Very convenient
The ongoing sleaze of Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, and now her husband's claim for blue movies...
Smith, who employs her husband on a salary of £40,000 a year to run her office, was said to be "mortified" after she was forced to apologise for the claim. A close friend of Smith's said Timney would be "sleeping on the sofa for a while. To say she's angry with her husband is an understatement."
Is that really a fit punishment? To make him sleep on the sofa, the sofa in the lounge, the sofa in the lounge with the TV and DVD player... Whatever will he do to pass the time?
It is quite hilarious that New Labour now has the family of ministers wanking at taxpayer's expense.
I would like to ask, on behalf of the British people, if there are any more wanking the state has reimbursed Mr Smith for? Perhaps he would like to submit a further claim for tissues?
Very Finnish
I really love this blog post that rails against the Finnish arts funding system and sets out 'extreme opinions'.
What I like most is the '0 comments' at the end.
Howling into the Finnish void. Delightful. To widen this circle, please, nobody comment on this post. Instead, perhaps others can pick up on this blog post and the source post, and form an ever widening non-engagement with the pressing issues that afflict contemporary Finnish artists.
Sire, you lie
Current front page of Labour site:
Britain faces a clear choice – a Labour government that understands that families, businesses and communities need help or a Conservative opposition whose approach to the global economic downturn is to simply do nothing.
Conservative economic policy points re: economic downturn
* We will freeze council tax for two years by reducing wasteful spending on advertising and consultancy in central government
* We will introduce a £50bn National Loan Guarantee Scheme to underwrite
bank lending to businesses and get credit flowing again
* We will help the innocent victims of the recession and encourage a new culture of saving in the long term by abolishing income tax on savings for everyone on the basic rate of tax and raising the tax allowance for pensioners by £2,000 to £11,490
* We will provide tax cuts for new jobs with a £2.6bn package of tax breaks to get people into work, funded by money that would otherwise go on unemployment benefit
* We will cut the main rate of corporation tax to 25p and the small companies' rate to 20p, paid for by scrapping complex reliefs and allowances
* We will give small and medium-sized businesses a six-month VAT holiday, funded by a 7.5% interest rate on delayed payments
* We will cut National Insurance by 1% for six months for firms with fewer than five employees, paid for from the above changes to the company tax regime
* We will abolish Stamp Duty for nine out of ten first-time buyers and raise the Inheritance Tax threshold to £1 million. Both of these changes will be funded by a flat-rate charge on non-domiciles.
***
Whether the Conservative proposals are any good or not, that can be debated. But the destructive nature of the self-serving and wholly false claim that the Conservatives plan to do nothing re: the global economic downturn - this is the problem, in plain view, that the truth is seen as utterly irrelevant when crafting messages.
G20 demonstrations
There is always a small well-organised minority intent on violence at these sort of demonstrations - the police.
Really enjoyable writing
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/print
Personally, I have found the global economic crisis a huge relief from my own more personal crisis / crises. Relieved of worrying, once and for all, about the consequences of what choices I make re: work, where to live, etc (I can collect cans in plastic bags and sleep under a bridge just about anywhere, so long as it has cans, plastic bags and bridges), I can now, finally, get on with the business of living.
Lunch, not pig sex
I went for lunch today with my Chinese teacher and was invited to eat something fatty-looking with a seam of cartilage running its length. It tasted quite bad, and needed a disproportionate amount of chewing, during which time the bad taste was able to bloom into a very bad taste. The only relief was to have swallowed it.
"That was the ear of the pig," said my host, triumphantly, timing this remark with the thud of the food in my stomach.
Yes, it tasted just as I thought pig's ear might taste, thereby justifying my lifelong boycott of eating (knowingly) pig's ear.
"Thank you for feeding me pig's ear."
"Try this, do you know what it is?"
"It's intestine."
"Yes!"
The intestine genuinely tasted like shit - had they bothered to clean it? I chewed it, wrestling nausea. Christ, I've just nuzzled the pig's ear and now I'm rimming it's asshole - I came here for lunch, not pig sex. I jammed in enough spiced ginger to overwhelm the shitty taste, and swallowed it.
"Wow, you ate that fast! More?"
"Bao le."
"But you've hardly eaten anything. You've only eaten pig's ear and intestine!"
Yes, that's right.
In a corner of the lounge, my host had an enormous poster of himself and his bride, with him in a white suit, leaning down against her. He has perfect skin, and the image in the poster reflects this fact. His wife is pretty, too, but there was a clumsy green sliver of pixels around the line of her chin.
"They photoshopped her chin!" I thought.
I sat in my chair, thinking, "What is wrong with his wife's chin?"
Speculating.
And then restating the question.
We spent an hour painting Chinese characters on old newspapers. My host was amazed that I knew what a brush was, just as the man in Hong Kong had usefully explained traffic lights to me - "We don't walk on red, get killed..."
I painted the Chinese character for 'forever', which is a common exercise as this character features the eight basic strokes of Chinese writing in the designated order.
永
A grandmother was provided for the occasion, and the grandmother smiled and asked me questions in Chinese.
Where are you from?
How old are you?
Where is your girlfriend from?
How old is your girlfriend?
How old is your father?
How old is your mother?
I clarified the age of almost everybody I know.
"My grandmother pronounces Chinese very well."
The host repeated this in Chinese.
"My grandmother said that she pronounces Chinese very well because she is from the mainland."
The host repeated this in Chinese.
The grandmother said...
I was restless in my house shoes, and house shoes make me feel like a pensioner.
Time to go.