One of the small pleasures in my life – besides eating apple pie with ice cream and fox hunting – is to look at the google analytics report for my blog and see which search queries have lead people to my site. To learn more about my readership, obviously. Not to laugh at them. That [...]
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A disturbing phenomenon seems to be rearing its ugly head in The Netherlands. After decades of healthy figures, sometimes even double-digit growth, the last year has shown shrinking numbers. And our government is doing nothing to reverse the trend. In fact, they’re even closing prisons to accomodate this dramatic fall in the number of prisoners.
Sure, [...]
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Psychologist Bruce Hood has written an article in the Guardian about superstition. Apparently 50 per cent of Britons will not walk under ladders. Given that this is an article about superstition, I’m assuming this is not because they are simply fat bastards who refuse to walk flat out.
Mr Hood begins by describing how city councils [...]
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Sky reports on the rising trend of social ‘petworking’. As the term suggests, this is social networking, for pets. The article offers Sasha as an exmple. Sasha’s updates say: I am the laid back one of the family. I love sunning myself on the swing in the back garden. Now this may seem like a [...]
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Sarah Brown – wife of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown – is apparently quite impressed with Paris Hilton. Brown met Hilton at the African First Ladies Health Summit. That the current economic climate and mishandling of the NHS mean that Britain now qualifies for health aid from Africa makes perfect sense, but which African dictator [...]
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In Slough, Mahboob Khan has been jailed for 4.5 years for his role in a scam that prosecutors described as part of an epidemic threatening to destroy British democracy. No, hold your horses, this isn’t the great news that people are finally being jailed for being too stupid to vote, Mr Khan has [...]
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Dick Swaab is a neurobiologist who writes a column for NRC. His latest column is on the rational basis of religous rules.
The first religous rule he mentions is the ban on eating pork: The Jewish and Islamic ban on eating pork was probably very sensible in an age before meat inspection. Sure, just as sensible [...]
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The Fox television network has announced a new reality show called Someone’s gotta go, in which employees get to choose which one of them gets fired. Like any reality show, there will doubtless be spin-offs. To help out the reality show producers, I’ll make some suggestions:
Someone gets to live
In which patients with a life-threatening – [...]
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In the Dutch public broadcasting system, any association with enough paying members can claim time to broadcast programs. Two new associations have found enough members and both will make programs for the so-called ’silent majority’.
The silent majority – being silent – is not a well-known group and is hopelessly under-represented in the current public media. [...]
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The new qualifications watchdog for England has some complaints about the level of GCSE science and physics examinations. For those of you fortunate enough not to have been permanently scarred by Britain’s characteristically unfathomable education system (and the fact that you can actually understand these posts with their parentheses and long words suggest that you [...]
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