Why America loves its guns?

The question is a little misleading. And I really don't want to mix it up with well funded lobby groups like the NRA. My actual question is this what role does the media play-and continue to play in the aftermath of shootings involving multiple victims in the US.

There is a great comment attributed to Morgan Freeman, the gist of which is this. If you put the killer up on a pedestal even give him (to my knowledge female's don't commit that many mass murders) a catchy nickname, you glamourise and even memorialise their crime.

An example, everyone remembers the 'trenchcoat mafia' but try and name one single victim of Columbine, without resorting to Wikipedia. Can you?

24hr news channels have to have news, so when something awful like Sandy Hook or Gabriel Giffords or Century Sixteen happens they flock to the spot and drill down into the life of the the looney that committed the crime, they interview his mother, his babysitter, people who went to school with him (that's him again with the single white guys) and lay out a buffet of his life on the next bulletin and we lap it up, ratings go up, much hand wringing, talking heads, psycho babble and on to the next big bad thing.

We get the media we deserve so someone must be watching this crap but how different would things be if the shooter wasn't named, no details. That is what a lot of European countries do, Mr A, or Mr S, that's all they get they are not glorified. An investigation is carried out and the findings used to make sure that 'this never happens again'

But in the US it happens again and again. Ask yourself, why is that?



I haven't put any references with this article but I will research the male to female ratio in regard to major incidents involving firearms and add it to this post.

Would you hang up on the Queen?

It's been all over the news this week, the prank call by two Australian DJs to King Edward the 7th hospital where the pregnant Duchess of Cambridge was being treated.
The DJs are defending themselves saying that they didn't think they'd get put through, as a result of their stupid, childish prank the nurse who took the phone call took her own life less than a day later.
Some say the nurse was too gullible but would you have reacted
any differently? We are all instilled with a need to be helpful
(read the art of deception by Kevin Mitnick) and would your first
reaction be a) oh my god I'm talking to the actual queen or
b) why isn't she using William's mobile number this must be a hoax.
This was social engineering and a woman is dead because
of it. Public opinion should take these two idiots off the air.
I would've done the same as the nurse.

Why can't we cure the common cold?

First of all, common cold? Are there posh colds? Bear with me, all I've been doing for the past couple of days is reading, pondering sleeping and coughing. Stupid little asides like that keep popping into my overheated brain. Today, thanks to some meds for a 'severe' cold (I wouldn't call it severe but then it wasn't 'common' either)I'm vertical instead of horizontal.

However the question remains, our scientists can put a man into orbit, they can cure certain genetic diseases, what's a pesky little viral infection to science? And a cold is a virus which is why antibiotics won't help because antibiotics treat bacterial infections.

I prefer a natural approach but sometimes you have to wheel out the big guns so when two days of steaming, hot honey lemon and ginger and salt gargles didn't help, I went the drugs route. Of course I went roaming around the internet before writing any of this. I came across several interesting sites, links are below. I also came across the reason (I think) that I caught whatever it was. My smartphone use has gone through the roof.

http://www.redorbit.com/news/health/729866/how_to_heal_a_cough__does_anything_really_work/ http://purehealthguide.com/2012/04/honey-diy-beauty-tips-home-remedies/ http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cold-remedies/ID00036 http://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/cold-guide/chicken_soup_and_recipes_for_cold http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2222538/A-breeding-ground-flu-diarrhoea-eye-infections-Is-smartphone-making-sick.html

Why are we wasting all this natural talent?

In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, he declares that 10,000 hours is the time it takes to perfect your talent. I don’t 100% agree with that because I think we all have something we gravitate towards, we’ve all heard of child prodigies. The one that springs to mind is Ruth Lawrence, who was accepted to Oxford to study maths at 12 years of age. But your experience is more likely to be the star athlete who blew by you at every race or the kids who absorbed languages like a sponge while you were still struggling with your German vocabulary tests.

Another one is much closer to home, my brother. A gifted musician, he won a scholarship to RCM in London. He’s the only one in our family with a degree, a 2.1 but not in music. He went into engineering.

In England the school system isn’t set up to nurture natural talent, you have to choose what you want to study at an age where you shouldn’t be making decisions like that. The saving grace is that if you choose not to pursue higher education, you will still be able to get a job based on experience gained through doing other jobs.

The US is a completely different animal, here the paper is everything, a degree is the goal, saving for a college a family obligation. There are multiple advantages to having an education centric society but here’s the thing.

On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart interviewed two battlefield medics, newly returned from Afghanistan for a school nurse position. The man and woman told how they patched up casualties and got them back on the battlefield, these people saved lives, every damn day. You would think, based on their front line experience that any ER in the country would be honoured to have them. You would be wrong, no BSc, no ER and definitely no school nurse position. They have to retrain for years before they can do a job like that, one they could probably do in their sleep.

A friend’s wife, had her pay cut because she didn’t have the correct qualification, note she’s been doing her job for nearly 10 years, flown lifeflight, taught others, and it’s not like she suddenly got dumber overnight, no paper, less money.

One final example, a friend and colleague who went off to teach for a year, she came back because they told her she’d have to get qualified to take it further, the kids loved her, she was an excellent teacher, but no paper, no inspirational teacher.

I'm sure you can come up with plenty of examples of your own, or come see me in the shop and we'll talk...

Is there such a thing as too many managers?

Corporate America, thinks not. The function of a manager should be to manage a group of workers, to make sure they have the finance and resources and knowhow to get the job done. I know a group of workers who have just suffered their semi-annual cull (12 workers-this time), they are all a talented bunch, on whose shoulders the technical reputation of their company rests. Of course layoffs happen, but how many managers do you think got laid off? Go on, have a guess?

One? Two? perhaps three?

Nope it was zero, zip, zilch.

This is a big, big company with a worldwide reputation, and multiple layers of managers who seem to do nothing but manage thin air. The only thing these people seem to be good at is

a)panicking when deadlines they haven’t told anyone else about are a week away

b)having meetings, sometimes even meetings about meetings

c)collecting pay cheques and bonuses (for apparently managing said thin air)

I am not against all managers, there are some good ones out there, however when your ratio is 7 managers to 1 worker something is clearly wrong.

Is it just me?

Or is social media becoming less of a communication tool and more of a nosy parker? I have been on Facebook for several years now, mainly to keep up with friends in faraway places, we get little snapshots of each others lives and that was fun. Now more and more I'm being told what I should like.

The rot started when FB went public, they need advertising revenue to keep the shareholders happy, I get that. I also understand that FB deems that my friends and I should have similar interests right? Wrong!

We aren't drones, my friends have wildly different opinions to me, and I don't care about that. I'm not going to stop being friends with someone because our political views don't match up or if they like Justin Bieber and I don't, or they love 50 shades of grey (and I don't). Our differences are the things that make us interesting. But I'm getting off topic here.

I have FB on my phone (or should I say had because I just deleted the app) and this morning in my news feed was a post about real estate from someone who is not a friend and which I am encouraged to 'like'. It was actually cathartic to delete the FB app. It still lurks on my computer but that doesn't issue a siren song of clicks beeps and pings. Mobile FB I'm not going to miss you at all.

Political Ads, why believe anything they say?

Let’s get this out of the way upfront, my political views don’t count. American politics is a closed book to me. Not because I want nothing to do with it, but because for a legal alien like me it is an offence to vote or attempt to register to vote in a federal election punishable by deportation.

Non-U.S. citizens, including permanent residents (green card holders), who vote, or register to vote, in a federal election also can be denied naturalization and/or removed (deported) from the United States.

That comes directly from uscis.gov. I checked my facts before writing this post in case anything had changed.

Apparently the people who put political ads together, especially the new breed of attack ads don’t. I’ll give you an example, a democractic candidate was redistricted out of his seat by the republicans (we’re in Utah they bleed red). He is now running against a republican for a senate seat and this is where it gets dirty. In his ad he says he voted against the stimulus and voted to repeal Obamacare. In the attack ad the republicans say he voted for those measures. Someone’s lying, and seeing as it’s on the democrat’s website I’m say it’s not him.

So that’s local politics what about the highest office in the land? Policiticans are slippery creatures, there’s that old joke ‘how can you tell if a politician’s lying?’ the answer being ‘his lips are moving’. Which you could apply to pundits on CNN and Fox News but let’s not go there. And this being Utah if we get onto church and state we’ll be here all day.

Pretty speeches are one thing but in my view actions don’t speak louder than words. Words are powerful, words are also recorded and it’s amazing how often you can get a candidate to argue with themselves because they held the opposing viewpoint when their party was in power. Once a flip-flopper… Name a president who hasn’t made more than one mistake during their terms. It’s not the mistakes it’s how the CIC reacts to them, but we’re getting off topic here.

Political ads, superpac ads, attack ads just use the mute button and go to FactCheck.org you can even ask questions about specific statements made by democrats or republicans.

As I said at the top of this post, my vote doesn’t count, but here’s something to make you think. Cos you’re thinking that back home, where I could vote, I voted labour (democrat) right? Wrong! In England my voting record was 100% conservative (republican) but english republicans are nothing like the ones they breed in the US.

The whole grain elephant in the room?

Were you watching 60 minutes last night? Sugar is bad, sugar is toxic, sugar can give you cancer, okay I’m paraphrasing here but the segment was on after the one about the space program and with a hook like that who wouldn’t put down the chocolate and pay attention. The scientist, Dr Robert Lustig has been researching the sweet stuff and his findings are alarming. I’ve posted the link below.

However there is another staple that you’ve probably had some of this morning or will be eating some of today that needs to be cut back as well. Wheat. Working in a bookstore I get to read the back of plenty of books when I’m shelving them, but one, Wheat Belly by Dr William Davis really caught my attention so much so that I bought it. Davis’s opening remarks about constant exercise and lack of weight loss struck a chord with me. I’m not exactly fat but I have to work out every day to maintain my weight well I did but we’ll get to that in a moment.

The next thing that got my attention was that the wheat we eat isn’t what my parents and grandparents used to eat, the grain was cross-bred with other varieties to make it smaller, more resistant to disease, double yield and stave off famine in developing countries. The only thing they didn’t do to it was test the effect it had on humans.

Then I got to the bit where wheat messes with your brain chemistry and I very nearly put the book down. Oh come on! I thought, this was all going so well and then you have to go all junk science on me. So I put Dr Davis to the test, substituting my normal cereal for one of his recipes and didn’t feel the need to snack, had lunch (again wheat free) and then dinner. I didn’t feel the need to eat anything extra and all the usual temptations were there I just didn’t want them. I’m not completely wheat free because my husband insists on pizza Saturday nights and I don’t want to eliminate wheat completely because accidental ingestion can cause some pretty bad reactions. So Saturday night bad things get eaten but for the rest of the week I have my willpower and that’s not all.

Eight weeks in and I’m down one dress size, I exercise twice a week instead of every day (I think if I kept up the seven day a week thing I could drop another dress size but I don’t need to) and my energy level is through the roof. I still eat plenty of meat, fish, eggs, cheese, nuts, chocolate etc just no wheat. Links to both the CBS article and a link to the book itself are below. I never recommend something without first trying it. I highly recommend this.

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57407294/is-sugar-toxic/?tag=pop;stories

http://www.kingsenglish.com/book/9781609611545

Gullible US?

My family has a saying never discuss religion or politics with people you want to stay friends with.

Politics in the US wears its heart on its sleeve, I knew that when I moved here. As those of you who’ve read this blog before know I don’t exactly give a flying fig for it. In the UK it’s easy to ignore-sure I voted back home and if you know me well you might be surprised who I voted for but that’s not the issue here. Because right, left or independent should never be the basis for liking someone, and should never ever be hurled as an insult. Yet in the US it never fails to be and this election campaign is one of the bitterest insult-ridden yet. You can blame technology for a lot of it, citizen journalism, one click and your facebook comment or tweet can go around the world if it is controversial enough. Negative attack politics is rife. Now I know that honest politician is an oxymoron but we didn’t come out of the womb with a political party symbol tattooed on our butts we choose our political affiliation or lack of it, the same as we choose our best friends, our lovers, our jobs, the food we eat, or how we use our brains. Here’s my favourite trick, don’t listen to the words, use the mute button and look at the body language every politician has a ‘tell’ when they’re lying or flip-flopping the trick is spotting it and that's a lot easier when you can't hear the spin.

NB

In the UK Monster Raving Looney party candidates stand quite often for local government-and they’re a joke. In the US tea party candidates stand for election and Americans take them seriously even voting some into office.

http://www.loonyparty.com/

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig/felkins2.html

What’s so dangerous about daytime running lights?

I used to think DRLs were a necessary evil, they come on when I turn the key, I have no say in the matter unless I want to hack my car (and I don’t) When it’s dark or overcast as a matter of habit I put my main ‘dipped’ headlights on. Most people in the US seem to rely on DRL and according to various websites DRLs have reduced front and side impact crashes by 5% or 0% depending upon which data set you look at. The word you should pay attention to here is front-not back. At the back DRLs don’t operate the tail lights which is fine in clear visibility but drive in rain, spray, fog or snow and unless you put the main lights on no one can see the back of your car, until you either brake and your brake lights come on, you indicate to pull out, or they run into the back of you. Brake lights and tail lights are not the same thing. Driving back down I15 yesterday from NV to UT in snow and heavy spray, I saw multiple cars with their DRLs on and nothing else. There were also some drivers who didn’t have DRL but hadn’t turned their lights on. Don’t take my word for it, have a friend check the back of your car and see what comes on when you have only DRL. On one of the sites I visited (lightsout.org) they equate DRLs to stone age technology when sensors could be installed that would turn the lights on automatically or better yet, improve the driver training programs and stop relying on safety devices that don’t make us safer.

http://www.iihs.org/research/qanda/drl.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daytime_running_lamp

http://www.lightsout.org/story.html#ourcase

http://m.theglobeandmail.com/globe-drive/car-life/auto-therapy/spotlight-on-daytime-running-lights/article2191954/?service=mobile

Who's the victim here?

A YouTube clip that is causing controversy across the UK. You may have seen it, I hadn't. Until we landed yesterday I'd no idea it even existed. A student on a train in Scotland with the wrong ticket is ordered off by a conductor who is old enough to be his grandfather. Said student verbally abuses both the conductor and the other passengers in that carriage until a big chap steps in asks the conductor if he needs help with the problem and when the conductor says yes puts the kid off the train. After he does this he gets a round of applause from the other commuters. You cannot see the student's face and what should've happened is that the unnamed student learned a valuable lesson and the public got to realize that we can stand up for ourselves and others. What actually happened is this. The student revealed himself to be 19 year old Sam Main (remember that HR departments this little charmer will be looking for a job once he's graduated) and has been photographed looking like an angel with a scuffed face, I'm betting he isn't giving the money he gets from the interviews to any good causes. He loftily admits that he was out of order with the verbal abuse but says that he shouldn't have been thrown off the train especially by a member of the public. Seeing as the conductor couldn't have lifted a bag of sugar let alone an abusive 19 year old kid methinks he doth protest too much. And the have a go commuter? He has been charged with assault. Oh and the conductor is now under investigation. So here's the message loud and clear, don't interfere, standing up for your fellow man will get you a criminal record.

Who threatens Santa Claus?

A British teenager instead of writing a letter to Santa, has sent him an ultimatum. Give me the presents or Santa gets it (and I'll cook his reindeer). The little charmer (I'm being sarcastic here spoilt little brat would be far more appropriate) has a long list including the real Justin Bieber she is quoted as saying 'I don't see any problem with the letter, I want all of these things and I don't see why I shouldn't get them.'

 

Her mother says that she's going to try and get most of the things on her spoilt little kid's list. I don't know about you but I have two huge problems with this.

Firstly, she's thirteen! and still thinks that Santa exists and second and worst of all, her mother is indulging behaviour that will carry on into adulthood. What the kid needs is a good slap and no Christmas presents, instead she gets publicity in a national newspaper. If I could be a fly on the wall at their house on Christmas morning the meltdown when she doesn't get what she wants is going to be spectacular!

Here's the link to the article.

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2073907/Christmas-list-Spoilt-girl-13-demands-presents-says-Santa-Claus-die.html

Your bargain or your life?

Ah Black Friday. Every year I think to myself, should I do it. I mean get up at 3am and queue in the freezing cold. Think of the money I'll save. But here's the truth, I am a lazy shopper and I shop local not big box and at 3am the only place I'm going to be is in bed. Looking at what happened over the weekend my opinion of 'the running of the bargaineers' still hasn't changed. The woman who pepper-sprayed a crowd to get her greedy little paws on an Xbox, the grandfather who may - or may not have been shoplifting but was brought to the ground by a zealot police officer who tackled him as if he was a suicide bomber and slammed him face first into the concrete floor. And the poor guy who had a heart attack and died, people just stepped over him. Also when they put up those lists of the worlds deadliest jobs, you would think the poor sap who has to open the doors of any store on Black Friday would get a mention. Bargains are material possessions, I prefer to enjoy Christmas with my family not in an emergency room.

What do the 99% and the Arab spring have in common?

My what short memories we have.  Arab Spring - peaceful sit-in protests in the middle east that led to a lot of changes, people died, some dictators were removed, the sheer will of the people did this.  Now cut to Occupy Wall Street, peaceful (mostly) protests all around the US (Salt Lake has an 'occupy' protest down in Pioneer Park) and in many cities around the world.  Our citizens saying that they've had enough of the culture of corruption that the banks have been getting away with for years.  Even after we bailed them out (remember that - your tax dollars paid for it) they're back to their old ways.  And when we try and do something about it - the police are ordered to break up these camps using force.  Laws are rushed through local government to rid us of this public nuisance.  These 'occupiers' are from every walk of life and they are expressing their discontent in the only public way they can.  They can't bring down these banks or large investment houses only the super rich can dismantle their little eyrie and why would they want to do that?

And what do we give these (mostly) peaceful demonstrators for their trouble?  Violence. Demonstrator Scott Olsen - an Iraq war veteran , 24 years old. He survives fighting for US freedom and he gets a fractured skull courtesy of a smoke grenade from the Oakland police force.  Using excessive force on your citizens here at home makes you look like a bunch of bullies. And unlike middle eastern countries where refusing to obey an order meant you could be shot, if the police refused to take these orders they would only lose their jobs not their lives and that would be a sign that the 1% were losing ground. Taking away the generators the NY protesters are using for warmth because they constitute a 'fire hazzard' also smacks of the 'the man' sticking it to us. Occupy Wall Street is a way for people to express their discontent with everything that's gone wrong in this country.  A safety valve if you will.  And neither negative media coverage, nor dismissive politicians have managed to put this upstart movement to bed - the protesters say they are in it for the long haul.  Six weeks in they've no clear message, they don't have an agenda, they're all ages, all races but they are still occupying.

There are those who read those post and will assume I'm a democrat.  Guess what I don't support any political party, the left is wet, the right is so far right that if we moved them back in time to Berlin in 1933 they'd fit right in.  Moderates are few and far between, if I could find one I would support them.  Oh and speaking of history, you might want to look up that time the French 99% turned on the 1%.  They skipped the peaceful protest - it wasn't pretty.

Why don't we notice small amounts going missing from our bank accounts?

You'd think with all the tools we have at our disposal to monitor our bank accounts that this wouldn't be allowed to happen.  I check my bank accounts regularly and I completely missed the $5.10 withdrawal by Witifile but my bank (thank goodness) didn't.  It's not a huge amount in fact its so small that lumped in with all the other transactions I just assumed it was meant to be there.

Once the bank had alerted me I started to look into Witifile and found I'm not the only one.  Somehow they've gotten hold of a bunch of card numbers and debited that small amount from each one.  If you times $5.10 by millions suddenly its not such a small amount any more.  The moral of this post is, check your bank account and if you don't recognize a transaction call the bank, they will be able to tell you more and dispute the charge if necessary and unlike me keep all your receipts until the bank has put them through which I will be doing from now on.

Now I'm stuck with a dead debit card until my new one arrives.

Since when is it okay to steal?

I know we are in a down economy, I know that people have to make ends meet but I cannot get my head around stealing books.  I mean why? Why would you do that.  Get in the queue at the library, don't come to a small business and steal the inventory.  Of course this person isn't going to steal from a chain, they have cameras everywhere and they prosecute shoplifters.  We are booksellers not store detectives I have no authority to challenge a customer even though I followed said customer to the cash desk and the book was still in evidence and suddenly it wasn't.  I even asked if that customer was ready to buy the book I'd seen in a hand only moments earlier. I was told that the book had already been put back.  Did I say 'liar' of course not.  The thing that gets me is that I can't prove anything was stolen, bookfairs mean our inventory is spread all over the valley at the moment.

Makes me mad.

Also makes me miss our manager at the local newsagents in Storrington.  She watched a kid thieving with such sleight of hand that we two at the counter knew he was taking stuff but couldn't catch him in the act.  She had the security camera footage and she had a temper. She came flying down from the upstairs flat, grabbed the kid by his ankles and shook and you would not believe how much stock fell out.  Then she righted him, told him he was 'barred' and his mother would be seeing the footage along with the local policeman if he dared set foot in the shop again.  He never did.

Of course that wouldn't work for the bookstore because we are welcoming in honest fellow bookworms...

Where are my manners?

You aren't born with manners, as a baby the first words are more likely to be mamma or go goo than 'please' or 'thank you' (If you're first words were please or thank you consider yourself a child prodigy)  Parents teach kids manners, if they don't their kids learn by copying the other kids in the playground.  To be honest I was dragged up pretty well but there was a stage where my manners were sadly lacking.  It is very rude to swear and when I worked for the civil service it was a way for staff to let off steam, I even learned to swear in Dutch - which ticked off my manager no end because she couldn't tell if I was swearing or not.  Since most of my jobs - except that one - involved a degree of interaction with the public I'm sensitive to bad manners and at the moment we're not doing the next generation any favours. 

Take this morning, standing in a queue at the post office.  Mothers on cell-phones ignoring their kids, people pushing into the queue to get forms for various things, in one case the guy was so keen he stood on the foot of the woman in front of me, a woman who was so interested in her cell-phone conversation that she was ignoring the questions of the clerk trying to serve her. With our busy and increasingly isolated lives we get less and less chances to talk to real people.  Good manners cost nothing so the next time you're out and about turn off your cell phone and turn on a smile, you might make someone's day.

(I'm always polite to our customers, I've come to know a lot of the regulars by name.  We do our best to make everyone who walks through the door feel welcome.) 

Are we slaves to our Sat Navs?

For reasons it isn't worth going into I'm about to upgrade my iPod to an iPhone and this brings up an interesting dilemma.  I've been hankering after a GPS in my car for years and now I'm about to get one.  The concept of being able to plug in an address and be directed to it instead of having to reccee places before I go to them or using google streetview really appeals to me.  I hate getting lost, and worse being late for important things because I was driving round in circles unable to find a tiny unmarked side street.  Not that my navigation is terrible, but knowing exactly where you're going is one less thing to have to concentrate on especially in down-town Salt Lake, where lunch time commuters wander around the streets like a flock of lemmings.

Did you know in the UK alone 300,000 crashes were blamed on satellite navigation aids. In a quote from UK tabloid The Daily Mirror

One top academic argued mindless motorists were at fault for perceived problems with satnavs.
Psychology professor Cary Cooper, of Lancaster University, said: "When you see pictures of a lorry being lifted out of ditch with a crane, it's difficult to understand why drivers follow a satnav even when it's clearly wrong.
But some people are easily persuadable and will follow instructions, whether it is their wife or a computer telling them where to go.
Some people like to hand over control and don't want responsibility, even for something as simple as directions.

If you google 'sat nav accidents' there are many, many pages of stuff just like this.  Having read plenty of these articles I have come to the conclusion I will let my GPS offer advice on my route - which I don't have to take if I don't want to- and will always keep a map handy.


www.engadget.com/tag/gps+accident/
http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/gps_related_accidents/
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~johnson/papers/GPS/Johnson_Shea_Holloway_GPS.pdf

Why is doorstep harrasment still legal?

Ever heard the phrase an Englishman's home is his castle.  I used to think that was a really grown-up (ie boring) thing to say.  Now I have a home of my own I can see what it means. I - the co-homeowner - decide who comes in, I don't even have to open the door if I don't want to.  My friend - the wise girl I was discussing this subject with intends to put a notice on her door that basically says, 'if we don't know you we won't be opening the door'  Which throws up all kinds of problems - all those packages you have to sign for that won't get delivered, publishers clearing house cheques, the passer-by who has just spotted your garage is on fire....    My parents have an airlock between them and the front door so they can open the door shake their heads and close it again without a word being exchanged.  Unless its the JH's and then Mum hides under the table until they've gone - I am not making this up!

I tend to take direction well, a sign saying 'NO TRESPASSING' will stop me in my tracks.  So will a sign (like the one on our front door) that tells you to read it before you ring the doorbell.  People who ignore that sign and aren't people we know or a appointment that we have set up, or parcel/pizza delivery are likely to get an earful from hubby (if he's home) or me.  But ignore it they do and then they wonder why  I'm so short with them.  It could be because I was buried inside my washing machine trying to extract the filter, balanced half way up a ladder, had just got my head around a concept and the doorbell sent my thoughts flying to the four corners or the fact that the doorbell scares the hell out of my cat. And when I do open the door they launch straight into their sales pitch.  The words "I'm sorry to bother you," would go a long way in this situation.

If I am in the front garden however, I'm fair game.

Update : Privacy film on the window at the front door, you can see them and they can't see you. People still ring the doorbell they just don't get an answer unless we know them. Simple but effective.

Is it time to say goodbye to Facebook?

Have you noticed that just recently a lot of companies are riding roughshod over us the consumer.  They tell us what we want, they tell us to pay more for services which frankly aren't worth the money.  They try to tell us what to listen to, what to eat, how to dress.  The most recent and vocal of these - 'you'll grow to love it - stop complaining' companies is Facebook.  FB has become a part of my life.  I use it to keep up with my friends all over the world.  I have the FB app, I check it all the time.  But get this FB I am the boss, I dictate our relationship or so I thought.  With each new update I renew my privacy settings.  But this last update - the one that sorts stories into an order of importance that's done by an algorithm is quite possibly the beginning of the end -for me at least.  FB wants to move in with me, it wants to tell all my friends what I'm watching or listening to.  It wants me to give it a timeline of my life long before FB was an idea for an exclusive ivy league network.  FB sit down and listen, its not you it's me.  I value my privacy, my guilty pleasures, my pandora playlist, youtube videos ect.  I'm announcing a trail separation.  If you haven't come to your senses in a month, I'm afraid it's over.

10/10 Moved the facebook app to the second screen on my iphone and found I don't feel compelled to check it.  I'm thinking I'll stay with FB but only at the weekends unless someone messages me direct.