the corner office

Losing your job must suck, but would it suck more if you knew before or after Christmas?

GMB national secretary Brian Strutton said: "Every job lost is a personal tragedy and often a family left despairing for their future.

"What sort of Christmas is it going to be for the council workers under notice of redundancy?"

...

A GMB spokesman told the BBC some councils - such as Northamptonshire County Council - had deliberately delayed sending out letters until after Christmas.

The sooner you know the the sooner you don't max out your credit card, blissfully unaware of what's coming. The sooner you know, the sooner you can start looking for a new job or making plans and preparing for the future. How patronising to withhold information like that from someone when it could so materially affect their circumstances?

My word. Belated Christmas wishes, gentle reader. Two days of awesome food, two days of assorted flavours of beer, two days of assorted flavours of desserts and goodies and chocolates. My body is saying enough (and a few other things, besides)... it's lettuce all the way, for a while.

*urp*

Oh yippee:

God is faithful to his promises but often surprises us by how he fulfils them, the Pope is due to say in a BBC broadcast.

Like when a little child prays 'dear God please stop the priest from fiddling with me' and then God gets the pope to quietly transfer the priest to somewhere else and then God sends another priest to fiddle with the child instead.

Or else when a little child prays and says 'God please help me to stop being so hungry' and then God lets the child starve to death and then the child isn't hungry any more.

And yet the world takes this man and his lies seriously.

Homo erectus, Humans, Neanderthals, little Floresians and now Denisovans. Denisovans, "shadowy human group" - they definitely sound the coolest:

An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group known as the Denisovans as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today’s inhabitants of New Guinea.

All the Denisovans have left behind are a broken finger bone and a wisdom tooth in a Siberian cave. But the scientists have succeeded in extracting the entire genome of the Denisovans from these scant remains. An analysis of this ancient DNA, published on Wednesday in Nature, reveals that the genomes of people from New Guinea contain 4.8 percent Denisovan DNA.

(via, with plenty more links)

While the SNOW CHAOS!! continues and ruins Christmases across the country, I should report that my son and I are still enjoying it tremendously (I advisedly leave out other members of the household who are getting a little Tired Of It).

We had a new blast of snow on Friday. Thankfully cleared up by the time I came home, but leaving a nice dusting for effect.

It started snowing lightly on Saturday, so Leo and I ventured out and played in the snow on the lawns out front. We did this because in my books being out while it's snowing is something I never got to do in the first three-plus decades of my life, and now's the time to catch up. Neighbours looking out the windows probably thought we were nuts but at least we had the snow to ourselves (and just as well, doesn't take much for any discussion with most neighbours to descend into What Is This Country Coming To? discussions about the SNOW CHAOS!!).

We had great fun, building snow houses, throwing snow-balls at trees and each other, etc etc. At some point I realised the snow was coming down pretty heavily, looked up at the road and it was covered in a layer of snow, with cars having a tough time getting anywhere. No problem for us, but more of a problem for other members of the household who were still doing their shopping at Morrisons while this was happening. Thankfully everyone Got Home Safely.

More light snow Sunday afternoon, so Leo and I ventured out again, this time out into the countryside (cue benefits of living around the corner from green belt etc etc). It's amazing how many yellow spots you see in the snow. Taught child to avoid yellow spots. Made our way to favourite railway bridge, soaked up the scenery. Tried to wavey-arm show the snow-covered hillsides and woods and farmhouse and explain to my son just what a magical experience this was, he was more taken by some snow on a branch. He's three and a half, what can you do? Walked to station to meet mother who was heading home from London. Mother Not Happy With The Weather.

Needless to say, SNOW CHAOS!! meant that SouthEastern Fail failed again this morning, and this afternoon. Got into work, but not without considerable inconvenience and delay. Certain members of the household not impressed when I grumble about SouthEastern Fail. She has a point; it's snow, it continues to be awesome and it still beats the hell out of a Highveld Winter any day.

The X Factor is like WWF for pop music. Take it as a given that every little tiff between wotserface and wotsis-rubbery-botoxed-face is scripted, that the intrigues and dramas and breakdowns and kerfuffles are a load of BS. A big fat farce in the name of entertainment.

But hey, it very clearly is entertaining to lots of people. Millions and millions of people choose to watch it and nobody's holding a gun to anybody's head. Might not be my cup of tea but so what?

The internet has made it ridiculously easy to discover new kinds of music, to listen to the kind of music you want to hear, to mingle with like-minded people, if that's your fancy. Getting music legally is cheaper and easier than it's ever been and getting it illegally is a helluva lot easier than it was in the old cassette tape days.

So yes. Is Simon Cowell damaging the music industry, or is it sour grapes because he's found a way to be profitable in an industry that's been blind-sided by technology?

If you're feeling somewhat despondent about the cost of the festive season's excesses, then this post might do something for your disposition (one way or the other).

Back in late 80s in Palm Desert, California, bands started lugging generators and their equipment up into the desert and played small concerts to lots of people who probably all look back very fondly upon that time although they probably don't remember much of it. Thus was born what came to be known as desert rock, or slightly interchangeably, stoner rock.

One of the earliest bands in this scene were a crowd called Fatso Jetson. So named for an obvious reason. Awesome if you're into trippy and hazy and loud.

Fast forward a decade and a half and take inspiration. It is indeed the same guitarist, looking a helluva lot healthier. A little less stoner, but would you be expecting to rock out like this at your 20 year high school reunion?

But Colin, you ask, if this isn't just a plot to foist desert rock on unsuspecting friends, is it really about not feeling guilty about reaching for another mince pie this Christmas? Not entirely. For any of my school friends who're reading this - it might have escaped you that around about 20 years ago this week, we got our matric results.

Have a nice day.

Speaking of freedom of speech, I realised today that I can no longer refer to huge 4x4s trying to squeeze between the metal speed barriers across a railway bridge as 'those people in their big-ass cars,' when my son is in the car with me.

Thankfully, as I tried to dig myself out of the hole after the 17th time said phrase was recited, with me saying 'daddy said something naughty there, we shouldn't use that word,' Leo's response was 'no that's not a naughty word dad, it's just a silly word.' So that's alright then.

This was about the best opinion about Wikileaks I read this week.

WikiLeaks is not a freedom-of-speech issue, any more than rifling through your neighbour's bins and publishing his bank statements on the internet is. You might be able to make a case - if your neighbour is laundering drug money, say - for it being in the public interest to publish your neighbour's bank statements. But that case will be nothing to do with freedom of speech.

At least the student riots have given the UK papers something else to get frothed up about instead of the injustice of being denied the right to host the World Cup. It was getting a bit tiring.

An appropriate time for an article which says that South Africa recovered only 10% of what it laid out for the 2010 World Cup. Which should come as no surprise to anyone who'd remembered that the same happened to Greece, and to Japan and Korea, and what is already happening with Olympics 2012, and and and.

Most South Africans got shafted, but FIFA aside, some well-connected South Africans did very nicely out of World Cup 2010. Very nicely indeed. Which is how it always works when people have lots of taxpayers' money to spend.

The UK should consider itself lucky that it dodged the World Cup bullet. People should pity the Russians, not resent them for their 'success.'