"Messing about on the water..."

It must be great to have a hobbie like owning a barge and lazily watching yourself drift down a canal as this picture taken on a canal in Birmingham, the UK shows.



I am here again teaching at the University of Birmingham and when the sun dos actually decide to grace us with its presence, it can be really nice to take a stroll down the canals where, during The Industrial Revolution, much of the business of transporting goods took place.

Nowadays, of course, it is just a place to get away and relax, savour the smells of the summer, watch the geese flap noisily, the birds gently sway and swoop for the canal's small fish, and gently and lazily wile away the hours thinking of former times.



Umm....maybe...just maybe...I'm gonna get me one of them barges!!

Hello Mr. Fed Chairman...where's the cash mate?

In an age when so many Americans are feeling the pinch in a recession Ben Bernanke should be flayed alive if he can't account for half a trillion dollars.

Forgetting where you put your car keys is one thing, but being unable to say where such a huge chunk of money has gone seems reckless in the extreme.

As one of Oscar Wilde's characters says in a scene from The Importance of Being Earnest, "To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness."

I only hope he takes care of his own personal finances better than he does the finances of corporate America!

This is the video where the chairman of the Fed, Mr. Bernanke, in an interview entitled "State of the economy and monetary policy" was unable this week to explain where a sizable chunk of US taxpayer's money, half a trillion dollars, had actually gone! Priceless!

Men and kids...when will the madness end?

No doubt, other people have been following with alarm the recent events in the UK where it seems that when a man gets anywhere near a small child he is in some way suspected of being a pedophile.

This reminds me of the Feminist battle cry of the the 1960s that declared often in an underhand way that every man was a potential rapist!

I read in The Observer, the oldest Sunday newspaper in the UK, that some schools have banned parents from attending a Sports Day celebration to watch an egg and spoon race, a time when parents dutifully attend the school to see the prowess of their kids and marvel at how they have matured physically and how well they have integrated with their peers.

Now it seems that some parents were actually banned from attending their kids' sports day because they might possibly be potential pedophiles!!

Has the world gone barking mad? When has the time come when parents cannot visit their own kids in a school where they are probably paying hefty fees? One school in Birmingham called King Edward IV (not a million miles from where I am currently teaching, University of Birmingham) has actually introduced a fingerprinting system so that the kids can get their lunch? Eh? What is going on?

As the writer of the article, Henry Porter states, "Much will be lost, but that is to be expected given the mood of fear and suspicion that has taken root in our schools over the last decade and is doing so much damage to relations between adults and children, and to the children themselves, who are growing up in a surveillance society."

What are we telling our kids about men in general? The underlying subliminal message that we are sending to our kids is that men cannot be trusted, that they will abuse you and that that little of any positive value can come from male association.

This is extremely sad as I read another report recently (possibly in the same newspaper) that kids are growing up cushioned and over protected because parents rarely let them out to play like they would have say, 20 years ago. Where once they enjoyed relatively free rein to explore nooks and crannies with their friends in the safety of thir neighbourhoods, now they are kept indoors for fear of possible abductions or abuse. Where once they had a freedom to discover themselves and develop relationships with others, whether male or female, now they are often overprotected which stunts their growth.

This is primarily because of these underlying fears that men are predators who are waiting in the bushes of every park, or the alleys of every street waiting to stalk their teenage victims.

The loss is clearly that young children will grow up believing in all this guff and will be robbed of the normal healthy connections with male figures in their lives, relationships that pass on guidance and mutual respect have possibly gone down the drain.

My question is, when will thus madness end?