Cheryl Loses It: Shock Horror

I normally rate Cheryl Cole. True, she is a bit of a professional Geordie, but relatively sweet and harmless. Then she loses all reason.
Two of her three choices for X-Factor were a joke. One couldn't sing and couldn't sing (tonsilitis) and another couldn't sing and couldn't sing (nerves). I can't recall their names. One will be eliminated in Week 1, the other in Week 2.
Gamu Nhengu. That's who should have gone into the last 12. I hope someone spots her and signs her quickish.

University League Tables

Ah! There we are. Damn. Delft University of Technology is above us!

There are just over 17000 universities in the world. The THES recently published a booklet detailing all sorts of league tables for universities but, of course, the "overall" table is the one that everyone looks at. Just like in football. We could have a Goals For league table to highlight the strong attacks or a Goals Against league table to highlight the strong defences. But we don't. We look at the overall points that these teams, with their strong bits and weak bits have managed....er...overall.

The universities that really intrigue me are those in the lower reaches. Who is 17000th? We aren't told. God! What a hell-hole that must be! Degree shops, lectures cancelled or lecturers late, exorbitant fees for an inferior product, courses cut for lack of funding, poorly qualified staff teaching vast numbers of increasingly poorly qualified students, crumbling buildings apart from the Business School and the Vice-Chancellor's new admin block with marketing dominating everything. Medium over message every time.

I'm glad I don't work somewhere like that.

Emails

I get emails (all the time!) that end with...

The information in this email is confidential and may be legally privileged. It is intended solely for the addressee. Access to this email by anyone else is unauthorised. If you are not the intended recipient, any disclosure, copying, distribution or any other action taken in reliance on it, is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you believe that you have received this email in error, please contact the sender. Etc. etc etc etc.

Globally, this legalese must be having a major impact on bandwidth. Truth is, we never have enough bandwidth so adding this to nearly every effing email must come at a hell of a cost worldwide.

Why can't we just add in a hyperlink to a page that gives all this guff? There would not really be a page there; no-one would ever go there.

Oops

BBC again.

Ewan McGregor and his brother Colin did a very good retrospective on the Battle of Britain a few nights ago. They both ended up flying around in a truly ugly two-seat Spitfire (which the RAF never used) but, overall, it wasn't bad.

Ewan (or his script writer, let's be fair) did make one horrible gaffe.

He was describing the tensions in the upper ranks of Fighter Command as the Battle got more and more desparate and highlighted the feud between Keith Park (OC 11 Group) and "Douglas Bader who commanded 12 Group".

Wrong.

During the Battle of Britain, Douglas Bader was a Squadron Leader commanding 242 Squadron based at Duxford and a small part of 12 Group. Air Vice-Marshall Leigh-Mallory - not Bader - was Park's opposite (in more ways than one) in charge of 12 Group based north of London. As it turned out, most of Bader's theories were simply wrong. Thank God we had AVM Keith Park in charge of 11 Group (in whose skies most of the Battle took place) and not Leigh-Mallory or (worse!) Bader.

The outcome might have been very different.

PS: Park also "won" the other crucial defensive air action of the war - the Battle of Malta.

Dieting

Having been "on a diet" for the past thirty five years and largely failed (cunning use of "largely" there) I think I have come up with a clever way of losing weight.

Cat poo, as you will certainly know, is considered a delicacy by dogs. This is because cats are quite inefficient when it comes to digesting food and what comes out is (yum!) still "food" in the broadest sense. Then there are tapeworms. These bad buggers grow right the way along our intestines using our partially digested food as their own. Let's combine the two ideas...

Insert into the intestine a tube running the whole length from stomach to bowel that takes a goodly proportion of the slop we pump out of our stomachs. Say 25%. Anything that goes down this "tube within a tube"* will not be absorbed into the bloodstream via the intestinal wall and - like cat poo - our faeces will have 25% undigested stuff. I'm not suggesting you then feed it to your dog, but you would certainly lose weight pretty quickly. In my egotistical style I'm calling this the Timworm^®.

You know where you heard it first.

*It would need to be held clear of the intestinal wall by projections of some sort. I would think that PTFE might be a good material.

Prize Giving

Last night I was in the audience for the Newcastle upon Tyne Church High School Annual Prize Giving at The Sage, Gateshead. My six years at this school as a teacher were the happiest in my career and it always brings a lump to my throat when I go back to events like this.

The purpose of these few lines is not, however, to laud the independent education system (although I do) or to congratulate the staff and students of this fine school for another great year (again, I do).

I write simply to note how much I am in awe of my wife's organisational abilities. Whoever reads this (hello, again) keep this in mind. If ever you need a really big, complex, costly, involved, time-critical and important event staged, then call my wife.

Amazing woman.

Gareth Malone: Hero

I watched Gareth Malone's Extraordinary School for Boys with a great deal of enjoyment. I often bash on here about the whole hunter/gatherer differences thing betwixt men and women. Gareth rammed this home beautifully. He made the boys into hunters and competitors. He activated tribalistic sub-memories by getting their Dads involved. He had them outdoors burning up energy. He did everything that a little hunter would love to do. The really clever thing was that he based it all around reading. Hero.

Needless to say, it worked.

It just goes to show that when our safety-obsessed, risk-averse, competition-free, namby-bloody-pamby education system is run for boys as well as girls, boys flourish.

Go Gareth!