Saturday 23 October 2010

What planet am I on?

Work is intense for the next week, including weekends so if I miss a day it'll be because I'm shattered. The thing about self employment is that either you have loads of money and no free time, or loads of free time and no money. The trick is to stash during the loadsamoney periods to survive the skint ones.

I'm looking forward to the lull that comes after this one although other projects are already being discussed. Sod it, I'll pretend to have a cold for a week.

Anyway, today I'm wondering if I've worked so fast and drunk so much caffeine that I've exceeded the speed of light and slipped into an alternate dimension. The news is beyond weird, even for the Daily Mail.

A man with no arms crashed his car. Question Time has a lefty bias (this is news?). Traffic wardens are playing James Bond and millionaires are buying babies. This is not the real world. It can't be.

UK schools are now the worst at teaching the fundamentals. Meanwhile a teacher has been barred from the profession for being utterly useless. Just how useless are we talking here? He would have to actually suck knowledge from children's heads to reach that level of useless. How did he get through teacher training college? How did he manage to teach for 13 years (oh, wait, there's something about that number). And how did he get to be head of business studies before anyone noticed he was useless?

Did you know Mrs. Queen owns the seabed? I didn't. So the wind farmers have to pay her rent for building their windmills on her submerged estates. That son of hers, the one who looks like the FA Cup, is a big fan of wind farms but doesn't want them on land. Especially not on his land, although on yours is fine. He wants them at sea so his Mum gets the rent. It's no wonder the Navy are cutting back on ships. Soon there won't be enough open water around the coast for anything bigger than a dinghy.

I've had booze-fuelled dreams that made more sense than this.

Oh, that's enough of the Daily Mad for anyone's blood pressure. Let's try the Telegraph. Surely there's a trace of sanity over there? Not a bit of it.

In order to save us from global warming and cut the deficit, the government plans to... sell all the trees. I'll have to put some padding on this desk before I give myself concussion. Sell the trees? Is that really all that's left? What next, dismantling Snowdon and shipping it across to some American millionaire's ranch? We are so skint that we have to sell the trees!

Sky news. Surely there's sanity over there? Nope.

One man gets out of bed to feed his child, twelve people who know him - he lives there - mistake him for Satan and attack him, then they all jump out of the window. I really can't think of anything to say.

When did Kafka take over running the planet? Who thought it was a good idea to let him?

Reuters. Surely the staid and sober Reuters contains no madness?

London fire brigades are to strike. The TUC wants a street riot but they'll have it next March because it's a bit cold at the moment. Someone should tell the TUC that the country has nothing left to sell but trees. Sure, keep your jobs. There's no money to pay you, but you can go to work if you like. Perhaps they'll declare leaves legal tender. They already think money grows on trees.

Oh, and Jane Austen was a crap writer, declares a loonie who bases her assessment on the fact that Austen's first drafts weren't letter-perfect. There's no spellchecker on paper and pen. First drafts always look terrible, they are just to get the idea written down before you lose it. Spelling, grammar, handwriting, none of that matters at that stage. Just get the damn thing down. Then work on it. Nobody gets to see first drafts. Especially not the ones that didn't turn out to be worth keeping. Well, not until some mad professor pulls them out.

I'm not worried about being 'denormalised' as a smoker, drinker, unapproved-food-eater or anything else. Denormalised?

What the hell is left that's normal?

I need a drink. And a smoke. Ah, normality at last. I knew it was here somewhere.

6 comments:

subrosa said...

You're normal but we're few and far between. In my home is a 'fence sitter' - a right wing one and if he had a vote here he'd definitely vote tory.

He can't see there's no difference between political parties and is stuck in the Maggie era. I can appreciate that but it's too long a story to expound here.

I'm lacking in inspiration with blogging because I've discovered my offspring is in luv with a meal ticket. Back to the white wine for me while the house sleeps.

Leg-iron said...

There are people in your house? You're obviously not being difficult enough.

White wine - I can sympathise. I haven't restocked after Smoky-Drinky yet so I'm on the port.

Sometimes I pass it to the right, when nobody's looking...

JuliaM said...

"Just how useless are we talking here? He would have to actually suck knowledge from children's heads to reach that level of useless."

That's exactly what a poor teacher can do - erase the building blocks put in place by your parents. And turn you into another unquestioning drone..

PT Barnum said...

We're all of us Josef K. these days, when we look at the world and can make no sense of its arbitrary cruelties.

However, that Oxford academic wasn't saying Austen was crap, she was being much more ideological. What she was actually arguing was that Austen would have been Virginia Woolf if it hadn't been for the big bad nasty male publishers turning her 'feminine discourse' into phallologocentric rectitude. That kind of argument was trendy c. 1986. I am not surprised Oxfordians still regard it as bleeding edge research.

Anonymous said...

"Not only is the economy on its knees, not only is the law tilted against us..." "TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber will say in a speech to union groups in London."

And precisely WHY is the economy on itd knees, and WHO passed the laws that oppress legitimate debate? Please don't say 'Thatcher'...

Leg-iron said...

JuliaM - it's a whole new world compared to my schooldays. No teacher would have put warble gloaming and antismoking and kiddie sex higher up the curriculum than geometry.

Geometry was handy recently. It let me work out that I needed 250 crocus bulbs to make an eight foot circle with a star inside in my lawn. Who says education isn't useful?

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