Body Scanners
There has been a couple of women refused travel on a plane at Manchester, because they would not be checked by one of the new body scanners.
I’m all for security and are broadly for increased measures, but the way it is in the UK is different to the USA. There if you refuse to go on a body scanner, you can be personally searched. In the UK, you can’t.
This is wrong, as there are various illnesses such as Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, where exposure to radiation is not recommended. In my view anybody suffering from such a disease would be totally within their rights to ask for a personal search, especially if they had a letter from their hospital.
How to Attract Business
I really don’t care what language people use in private, but are new powers for the Welsh Assembly to force companies and organisations to provide services in Welsh a good idea?
If I was thinking about relocating a company to Wales, I would think again, as if at some future date, I’d have to go to the expense of providing everything in Welsh as well as English. I would go to part of the UK, where things were less strict. In these days, where business efficiency is the key, then imposing rules like this doesn’t make sense for the vast majority of companies and organisations.
Stunning Scanning
I was just watching the local BBC news and saw an item about SatScan. A company called SmartDrive have developed a very high class scanner to help in the understanding and restoration of major art works.
Very interesting.
Click here to view an infra-red image of Titian’s “Nymph and Faun” at a very high resolution of 16,000 by 14,000.
Rose Gray at the River Cafe
The death of Rose Gray, one of the co-founders of the River Cafe, has just been announced. That is obviously extremely sad for her friends and family, but it also marks the passing of someone, who has left her culinary skills to the world. Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall have all paid tributes.
My late wife and I went twice. It was marvellous and of course, I was able to eat a real high-class gluten-free meal.
I’m sure if my wife was here now, we’d be discussing those two meals and paying our tributes.
There is a post here, that I wrote after one of the meals.
Sexuality in the 1960s
The report by Dr. Linda Papadopoulos, that children are over-exposed to sexual imagery makes some good points, but it seems to give the impression that this is a new phenomenon.
I doubt it is.
Top of the Pops was one of the top BBC shows from the 1960s onwards until it faded away a few years ago. Before the advent of pop videos many of the bands played live, but in many cases when they couldn’t, a dance routine would be performed by Pan’s People. Tame they weren’t, and they did go out in the early evening on BBC1. So when the report talks about rating pop videos and banning some before the watershed, I say “What’s New?” Pan’s People got there fair share of complaints about exposing sexuality to the young.
The report also suggests that certain magazines should not be sold to those under 16. Will this make any difference? I doubt it. When I used to deliver newspapers as a fifteen-year-old, we always used to go back to the shop afterwards and thumb through the dirty magazines. And some were quite dirty! No not quite, very! We didn’t have the Internet, but it didn’t matter.
But what has changed is that in the 1960s and before, you had to beware paedophiles. Hadley Wood, which was near where I live, was full of them. All the kids passed messages between themselves, but we never told our parents as then we’d have been banned from going to the Woods to do things like train spotting on the Great Northern line to the north.
Thankfully, paedophiles seem to have gone from public places.
It’s a funny thing, but some of the most explicit photos I’ve ever seen, I saw when I worked in a factory as a vacation job from University in probably 1966. They didn’t involve children, but they did involve most other perversions.
Was it the same before the Second World War and even in Victorian Times?
Dr. Linda Papadopoulos has made a lot of good points, but I doubt that any will make any difference. Commercial pressures from MTV, Facebook and other American sites will mean that no legislation will be enforceable and kids are always curious and want to experiment. So it could be a losing battle.
What we must do is educate children properly, so that they take everything around themselves with a strong pinch of salt and choose the things that will enrich their lives and make them valuable members of society.
Airbrushed Photographs of Women
There is a report today by Dr. Linda Papadopoulos, that says that children are over-exposed to sexual imagery.
One of the points it makes is that photos are often airbrushed to make the subjects closer to what is considered to be an ideal. It says that that airbushed photos should be marked as such. I think there is a fat chance of that ever happening, as suppose they insisted on it in the UK, would it apply to imported magazines printed in the US and Europe. If they were not allowed to be distributed here that would be censorship!
It just shows how far this report is from what can be achieved in reality.
Look at this photo of a lady dressed how she would have been in the Belle Epoque era, I found on the web from 1895.
The waist looks very much that it has been retouched.
Plus ca change! Except then tiny waists were important and now it’s being stick thin.
Dish Ran Away with the Spoon
This story is from the Daily Mirror.
A woman tunnelled out of jail using a spoon.
The attractive un-named 35-year-old – doing 18 years for trying to murder her sister-in-law – was called “a dish” by local newspapers.
Her lawyer Ludo Hameleers said: “She would have been released in 18 months. She just couldn’t wait.”
The woman, who had served 12 years, dug the 30ft tunnel from a cellar of her Dutch jail, hid the soil in her trouser legs and then sprinkled it around the yard – a ruse straight from classic PoW tale The Great Escape.
This is the complete story, so apologies to the Mirror.
On the other hand, this was repeated word-for-word on the BBC.
How to Behave, Libyan Style
This article in The Times caught my eye. Here’s the first two paragraphs.
A Swiss businessman who has been holed up in his country’s embassy in Tripoli for much of the past 19 months finally surrendered to the Libyan authorities yesterday after they ringed the compound with police and allegedly threatened to storm it.
Max Göldi walked out of the embassy and was taken to prison two hours after a noon deadline that the Libyan regime had set for his surrender. It was the latest twist to a saga that began when Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s son was arrested in Geneva in 2008 and led to Libya denying entry to most Europeans last week.
Colonel Mad (a.k.a. Gaddafi) seems to be up to his old tricks again, perhaps this time on behalf of his son, Hannibal. The son, sounds like a very bad chip off the old block, if the list of his offences in the article is to be believed. But he’s obviously a devout Muslim, so it doesn’t matter.
But we’re supposed to be all friend’s with Gaddafi now. He has the oil. And the blood on his hands!
Scientifically-Correct – Raymond Tallis
I have used the term scientifically correct several times in this blog and you’ll find out a bit more about the history of the use of this term here.
Today, Raymond Tallis in The Times has written a comment entitled, “Test medicine in the lab, not the court”. Here’s the first two paragraphs.
A while back, I wrote a piece arguing that the retired, such as myself, had a responsibility to speak fearlessly about what we saw to be the truth and to take unpopular stands on difficult issues. After all, we no longer had any hope of advancement and the execration of ill-informed, unthinking or self-interested opponents could not touch us. Recent events have awoken my dormant cowardice to question this bravado. Speaking out on some things might mean that Mrs Tallis and I could end our days on the parish, cleaned out by a ruinous court battle with individuals or institutions with deeper pockets than us. The libel case brought against Simon Singh is one such event.
Singh is one of the most brilliant, accurate and thoughtful science writers of his generation. In 2008 he wrote a piece in The Guardian to coincide with Chiropractic Awareness Week challenging claims that spinal manipulation could be useful for treating childhood conditions such as asthma and ear infections. (Yes, ear infections — I kid you not!) The British Chiropractic Association (BCA) protested that he had defamed its reputation and threatened to sue for libel. The Guardian offered the BCA a 500-word response and an entry in its “Corrections and Clarifications” column. This was rejected, The Guardian chose not to engage in a potentially costly battle, and Singh was on his own. He courageously decided to fight on, because of the principles at stake.
Now I was married to a barrister, who did one of her pupilages in libel chambers. In those far-off days of the early 1980s, libel was all about people with massive egos and often bank balances, who felt they had been wronged in the tabloids. Now, it seems it is being used in a much more general way to protect commercial interests.
In the next few years, how many writers and scientists will challenge the established view, if they felt that what they said despite the overwhelming evidence was against the commercial interests of a large company or professional organisation?
Raymond Tallis finishes by asking us to become a signatory on the National Petition for Libel Reform. I have done what he asked and suggest that all those who want scientifically correct, rather than lawyer derived truth, should sign.
Watering Down Sex Education
The government has retreated on sensible proposals on sex education, by allowing faith schools to virtually opt out of reality and the truth.
I thought that it was no well excepted that the more and better you educated kids about sex, the less teenage pregnancies you get.
But think of all those religious votes!
The Anonymous Widower 