Dough Diary

Why go to war for oil and then make it so expensive that your citizen's can't afford it? Today, hauliers from across the country delivered a coffin to Downing Street, warning the Government that it is killing the industry.
A haulage boss told the media that his monthly fuel costs had gone up by £30,000 a month since November.
This is not good.
It's time for the Govt to act. I don't know how, perhaps slash the taxes on fuel and find the money somewhere else?
And let's not tax the poor this time please.
What annoys me even more is the mis-judged opinion that this is great for the environment and will reduce our CO2 emmissions.
Utter rubbish - no one is driving less (yet), it's just costing them a lot more money and hurting the leisure and retail industries, as people cut back on fun and luxury items.
British industry is being made less competitive and at the end of the day its going to hurt everyone.

Nuts and Eggs

Few things have been annoying me more than nuts and eggs lately. The nuts are the NUT, who in my view are nuts. Never has a union acronym been more apt as these self rightious teachers have voted to strike in a bid for a 10% pay-rise. I can't be bothered to look up the exact figures but I believe nurses recently got about 2.9% and the cops got 2.7% staggering up to about 3.2 or something like that.
Cops and nurses work 40-50 hr weeks + with five weeks of holiday. Teachers get 12 weeks of holiday and work nice regular hours.
Now I'm not criticising teachers' work as I sure as hell wouldn't fancy it, but voting for a pay-rise more than triple that of everyone else just loses you all credibility. It is either incredibly naive or they're hoping a strike threat for 10% will get them 3-4%. A gutsy piece of negotiating considering the cops and nurses have both marched on Westminster and got not a penny more.
And at the end of the day, as crap as it is to work for a so called public service, the pay and conditions tend to be a lot better than they are for the majority of private sector jobs.
So NUTs, yes everyone believes you when you say teaching is getting harder, but come on, suck it up and get on with it. If the Army, cops and nurses can do it, so can you!

Now to eggs, or to be more specific, embryos. Religious types, specifically Catholics, and other cold hearted types, are calling for a ban to stem cell research. They object to the idea of human and animal cells being mixed. The fact that the hybrid cell will be 99.9% human does nothing to ease their worries that mad scientists are on a mission to create some kind of mutant being.

I would say suspicions of such subterfuge are entirely illogical and completely lacking in compassion for humanity. What are you afraid of? This is not a life - it's a bunch of cells - 99% of which are of human origin. You're happy enough to mix human and animal cells when you eat your roast dinner. I just don't get such irrational thought processes? Why do you want to punish people with painful debilitating diseases just because you don't like the idea of something you don't really understand? It staggers me that time after time, so called Christian ideals involve increasing the pain and suffering of others just in case something someone progressive has done for the greater good might offend God, or just isn't right.
And for those of you who aren't religious and are still against it, get over yourselves, why does your instinct that it's wrong come above the health and sanity of critically ill people? I really am yet to hear a reasoned argument against this science and I have a really really big problem with that. When I was kid I didn't like onions. I had no reason not to like onions other than I didn't like the idea of them and that I was a stupid kid. I didn't understand onions because I had no experience of eating them or cooking with them. But then I grew up and now I eat them all the time. Why don't people trust genetic scientists? I think they must have watched too many monster movies. What other reason could there be?

Labels: catholic, embryo, NUT, religion, stem cell, teachers

I recommend this column by my colleague Barry Gibson. He distills the recent comments by bushy brows Williams down in a very clear yet compelling way. No doubt he'll be writing for the Guardian before too long.

Brilliant trip

If you can find a way of viewing 'Unchained America' that was on More4 last week, I would suggest you do? Maybe it's on YouTube or Channel4OD?

The 2 hr show simply entailed comedian Dave Gorman driving from coast to coast in America, trying to not spend any money at major chains, or giving any money to 'the man' as he called it. I thought it was brilliant and it made me want to do it immediately.

I was very jealous of his complete freedom to just go wherever he wanted and in a bid to check out a multitude of towns called Independence, he ends up driving over 6,000 miles to go coast to coast, instead of the standard 3,000.

Not only is it a brilliant idea but it revealed the soft underbelly of the USA that most people don't know about. He actually drives through a place I used to live near in Colorado and a lot of his journey passes through places I remember fondly.

This is a trip I will do in the next 5 years - who's in?

More ill thought out opinions

Blogs are a great place for dumping those debates you have with yourself, so here's another thing that's been bothering me of late...accents and their affect on different people. I bet there's been a study on it but here are my completely un-researched raw thoughts.

For such a small country the UK has a lot of accents with quite acute differences. We've obviously got Northerners and Southerners, Scots, Welsh, Northern Irish. But there's so many more; Scousers, Brummies, Geordies, Kent/Essex, South West and Mancs. And then to my finely tuned ears there's South Yorkshire, Asian Yorkshire and East Yorkshire.

Advertisers love accents - they think it makes their ads more memorable and hence will increase the likelihood of sales. And this is where the thinking behind this post was born. Tesco use Bob Hoskins as the voice-over for the their patronising "every little helps" campaign. Old Bob has the broadest saaaaf Landan accent you're likely to hear. Now it's hard to argue with anything Tesco do, as they are nothing but successful, but I have to say old Bob's command of the English language annoys me somewhat.

This got me thinking what other accents annoy me and might cause me to involuntarily discriminate against that person? And is it involuntary? I mean racism against people because of their skin colour is a conscious decision so are we all guilty of aural discrimination? I would say so as a person can't choose how they speak much more than they can how they look. Once a kid hits their early teens I would imagine their accent is pretty much set so it's not like we can expect people to change them considerably.

But on the flip side is it unreasonable for me to be irritated by certain accents? And what is it about those accents that annoys me? Is it the preconceptions I have about that person due to how they sound or is it purely their aural tones - or a bit of both? Maybe I'll google it and see if there are any answers?

I started to write down a list of regional accents and what their effect on me was, but it just became a list of stereotypes. Stereotypes are generally seen as quite negative so I've refrained from listing those out, but on a serious level, I do believe there is something in my brain (and everyone's brain) that influences how I form an opinion based on how something sounds. Maybe it's the same part of the brain that controls what music we like?

And another thing, why does class affect your accent? People living in the same city but with different levels of wealth can have vastly different accents. And people living at the same level of wealth and socio-economic status who live a piffling twenty miles away can pronounce or enunciate certain words so differently it can be baffling.

It's fascinating...!

Review of the year

It's over already - I cannae believe it! 2007 was but a blur to me. Bar a shaky patch in late June/ early July it was all good. To coin a cliche, it's been a rollercoaster, but no regrets.

2008 sees the 5th anniversary of Dough Diary - the catalyst behind my career 180. Whilst there are a few things I'd like to acquire this year, my main hope for 2008 is that it whizzes by at 100mph and no stagnation occurs.

In one year I've gone from working with numbers to words. From making about one phone call a week to more than 40 a day in some cases. From earning a shed load of cash to earning peanuts. But none of those things matter really...what has changed most significantly is that I'm no longer bored at work.

How is this allowed?

A few years ago in an optimistic moment I decided to reply to a Reader's Digest mailshot. I guess the lure of winning something for nothing gets even the most cynical of us sometimes.

For those of you who have never been a "valued member" let me enlighten you briefly, to what happens. They send you a lengthy letter telling you that you have a chance of winning £10k if you just return their letter to subscribe to their montly mag and trial a book or two. And then several more lengthy letters with Art Attack like challenges involving ripping and sticking.

One moment of weakness, that's all it was, and now it has snowballed into an uncontrollable deluge of documentation. Over the last year to 18 months they must have sent me at least 2 letters a month, asking me to subscribe to stuff, trial books, detach slips, scratch and sniff stuff, stick stickers and check numbers.

Over time I became wise to their little marketing tricks, becoming an expert in what to stick where to minimise the next deluge. I played along for a while caught up in the momentum of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Foolish perhaps but it wasn't costing me anything other than a few stamps. In fact - working out how to return their complex documents without subscribing to anything was quite an achievement and gave me a little buzz that I had worked out how to beat the system (sad - yes).

But now it's getting to the point where even though I haven't paid Reader's Digest a single penny in over a year, I'm getting letters saying I'm a matter of minutes away from becoming rich.

Of course, I'm not, but the latest letter is so unbelievable I must quote it to all my readers - all 7 of you.

Dear Mr **********

Please take a deep breath before you read this letter, because great news like this doesn't come along every day.
The reason I'm writing to you is because you could soon be confirmed as the sole winner of our £10,00.00 immediate payout draw (notice their deliberately misplaced comma). Further this prize will be awarded in mid-February. Therefore the action you take now could easily translate into a big cash windfall for your household.

Many large cash prize winners have told us that suddenly coming into so much money often brings with it a few days, sometimes weeks of utter exhiliration. In fact this could end up being among the most exciting and memorable moments of your life.

It goes on to tell me to think about what it would feel like to win the £10,000.00 immediate pay out draw. Now we seem to have gained a zero. Is it £1k or £10k - who knows? I am also now the lucky owner of the in no way hope building "frequently asked questions for RD prize winners" booklet. Which includes such gems as 'Are prizes taxed?' and 'Will I be contacted by the media?'

How is this allowed!!!? Can I write to someone and tell them they will win £1,0.000000000 if they send me a completed 1986 Mexico World Cup Panini sticker album? That's essentially what RD are doing to me.