Men vs. women

We've had plumbers in installing central heating so I wasn't able to get online yesterday to give my rant about the pay gap between genders in the UK. This is a personal favorite topic of mine as I always argue with my mother about it.

Don't get me wrong, I fully oppose any company that pays anybody less than someone else for doing the exact same job simply because of their gender, race etc.

However despite how this article paints the picture, the hard end of the statistic behind the story says that all the men working full time in the UK earn more than all the women working full time in the UK (The figure quoted was 17%). The study does not say that on average women in the same job as men earn less than them which is where the article has gone with this.

Legislation was brought in during the 1970's making it illegal for any company to pay women less than men for the same job.

All but one company I have worked for (13 to date) has had structured pay scales and has not paid anyone less money simply because of their gender. On one occasion I was earning more money than everyone of the same grade but that was because I had transferred from elsewhere in the country where they paid more because they couldn't attract the workforce (Male or Female).

The reality of this report is that women are paid less on average than men because they tend to do less well paid jobs.

Women (on average) tend to have no-one else to blame but themselves. When I was at University (which probably wasn't as often as it should have been) I always noticed that the percentage of women on courses that lead to well paid or in-demand careers such as engineering, information technology etc. was very low (Less than 5%) whereas those that lead to lower paid or less in-demand careers such as socialogy or psychology were very high (90%+). No-one puts a gun to their head forcing them to do a degree.

There are other matters to consider as well:

Firstly, those currently at the top of the employment tree now would have (mostly) entered the workforce in the 1960's and 1970's before these reforms were made. When they are eventually replaced upon retirement, they will be replaced by younger employees. Many of whom will be women that have worked to the top in the new, more equal environment. Those at the top of the earnings tree have the biggest impact on any average.

Secondly as it stands professional womens football does not exist in the UK. The reality of this is that there is little public support (i.e. crowds) to justify this at the moment. However male footballers playing in the premier league earn average salaries in excess of £1m per year. Assuming that each club had 20 players earning that amount (Chelsea can top up Villa's figures) that would amount to £400 million pounds bumping up the male average.

Finally although I am in favour of women having maternity leave and don't complain (too much) about the pathetic two weeks paternity leave that men get in comparison (after all we don't go through the physical ordeal that they do). Can a women really have cause to complain if her male counterpart has been promoted in the 9-18 months she could have been away from work?

I'm all in favour of equality, but I think we have it already. Any further legislation would just descriminate against future generations of the male workforce. I don't see why I should have to suffer for the actions of my predecessors.

Knocking on heavens door

Naturally there was enormous outrage yesterday when an expert suggested that care homes should be able to opt out of attempting to resuscitate elderly patients.

Many said that this was ageist. I agree, however death happens to be ageist as well.

I doubt there are many occasions of an elderly person moving into a care home and not dying before they are moved out again. Lets be realistic here. Elderly people do not go to a care home to get better, they go there to receive care (as they can no longer care for themselves) until they die.

I think what many people are doing (including Doctors) is confusing medical care with personal care. The human body will always fail at some point. You can increase a persons life by giving them medical treatment but effectively you're just plugging holes in a dam that's about to burst.

In England an elderly person gets free medical care but unless they have no money whatsoever they have to pay for their personal care. Am I the only person that thinks this is the wrong way round?
I'm all for making sure that elderly people are cared for and kept warm etc. but I don't see the point of wasting medical care on someone that has reached the 'seventh stage' already (As You Like It - William Shakespeare).

To give you a very personal example, my grandmother had a lump on her breast which the doctors opted to remove when she was 83. She had mild dementia but the doctors chose to proceed with the operation regardless.
The general anesthetic caused further damage to her already fragile mind and she was no longer capable to look after herself. She had to go into a nursing home and died within two years of the operation. I firmly believe that if she hadn't have had the operation, the dementia wouldn't have kicked in as strongly as it did and she would probably still be alive today. She would admittedly be dying from breast cancer but at least she would still know who she was and who her family were when they came to visit (well most of the time anyway).
The doctors only saw it from the perspective of 'we are doctors, we must cure cancer' they didn't actually think about what was best for the patient or their family.

This is all part of the same problem relating to assisted suicide. If a person knows they are terminally ill and it is a question of when rather than how, shouldn't they have the option of ending it before the illness distorts who they are?

Talking from personal experience there are few things more heart wrenching than seeing someone you love fail to register who you are, or becoming a mere shadow of who they once were.

I certainly don't want to go on living when I'm not 'me' anymore. Of course by that point I won't be able to make the choice.

Flowers vs. Seaman

I can't see this catching on.

What if you're a veggie?

Water Shortages - A Press Statement

There now follows a statement from Thames Water And Treatments (T.W.A.T.) plc. :

"On behalf of the T.W.A.T. directors I would like to confirm press reports that we do indeed have water shortages and that a hosepipe ban is very likely. The water shortage has been a result of a lack of 'The right kind of rain' due to Global Warming. We must stress that in no way was this water shortage down to our glaring incompetence and lack of investment in new drainage systems.
Although the drainage systems may have been damaged by the 'Wrong kind of rain' that caused flooding over the summer of last year. (This flooding was of course due to global warming).
There has been very little rainfall whatsover over the winter months and much of our piping network was put under immense strain by the record snow fall (This was of course due to err... global warming - is that right?).
We apologise blah, blah, blah.
Reduce water consumption blah, blah, blah.
Well it's not like you're paying for it blah, blah, blah. (Ha I just said 'well', geddit?)
Record profits a coincidence blah, blah, blah.
Bonuses for the directors blah, blah, blah."

Mayor Offensive

So Ken Livingstone has been suspended for four weeks for comparing a newspaper reporter to a concentration camp guard. Naturally the focus of this whole debacle has been that the reporter in question is Jewish. So???

Having never actually heard the conversation leading up to Cockney Ken's verbal assault I cannot be certain of any facts. However I can be sure of one thing, when someone annoys me and I want to say something to them I tend to want to make sure it's something offensive. Therefore I wouldn't be inclined to apologise about it because if they hadn't annoyed me in the first place I wouldn't have set out to offend them.

Ken Livingstone didn't set out to offend all the Jews in London, the UK, the world etc. All he set out to do was offend a reporter that had just done something to upset him. The fact that he was Jewish is irrelevant and so naturally that is the focus of the reports. If he had 'Jewish Reporter' written in big letters in a T-Shirt he was wearing then maybe it would be different but I'm going to take a chance on that not being the case.
I'll probably never find out what he had done to upset Ken because (as mentioned above) I haven't heard the whole exchange, just the bit where Ken blows his top. If anyone knows where I can get a download of this, please let me know.

As with the Danish cartoon incident, and many more examples (Glen Hoddle, 'Jerry Springer : The Opera', 'Brass Eye - Special' etc.) I can't help but notice a pattern. This all seems to come about from the popular belief that if something offends someone then it must be bad.

People will always be offended by something, you cannot measure how offensive something is as it is down to personal interpretation. You have a right to be offended as an individual but that doesn't mean that individuals don't have a right to express themselves in case they might offend.

In short, keep on offending newspaper reporters Ken as they're the scum of the earth. You've got my vote, sadly I don't live in London.

Hollow cost

I would like to deny Hollioaks exists.
I would like to say that at no point were any 'actors' taken into dark rooms (known as 'Studios') to perform violent or sexual 'acts' whilst being filmed for other people's sick pleasure.

I am entitled to my opinion. No matter how wrong I may be.

Why is it that David Irving has been jailed for expressing an opinion despite the fact that he has since admitted that he was wrong? We all make opinions based on what we know.

In 1989 I would have denied the Holocaust too (Mainly because I was 10 years old and the only time I had heard the term holocaust was from Lorne Green in 'Battlestar Gallactica' when talking about the Cylon's destruction of the 12 colonies)

People state opinions all the time only to admit they were wrong later (Unless they're politicians - in which case they'll blame someone else for it or deny they ever said it at all)

The whole point of freedom of speech is that you should be free to say almost anything you want. There obviously cannot be total freedom as it can only be to the extent of everyone else's personal freedom. So you shouldn't for example be able to say "Behead all who insult Eamon Holmes" as that's inciting a serious criminal act (murder) to which you would then be an accessory. And it effects other peoples freedom to err... be alive.

Just because someone says something you don't agree with, it doesn't mean they shouldn't be allowed to say it.

This was the same here in this country with the chairman of the BNP. He made some statements about ethnic groups (particularly muslims) living in the UK and he nearly went to prison for saying it. I don't agree with what he said but that still doesn't mean he should be imprisoned for saying it.

The facist movement is a laughing stock in this country but if we continue to create right-winged martyrs like the Austrians just have done, that will change quickly.

Before today I doubt many people would have heard of David Irving. Tomorrow he'll be a household name.

Military Police

I must say I truly love the way that the Prime Minister and Defense Minister managed to wash their hands of the 'brutality' that came to light last week.

What's more brutal, giving a couple of kids a bit of a kicking-in or ordering your armed forces to invade a sovereign country (illegally) ? - wiping out whatever pitiful resistance it can offer.

Allow me to clarify one point about the whole brutality thing:

The Army are just that (an army), they are not the police. Basra is not the same as Birmingham. You can't expect trained soldiers undergoing mortar fire not to respond to an attack. It's what they are trained to do (and tend to do rather well).
Lets put it into perspective, if those kids threw rocks at the Israelis the Israelis would have either:

a) Responded with cannon fire towards the nearest housing estate
b) Called in an air-strike on the nearest housing estate
c) Demolished the nearest housing estate using bulldozers.
d) All of the above.

The army had to respond in some way because they had to show their hands weren't tied. Which of course, they now are courtesy of Blair and co. condemning them so quickly.

Personally I don't have a problem with them bringing back a couple of kids that were throwing rocks and giving them a hiding. It wasn't so long ago that we used to do that in our schools - and it was for a lot less than chucking fire bombs.

If this was something that had happened in the UK then I would of course be outraged but I think it's a bit rich for the government to put the military in a near un-winable situation and then stab them in the back when they do anything 'un-civilised'. Iraq is about as far away from civilisation as you can get at the moment. We're talking about a country that contains morons so hell bent on violence that they'll kill aid workers that have dedicated their working lives to helping them.

I certainly agree with what a lot of the Iraqis are saying in that Britain should leave.
F@ck Iraq!
It's doubtful that we will ever recoup enough revenue from the oil to break even from the billions that this war has already cost us.

Anyone who thought this was about anything other than oil needs their head examined.

It will obviously leave those who do need our help in the sh!t but exactly how many is that?

Elected officials in the area say they want nothing to do with us. Iran seems to be increasing its back-handed support for the region Britain are protecting/occupying and whatever friends we had when we arrived seem to have dwindled.

If we leave there is no doubt many Iraqis will suffer but given the number that were slaughtered during the war/invasion and the countless others that have been killed by roadside bombings, car bombings, shootings etc. since the war/invasion I would say that they're f@cked with or without us.

If we really want to help Iraq then we should be investing more in the mass production of ethanol to replace petrol and vegetable oil production to replace diesel. Combine this with a massive R&D investment into Fuel Cell technology and efficiency increases in all electrical appliances and we would perhaps go from being an energy user to an energy producer.
If the burger state followed suite then the demand for oil would diminish to the point where Iraq would have nothing worth fighting over.

Villa Blues

So Villa have got Man City at home in the Sunday evening FA Cup game.
I think we're going out, mainly because :

a) We're rubbish at home this season

b) We're crap nearly every time we're on the telly (4-0 drubbings of Everton aside)

c) We don't have a good record against City of late

d) You just know Darius Vassell is going to score at least one goal on his return to Villa Park

Don't get me wrong I'm not the pessimistic kind, I just think tomorrows fixture is a bridge too far. We struggled at home to Port Vale and lost our last home game to Newcastle.
I don't know why we're better away from home this season, maybe it's all the takeover speculation causing uncertainty in the crowd?
There was definately a strange atmosphere in the Holte End when I went to see us loose to West Ham last month. It was almost as if everyone expected us to loose, even when we were 1-0 up.

Loony Toons

It seems that another 10 people have died in the war on freedom.

I can appreciate that everyone has a right to be offended by something but I think calling for people to be killed and so forth is just a tad over the top.

I find 'Westlife' offensive, that doesn't mean I want to firebomb the Irish embassy because I saw an Irish MP wearing one of their T-Shirts.

It also seems perfectly obvious that the papers that re-published the cartoons did so to see what all the fuss was about. And they have all come under attack as well.

If a bunch of Christians took offense to a few cartoons about Jesus then:

a) No-one would give a shit
b) Every paper in the world would re-print the cartoons to let everyone see what was causing the offense, public opinion would then judge how offensive the material really was.

I remember the enormous storm in a tea cup about the 'Brass Eye Special'. I wanted to see it for myself and when I finally did, I thought it was a hilarious piece of satire. Blatantly a lot of people didn't get the point it was making about the media blowing things out of proportion and then the media duly did just that.

What's more, the vast majority of those stirring up trouble haven't even seen the cartoons. How can you be offended by something that you haven't even seen?

Every time I see this escalate I keep thinking of Graham Chapman in 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' saying
"Stop that, it's far too silly"

The Arkness

I took Mrs. Mellie to see 'The Darkness' at Plymouth pavilions last night.

They rocked!

We saw them live a couple of years back just before they released their Christmas single 'Christmas Time (Don't let the bells end)'... I still can't believe that didn't get to number 1!

The support for the last concert was appalling to say the least but this time they had a Swedish rock band called 'The Ark'. They were a bit camp to put it mildly but they were the best supporting act I've seen where I hadn't heard any of the songs before... It's a bit different when you already know some of the songs as you get into it more.

I was initially disappointed when they came on because I'd wanted to see 'Juliet & The Licks' (mainly because Juliet Lewis is the lead singer and it's not every day you get to see a movie star), but they'd decided they couldn't be arsed to come all the way down to Plymouth so f@ck em!

The set was a lot more flamboyant than it was two years ago. There were fireworks, flame-throwers and loads more besides. I've never seen fireworks at an indoor concert before, it's always been outdoor gigs in the past.

I have to be honest and say that I hadn't expected to enjoy the show as much as I did. I didn't think the new album was as good as the last but fair do's the new songs are much better played live. The album itself lacks the kick-ass element that 'Permission to Land' is full of... Plus it clashed with cricket nets.

Snobbery at the Beeb

I was watching 'BBC News 24' when I got home from work today and saw a report about how some car mechanics 'outragiously' charged more money per-hour than barristers and doctors...

So?????

They're a skilled labour force just like they are. Just because they (typically) have a lower academic standing than them it doesn't mean they can't earn more money.

Premiership footballers earn considerably more money just for kicking a ball around a field.
TV presenters earn a fortune just for reading an autocue.
Movie actors earn millions just for pretending to be someone else.

Give the mechanics some credit, at least they fix your car.

I can't see what use Fern Cotton would be when your clutch burns out.

Here's a link to the not-so-snobbish report on the website.

Calling Planet Earth

'Ba-ba-ba, ba-ba ba-ba-ba,
Looking at Planet Earth' - (Duran Duran 1979)

Hi there, well I guess this'll be my first post on my new blog.

I had to get one as I have seem to have an opinion on everything these days and it annoys me that too many idiots get their voices heard in the British media (but I don't).

Pete Docherty for example - his music career didn't take off until after he got 'done' for drugs his old band (The Libertines) dumped him not long after (having let him back in to cash in on his fame). His new band (Babyshambles) is a flop, his celebrity-girlfriend dumped him months ago and yet we still have to put up with the irritating little prick being in the news.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure he provides endless stories/amusement for the tabloid press. But do we really have to have him being interviewed on' serious' programs like 'Newsnight' or 'The six o'clock news'?

Pete, your fifteen minutes is up. Now be a good boy and p*ss off!