The beaver is a proud and noble animal
Notes from a bemused canuck
From the CBC: With 99 per cent of polls reporting, the Conservatives won 167 seats, followed by the NDP with 102, Liberals with 34 and the Bloc Québécois with four and the Green Party with one. A party needs to capture 155 seats to win a majority in the House of Commons.
Canada, seriously! He was the first prime minister to lead a party that lost a vote of non-confidence with contempt, and you vote him back in with a majority government? What the hell were you thinking?
In a case against a New York website owner, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is claiming that merely linking to copyrighted material is a crime. DHS, along with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), seized Brian McCarthy’s domain, channelsurfing.net, in late January. The site has now been replaced with a government warning: “This domain has been seized by ICE – Homeland Security Investigations, Special Agent in Charge, New York Office. It is unlawful to reproduce copyrighted material, such as movies, music, software or games, without authorization… First-time offenders convicted of a criminal felony copyright law will face up to five years in federal prison, restitution, forfeiture and fine.”
[…]
The advocacy group Demand Progress has claimed that McCarthy never reproduced copyrighted material, and that his website simply linked to other sites. While the criminal complaint alleges that McCarthy did engage in the “reproduction and distribution” of copyrighted material, it is never clear that he actually reproduced any of the specified broadcasts.
“Under that sort of thinking, everyone who’s sent around a link to a copyrighted YouTube video is a criminal,” Demand Progress warned, calling the prosecution a “radical shift” in the way the government polices the Internet.
Seriously, shit like this makes me scared. If only to avoid the potentiality of trouble, I’m temped to relocate my website away from US soil. I wonder if Sealand is still running a web host…
Sir.
For the last few weeks, I have been taking my two year old son to nursery using the shuttle service that my workplace provides. There is a stop just opposite your pub. It is a short walk from our house, situated in The Glebe, in the mornings. However, in the evening, my wife picks me up from the pub parking lot because the side-walks can be very slippery at this time of year and are generally poorly lit. She has been in the habit of parking in your car park for generally no longer than 10 minutes while she waits for the shuttle bus to arrive (unfortunately, the shuttle schedule tends to be a bit chaotic, hence the longer-than-expected wait).
At no time during those recent weeks has your car park ever had more than a handful of cars in it, including ours. Considering that your lot can reasonably handle several times than number of cars, we never considered this to be a problem. However, last night, you or one of your staff came up to the car while my wife was waiting and informed her that yours was a private car park and that she should not park there to wait for us in the future.
While you are entirely within your rights, I believe that this shows a stinginess of spirit that is not appealing for our continued custom. It’s not like your business is exactly booming and heaving at that time of night, and it doesn’t cost you anything to let my wife wait 10 minutes in a near-empty car park. If anything, it might give the impression that there are actually people frequenting your pub.
In any case, you will be happy to note that we will refrain from using your car park and we will also refrain from using your pub, in general. My wife will park in a lay-by further up the road. You can take your precious parking and shove it far, far up where the sun doesn’t shine.
Have a nice day,
Rc
I’m sorry. I’m going to rant a bit now (even moreso than usual). Xmas is supposed to be all pap and tack. It’s all about gaudy. It’s not supposed to be tasteful, and clinical, with everything in its place and no speck of glitter in sight. People who buy two trees are in the same league as the idiot woman who bought £50 rolls of ribbon for her presents.
The rise of the 2 Christmas tree household
Children’s badly-made decorations and gaudy flashing lights are, for many, the true essence of Christmas. But it would seem an increasing number of parents are banning garish decorations from the family tree. Instead, children are being bought a tree for their bedroom to decorate themselves, while the adults ensure the main Christmas tree is kept more tasteful.
Leading retailers have reported that they have seen customers buying more than one tree, with their research suggesting that the second, smaller one is being bought for children’s bedrooms, in another sign that the recession has failed to dent parents splashing out on their offspring at Christmas.
The phenomenon of the two-tree household is also the culmination of a long-running trend that the family Christmas tree has become a status symbol and a design feature, rather than merely the main traditional decoration during the festive period, according to one expert.
B&Q, which said it will have sold more than 250,000 real trees by the end of this weekend, calculated that a quarter of all of its customers buying a tree were also buying a second one – invariably a sparkly, fake tree. Annette Hill, assistant buyer in horticulture at B&Q said: “There appears to be a growing trend for households displaying more than one tree, giving parents and kids a chance to stamp their mark.”
Tesco, too, said that 25 per cent of small fake trees that were being sold were being bought alongside larger more tasteful versions, with the supermarket pointing out that the small versions were ending up in people’s hallways or children’s bedrooms. A spokesman for Tesco said: “It’s part of the trend to splash out on your children, regardless of the economic conditions.”
Part of the problem with allowing children to make their own baubles, angels and stars is that they while they may have charm they can ruin an otherwise tastefully-decorated sitting room, said Laurence Llewelyn Bowen, the interior designer and television presenter. The lack of sophistication of preschool glue-and-glitter efforts are compounded by being clustered on just the bottom two branches of the tree, with young children unable to reach the higher branches, leaving the top half naked, and the bottom covered in bright lights and tinsel. Mr Llewelyn Bowen said: “I think the whole two-tree phenomenon is about controlling your environment. Things have changed enormously from when I was growing up and you put up the tree and got out the box of old decorations you used every year. Now we are very keen to show off our lavish side at Christmas and have a tree that you can impress the Joneses with. You are never going to do that with it covered in Barbie glitter. As far as I am concerned buying your children a tree for their bedroom is a case of the parents indulging themselves.”
I woke up with rather unwanted news this morning. I tried to check my email from my phone and got a message saying that my password was invalid. After a few tries, I simply reset it and was then informed that there had been unusual activity with my gmail account.
Well, fuck. This is the email account from which my whole online presence is registered. This is the one that gets all the password update emails and shit of the sort. The good news is that it seems that the chinese fuckers only hijacked my account to spam all of my contacts. The bad news is that I have to assume that every email I have sent and received from my gmail since 2004 has been compromised and copied. How… violating. Most of that is useless and trivial. But still. It means that I have to change every password that I have, just in case. So far, I’ve changed over a dozen, including my gmail, amazon, ebay, paypal, linkedin, facebook, skype, creditexpert, sourceforge, domain registrar and web host. I’m still debating if I need to change all of my secondary stuff, like Tesco and Dabs.
The really, really annoying thing is that I don’t know how they got my password. I’m generally on the lookout for scams or phishing, and my password isn’t susceptible to a dictionary attack. It’s a giant faff that I did not need today.
Summer sucks. There should be a law abolishing summer. Give me fall/winter all year round. That way, I can still BBQ but without the f’n annoyances of bugs and allergies.
I hate summer.
I talk about the weather a lot. I grumble a lot. I have now achieved the next level of Britishness – the sternly worded complaint letter.
In a nutshell, it seems that Barclaycard have been incapable of correctly setting up a direct debit for a balance transfer I’ve done 3 months ago. Because of this, I now have two missed payments on my credit report. The first time, after multiple painful phone calls to an Indian call centre, it came about that some unknown error on Barclaycard’s side had prevented the direct debit to be setup properly. It took another call to refund my late fees and yet another call to have my promotional balance transfer rate re-established. At every step, I was assured that my direct debit had now been properly setup.
This time, a payment was attempted, but rejected by Natwest. Turns out that the payment was made on the 11th, but the direct debit instructions were only received on the 14th. 3 days after the payment was attempted. 3 months (!!!) after it was supposed to have been created in the first place! It took two phone calls to refund my late fees, and I need to call back in 3 days to confirm that the promotional rate is again re-established. Good money says that it’s not, and will require yet more phone calls.
Of course, every time you call any number to try and reach a flesh-and-bone human, you get somebody called ‘Frank’ or ‘Jim’ with the heaviest Indian accent this side of the golden mile in Leicester. They try and be helpful, but they mostly follow a script and can’t really do anything concrete.
So, a stern letter. I faxed it this morning, and a copy of it went out by post. Since the fax number and the postal address are in Leicester, hopefully I’ll get in touch with somebody who can ‘get-things-done’.
We’ll see.
The DVLA assured me that they sent a letter to my GP last thursday. My GP tells me that they haven’t received anything. It’s been more than a month now, and I have the feeling that I’ll have to push back the course – again.
This is taking all the fun out of what started out as a great thing, and I am not amused.
UPDATE: The GP surgery just called me. Apparently the letter arrived last Friday. However, they have no record of the condition that the DVLA wants information on. This makes perfect sense as this is something I was diagnosed with in Canada, about 20 years ago. The practice manager is going to call the DVLA. If they want my Canadian records, I’m screwed because I had to cancel my health coverage when I moved to the UK 5 years ago so those records, if they’re still around, are probably archived in some lower level of administrative hell. If they want me to go for tests here, I might as well cancel my course because it’s going to be months before I can see anybody. This should be fun.
I came home yesterday and Katy gave me this:
She’d bought it for me cause she knew it’d wind me up. We’re barely out of Christmas and Tesco is already stocking up on Easter crap.
FOR FUCK’S SAKE PEOPLE!!!
Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government backed study has revealed.
It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial. There is also resistance to tackling the 11th century Crusades – where Christians fought Muslim armies for control of Jerusalem – because lessons often contradict what is taught in local mosques.
The findings have prompted claims that some schools are using history 'as a vehicle for promoting political correctness'. The study, funded by the Department for Education and Skills, looked into 'emotive and controversial' history teaching in primary and secondary schools.
It found some teachers are dropping courses covering the Holocaust at the earliest opportunity over fears Muslim pupils might express anti-Semitic and anti-Israel reactions in class.
The researchers gave the example of a secondary school in an unnamed northern city, which dropped the Holocaust as a subject for GCSE coursework. The report said teachers feared confronting 'anti-Semitic sentiment and Holocaust denial among some Muslim pupils'.
It added: “In another department, the Holocaust was taught despite anti-Semitic sentiment among some pupils.
“But the same department deliberately avoided teaching the Crusades at Key Stage 3 (11- to 14-year-olds) because their balanced treatment of the topic would have challenged what was taught in some local mosques.”
A third school found itself 'strongly challenged by some Christian parents for their treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict-and the history of the state of Israel that did not accord with the teachings of their denomination'.
The report concluded: “In particular settings, teachers of history are unwilling to challenge highly contentious or charged versions of history in which pupils are steeped at home, in their community or in a place of worship.”
But Chris McGovern, history education adviser to the former Tory government, said: “History is not a vehicle for promoting political correctness. Children must have access to knowledge of these controversial subjects, whether palatable or unpalatable.”
The researchers also warned that a lack of subject knowledge among teachers – particularly at primary level – was leading to history being taught in a 'shallow way leading to routine and superficial learning'. Lessons in difficult topics were too often 'bland, simplistic and unproblematic' and bored pupils.
I completely agree with the quote: “History is not a vehicle for promoting political correctness. Children must have access to knowledge of these controversial subjects, whether palatable or unpalatable.”
As written by ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
elfs: The Holocaust is a matter of historical record. Not one person indicted at Nuremberg tried to claim it didn't happen. You should not be allowed to dictate class curricula because your beliefs contradict reality. This is as true of history as it is of science. Holocaust denial and Intelligent Design are exactly the same in this fashion: those who propound these points of view are wrong and that needs to be repeated every second of every day until they feel absolutely beaten by reality.
History is ugly. It's messy. It hurts. It needs to be told as it is though, and not as we'd like it to be, wearing rose-coloured glasses.
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=445979&in_page_id=1770&ICO=NEWS&ICL=TOPART