I love a badly worded headline. Nothing like it for a quick giggle. Today’s comes from the Bournemouth Echo:
Annoyingly, the RSS headline differs from the actual page headline.
Categories
Month: March 2011
Categories
'Ch' Foods
I don’t know what it is, but all of my favourite foods begin with ‘ch’:
- Cheesecake
- Chips
- Chocolate flapjacks
It’s uncanny.
I suppose it does speak volumes about me that these are my favourite foods. Yeah, that poncy stuff on Masterchef sure does look good, but when it comes down to it nothing beats a good bag of chips.
Well, at least Krispy Kreme are reasonably honest about their products…
… it’s just a shame they put it on the underside of the box so you don’t find out until your own sprog has eaten the whole dozen.
Now look.
Describing something as an “incident at Waterloo Station” does not do enough to satisfy my curiosity. Especially when it involves a fire engine outside the station and an ambulance parked in front of the ticket barriers. That’s interesting; I want to know what’s going on.
I first thought, maybe it’s something as trivial as someone getting trapped in one of the on-board toilets. As I have now discovered it was actually someone under a train, which obviously is a terrible thing.
This seems to happen to me a lot. A while back I was attempting to contact the Apple Store in the Bentall Centre in Kingston to chase up a repair and the hold message changed to ‘due to unforeseen circumstances this store is closed’. I wondered what the heck it was, maybe a bomb threat or something. It later emerged it was a woman who had tragically fallen from the top floor.
The reason why people crowd around accidents (or ‘incidents’) is because they want to see what’s going on. Most people are inherently nosy. That’s the inquisitive nature that got humanity so far… until it turned into the desire to hear celeb gossip, and now we’re mostly fucked.
There might have been a point to this post, but if there was it has temporarily escaped me.
Categories
Discrimination
–verb (used without object)
1.to make a distinction in favor of or against a person or thing on the basis of the group, class, or category to which the person belongs rather than according to actual merit; show partiality: The new law discriminates against foreigners. He discriminates in favour of his relatives.
2.
to note or observe a difference; distinguish accurately: to discriminate between things.
So, it appears that insurance companies are no longer allowed to discriminate against people based on their gender.
Interesting idea.
It won’t work, of course. The problem is insurance is an area where you’re allowed to discriminate. That’s the point. You’re working with odds, charging an insurance premium based on the likelihood that you’ll have to pay out. It’s what keeps insurance costs so low for low-risk groups. This is basically going to hurt people less likely to crash whilst helping those more likely to.
This worries me a little. Not because of changing insurance premiums, I haven’t owned a car since last summer. But I’m reminded of a favourite book of mine by Rob Grant called Incompetence, a detective story set in a United States of Europe in which nobody can be “prejudiced from employment for reason of age, race, creed or incompitence”. It’s a story – one of the funniest books I’ve ever read – which I often think of when Europe starts stopping us from discriminating against the people we should be discriminating against.
Discrimination is good, people. Not all discrimination obviously, but most is fine. We’re all different. People claim they want to be treated equally but they don’t really mean it; either that or they haven’t thought it through properly.
Single sex toilets are discriminatory. Disabled parking spots are discriminatory. Film ratings are discriminatory. Ten items or less checkouts at the supermarket are discriminatory (if you try to tell me it’s ‘ten items or fewer’ I’ll stick a spanner up your nose).
You see where I’m going with this.
We have to discriminate, because we’re all different.
The only good that might come out of this is it could spell the end of those horrible Sheila’s Wheels ads.
My Blog Thing 