VinnieK

I agree pretty much with Declan with regards to the quality of Rushdie's work. Rushdie's prominence as a writer owes everything to the content of his work and little to his style or qualities as a writer, in which he's pretty mediocre - burying his themes beneath turgid prose and working in established genres such as magical realism rather than doing anything interesting or important with literary forms themselves. As such it's hard to make the case that he deserves a knighthood for services to literature. However, the honours system has always been politically influenced, from rewarding civil servants for little more than doing their jobs to trying to associate the establishment on popular culture (such as the Beatles MBE's), and within this context you can see the reasoning behind awarding Rushdie a Knighthood: He's the right age and the most well known and, with the possible exception of Amis, the most establishment of the baby boomer authors. Furthermore, his knighthood is a cheap and efficient way for the Government to state that they will not be cowed by extreme and violent opinion. Of course violent opposition to his knighthood should be condemned outright, but that does not then mean that his award is justified.

I'm not sure. I think by the time Sauron made an appearance I must have already have hurled my copy of Lord of the Rings across the room, wishing that I had an open fire for it to land on. The film was alright though, or at least the bit where Sean Bean got filled with arrows was - take that, housewife's choice! The rest seemed to be some nonsense about monsters wondering where they'd lost their jewellery, which nicely leads us back to subject of The Outback/Tardis.

Perhaps, I'm not really sure I'm qualified to even begin to imagine what a dwarf orc would look like. In any case, all I can think of at present is golem attempting to walk over hot coals.

Glass houses, man. Glass houses.

I'm reminded of the time an acquaintence of mine cast a derisory gaze over the Outback's clientelle and asked why he appeared to be in a scene from Lord of the Rings. Nice to see the nominal australian motif still has room to accomodate the traditional golem theme that's been running since the Tardis days.

I believe it's a popular mod of The Tardis, same buggy game engine and shakey graphics but ok if you can suspend your disbelief long enough for the alcohol to take over. make sure you've got plenty of protection when you're browsing in there. Otherwise you might catch a virus!!!... Browsing and virus protection in a game? Is this some fabled Internet Simulator, bringing all the thrills and spills of the internet for people with a computer but no modem? But yes, with regards to the Outback, the symptoms are frighteningly similar to that of Narcolepsy. Nothing has as of yet been found to protect against them, not even the pinball machine.

I believe it's a popular mod of The Tardis, same buggy game engine and shakey graphics but ok if you can suspend your disbelief long enough for the alcohol to take over.

I think we can all agree that the New Statesman is terrifying, being a cross between your average high minded student newspaper with the Beano, but the more pressing question is what's to be done about it?

Smoking dimps out of the ashtray, listening to Simple Minds and Billy Idol. It this isn't a cry for help, I don't know what is.

I haven't read the article itself, but this seems to make no sense. To say that the small team of experts fund the treatments is misleading - they merely decide how existing resources should be redistributed. For this scheme to work, funding would have to be taken from the Primary Health Care trusts and given to this centralised organization. This rehuffling does nothing to address scarcity of resources, and indeed could make the current situation worse by establishing another costly layer of bureaucracy to process and document claims and assessments. Furthermore, it does nothing to address the ethical issues involved in bypassing the existing method of testing and licensing medicines, possibly diverting resources from the provision of existing licensed medicines to those who can benefit from them. Ultimately, the question of resource allocation and the organisation of health care is much larger than the Herceptin issue, or that of providing any given emerging medicine. Indeed, these are merely a few symptoms, examples, and special cases of a far more general problem involving funding and the question of provision. As such, any proposed method of dealing with such a narrow strand of the problem can't be taken to be anything more than a temporary 'patch' designed to appease popular demand more than address the fundamental questions and problems that need to be dealt with. Secondly, although I'm a great fan of learning from debates and examples elsewhere in the world, I'm not sure that this is a case where such a method is truly applicable. After all, don't we already have the kind of largely centralised health care service that the article suggests is a solution to this particular problem?

Is a song about marching across the Rhine likely to have been popular in Germany? Depends on which direction they were headed in;)

I didn't know that anyone on here even knew what I looked like... unless this is all part of some elaborate sting operation, of course.

No one's mentioned Flickr yet. Is it rubbish? Or haunted? I used photobucket for a while, but I hated the layout, Flickr makes me feel like I'm young, and maybe even a little hip. Not that this is an empty attempt to advertise my flickr account or anything. link ahoy! Ok. It was exactly that.

Along with spending a significant amount of the school's budget on building a concrete pediment or something over the main enterance, and the bizarre charade that was the annual prize giving ceremony at the Villa Marina, year nine camp was, I believe, indeed yet another part of Masterton's misguided attempt at fooling himself into thinking he was running a fine old grammar school instead of the run down comprehensive Ballakermeen actually was. He was a terrible head teacher with an arrogance and pompous air that made his actually woeful abilities seem all the more diminutive by comparison.

I thought penfold was Mr Watson (history). Well meaning and a good teacher, but would always panic when things got out of hand and would threaten to get 'The Boss' in, otherwise known as Vaukins, the hirsute tweed beast himself. Glad to hear the rumour about his wife running off with a sailor confirmed. I've had a hankering to track him down and perform a little jig in front of him whilst singing 'A life on the Ocean Wave' ever since I first heard that rumour. Also, thank god someone else has had Shepstone delivering their pizzas to them, for ten years I thought I had just imagined it. The only thing I can remember about Mr Millerick is that he was rubbish, and wasted an entire science lesson making us watch a video showing 'scientific' proof that the biblical flood happened. Science was terrible at ballakermeen: with Millerick using every opportunity he had to try and bring jesus into science, Mr Miller making us play crappy BBC computer games, Mr Oats distracting everyone by rubbing his crotch against every surface available during lessons, and Mr Shepstone devoting every lesson to demonstrating just how zany he could be, it's a wonder than anyone managed to pass their science GCSE's. Does anyone remember the futile gesture of 'building character' that was the near compulsary year nine camp, complete with forced march and dangerous canoeing activities in Port Erin harbour?

Mr Oates? He did that regardless of who he was talking to, and sometimes as he just stood there quietly watching as every one worked.

I managed to get kicked off the 'Craft, Design, and Technology' GCSE course thanks to being caught spending an entire year doing nothing more substantial than sanding the same piece of wood down in every single lesson. As it is, it turned out for the best. Those of us who got kicked off got our own special little room to sit in and relax unsupervised during CDT lessons, and, since I never harboured any dreams of being a mediocre carpenter or an expert in the uses of gigantic simplified circuit boards, the downside of having one less GCSE never made itself felt.

I'd forgotten how much ballakermeen looks like a prison camp, apart from the palm trees.

I was a bit later, about 91' to 96 or so Nice to see I'm not alone in my contempt of all things Jeff. From what I can recall from overheard conversations, not that many of the other teachers were keen on him either. Hopefully on my next visit back to the Island I can find comfort in seeking him out and hurling rocks at his fat swollen face, especially since this voodoo doll I've been using until now is getting a bit tatty. In my time at ballakermeen the best teachers were, in my opinion Mrs Stopps (Music), Mr Withington (History), and Mrs Bell, née Godby (French).

There was a rumour around my time that those grooves were where his wife bopped him on the head with a garden rake Vaukins was, and to my best knowledge probably still is, a swaggaring, vulgar oaf of a man whose self regard is matched in terms of ridiculousness only by his moustache... which more closely resembles a symptom of some terrible mental illness than an aesthetic choice. He's the only teacher with whom I feel comfortable slagging off on here, and possibly also dropping his fat ass with a hunting rifle. Anyone who says "aw, he was alright in the second year of A-level" or "he treated you well if you respected him" will be punished.

I can't think of ballakermeen without remembering seeing P.E. Teacher Robbie Teare running down the corridoor with his arms outstretched, making aeroplane noises. Of course, that's not the only memory I have of the place. I just wanted to say something positive.