New word

Do you know what the word lipogram means? I didn't until today. Well, that's not true: I heard it years ago but then forgot then was reminded today.

Answers on a post card, please!

DW

Australians and pies and peas

You don't get this sort of information anywhere else!

Talking to an Aussie last night and I asked him for his view on the meat pie float that I'd heard about a year or so ago from another Aussie. He didn't know the term but said that I shouldn't be surprised as diet and dishes vary from area to area. He then described yet another variation on the delicacy that is pie and peas.

Take a cooked pie of your choice;

1. remove its lid;
2. pour in enough cooked, mushy, peas to fill the pie;
3. put the lid back on

et la voila!

Another winner for the world of the savoury pie and the mushy pea!

DW

Remember Alan Ball

Some people cannot pass by without a worthy mention. I told young master Williamson just the other week that the England football team needed another Alan Ball.  As you probably know the poor little man died last week: you can now see how important he was to old sticks like me. A fantastic player, a ball of fire and a great leader.

His funeral is on Sky News as I type this  and how can I help but watch and pay my own little tribute to such a man?

 

Ave atque vale Alan

 

Duncan :-(

This made me laugh today. I was using the normal distribution curve to explain Six Sigma and had asked the audience to consider the heights of doors, people, feet sizes ... And had put a sketch of the normal distribution curve on a flip chart. I overlayed the curve with three sigma.

Hameed bemoaned the idea that his feet were beyond the line to the left of the graph: much merriment ensued!

I had to agree and said that my size 47 feet were off to the right as I find it very difficult to find them. DW

Sale and leaseback

Sale and Lease Back

Here is a short article on sale and leaseback: not a difficult thing to deal with so this is another example for you to add to your files.

Travelodge, the budget hotel operator controlled by Dubai International Capital has raised £128 million through a sale and lease back of 17 of its hotels.

The company operates 314 hotels, the majority of them in the UK and is selling some underlying property assets to Prestbury, the property vehicle owned by Nick Leslau.

It is the second sale and elase back deal Travelodge has signed with Prestbury. Leslau is expected to inject both packages of Travelodge properties into the £2 billion real estate investment trust he is planning to float on the London Stock Exchange.

Source: Khaleej Times 29th April 2007

Duncan Williamson

Arbitrage

Arbitrage is a business/finance word that some people have difficulties understanding so here's a good example of it.

Mr X is currently in Dubai and he has a business in Saudi Arabia. He is runnning a transport company in Saudi where the cost of Mercedes trucks has increased significantly recently. Mr X believes that the price of Mercedes trucks in Dubai can be bought at a major discount vis a vis Saudi.he says that if he can buy the truck he wants in Dubai for $10,000 less than in Saudi he will buy it. If not, he won't!

Dealing in goods and services where difference prices exist in different areas/markets is known as arbitrage.

 

Duncan Williamson

Hummer H2

Just thought you'd like to know that yesterday I was given a lift in a Hummer H2, erm, vehicle. Bit of a beasty that: 5.2 litre engine apparently!

DW

Examiners Cheating on Behalf of their Students

A simulcast.

I was called by a journalist last week who wanted to discuss the way that Britain's GCSE examiners may be behaving. He was specifically worried that the examiners who are marking our children's examination scripts are providing private tuition and behind closed doors advice to teachers and students alike.

We had a useful discussion and you can see the fruits of that discussion on the Times Ediucations Supplement dated Friday 20th April 2007: there is a story on the front page, on page 18 and there's an editorial on the subject on page 24: that editorial has the headline, Examiners should stop cheeating.

I am happy to say that this is not the end of the matter: there is to be another article on the coming Friday by another journalist from the TES. I am delighted to say that I have been able to provide some detailed evidence that is being used for this forthcoming article and I am grateful to Chris Sivewright for providing the contact details that got me and journalist in contact with each other: she sits at the desk next to last week's journalist!

I have been campaigning against the practices to which these articles relate and I am keen to see them develop further and lead to the outlawing of these grossly immoral and unprofessional activities of these unscrupulous examiners.

In case you think these examiners are not being so badly behaved then answer this question: have YOU and/or your students/children benefitted from such presentations and meetings? The chances are that you and they haven't. That means that you have automatically been disadvantaged as a result.

The second major argument concerns the fact that once an examiner says, for example, just concentrate on these 42 questions and you know automatically that the quality of education and learning have suffered. Full stop. Idle Jack will do no more and even though s/he may pass the exam, s/he will still know nothing except the answer to 42 questions. If you are happy with that then you are happy to condense 11 years of education into nothing of value.

DW

My recent ramblings

The Jay

Trips away from home are always rich experiences. Perhaps the richest was seeing my first ever Jay: a common British bird that I saw at the back of my sister's house in Halifax on Sunday. Never seen one either? Take a look at a couple of images courtesy of the British Garden Birds site:

http://www.garden-birds.co.uk/album/images/jay1.jpg
http://www.garden-birds.co.uk/album/images/jay6.jpg

The startling thing for me was its Magpie like tail: brother in law Neville, a bird spotter, tells me that Jays and Magpies are related. So no surprise there then!

MI5

This is a true story! As I was driving North on Friday they announced on the news on BBC Radio 4 that MI5 is to have a new boss, John Trympingtom Smythe Gore Blimey or some such. At the precise moment they said that (and I mean precisely, without a word of exaggeration) a Rolls Royce car with the registration number M15 DRW passed me ... spooky or a massive coincidence containing no significance whatsoever? You decide!! I didn't take a photo of it but a few weeks ago I saw a car in a car park with the registration number M15 BBC. Am I being followed? What do they want? Is it because I have just read SpyCatcher?

Scraps

I have opined on this topic before but I met a lady in Halifax and the topic turned, as surely it must, to scraps: those bits of fried batter that are a by product of the fish and chip trade. She told me that her daughter once went to their chip shop and returned with a huge bag ... fearing the worst, mother asked what daughter had done ... she'd been given the fish and chips they'd all wanted and she had been given a bonus big bag of scraps. none of this paying for them and none of this refusing to supply them! Bliss!! They call them bits in Halifax apparently. Still, a rose by any other name!

NHS Systems

This may make your hair curl. When pharmacy staff at a hospital I know of need to update the medicine records (I cannot bring myself to say medication!) because, for example, a patient is returning home or a medicine regime is being changed, the changes are entered into the computer based database and the relevant labels etc are printed off. The changes are saved as they should be and there you are. Well, actually, there you are NOT. Apparently, those changes are NOT being saved. So if there is an amendment to be made or more labels or records to be printed, the data have to be typed in again from the begnning.

What do you think about that? How much has this system cost and, more importantly now, how much are they going to cost in terms of inefficiencies and possible health consequences for the NHS's patients?

Just a few ramblings for your delight!

DW

 

The Apprentice

I watched The Apprentice last night: the first time I have watched the Alan Sugar version. I watched a few of Donald Trump's version and thought it was tripe.

I missed the start of the programme but was hooked by what I saw. I am pleased to reveal that as soon as I saw the person who was fired last night, I decided that she should be sacked. I felt she was like a fish out of water. I then turned over to see the follow up programme with the sacked one and she just got worse. I was reaching for the off button (NB, not the stand by button!) as she was describing her personality, how she was academically so well qualified (erm, why is that relevant in that context?) and had just said that she was 'bubbly' when I cut the power.

The thing that struck me most of all about that episode last night was how the contestants are allowing personality clashes to get in the way of just about everything they are doing.

Bubbly my @rse.

DW

The marshal of where?; spo; and Polish bus drivers

During my trip to Halifax last week I met the Marshal to the Baron de Musard: whew!

The Marshal's real name is Robert C Johnson and he runs the second hand bookshop in the Piece Hall Halifax! A chirpy Scot with a definite Scottish accent who's lived in Yorkshire for 33 years!

I asked him what he does as Marshal and was told that he's the official organiser of the Baron's weddings, christenings and funerals and such. He gets paid three bottles of Claret a year for his pains.

Hmm, impressive I thought. So I asked him how many such events he's organised so far and he said, with a grin, none!

Ah well, he must have a job before too long, surely?!

Good to meet the chap and his 37,000 books. At least he was able to sell me a copy of Gerald Durrell's My family and other animaals for my sister who's been looking for a copy for months: £2 it cost me.

Well done! You can see Robert on the internet here: http://www.piecehall.info/ click on the link to the bookshop, funnily enough! You can find a brief history of the Piece Hall there too, starting with:

The Piece Hall was opened on 1st January 1779.  It was built as a place for handloom weavers to sell their pieces of cloth, hence the name,  and was a replacement for an earlier, smaller, Cloth Hall.

Anyone know what spo is? I haven't had any for years but I bought the ingredient last week for it and may well have some on the go before too long. Answers on a postcard or through the comment facility here!!!

All fascinating stuff isn't it?

Then there's our fantastic bus drivers. A Polish young chap told me that he's impressed by our bus drivers: they are thanked by their passengers and they are friendly and helpful. In complete contrast, he says, to the Polish bus drivers in Poland who are miserable and grisly ... unless you know different, of course; as I wouldn't like to malign anyone on the basis of a sample of the story from one!

DW

Warped people

A couple of years ago I said in a discussion forum that I KNEW many people in the former Soviet Union (FSU) who revered the time when Stalin was in charge. They felt, I said, that everything was better then as everything worked, the trains ran on time ...

I was then subjected to a nasty attack by people who said I should crawl back to live with those communists ... Someone pathetically said that he'd worked in an office in the USA where they put together proposals for Aid projects in the FSU so he KNEW that I was a liar. I was even threatened with violence by a student at Oxford University who said that if ever he saw me in Oxford then he and his friends would beat the sh*t out of me. In this latter case, I tracked the lad down and told him that as I worked in Oxford I was in fear of my safety and unless he withdrew that threat and apologised unreservedly I would take the appropriate legal action. He apologised.

No surprise then that I heard the story that someone (I won't name himfor fear of yet more unprovoked attacks on him or me) had said that he liked the artistic and architectrual work of some specific and named people who were Nazis or Nazi sympathisers. He was then forced to apologise because certain groups felt offended at what he had said.

Freedom of speech was something that took centuries to secure. However, there are those who clearly don't understand what it is and how it works. There are those who simply do not understand how to respect it either.

DW

Women or eels, you choose!

I have started reading a biography of Samuel Pepys and this is quoted:

He that hath a woman by the waist
Hath a wet eel by the tail

I don't necessarily agree with it. Then again I might. I merely record that I found it!!!

DW

Global Warming, Climate Change ... Call it what you like

Everyone knows that I read The Economist and from time to time feel that there is something worthy of sharing with everyone here: another simulcast, by the way.

You may have read or heard about how the Antarctic ice cap is melting and how that is PROOF that global warming is nigh and that we are all doomed. The article I am about to refer to says that if all the ice on Antarctica melted today (don't panic, it's not going to happen) then sea levels around the world would rise by 70 metres. In general, this message has been spread far and wide and we are being encouraged to panic because if, say, just 10% of the Antarctic ice melted then sea levels would rise by 7 metres ... Taking a very simple and linear view ... Feel free to tell me that such changes would occur exponentially, geometrically or otherwise and I'll happily concur with the proof. Although The Economist says, Even if part of that ice melted, the sea level would rise dramatically.

Moreover, the article says that of all the ice in the world, about 90% of it is on Antarctica.

It was a surprise for me to read that In much of the Antarctica so little snow falls each year that it is technically a desert. Nevertheless, the article also says that lots of snow falls in the East of Antarctica; and this means, they say, that the Eastern ice sheet is thickening at the moment although the Western ice sheet is thinning at the rate of 10cm to 1 metre a year.

 

So in addition to redressing the scare tactics of the global warming mongers who only tell us about the Western Antarctic ice sheet, the article also says So far, it looks as if the ice sheets have advnaced and retreated more than 50 times over the past 5 million years. They know this from the work being done on core samples taken from the ice sheets that allow scientists, literally, to drill back in time for many millennia.

 

My point is this, here in the UK we have had ice ages and now we haven't. In the Antarctic the ice has thickened and thinned: at the moment thickening in the East, thinning in the West. The world may be warming but I really, seriously, ask everyone to learn as much as possible before falling for all of the histrionic hype that we are all climatically doomed.

 

Yes global warming happens: it happens naturally. Yes man is pumping noxious substances into the atmosphere at an alarming rate: it should stop. The Al Gore film you might have seen, whose title I can never remember, has done more damage to the global warming crusade in my opinion than one excess tonne of carbon emissions. Anyone who watches that film and falls for his nonsense is guilty of the sin of having fallen asleep in their maths lessons and statistics lessons when they were around 14 years of age. Yes, in my opinion, Al Gore is using the maths and stats of the 14 year old to strengthen an argument that in my opinion is not as strong as such people would have us believe.

 

In conclusion: stop burning and using fossil fuels as a matter of routine for all our sakes, not just to feed this global warming frenzy. Stop driving around in a car with just one occupant: walk when you can, too. Turn lights off that you don't need. Do you really need an air conditioner in your house or office ... really need? Switch it off when it's not vitally necessary. Do you buy processed and pre packaged food and other items where that packaging serves not functional purpose? Stop buying it. Recycle where you can.

 

I have changed many light bulbs in my house from incandescent to energy saving and now spend just one sixth on them compared to before; and before you say that these new bulbs cost the earth, not at Home Base they don't. I work from home and told one client who wanted me in the office every day that I would continue to do stay at home as much as possible as I was wasting as much as £50 worth of petrol a week to fend off his loneliness: that's around 35 litres of petrol a week I saved. I am a lacto ovo vegetarian and because of that and because I buy loads of fresh fruit and veg, my packaging needs are tiny. When I am alone, I need my rubbish collecting no more than once a month. I recycle my plastic, paper and glass: they don't recycle card board where I live. In addition,once I learned that it could be costing me £1 a week to leave my television on standy by I switch it off at the set every time I go out or go to bed or stop watching it. I also know from carrying out a simple experiment that my laptop uses a lot of electricity when it's in stand by mode

 

Finally, please read State of Fear by Michael Crichton: it's a novel with some very useful and fascinating information on global warming and climate change. Really well worth reading as he takes the same stand point as me: man is a nuisance because he is doing lots of stupid things with the planet. However, he says, just look at the hype carefully please: you will be shocked at what he tells you. Your mind will, however, be better balanced as a results. The story in the novel is enjoyable too so that's an energy effiicient book to boot! You can read my review of this book here http://www.duncanwil.co.uk/cri.html although I have just found out that the graphics linked to the page have suddenly stopped working ... I'll find the cause and cure it!

 

 

Duncan

 

 

 

 

 

How the other 0.0000001% lives

You will not be able to empathise with what you are about to read but it's true!

There is a phrase in English, 'How the other half lives'. I have now invented a new phrase, 'How the other 0.000001% lives: that's an estimate, by the way.

He's 20 years old and his father has set up a credit card and concierge service for him. He did this one day: please have a Rolls Royce taxi outside my house in ten minutes time, the driver must speak xxxxxxx and I want to go to xxx restaurant. I will return home at xx:xx. It happened.

He then decided on this: round the world trip taking seven days. The aeroplane alone cost £30,000 A DAY and it was hired for the lad and his girlfriend. He went to Paris, Rome, Madrid, California, China ...

You can imagine the rest.

The father is a billionaire from a well known for soviet block country.

DW

The Quiz that was Fixed

As promised, here is the story of the quiz that was fixed. Not exactly on the same scale as the recent scandal surrounding premium telephone number scams on ITV but shocking nonetheless.

Spent some time with a South African chap and his wife and the last night we were together in our favourite bar he was approached by one of the waiting staff who invited him to complete the entry card for the evening's quiz. The question was on the ongoing world cup cricket being played out in the West Indies. This is the shocking part, he didn't know the answer but was told that he shouldn't worry as he's won anyway.

What?! A fixed pub quiz?

They helped him with the answer and he pushed his card through the slot of the box holding the other entry.

After a while, one of the other waiting staff said that Wendy, waitress one, was calling his name down at the other end of the room. She came down to our end and presented the "winner" with his prize: a rather large box of packets of instant noodles! Phew!

Corruption in low places! No offence!!

DW

Television today

Radio 4 went to Blackpool and Morecambe this week and as part of the programme they did they talked to someone whose name I missed but he said something profound and maddeningly true.

In the old days, talented people used to appear on television so that ordinary people could be entertained and informed in their homes.

Today the ordinary people are on the television while the talented people are at home.

That sums up the modern obsession with this ridiculous celebrity TV nonsense I am constantly avoiding now.

DW

Orang Utan Nonsense

Who are these ridiculous people they put on the telly?

 

I caught the second half of tonight's programme on BBC 1 on Orang Utans. They are following the work of an Orang Utan sanctuary in Borneo where they find baby OUs and so on and rehabilitate them then release them into the wild.

 

So this goofy woman took a baby OU for a walk through the trees and she was AMAZED when the OU climbed a tree. How did it know what to do?, she asked.

 

Then they came across a fully grown OU that had spent its life in a cage, poor thing. They released it into the wild immediately and then went back for a look see the following day. This woman was ASTONISHED to see the thing up a tree behaving as if it had been living there all of its life.

 

I'm sorry, woman, but these are wild creatures and they just know these things: sheep dogs know how to look after sheep without being told; snakes know how to eat mice without being told and turtles born on a beach with nary a mother nor a midwife anywhere near, know that they need to get into the sea and then do their business.

 

Can they put more intelligent people on these programmes? People who are neither AMAZED nor ASTONISHED when wild animals do what wild animals are meant to do.

 

DW

True story

How about this for a bit of nannyism?

Mr X was shopping at Tesco and when he was asked at the check out whether he wanted the vouchers for schools. He said no but the lady behind him in the queue could have them. That lady declined so the check out operator pointed at someone in another queue and said he could give them to her.

Mr X replied, 'Look at what's in her trolley. I'm not giving the vouchers to anyone who can buy that rubbish.'

I kid you not!!

DW

Vienna

So, I was in Vienna airport yesterday and because I had around five hours to kill I wanted to use their CAT train to get to the city sentre within 16 minutes. The instructions were entirely in German so found it a challenge. A knight in shining armour coming towards me: a member of the local constabulary.

Me:     Sorry, do you speak English?

Plod:   (Head goes down, pace of walking increases) Nein! (Walks off!)

That sorted that then.

I wandered on and found two more machines nearer the station but neither of them worked so I took it as my cue that I shouldn't bother. So I didn't. Pity; but I'll go next time!

DW