numbers last week? It was a good show. He appeared to predict all six numbers before the draw was made. His follow-up show, that promised to explain how he did it, was a wash-out however. He claimed that he employed 24 people to guess six lottery numbers each and then averaged them out. He also made some wild claims about automatic writing. It was all bullshit. I don't mind him not giving the trick away, but trying to pass off an illusion as something scientific is really beneath him. I was disappointed.

I mentioned briefly last week about a primary school which ran a farming project for the kids. They got to raise some animals including chickens and sheep. Some parents were up in arms when they learnt that the kids voted to have the sheep slaughtered and sold for meat so that they could use the money raised to buy more animals for the following year. The situation prompted several animal sanctuaries, national newspapers, and a local transvestite comedian to offer a home for the animal. I'm happy to say that all offers were rejected and the sheep was slaughtered.

Here are the facts as I see them:

The project was to educate the children in the food cycle and all aspects of a farm and everything that that implies. Keeping a 'pet' sheep achieves neither of those objectives.

The kids got to decide the fate of the lamb. You can't give the kids the opportunity to make a decision and then tell them they can't make a particular decision because you don't like it.

I think it's great that kids find out where lamb chops come from. Most children seem to think they arrive by magic, wrapped in cellophane on Tesco shelves. This is exactly what they need. Here's the Telegraph report. If you take a look at the BBC website report they also have an interview with the head teacher. Good woman, we like her.

Seems 92-year-old Dame Vera Lynn has managed to reach number one in the British album charts with a "best of" collection of songs. She is outselling the like of Jamie T and the Kings and Queens. The media are quick to congratulate her on this amazing achievement, and it is a worthy achievement, but I think it says something about the quality of contemporary music if you ask me.