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Nan Knows Rhino

National Novel Writing month is upon us, in fact Nano is already a good 7 days in, the challenge is to write a mere 50 thousand words in a single month in some form of novel format. Many people enter this fine competition, some even finish on the first day. Me I tend to take about a month.

Go here: National Novel Writing Month

This year i seem to have mad ea good start I am already topping 29,000 words and I know roughly where my story is heading, and it isn't the toilet (yet) I have some characters, bit of a plot, and they seem to be wandering into fun and laughter and random silliness (Space Monkeys).

The best thing of all is that I have already written the ending to this and so therefore have a direction to head towards.

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QotD: Makin’ Babies

Who was the first person to give you info — correct or not — on how to "make babies"? 
Submitted by Manon-It-All.

My mother. She told me that I was found under a Mulberry Bush, which is odd as i could never find any Mulberry bushes growing anywhere near where I lived. Yes, I was a sad child who scoured the countryside looking for mulberry Bushes to see where the babies were.

Now I am old and know different….especially about bushes ;p

It isn't just Mulberry bushes, it's also privets

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QotD: My Thoughts on Prenups

Would you sign a prenuptial agreement? Why or why not?
Submitted by Lantastic

Okay before i answer this question and set myself up for the inevitable disagreements to my stance (I doubt that everyone will agree with me and I often don't agree with myself, I like to think I am able to be persuaded) I want to go on record as saying that the whole thing is very silly as no answer could cover this very huge question as each case would be context specific. So any conversation around it, any response to it, is also silly as it cannot fully encompse the argument or the individual aspects associated with it…

That being said…

I guess I am an old fashioned boy at heart. Not old fashioned that I think a woman's place is by the side of her man, or in the home, or whatever. I am old fashioned in that I think that when you make a promise, you keep it. So I recently got married, and never intend to get a divorce as I promised to love my wife and to stand by her.

I would like to believe that we will have a Disney marriage, forever in love, forever devoted, forever true and never have any disagreements and all that, but I am a little more pragmatic and realise that marriages are not like that. They are full of challenges and conditions, they have their ups and downs. I do, however, remember my promise to stand by my partner, and I hope that if ever I need reminding of that promise I am a strong enough person to honour it. Otherwise I should have NEVER made the promise in the first place.

So a pre-nuptial agreement would kind of indicate that I didn't believe in that promise.

Now I can see a problem with my argument. What about my wife. She also made the same promise, and I know she loves me. She is a very honest person and I trust her word implicitly. But say some event were to take place and she did leave me…

(and I am on purpose hypothesising leaving not losing as that is a road I do not ever wish to contemplate)

Say I had the kids…

(I know this is a reverse to most (not all, many single fathers do exist) situations but bear with me, gender really isn't important to the thrust of this reasoning, and I am talking for myself)

Say I needed her to give me money to support the kids? Say I needed half the belongings that she now has. What do i do. Well i guess I would have to sue her for them. Not an ideal solution I know, but the only one I would contemplate as I still believe in the promise, and if the promise was broken then no amount of fiscal reward from a perceived sense of fairness and share would replace that loss.

Basically the breaking of the promise cannot EVER be replaced in any manner. So again for me I would gain nothing from the pre-nuptial agreement.

Okay, so time to think of other people.

CZJ married MD and they had this huge pre-nuptial agreement. from what I recall they are only entitled to X amount of each others wealth and X amount for each possible offspring from their union. This seemingly cold approach was to protect them due to the high risk of divorce for their particular sway of marriage (celebrity), and also because of the disproportionate difference in their income. I guess it was also because most people thought it very suspect that pretty-young-thangs marry incomprehensibly-older-wrinkly for anything other than the cash refund.

But isn't that also soulless. I'm sorry but by this reasoning if I was CZJ I would either:

a. Be actually after the security and pleasure gained from marrying a rich dude.

b. Be waiting for the wrinkly fecker to croak

or

c. Be enormously insulted that he thought I could be either reason a or reason b.

There are more possible reasons, but I don't want to belabour a point or become to graphic or rude. The fact still remains that my new husband, and his lawyers, don't trust my word.

Now I guess I am just an old fashioned boy, like Proctor "you cannot have my name" but if I give it I will not have it taken away for a small thing such as incredible wealth.

Now I am not doing the Beatles and claiming that "money can't buy me love" or that it can't buy happiness (though it does however but a better class of misery), as for some people reason (a) and (b) buys a heck of a lot of love. In fact a couple of hundred million will buy you many things. But the way I see it is all it bought you from the person you actually may love is a profound sense of distrust in their reasoning and a wish to protect an irrational item (i.e. fiscal wealth). I find it insulting and if I were placed in a position where my words of fidelity, honesty and a promise were diluted by my life-partner's mistrust and insistence on arrangements for when the marriage ends. Then what value has that marriage got anyway?

You should NOT marry unless you intend to be with that person, and if your marriage ends then half of your fiscal wealth is nothing in comparison to the loss of that.

This does not mean I don't believe in divorce. My mother divorced twice and for each time she did I was glad for her. But, had she been incredibly wealthy then I would not blame them for taking half her wealth (I might despise and begrudge it, but not blame).

Man and wife are as one. One union. One marriage. One wealth.

But, since it is only money and it isn't mine I don't really care about other people's pre-nuptial agreements. They can do with their life and their wealth what they see fit and what they consider to be best, even if I believe it does make them incredibly shallow. 🙂

 

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Myth-ing Time

There is a general myth about time and it has been remarked on at great length but I thought I'd throw in my tuppennies (two pennies) worth for good measure.

Consider
*The Average:
Ten men take 40 hours each to dig a hole, therefore the hole takes approximately 400 man hours to dig

*The Pros:
Three strapping professional diggers take 65 hours each to dig the same hole, ergo the hole is 195-400 man hours deep

*The Managed Team:
Sixty managers take 15 meetings of 2hrs, 60 consulatncy sessions of 1 hour, 18 business lunches of 3hrs and a trade review lasting 20 weeks by 6 men at 30hrs a week to decide to dig the hole, which is 3744 hours, they then appoint Twenty men to work 45hrs, taking 900hrs making the job 4644hrs. Ergo the hole is now between 195-4644 man hours deep

*The Machine Solution:
A machine manufacturer build a digger that takes 1hr to dig the hole. the official specs state that it does approximately 250 man hours per hour, the marketing promotion claims that is does 3000+ man hours per hour saving you the job of employing 3000 people. A company buys the digger, sacks its 3000 professional diggers and gets 6 months behind on its projects in the first 2 weeks.

I was talking to a couple of friends about the number of hours I had worked one day, and he was comparing it to the numbers of hours he worked in a general week, you know this type of conversation and you know where it goes and how it leads to a general pissing contest with each stating how much longer, or harder, they have to work.

Me: Wow I had a seventeen hour day yesterday as I absolutely had to get that work done.
Friend #1: That's nothing I had to work seventy-five hours last week and I will most likely do the same this week.
Friend #2: Yeah, well me and him (he indicates #3) had to do a thirty hour shift to move some server code.
Friend #3: And we stayed up all day after that to wind down and chat
Me: Well I have done a thirty-four hour shift
Friend #1: I had to work for three months at sixteen hour days without a break

(And as we strayed into Monty Python territory)

Friend #3: That's nothing I once had to do one hundred hour weeks when I was Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990.
Friend #2: That's nothing, I was once trapped in a Chinese brick works where I worked for sixteen years at twenty hours a day on a stale crust and a cup of water each week.
Me: Luxury, I had to single handedly build the great pyramids at Giza….

Now this particular conversation is in fact fictional (well except for the bit about the pyramids), but I am sure that you recognise it. We have come to place a value not on what we do at work, but on how long we are physically doing it.

I began to think about this in the light of my office. Primarily there are three of us who work out of the same office, and it is a moot point to some of the people I talk to how much we actually do work out of it as our office hours are a little odd.

There is no imposed regime for times, I generally work nine to five at the office and then at home on some evenings, early mornings and weekends. My companions will work twenty-hour shifts, or do three days at eleven hours each day and then work a Saturday/Sunday at home. Sometimes they will work for two days solid and not leave the office at all. On occasion, and it does happen, so do I. We don't impose a flexi-time or a standard work time, we work to what we find comfortable and effective for ourselves and our lifestyle. This has caused friction in the past, both internally and externally (clients) as there is no set regime for contact and reciprocation, but once you settle into it, the system works very well.

For instance most offices on a diet of 9-5 – mon-fri, may have a regular time for contact but what do you do if you are out of those hours and need someone, what do you do if you are in a different time zone? We have found that because we all work different hours and times of the day, and because we all work on different days of the week, with Sunday being about the only day when we try not to work, we generally cover seventeen-eighteen hours of each day from Mon-Saturday. Many of our clients are between 6-9hrs displaced from us, so this works really well for them, but we would do it if our clients were in the same time zone. The basic point is that we can be contacted (usually in a text manner) at most times of the day and someone will usually reply within a hour or two. It may not always be the person you needed but it will be someone who can take a message and pass it on.

This flexible working also leads to a much more comfortable working environment. We don't usually feel pressured to come into work at a certain time. As long as the work is done and the clients are happy we generally don't mind. This means we are rarely involved in the general exodus of frustration that is the rush hour traffic. It also means that we have all become comfortable about the amount of work each person can be considered to be doing at any one time. Like the mythical man hours above we can vary between the professional diggers and the managed team without much concern as to what the others think as we have come to accept that this is a part of a normal working lifestyle. No one runs at the pace of the professional worker all the time without burning themselves to a crisp, and many of us know that in our working life we often stray into the managed team with surprising ease.

So, aside from industries where regular working hours and shifts are essential (it would be crap if everyone at your local A&E decided not to come into work on a Monday morning) the flexible time based approach does work. In a larger organisation it should be possible to use flexible schedules to allow 24hr coverage yet still give staff flexible working hours. It is not beyond the realms of reason to imagine that people would like to occasionally arrive at lunch time or leave at midnight, most staff would stick to a general routine as that's how their lives are composed. What I have found it brings is a greater devotion to work when you set your time to do it. So I may arrive late one day and finish early, but when I am there I dig that hole in 200hrs, and for the weeks where i trudge through my nine to five routine as a lesson to prove it can be done, well for those times I set up meetings, business lunches and consultations on hours worked and goals achieved to ensure tht i dig that hole in the time I have allotted for it 😉

 

 

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Vintage QotD: Here Comes The Bride

What was the last wedding you went to?  Were you in the wedding?

Hmmm, gosh, hard, well I married Satrkitten in July of this year and that was the last wedding I went to. I was the groom, which placed me almost to the centre, welll a little-right of the centre-of-the-occasion (and attraction, universe, equation, whatever).

So you can see the images I posted to the wedding photo section or look below 😛

Wedding - Photographer_s Pictures - 9
Wedding - Photographer_s Pictures - 22

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So why no note

So, I haven't blogged much lately, or at all. Generally it is because of an increased level of work and organisation created from getting married in a few days time.
And right at this moment all I can actually think of is all the things that I need to finish before the big day, which isn't entirely inspiring me to wrtie anything at all.
Anyway, I did feel that the lack of blogging was sad and that I should write something and that then I developed massive writing block and couldn't actually work out what exactly I was doing and why i was typing. In fact this just turned into a long series of murbles from a man who has totally lost his brain.

Hmmm.

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Innocent or Gulpie?

CAUTION: the following rant may contain random inaccuracies and wild speculation and is not to be taken as the literal truth (though if anyone would care to weigh in on how we are able to obtain literal truth from anecdotal evidence I would be glad to hear it). This is in fact an interpretation and response to a conversation which contains elements of an interpretive nature (which can translate as "people make sh*t up when they are telling a story as it adds dramatic narrative").

I was approached by a smoothie-groupie last night, I say approached but I know them quite well so actually I was latched on to and held, for my interpretation and opinion on a particular argument that had come under their gaze at it concerned a said company and their recent announcements and the furore of reaction this has caused.

So let me give you a brief overview of the company and the argument before I carry on with what the groupie was groping for :0

The smoothie company in question does a nice line in real fruit soft drinks. they have no artificial flavours or colours, great taste and are fairly ethically minded for a business. They contribute to the community and the environment with good hiring practices and a strong lean towards improving the recyclability of their processes and products. They have won numerous awards including awards for the good treatment of their staff. Many people like their products and are enthusiastic about the ethos and attitude of the company.

So the argument:

the smoothie company has recently announced a deal with a large fast food chain. this chain has been seeking to improve its image and the range of products it offers to keep its market position and to prevent further negative portrayal.

The response has been two-fold:

Firstly the company and those who seek to continue to support are claiming that this bold move is a positive influence on the well-being of the fast food seeking populace as it will add balance into their diet and more choice of healthy meals at their favourite eatery.

Secondly, some people see this as a sell-out by the company and that they are degrading themselves by climbing into bed with a hungry giant who only seeks to destroy the world with their fat-laced obesity-causing meat products.

Some of these people have gone even further by declaring they will never touch the smoothie companies product again, and in the case of one person who was so incensed they instantly poured their smoothie away. Lucky they had one to hand when they heard and what a waste of a smoothie, I cannot imagine how further wastage is a proof of moral superiority.

Which is principally what these two arguments are, who has the moral superiority. I was asked by the said smoothie-groupie for my response.

I opted for the third way, more loosely known as "my own answer".

My answer was that the company in question is not a charity. When whomever set the company into existence they did so with the intention of making a profit.

(Now there is a call for why this can be a bad thing even if we ignore the Marxist/Communist argument there is a view about profits being a bad reason for production and that the pursuit of greater profits leads to a degradation of product and consumer (but I am not going to discuss that here).)

The company charges a good price for their product, in fact they charge between 130 pence (£1.30) and 200 pence (£2) for what amounts to flavored water through the product range to a handful of pressed fruit in an approximately 300ml bottle. This charge can be increased by some purveyors but it still accounts to between £5-7 pounds per litre of fruit drink.

This is not entirely good value for a small bottle of water, in fact it is quite an expensive way to obtain fruit, one apple, one banana and a pint of water has the same nutritional value, with the advantage of being more filling and costs about a quarter of the price.

So, contrary to the perceived notion by smoothie-groupies and the inconsequential idiots seeking a set of morals and viewpoints as they don't have the backbone to construct their own; the company in question is in fact perfectly justified in its approach. It is following the same course it did when it was set up, that is to provide a product at a cost that leaves it able to maintain its position and increase its output in proportion to its ambitions. In other words it is doing what every company like it wants to do, it is being successful. Not only that it is keeping exactly the same moral stance.

Yes, they may be aligning with a perceived monster in order to alter the ethos from within.

yes they may be continuing their marketing spin about ethical approaches. And, yes, I can give you a hundred reasons why both of those are b*ll*cks, and I could probably give you a hundred why they are valued.

But it doesn't matter as the company is doing no different to what it has always done. So this recent reaction by the two camps is completely pointless. The companies in question have in fact changed very little in terms of their structural approach to business, they have simple re-organised in order to survive in a fluctuating marketplace built on shifting perceptions.

Hence the spinning. Hence the deals. Hence the reaction and counter-argument.

AFTER CAUTION: So, if anyone feels this is invalidated by that fact that it was a story, or that there was speculation and third-hand telling of someone's possible actions or words, then you are missing the point, this rant was about the perception of argument and the need to think around the discussion and present your own thoughts.

PLEA: Please leave a comment after reading this, go on, be the first to do so, I haven't had any yet and that makes me sad 🙁

AFTER PLEA: Okay that was wheedling and manipulative. have you not left a comment yet?

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Happenstance to illuminate a vernacular with archaic lexification is so quaint

(IN A SUFFERABLY ENGLISH MANNER, OF COURSE)

I am perceived as a wordmonger

For the phlegmatic, autocratic, I hunger

In as mellifluous tone

Onwards I drone

Because I don't get any younger

I can even be tiresomely described as a verbiator, which sounds like a Prodigy song:

I'm a verbiator, twisted lexicator, yeah

I'm a word-addicted, twisted educator

lexicate the verbiator, twisted verbiator

"Don'na du Anglish, as wurds as bad fur us all as it twists ur littal mindz rund and rund…"

Good morning one and all and welcome to the cheap seats where you have the wet and wild view of a man so lacking of a coherent thought it is like watching an epileptic disphasic during an acid flashback. So, and anyway, what's it all about Alfie? Not a lot really, in a weird mood and just wanted to jot some stuff that randomly floated into my mind.

Insane in the mainframe, a written spew of dialogue and paraphrase that is vaguely edited or maybe that should be remotely edited by a bloke called Bob from the little town of Swiftpiddle-on-the-Marsh.

"I clear my mind of the random crap that is floating below the level of consciousness so that I can amuse you for a brief moment, a passing minute of your time."

"Really?"

"Yes, for there is a belief that if we empty the consciousness of clutter we can access the pure reasoning that floats like a three week dead sturgeon in the depths of our subconscious."

"Float in the depths? Really, that's a nice mixture of imagery."

"I'm glad you think so."

"So, are these icy-depths?"

"No, I wouldn't have thought so, icy depths cannot quite describe the bleak blackness of inner space one achieves in the vast reaches of the abyss."

-Finis-

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