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Proceedings of the Castle Aching Parish Council, 1905


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On 19/11/2021 at 13:37, Welchester said:

 

I did quote the original and said it was a loose translation. A 1930s audience would have got 'Browning' too, whilst we might think of Bisto.

 

Ich greife nach der Bräunung, um die Soße zu machen.

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16 hours ago, Regularity said:

 

 

 

And he chose so to do: he wasn’t forced to.

 

It seems that the lady was willing too, she probably considered Major to be "A good egg".

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I found myself recently surprised/shocked by the British Prime Minister's speech to the CBI.

 

Watching the PM shuffle through his written speech, looking confused and puzzled, two theories as to what I had just witnessed occurred to me at around the same time. One farcical, and the other tragic.

 

Farcical theory: The PM had picked up the wrong papers instead of his speech (maybe it was Carrie's Christmas gift list).

 

Tragic theory: Early-onset Alzheimer's. This is something that I would not wish upon anyone, having had close family members suffer from the disease.

 

 

Edited by rocor
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On 17/11/2021 at 14:31, alastairq said:

 

There's a degree of ''if I can do it, why can't everybody else?'' about it all.

 

Instead of feeling smug about it all, how's about thinking ''phew?''

As one wipes one's brow?

Somebody (I can't remember who) put it rather nicely.

Some people are born three goals up then think they deserve to be privileged because it was they who scored a hat trick.

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40 minutes ago, rocor said:

I found myself recently surprised/shocked by the British Prime Minister's speech to the CBI.

 

Watching the PM shuffle through his written speech, looking confused and puzzled, two theories as to what I had just witnessed occurred to me at around the same time. One farcical, and the other tragic.

 

Farcical theory: The PM had picked up the wrong papers instead of his speech (maybe it was Carrie's Christmas gift list).

 

Tragic theory: Early-onset Alzheimer's. This is something that I would not wish upon anyone, having had close family members suffer from the disease.

 

 

To paraphrase Morecambe & Wise, "all the pages in this speech are correct, but they may not be in the right order" :jester:

 

John

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1 minute ago, Dunsignalling said:

To paraphrase Morecambe & Wise, "all the pages in this speech are correct, but they may not be in the right order" :jester:

 

It's more a question of whether he's looked at them in advance or has any idea what they're about. He does seem to be a person upon whom a good education has been wasted.

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35 minutes ago, rocor said:

I found myself recently surprised/shocked by the British Prime Minister's speech to the CBI.

 

Watching the PM shuffle through his written speech, looking confused and puzzled, two theories as to what I had just witnessed occurred to me at around the same time. One farcical, and the other tragic.

 

Farcical theory: The PM had picked up the wrong papers instead of his speech (maybe it was Carrie's Christmas gift list).

 

 

 

 

Not such a farcical theory. My most distinguished friend (MBE & OBE) used to be the director of a children's charity and, when he was Mayor of London, they invited him to speak at a fund raising dinner. He eventually turned up - late - turned to my friend and asked her what the charity was.  He then cobbled together a more or less incoherent speech. I wonder if this was another example of "the cat was sick on my homework". Remember also how many Cabinet Office Meeting Room A meetings he couldn't be bothered to attend when the pandemic  was kicking off and how much higher our per capita death toll was compared with most other  countries.

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5 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

It's more a question of whether he's looked at them in advance or has any idea what they're about. He does seem to be a person upon whom a good education has been wasted.

 Boris waffles and harrumphs so much that its hard to imagine he ever rehearses anything.

 

Working out how long he'll take to deliver any speech to fit everything else around it must be a nightmare!

 

John

 

Edited by Dunsignalling
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11 minutes ago, Compound2632 said:

 

It's more a question of whether he's looked at them in advance or has any idea what they're about. He does seem to be a person upon whom a good education has been wasted.

P155 poor preparation leading to a P155 poor performance?

 

John

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1 hour ago, Nearholmer said:

He was right about Peppa Pig World though.

 

 

Really?  It might be a great entertainment for the younger members of society, but his premise that the business leaders of Tyneside should visit misses the 12 hour return trip with young children as being an issue.

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Probably best to send toddlers as Passengers' Luggage in Advance, I agree, but I thought it was jolly good. We spent a mini-holiday in the area when our youngest was of the right age. That, plus a day at the Moors Valley Railway, which is also good fun, a couple of days on Bournemouth beach, and a day at a pony-riding ranch.

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18 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

...., but I thought it was jolly good.

Do you get to splash in muddy puddles?

 

Jim  ( who holds by the maxim that growing old is inevitable, growing up is optional)

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On 08/11/2021 at 17:58, Edwardian said:

 

Could not agree more. It's a way people who feel, rightly or wrongly, de-valued can feel special. Being 'in' on a conspiracy theory is privileged access to truth and puts the Believer in his estimation above all those clever-clogs who are telling him he's wrong.  

Yes. I first saw this conspiracy thing a decade or more ago over 9/11 and then the NASA moon landings and my mind began to boggle. I mean *obviously* we've been to the moon because university students in the UK are still using an infra-red reflector at one of the moon landing sites to bounce back distance data of how the moon's orbit is shifting. So 100% yes, humans have stood on the moon. But that was okay because it was harmless nutters doing harmless nutty things, but when the things people do as a result of their nutty convictions directly affect the lives and health of others then its time to call a halt to the bullsh*t.

My view is that modern western capitalist living has made people's lives so dull and boring and our primitive DNA and genes demand that we be hunter gatherers and seek our prey that many people need more stimulation in their lives than their 2020's world can give them - so they go seeking more exciting and stimulating things... and what is more exciting than discovering that Bill Gates wants to control you by putting nanobots into you via a vaccine? I mean *of course* Bill gates would do that, its a very obvious and successful business decision. *rolls eyes*

So yeah - bored and empty souls need filling up. Personally I get my fix by playing god and inventing a tiny world in which I run little trains and have little metal and plastic people subject to my every whim and buying and reading huge expensive books so I can paint the button hole lace on my toy soldiers the proper colour but each to his or her own. But my choices don't kill anyone. And there's the issue.
 

Edited by Martin S-C
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I’m not totally sure it’s an entirely new phenomenon though. If you look back across history, people have convinced themselves that all sorts of things are true, and mass movements have grown-up around beliefs that are firmly held, but for which there is no supporting evidence in the conventional sense, and people have done truly appalling things, as well as occasionally truly wonderful things, in the names of beliefs. The idea that some shadowy elite is conspiring to act as puppet-masters over the rest of humanity, for instance, is hardly one that got invented yesterday.

 

There is something in the human mind that sees “agency” in natural processes, and especially in coincidences, and something that desperately wants to find “a hidden truth”. We have evolved into highly effective problem solvers, so we unwittingly set riddles for ourselves and get a buzz from “solving” them, in just the same way that evolution has made us so good at spotting faces of potentially threatening people and animals that we see faces in clouds, and random gaps in hedgerows.

 

IMO, the only cure is education, to help us recognise the dangers of our in-built propensity to imagine stuff and, as you say, the best thing to do with our minds when they are underemployed is to give them something complex, but harmless, to chew-on.

 

The devil makes work for idle minds? (that’s possibly a recursive way of thinking about it, thinking about it)

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Boris has used his carefully rehearsed “unpreparedness” to good effect for many years, basically tailoring one speech to suit whoever he is talking to. It has taken him only so far: to become Prime Minister, in fact.

That was one of his two aims in life, to become Prime Minister.

The other aim was to have been a successful PM.

He is astute enough to realise that Attlee and Thatcher were extraordinarily capable administrators, and that most other PMs were most effective when they did as little interfering with the wheels of the civil service as possible. Unfortunately, he had expected the problems of Brexit to have been resolved by the time he took the reins of power, but he underestimated Theresa May’s ability to get little done, and then COVID came along.

He had no strategy for making decisions: he always left that to other people - “Find out what people want, and the easiest way to get them to believe I will deliver it, and also how to rubbish the opposition with snappy sound bites, and leave me alone to play the role of likeable bluffer”.

He will be remembered as a PM, when he has gone. I doubt that history will view him as successful, despite what his myriad followers think.

 

But that’s just my view.

 

On disbelieving evidence, we have been here before: people confuse the freedom to speak with a perceived “right” to spread lies about things they don’t easily understand. Here’s the clue: it’s science. It requires hard work to understand it. It isn’t always easy.

 

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20 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

IMO, the only cure is education, to help us recognise the dangers of our in-built propensity to imagine stuff and, as you say, the best thing to do with our minds when they are underemployed is to give them something complex, but harmless, to chew-on.

Ah yes. This being the “education” that has been dismembered and underfunded by governments for decades?

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12 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

IMO, the only cure is education, to help us recognise the dangers of our in-built propensity to imagine stuff and, as you say, the best thing to do with our minds when they are underemployed is to give them something complex, but harmless, to chew-on

 Which raises  in my mind the question, ''who educates the educators?''

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18 minutes ago, alastairq said:

 Which raises  in my mind the question, ''who educates the educators?''

 

Experienced educators. 

 

Backed up by a good deal of research into what an effective curriculum and effective teaching looks like. Sadly a lot of this expertise is unknown to and/or unappreciated by opinionated politicians and commentators against whose malign influence the teaching profession has to struggle, making the best of a bad job in terms of what is imposed from above. 

Edited by Compound2632
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22 minutes ago, alastairq said:

 Which raises  in my mind the question, ''who educates the educators?''

Those who can, do.

Those who can’t, teach.

Those who can’t teach, teach teachers.

 

Said to me by a Professor of Educational Psychology who was a teacher trainer…

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