Women told to stop looking for Mr Right

This must be one giant kick in the teeth for feminism. After years of trying to educate (some one say indoctrinate) women, the feminists find that what women "really, really want" is not a managerial job in an office, to be the head of a multi-national, or a small waistline, bigger boobs, a smaller bum. No, what they "really, really want" is... a good, reliable husband.

"Of course, women are loth to admit it in this day and age, but ask any soul-baring 40-year-old single heterosexual woman what she most longs for in life, and she probably won't tell you it's a better career or a smaller waistline or a bigger apartment. Most likely, she'll say that what she really wants is a husband (and, by extension, a child)," she writes."

And if you're a medium rated kind of guy on the handsomeness scale like me, you'll perhaps feel a bit better knowing that some of the really pretty girls you chased at school and in the discos and pubs of your late teens that you are the one that gets the last laugh as they rejected you in favour of a better looking guy. And, according to the statistics, your marriage was quite likely (or still is) to end up in divorce,

"The theme of holding out for true love (whatever that is – look at the divorce rate) permeates our collective mentality," writes Gottlieb, a 40-year-old single mother who now admits she wishes she had "settled" for any of the "perfectly acceptable but uninspiring" men she rejected during her search for the perfect man."

What does this tell us about love? That while it may be fabulous, exhilarating, jaw dropping while it lasts, at the end of the day, it's the practicalities of life that concern us most.

'Worthless qualifications' give false hope to state pupils, says Harrow head

There seems to be a clear and inexplicable disintegration of the UK education system in the last few years. I read this as an expat, an outsider looking at the system that educated me and, I think, from such a safe distance, I look at it objectively. What I've noticed is starting in 2006, all UK students had to start paying for their university studies where hitherto it was free. This is on top of the 1992 law that removed maintenance grants for universities meaning that there was to be an introduction of student loans for this first time. Only recently I read that the government is considering reducing degrees from 3 years to 2 years. An alien from outer space might reasonably consider that the government doesn't want an educated populace for fear it may stop it from doing its own thing. Am I just being a conspiracy theorist again?

The head of Harrow school, Barnaby Lenon, berates the trend for smart kids to be told to take soft subject and get a so so degree while the bright kids in independent schools are told the opposite, "take the toughest subjects, such as sciences and modern languages". Here's what he said,

"Bright children from poor backgrounds are being short-changed by those who lead them to believe that "high grades in soft subjects" and going to "any old university to read any subject" were the route to prosperity, he told a conference of leading private and state school headteachers."

We seem utterly incapable of producing adults that will have a part to play in shaping our society and seem to be farming our children to produce nice reliable, dependable consumers who will keep the economy ticking over while the fat cats in Wall Street and in Whitehall reap the financial benefits society has to offer.

I also saw also Sir Ken Robinson's 20-minute talk at the world TED conference which I thought was outstanding. In it he argues that we are failing our kids by not recognising their talents. He mentions Picasso saying that all children are born artists and it is us who educate them away from their natural creativity and artistry. We do this by creating rigid boundaries for them stigmatising the making of mistakes and telling them that,, when they leave school, they should go for a job that will be safe and not a job they will necessarily be any good at or enjoy. Again, we return to the subject of soft skills.

Isn't it about time that something major was done about educating children using a system that hasn't changed in 150 years, certainly since the advent of the Industrial revolution?

One quarter of US grain crops fed to cars - not people, new figures show

As if we need anything more to tell us the world is out of sync with nature - the earthquake in Haiti, the tsunami, the bush fires in California and Australia, the global flooding. Couldn't this be Mother Nature's way of saying, there's a lack of balance as we are taking too much from the oceans, using too much of the land for agriculture, mining too many of the world's precious fuels and minerals? When is it going to stop? When is enough going to be enough?

I read this with interest namely that "One quarter of US grain crops fed to cars - not people, new figures show". Now if you didn't think so before you have to admit tat when you read this something goes through your mind? What about all the starving people who live on a dollar a day in sub Saharan Africa, in places so poor like Bangladesh and many other places. Wouldn't it make more sense to ship that food out to those people who really need it? And where does the seeds from the crops go? To make bio fuel for all those huge Hummers,SUVs and gas guzzlers that the Americans have been using for years which at the same time as they cost so much to produce one litre of gas, pollute the air with their spent exhaust gases.

"The 2009 figures from the US Department of Agriculture shows ethanol production rising to record levels driven by farm subsidies and laws which require vehicles to use increasing amounts of biofuels.

"The grain grown to produce fuel in the US [in 2009] was enough to feed 330 million people for one year at average world consumption levels," said Lester Brown, the director of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington thinktank ithat conducted the analysis."

That's so scary; so many people who could have been fed with this food instead being consumed in such a wasteful way.

English lessons for 'Polish' dog? Get away!

We've all heard of the proverbial "shaggy dog story", but this dog went to a kennel and couldn't understand the staff-member's commands till they realised his original owners were Polish! So they had to speak to him in Polish! Where do they get these stories? (click on the link above in the title to read the article.)

Clearly perplexed the staff thought he was just deaf. But then they looked into his background and realised he had a Polish owner before, so they brushed up on Polish commands. Apparently, now four months on, they say Cent is now bilingual and ready for a new home. Um..maybe he'll become a TEFL teacher? Or maybe that should be a TPFL = Teaching Polish as a Foreign Language!

"When he came in he wasn't responding to the basic commands," said care assistant Karen Heath.

Here are the words they had to learn and their Polish equivalents:

Sit - siad
Come here - do mnie
Heel - noga
Stay - zostan
Fetch - aport

Maybe the dog is having the last though withthese handlers having to get to grips with the odd pronunciation,

"Obviously, maybe he's having a chuckle because were pronouncing it a bit wrong... but we've got to work alongside that to teach him the English versions of them as well."

You couldn't make this stuff up could you?

Human civilisation 'will collapse' unless greed culture is stopped, report warns

These reports just keep coming and coming and don't appear that they will stop anytime soon.

"Human civilisation would “collapse” and efforts to tackle global warming will fail unless the world curbs its culture of greed and excessive consumerism, a report has warned."

This is unlikely to happen since all the governments are on record as saying that economies need to grow and consumers need to spend if we are to recover from the global recession. How can we solve the problem of global warming if we don't cut consumption? This is yet more proof that we are out of kilter with the world we live when we need to continue developing a problem (consuming too much that Mother Nature has to offer).

"The world's population is burning through the planet's resources at such a reckless rate – about 28 per cent more last year - it will eventually cause environmental havoc, said the Worldwatch Institute, a US think-tank."

Wow!! That's quite an increase in only one year? So we have followed our lovely caring politicians and consumed like those lovely old Beatniks with their mantra - "work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume".

Will The last one left alive on the planet, please switch off the light. Thanks.