Poms

So, TC, no, not Top Cat but Tom Cruise, continues to delight. You can't mess with Aussie women, well, apart from Nicole Kidman obviously, no, they have awarded Tom an 'Ernie'. How has he earned this? By being the most sexist celeb. God Bless Australia. I wonder which nation will give him a 'Twat of the Year' award.

I thought it very random today when NetDoctor announced that Pomegranate juice has been found to be beneficial to diabetes sufferers. The Pomegranate it seems, has the foresight to tidy up its sugars so that they don't all wander all over the place causing harm.
So far so good. And I can even see that if you are doing research, you would test all sorts of unlikely fruits and juices to see if anything new can be unlocked. But where, I thought, are people supposed to obtain pomegranate juice? How many people could correctly identify a pomegranate even?
Now, as it happens, in Britain, the big supermarkets allow you to order online and they will deliver your groceries to your home. This is a popular and very useful service. So I went to Sainsburys online and searched, and lo! Not only is Pomegranate juice available to buy, but it comes in two power combos, one with apple and Omega 3 and one with blueberry juice. I reckon if you drink some of this every day you will be immortal. Of course, they would need to be sugar free for diabetics, but if memory serves, if it says juice, then it is juice.

My brother-in-law, Trevor, draws Tony the Tiger. But the contract with Britain has recently been cancelled because of new measures to combat unhealthy consumption patterns. So Tony is no longer going to be assuring British children that eating sugar-coated cornflakes in the morning is g-r-r-eat. The teaching profession salutes.
Today, health charities are calling on the government to take an even firmer line on food advertising, the costs to the health service of obesity is huge.
To be fair, the Blair government have always taken this problem seriously. They listened to and acted upon the advice about school dinners which Jamie Oliver gave. They have damped the activities of the advertising industry. No, the problem is not the government, but rather the governed. We know what makes us unhealthy, but we can't stop ourselves.
This is why the advertising industry is key. They serve a useful purpose when they are ethically directed. Yes, their prime purpose is to sell, but they are also there to inform, they just have to be straitjacketed.

Yesterday was the day when British school children received their GCSE results. This is a horrible day for them, and it is a horrible day for their teachers. You have to explain your results, you have to set targets for them, you have to present a plan for how you are going to improve them. Results are not fun because you are judged on someone else's achievement.
Ben, as might be expected since he is here, has not received his. At the moment we are, as ever with Ben, in the realm of rumour and whisper. They should have plopped through the letterbox this morning since he wasn't in school to collect them. But they didn't and Ben's dad saw Adam who had seen Will who said that Assa had them...or something like that. The saga continues.

Since the status of taking a Modern Foreign Language was downgraded from compulsory curriculum to optional last year, uptake of them has fallen significantly. Just as MFL teachers said it would. But industry has been urging the government to promote languages, firms can't compete in a European market if they have to rely on others speaking English.
Now panic has set in, someone somewhere has realised that pupils are opting NOT to take a language because they are hard. Yes, we know that, so it seems to me that if you are an employer and you are faced with two candidates one of whom has taken a language, your best bet is to give them the job because they didn't back off from the difficult choice.
Language teachers have been giving this message consistently now for years. But there is no sense of validation in the knowledge that the government and industry are now seeing the situation as being in free-fall.
The only thing about this article that made me laugh grimly, was the statement that,
"French remains in the top 10 most-studied subjects at GCSE" which is an idiotic thing to say. How many subjects do most school offer at GCSE? Not many more than ten.

Often I start by talking about a film I've seen, but today I'll finish with one. We had rented the movie, 'The Hills have eyes'. We were probably not even halfway through it when Ben and I had to just walk away. Not because of the usual over-the-top gore of most horror films, but because of the sheer, abject stupidity of it. I can't see that you've made a very good film when the plot is dependent on people running around screaming and waving their arms and doing the EXACT opposite of what the majority of people would in fact do in that situation. I expect better.