For want of a (French polished) Nail...

My train pulled in to the station. I walked thru the barrier and crossed the road to a narrow footpath.

I followed it and past a bend, down to where I had parked my vehicle.

I rounded anther bend and there it was. I approached it and remotly keyed the locks.

I was going to dump my laptop bag on the passenger seat, walk round and get in the driver's side.

I was moving to slip the strap off my shoulders, I had just reached for the passenger door handle to open it and pulled, when it happened...

My fingers slipped off the handle and the tips of my nails, longer than the end of my fingers caught on the door handle.

My fingernails broke, bent, tore or shattered. one split torn horizontally hafway accross. They were totally trashed... and to make matters worse it was agony.

I bit on my lip and I sooo didn't cuss, you could practically hear me not cussing. If I were a manga"graphic novel" there would have been this blank speech bubble drawn in just to show I wasn't cussing.

The lock had not released. It needed a second click to release the passenger doors. I thought I clicked it twice. It felt like I clicked it twice.

I Just bet that security system was designed by a maaan ^_^

I did my best to fix things when I got home, but it looks terrible. What to do?

Really long cuffs? Maybe a glove? Falsies?

This could be para- para- paradise

Hmnn.. Is this hard hat or not? Now I was thinking about a post that ended up somehow trying to figure out how many virgins anyone gets in an Islamic Paradise.

It turns out when, I read up on it, it is probably (best guess) 72. That is if you are talking about Houries, who are apparently some sort of (could be soulless) fabulously beautiful transparent clone (in two flavours), male and female with extra pointy boobies..

(There is no mention I could find about how many lashes you might get for taking the family car for a spin tho.)

Sooo.. Sounds easy so far. But if you get in to paradise you also get your earthly husbands or wives, at least two of them. Now having your ex living in possibly with all their exe’s as well strikes me as worse than having the extended family over for a looong long Christmas. Thos it sounds like food and booze is all laid on and guaranteed no hangovers.

It also racks up the possible spousal total to maybe 74, with some of them on a timeshare system. Gives me a headache just thinking about those numbers… is the virgin thing renewable?

Anyway. Part of the paradise deal is you get totally rebuilt from scratch, but way better than you were before. It’s like this complete makeover thing, where you come out looking fabulous, totally hot and eternally young.. aand as in the song; “Like a Virgin”, with everyone being the same age. Maybe that might make your ex slightly less awful to put up with.

So that got me thinking… What is the “perfect” age? Maybe there are several even depending?

But the deal is all the same age, so someone must have officially decided on a perfect age.

I am thinking about 17 ish? Does that work for you all?

If paradise were half as nice…

Taking back the school yard

This is a touch “Hard Hat”.

I saw a discussion between two British “educators” (Headmasters) on TV the other day.

They were arguing about a new sort of free school.

They are free in that they can be run by any group, say parents not happy with the quality of schools in their area, and they are free from Local Authority control, just subject to school inspectors.

One of the “Educators” clearly hated the idea and hated school “league tables”. He was absolute that the new schools would take money from underprivileged children in failing schools. He felt the schools should not have to be compared as that made “pushy” parents want to avoid sending their kids to those schools. That it was elitist and took resources out of “underprivileged” schools.. He didn’t approve of completion either.

The other guy was trying to argue that the money for those free schools came from the government based on the number of pupils they had and the money the government gave to Local Authorities was based on pupil numbers also, so the Local Authority would get just the same amount per pupil as they were getting before.

He was also arguing that it was not a case of taking away from kids, or pushing them down, or elitism, but helping to raise the standards for all and that there was really no excuse for Local Authority schools failing long term.

The TV showed a new free school in an “Underprivileged” area where all the kids were all in uniform and behaving .

The second guy was arguing it was as much down to teaching methods and proper rules and such. The other Guy just thought it was turning back the clock and entrenching “Privilege”

I thought to myself that he was only just about keeping connected to the real world. Was he kidding, even without “League Tables” parents compare notes and have a pretty good idea of what schools in the area they would really want their kids to go to and what ones to avoid if you possibly can.

The first guy didn't seem to like the idea of privilidge or uniforms.

Call me naive, but I can’t see why all schools can’t be at a much higher level. Goodness knows they need to be. I know that some kids are not as bright as others. I know some are less motivated and have less support at home. But to me school should expect and encourage the best a person can manage.

It should provide an environment that helps them to achieve that.
Surely it does not have to be that some schools are useless and some good.

It is not a Malthusian closed system equation, and that first guy was trying to make it one.

I know what one of them I would want in charge of a school my kides went to if I had a choice and it would not be the first guy.

Lest we forget

I had trouble getting to sleep the other night. There was a documentary about 9/11 on the TV and I could not stop thinking about it. So a serious post, maybe a hard hat?.

It’s ten years since that evil atrocity. Once I never thought I would fail to regret a person’s death, but when I heard Osama Bin Laden had got his I could not find it in myself to feel anything other than relieved a source of hate and evil had gone out of the world and regret that he had been festering, spreading and breeding it so long as he had.

I remember I was working at home doing something tax related for the company. Heart not in it, but It needed to get done. The phone went and the world changing ripple washed over me.

It was my nearest and dearest calling from work. “Hun turn on the TV, see what you can find out, call me back ”.

Their Company had an office, people, in the World Trade Centre. I put on the TV and they were showing the loop of that first air plane cutting through the perfect blue New York sky and slamming into the north tower.

I thought "OMG! What a horrible accident. How terrible." I was thinking about how, in the past, a plane flew into the Empire State Building. Confused horror. Still hope that it would not be too bad.

We had flown to NY and stayed there for a few days Just coming up around Easter that year. Funny little prop driven air planes. We had done lots of the touristy things, Empire State building, Central Park Zoo sort of thing, but missed out on going up the WTC and figured we could do the WTC next time. It was dawning on me that there might never be a next time for that now.

I was truly horrified for the people there and feeling a sense of there but for the grace of God.

I was thinking what a terrible accident and how the world could be so randomly cruel with disasters and stuff and how we need to support one another and work against the randomness of these things.

There was not much on the internet and TV news reports trying to give facts and make sense of them.

Then the second plane hit the other tower. I watched that live, on TV and realised horribly in that instant it was never an accident, Not just chance. It was something deliberate. I had a real feeling in that moment of true evil being abroad in the world. That whoever had done this had only one master.

It seems to me now I figured in an instant it must be terrorism. They were commercial flights, not missiles, someone willing and eager to die to commit such acts.

So I basically sat watching, stunned, clutching the phone, connected on and off to a bunch of people also by now watching TV in a boardroom, or something . All trying to make sense of what was going on., pooling our collective smarts and knowledge…. All Involved and made immediate, somehow intimate and realer than real to us as we were twined into it by our connections with the City and the buildings and our humanity.

I tried to make sure a friend was ok, it turned out they were evacuated and the cells were all tied up with traffic.

At least that’s I figure it might have been something like that... if I lived in rl.

So I am remembering and keeping true and real in my mind, because we need to do that and not be useful idiots playing silly games about it being some Israeli plot, or dynamite or other nonsense.

I do apologise in advance if anyone comments and I don’t get right back with a response, but I will be away for a week or two and might not get a connection.