Author: bobmcgee

Relevance restoration service …

Newly retired?

Do you suffer from relevance deprivation syndrome?

We have the answer.

Your inbox can be stuffed to overflowing every day. Our service will make you feel even better than you did whilst working.

Fully fifty percent of the emails will be marked urgent. You can be absolutely certain for the first time in your life that ALL of them will be of no significance whatsoever. Just imagine the pleasure it will give you to select the lot and hit delete.

Realism is our watch word. Even though most of the emails are randomly generated our expert staff vet everyone to make sure that none accidentally make sense. Additional emails are produced by our staff of specially selected primary school children so that the quality is no different from that which you were used to. Fully forty percent are presented in compressed format so that U CN NJOY LKE B4 LOL. U’LL ROTFL. And we guarantee that NONE are spell checked.

Emails will arrive day and night so you can leave your computer on and sleep fitfully to the sounds of reassuring relevance as the mail hits your inbox again and again.

Nominate your holidays and we will redouble our effort. For four weeks a year we can bombard you with carefully crafted inane questions and totally irrelevant information, in addition you will receive advertising material for any product you care to nominate as having no interest to you whatever. Take the deluxe package and you will receive daily phone calls early morning and during evening meal times. Faxes can be delivered to your breakfast table at participating hotels around the world.

This is even better than working. Your replies can be replete with foul language, racism, pornographic photos and links to adults only sites. Let yourself go.

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Congratulations, Gayle*, on your very distinguished career. You will be greatly missed. Do enjoy your retirement.

* name changed to protect her identity.

Speaking freely …

Freedom of speech has been in the news again this week as the Government gets ready to do something about the odious section 18c.

A couple of excellent quotes …

First, any commitment to free speech is a commitment to allowing people to say and write things you may not like, that you may detest, that you may disagree with and find offensive. If the words spoken are words we all agree with and find congenial, then there is no need for any commitment to free speech… Professor James Allan.

and

The Nazis did not flourish because they had too much free speech. They flourished because their critics had none. Andrew Bolt.

Nelson Mandela …

Nelson Mandela is dead.

Born July 18, 1918, died December 5, 2013.

For most of his life he was a Marxist with no objection to violence as a means to an end.

But when the time came he recognised the greater value of forgiveness and reconciliation.

And in doing so, made himself the greater man.

A denier, again …

On February 15th an asteroid weighing about 10,000 tonnes entered Earth’s atmosphere at about 67,000 km/hr. On impact with the air it exploded into thousands of pieces 23 km above Russia’s Ural Mountains.

 The city of Chelyabinsk and neighboring communities bore the brunt of the shock wave which shattered thousands of windows and flattened the roof of a zinc factory. Flying glass injured some 1,500 people.

What’s believed to be the largest piece punched a 7 metre hole in the ice covering Lake Chebarkul 78 km west of Chelyabinsk.

Andrei Breivichko founder of the Church of the Cheylabinsk Meteorite believes that this particular chunk brings a message from God containing legal and moral guidelines in the form of “scriptures” that would elevate humankind to a new level of consciousness. Only the faithful, of course, could interpret such a message.
Nonsense, of course … if God wanted to send us a message it’s obvious he’d write it in English.

Falling behind in maths …

I went to school in the post war years in London’s east end. My final primary school class had 44 students. 40 of them passed the Eleven+ examination.

My secondary school was woefully equipped, staff student ratios were better than 1:44 but nothing like today’s ratios. Our gym was two classrooms with the dividing wall knocked out. Somehow a great majority of students went on to obtain degrees and somehow the school seemed able to generate basketball players that went on to represent England at junior and senior levels.

Those schools succeeded because of the quality of the teachers and the focus of the curriculum.

Here is an excerpt from the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority website (ACARA) …

The Australian Curriculum: Mathematics values Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures. It provides opportunities for students to appreciate that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander societies have sophisticated applications of mathematical concepts.Students will explore connections between representations of number and pattern and how they relate to aspects of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. They will investigate time, place, relationships and measurement concepts in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander contexts.

The maths class would be a good place to concentrate on maths, leave the social engineering to whichever syllabus has replaced religious instruction.