Smile of the decade blog

I enjoyed some of the Olympic games - I usually do, and it doesn't depend on the UK doing well, its all to do with the extremities of excellence and effort, the best in the entire world aspect...
The hilarity of the "Cartoon marathon runners" in the opening ceremony notwithstanding, are you as excited about the other ultimate competition..? the Paralympic Games?

If you follow the link and watch that opening ceremony (or were you glued to it anyway?) you might be forgiven for thinking that it was fantastic if a little odd, but lets get real and note "The most watched Olympic video" section.

I have been having a debate with a friend about the greatest Olympians, following the literal medal haul claims of Michael Phelps, we looked at Jesse Owens, the great Decathletes, Bob Beamon and many others. He included Tanni Grey-Thompson on his list,
I didn't.

I don't knock the disabled athletes or want to deny them their chance to shine but I have a difficulty in looking at the status equality issue, particularly well exemplified by how the system has been thrown into disarray by Jaco Pistorius (pictured above).
Pistorius wants to compete in the Olympics proper. He can go faster than many able bodied athletes, thanks to his carefully designed "blades" that seem pretty simple to me.
To the world athletics bodies however, these blades constitute an unfair advantage, so he isn't allowed to compete in the international able bodied events...much as someone in a wheelchair cannot run in the Olympic marathon and swimmers are not allowed to use outboard motors...

I have always been puzzled by those who demand that we, the public should give equal regard to disabled Olympic achievements. When we are wowed by Ussain Bolt, we are then supposed to be equally wowed by a one armed man winning a running race designed specifically for people with a certain set of disabilities...
err no, sorry, it just will never be.

If we could find a complete medical cure for paraplegia, would these wheelchair Olympians choose to have it and no longer have their own competition?
...and try for the "ordinary" Olympics? - In those circumstances I don't consider them likely to succeed, and I am sure they know it too.

There can only be one level playing field when it comes to measuring the best in a fair competition. The Paralympics might be fun - but it is not, in any realistic sense, on a footing (sic) with the real Olympics.
I won't be watching the wheelchair rugby, no matter how much fun commentators try to convince me it is.

When you are at school, there is a tendency to believe that there is where you learn, and at home is where you don't have to think, presumably because your parents do that for you.

Some parents grasp this nettle early on, and instill in their children the varying levels of responsibility that they are capable of as they grow.

A research psychologist looking into children with disabled or dependent parents found the evidence that supported the notion first put forward by Bruno Bettleheim, that any 9 year old can, without prompt, help or pressure, get themselves up, washed, dressed, breakfasted, dirty dishes washed/in dishwasher, cup of tea made for said parent, dinner money organised, and self transported to school without any bother...

When you are older and have had at least a taste of having your own, parent free home, you need to have learned a great deal about how to live.

It strikes me as somewhat sad that the learning capacity seems to drop, rather than increase in the 20s – students, especially when they return to the parental home* seem incapable of learning as fast as infants, the tools for proper living.

Things like, closing – or turning things off that they have turned on (TV, lights, taps, computers, heaters, jar lids, doors, anything else). Cleaning is another problematic area – some regard this as something they may have to do elsewhere but not at “home”.
And therein lies the rub...
* The parental home, remains where children are infantile, because they have been allowed to remain infantilised. - Outside they can dress, go to work, behave decently, etc. but in the home, the whole idea of behaving like a responsible adult seems anachronistic to them.

In these days of reconstructed families this presents even greater heart ache for step parents than in the steady nuclear model – each partner's children have different childish ways and even if they do overlap – the children of the other are not subject to the “loving infantilisation” - therefore they can definitely not leave the tap dripping, when your own children are, perhaps too often, allowed to get away with it.

I would love to be able to just deal with the situation I am at home with at the moment – not as bad as many people's I fear, but frustrating nonetheless.
My 2 step-daughters have returned from College with their massive debts and plans to spend spend spend rather than earn earn earn... and they seem to resent the idea that I might not be happy working to support their daytime TV and eating whatever is in the fridge habits. This was never their home, they left a previous home to go to college. This is my home, me and my new wife's home...

I would be interested to know if anyone has established a satisfactory way forward that ends with the children leaving the home, (reasonably happy rather than in a box) or learning how to behave including paying rent (albeit at cost, not commercial rates) and at the same time has seen them developing into people who can turn lights off because they understand that it is their money too..?
that they can be awake – and learning how to live every day in the present – rather than sleepwalking whilst dropping litter through my life...

The doom and gloom mongers of the green liberal left often get on my left tit
- mostly to do with smugness if they are practicing and preaching about recycling the whole time, but sometimes because they suffer from the same arrogant anthropic world view that the idiot right wingers do.

All the debates seem to centre around our need to reduce the use of carbon fuels, reduce CO2 emissions, reuse and preserve,
or conversely - the need to never sacrifice big bucks free market capitalist greed for the sake of saving a planet for some people who haven't been born yet.

I am vaguely with the greens - though I feel that most recycling schemes are ineffective tools used to try and persuade the general public to start contributing to the solution, and they are often misguided in terms of emission saving anyway.
But the one area that doesn't get much attention from either "wing" is how the earth may respond to all we do, or don't do, and what it is capable of doing without us being able to influence it in any way.
I quote from one brief science site summary:

"Volcanic eruptions can enhance global warming by adding CO2 to the atmosphere. However, a far greater amount of CO2 is contributed to the atmosphere by human activities each year than by volcanic eruptions. T.M.Gerlach (1991, American Geophysical Union) notes that human-made CO2 levels dwarfed the estimated global release of CO2 from volcanoes by at least 150 times. The small amount of global warming caused by eruption-generated greenhouse gases is more than offset by the far greater amount of global cooling caused by eruption-generated particles in the stratosphere (the haze effect). Greenhouse warming of the earth has been particularly evident since 1980. Without the cooling influence of such eruptions as El Chichon (1982) and Mt. Pinatubo (1991), greenhouse warming would have been more pronounced.

What they fail to attend to is what the effect of a far more catastrophic volcanic eruption, or series of volcanic eruptions, might do to global warming/cooling, given mankind's likely panicky reaction and tendency to arrogantly interfere when we were better off leaving well alone.

In the after effects of the Mt. St Helens eruption, vast efforts were put in to replanting trees that had been reduced to flattened matchsticks by the lava and ash flows. The only places where we couldn't replant were in the deep gorges where the tress went down to rivers or just crevasses.

10 years after the reconstruction effort, the untouched areas had recovered better than the replanted areas, had a far better mix of wildlife and proved,
beyond reasonable doubt,
that we,
mankind,
don't really know much.

please just shut the fuck up.
Most of the people I see or hear on this subject, and the damn "credit crunch", are speaking from a position of not having to worry about a roof over their heads or a monsoon about to wash away their tin shacks and the bodies of their recently drowned parents.

Talk down the economy, get peed off with the Chancellor, and run around in a panic if you will,
but do it in private please
- there is real news out there and I no longer want to see your anxious faces as you spout about the grave financial problems we all face when your own biggest worry is whether little Jessica can get a lift to her French horn lesson...

...It was a bracing Alaskan Spring and red blooded American Man,

Rush Limbugh, was wiping clean his classic Winchester Model 70.
The moose he had just shot, after it had obligingly climbed aboard his rented pick-up, more than made up for all his previous near misses, and the sad loss of the two cows and three hunters he had accidentally killed on his previous trip.

He was in the mood to celebrate and after a few beers had washed down his 32 oz steak with fries, he noticed the young beauty serving behind the Pentecostal Happylife strip club bar. Nature being what it is, it wasn't long before this pure and innocent pro-money beauty pageant winner's daughter was under the spell of the man who held 6 million people and their 6 million brain cells in awe every day on the airwaves.

It was only later that he began to regret that he couldn't get that little rubber thingy to stay on, that she had been so keen, that they had been so high on moose blood, and that it turned out McSame had chosen her mother to be his VP running mate.
- now he hoped the bluff worked...the FBI would help with the cover up and maybe she could die on a tragic hunting trip - to aid the all important progress of the Republican party...
"God bless America, but please lets kill off all those democrat voters who shouldn't really live here" he wittily wrote for his next show's quote page...

It seems that more women than men prefer to hang the toilet paper like the devil incarnate - in the forum on that previously linked blog the other, connected, perennial no brainer was asked by a man...
Should men leave the toilet seat down for the ladies, after peeing, or should women leave the seat raised for the men..?
Answer:
Everyone should leave the lid down, not just the seat
and that's after any necessary cleaning with the brush to make the inside spotless, no monsters jumping out or cats jumping in...
I am in no way a cleanliness anal-retentive type but a toilet should be shut - just like a door on a winter's day, a mouth on entering the monkey enclosure and a Republican's mind, in order to qualify for that GOP badge.

when it comes to hanging toilet paper on the wall holder...

There are some who believe they will not burn in hell for changing the paper to hang the wrong way - but they do not know what hell is - not until their nails have been torn off on a jagged surface and they have had to spend eternity with excrement all over their hands and no means of washing them...

and for those who require the logic behind this - try this link http://currentconfig.com/archives/000083.html

Every hotel in the western world has managed to train all their lowest paid migrant workers to understand that they risk eternal damnation if they fail to put the toilet rolls in correctly - why has anyone not understood this simple message yet..?
eh? Children of over 20 years of age?

The papers here are reporting that people are running scared in the USA of even discussing the real reason why Obama is not doing so well in the poll as his nearly dead rival McCain.

It isn't just the issue that Lenny Bruce exposes so aptly in that clip from a supposedly bygone age, it's that the concern that a Black man cannot effectively lead a country where long term air time is still granted to racist idiots like Rush Limbaugh... (He's got a lot fatter since this flattering pic was taken) - and others are plentifully supported in high places
- by people with some education and wealth as well as the mass white working class, many of whom have fixed and overt racist beliefs common in the less celebrated corners of the Western world.

Fat, thick, white, middle America voted for Bush, - twice
- they will turn out for a blind white corpse over Obama, never mind if he had 6 Olympic gold medals, 2 Nobel prizes and a best selling jazz album.