Category: Comment

Other than giving birth …

… I share a lot in common with Victoria Coren Mitchell’s view of the Mother-of-all-awful-years.

But awful year or not, at least we can be amused by her source of inspiration (or, wearing my current Grinch persona, we can once Christmas is over!) …

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Postscript#1: Unsurprisingly, I don’t really have much in common with Coren Mitchell. After all, she’s an elite poker player, successful writer, highly amusing TV personality and, ahem, muse to men-of-a-certain-age, and all that I can do well is to count fish (commercial fishermen would disagree) and I haven’t actually done that since about 2005!

Postscript#2: In the Observer article on which she tweets, she cites Victoria Wood’s death as the saddest of the year: “… take your pick whose fall upset you most … for me the deepest cut was Victoria Wood, that sparkling creature of joy and laughter“. I agree, recalling from posts passim: “There has been a heavy toll taken of performers recently, but, for me, hers is the most egregious loss. Too soon and too young. A genuine laugh-out-loud writer and a comedian …“. (Of course thousands will have read Coren Mitchell’s comment on Wood; 11 people read mine – and that includes the author – so not much in common there either).

A word of comfort …

… to a mathematically ‘challenged’ social science class. 

I’ve previously mentioned the hilarity evoked by Firstborn’s decision to take a course in statistics during her Masters year. Well, that is over now and she didnae enjoy it, concluding that statistics is “evil”.

Tutors take note! That’s what happens when a subject is badly taught. From a pedagogical perspective the teachers could learn much from the following extract from Jordon Ellenberg’s book ‘How not to be wrong; the hidden maths of everyday life“:

“Working an integral or performing linear regression is something a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense … requires a guiding human hand. When we teach mathematics we are supposed to be explaining how to be that guide. A math course that fails to do so is essentially training the student to be a very slow, buggy version of Microsoft Excel. And let’s be frank: that really is what many of our math courses are doing.”

 

 

There is a god …

In the Graun today:

UK brussels sprout harvest hit by ‘super-pest’ moths

… consumers shopping for sprouts this year could have less choice than usual after some British-grown crops were ravaged by “super-pest” moths during the summer. … The problem has arisen as a result of an explosion in the numbers of diamondback moths arriving in the UK from Europe, which can cause huge damage to crops such as sprouts, cabbages and cauliflowers.

Add broccoli to that list of cruciferous b******s and I’ll happily start a diamondback moth appreciation society 🙂

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Because we’re idiots …

Today’s Graun had a long piece in it by Ian Martin, reflecting on his 10 years as a cancer survivor. At one point he went on a bit of a rant. I don’t normally just copy and paste anything other than short quotes in this blog, but what Martin was ranting about is important. Let’s hope we stop being idiots soon:

My antigen numbers had come in, spectacularly high. But an inflexible NHS system had already decided there was no way they could bring forward the biopsy, set for three months’ time. A neat solution as by then I’d be, if not dead, unsaveable. So in July 2006, for the first and only time in my life, and following the clever advice of Barbara on reception at my GP’s surgery, I paid for a private consultation with my NHS oncologist, at the local private hospital where he worked part-time. He was then able to pick up the phone from his private consultant’s office and book me an NHS biopsy, with the public sector version of him, in two days’ time. Then at that biopsy his NHS persona acknowledged the seriousness of the situation flagged up by his private sector self and thankfully “they” immediately started me on the treatment that’s kept me alive ever since.

This blurring of who does what in the NHS – this is how the lung-shadow of privatisation has spread in the last 10 years. Lobbyists and politicians push for lucrative contracting-out for companies and their shareholders but call it improved customer service, and savings. Those of us in the #WeLoveTheNHS club are forced to circle the wagons, when it clearly needs not brittle defence but proper reform. And those of us born in the infancy of the NHS, who have paid in their whole lives for the treatment they receive, now discover they’re part of an “overspend”. Before the Tory cuts – £20bn so far and another £22bn by 2020 – the NHS was “in surplus”. Why in the name of Beveridge’s bollocks are we even talking about overspending and not underfunding? Because we’re idiots, that’s why.

It’s a long read, but worthy; the full article is here.

Quotes that made me laugh #19

The Titanic had no sooner been launched than more than 1500 people died in one of the worst-ever peacetime maritime disasters when a supposedly unsinkable ship ploughed into an iceberg and sank.

Meantime, Boris Johnson considers that Brexit will be a Titanic success. Another quote that made me laugh in despair and not in humour:

“Brexit means Brexit and we are going to make a Titanic success of it“.

So much for a classical education …

Things that I wish I’d said …

Following on from my previous post, I have always been impressed and rather humbled by the ability of my international colleagues to conduct our business in what is, for them, a non-native language. This admiration extends particularly to their participation in what can be at times quite intense and argumentative discussions.

Consequently I just loved this quote from an exasperated Swedish colleague during a ‘lively’ discussion of the draft text of our current meeting report. She demonstrated her command of the English language with the following:

“It’s this kind of sloppy decision making that’s going to f**k -up the whole thing!”

I couldn’t have put it better myself!

Quotes that made me laugh #8

This is a quote that made me laugh not so much through humour as in despair. It seems that the CV posted by one of the contenders to become leader of the UK’s Conservative Party may have been ‘sexed-up’ (which is ironic given that it appeared in the same week as the Chilcot review of events pre- and post- the Iraq war; events that had alleged the production of a sexed-up dodgy dossier):

“It looks as though the issue is that anyone who reads Andrea’s CV and attaches a lot of weight to that particular role may actually be under some slight misapprehension as to what it was she actually did.”

‘Sir Humphrey’ couldn’t have put it better himself.