On a recent trip to Surrey I stopped off at Chobham services on the M25. You wouldn’t think I’d find much to comment on while having a quick wee break on a journey but “Oh My!”.
Every advert in the male toilets was for Shreddies and not the breakfast cereal.
Women Can’t Fart
Now, I will look at their website shortly and comment after but my initial reaction was:
WHY THE FUCK CAN’T WOMEN FART? WHO CARES?
My immediate next thought was:
We’ve had plenty of period shaming on women and now we shame them into smelling nice and pretty all the time and won’t allow them to perform normal bodily functions.
Well. I hope that the adverts in the ladies’ toilets were all for fart-pants for men, but i am unaware of those facts.
This advert is appalling. Women must remain clean and sweet and smell of roses for men. Women aren’t allowed to fart. Women should be beautiful for men. Farting is bad.
FUCK this company. I found this advert and all the other similar ones in the toilets sexist and shaming of humans for doing NORMAL human things.
Now, I’m off to look at the website and I’ll comment below.
So, they do men’s stuff too. Most of the web page is products aimed at men. It’s still disgusting.
“Fabulous idea, a great quality product with great styling, this could save many a marriage! A much needed product, fantastic innovation.”
I have spent some time recently learning to be bored. I guess what I really mean is trying to learn to give up social media and put my phone down.
[I’d like to propose that mobile phones are no longer called phones, or telephones. They are now Portable Digital Devices and I rarely use mine as a phone. These devices need re-branding. The name needs to change to reflect their usage. I suggest PDA. This is controversial because PDAs were used in the early 90s and they died. They didn’t succeed because mobile phones came and took over. That is capitalism or progress I guess. So, Portable Digital Assistants need a revival. It more accurately describes the function of the rectangle of black in your palm.]
There are four main reasons that I have opted to try and get bored more often. One is Brexit, then there is Trump along with all the “stupid” and finally there is All The HATE.
I have a couple of twitter accounts. In one of them I follow a few people and use it to communicate with friends. The other account is full of random people and politicians who I follow for the news and pictures of aeroplanes. Over the last couple of years I have noticed that my overall personal mood has reflected the level of crap I see on twitter. I would look at my twitter feed every hour or so and catch up with what’s happening. But quite often the anger, rage and shock supplied by people on twitter was reactionary. It wasn’t considered or sensible.
I would react emotionally. I would re-tweet people I follow. I would become annoyed and enraged at the injustices I saw. It felt like everything I held to be good about the world was deteriorating.
When you read tweets about what racist shit the foreign secretary has said, try to understand trump, see the hatred towards minorities, see the hatred of the religious, see the twisted responses by people with internet-balls, see the hatred and such low level of discourse, then you start to feel worried about the state of the world.
If you can’t manage a walk to the corner shop without staring at your phone, then maybe you need to stop and put it down.
I removed the other account on from my phone about a month ago. I also have stopped the side-bar on my PC from popping up with that twitter account. I try to get my news from a couple of websites and the radio.
I constantly worry that I am missing out on a gorgeous photograph of an airplane. I worry that something might be happening in the world that needs my attention. This is FOMO I guess. I understand the troubles of generations younger than me who have never known anything else. That constant connectivity to a world of opinion and thought. Here’s the news for you people: humans aren’t “built” to cope with all that. Also, and this might be news to you, getting bored is a good thing.
I will add some provisos to that last statement. Make sure your mental and emotional health is good before trying to get bored. You don’t want to end up in a cycle of bad thoughts while out and about doing nothing.
Our best ideas and processing comes when we are bored. We have the chance to think and ponder and imagine. We should learn to put PDAs down. For an hour at a time to start. Then we can increase that. I’ve tried to leave my phone in the other room. I’m almost at that stage when I sometimes can’t remember where my phone is in my house. I hope to get better at this over the next while. Keep a book nearby, you know a printed book.
It’s important to switch off. To chill out. To wander the streets/countryside while pondering.
A trend I have noticed more and more in the news these days is the use of quotations in a headline. This is probably because of two reasons. The first is that it is incredibly expensive to defend “libel” accusations in the English court system. This gags publishers to a certain extent. The second reason is that it makes headline writing easy and removes controversy because the publisher can say “we were using quotes”. Here are some examples from the best UK news organisation the BBC.
Quotation Marks Excuse
In the Toby Young article the term “regret” is used in quotation marks because it’s a feeling that an organisation is having. It’s obviously a bullshit term for the fact that the Office for Students’ were WRONG, but rather than admit to being wrong they claim the organsation has “regret”. Let’s face it, they were wrong.
“Intorlerance” is written because someone said it and the BBC don’t want to put any form of objective fact into the reporting. Also, this article relys on what MPs and Peers said rather than any form of what does and will work. It’s entirely opinion and therefore possibly wrong. Hence the quotation.
“Down to privilege” used in the third article is ammusing. Being in quotes means that it’s treated as an opinion rather than a potential objective truth. This saves the BBC from having to defend their wording for the article because all they are doing is quoting a scientific study, or maybe they are putting their own spin on it. It doesn’t really matter. What the BBC have done is shy away from stating an objective truth.
The world these days doesn’t seem to like the idea that some things can be known for sure and they are truths. We can test them. Hell, you can test them if you want to study for long enough. Other things are opinion. I’m not sure opinion belongs in headlines.
Not Risking It
Look at these headlines. The BBC aren’t claiming the welfare system is at critical point. They aren’t being objective about it. They haven’t looked at the evidence and declared it is fucked. They have been lazy and just written down what someone said. It weakens the argument being made for investment.
“Lots to do”, if we were honest and objective then we could clearly state, without the need for speech marks, that there is a ton of stuff still to do on Brexit. Once again the quotation weakens the argument being put forward. It lends a sense of opinion rather than reality.
“Cheating”, yeah. They were lying weren’t they. They spent more than they were allowed and yes they cheated. It doesn’t have to be in quotation marks. We know that’s what they did.
“Sexism”. This headline says that although someone accused Boris, the sexist, of being sexist, we aren’t sure and are really relying on the speech of someone else rather than declaring our foreign secretary a rascist, sexist idiot.
Just look at the US press. They accuse their president of telling “untruths” or being “misleading”. Bullshit. He’s a liar. Let’s call him that.
News agencies have a duty to report the objective truth as much as possible. The rising use of quotations means there’s less chance to offend people who can’t cope with objectivity.
I spent the weekend at RAF Honington for a competition the CCF had been selected for. It was good fun even though I spent most of Saturday with a migraine and in bed. I did manage to watch them become best dressed in the organisation and also saw their drill routine.
Belated congrats to Maidstone Grammar School CCF (RAF) Section on winning uniform inspection at National Drill Championship. You did your school proud.
00:26:11 I hate that. Every time I hear that, something terrible happens.
00:26:15 Charlie don’t never see them or hear them, man.
One day, a momentous day for colour, I happened to think the place of work was particularly lovely. Fortunately I have a camera in my pocket and so recorded it for posterity.
Orange Grammar
My phone didn’t really capture the colour well as it auto-corrects the white balance and can’t cope. So, the above image, which I don’t process apart from cropping, is not really what it looked like. With that we could get into a lovely discussion about how we experience things and human memory but it’s probably best not to. Just to act as a contrast to the relaxed lovely image above, here’s what my work normally looks like:
What Work Looks Like
This is the dullest part of my work. The best bit is seeing learning and understanding along with challenging views of people and trying to create a more progressive society that is accepting of all.
Every two weeks I spend a terrifying ten minutes standing on the edge of the school’s property watching what seems like the entire world pass by in symphony. There are around 1400 pupils who pretty much leave the site all at once. Through the narrow gates of what I have labelled the school castle.
Lorenz
At the same time there are buses, school buses and many cars trying to use all the roads entering the centre of the picture. It is horrifying watching cars in a hurry and kids who don’t look and buses fully laden navigate this chaotic corner.
My current working theory as to why there are not many accidents here is down to the nature of the corner. The exact fact that it is quite chaotic causes people to slow down and be more aware. I do think that if there was a zebra crossing or similar put here there would be more accidents. The exact nature of busy unpredictable systems is that people slow down and look more.
Ask yourself this. When driving on a motorway do you fully concentrate at all times? When driving near your home do you fully concentrate at all times? Of course you don’t. It’s human nature to diminish tasks when they seem routine. Do you turn the stereo down when getting close to an unknown destination? Of course you do. It’s all about applying brain power from one activity to another. I know that I almost lose the ability to talk when driving near junctions or when I need more observation power. It’s almost as if multi-tasking didn’t exist!
I have a communication I am trying to write but I can’t yet find the words. I know what I want to say and can probably sum it up in two short sentences but I really want to elucidate my offerings with my personal experiences, up to a point.
So, I wondered if I could glean some data from this website. It takes effort, time and concentration to write these communications, even if it doesn’t look like it. I thought I’d look at how many communications I had published each month since this site started and spot how that fits into my plans for another piece of writing.
Fooyah Communications
I don’t like Excel, or at least the graphs it draws but this is a start. Except I’m sure it doesn’t show what I expected. Believe it or not that is a good thing in science. But it won’t help me with my writing.
Perhaps a moving average would work?
Fooyah Communications Moving Average
Nope. There’s not a great deal I can take from this either. My hypothesis failed entirely. Which, again is a good thing. Great bounds in understanding are made not when things go right but when they don’t go as expected. “Hmmm, that’s interesting” is probably the most exciting thing a scientist can say.
So, this didn’t work. I need another way of getting into writing the next something. It’s currently sitting as a draft with thirty words looking all sad and alone. I will get around to it. The tricky bit will be deciding which words and what order!
I recently had a day trip with the cadets to RAF Brize Norton. We visited three main areas of the base:
TMW – Tactical Med Wing
GEW – General Engineering Wing
47 Sqn
Allison AE 2100D3 and composite blades
I learnt a lot and saw two types of aircraft I hadn’t seen before. The weather was quite grey and so the photos are a bit of a washout, I don’t do Photoshop. The low cloud base did mean that the aircraft would take off and about fifteen seconds later they would climb through the cloud.
I know they are the best we have but sometimes there needs to be some serious editorial control from the BBC because they publish utter rubbish like this:
Bad Headline
This is the first article in the Health News section for today. Click on the story and you get this:
Terrible Article
First up, a warning. The word CHIROPRACTIC already flags this up as a terrible article. The only responsible news item that mentions CHIROPRACTIC is one where there is a decent discussion of why it is rubbish and doesn’t work.
Rather than get enraged at the poor reporting lets look at the data and quotations included in the article.
First the BCA is quoted as saying that clothes can be bad for us. Then in the next paragraph:
However, the research has been rejected by the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy and other back experts.
They say we shouldn’t be afraid of our clothes.
Real doctors and scientists say this is bollocks. Then there follows plenty of gumpf from the BCA about what items can be damaging. While the BBC do “balance” this with more quotations from proper scientists they have already done the damage by publishing this shit.
In a section called “What’s the reality?” [it’s not reality, it’s written by the BCA] the BBC write:
The BCA’s poll of 1,062 people found 73% had suffered back pain and 33% were not aware that clothing could affect their back, neck or posture. They warn that any item of clothing that restricts movement, or that leads people to stand or walk unnaturally, can have a negative impact on the posture, back or neck.
There are major problems here. First they say a survey found that people have suffered back pain. So fucking what? I’ve suffered back pain. Most people have. Then, apparently, one third of people aren’t aware that clothing can affect your back, neck or posture. Well, given it’s not a thing they can’t know about it can they? This article relies on people being unable to understand a causation-correlation problem. Surveys are the worst of scientific evidence, but slightly better than anecdote.
At the base of the BBC article there is a quotation from the head of practice at the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy who says that disseminating this false information could lead to real problems. The BBC need to get an editor who understands a load of bollocks when it is written and when to pull it. I am not going to look but I bet there are loads of news articles online and in print running this bollocks too.
Steve Tolan, head of practice at the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy, says “reading scare stories about skinny jeans is probably more harmful than actually wearing them.
“People should wear whatever is comfortable and they feel good in – skinny jeans and hoodies included. They certainly shouldn’t fear that their clothes are going to do them harm as there is no evidence for that.
“What is probably more relevant is whether a woman thinks that they are wearing something that is damaging their back, says Dr O’Keeffe.
“The beliefs about the jeans and bags may not only be incorrect, but detrimental if they cause worry about the spine being fragile and discourage women from moving normally and wearing what they want.
“Misconceptions regarding the causes and treatments of low back pain are widespread. This story about skinny jeans and heavy bags is just another myth in the long list of myths about back pain.
“It fits with the misconception that load and movement are bad and that the spine is a vulnerable structure that is easily damaged. Strong evidence shows that this is not true.”
I thought I ought to look at the BCA article or press release to see what it said. So I went to their website.
The “research” was probably a telephone or internet based survey. The BCA don’t link to the actual results. There is so much wrong with this article it infuriates me. As my tweet earlier said:
Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!
Research from the BCA! Grrrrrrrrrrrr.
This “news” article is an advert masquerading as serious science. It’s bullshit. It’s designed to make people think “oh, I feel like that”, then they visit the BCA website and try to find a local chiropractor. This will cause proper injuries as chiropractic DOESN’T work.
Saw a lovely part of London today when I walked along the Regent’s Canal today. I was learning some maths in town and I had to walk from St Pancras to the venue and rather than walk along the main roads I took the tow path. I’m glad I did.
Part Of The Canal
I also saw this exquisite book shop. There was music playing from loud speakers as I walked past and plenty of vinyl on display.
Bookshop
I also saw a lovely old industrial building that, if I had loads of money and the relevant experience I would turn this into a music venue.
It’s a shame I don’t have money, the contacts, the experience or any industry knowledge at all!
My Future Venue
When I got back home I went for a run and jogged past this quality piece of Kent countryside. I think this is the second burnt out car to grace these pages!
They cut out the VIN
But, there is good news: This lovely view over the Medway and Tonbridge and Malling Borough.
