Hello McKinney watchers!
There has been a fresh twist in the ever bizarre tale of Joyce the "manacled Mormon kidnapper" McKinney.
Turns out it's not just Mormons that she's obsessed with, she's got a freaky thing for animals too.
First it was the South Korean puppy cloning, now it's - actually I'll let The Times, who have followed the story so faithfully, take over:
The “manacled Mormon” kidnapper who was exposed after cloning her pet pitbull terrier in South Korea is wanted on burglary charges involving a three-legged horse in the United States.
Joyce McKinney is accused of telling a 15-year-old boy to break into a house in Tennessee so that she could get money to buy a false leg for her beloved horse, her lawyer said.
Prosthethics for ponies - who knew it was so lucrative?
On other business, it has been brough to my attention that there is another possible explanation for the linguistic conundrum that is the phrase "to get caned".
Captain Mac said: "I think caned comes from when drinks like rum were brewed from fermented sugar cane."
I like it.
Meanwhile, the latest news on the future of Cains is that PWC are talking up their chances of finding a buyer "to take control within just a few days" according to the oft over-looked publication The Publican.
PWC said: “We are advertising for interested parties in the Financial Times at the end of the week and that should help us set a timescale for positive offers as early as the week beginning August 18."
Consider yourselves updated.
Saturday, 16 August 2008
Friday, 15 August 2008
Friday fun
Maybe I'm going crazy, but I found this hilarious.
It is truly the fail blog of cakes, enjoy!
http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/
I'm off for a nice slice of Victoria sponge myself.
It is truly the fail blog of cakes, enjoy!
http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/
I'm off for a nice slice of Victoria sponge myself.
Thursday, 14 August 2008
Boris Johnston, Kelvin MacKenzie, and now...
Tim Leunig.
The think tank academic who urged scousers to move South because Liverpool has lost its "raison d'etre" has found himself on the wrong end of the city's wrath.
Not since blundering Boris and The Sun's infamous Hillsborough splash has there been such an outcry directed at one man.
Leunig's half-baked ideas have been the subject of acres of coverage, with stirring double page spreads in the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo.
Undeniably its been great fun to read, but should we be wasting our time on Leunig? By taking a swipe at the proudest city in the UK the LSE economist was always guaranteed to make the front pages.
Which has me wondering if our northern pride had been manipulated?
A friend at the Hull Daily Mail summed it up today when she said: "We fizz up like a bottle of pop when someone has a dig."
And we do. The fact is, far from harming his career this furore is going to make the Bill Gates look-a-like Leunig into a darling of academia.
You only have to look at Johnston and MacKenzie to see that they didn't suffer much for their ill-advised pot shots at scousers. Boris is now mayor of London and MacKenzie is a millionaire.
In a way it's a shame that Leunig went loopy and suggested mass migration as an alternative to making regeneration work, because there are questions to be asked about the received wisdom that "regeneration" is the saviour of our cities.
A week ago The TaxPayers’ Alliance came out with their own paper arguing that regional development agencies have cost the tax payer £15bn and have failed to deliver value for money, at the same time the National Audit Office are scrutinising the work of such quangos ready for a major report in 2009.
Now, there's something worth dedicating column inches to.
The think tank academic who urged scousers to move South because Liverpool has lost its "raison d'etre" has found himself on the wrong end of the city's wrath.
Not since blundering Boris and The Sun's infamous Hillsborough splash has there been such an outcry directed at one man.
Leunig's half-baked ideas have been the subject of acres of coverage, with stirring double page spreads in the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo.
Undeniably its been great fun to read, but should we be wasting our time on Leunig? By taking a swipe at the proudest city in the UK the LSE economist was always guaranteed to make the front pages.
Which has me wondering if our northern pride had been manipulated?
A friend at the Hull Daily Mail summed it up today when she said: "We fizz up like a bottle of pop when someone has a dig."
And we do. The fact is, far from harming his career this furore is going to make the Bill Gates look-a-like Leunig into a darling of academia.
You only have to look at Johnston and MacKenzie to see that they didn't suffer much for their ill-advised pot shots at scousers. Boris is now mayor of London and MacKenzie is a millionaire.
In a way it's a shame that Leunig went loopy and suggested mass migration as an alternative to making regeneration work, because there are questions to be asked about the received wisdom that "regeneration" is the saviour of our cities.
A week ago The TaxPayers’ Alliance came out with their own paper arguing that regional development agencies have cost the tax payer £15bn and have failed to deliver value for money, at the same time the National Audit Office are scrutinising the work of such quangos ready for a major report in 2009.
Now, there's something worth dedicating column inches to.
Monday, 11 August 2008
Phrase and fable, caned and able
********* http://tinyurl.com/5kfwcz *********
Is the soundtrack to this post - there's a reason.
On the way home from work today I was thinking about a pint of beer.
Which is no unusual state of affairs, but this time I was pondering the etymology of the pint in question.
"Does," I wondered, "the verb 'to cane' (most common usage 'we were caned' or 'he's a caner') derive from Liverpool's very own 'Cains' beer?"
Caners are a breed of their own according to The Sun, and just like that other incomprehensible, monosyllabic, dribbling group - premiership footballers - they have their own league. See: http://tinyurl.com/66nnpj
Chugging through Birkdale and Sandhills I tried to get to the bottom of the question: To get caned do you need to be drinking Cains?
Because if that's the case we're all going to be sobering up very soon. Last week the tax man called time, RBS handed the beleaguered brewery over to the receivers and the long hangover began.
Now, there is another school of thought that argues the root of the verb is cocaine, or 'caine if you're really cool.
Which makes me wonder, has the government really thought this thing through? Do they want good sup-standing Cains drinkers to become coke fiends whose nostrils harbour half of Columbia just because there's a £4.2m financing shortfall?
How much did bankrolling Northern Rock cost?
Surely it's time for a private members bill in parliament calling for the nationalisation of Cains before we all end up in a worse state than Ms Winehouse because we've had to swap a nice pint for class A substance abuse in order to carry on getting caned?
Is the soundtrack to this post - there's a reason.
On the way home from work today I was thinking about a pint of beer.
Which is no unusual state of affairs, but this time I was pondering the etymology of the pint in question.
"Does," I wondered, "the verb 'to cane' (most common usage 'we were caned' or 'he's a caner') derive from Liverpool's very own 'Cains' beer?"
Caners are a breed of their own according to The Sun, and just like that other incomprehensible, monosyllabic, dribbling group - premiership footballers - they have their own league. See: http://tinyurl.com/66nnpj
Chugging through Birkdale and Sandhills I tried to get to the bottom of the question: To get caned do you need to be drinking Cains?
Because if that's the case we're all going to be sobering up very soon. Last week the tax man called time, RBS handed the beleaguered brewery over to the receivers and the long hangover began.
Now, there is another school of thought that argues the root of the verb is cocaine, or 'caine if you're really cool.
Which makes me wonder, has the government really thought this thing through? Do they want good sup-standing Cains drinkers to become coke fiends whose nostrils harbour half of Columbia just because there's a £4.2m financing shortfall?
How much did bankrolling Northern Rock cost?
Surely it's time for a private members bill in parliament calling for the nationalisation of Cains before we all end up in a worse state than Ms Winehouse because we've had to swap a nice pint for class A substance abuse in order to carry on getting caned?
Thursday, 7 August 2008
I wish I'd written this intro
"The woman who had her pet dog cloned by South Korean scientists flatly denied early today that she was a bail abscondee accused of sexually assaulting and kidnapping a male Mormon missionary more than 30 years ago in Surrey."
In Surrey! Not in Waco, Texas, but Surrey. Who knew that the leafy green costly-property public school outpost was in fact at the centre of a global movement to manhandle male Mormon missionaries?
As for the dog cloning and the South Koreans, I just don't even know where to begin.
Leo Lewis, Ben Quinn and the sub, I salute you!
Share the love at: http://tinyurl.com/6kta8t
In Surrey! Not in Waco, Texas, but Surrey. Who knew that the leafy green costly-property public school outpost was in fact at the centre of a global movement to manhandle male Mormon missionaries?
As for the dog cloning and the South Koreans, I just don't even know where to begin.
Leo Lewis, Ben Quinn and the sub, I salute you!
Share the love at: http://tinyurl.com/6kta8t
Monday, 4 August 2008
The Big Issue
I just read this story in The Guardian:
"Parents in England will for the first time be routinely informed if a child is clinically overweight under controversial plans to tackle an epidemic of obesity that were announced yesterday by the Department of Health.
"Ministers have ruled that letters to parents should not use the words "fat" or "obese" for fear they might stigmatise overweight children and cause families to ignore the results."
I'd have thought weighing more than a small baby elephant is enough to "stigmatise" a seven-year-old. I can't claim first hand experience on that, but surely being the morbidly obese kid in the class will mean they've heard a lot worse from their playground peers.
Coverage like this is worse than a letter home telling it like it is: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/woman/real_life/article1499935.ece
It also crossed my mind that it might be time for action, not words on the issue. As in 20 laps of the playing field action?
"Parents in England will for the first time be routinely informed if a child is clinically overweight under controversial plans to tackle an epidemic of obesity that were announced yesterday by the Department of Health.
"Ministers have ruled that letters to parents should not use the words "fat" or "obese" for fear they might stigmatise overweight children and cause families to ignore the results."
I'd have thought weighing more than a small baby elephant is enough to "stigmatise" a seven-year-old. I can't claim first hand experience on that, but surely being the morbidly obese kid in the class will mean they've heard a lot worse from their playground peers.
Coverage like this is worse than a letter home telling it like it is: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/woman/real_life/article1499935.ece
It also crossed my mind that it might be time for action, not words on the issue. As in 20 laps of the playing field action?
Friday, 1 August 2008
Who's the daddy?
"The Child is father of the Man," Wordsworth declared in 1802, and we all agreed.
Since then children have been becoming more and more and more powerful.
Starting with this romantic concept that childhood experiences shape us for life, we have heaped growing importance, pressure and scrutiny on the little 'uns.
Thanks to this new improved childhood we've become terrified of the small tyrants who wield so much power in our culture.
If that sounds like an over-exaggeration ask yourself when was the last time you told a bunch of 10-year-olds on a train to turn their fit-inducing phone music down?
And why not? Because they might knife you. Because being perceived as a judgemental critic of someone else's parenting is now a social taboo. Or because a stranger talking to children is clearly a paedophile.
Either way, it boils down to the same thing: We're scared of children.
There's no doubt they now have the upper hand. We don't know what to do with them, or what to make of them - and they know it.
By giving those years so much significance we've distorted childhood beyond anyone's understanding - theirs, or ours.
Stars are no-longer real stars unless they started their career under the age of 18, see: Britney, Lindsay Lohan, Justin Timberlake, Miley Ray Cyrus, Peaches and Michael Jackson. A line-up in questionable mental health to say the very least.
We want them young forever, and we also want them looking like grown-ups - but paedophilia is definitely a bad, bad thing. No wonder everyone is confused.
Not only have we created some kind of sexualised pre-teen siren strain of child, we now need to woo them. That's because they're a market force of pester powering future consumers who brands need to seduce.
Then there's the matter of parenting. Children are tiny walking, talking status symbols - why else would Posh'n'Becks, Brangelina and even Jordan and Pete have so many of them?
But they need to be the whole package to carry real caché - which is possibly why kids in the UK consistently rank among the most stressed and depressed in the world.
In order to understand this childhood thing we've adopted a scientific approach which seems to have resulted in very little success. If you need proof of this then look no further than the fact that we test our children practically every year of their sad little lives.
We're obsessed by the idea of the child prodigy, as confirmed by the recent series of "Britain's Got Talent" which saw George Sampson, 14, Faryl Smith, 12 and Andrew Johnston, 13 dominate the show.
Even on the news agenda kids pack a punch rivalled by few adults - Madeleine McCann, Shannon Matthews and the Fritzl family all have a claim on the biggest news story of the last 12 months.
Perhaps this obsession with childhood, and our fear of its power, says much more about us than them. In other words: The only thing we're more scared of than the kids is getting old ourselves - last one to book a botox appointment's a loser!
Since then children have been becoming more and more and more powerful.
Starting with this romantic concept that childhood experiences shape us for life, we have heaped growing importance, pressure and scrutiny on the little 'uns.
Thanks to this new improved childhood we've become terrified of the small tyrants who wield so much power in our culture.
If that sounds like an over-exaggeration ask yourself when was the last time you told a bunch of 10-year-olds on a train to turn their fit-inducing phone music down?
And why not? Because they might knife you. Because being perceived as a judgemental critic of someone else's parenting is now a social taboo. Or because a stranger talking to children is clearly a paedophile.
Either way, it boils down to the same thing: We're scared of children.
There's no doubt they now have the upper hand. We don't know what to do with them, or what to make of them - and they know it.
By giving those years so much significance we've distorted childhood beyond anyone's understanding - theirs, or ours.
Stars are no-longer real stars unless they started their career under the age of 18, see: Britney, Lindsay Lohan, Justin Timberlake, Miley Ray Cyrus, Peaches and Michael Jackson. A line-up in questionable mental health to say the very least.
We want them young forever, and we also want them looking like grown-ups - but paedophilia is definitely a bad, bad thing. No wonder everyone is confused.
Not only have we created some kind of sexualised pre-teen siren strain of child, we now need to woo them. That's because they're a market force of pester powering future consumers who brands need to seduce.
Then there's the matter of parenting. Children are tiny walking, talking status symbols - why else would Posh'n'Becks, Brangelina and even Jordan and Pete have so many of them?
But they need to be the whole package to carry real caché - which is possibly why kids in the UK consistently rank among the most stressed and depressed in the world.
In order to understand this childhood thing we've adopted a scientific approach which seems to have resulted in very little success. If you need proof of this then look no further than the fact that we test our children practically every year of their sad little lives.
We're obsessed by the idea of the child prodigy, as confirmed by the recent series of "Britain's Got Talent" which saw George Sampson, 14, Faryl Smith, 12 and Andrew Johnston, 13 dominate the show.
Even on the news agenda kids pack a punch rivalled by few adults - Madeleine McCann, Shannon Matthews and the Fritzl family all have a claim on the biggest news story of the last 12 months.
Perhaps this obsession with childhood, and our fear of its power, says much more about us than them. In other words: The only thing we're more scared of than the kids is getting old ourselves - last one to book a botox appointment's a loser!
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