A Growlery?

 General  No Responses »
Oct 122013
 

Sometimes people get amused when they see my blog’s tag line (“Grumbles from the Growlery”), because they get the word “growlery” confused with the word “growler”. Just to show this isn’t that sort of blog, I’m going to define it.

It’s a room for growling in; nothing more and nothing less. See “Bleak House” by Charles Dickins which has: “This, you must know, is the growlery. When I am out of humour, I come and growl here.”.

Other definitions come from :-

  1. The Collins dictionary: “a place to retreat to, alone, when ill-humoured”.
  2. The Phrontistery list of unusual words (you have to scroll down): “a retreat for times of ill humour”.

And you can probably find many other definitions yourself.

The Growlery

The Growlery

 

Autonomous Vehicles – Who Needs A Driver?

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Oct 122013
 

If we are getting to the stage that autonomous vehicles can drive themselves – probably safer than most human drivers – do we need to think about whether a human driver is necessary at all? Although there are people who enjoy driving, not everyone does and even those who do may not enjoy it all the time.

Why bother with a driving license if you can get a robot driver to do all your driving for you?

Who Decides What Public Inquiries Should Take Place?

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Sep 292013
 

Who decides whether or not to hold a public inquiry? The government of course, and they usually make their decision on the cost of a public inquiry.

But it is rather convenient when a public inquiry delves into embarrassing subjects such as :-

Never mind the fact there has been no public inquiry into political corruption after the MPs expenses scandal. Which all goes to show that we cannot trust the government to investigate themselves. Or the police: Look at how hard people have had to work at getting at the truth behind the Hillsborough disaster.

Or in other words, we cannot trust the government to determine whether public inquiries should be held, nor the scope of those inquires. Whilst the government usually does reasonable work in setting up public inquiries, and the reason for refusing to establish public inquiries is down to cost, it is not unreasonable to plan for the worst case scenario where a future government may refuse to establish an inquiry to conceal their own bad deeds.

As such the decision of what public inquiries should proceed should be in hands of a third party. An independent third party with no past or present politicians, senior policepersons, etc. Essentially a panel of the powerless.

Shouting At The Fashion Police

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Sep 252013
 

Tonight I caught a bit of a TV programme about the fashion choices of a celebrity (Kate Winslet); not my normal kind of TV which is why I very quickly turned over to something more interesting (to me) like the test card!

But before I did, I was treated to some self-important fashion gurus flaming some of the fashion choices of a younger version of the celebrity in question. In particular a 20-year old celebrity.

My initial reaction was: Of course a 20-year old celebrity makes some fashion mistakes. At that age we all make stupid choices; in fact without those stupid choices we don’t learn what is sensible and what is not.

But then I thought: Actually they weren’t mistakes at all. Young people should be experimenting, and sometimes experiments don’t work out. But they are not mistakes.

If we discourage young people from experimenting – especially with something as harmless as fashion experiments – we risk ruining what makes young people young. Not their age, but their sense of adventure and willingness to experiment.

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