Rob, Rambling - A lot of things interest me...

Headline of the day, courtesy of (where else) the Daily Mail.

Oh, and it gets better:

They also said the head trainer at the Orlando theme park where the incident took place a week ago should suffer a similar fate.

I don’t know whether it’s because this town is near where I grew up, or because my dad worked at the airbase mentioned for many years, or the sheer quality of the writing, but this article brought a lump to my throat.

For all that I may be completely against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have a huge amount of respect for the armed forces themselves, and the men and women who serve in them. This tale of the repatriation of bodies is a real tear-jerker, and drives home the point that each dead soldier is an individual.

Non-brits might not be aware of the concept of Page 3 girls in our newspapers. In our red-tops, the bottom end of the newspaper market commonly called tabloids, there is a tradition of having a topless girl on page 3, so it’s the first thing(s) you see when you open it up. The Sun is the most famous for doing this, but the Daily Star does it too.

I think this whole tradition started in the 70s, and it’s made a few celebrities out of the readers’ favourites over the years. It’s a bit of an anachronism nowadays, but who doesn’t want to start the day with a nice pair of boobs in front of them?!

What has started appearing recently, though, is the little ‘News In Briefs’ paragraph attached to the page 3 photo. In this micro-column, the girl of the day gives her opinion on one of the bigger stories of the day.

Well, it’s supposedly her opinion…

It’s pretty obvious that it’s just a hastily written blurb by some journalist on The Sun, and handily it always reflects the Sun’s latest editorial position. Usually they contain some godawful pun too.

I’ve always been amused by them, and thankfully some random soul is creating an archive of them all online. It’s funny to see them all in one place and revel in their awfulness.

AMII, 23, from Birmingham

AMII hopes ranting President Ahmadinedjad’s boast that Iran is a nuclear power will blow up in his face. She said: “It’s one thing to brag to an adoring mob about having produced your first weapons-grade enriched uranium. But to have achieved perfect composition of uranium-235 through isotope separation is quite a different kettle of nuclear fish in my book. Sanctions will show he’s not a big beast – just an atomic kitten.”

Epic.

File under: epic, epic irony.

Although this figure of £6.6 million doesn’t take into account the fact that this new body is replacing the existing Commons Fees Office, which must require funding itself every year. So it’s not quite as sky-high a cost as it might seem at first.

And to be honest, the problem with the MPs’ expenses scandal was never the money, which in the grand scheme of things amounted to a relative pittance. The public was outraged because of the sheer audacity of the system as a whole, and the lack of contrition from MPs once they were caught.

We didn’t particularly care that the abuses were “only” in the tens of thousands of pounds range; it was the fact that these people were elected by us, and are supposedly our moral guardians, yet took us for a ride. They should be as clean as a whistle, but they’ve been shown to be horribly dirty.

Saying “it was within the rules” isn’t an excuse either. The rules were wrong, and they were allowed to continue being wrong because it suited the MPs to maintain that state of affairs as they milked the system. It’s not a valid excuse to work within the absolute letter of the law when that law is inherently flawed.

This upcoming election is going to be very interesting, because there’s a lot of people very pissed off with the whole political system, probably more than are apathetic towards it all. We have low election turnouts in this country anyway, but this year could be worse than usual.

My prediction is a lot of smaller parties and independents getting elected, standing on an anti-politics or anti-Westminster manifesto. They’ll represent something a bit different than career politicians, I hope, and will bring something fresh to parliament.

I love NewsArse sometimes. It’s a satirical news website which occasionally comes up with an absolute gem. A British version of the Onion, but usually less subtle.

This line is brilliant: “One paedophile, who wished to remain nameless for fear of losing his role in the House of Lords, told us…”. That’s very clever.

WARNING: the photo I’ve linked directly to is pretty horrific. Don’t click if you’re likely to be upset by the image.

This image, a mass grave of unidentified victims of the Haiti earthquake, really brings home to me the power that nature wields, and how indifferent it is in how it is shown.

Usually, photos of this kind of mass grave, of a pile of bodies, are as a result of deliberate human actions, such as war or genocide. There are reasons for the deaths, no matter how abhorrent those reasons may be. A decision was made by one or more humans to carry through these actions and kill those people/

These deaths, however, were just plain bad luck, for want of a better phrase. Yes, many of the world’s population live in earthquake-prone areas, but our ability to predict earthquakes is almost as non-existent as our power to control them. Mother Nature wields her power apathetically, and this kind of event is the outcome.

It’s very sobering.