Catch Up

Goodness, I cannot believe that it has been 6 weeks since I last made a post…. Tut Tut Tut… Naughty me..

If I’m totally honest it’s because every time I thought about posting my thoughts were diverted to the ever growing mystery surrounding the ‘disappearance’ of Madeleine McCann and that is a subject that I find puzzling to say the least. I didn’t really want to make my feelings on the matter known but the more it goes on the more I think that there is something wrong with the picture.

Kate McCann has not shown one fragment of any emotion. Not a tear, not one. Even when she has made ‘pleas’ for her daughters return. Gerry McCann has remained calm and composed whenever he has made his statements to the press. The only time Gerry’s emotion seemed to appear was when they arrived back in the UK. During his statement, his voice trembled a little, but not where you would have expected. His tremble came at the part of his speech when he says they had nothing to do with the crime, not when talking about his missing child.

They have spent the last 4 months on a world tour, almost rivalling that of our ex beloved leader, Tony Blair. They even got to meet up with the Pope. They have wandered along, past crowds behind barriers, shaking hands and receiving gifts as if they were on a royal visit. They have appeared to be enjoying the spotlight.
Unfortunately, for them, the spotlight has started to burn them and they don’t like it. They may ask the media to give them some privacy but they aren’t going to get it. You can’t unleash a tiger and then ask it to behave. The McCanns stirred up the media into a frenzy but know the suspicion has turned to them, they aren’t having as much fun.

You may think I sound harsh, and maybe I do, but I don’t like them. I don’t know why or what it is about them but there is something about them that doesn’t sit right.
Maybe it’s the fact that they think it is OK to leave 3 toddlers alone in an unlocked apartment in a foreign country while they go off with their friends (who, by the way, have also left their children alone) Something that, as a GP in the UK, Kate McCann has a duty of care to report to the authorities if she suspected it of one of her patients.

I also don’t like the ignorant xenophobia that has been spouted from their family. Some of the family members have said, when things started to point to the parents, that the evidence was either planted or contaminated and that the Portuguese police were all incompetent and were making ludicrous accusations.

It could just be that the evidence actually does point to the McCanns.

To my very untrained eye it looks like a classic case of Munchhausen’s. Hurt your child and revel in the attention.
Maybe I’m wrong. I guess time will tell.

How evil can people be?

I cannot remember the last time, if there ever has been a time, that a story in the news has actually made me cry.
The story of 29 year old Kevin Davies makes me want to weep each time I hear about it. Kevin, who suffered from epilepsy, was held prisoner in a shed for 4 months. He was starved, beaten and burned, he was even forced to make a hostage style video by his captors. One of them kept a diary containing details of the abuse dealt out to him.

He died on September 26th 2006. Yesterday 3 people were convicted of assault and false imprisonment. Charges of murder against them were dropped as it couldn’t be proved that Kevins death wasn’t caused by his epilepsy, although experts said this was highly unlikely.
2 of the guilty were sentenced to 10 years, the other received 9 years. They will probably only serve half their given time.

It saddens me to think that these 3 will enjoy more comfort in their incarceration than they allowed Kevin in his.
I hope they receive the welcome they deserve when they arrive in their cells.

Full Story

Carry on Wilfing

Recently, and scarily increasingly, I have been beginning to worry about the state of my mental health. Not that I was going mad but that I was losing even the tiniest amount of memory span.
I would see a commercial or hear about some product or service on the TV or radio & want to find out more about it. So I would come upstairs to the office & open up my browser. To my dismay, by the time I clicked my mouse on the search bar I had no idea what I was going to do & would start to look through something different.
What was worse was that I didn’t even have to make the journey upstairs. I could be sitting browsing the net or one of favourite sites, see something interesting, open a new browser & it would be gone, leaving me the to wander off course until something triggered the memory of the thing I should have been looking for all along.

The amount of times I have had to walk backwards around the house desperately trying to remember what I was doing is nothing short of terrifying.

Peter, who is older than I am, finds this hilarious & says things like ‘Welcome to my world’. Not a comfort at all.

Relief has been delivered to me in the discovery that this is not the early onset of Alzheimer’s. All this time I have simply been ‘Wilfing‘.

Wilf stands for ‘What am I looking for?’ and for me it is a godsend, or would be if I believed in a god. (Yes I know that ‘god’ is supposed to have a capital g but if as I don’t think it exists, I doubt it matters)

A YouGov survey of over 2400 people found that two thirds of people spend time on the Internet not looking at anything in particular. Just aimlessly milling around the pages. Which, in itself, is no bad thing. I have stumbled upon many interesting things while meandering through cyberspace. Granted there are considerably more things which are just there to distract you from what you should be doing.

The fact that any, or most, of us are ‘guilty’ of wilfing is not in the least surprising. If you understand the way supermarkets carefully place items around the store to distract you, hopefully into buying something you didn’t come in for, then surely you will see that the Internet in being shaped in the same way. There are millions of sites out there all vying for your attention & if they can catch your eye, they can lead you off your chosen path & maybe even make a sale.

You, dear reader, are most likely wilfing as you read this.

The power of porn

It seems the battle for the dominant DVD format (HD DVD vs Blu-Ray) will be decided, not by which company gets their machines out first, nor by consumer demand or even by price, but by the adult entertainment industry.

It appears that Sony has not learn the lessons from it’s own history and is, once again, shooting itself in the foot by not allow porn films to be produced on it’s Blu-Ray format.
This is exactly the same stance they took in the 1980’s which led to the dominance of VHS over Sony’s Betamax system in the video war. This forced the massive porn industry to use VHS to release their product and the same is going to happen to Blu-Ray.

You may not watch, like or even agree with porn but it’s big business with annual sales of between $10 & $14 billion. So for Sony to exclude them from using their format is a huge mistake. If they change their policy they could still be in the running. If not, then Blu-Ray is doomed. As many adult studios are already releasing films on the HD DVD format it could already be too late.