I didn't quite catch that...

I’ll fully admit to not being an expert on industrial relations; I’ve been fortunate enough to avoid any serious union issues, I’ve not had a boss bad enough to make me think about joining one.

But I’ve been listening quietly from the sidelines through several industrial actions, from the big ass ones (fire strikes, anyone) to the piss-ant things that make it even more difficult to get hold of government departments (no-phone days in the silly service). And, in the years I’ve been paying attention, I’ve not actually heard anyone say anything as sensible (or blunt) as that wot Beardy Branson said:

In his letter, Mr Branson admitted that rival airlines often offered better basic wages but said that they did not offer the perks that came with working for a “smaller, more friendly” company.

“For some of you, more pay than Virgin Atlantic can afford may be critical to your lifestyle and if that is the case you should consider working elsewhere,” Mr Branson said.

I’ve known a couple of people who fought like cats in a sack to get into Virgin Atlantic; they’d been working as cabin crew for charter airlines and wanted into Virgin because of the working environment and culture, which was – to them – worth taking a small pay cut. Nobody was forced to work there, they’ve all signed up to the existing pay and conditions and if they’re not pleased with that now, they can always go elsewhere to work.

So why has it taken so long for someone to actually come out and say it?

Given that the army’s Operation Banner has ended, why is it that I’m noticing as many, if not more, flights by AAC and RAF helicopters that I have in the last couple of years?

Is it because they’re much more noticeable by their rarity? Instead of seeing two or three a day, does the one you see every other day draw you attention more because of it’s rarity?

Is it because there’s a constant need for FIBUA training, and the Army has been using here for that sort of training for years – why throw away a perfectly good tradition?

Is it because I’m much more interested in helicopters since I started flying them?

Or, and this is the likely one I think, is it because they’re all part of a massive conspiracy to subjugate us under the iron heel of the EU / French Foreign Legion / Chelsea FC Fan Club / NAFFI / Catholic Boy Scouts of Ireland [delete evil world domination vehicle as appropriate]?

Just wonderin’…

A note for the National Union of Teachers, the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers and the ‘many parents’ mentioned towards the end of this article: children (and especially boys) are not aggressive because they play with toy guns. They play with toy guns because they can be aggressive all on their own.

the National Union of Teachers (NUT) has criticised the government’s advice on toy guns.

General secretary Steve Sinnott said the problem with toy weapons was that they “symbolise aggression”.

And why is that a bad thing? Aggression is normal. As children, it’s how we find our limits. As adults, it’s how we define our limits. Aggression, in and of itself, is perfectly healthy. As with so many things, it’s only misplaced aggression that causes problems; when someone aggressively tries to move their limits over the boundary of someone else’s, that is a problem.

Does not the state use the threat of financial penalty (aggression) to ensure that children attend school?
Does not the teacher use the threat of punishment (aggression) to ensure that children behave at school?
Does not the parent use the threat of punishment (aggression) to ensure that children behave at home?

And then,

Is not the pupil expected to defend their work in class, which is a form of aggression?
Is not the pupil being prepared for the real world, where they will try to get jobs ahead of other people, by aggression?

Just saying that something is aggressive doesn’t mean that it’s automatically a bad thing. And if aggression itself isn’t a bad thing, then how can something that symbolises aggression automatically be a bad thing?

Mucking fuppets, the lot of ‘em…

Campaigns with which I could get involved:

Sod off with yer silly hats.

A thing which I’ve mentioned before, but outside work, I’ve never really understood why you’d go about wearing baseball caps indoors in the first place. They’re there to keep the sun out of your eyes, which generally isn’t a problem inside. Or, in this country, outside.

Support the duToits: make silly hats history.

Yes, it’s a fact that young drivers are more likely to get into accidents than more experienced ones; this is because experienced drivers have experienced situations where they could have been in accidents. Experience being the one thing that you can’t get in a classroom or in a syllabus.

Which is the second reason¹ this article grinds my gears.

The driving age will effectively rise to 18 in a major overhaul of how young people are prepared for the road.

Learners will still be granted their provisional licence from 17, but will need a year to pass a beefed-up test.

It means the minimum age at which a new driver could realistically go out on his or her own will be 18.

The move follows a Daily Mail campaign, backed by the insurance industry, road safety campaigners and motoring groups, to raise the formal driving age to 18 to help cut accidents caused by young drivers.

Road safety figures show that one in five new drivers aged between 17 to 19 crash within a year of passing their test. But for 17-year-olds the risk reduces by 43 per cent after the first year of driving.

The problem isn’t the age of the drivers. It’s the amount of time they have been driving in the real world. Driving in a supervised fashion to rack up hours in some damn silly log book isn’t real world, it’s an extension of a cushy classroom existence, with the added downside that most people will have to pay a fortune for it.

Suggestions like this are really quite silly; they’ll do very little to improve matters, but at immense cost. Whereas I’ve already provided a simpler, cheaper solution, and what thanks do I get, eh?

–
¹ – The first of course is that it’s a Mail article, which can do nobody’s blood pressure any good at all.

There’s a tradition at Christmas of watching any old rubbish that appears on the TV; silly films, dusted off sitcoms, that sort of thing.

There’s also a tendency to break out some of the new DVDs that Santa threw down the chimney. Last year the extended clan watched thon awful Barley nonsense. And this year we all watched a film I’d never even hear of: Once.

And for all the not hearing about it, it’s actually a very good film. Despite being a low budget, independent Irish effort.

I humbly suggest you have a watch of it if the opportunity presents.

So, did everyone have a pleasant Christmas? All gorged on food and satisfied with their lot?

I have to say, I ate like a fat bastard and am pleasantly content with my haul. But that’s not what this is about.

I spent my Christmas morning not, as intended, in bed. Instead I traveled with some family to a cold and misty graveyard in Tyrone for a funeral. Whereupon I chanced to be standing before a large gravestone belonging to a largish family.

The father of the group had died in 1890-something, aged 104.

His wife, thirty years his junior, had died twenty years previous.

Their eldest child, forty five years his junior, had died in 1911.

What do you take from those figures?

Some 44 year old got a 14 year old knocked up, and didn’t get beaten to death for his trouble, but got to live another sixty years.

Very, very different from what’d happen today, methinks…

Once again, it’s the time of year when I dust down the old Christmas JPEG lifted off a Christmas card in dark days of yore.

Merry Christmas to yez all.

Two months ago (give or take a day or two), I bitched and moaned about the spam situation. Fifteen months, fifty thousand spam comments. Three thousand a month, roughly.

Yeah, it done got worse.

Two months down the line, and twenty thousand more spam comments. Despite my best efforts re. blacklisting the twunts behind it…

Not impressed.

Also: working on Christmas Eve. Definitely not impressed.

Aw damn. Now I suppose I’ll be meant to like the greasy fecker…

Or would that be taking things too far?

My head, it is not in the best of conditions. I blame that beer that is clearly not the best lager in the world.

moar funny pictures

But hey, soon I shall be off to partake in some Conspiratorial Whispering, which should be beginning in a coffee shop. So the caffeine shall be mighty…

Number of passengers using BAA airports every year: 148,595,977

Therefore:

Average number of passengers using BAA airports every day: 407,112

So, in two 24 hour stoppages and one 48 hour stoppage, 1,628,449 people would have their travel plans nixed. All flights from Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Prestwick, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen would be cancelled, and there is nowhere in the UK that they could be redirected to. On top of that, obscene numbers of planes would be out of position for travel on the following days, resulting in misery for hundreds of thousands more people.

One more number for you: 1,946 who voted for said strike.

Those numbers are the very reason why I’m often iffy about trade unions. Two thousand folk decide for themselves that their issue should take precedence over the actions of a million and a half others. Doesn’t seem particularly nice, does it?

Not that I’m in the business of disagreeing with ‘UK experts’, but I think that they’re off the mark with their thinking.

Maybe the golf isn’t going to do much, and I doubt the bowling will reduce your odds of having a heart attack. But I humbly suggest that an hour doing the boxing would provide the necessary increase in heart rate…

And I’m not just saying that because I still have cramps in my shoulder from playing it t’other night. No sirree.

I thought it would be more. Oh well.

28

I was very pleasantly surprised by how good Batman Begins was. Which is why I’m more than annoyed that the trailers for The Dark Knight are out.

The bloody film won’t be out for six months, yet they’re showing bloody good looking trailers already. That’s just teasing too much. ‘snot fair.

The difficulty with being know by more than one name is that doing a meme such as this features quite a bit of duplication of work.

Oh well.

Actually, that was more difficult than I though. Plz to spot the obvious ones where I had problems…

There was me thinking that Sinn Fein were all about the equality and fairness, as long as the ancient Protestant/Catholic imbalance was corrected.

Apparently not.

Migrant Catholic workers should not be classified as Catholic when it comes to monitoring the Northern Ireland workforce, Sinn Fein has said.

Foyle MLA Martina Anderson said
…
“Employers do not perceive migrant workers as belonging to the local nationalist or unionist communities and this is artificially inflating the Catholic/nationalist representation in the workforce, the bulk of whom are from Catholic countries.

“The same situation has arisen within the internal tracking systems of the PSNI making it difficult to track the true numbers of Catholics/nationalist applying or being appointed locally.”

So the problem isn’t that there are too few Catholics joining the PSNI, it’s that too few Norn Iron Catholics are joining it. Not content with dividing the population into green and orange, are we now to be subdivided into green (home), green (away), orange (home) and orange (away) divisions? Not that it’s any more silly than the existing system, of course, but it’d be a further annoyance…

Consider this scenario: a private firm has a systematic failure in their data security and somewhere in the region of a thousand people suffer a financial cost. That company is very heavily fined, as is just and proper.

A government department loses financial data on half the country, and one person quits.

Another department loses personal data on 6,000 people (sure it’s only 0.4% of Norn Iron), and nothing happens.

A closely related department first of all sends 3,000,000 names and addresses to Iowa, of all places, and then loses them. And expects to get away scot free.

Tell me I’m not the only one who’s seeing massive double standards here?

And then please tell me that most people will see the logical conclusion: the only way to stop the government losing all your data is to stop the government having all your data in the first place. Because they’re fucking haemorrhaging our details all over the show…

Many moons ago, I spake thusly:

That’s probably the worst thing about all these attacks. When people go out and attack the fire service or the police for a laugh, they’re going at people who have very dangerous weapons with them, and who are trained to use them. If a cop or a fireman loses patience, one of the twats could very easily be killed. Personally, I’d class that as suicide, but the courts, media and politicians would probably disagree, so the poor person who goes out to help people and gets attacked for it would be hauled up infront of the judge for it.

And then in the news over the weekend:

Firefighters had to turn a waterhose on a man armed with a samurai sword while attending a fire in Dundalk.

The man ran from a crowd towards the firefighters tackling a car fire at a house in Marion Park at about 0150 GMT on Friday.

The firefighters turned their hose on the man to defend themselves, knocking him to the ground.

Well done the firefighters, that’s what I say. ‘cos it’s not been a long time since I saw those hoses in action, and if it can break a car window from fifteen yards, I’m fairly sure the human ribcage would be rather bruised after an encounter…

For those of you of a more Northern persuasion than Dundalk, rest assured that such an event could never happen up here. Because they’re going to ban imitation samurai swords, which means that we’ll never see them ever again. As we all know, banning weapons has a 100% success rate. Honest.

… it is traditional to think of family; the family scene in the manger is often dragged up.

But is it particularly relevant? Does it matter to us, today? Hell, would we even recognise it?

To combat this, a careful casting call went out through Norn Iron, and a suitable modern manger scene was developed. And it’s certainly relevant…

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