I was browsing the BBC news site for something to talk about, and I was saddened to see that haulage magnate Eddie Stobart had died following heart problems, at the age of 56. Many of you may think this is a strange subject to talk about, but his lorries have played a part in my life since I was a tiddler.
I would imagine many of you have played some variation of the game 'who can see the seaside?' where you may be driving to the beach and the first person to shout 'I can see the seaside' won a Werther's Original, or what have you. Well, whenever my family would go to visit my relatives elsewhere in the country, we would always play the game 'who can see an Eddie Stobart lorry first.' I have a feeling that the game started because my grandad (who loves models and Airfix etc.) was a member of the Stobart Fan Club, I don't know that for sure, but he certainly has a few models of the distinctive lorries scattered around the house.
It's a bit of a random post I know, but I felt like it wouldn't have been right not to mention it.
I was having a gander through the forums on a nerd - ahem! - gaming website the other day (I love how general that term can be) and I stumbled across a thread talking about Duke Nukem Forever. Now for those of you who have enough of a life as to not know about the palaver surrounding DNF let me give you a brief outline.
The Duke Nukem series, running since 1991, has become infamous in the gaming world, firstly for its incredibly chauvinistic, sexist approach. But more noticeably for the ridiculously long development time of DNF. Originally planned for 1997/1998, it was repeatedly put on hold until the developers (3D Realms) got sick of all the nagging and simply said it would be released “when it’s done.”
And now, 14 years after work began, and after a huge amount of piss-taking at its expense, ranging from simple name calling ‘Duke Nukem Whenever’ etc. to tirades of bile spewing mockery such as this:
The thing has been announced and actually has a date stamped onto its aging forehead.
Now, the particular article about Duke Nukem If Ever, was concerning Fox News. Ah yes, surprise surprise they found something to complain about. They chose to centre on the game mode Capture the Babe (in which players can give the girls a “reassuring slap” should they begin to freak out), and the general sexism that is present throughout the game. Personally I find this hilarious, but then I’m a terrible person. What Fox doesn’t seem to understand about Duke Nukem is that this is the whole point. It pushes these things right to the edge and makes fun of them, thereby disabling their potency. I’m not saying that they make it okay to do this to women, but by no means am I saying that that is their intention in the first place. It’s just immature fun.
I’d say the forum article is well worth a read, if nothing else, just for some of the comments: Escapist Forum Thread
And here is what I suppose must be the Fox News piece itself: Fox News DNF
DISCLAIMER: This blog does not encourage any form of sexism or domestic violence. Lock up your wives, your sisters, and your daughters. ‘Cos they be rapin’ e’rybody.
Today, I though I’d buy my local paper and, just sort of walk you through it, maybe make a little light mockery. Firstly I want to make a couple of points: the Kingsbridge and Salcombe Gazette is only a weekly paper, bear in mind, this is the West Country, where nothing much happens. At all; and also, I want you to keep an open mind and don’t stereotype us before you know about us. We aren’t all farmers and fisherman you know. Bearing all of this in mind, let’s begin.
It’s a tabloid format for a start, front page has three stories on it, one is just a picture of some children from one of the local primary schools who had raised money for Comic Relief. The main story dealt with the local police, saying that due to spending cuts, more will be moved towards the Totnes area (it’s full of weirdoes over there so they need a strong presence). And the last one is about… a farmer. Brilliant.
Moving swiftly on, page two has some god-awful alliteration fo us to enjoy: “Players preparing a perfect production.” you can smell the rube-ness through the internet can’t you? There are also several stories basically complaining about teenagers and the like. Par for the course when you live in an area where people come to die in peace. Page three (don’t worry I wont do every single page) has some pictures of schoolchildren… awkward times.
The next few pages hold the family announcement section, designed to embarrass anyone who has the gall to turn 18 by putting up a baby photo of them, as well as several local ads some karate related stories, and a report saying that more than a third of the South West’s teachers have been abused online. That’ll teach them to set homework.
This is followed by Letters to the Editor. I don’t really need to describe them do I? you can guess the calibre. Village Voice then rears its head, this is essentially a few pages in which local residents write a small column about what is happening in each village or town of the area.
At this point I did get a little bored so I skipped ahead to the Readers’ Pictures. A section in which people can send in pictures of the area looking nice. One of these put a smile on my face: “Great tits in Strete” says the caption… It’s a picture of some birds! you dirty minded little minx.
We then have some pages of random things such as “Delving into the Past” which looks at pictures and stories from the 1950’s and earlier. One details a gravestone of a girls who was burnt at the stake for poisoning her boss. This was about 70 years ago now (Kidding! We’re not that backward, it was 1782 if you actually want to know). Then there are the Classifieds (anyone want a bridesmaid’s dress. Pink size 8-10. £10?)
From then on there’s a little about real estate, and finishing with the sport, we seem to be losing everything except netball (and this weirded me out because there were boys on the netball team, I mean they were primary school kids but still).
Conclusion time! I feel a little wrung out. There’s just something you can’t get away from when it comes to local papers. It feels as though your Grandmother wrote it. And that you’re being told off. Maybe that’s just Devon, or more specifically, the South Hams.
Let me know what sort of reaction you get from your local paper. If you read the whole post and are still awake.
I was thinking about my post the other day on obesity and it made me feel lazy. Now I'm no health nut but i try my best not to eat too much crap, and I've always done a fair bit of walking (matter of fact I took part in a walking event on Dartmoor called Ten Tors in which I walked about 60 miles over two days, carrying a 65 litre backpack. Just for giggles, here's a picture of one of my feet just after finishing.
That's some lovely trench foot right there
Anyway, back to my point, basically I decided to start running again and I thought I'd share the programme with you lovely people. I started it during last Summer, but never completed it because I went to university and got distracted by work... and booze.
It's a really good programme that uses interval training to ease you into running. it's designed to get you running five kilometers within nine weeks with no prior exercise. This comes highly recommended by me (so you know it's good) and it's a brilliant way to exercise. So let's all get motivated and make ourselves all lean and toned.
That way cannibals will find you much more tough...
Aright Avid Readerrrs? You may be a’le to guess, bu’ Oi’m back’n Dev’n! Ahem! Sorry about that, the accent here is so infectious it even changes how you write. It’s like living in an Irvine Welsh book!
Maybe one day, if you’re lucky I’ll do a recording of some Devon accents for any of you who may not know just how amazing it is. I know, bated breath right? Come to think of it, here are some Devon lads in a town a couple of miles from where I live, just, having a chat:
Anyway, onto some real news (tongue well and firmly in cheek). Being in Devon reminded me of news story I heard about a week or so ago. Essentially, it says that despite a rise in obesity, European countries are also seeing an increase in life-expectancy. Thereby dismissing fears that todays generation will be the first to die before their parents. Now I feel I should point out that I don’t think that this is one of those “CHOCOLATE CAKE MAKES YOU LOSE WEIGHT” type of crappy surveys. The bloke who found this, has been studying it for 40 odd years (that’s a lot of jiggling), and he’s from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, so I don’t know, he could very well be legit.
But is this now going to be an excuse for people to just pig out and then complain that they deserve better quality of life because they just won’t die? I’m not sure how PC that last bit was…
It’s just a strange perspective for me, I’ve never really spent much time around biguns. Growing up in Devon (a pretty healthy place) I can fairly confidently count the number of really obese people I know, on one, maybe two hands.
Local governments are generally formed as a two-tiered system. In Winchester, for example, The top tier is Hampshire county council . With a budget of about £1.8 billion, they are in charge of road maintenance, and the emergency services as well as services such as libraries, education, social care. The bottom tier (the District council) Winchester city council, have a much smaller budget of £12.5 million and they look after things more closely related to their district. These include traffic control, some elements of waste disposal, control of council housing and other community and leisure activities and facilities.
The exception to this rule of the two-tiered system are Unitary authorities. This is when there is a single authority that is in charge of all the things that are usually separated between the district and county councils. There are 55 UA’s in the UK, and they are usually formed for places which may be too large for the two-tiered system. One example for this would be Southampton.
Councillors for both District and County councils are supposed to represent the people in the areas they preside over. Indeed, county councillors are elected by a group of their peers every four years, this does not mean that the actual people change particularly often as, in general, the majority of the public do not care about council proceedings unless they are affected directly. Although the cabinet can be liable to change as a result of a general election. This is because cabinet members for the county council are chosen from the largest political party of the area, and from them, a cabinet leader is chosen. So if political attitudes were to change drastically, an entire cabinet would have to be re-elected.
Councillors for district councils are elected from their wards, for which they are responsible. This usually means addressing problems that come up in those wards and bringing them to the attention of the District council. During a ‘safer neighbourhood’ meeting for Winchester, the issues raised were relevant only to Winchester, and generally, each came from a councillor’s own ward. Though the police were also present and talked about general crime over the entire city.
County councillors on the other hand, do not tend to concentrate on specific areas, instead, they look at broader issues affecting their county as a whole. During a County council meeting which I attended, some of the issues addressed included: Deciding on how to change the way in which adult social care is paid; how to implement a broadband scheme for all of Hampshire; and a short discussion about public transport, bus routes etc. Each of these has a fairly broad target area as opposed to even a specific town or city.
To conclude. Both types of council do essentially the same thing, in helping their particular areas, but county councils are able to do much more as they have much larger budgets and are therefore able to do more for their area than a district council can as they have much less influence respective to their counterparts.
Just a quick blog to say that I'm not posting a blog, I have too much real work and/or sleep to do. plus I'm back to Devon tommorow, so packing ensues.
It’s a beautiful day out here in the backwaters of Hampshire. The sun is shining, the birds are singing. And I’m sitting indoors writing this post for you. So appreciate it!
I was surfing the interwebs, as I am known to do on a bright, sunny day, and I found an article on the BBC News site that made me smile. Apparently the public are being invited to suggest names for the five neighbourhoods to be built on the Olympic site after the 2012 games. Now, am I the only person that smiles maniacally upon hearing that news. Or am I simply very immature?
Of course they can only suggest names and they are being asked to take inspiration from the history of East London (such as that is) or from the Olympics themselves.
I can only hope that people use this chance as an opportunity to be creative and not just recycle the same old rubbish over again. Hell, maybe there’ll be a Bob Hoskins Boulevard, or an Apples n’ Pears avenue by 2013. Only time will tell.
This is me, signing off to go and frolic in the sunshine.
As some of you may well have heard (I would certainly hope any students among you may have) lecturers are striking all over the UK in a bid to stop changes in their respective pension schemes. This is on top of planned government budget cuts that could cause redundancies all over the country.
For any foreigners who don’t know a huge amount about us Brits, it isn’t too often that this sort of thing actually happens. Certainly over the past year there have been countless demonstrations against the rise in university tuition fees; and of course, lest we forget the miner’s strike of the Thatcher era. But for the most part, we do not often go to these sorts of extremes. Perhaps it’s our mild temperaments, or our preference for the strongly worded letter. Personally, I think it’s the weather. No one wants to be stuck outside in the pissing rain, waving a disgruntled looking placard and wishing we’d just stayed in and played a game of Monopoly.
Now, look at France on the other hand (before you start, I’ve got nothing against France, I think it’d be wonderful if it weren’t for all the bloody French), over there, they will protest at the drop of a pin, maybe they just get bored of smoking in cafes, in black and white, I‘m not an expert of French culture
I’m not saying the weather over there is perfect, But it’s certainly a damn sight better than it is back here. Definitely enough sun for a good ‘manifestation’ every other week (A level French is finally proving useful).
Alas, I find myself diverted from the point I was trying to make. Personally, I’m all in favour of these strikes if it helps them to keep a little say in their lives, and if I am forced to not go to my lectures on Thursday then I shall carry that burden with head held high. You won’t find me crossing that picket line, I mean, my lecturers spit and shout at me anyway so that wouldn’t be a change. But remember the point I’m trying to get across: I now have a free day on Thursday!
Continuing a week or two of ever-changing blog-content (my apologies but at the end of the day, my course trumps the asinine rants that come vomiting out of the gap between my ears). Today I thought I’d actually talk about this blog. Now, those of you who have visited before will know that in September, I started a journalism course at the University of Winchester (for all you latecomers, consider this an introduction). One of the first things we were asked to do was create our own blog, which were to use as a means of publishing course notes and generally as a means of practicing our writing skills. For the first semester I was pretty religious about posting lecture notes and the like, but (me being a lazy little meerkat) I did virtually nothing towards the extra-curricular side.
After our Christmas break however, that changed. During a lecture about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) - this would be relatively difficult to explain, however, one of my course mates has written a blog about the basics which you can read here - our lecturers decided to make the blogs a competition. Now if anything was going to light a fire under my arse, it was learning that I was below the middle of the pack. And so, SuperEwan was born! Dedicated to producing blogs, regardless of content, quality, or sanity. So, it’s been about six weeks since that fateful day. And I’ve shown, to quote my lecturer: “dramatic improvement.” I’ve moved up the rankings to fourth place, and I’m just about to reach my end-of-semester goal of breaking the three million mark.
I feel I should digress slightly at this point, to explain how the blogs are actually ranked. Well it’s quite simple actually, as long as you use Mozilla Firefox as your web browser you can download the ‘SEO Status PageRank/Alexa Toolbar’ (bit of a mouthful I know). This gives you a toolbar that ranks web pages. At time of writing this post I am ranked at 3,060,580. It doesn’t sound great but for a blog that’s only been alive for a few months I’m relatively happy.
So, you know, if you felt like telling a few of your friends (or depending what you think of my blog, a few of your most hated enemies) about this little asylum of mine, and help me to become King of the Internet.
Hello there avid readers! In a slight change of pace I thought I'd put up a post that doesn't have any puns, cheap laughs or sexual innuendo (depending on the filthiness of your mind).
This is a media assignment for which we had to write about 500 words about a media artifact, talking about its context in history, and the relationships that surround it. I chose to do the iPad (since I own one, and am lazy). Hopefully it's not too awful for your standards.
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The iPads were the first line of tablet-style computers made by Apple. The Wi-Fi model, first released worldwide on May 28, 2010 was designed in the same manner as Apple’s iPhone and iPod including touch screens and a plethora of applications that vary from practical functions such as word documents and presentations, to games and various novelty functions.
The 32GB iPad has an RRP of about £600, making it a product that is not generally acceptable to people who do not have disposable income. In my opinion, this suggests it is targeted towards a western market, presumably aimed at younger audiences, either professional, or casual.
As a recently designed item, it follows the current trend of most Apple software, being both aesthetically pleasing as well as practical. In the case of the Apple iMac, it was essentially a monitor that did not have a tower attached for memory, and drive space etc. with iPads, the closest comparison would be any type of laptop, though the smaller size and long battery life of the iPad, as well as being lighter than the majority of conventional laptops, make it more portable and easier to handle.
The iPad has changed the way media content can be viewed, the portability of the iPad allows it to be used effectively as a sharing device. This could be an essential aspect of the iPad as, with the amelioration of technology, and the convenience of the Internet becoming more apparent, many newspapers are beginning the transition to online sites, and tablet PC software is a perfect medium for digital newspapers. Media mogul, Rupert Murdoch has already made a deal with apple and has created the first of these. Designed specifically for the iPad, The Daily has supposedly found a synthesis between the newspaper and the tablet. At this point, the only other possible competition for the iPad in regard to digital papers would be the Kindle, however the difference in design would, at present, favour Apple.
The iPad is by no means the first tablet PC, the earliest being created in the early 1980s and known as ‘Pen Computers’, though these have not survived, most likely because the technology available at the time did not meet the standards needed to run them as effectively as would have been required to be a viable product.
The iPad, however, makes the most of the technology of today and is very likely to last. If not necessarily in its current form. In the vein of many Apple products, a newer version has been released which supersedes the current iPad. The iPad 2 is 33% thinner, and 15% lighter, with a dual-core processor and up to nine times the graphic performance of its predecessor.
This is a technique Apple uses: launching an innovative product, then within a year, or sometimes after just a few months, release an improved version. Generating a huge amount of income for Apple. This means that products can become virtually redundant within a matter of months, forcing consumers to purchase the newer technology if they wish to have the highest spec. products.
This places the iPad in an interesting position, as it is its own company, not superior outside competition, that is threatening to make it obsolete. For the time being.
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Thanks very much for reading, as usual, feel free to be as scathing as you want to be in the comments.
Well, as promised, avid listeners, here's my full radio bulletin, complete with script, warts, and all.
Winchester's Trinity Centre, a support facility for the homeless of the area, has relaunched a scheme called 'Spare Change for Real Change.' Previously named 'Diverted Change', it encourages people not to give money directly to the homeless. Sue Mckenna, Development manager for the Trinity Centre, explains further:
AUDIO IN: "The idea is..."
AUDIO OUT: "...make a difference for homeless people."
Hampshire County Council has decided to begin plans for a broadband project that aims to provide an Internet service to all of Hampshire over the next two years.
The County Council plans to use local funding to improve speeds in certain ‘not-spots’, so that they can be considered for a government grant. Which they would not otherwise receive without a minimum broadband speed decided by the Broadband Delivery UK service.
Executive for Economic Development and Rural Affairs, Raymond Ellis, said that these plans would help encourage people to use the Internet as a tool to make life easier, allowing them to shop online, and help to improve the economic drive of the area.
Costs for these plans are estimated to reach around 3.7 million pounds.
Winchester Tourist Information Centre is gunning for gold in the National Tourist Information Centre of the Year Award, after coming first in the South East Regional finals, gaining a place among the top four Centres in England.
Team leader for Winchester, Sarah Harfield, said she was thrilled at their success.
AUDIO IN: "We're really pleased..."
AUDIO OUT: "...Sets us apart from other TICs."
The results for the nationals will be announced at the EnjoyEngland Awards in Birmingham’s Great Hall on April 15th.
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Thanks very much for listening to me speak. It's like a dream come true. And don't worry, I'll try and get back to mad rants as soon as possible, The end of the semester is approaching and I actually have to start concentrating on work.
The countdown has begun! In a mere 499 days from this posting, the 2012 Olympic Games will be underway. How can I be so accurate I hear you ask. Well yesterday the Countdown Clock was unveiled in Trafalgar Square, and… In this humble blogger’s opinion, the word ‘eyesore’ can be a touch overused, but in my opinion just go nuts with it. Why do all our symbols for the 2012 games look so terrible. I wasn’t too bothered about the official logo until it was pointed out to me (those of an easily offended disposition best look away) that it looks like Lisa Simpson giving head…
Moving on swiftly. Tickets for the games are now on sale with a range of prices for all the family starting at about £20 (I believe certain concessions cost less) up to £2012 (who believes in coincidences?). Of course some of the cheap ones will probably end up in the sand. No not the long jump area, the places where the building haven’t been built yet and there’s still blokes in their high-vis jackets chucking cement into a mixer and whistling at all the female athletes. Though probably not the weightlifters…
Let’s hope that the half a billion pounds expected to be generated by the games can pay off some of this debt the world seems to be in, of course, £500m is barely the tip of the iceberg. As I’ve said before, why not just get the 10 most highly paid footballers to just give away a couple of weeks worth of their salary every other month. World debt, not to mention starvation and poverty, would be abolished within about 4 months. Overpaid sods. we could have slogans and everything:
Okay deep breaths, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. I have something to confess avid readers. Today, I bought the Daily Star. I know, I know, but I’m trying to acquaint myself with all forms of -ahem - journalism (I think I made that joke in my Pun in the Sun post… meh). No offence to any die-hard Star readers by the way... how is it in the C2DE social grade?
Who thought that was a good idea?
But enough bullying the lower classes, which technically includes my dad… awkward. After scouring the paper for a story I could laugh at, as is my custom, I finally settled on one featuring TV’s craziest man, Charlie Sheen. Now I wouldn’t normally sink to celebrity based news as I think it’s too easy. But bear in mind. I was reading the Star. Besides, at this point, watching Charlie Sheen’s antics is more like seeing a train falling down a cliff into a patch of landmines and then ripping a hole in the fabric of the universe, unleashing Cthulhu on the world to ravage humankind for all of eternity. You get the drift.
For anyone who either has no idea who Charlie Sheen is, or why he should be in the news. Well it’s relatively complicated but essentially it started a month or two ago when he went a bit crazy in a hotel room with a ‘porn star’ and it’s been a downhill, drug crazed, slope ever since. Most recently with his being sacked from TV show Two and a Half Men, for which he was paid £1.2 m an episode. And they say footballers are overpaid. He has since got a little nuts, done some crazy internet rants, and waved a machete around whilst standing on a rooftop.
The particular aspect of the story that the Star went with was that Hollywood legend, and "Beetle Juice star Alec Baldwin" has told Sheen to “sober up, say sorry and beg for your job back.”
Makes you think doesn’t it? I mean, surely they could have picked something other than ‘Beetle Juice star’ to announce Alec Baldwin. He's been in countless other films and has 10 acting awards. Just a thought.
For those of you wondering how much coke Charlie Sheen took. It was enough to kill Two and a Half Men.
Get out the red flags and throw away all your stuff! Because it’s time to talk about Karl Marx, and communism.
He's got something you don't. A great big bushy beard!
Marx started his academic life brilliantly, initially studying law, he was held up as a model pupil. Until, to the shock of his tutors, he changed to philosophy. And from that, no doubt to the utter horror of his parents, he took up journalism. He’d have caused quite a stir in any press conference no doubt, what with the crazy-rabbi look going on. Indeed, his radical thinking got him kicked out of pretty much any country he tried to live in, until he came to London, the home of free thought.
Marx’s basic principle was that man was a productive animal. He is master of the world because of his use of tools (In a sense, you could say that man has out-evolved evolution).
Marx took a Darwin-like approach to his research, studying every aspect of society in order to try and understand it. He believed that other philosophers made no attempt at real change, they just spent their time sitting in darkened rooms, pontificating all the worthy questions of life.
Indeed his tombstone is inscribed with the words:
“Workers of the world unite”
“Philosophers have only interpreted the world - the point however is to change it.”
Very eloquently written, and ever the pragmatist.
Engles, an associate of Marx who also had a fantastic beard, and helped publish the Communist Manifesto. Said that Marx achieved in his philosophy, a fusion of Hegelian philosophy (dialectics), British empiricism (As of Adam Smith), and French revolutionary politics, especially the socialist side (remember from our romanticism discussion, “Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains”).
Though he was a self-proclaimed disciple of Hegel, he attacked the mysticism and idealism which clouded much of the man's work. He did not approve of wishy-washy ideas like the Geist, or the spirit of the world. But he did approve of the Dialectic, that opposing points of view could come together and form new (supposedly better) points of view. The dialectic that Marx favoured was based on materialism. No he didn’t spend his time angsting over the latest PlayStation console, or a particular polo shirt that is exactly the same as the one from Peacock’s only this one has a special label which makes it fly or something. No, his materialism was that which is based in the real world. Not the ethereal haze of other philosophers.
In this respect, the main focus of the dialectic was the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The proletariat are the plebeians, the workers, they were the people who had no means of production save for themselves. They are the lowest rung on the ladder, and as such, they have nothing to lose. As Marx said: “they have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”
On the other side of the scale, the Bourgeoisie are the people who have property, whether they’re rich aristocrats, or the meanest landlord, they own some form of subsistence. Marx predicted that at some point in the future. There would be a clash between the two parties, resulting in the victory of the proletariat, and the introduction of a socialist system in which production is used for the benefit of society as opposed to the benefit of the market (for an outline of the market system referred to, look at my earlier post on Adam Smith’s Opulence of Nations). This would show all the people that this is to the common good (hello hello, traces of Rousseau’s General Will idea) and the state would be able to disappear. Leaving a society not alienated by the division of labour (another Smith idea) as all activities are considered equal. The rocket scientist is not above the farmer, they are both as important as each other.
“From each according to their ability, to each according to his need”
Of course all of this is brilliant in theory, the USSR took up their own version of it, as did several other countries (everyone knows about the Berlin Wall for example, not to mention Cuba) though none of them got it quite right. It’s probably worth remembering that whilst Marx was dying, he said to his best pupil something along the lines of:
“You were my best pupil, and not even you got what I’d meant.”
That's right avid readers, get out your sandwich boards and take to the streets proclaiming that the end is nigh! Domesday is approaching, and there’s nary a thing you can do to stop it. Unless of course, you don’t live in the UK. A cheeky deception.
For those of you who stick to the opinion that I’ve lost my mind, I’ll remind you that that has nothing to do with what I say… especially when’s I’m being as clever as this. I’ll stop being odd for a moment now and actually make sense of my blathering for you.
The 2011 census is being prepared for distribution on Sunday 27 March, because that’s what people look forward to on a Sunday morning, bureaucracy. It has been a decade since the last census and will no doubt ask the same thrilling questions as usual. How many pairs of underpants do you own? What’s your favourite flavour of fish? I don’t know, something along those lines, I was 10 years old when the last one came out, do you expect me to have paid attention? I’m pretty sure Mona the Vampire would have been more interesting, and that show made me want to put pins in my eyes.
As a side note, whilst doing a little research into the census, I found out that you are able to put your nationality down as Cornish. I’m sorry, what? First they put a monopoly on pasties and then they’re claiming they’re a nation! Why can’t I put down Devonian as my nationality eh? It’s favouritism that’s what. It’s a conspiracy between the surfers and the government. Let’s just make it official and put down a militarised zone all around Cornwall filled with landmines and crimp-on-top pasties. If they want to be their own nation, let’s separate them, right?
Hmm, I’m not quite sure how a blog post about a census, and a bad joke about the first ever census of the country, conducted by William the Bastard in 1085 and called the Domesday Book (and you thought I was being a crazy person talking about the apocalypse), ended up being a rant about Cornwall, if it’s any defence, bear in mind I am from Devon. There has always been a certain… antagonism between our two counties.
Hampshire County Council has decided to begin plans for a broadband project that aims to provide an internet service to all of Hampshire over the next two years.
The County Council plans to use local funding to improve speeds in certain ‘not-spots’, so that they can be considered for a government grant. Which they would not otherwise receive without a minimum broadband speed decided by the Broadband Delivery UK service.
Executive for Economic Development and Rural Affairs, Raymond Ellis, said that these plans would help encourage people to use the internet as a tool to make life easier, allowing them to shop online, and help to improve the economic drive of the area.
Costs for these plans are estimated to reach around 3.7 million pounds.
Seminar time certainly comes about quickly. This time we were discussing Kant and Hegel. And these are my higgledy-piggledy notes.
Immanuel Kant was of the ideological school of thought that believed in (to paraphrase) mind over matter. Many of his writings have an air of romanticism about them, and indeed I got a feeling that there was a definite link to Rousseau’s General Will idea (as mentioned in a previous blog).
Kant is a great believer in a priori knowledge (knowledge that is known without experience), and is vehemently anti-empiricist.
We also discussed perception of the world. This tends to annoy me as I can’t see the point of thinking about it. For anyone who doesn’t know what I mean (probably most of you), a good example is that if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, does it make a sound? The usual argument being that sound is a human concept, and if there are no humans there to hear it then no sounds exists. This kind of talk irritates me because I can’t see the relevance to my life. As far as I’m concerned, when trees fall over, they make noise. It’s wouldn’t matter if there was noone around to hear it because it doesn’t affect people. At least, not until they find their car blocked by a tree lying across the road.
We also touched upon Numenal objects, which are things around us that cannot be seen , but we know they are there. This got George very excited because it meant he could talk about dark matter and other physicsy gobbledegook, but most of it went sailing over my head. Something about string theories…
But I digress. Kant would say that if something is not being perceived, it is still there. But it is constantly changing. At a molecular level he is right, but once again, I don’t see the practicality of thinking like that. It just gets in the way of the important things in life. Like crossword puzzles.
As far as his morals go, he might as well live on a chessboard, they are just black and white. Lies are bad, even for a good cause, because the good cause is in relation to you. Doing your duty is very important (this part got very Nurembergy at this point).
It is interesting to note that in their respective ways, both the Nazis, and the Christians, are followers of Kant’s train of thought. Though obviously, not necessarily with the same results. We’ll see.
Hegel was essentially the same start as Kant. He was a Romantic and he was anti-empiricist. He was not a fan of logic (in the traditional sense), considering it to be metaphysical and therefore of no real use. His theories centred around the idea of absolutes. There is no truth without the whole, and since it is virtually impossible to know everything as it is irredeemably complex, nothing could be considered wholly true. A simplified example of this would be to say: A is the father of B, Kant would reply that we do not sufficiently know A enough to make such a statement. We would need to know all his relations to everything in the universe before we could assess his relationship to B. Not particularly practical in my opinion. Maybe we’ll just give him the benefit of the doubt (I tried to be ironic there, I’m not sure if it worked…).
Something that both Kant and Hegel share is a love of change. And the best way for change to happen (in their opinions) is war. Generally, in war, you have two opposing sides, and whichever side wins, spreads their values to the other side. This allows for greater improvement of said values as there are more people to work on them. War is change, only accelerated.
This also leads to the Geist. It’s not easy to pin down what this means, but Spirit will do. It is the essence of thought at a time. Zeitgeist, for example, meaning in this context the ‘wind of change’ blows across the world carrying ideas (for want of a better word). You could say that the Zeitgeist of the current epoch is revolution. From the student protests in London, to the demonstrations in Libya, Egypt, and Bahrain. They are all linked, with this ‘spirit’ regardless of boundaries. How very deep, I think I fell down a philosophy well. Oh dear.
Thanks for reading my terrible attempt to explain German ideology. Go get yourself something nice.
