No, it’s not because I am organised or have a loathing of the Christmastide crowds and it’s not even for this Christmas I have finished shopping - It’s last Christmas I both started and finished shopping for today, a mere 218 days after the actual event.
In my defence I have known since last year exactly what I was purchasing and for whom. My father always gets a bottle of Southern Comfort and the chocolates are for my step-mother. Unimaginative gifts they may be, but I know they are appreciated and what more does a gift need to be?
As to why I hadn’t purchased them sooner I haven’t visited my Dad since last October or November - Yes, it has been that long that I am not sure when I visited and I wasn’t going t buy the gifts in advance as I would only wind up having to replace them after eating them and drinking them myself.
Anyways with a mere 146 days to go until Christmas this year, That just means 365 days until my Dad gets his next Christmas present from me.
Although I would like to ask if the artist has any basis for the claim, or if he is just claim is based on a logical progression based on the starting point of elephants never forgetting?
Whilst bored and playing around upon the Times Online website I came across one of this years articles bemoaning the fact that exams aren’t as hard as they used to be back in the good old days when you were still permitted to beat lessons into your students and whiteboards were as unheard of as chalk dust allergies.
To illustrate their point and settle the case once and for all they decided to get 5 A* pupils; who had just done their GCSEs, to sit a paper for which that had not studied the syllabus - Only 2 passed the O Level, so obviously O Levels are the harder exam.
Mind you judging by the example questions, the students never had a chance. Even The Times (or whoever wrote the article got the answer wrong:
Test yourself Maths and English O-level
1) A machine that cost £35,000 is operated eight hours a day in a five-day week but one hour each day is used for test purposes. There are three scales of charges, the first at the rate of £5 an hour for private use, the second at £15 an hour for research work and the third at £40 an hour for commercial work. It is estimated that the numbers of hours charged at the first, second and third rates are in the ratios 4:2:1. Express the receipts from commercial work as a percentage of the total receipts.
If the machine costs £30 a week to maintain, how many complete weeks must elapse before one quarter of the original cost of the machine can be recovered?
2) Rewrite two of the following sentences to remove any errors. (i) Uncle Tom has agreed to share his money between you and I. (ii) The dog had hurt it’s paw. (iii) The number of accidents on the road are increasing.
Maths answers: 44.5%; 21 weeks
English answers: you and me; its; is increasing
As can be seen from my working out in the picture below the maths question isn’t that hard and doesn’t even require a calculator - For verisimilitude I did it like an O Level student with just a pen and paper, a calculator would only have slowed me down.
As you can see I arrived at an answer to the first part of question 1 as 44.4% and not 44.5% unlike The Times who obviously never passed their Math O Level*.
You can see clearly in my working out that the fraction 4/9 drops out rather nicely to express the proportion of money raked in from commercial work and as I am sure anyone reading this knows 1/9 is 0.111111111… and so 4/9 is 0.4444444444… and to go from a decimal to a percentage all you do is times by 100 to get 44.4444444… which does not round down to 44.5 - The Times is evidently dumbing down as much as the exams!
*Although they may well have passed their English O Level - I only managed 50% on question 2.
Filed under: Humour, Life — Camera Dave @ 10:10 am
Most Fridays, where I work we can wear pretty much what we want to work. When I say we I mean men, as women seem to be able to get away with anything during the rest of the week - Not that I am necessarily complaining about that.
What I am complaining about is the fact we only get a Dress Down Friday, why can’t we have a Fire-Fight Friday like this office:
Not only does it look like more fun, it’s more alliterative as well.
Filed under: Humour, Life — Camera Dave @ 10:10 pm
I rather like anime and I have rather a sizeable collection to prove it, both on DVD and fansubs I’ve acquired. I first got into it when I lived in Germany and was working part time as an assistant English teacher and had lots of free time outside of work, but no TV to watch at home. Thankfully though, my housemate had an Internet connection that he let me abuse and so to supplement my film collection I started downloaded a few Japanese cartoons to help me pass the time.
Now when I mention anime to people I know I get one of three responses:
The person has no idea what anime is.
The person is also an anime fan and we start comparing notes on shows.
The person will start going on about hentai and make jokes about my deviancy.
Now I admit that hentai is anime, but only in the same way that pornographic videos are films - It’s a specific genre with it’s own set of sub-genres. Most anime however is not hentai and is much more mainstream.
Although I am aware of it I have never watched any hentai, but I nevertheless indirectly been entertained by it. I was once bought a book by a girlfriend and it was probably the best gift I have ever been given by a girlfriend (not that I have had that many gifts from girlfriends). It was The Anime Encyclopedia, or as it is known in our house, “The Anime Bible” as we frequently consult it for information about animes we are watching or considering watching.
However spanning over 750 pages it also has a lot of information about anime that I have not seen or even heard of and whilst looking for one entry frequently others get read as well - As I mentioned earlier hentai IS anime and so in an effort for completeness The Anime Encyclopedia also encompasses entries for hentai animes and last night whilst looking for information on She: The Ultimate Weapon* I stumbled across the following entry for an Anime called Moral Hazard.
Rather than describe the description of this production I will just quote the paragraph written on it:
Moral Hazard: A nameless young girl is walking home through a park at night, where she is set upon by a would be rapist. however, she is saved by a nameless man wielding a baseball bat, who confesses to her that he is a business man facing bankruptcy and is so depressed that he night as well rape her himself. However, the former thug then fights him off and the pair of them chase her around the park. Compare to Dying for a Girl in the Lolita Anime series.
Of course this sparked off a game for me and my housemate to see what other weird and not-so-wonderful descriptions of hentai anime we could find. We started by looking up information on the Lolita Anime series which is even less classy and more offensive than it sounds, but on the opposite page we found the following equally family unfriendly but much more amusing description of an anime called Love Doll.
Love Doll: Bereft at her mother’s death. Rachel goes into a convent, only to discover that the contemplative life is not quite as she imagined when she is bound, gagged and sexually assaulted by lust crazed lesbian nuns.
First place however has to go to Living Sex Toy Delivery, a three part series also known as the boxed woman and actually has a plot. Just so you don’t have to go and watch to find out what it is about here is the synopsis of it from The Anime Bible:
Living Sex Toy Delivery: Young removal man Shoji is invited to a party by pretty Yuika, then drugged and used as a sex toy by multiple women. He wakes up to find himself dumped on a railway line in a cardboard box with a suicide note. Understandably annoyed he vows revenge.
He goes back to Yuika’s place, tricks his way in by pretending to be a delivery man and takes her prisoner. he forces Yuika to take incriminating photographs of each of the girls in secret and then convinces each that the only way to dispose of the pictures is to climb into a box and agree to be delivered to it’s destination - a secluded warehouse where he assaults them.
Since he already knows their secret fetishes, his chosen method in each case ensures that they begin by resisting, but are then forced to admit that they actually enjoy his attentions. he then subjects them to an additional humiliation by boxing his victims back up and mailing them to their place of work, thus ensuring everyone knows their secrets.
The final episode finds Shoji having to avoid and then abuse the two ringleaders, who discover that he was not killed in a train accident as originally planned.
Who says cartoons are just for kids, eh?
*Which is too new to actually be in the edition of the encyclopedia I have and frankly doesn’t seem that great, but I’ve only watched the first two episodes so I could be wrong.
Sunday afternoons are awful, there’s nothing on telly and all the books you can find to read are ones you’ve read before and aren’t really in the mood to read anyway - Or as a much funnier person than me once put it:
In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you’ve had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.
Now I’ll admit I didn’t do any pruning today, but lacking insufficient motivation to even put off doing the garden any longer I went out and started waving a strimmer around, scything the grass before me like some kind of deathlike figure - Or at least I would have been deathlike if I was bony, wearing a black robe and not dancing with the strimmer whilst listening to the radio.
It was whilst I was massacring the grass and weeds that make up our garden that I noticed something interesting. A murder, or at least an attempted murder - Technically the tree is still living, but realistically at the very least it’s facing some surgery to amputate most of it.
I thought that the tree had been blown over a while ago when the winds were higher, but look more closely at the wound - I’ve heard of cutting winds, but any wind that cuts that straight is taking the piss to be honest.
The question however isn’t who did it and why - My money is on a neighbour who wanted a little more light. (Of course I have no evidence of this). The real question is when is it going to be dealt with, we phoned the agency from whom we rent our house when it happened over six weeks ago and reported it.
The smart money is on not soon as previously when we’ve asked them to do something like repair a fence firstly it took ages to come out and when they finally did they went next door and put a fence up there instead. That incident led to a wonderful conversation between me and the agency claiming they’d put it up, whilst I was staring at a fence where panels were missing describing what I could see. Mind you the agency has obviously heard about my legendary bad eyesight and sent someone around to check for themselves - My eyesight may be bad, but even I saw how red his face was at that point.
