Peaches

I don't know why I did it, but yesterday I thought I'd read an article and interview about Peaches Geldof - you know, daughter of Bob who ran away to get married in Vegas, at 19, while only knowing her husband for a month previously (half of which was on Facebook or MySpace, so does that really count?)

Anyway, I don't know if anyone else out there has braved reading this article but it's full of contradictions and hypocritical behaviour. For instance, she claims to not respect the media for the way that she's been treated yet she has become a journalist. And then she goes on to say that she would like deep, meaningful articles but openly admitted to asking stupid questions about cheese in some of her articles.

Hmm.... I think the thing that ticked me off the most is when Peaches said that she'd been offered a place to study English Literature at the University of London and yet smugly said that she'd deferred for a year because she wanted to live the high life in New York. Oh god, I think I nearly died. I don't know what anyone else thinks, but is there a distinct.... smell of being a spoiled brat? Is that just me?

A lot of people have to work madly hard and grind themselves into the ground to get to where they are but Peaches seems to have glided through everything with such ease. I think this is like the episode of the Simpsons (yes, yes, I know, but it's a good reference point) when Homer meets Frank Grimes. Now, if I'm Frank and she's Homer, I'll eventually electrocute myself with rage because of the utter frustration that I feel from seeing someone glide through life without any sort of work involved what-so-ever. To quote: "You're what's wrong with America today!!" or maybe "You've got the house, the family and lobsters for dinner and all I have to show for my years of hard work is a briefcase and this haircut!!"

I'm angry, super-angry. I don't like sleb culture* anyway, but it's weird.... In another section of the paper there was an article about people being snobs towards the working classes and getting into Uni (er, college in America, right?) I think maybe Peaches got there because of who she is rather than what she is. And that's the worst thing about sleb culture. If you're not known, no-one wants to know. Argh!!

*Sleb Culture - Well, it sounds better than Celebrity Culture doesn't it? Actually I don't mind some of them because some are more genuine than others... I hate the ones that are only famous because of their parents....

Practicality Over Fashion

I love these shoes - but they have a 4.5 inch heel and I can only manage, at the most, 4 inches. It's odd because when I first saw these I thought.... wow! Look at all the pretty colours! They're so different! But after clicking to see the heel size (which I thought was going to be below 4 inches judging by the first picture they displayed) I was bitterly disappointed.

I think manufacturers should start making shoes that either have adjustable heels or they should make a wide range of heel sizes - everything from flat to sky-high (if you really want sky-high). Shoes that have a heel the width of a pinhead should be banned and made illegal, while people over a certain height shouldn't be wearing heels at all (trust me, when you're only little over 5 foot it's scary seeing a woman who's nearly 6 feet tall in a pair of 6 inch heels).

The heel situation is really limiting the type of shoes I can wear. Dolly shoes may be cute and a little quirky - only a little since everyone seems to wear them - but heels would give me a.) a sense of height and b.) a more grown-up feelings. Being the proud owner of a pair of brogues that have a medium-sized heel is brilliant - but they were a rare find. To most people brogues mean granny shoes, with no style, no heel, a dull colour and make your feet look so wide and fat that it brings a whole new meaning to the cockney term "plates of meat".

So we have a conundrum! Either our feet ache with rubbing and blisters but we look feminine and have the illusion of height or we go for these awful, awful, simply awful pieces of rubber. I know what I'd rather pick, much to the chagrin of everyone else. But can we please have a fashion season when Chanel or someone does a whole collectino of fashionable mid-sized or kitten heels?

So In Relation...

So after posting a couple of days ago about closing down libraries I had a conversation with some colleagues about the state of reading in this country right now.

I think we all agreed that less and less people are reading, even if it's just a few pages a night like me - most worryingly, this seems to be true of children and teenagers and aren't they the people who need to be reading the most? It does, after all, extend their vocabulary and their overall general knowledge.

I wouldn't exactly say that I'm a book aficionado but I do know a fair bit and I have spent a large number of years studying literature - from this you generally get a good feel of how things should and should not be written (although really the basics of writing should be drilled in during sessions in school - I can't stand bad grammar and spelling).

Since one of my associates teaches English, they know what is and isn't acceptable in the world of teaching. So now we have a parallel - as TV, games console and computer ownership goes up, the number of books being sold and read is going down. Add to this a second parallel - as the number of books being read is going down, the number of kids who can't read, write and communicate properly is going up. And it's going to be difficult to solve since if these kids don't want to read, which is generally the case after they hit the age of 12, literacy skills will be in free fall and we'll have a whole country of illiterates!

(Well, maybe that was an exaggeration but you get the drift....)

My associate pointed out that children don't even have to be reading Shakespeare or Wordsworth to generally increase their reading and writing standard - even works of science fiction, fantasy and crime thrillers will help them because they all have one thing in common - a wide vocabulary and generally impeccable grammar (I say impeccable because, while most books have very few mistakes, I consider the rotten Oxford Comma to be awful and unnecessary!). I would highly recommend people like Terry Pratchett for people who can't stand more realistic concepts - even he involves the politics of the day and the state of our world into his hilarious Discworld novels.

Oh, what to do? I believe we're in a conundrum....

Go Philip! Go Philip!

Philip Pullman, aka the author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, spoke out this week about the closure of the library in the school he used to go to - basically he said it was a disgrace.

The reason for the closure? Technology. Flamin' technology again (and yes I'm aware of the irony of me writing about "flamin' technology" given that I'm using it to express my view here). They're going to replace the library with some technology that means you can have books digitally or something.

Here's a positive - perhaps the kids might treat these digital books a bit like their mobiles or iPods. With some respect. I don't know about anyone else but everyone seemed to hate books when I was at school and would do anything to get out of reading them. At least this might spark some more interest in literature.

But what really ticks me off about this is that in many schools libraries are being scrapped because they are seen as "not an essential part of the curriculum or the way the school is run". Er, isn't English a core subject? Don't you, you know, have to get a good grade in English to get anywhere in life? Books suddenly not part of English any more? Have I suddenly become old fashioned and no longer know what English entails?

NO!!!! I haven't. In fact, I'm pretty sure that, apart from the titles of the books studied in schools today, the basic curriculum of English revolves around reading and writing. 2 of the legendary 3 Rs (the other one is 'Rithmetic as in Arithmetic as in Maths - but that's the least important of the 3 Rs).

What are all the librarians going to do? They'll be jobless! It's another catastrophe! Can you see where I'm going here? You can't shut the libraries down because, surprise surprise, it would be an atrocity. I like the feel of a solid book, and I hate to think about this since it could signal the very beginning of the end for the physical book. I can't fathom why anyone would want to read a book from a little digital machine - they're probably going to give you the eyes of an 80 year old at 25 and lock-arm from using them (since you'll be straining your eyes to see the words and holding your arm up constantly to look at the screen. Oh, so add iPod finger to that as well seeing as how you'll be tapping furiously at a little button to turn the pages....)

Who needs a mechanical book? I'd be so annoyed. I don't care if I end up with a really scrappy copy, I'll never change from good old paper and so what if I'm old fashioned!? I agree with Mr. Pullman!

Protesting...

First of all, let me apologize for being away from the desk for... well, ages! This might actually be a more frequent event and if you happen to notice that I'm away for a couple of weeks don't panic, I will post eventually. Bearing in mind that it's been a madhouse here I'm pretty sure that you can all forgive me. Hopefully.

I've been watching a lot of news lately, and by that I mean watching the 6pm national news then the 6:30pm national news on a different channel and then yet another news programme at 7pm on yet another channel... whew.

During this time I've been noticing some weird coincidences. First of all, the Pre-Budget Report came out yesterday with Alistair Darling saying we should all spend more. Cue the presenter standing in, you guessed it, a shopping mall!

But the thing that got me was when I watched the BBC 1pm news and during an interview with their political correspondent outside Westminster, a guy with a placard saying that Iraq was turning into World War 3 and a nuclear holocaust starting waving his banner behind the reporter's head. The thing about this was that the cameraman tried to surreptitiously zoom in to the correspondent's head to try and block the placard out of view. He did this so many times that you could practically count the amount of nose hairs that political man had.

The Beeb are supposed to be impartial so I guess this was only necessary - I was hoping to hear a little statement from the anchorwoman claiming that the views reflected in the report were not that of the BBC. But no, they must've just about avoided any sort of egg/face incident.

The punchline is that Mr. Protester did exactly the same thing on the 6:30pm news! How brilliant! I ended up egging him on to give the angry sign-waving a bit of welly but the report ended to quickly for him to get anywhere. What a shame eh?

Still, this news channel is supposedly a little less unbiased (er, well, that's actually arguable) so if we had more placard/camera interaction would the cameraman have attempted a similar zoom in strategy? I guess we'll never know, but the point is that maybe the news channels shouldn't be so touchy about little things like this? It was a peaceful protest, unlike the numerous times when football hooligans have shouted and started chanting like dummies just to get attention when some of these journalists go outside a stadium. He wasn't being noisy - what's everyone's problem?!

Neighbours: Now With 10% More Fat Than The Next Leading Brand!

So I was reading the paper a couple of days ago and I read an article that said you were much more likely to be overweight if your neighbours were. They said it was like "keeping up with the Joneses".

Now, I don't know about anyone else but I would be a bit worried if I started putting on weight to keep up with the way that my neighbours looked. Apart from the fact that it's just a little bit weird and sad*, surely it's not good for your health at all?! With all of the warnings that we have about being over a certain weight I find it odd that people would be putting on weight in this way: can't we just leave the whole keeping up with your neighbours thing to TVs and sofas?

Perhaps I'm not the best example though. I'm a healthy weight and living in a fairly slim neighbourhood - would I really be fatter if I lived in a neighbourhood with more overweight people? Can I extend this "area" to mean my whole town? If this was the case I can say this research is terrible since there's a lot of large people walking down my high street eating a Greggs** pastie*** and McDonalds. At the same time.

I wonder what kind of sample they had? If we think about this deep enough it could have been done in particularly hefty streets in generally hefty towns. At least this research doesn't state the obvious though: most of them say things that are blatant even to people who've been on another planet for all their lives (we're talking smoking here, which is such a stupid subject if looked at in more depth).

Somebody please tell me if this is applicable to anybody/anywhere near them. I'm very interested....

*Sad = just something a bit weird and pitiful really. Like people who constantly go "ahhh, isn't that cute" whenever they see a baby or any kind of animal
**Greggs = I wished I'd never have to explain since it's disgusting. They're a bakers who make nice doughnuts and little else - I think that they serve food disgracefully high in fat, salt and sugar, mostly at the same time. Catch the smell wafting around on the mornings and be sickened for the rest of the day. Don't be fooled by the apparent "healthy" options like the piled high cajun sandwiches or whatever they are. No comparison to rival bakers Milligans in my own humble opinion
***Pastie = I deliberately spelt it this way so that people who didn't know what one was wouldn't say "pasty" as in looking a bit white and ill. Pasties (pass-teees) are like a savoury pastry with various fillings. Quite filling, quite fattening in some cases but if you ever have a chicken tikka flavoured one you'll understand that one every now and then is pretty good for you really. Available in corned beef, chicken bake, tikka, cheese and onion, and the most famous Cornish to name a few

Eats, Shoots and Leaves: Resurrection Of The Stickler

In reading through Lynne Truss's book "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" (a no-nonsense guide to punctuation that is often pretty funny and sometimes throws some weird facts at you) it dawned on me that I am a "stickler".

A stickler is someone who goes around and gasps at the shoddy use of punctuation, and in my case this is particularly true of the apostrophe. There are many times when I want to have a heart attacks because I see signs like "CD's for sale" or "50% off hose's" (and I know this is a bit of an odd example).

To add to the issue this afternoon when in a shop I saw the line "... and all the bands I'm yet to discover" instead of the fully grammatical "...and all the bands I've yet to discover". Tsk tsk, this is awfully sloppy and is setting a bad example. I would blame texting but to be perfectly honest I text people far more than a call them; I'd be a hypocrite to say that this wonderful function is causing the death of English grammar.

But like Lynne says, all of the sticklers need to unite and fight the wave of sloppy grammarians who think it's okay to be shoddy with words - they are effectively killing our language. Where would we be, after all, without apostrophes and commas? They help us understand the true meanings of sentences and are necessary to be fully understood. You wouldn't want to read a book and think that it's about a completely different subject to that which the author intended would you?

Gather the following items and join me in the grammar wars: stickers, banners, balaclavas, megaphones, spray cans, and a gun (to shoot people who still won't get the message or maybe even to turn on yourself if the situation gets too awful which is how I feel sometimes).

Oh, what's the use? I even corrected the grammar of my friend the other day and she was surprised and shocked that I'd be so picky about where she put her comma: "But it's grammatically incorrect for what you're trying to say!" I squealed. "So? Stop nit-picking!" She protested. Am I the only stickler in this part of the world!?

For those of you who don't understand the panda, I'll explain: The idea is based around a joke about a dictionary entry about the panda. Instead of typing "eats shoots and leaves" which suggests the panda's eating habits, the compiler of the dictionary wrote "eats, shoots and leaves" which suggests that pandas eat in a restaurant, shoot everyone dead and then leaves without a care in the world. Awful joke, but it makes a valid point!

Epidemic! Run For The Hills!

So right now I'm recovering from the common cold (which I find as being an odd name because there's nothing common about the type of colds I get - it's much more than the regular sniffles and drippy nose!) and everyone around me is coming down with it.

My three best friends are either in the grip of the cold or are developing all the symptoms that point to them getting it! One was absent from work and bedridden today thanks to this supposedly harmless little virus that everyone says you should just get on with.

The thing is, when you've got the cold you instantly think that it's going to develop into something worse or you're paranoid about passing it on to other people. Watching "28 Days Later" yesterday turned my friend into a nervous wreck, not just because we'd watched a scary movie at 10am but also because it made her think that she was going to spread the cold to everyone and anyone she came into brief contact with.

Unfortunately if you're working in the confines of an office or are sitting in a meeting room you can't escape other people's germs and they can't avoid yours. I ate the whole "grit your teeth and get on with it" attitude to the cold, so can someone please invent a vaccination for it?!

And On That Note...

Remember last week when I said about the misreading of signs? Here's another one for you (please don't knock me for this, it was at a great distance on the bus today!):

"S&M Animal Accessories"

Make of that what you will - I think that the "&" was supposed to be a little fancy squiggle to make the sign look nicer but it made for me nearly dying of keeping giggles in for too long after I'd seen it!

Waht Wsa Htat?

Yes, this is supposed to say "What Was That?" in the title and the point is that today I was sitting on the bus travelling to work when I saw the most curious thing - and this must have happened to someone else at least once before!

So it's raining, I'm listening to Black Kids to cheer me up and we pass by Hays Travel where there's a sign in the window saying "Thinking of going on holiday? Cuddle us now!" Okay, yeah, the sign didn't really mean that we should be getting hugs for going on holiday but instead the sign really said: "Thinking of going on holiday? Come in now!" So either this was a bad case of morning eyes teamed with the rather annoying will it develop/ won't it develop kind of cold or I'm going crazy.

But then opposite there is a barber's where the sign says "Free Haircut With Every Chosen Design" - design meaning a pattern to shave into your head (why anyone would want to do that is beyond me!). So we've gone from misinterpretations to stupidness - does anyone else have a problem with signs and flyers in this way? No? Fine.