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The BBC News site always asks for my comments, but they never publish them. They only seem to select comments from deranged left-wing risk-averse party-line-toeing buffoons. I can’t imagine why this is. Anyway, I’ve decided to start publishing my comments myself.
In response to this ‘article’ (which is entirely old hat anyway) and inspired by the stupid comments they published, here is my contribution:
James Lewis is the Labour candidate for Elmet and Rothwell, thus making him, in his words, my “real local choice” in the forthcoming General Election – local, because he grew up in the area, went to school here, and served as a City Councillor for some time. I know all this because he was kind enough to send me a leaflet, printed in far-off Essex, to tell me all about it. It seemed rude not to reply, so:
I realise I’ve ranted about this before, but I make no excuses for it, and I’ll do it again if the opportunity arises. Just look at this:
Yes, the sticker says “25″ with a line through it, and “Are you old enough?”. And yes, it’s a child’s cutlery set, with a knife you’d be hard pushed to slice off a piece of ripe brie with, let alone stab a rival gang member in a dark alley. Let’s have a look at the back:
Even at the best of times, there’s nothing more embarrassing than a politician trying to “communicate with the young”. But Ed Balls managed to take this one step further by engaging a bunch of manufactured gangsters to spearhead a ‘beat cyber-bullying’ campaign, as depicted in the artist’s impression opposite. The fake hoodlum standing alongside bully-boy Balls is Dappy, of N-Dubz, who shortly afterwards stole the mobile number of a Radio 1 listener who sent in a less than complimentary message about him, and used it to harass her, culminating in sending her a death threat. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Behind the farce though, lurk more serious problems. How did we reach this sorry state where, in order to try and convince school children to stop bullying each other, it seems like a good idea to enlist the help of dubious role models who make a living pretending to be (or in this case actually being) illiterate thugs?
You know you’re getting old when you start complaining to the BBC about things. I’d like to think I’m not getting that old yet, but even so, this dreadful article made me do this:
Have a guess what this was on the back of…
What did you think? A crossbow? A box of hand grenades? An assault rifle? Close, but no cigar…
If you don’t know, you probably don’t care, but in any case: stopwords are words you CAN’T search for in a full-text search of the database. They’re filtered out for performance/space reasons, because they’re ‘noisy’. You know, words like “the” or “and” – things you wouldn’t search for anyway. Or “novel”? “welcome”!?! Anyway, it’s annoyed me so many times that I wrote the following poem composed entirely of them:
Thanx, whoever they may be
For specifying many useful ones
Amongst the others ignored
C’mon, it just isn’t sensible
Consequently I wonder why
But regardless
Somebody somewhere should be sorry
I’ve been called cynical more than once. In fact, I’d go so far as to call myself cynical, and being cynical is a healthy thing if you ask me. Another thing that’s healthy, all of a sudden, and once again, according to the media, is eggs. They used to be good for you, you should have one every day. Then they were bad, you should only have your allotted quota of standard egg units per week. Now you can, and indeed should, have as many as you like again.
Of course, all reasonable people are used to this backwards and forwards nonsense with every kind of food and drink under the sun and routinely laugh it off with a good dose of “all things in moderation” common sense. Only the media seem to suck it up like a sponge, with this latest egg story apparently being headline news everywhere.
I was blissfully unaware until it was given a prime slot on the BBC evening news, the highlight being the way they managed to wheel out the amusingly named Lucy Egerton from the British Egg Information Service without cracking so much as a childish grin.
The cynical side of me though, as always, responded with a weary “who paid for this ‘research’ then?” No surprises in the answer, or the fact that you have to dig a bit deeper than the news stories (a.k.a. press releases) to find out. It was of course the egg industry, which also seems to double up as the acronym industry, what with the BEIS (British Egg Information Service), the BEIC (British Egg Industry Council), BEPA (British Egg Products Association), the BEA (British Egg Association) and many more.
None of this though, should detract from the fact that you should eat eggs. Because they’re nice. Poached, boiled, scrambled, fried or omeletted – you can’t go wrong with an egg. Ok, you could – there is eggnog, for example. But in general, my advice, which I say is just as valuable as some ‘scientific’ research paid for by a vested interest, is to eat plenty of eggs. I wouldn’t advise eating eggs produced by an industry though – instead, eat eggs produced by a free* and happy chicken, preferably your own.
*As with free software, the “free” is as in freedom, although of course if they’re your own chickens you don’t pay for the eggs)
So you followed all my tips in the first installment, but you’re still worried that your code might be maintainable? Here are some more:
// Initialize the column to '0' ColumnToSort = 0; // Initialize the sort order to 'none' OrderOfSort = SortOrder.None;
No, really, that’s not made up – see for yourself.
What’s the difference between these?
