Friday, January 27, 2012

The Old Alma Mater

Remember Windscale? It was a nuclear power station that had a bit of a meltdown and subsequently got a bad name.

The marketing people solved the problem by renaming it Sellafield and everyone thought it was a different, new, improved nuclear power station and the threat went away.

Apparently, renaming a failing institution is the best way to improve things and by far the cheapest, so it's win-win!

The proof of this is in our education system. In fact the Shoebox's old school Herbert Carter Secondary Modern, which was always a bit crap, was renamed Carter Community School (specialising in SPORT, so don't worry about Maths and English, everyone's going for gold!), and is now only the TENTH worse school in Britain! Hoorah!

Mind you, our old rivals Kemp Welch have been renamed TWICE! First as Rossmore Community College and now as St Aldhelm's, and THEY'VE just been the awarded the worst school in Britain award, so I don't know what happened there?

According to the local Echo:

Just three per cent of pupils leaving St Aldhelm’s Academy last summer scored the benchmark five A* - C GCSE grades, including English and maths.

That’s a drop of 11 places in a year for the former Rossmore Community College, taken over by sponsors the Diocese of Salisbury and Bournemouth University in September 2010 in a bid to raise standards.

Today the Borough of Poole has demanded urgent improvements at the school and action from the sponsors. It has also offered to help the school.

Carter Community School in Poole has also fared badly in league tables published today.

It is ranked as the 10th worst in the country with just 21 per cent reaching the benchmark standard.

Yes, one town has two schools in the worst ten!

Is it social deprivation? Well no, it's quite an affluent area without the unemployment desolation of the North East or the inner-urban blight of our major cities. It's not even racial, as most of these kids are white, and in fact it's the sort of area that white supremacists move to. (Most of the racism I heard as a kid came from the emigres from London and the Midlands).

No, it's actually all about the success of the local Grammar Schools. Poole never tolerated the move to Comprehensives, and stuck to the old two-tier education system, where the children of the middle-classes and the brightest of the lower orders were prioritised into the Grammar schools for a proper education, whilst the rest of us were basically abandoned.

The Grammar schools are very good at what they do, and are able to compete with private schools in their effectiveness.

However, the price of this success is the bargain basement approach that is the secondary modern system, (now rebranded as Community Colleges), where children are put on hold until they're old enough to work for fast food outlets, go onto the building sites or enter the prison system. And until it's recognised as a problem derived from SOCIAL attitudes towards working class children, the problem will persist unchallenged.

In short, it will remain a Conservative paradise!

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Four Legs Good

It's all things otter today.

According to the British Dog Breeders Association, celebrity endorsement of foreign breeds means our native dogs are under threat . And the most vulnerable is the Otterhound.

No, I hadn't heard of him either, and I'm sure that his ancestors were partly responsible for driving the nation's mostloved marine mammal to the brink of extinction, but just look at him: how could anyone NOT want an Otterhound?

I mean, look at his little face!

Meanwhile, at the HSBC they're using a pretend Chinese font to advertise their latest promotion. It reads:

Great Otters To Bring You Prosperity In The New Year!

Well, I THINK that's what it says.

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Supermarket Sweepstake

The elderly Jamaican gentleman queuing in front of me tonight was buying: A loaf of bread; a bag of samosas and a pillow.

I wondered to myself what he actually left the house to buy. Which was the target purchase, and what followed on impulse?

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

The Simian Salvation Disappointment


























One of the great adventures provided by dyslexia is the surreal potential afforded by text on first sight.

Until the words are translated for their actual meaning, they can momentarily represent anything, and therefore offer a world of possibilities. This was certainly the case today when I believe that the poor canine owed his rescue to a CHIMP and began to envisage the scenario, possibly with the heroic ape swooping down on a vine and hoiking up the victim by the collar with his articulated feet.

And yes, on realising this was wrong, I did ponder (like the rest of us) on how a slice of fried potato could possibly have achieved this, without even hands to clutch to the vine in the first place.

Maybe we'll never know, but the chimp version was a far better way to go.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Two Notes:

Saw "The Artist" and it deserves the Hype. (Go on, give the dog an Oscar!)

Also check out their previous work OSS 117 Cairo Nest of Spies which has the best comedy Nazis EVER.

Also: Tory chef Anthony Worral Thompson has been caught shop-lifting in Tesco.

To counter-quote Alan Bennett: "Tesco's? Sainsbury's yes, but Tesco's; REALLY" (Note for colonials: this is a British class based joke).

Friday, January 06, 2012

I Spy; The Emirates


























Visually Impaired? Have a four-legged friend with a full bladder?

Then why not visit Arsenal's sponsor-named stadium?

Otherwise, not really worth the visit.

Thursday, January 05, 2012

Abbot: Parties Race to the Moral High Ground

Blimey! That Diana Abbot's caused a right old commotion in Westminster today, leading the parties to dig out any "members of colour" to demonstrate that the only way to assuage whitey is to show that a) they do indeed have black & asian representatives, and b) that the black and asian representatives care for white people too!

After her tweet in support for solidarity amongst the black community the Tories saw an opportunity to score points with the predictable request for a sacking.

However, who to deliver it?

I imagine it went something like this:

Advisor: "Prime Minister, it will be to our party's advantage to request that Labour sack this woman."

Mr Cameron: "OK, go ahead and write my lines and I'll make a speech!"

Advisor: "I'm sorry Prime Minister, but that won't be suitable sir. She is a person of race who has made a comment which is racially related. If you speak out it may sound like you're being sensitive, and possibly a little bit racist yourself."

Mr Cameron: "Blimey, a bit of a sticky wicket you mean!"

Advisor: "Indeed Prime Minister sir."

Mr Cameron: "So what do you advise?"

Advisor: "Well Prime Minister, it will have to come from one of the few members of your party from an ethnic background sir."

Mr Cameron: "Oh I see. What about Inky? Will he do?"

Advisor: "I'm sorry sir, that's no longer acceptable language, and I believe Mr Zahawi dislikes the term. However, I believe he's desperate enough to get on in the party that he may well do your bidding."

Mr Cameron: "Hoorah! Good old… erm.. what's the blighter's name again?"

Advisor: "Nadhim Zahawi sir. I'll brief him and point him at the press forthwith sir."

Mr Cameron: "Excellent! Can I go now?"


Next thing you know, the Labour party are on the back foot.


Ed Milliband: "Bloody hell, what's she gone and done now? I bet Portillo put her up to it. What are we going to do?"

Advisor: "Well sonny boy, we're keeping you well out of it. We need one of our ethnic people out there to counteract THEIR ethnic people. I've got Keith Vaz on Radio 5"

Ed Milliband: "Oh no, not Vaz!"

Advisor: "I'm afraid so matey. He can do the elder statesman 'she was mistaken, but she's doing a great job otherwise' speech whilst we find a black labour MP who ISN'T Dianne Abbot to do a more damning condemnation to show how we just don't approve of that sort of thing."

Ed Milliband: "You mean David Lammy?"

Advisor: "You have to be joking, he's just run for the hills. However, we think there's someone called Chuka Umunna who may play ball."

Ed Milliband: "Sounds perfect, shall I call him?"

Advisor: "Certainly not sunshine, leave this to the professionals. Just get on with your homework until we tell you when you can come out again."

Wednesday, January 04, 2012

Who Do You Think You're Kidding Mr Coe?

OK, now we have Winterval behind us, there's nothing between us and the Olympics.

And it seems that we're waking up to the reality of what is about to happen to London for the duration, particularly at the hands of the Axis powers, that is, the Olympic committee and their cronies in the sponsorship alliance, who will lay seige to the capital, reverse the burden of proof for the prosecution of dissidents and impose their elite "Zil Lanes" upon us, claiming miles of road to ensure they have untainted access to anywhere they care to drive, all shamelessly assisted by the quisling London Organising Committee.

Farcically, that's not even standard blogger hyperbole; it's a factual summary of the events to come.

Check out:

The London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games (Advertising and Trading) (England) Regulations 2011

Zil Lanes

Even my employers are conflicted as to how to approach the impending Vichy period, simultaneously banning annual leave and insisting that staff avoid coming in to work, issuing instructions to staff reiterating both. It appears that many of us will be invited to enjoy "working from home", regardless as to whether we're not just avoiding the pre-school nursery fees whilst pretending that they "get so much more done without getting interrupted" as usual, (but don't get me started on THAT hot potato).

Meanwhile, our suppliers have spent some time now recommending customers to stockpile supplies, or to begin arrangements to receive deliveries over night whilst the the occupying forces are in their barracks, or making free with the local women. I await the guidelines as to how we should smudge our faces with burnt cork and establish a covert signalling network. Maybe goods can arrive by light aircraft on an improvised grass-strip lit by headlights?






















Even the Conservatives are up in arms. The Black Cab drivers have come up with this amusing logo in response to the Zil Lanes, whilst the reactionary press have all rallied against the plan to wall off 430,000 sq feet of sea view at Weymouth to prevent non-ticket holders from viewing the sailing! Maybe the small-time Tories are upset that they're to be excluded from a share of the profits as the multinationals monopolise the bauxite mine that is the olympic dollar.

(Mind you, the Olympics does take place during the summer months, so there is at least some hope that we could reactivate the anti-capitalist campaigners that bailed out of St Pauls due to the cold snap, and bring them back for a bit of mid-summer insurrection once the five-ring pig-trough opens.)

In short: It's not going to be a festival fun, it's going to be a pile of congested shit!

You think I'm exagerating? Remember: they booed Churchill's opposition to Hitler in 1933!

Hmmm? Hmmm?