Plus ça change?

Is this idea of "zero-hours contracts" which is much in the news lately just the modern equivalent of what I used to see as a kid, when men would line up outside the factory gates first thing in the morning in the hope of being taken on for the day?

Today I learned....

...that although the Queen is Head of the Commonwealth, it does not automatically follow that her heirs will inherit that title.  The London Declaration of 1949, which effectively created the modern Commonwealth was silent on the point, and although there is a general assumption that the title will always belong to the British monarch, this could be subject to challenge.

Ha ha.

Bloke walks into a pub and goes up to the bar.  Before he can order a drink, a bowl of peanuts on the bar says "Hey, you're a handsome fella!"  The bloke looks at the bowl of peanuts in surprise, and then hears it say "Like the shirt", and then a little later "That hairstyle really suits you".  The barman comes over to take his order, sees him looking confused and says "Oh don't worry - the peanuts are complimentary"!

Don't look, our Jimmy!

Is Page 3 (of The Sun for those from Mars) pornography?  Some people clearly think so, and have criticised the PM for not condemning it in the same way he has condemned internet porn.  So what do you think?  Why is (straight) pornography considered by some to be A Bad Thing?  We've discussed this before, and the main argument seems to be that some men (or all men if you're a feminist) may be inflamed by viewing such stuff and as a direct result may sexually assault some woman - including possibly their wife or girlfriend.  So is a fairly bland picture of some pretty girl with her tits out likely to produce such a result?  Or is the argument more about women being seen as simply sex-objects?  I think we're confusing two things here, and as a result are in danger of diluting the arguments for and against them both.  It would be good if we could have a calm, sensible discussion about this - unfortunately there are so many people (and newspapers) with such an entrenched position on the subject that I fear that will never be possible, but let's at least separate the two strands and look at each independently. 

Oops!

Bit embarrassing for the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has very publicly promised to put Wonga (see post of 17/10/12) out of business to find that the Church of England indirectly holds shares in that payday loan company.  So if he's successful he will damage the Church's own pension fund - awkward!

Hate to say it, but...

...does anybody else think that perhaps the worst - or certainly the most difficult - possible outcome of the Madeleine McCann business for her parents would be that she is found alive, well and happy?

There's lies, damned lies and...

In a paper the other day I saw that hoary old chestnut about 80% of road accidents happening within 10 miles of home.  So why "hoary old chestnut"?  Is it false? Well no - it's actually quite true, but meaningless.  Why?  Well think about it - chances are that about 80% of the driving anybody does is within 10 miles of their home, so if you have an accident it's more likely to be in that area simply because you are more likely to be driving in that area.  A similar "fact" that comes from Australia is that 97% of shark attacks take place in shallow water - well shucks, couldn't just be that that's where 97% of swimmers are, could it?

The war to end all wars - or not...

In just over 12 months time we shall be commemorating the start of the First World War.  Anybody else find that strange?  Why on earth should we wish to commemorate the start of what would turn out to be one of the greatest military slaughter-fests of history?  Celebrate the end, by all means, but the beginning?

Dear Mum - and anybody else who might be reading this....

Girl on a school trip has a "midnight feast" with some friends in her hotel room. The teachers searched her room and found some chocolate bars.  They then contacted her mother and - according to the mother - told her to come and collect her daughter for breaking the rules.  Now there is some dispute about what the mother was told, but what does not seem to be in dispute, and what I find utterly reprehensible, is that the midnight feast came to the teachers' attention because the girl mentioned it in a letter she wrote home to her mother.  So the teachers intercepted and read her private correspondence??  How dare they!!  Surely that's a criminal offence?  Unbelievable.

Members of the jury....

From a purely academic point of view, I found the most interesting feature of the Zimmerman trial in Florida was the fact that the jury was comprised of only six people.  We are so used to the idea of "twelve good men and true" that it comes as a bit of a surprise to find that there is nothing sacrosanct about the number twelve. Traditionally that is the number used for criminal trials in this country, but if a juror falls ill, they are not replaced and the trial continues with the remaining eleven jurors.  Indeed the number can go down to 9 before there is any question of abandoning proceedings.  And then a Coroner's jury can consist of anything between 7 and 11 jurors, and a County Court jury has 8. In the US a 1970 Supreme Court ruling held that there was nothing unconstitutional about a jury of less than twelve people. and Florida law states that a jury shall be twelve people for a capital trial, and six in all other cases. 

R.I.P

Mel Smith - we can ill afford to lose our top comedians, let alone at such a relatively young age.  Thanks for all the laughs - and there were lots.

What's sauce for the goose....

Everybody and his Dutch uncle lining up to criticise Muirfield - where the Open (golf) is being played - for being a men-only club.  But you don't hear anything about the many ladies-only golf clubs which exist around the country.  Why? Because there's no political capital to be made from commenting on men not being allowed to become members of ladies-only clubs, whereas expressing displeasure at women not being allowed to be members of men-only clubs pretty well guarantees good headlines.

Pardon??

Well thank goodness, it's not just me.  At my age, you don't expect to hear quite as well as you did when you were young, but more and more lately I've found the need to switch the subtitles on in order to follow the dialogue in TV shows and films.  But it now seems I am far from alone - the BBC has reported a significant increase in the number of complaints it gets about actors "mumbling" their lines. American shows and films are the biggest problems in my book, because they don't just mumble - they mumble in American, which is even more impenetrable!  I think I've mentioned before that I had absolutely no problem with hearing Hugh Laurie in "Jeeves and Wooster" and "Blackadder" but when I watched a few episodes of "House", I couldn't understand half what he was saying!

Don't wave your knickers at the train!

How have we survived the last 43 years?  That's how long the film "The Railway Children" has been around, but apparently it's only now that someone (I stress "one") has decided that it's dangerous because it might encourage children to play on the railway lines.  Best of intentions I'm sure, but really...!  My complaint would be that it's a film I only dare watch when I'm alone, because I always dissolve into tears at the end - you know, when the smoke and steam clears, and Jenny Agutter exclaims "Daddy, my daddy" - Christ, I'm blubbing now just typing this.  Strangely, it's the word "my" that does it - leave that out and I'd still have a lump in my throat, but with it - serious waterworks!

How retro can you get?

It seems that secrets are not necessarily... well, secret any more.  Computers can be hacked, hard drives can be copied, files can be decrypted.  So the Russian secret service have come up with an innovative idea - they are reverting to typewriters! They can't be hacked because they don't store data and as every typewriter produces an individual pattern of type, any document can be traced back to the machine that created it.  The old ideas are sometimes the best you see.

Miles out, mate!

Interesting research carried out by the Royal Statistical Society suggests that we generally tend to vastly overestimate the level of what might be called "social problems" - things like the level of benefit fraud, immigration, crime, teenage pregnancy and the like.  I think much of the blame for this must lie with the media, who have long realised that pandering to people's prejudices sells papers.  What to do about it though?  Not easy - perhaps the RSS should take out regular adverts in all the papers giving us the facts - but then, we don't like to be told we're wrong, do we?

Only in this country...!

World Peashooting Championships being held in Witcham, Cambridgeshire.  Does your heart good!

The Gentlemen's Game??

Should Broad have walked?  That's the question on every armchair sportsman's lips after Friday's events.  For those from Mars, we're talking cricket and Broad is an English batsman who quite clearly hit a ball which was caught by an Australian fielder.  For some reason the umpire didn't see it and therefore turned down Australia's appeals.  Broad must have known he had hit it, so should he have given himself out as it were, rather than simply stand there and go with the umpire's decision - or rather non-decision?  In my book, he should have walked, but I'm afraid that money has tainted the game of cricket, as it has rugby football (association football has long been a lost cause) and now winning takes precedence over sportsmanship every time.  Shame, but that's the way it is - bit ironic that you have to look to snooker, which is irrevocably associated in many people's minds with dingy pub back-rooms and Woodbines, as just about the only game where a player will take it upon himself to be the custodian of the rules, and call a foul against himself even though no-one else has seen it.

Read the question!

The answer to yesterday's riddle is - a 50p coin and a 20p coin.  This satisfies the statement "One of them is not a 50p coin" - the 20p coin is not a 50p coin!  The point is that most people automatically read it to mean that neither is a 50p coin, whereas that's not what it says!

Huh?

While we're on the subject of riddles and such, I've always liked this one -
I have two coins which between them total 70p.  One of them is not a 50p coin. What are they?  Answer tomorrow.

Magic money(2)

So, did you see it?  There is no missing £1 - it's just the way the story is told that creates the confusion, and the £30 is a red herring.  The easiest way of seeing it is to do a simple cash balance - the diners between them paid £27 - and where did that £27 go?  Well £25 of it went to the restaurant to pay the bill, and the other £2 ended up in the waiter's pocket.  All the rest is smoke and mirrors.

Where's me glasses?

Interesting to hear that the BBC are to stop broadcasting in 3D.  They describe it as a "pause" but there are no plans for a resumption.  I was always dubious about the practicalities of 3D TV and apparently the uptake has fallen well short of expectation. Even those with 3D enabled sets don't make full use of them it seems. If they eventually manage to come up with 3D screens which do not require special glasses then that may be a game-changer, but for the present it would seem the best advice is - save your money!

Hello, I'm in the supermatket...

Story of a Sainsbury's check-out worker who refused to serve a customer until she finished her mobile 'phone call has generated a lot of comment.  So - whadya think? Yes, it was the height of rudeness on the part of the customer, and there's a lot of it about these days, but the fact of the matter is that going through a supermarket checkout is not - or at least doesn't have to be - a social interaction. There's usually no need to say anything to the checkout worker, and apart from "Do you need any help with your packing?" rarely any need for them to say anything to you. So should the checkout worker have simply ignored the customer and got on with it?

And the next gentleman...

Congratulations to Andy Murray on becoming the first British male Wimbledon winner for 77 years.  Hopefully he will have several more years at the top of his game, but the worrying thing is that I think I'm right in saying that the next best British male player is ranked something like 250 in the world.  So, post-Murray we may be in for another long, long wait.

Magic money?

Here's a brainteaser which has been around for some time, but there may be those of you who haven't come across it before -
Three people go to a restaurant for a meal.  At the end, they are presented with a bill for £30.  They decide to split the cost between them equally, so each gives the waiter £10.  He takes the money to the cashier, who realises that the bill has been incorrectly totalled, and the true figure is £25.  He therefore gives the waiter £5 to return to the diners.  The waiter realises he cannot divide £5 equally between the three of them, and anyway they don't know what the true figure is, so he simply tells them they have been overcharged, apologises and gives them each £1.  The other £2 he keeps for himself.  So now each diner has paid £9 and the waiter has £2 - a total of £29.  What happened to the other £1?  As ever, I'll give you a few days to think about it.

Today I learned...

... that the fact that in the Middle Ages the average life expectancy was around the mid-30s is highly misleading.  The crucial word here is "average", and this was at a time when infant mortality was very high, and this pulled the average down to unrepresentative levels.  In fact, if you managed to survive childhood, then you had a good chance of making your three score years and ten.

Ha ha.

This one's got hairs on it, but the old 'uns are the best -
A German walks into a bar and asks for a martini.  "Dry?" asks the bartender.  "No, just the one" replies the German.

Egypt

I was going to post about what's going on there, but I've been overtaken by events.  Some of what I was going to say is still relevant though.  Lincoln famously described democracy as government "of the people, by the people, for the people". No real problem with the first two of those, but "for the people" can cause difficulties.  What it means is that governments are elected to govern for the whole country, not merely those who voted them in.  And this is at the root of the country's problems, with a clear feeling that, despite there being no question of its legitimacy, the government was proceeding on ideological rather than democratic lines.  It's difficult to see any resolution though.  It seems clear that the country is divided, with 50% or so seeking an Islamic state, and much the same proportion wanting a secular one.  So whoever ends up as top dog when the dust settles, is going to be facing the same problem, and I've got this horrible feeling that in twelve months time we may well be back here again.

Constitutional Law 101.

You would think that the Prime Minister of all people would be up to speed on constitutional law, but it appears not.  He is seeking to get a Bill passed which would guarantee that there would be a referendum on our continuing membership of the EU before the end of 2017 - that is, well into the next Parliament.  This completely ignores one of the fundamental principles of constitutional law, that "Parliament cannot bind its successor".  This means that any decision taken by this Parliament can be countermanded by the next one - or indeed by this one if they later change their minds.  So it can be seen as an expression of intent - of wishful thinking perhaps - but nothing more.

Déjà vu?

Back in the 1980s the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, ordered an independent review into MPs pay.  To her horror, the review concluded that MPs were woefully underpaid and should get an immediate payrise of massive proportions. Realising there was no way this could be sold to the country, she and the Chancellor decided that MPs should get a small payrise, but they should be given a generous expenses system and be advised to take full advantage of it. Thus were the seeds of the "expenses scandal" sown.  And now?  The question of MP's pay has been put into the hands of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority, who it is rumoured are about to say that they should get a £10,000 increase.  So here we go again??

What a cop-out!

It was around this time last year that I raised the question of what would constitute consummation of a same-sex marriage.  I suggested that this would cause difficulties, but I wasn't prepared for the official answer, which is, it appears, that there is to be no such thing as consummation of a same-sex marriage, nor indeed will there be any question of adultery in such a marriage with someone of the same sex.  The practical difficulties are such that it has been decided to simply ignore the problem.  You can still commit adultery with a member of the opposite sex but a relationship with someone of the same sex would only found a petition for divorce in a same-sex marriage if it could be brought under the "unreasonable behaviour" provision.  Of course, there has long been an argument that as far as "straight" marriages are concerned, the grounds of adultery and desertion are superfluous, as both would inevitably amount to unreasonable behaviour.  Perhaps a side-effect of all these discussions about gay marriage may be a helpful reappraisal of traditional divorce law.