Elephant in the room?

It seems scarcely a day goes by lately without some doom and gloom story about the health service - be it GPs' surgeries, A & E departments or problems in hospitals, and I can't help feeling that our current "sticking plaster" approach cannot go on much longer.  And it's my generation who are mainly causing the problem.  We're living longer, which is nice, but unfortunately many of us are living longer in bad health, which is putting a strain on the aforementioned services.  And all this at a time when public money is scarce.  I've talked about this before, but has the time come (or even passed) when people should be required to take out personal insurance to cover their care in old age?  Is it fair that we oldies automatically look to the working tax-payers to look after us?  And the myth that the National Insurance payments we made while we were working would fund our health care "from cradle to grave" has long since been exposed as a fraud.  It's a big problem which frankly none of the major parties seem to want to confront, and I fear that one day in the not-too-distant future it's going to blow up in our faces. And as somebody staring down the barrel as it were, I am concerned.

Err...what was that??

Was reading a humorous post the other day about mis-heard song lyrics, and it reminded me of the first time my wife and I heard the choral theme music that they play before UEFA Champions League football matches.  I now know that the final words are "the champions", but we both heard it - and indeed, even now knowing what it is,  I can still hear it - as "lasagna".  So UEFA Champions League football is forever known throughout our family as lasagna football.

In that case...

"Case" is a word with a lot of different meanings, one of which is "container" - so we have briefcase, jewel case, suitcase and so on.  In the early days of printing, individual letters were stored in large drawers known as cases and for whatever reason, it became accepted that the capital letters would be kept in the top drawer, and the ordinary ones in the bottom drawer - hence upper-case and lower-case. Now there's interesting!

Simples!

I was a bit surprised to come across a serious article the other day wondering about why buses seem to come in threes.  This is something that has been talked about since I was a lad, and surely the answer is obvious?  How fast a bus can complete its route depends on how many passengers it has to pick up and set down.  Every time it has to stop for these reasons, it loses time.  If several buses are plying the same route, the first one in sequence will pick up the majority of the passengers, which will slow it down, while the following ones will pick up fewer, and therefore catch up with the first and indeed with each other.  It's inevitable, and the further down the route you are, the more likely you are to see a bunch of buses coming along at once.  Seems clear enough to me!

Let's just call it marjoram?

We tend to get a bit insular when it comes to English, don't we?  After all, it's our bloody language isn't it?  How dare those johnny-come-lately Yanks muck it about? And yet every now and again we find that they are at least as much in the right as we are.  "Gotten" for example used to be the past participle of "get" here as there - we changed, they didn't, so who's right?  I was watching a cooking programme the other day when the chef referred to oREGano, and I cringed.  Like most people over here I pronounce it oreGANo, and the American pronunciation grates on the ear. But who's right? And I have to say that if you go back to basics, it derives from the Greek word rigani which they pronounce with the accent on the first syllable - RIGani, so somewhere along the way it picked up an initial "o", but you can certainly argue that the stress should still be on the "reg" syllable, and in Spanish (where it's spelled the same way) that syllable is accented to show that that is where the stress should fall.  Still don't like to hear it, but perhaps it's as valid as our pronunciation.

Ha Ha (??)

Sick I know, but the story of the North African migrants who set their boat alight irresistibly brought to mind the Muir/Norden joke about the Eskimo who lit a fire on his canoe to keep warm and it burned through the bottom and he sank, thus proving that you can't have your kayak and heat it too!
Really sorry for making light of what was a tragedy, but I feel better now I've got that out of my system.

Welcome back Nipper?

Interesting to see that HMV, which went into administration earlier this year, has been "rescued" by one of those restructuring companies which specialise in that sort of thing, and has now re-opened it's original Oxford Street store.  I sincerely wish them all the best, but wonder whether there really is much of a market these days for musical recordings in a physical form.  I have a pretty large collection of cassette tapes and CDs which I rarely listen to - and yes, I have some vinyl records too, though no longer any record player.  If I want to listen to music today, I use YouTube or Spotify - they give me access to a far more extensive library than I could ever own myself, and it's quick and easy to find whatever I'm looking for.  So like I say, I see little point in even considering buying recordings these days - but, thinking about it, perhaps HMV are aiming more for the games market, where you do still need a physical disk or cassette.  Mind you, there's a lot of competition there.

Seconds out!

Big row blown up between Ed Milliband and the Daily Mail over an article in the paper which labelled his father "The man who hated Britain".  Milliband has said this is "a lie" and accused the paper of "character assassination" (of his father, and by implication, of him).  So, what are we to make of it all?  Milliband's father was a committed Marxist and his views are a matter of public record.  It's clear he had an intense dislike of the institution of the Monarchy, and of privilege generally and would have welcomed a workers' revolution after the style of the Russian one. But does this justify saying that he "hated" this country?  It is surely just as valid to want to change a country out of love for that country as out of hatred for it.  Given that Milliband has said that his father was an inspiration to him it is clearly perfectly proper, in considering his credentials, to examine what his father believed and stood for, but the headline was intentionally provocative and rather unnecessarily nasty.  So the moral high ground is rather with Milliband, I feel.

8/10 - Good effort!

So Michael Gove (Education Secretary) has clarified this business of pupils retaking their GCSEs over and over again, and, for me at least, has got it spot on.  His ruling is that kids can retake as often as the school is prepared to pay for them to do so, but only their first mark will count towards the school's standing in the league tables. Judgment of Solomon, I think.  Mind you, what he should really do of course, is abolish league tables!

Duck!!

Following a fire on one of them on the Thames, "duck boats" are in the news - so what are they, and why are they so called?  Well, they're amphibious people-carriers, designed back in the War for use in situations where transport over land and water was required.  On land, it ran on six wheels and in water the engine drove a single screw at the rear.  Familiarly known as the "duck" its official designation was DUKW which looks as though it should be an acronym of something, but is in fact just a series of letters describing its function and features. I have to say I'm surprised that there are any still around - my recollection is that they didn't have a particularly good name for reliability back then,