Time for a quick post.

I am in the newsroom at the moment, feeling like a moron. The weekly lecture on Web Journalism has just ended, and I wasn't there. Why? Because I was convinced it was Thursdy and I should have a broadcast workshop. DUH!

Luckily it was a lecture that was handy rather than important.

Todays news - The Independants political poll ndicates that the Tories are 11 points ahead of Labour giving them a projected majority of 34 should there be an election tomorrow. Ooh er. A bit unnerving. If you aren't a Conservative that is.

I have noticed more and more recently that my political views are becoming more and more central and that the ideological view of the world that Mum and Dad assured me would dissapate, and that I assured them it wouldn't, is being slowly eroded.

Like everyone else, I now feel entirely free to poke fun at the Communist Student society and their ever futile attempts to get a student officer, ANY officer on the committee. Bless.

I always wonder just how communist these communist students are. As far as I can tell, their revolutionary agenda seems to consist of trying to make Uni education free and complaining about oil companies. Its good that they care, and that they are trying to do something, but... well it doesn't seem particularly likely does it?

Various student factions stand outside of the union all the time and ask me to sign petitions to the government that demand making education "free for everyone". Personally I don't have a problem with tuition fees. At the end of the day, it costs money to run a university. The money has to come from somewhere whether the student or the tax payer.At the moment it is a mix of both and the burden on the student is not particularly massive. Yes there is a loan to pay back, but its peanuts compared to gettign a mortgage or whatever. If you can afford to buy a new car (which I suspect may uni graduates will do at some point), I am sure you can afford to pay a minimum fee every month.

The Union have also decided to abolish the post of "Womens officer" and replace it with "Equality officer". Seems to make sense to me. Does the union need a full time salaried person [woman] to make sure women are represented? Personally, in 2008 I don't think so.

There isn't a whole lot left to reform to be honest. There is still a pay gap between men and women, but this is modtly due to women choosing to have a career gap to have children. Although it would be nice for there to be more stay-at-home dads, this is surely an individual choice and not some grave injustice of society.

The womens officer does provide a really handy Womens minibus for late night getting home. You just pay £1.50 and a nice man delivers you to your door and provides baby wipes for when the girl next to you throws up on your arm (as happened last year!). Poor blokes however have to walk home on their tod or pay £5 for a taxi. Statistically men are more likely to get attacked anyway! Inverse sexism anyone?

I think perhaps we need to stop worrying about having a neat cross section of the population in faculty of every organisation. Does it matter that most Phycisists are guys? Frankly, No.

I-art-mightyer-than-thou rant over.

In other news! Its the McDonalds christmas party tonight. Yes I know it is February but nobody wanted to go on a trip to Alton Towers so it had tobe cancelled. Crazy people! Instead we have a room booked at Varsity - a club on West Street. Apparently there will be free food and drinks and a kareoke. It could well be interesting...

Also, two fab bands are playing at Fuzz this Thursday. Hiem (a dance troupe not a million miles off being an electro Artic okeys), who I saw last year and really liked and 'extra special guests': "The Dead Eyed Bitches". Thnks to Uni being the gossip shop of the world, everyone knows that "The Dead Eyed Bitches" are actually Sheffields Indie super-group the Long Blondes. Although not that into Indie, songs by the Long Blondes are always played at union nights so the atmosphere is bound to be amazing! I wonder if the poor security guys will have to catch the crowd surfers thrown at them again...

Journo is stepping up again now it is getting towards the latter part of the year (in February! What ever happened to real hard work?). As all of my modules this year are coursework assessed (apart from French in which the exams are in lesson time anyway), I believe I finish on May 22nd. How wonderfully ridiculous. I guess I should sort out some work experience for the summer (and by Summer I mean late spring to mid autumn as Uni starts in October).

Things are looking good on the PR front. I talked to a man from the PR chartered thingummie at the Student employment fair and explaine my plan of action with work experience and Journo stuff. He said that I would be "well set up" for a career in PR. Yay! I also talked to the Local Government reps and they said that they emply graduates straight from Uni and training on the job. Yay! With so many local govs around the counrty things are looking good. : D

I guess the summer also lends itself to excessive McDonalds working. Kerching! I am not sure if I will be in Doncaster or Sheffield yet though... Also. Holiday!! I fancy going somwhere a bit further afield this time if possible. Even if it's just to spain or Germany or somewhere, I would really like to go somewhere new. AS most of my Journo friends are from far flung places, and I work with some many foreign nationals, I have felt a little cocooned recently... Ah well. One day I will get to Japan when I have a real job with real working hours...

This has been a bit of a rambly post today hasn't it?

I am at abit of a loose end to be honest. I do have a Web Journalism workshop in 30mins however. Hopefully when I have learne a little more HTML I can make this blog a little more fancy. Mmmm yes. Sounds fun : D

Well I think I will stop rambling now before I bore you to death.
Toodles : )

So. I was wandering around procrastinating when I came across this political ideology test. It is rather interesting actually. As well as measuring where you are to the left or right economically, it also measures it according to social policy too so you get placed on a rather pretty graph...

Here is where I came:


Not too much of a surprise there until you notice that I am inbetween Mandella and the Dalai Lama! How cool!




If you fancy taking it you can find it at: http://www.politicalcompass.org/

:)

I have noticed recently that I have accumulated two new catch phrases, both normally used when disagreeing with politicians:

1) "Is it shite!"

2) "Well they can piss off!"

Luckily I dont tend to say them very loudly and they are very satisfying! Politicians often speak a load of BS and expect everyone to buy it, but as somebody that studies the 4 subjects that seem to relate most to life and the world as a whole, it is not difficult for me (and most normal people) to see this.

E.G. TB - "Defeating the terrorists in Iraq will remover the problem as a whole" Will it shite!

BRAINWAVE ALERT! BRAINWAVE ALERT!

I just remembered a truly brilliant theory my politics teacher Mr Hemmingway cam up with over the reasons for an Iraq war. You may remember that several posts ago I mused upon why on earth Teflon Tony and Buffoon Bush for bombing Saddam and his weapons of mass dissapearance.

Well.

Mr Hemmingway says that the word is that Iraq DID have those weapons. But.... they sent them to Iran! Genius. So if that is true then Bush may have actually believed he was making a preemptive strike on Iraq becuase he DID have intelligence that there really was some weapons made by Iraq. Did he know if Iran had them or not? I am not sure. But what Mr Hemmingway is sure of is that at the start of the Iraqi war, all of the Iraqi airforce were flown for safekeeping into Iran and... they are still there.

So Iraq have given Iran some of there planes or more likely letting them stay there for "safekeeping". He suggests that Iraq was considering teaming up with Iran to make a middle eastern superpower. Now theres a thought. When you couple that with the act that Iran is now nuckear acive.... and how much America didnt like it. Makes sense dont it?

I just thought it was important to note this down just in case it turns out to be true. After all, I have never known my politics teacher be wrong about any of these things, and some of them have been pretty far out ideas. Well if it is true, you heard it here first!

(Hello Mr/Ms CIA/MI6 investigator, dont worry I am no terrorist, just a girl with an interest in politics :)

It has been a long time since I wrote anything hasnt it? You may (or may not) be pleased to know that I now have the joys of broadband on this beaten up old box. Yay! That is part of the reason that I havent written anything for a while as I had no connection for a while, that and laziness hehe. Well, actually I kept thinking about something to write on here but either couldnt think of anyhting remotely intersting or thought of something incredibly long, complex and ultimately boring.

Just a few minutes ago I had a big craving for chocolate but couldnt find any so I am sat here (rather ashamedly) eating Super Cook chocolate chips. I am so bad!

You may (if I have remembered how to do it properly) have noticed that this page is a fetching shade of blue - powder blue in fact. "Why?" I hear you ask... well I went to an open day at Lincoln Uni today and got taught a thing or two about html. It turns out that you can play around typing in different colours in to the script. Fun! [See my previous post on my colour fixation!] The Online journalism lecturer has emailed me saying that he would be interested in looking at my blog so this one is for you Bernie!

I am in a bit of a pickle now with which uni to put as my first choice. Until today Lincoln was supposed to be my insurance but having seen it.... oooh I dont know! The course looks really good, I can see myself really enjoying myself if I chose it. The city is lovely too, much nicer than the delapidated and gritty depths of South Yorkshire. The accomodation looks nice... if I understood the brochure right I could get up to £1000 punds a year in scholarship... there are less pubs for people to pester me to go to... there is a lakeland so I can persuade mum to come down and give me a lift back...

On the other hand though. Sheffield is Sheffield. It has a fantastic reputation, it is the cheapest place to live, it is only 15 minutes on the train compared to a lot of hoo ha on the train to Lincoln and the course looks like it would set me up best for a job. I would love to live in Lincoln and do the course because it just looks more fun, but if I am honest ith myself I really should go to Sheffield as I think the course is the closest you can get to real journailsm. You get a part of the city assigned to you that you have to go and report for. How cool is that!? You also learn shorthand as part of your course and get to spend lots of time in courts. It just seems more like the frantic caffeine dependent life of a journalist that is what seems exciting to me.

I guess the real reason that I am tipped in favour of Sheffield is that I know somebody that went to Lincoln Uni to do Journalism, and having graduated with a 2:1 cannot find a job. He is now working in my McDonalds. I just keep thinking "Oh my God! That will be me if I dont get a job out of this!"[Sorry Bernie!] If I had the pretentious prestige of Sheffield Uni on my CV I bet employers would look at me more favourably.

Well. Never say never. I wouldnt be dissapointed if I went to Lincoln just.... nervous of what would become of me. I think you can accept your insurance over your first choice anyway so the option is still there.

Oh yeah. I have been reading some of my old entries and realised that I often dont bother saying what becomes of my worries and efforts so I will do a little round up here:

• I got my driving liscense and have had a couple of lessons with Dad down a creepy lane full of cruisers. The DVLA have kindly sold of my personal details to various companies and I am now recieving crap through the mail from car insurance companies. Well, at least it isnt all the liposuction and christian life insurance sapm I keep getting!
• I finished my MED3 Media coursework. I did these three rathergood style anti smoking posters in photoshop and then did my entire written folder in 4 hours. Queen of cram yeah!!
• ID cards have been approved after Geoff "Git face" Hoon threatened the Lords with passing a new bill making them have to agree with anything in the governments manifesto, thus rendering them pretty pointless. The cards are (and I quote) "not compulsory". You will have to get one when you get a passport however. So you only actually have to get one if you plan on leaving the country at some point in your life. Riiiiiight...
• Iraq is at this time not at civil war but things still aint looking good. Blair is thinking of running away and leaving the Iraqis to it. Bitch. Just a couple of posts ago I said what I think about the whole Iraq business and I am not happy about sodding off from Iraq at all. When the British and American goverments have the audacity to go and play with their new missiles in some country seemingly chosen by raffle, dont you think they should clear up their mess rather than pissing off and leaving the civilians to pick up the pieces? Yeah they say that they are relinquishing control over to the Iraqi army but they barely have one yet! They just want to save their own sorry arses from dropping even lower on the opinion polls. Bush is down to just 33% approval you know. That is the lowest presidential score... ever! What an idiot. If Iraq ever want to get their own back on Shrub they should drop a bag of pretzels on the white house. That should finish him off.
• I still havent heard anything more about Katie. I guess she isnt coming back to CrapDonalds after all. Oh well, I bet she is happier where she is than having to work with somebody she hates. Matthew Clinton my old mate from school is now working there though so things are more fun now :)
• I havent got much further with learning Korean, I havent really had the time but I still intend to. I have kinda forgotten about it along with nunchaku. Well, with the holidays here I bet I can find the time for both. Roll on nunchaku bruises!
• I havent had any more dilemmas concerning having to store loads of secrets on behalf of anybody. It would seem that most people have stopped caring why Katie left and forgotten about the whole thing. Well fair enough I guess.
• I got my January exam results back: Politics A, English C, Sociology A and Media....B. How!? Ig ot full marks in my media resit after barely getting a D last time WTF?! The first essay I did in the exam was pretty good but the second was barely over a page long! Goodness only knows how all the YR12 noobs must have done to bump my marks up to full! Haha! I was really chuffed anyway and decided to resit my AS coursework (the MED3). It seemed like a good idea as my media module grades are now A,A,D-. This is despite the fact that tah only gave me 3 weeks to do my MED3 on a very bodged extension that really peed Mr Hudson off. Anyhoo I got it done as you know in a cramming style again. How good it is I have no idea as unsurprisingly I didnt recieve any help with it.

Well I think that is all I need to update for now. The online lecturer at Lincoln has suggested that all of us applicants send him some stories to stick on the Lincoln website. I have been wondering about doing an article "30 days" style on what it is like to work at McDonalds. This would have to be all hush hush however as there is an amusing clause in my employee ahndbook instructing me not to talk to "any media outlet as comments can be twisted and used against the company". Very true but also rather sad. I guess I could have done it under a psudonym but having mentioned this in my blog that would now be pretty pointless. Meh. I will think about it. I could always go for a no brainer of a review of something I suppose.

Well. As much as I could probably go on I should really go to bed. Despite waht the silly bar at the bottom says I am postin gthis at 12.00am and have to get up at 6 for work at the place of ineffable torment. You know, the other day for a short while, dying literally seemed better than going on at that place.... very worrying.

If you have made it this far Bernie without falling asleep or being thoroughly confused by my many tangeants, I thank you. You have probably doubled my audience.

Peace, sayonara, later, whatever. :D

Well isn't this an odd time to be alive? Some crazy shit is happening in politics and the world in general at the moment and nobody seems to notice. How very worrying....

Where to start. Well I guess the first thing should be that Iraq is on the brink of civil war. I have been saying for a long time now that we, no, the government has fucked Iraq up and will have to tread very, very carefully if Iraq is to get back on its feet and not tear itself apart. I can only imagine what will happen if it does break out... it will be an absolute bloodbath. It is already terrible with people getting bombed every other day but if a whole damn civil war broke out we could have a big, ugly Northern Ireland type conflict on our hand. But worse.

I mean Jesus. What was Blair et al thinking 3 years ago? I mean Bush is an arse under the control of his Texas oil buddies and everybody knows that he is corrupt (queue FBI check on this blog lol) so you would expect him to go chasing oil rather than think of some alternative fuels to use. But Blair.... WHAT WERE YOU THINKING YOU FUCKING IDIOT?!

I think that it was more of a tactical alliance than anything. The world superpowers are rising once again and Britain needs to show alliance with the USA if we want to keep our options open but.... to come up with the audacity to manipulate teeny shreds of possible evidence for some country having maybe a little bit of weapons that the USA and UK has piles of for an excuse for war takes the biscuit! A million people march against the government which are found to be plain fucking wrong in the end and not a single head roles besides the handful of decent Labour MPs that refused to go along with the idea!

Right from the start I had a bad feeling about the whole thing. I was like "Hmmm. Why does Blair want to go to war? The guy may or may not have weapons. He has been nothing but completely compliant with our requests, he even let the inspectors in his palace and they found nothing. Even if he did have some weapons, you can't attack somebody because they have some weapons that they may or may not use in the future. If we did that the whole damn world would be at war with Pakistan and Korea and the USA." The fact that the British government wanted to remove "Mr Evil" himself wasnt ever presented as an issue. Besides. He is an odious and most dislikable man that did terrible things to those who didnt agree with him, but as a whole he wasnt a bad leader. He ran a secular state with pretty liberal laws by Middle Eastern standards. He even let the Kurds have their own peaceful part in the North which suited everybody. Sure he was a horrible man, but compared to others that exist (might I mention the ignored segregator and practical genocidal Mugabe?) he really is not out of the ordinary at all.

I was part of the anti war camp from the start - in the minority I was. Everybody was just like "Stupid, idealistic girl, what do you know you are only 14". Well sometimes us youngster hooligans are right ladies and gentlemen. Please would you value our opinions for a change?

I am not entirely sure why our leaders decided we should go to war, either they are incredibly stupid, incredibly naive, incredibly cold and driven or know some MI6 national security conspiricy theory crap that nobody else does. I tend to favour the naivity theory.

Well. Whatever, Iraq is in a terrible, terrible state. If some other guy decides to blow up another mosque in "revenge" then I guess that will be it. The west fucks up the world again. People who are angry over what one guy did will get them back, and they will get them back and before you know it, the two sides will hate each other, eventually forgetting why and no side can let go and make the first move. I guess thats what happened in Northern Ireland. After all they are all Irish Christians even if they do disagree over how they worship Jesus or whatever. So stupid when you get down to it...

Well thats Iraq. How about what happening in our country?

Frankly I am starting to agree with all of the paranoid, outraged-at-everything Daily Mail readers I used to label everybody as when they said "ooooh we are becoming a police state". It is really staring to look that way if I am frank.

ID cards are practically at stage go-ahead. A very, very worrying idea indeed. "Oh you are just paranoid" a lot of you will say. Well that is what I kindof used to think but let us think about it a little more. You have a card with every piece of vital data of yours on it: Passport stuff, DNA maybe, Thumb print, Iris scans possibly. I am told the total of info is around the 30 pieces mark. Ok. So you have a car with your details on it, what is the big deal? Well, for a start have you any idea how time consuming and caostly that will be? Estimations are anything between £600 million (the government stats so very likely they are not accurate) and £19......billion! £19billion squid?! Just £1.5billion would give everyone in the world cclean water to drink! Why dont we give them a friggin drink?! We are going to squander our money on this hair brained scheme to (and I quote) "combat terrorism". What complete and utter shit.

The people who come from abroad to supposedly bomb indiscriminate places WONT HAVE ONE ANYWAY you idiots. People who are from abroad wont have them dur. Of course the terrorists that are British will have one. What the hell is that supposed to do then? Even if they were supposed to have one and didnt, what help is that going to be? "Alpha Tango to Bravo four, we have a suspect with a bomb about to kill us all, please look at his ID card." It gets on my fucking nerves when politicians think they can do what the fuck they like by uttering the magic word "terrorism". Are you scared yet? Maybe I should say it again. Terrorism.... TERRORISM.... TERRORISM!!! Run for your lives! Terrorists are everywhere and we are all going to die! Big scary men are coming to eat your children because they are evil and have no feelings! Arrrrggghh! What utter nonsense.

Did you know that you are 9 times more likely to kill yourself that be killed by a terrorist? Terrorism has always existed and probably always will do. Frankly the risk we face now is not really any greater than during the IRA bombings of the 80s and 90s. Of course things like the London bombings can and will happen and they are terrible. But we cannot all tiptoe around allowing our laws to be made less and less just for albeit awful but pretty unavoidable attacks by people alienated by western capitalism.

Suddenly we are going to have ID cards that can be stolen and our identities downloaded onto some criminals databse to use at his leisure at an obscene cost to taxpayers. There is talk of putting a grain sized chip in all products and possibly (but rather unlikley) people so that their whereabouts can be tracked at all times. People can be locked up for 28 days just beacuse they might be a terrorist. Suddenly the rules about charging people in custoday are thrown out of the window. There is talk of removing the right to trial by jury for some offences, the one thing that assures us that the powers that be cannot single handedly decide the fate of peoples lives. There are CCTV cameras everywhere. The details we give to the government like driving liscence details are sold to commercial companies that send me jumk through the mail. What happens our ID information is sold to other companies? Random Joes in offices are going to be able to read all about my DNA thats what! I shudder to think of what that knowledge could do whe coupled with the technology that will probably exist by then. Scientists are debating whether we should keep an embryonic clone of ourselves to 'use' to grow extra body parts. People are having face transplants. Oil is getting sparse and Russia is gonna pull the strings on the world soon along with the massive superpower China.

If I am honest. The future is looking neither bright or orange. It looks like a fucking Orwell novel.

Oh dear.

I wonder what this era in history will be remembered for in the future. I guess it is just a scare phase like the cold war. New Labour are not looking too new any more. Or indeed Labour. They are trying to allow "choice" into the education system. I.E: choice for the affluent people that already have an institutional advantage over the working class in education. Who is going to be able to afford which school to go to? Who is going to be able to afford tutors for their children so that they can get into the semi-private businesses that will be selective schools? You do the maths.

At least they made a smoking ban in pubs. Maybe it was a little extreme. You already know how much smoking irritates me [see the sensitively titles "I HATE CHUFFIN CIGGARETTES"]. Maybe it would have been better to let the businesses run themselves how they saw fit. Many already catered for non smokers with designated areas (although as one comedian put it "having a no smoking area in a restaurant is like having a no pissing section in a swimming pool"! hehe).
I dont know. Its a bit like the freedom debate about free speech. Can you be imprisoned for saying something offensive? It is essentially thinking out loud. Can you be imprisoned for having the wrong opinions? Hmm. On the other hand, is it right to have nutters like that BNP leader running around telling us to hate black people? I dont know. There is no such thing as a perfect society. As Durkheim said, devience is an inevitable part of society. Maybe we should just learn to accept certain levels of it and not try and force everybody to conform.

I dont know. Maybe I am just paranoid and like the millenium bug, this will end up being a silly and paranoid period that the people of the future will laugh at us for.

Time will tell I guess....

Hope I havent gone on too much, I just needed a bit of a vent for my opinions. Maybe in years to come I will look at this post and laugh, or maybe I will nod and think "yep, idealistic youngster does it again...."