Archive for March, 2007
Fingers crossed…
…that should be the blog up and running again. I hope.
Breakin’ the blog, breakin’ the blog
Just a quick heads-up: I’m doing some extremely overdue site management this weekend, and it’ll take the blog (and my email) offline for a few hours. Possibly longer, if I do my usual and make a complete arse of things.
Are cyberbullies really scaring schoolgirls into stripping online?
I’m always wary of scare stories that involve new technology - remember the scare over cameraphones being used to clone credit card numbers, which was widely reported despite the minor detail that such cloning had never happened? - and I’m equally wary of scare stories involving sexual misbehaviour. Combine the two and you end up with media panic over invented stories such as “toothing”, a hoax about people getting together for sex via the magic of Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones. I wonder if a similar panic is brewing over online bullying.
According to Reuters, “cyberbullies scare schoolgirls into stripping online”, and as I write this the story’s been printed verbatim in 21 different news sites. However, it shows all the signs of a scare story rather than a true one.
The story simply doesn’t justify the headline. In a series of focus groups featuring 47 children, researchers have found that in some cases (it doesn’t say how many), boys are pressuring their girlfriends to send them topless shots. Those shots are then circulated among the boys’ giggling friends, usually after the girlfriend becomes an ex-girlfriend.
Unpleasant? Reprehensible? Absolutely. But it’s not what the headline describes - a difference that, I suspect, won’t affect the inevitable tabloid coverage of the story. Perhaps it’s because “some teenage boys are dicks” doesn’t make such a scary headline.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure cyberbullying does happen. It certainly happens in the form of abusive SMSes and emails, and given that teenagers are generally bastards I don’t doubt that if a topless shot fell into the wrong hands it’d soon do the rounds of people’s mobiles or email inboxes. But equally, plenty of teenage girls don’t need to be coerced to parade themselves on webcams, to send their boyfriends cameraphone pics or to upload adults-only photos to Faceparty.com.
I’m reminded of a recent Lucy Mangan column in the Guardian where she reports on an apparent epidemic of STIs among schoolchildren. According to her friend, a community health worker, “The epidemic is thought to have come about through a combination of the novel opportunities offered by modern technology and the ancient and enduring blend of idiocy, atavism, vulnerability and vileness that has existed in children since time began.”
According to this friend, the epidemic of STIs is because of this: a boy persuades or bullies a girl into having sex, and he or a friend films it on a cameraphone. He then threatens to post the footage on YouTube, MySpace, whatever, and the only way to stop that happening is for the girl to have sex with all of his friends.
It’s all very unpleasant, but I do wonder if it’s true. Isn’t it possible that any explosion of teenage STIs is due not to technologically assisted sexual blackmail, but good old-fashioned teenage promiscuity?
You can’t get scanned when you’re skint
I know I rant about two-tier healthcare a lot (as in, it already exists in the NHS), so I’ll keep this reasonably short: after our pregnancy scan earlier this week, we had a chat with the midwife about the various tests designed to make sure your baby’s healthy. The biggie, it seems, is the 20-week scan: it’s when you check to see that the foetus is developing normally.
The room in which we had our 12-week scan was plastered with posters explaining why the 20-week scan is so important, so - being good little patients - we asked the midwife about it. Should we get it? Yes, she said. But not here.
It turns out that the NHS doesn’t do 20-week scans in Glasgow unless there’s already reason to be worried - something the midwife says is daft, dangerous and various other things beginning with “d”. Inevitably it’s because of cost-cutting.
So here’s your choice: if you can afford to go private, you can get a scan (which, incidentally, isn’t performed by a mere sonographer; no, it’s performed by a proper doctor. In this case, the doctor who’s a consultant at, er, the maternity ward that employs the midwife we were speaking to). If you can’t, you don’t get scanned. Simple.
Apparently the 20-week scans will be reinstated next year. Which is good news for skint mums-to-be this year.
In da (camera) club
My photographic adventures continue - and by “adventures” I mean “disasters”, because despite various online tutorials and help from David I still have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way for me to suss out this photography lark is to see other people doing it properly, and to have people explain to me what’s going wrong when I try to do the same as them and make a complete arse of it. So! A camera club!
Maybe not. I did some searching and right enough, there’s a camera club in my town - but reading through the site any appeal the idea had quickly wore off. As expected there’s the usual lectures - “Sergeant Major McDonald presents My Perambulations in Patagonia, a photographic essay” - which don’t float my boat, but it was the list of upcoming events that really killed the idea for me. The big event this spring? A trip to Jessops.
Jessops, for those of you outside the UK, is a high street camera shop.
Little bigmouth
This picture was taken at Glasgow’s Royal Infirmary this morning, and it’s the first of what I suspect will be very, very many baby pictures. We’ve just had our twelve-week scan, Mrs Bigmouth is positively radiant and little baby bigmouth is, we’re told, doing very well indeed. So come 6th October or thereabouts, I’m going to be a dad.
I am, of course, delighted. And terrified.
One job ad sums up the problem with health reporting
Posted to a journalism forum:
Men’s Fitness is looking for an experienced staff writer to write and edit the Nutrition and Health sections of the magazine.
You don’t need to be an expert on health matters, but you do need a proven record of producing sharp, witty and accurate copy for a consumer title.
Twat nav
There’s a nice wee story in the papers about the school bus driver who entered the wrong information into his sat-nav system and took a bus full of kids to Hampton Court in London rather than their intended destination, Hampton Court Palace.
I think the AA’s advice should be printed on all sat-nav systems.
“Take a look out of the windscreen.”
Let there be lightbulbs
Ah, the joys of trying to be environmentally friendly. I recycle my rubbish and even my cardboard - or at least I did until the binmen emptied the special cardboard recycling bag, left the empty bag at the side of the road and it blew away in the wind, quite possibly ending up on an endangered animal’s head and suffocating the bloody thing - and I’d put solar panels and a wind turbine on the roof if I intended to stay here long enough to break even on that particular investment (I don’t). I even try to buy energy saving lightbulbs.
Which means I’m an idiot.
I mean, jesus, the profiteering that goes on over energy saving bulbs is unbelievable. I popped down to homebase to get energy saving replacements for the bulbs in the hallway light and landing light, and they were £8.99 a pop. As both the hallway light and the landing light are three-bulb jobs apiece (you know, the little candle ones), that’s fifty-six quid.
Undeterred, I turned to the internet and wasted, ooh, about a million kilowatt hours of electricity trying to get a better deal. And I did, eventually: three quid a bulb. Not quite as good as the 3-odd-pence normal bulbs cost, and they’re imported from somewhere else to the UK and then delivered to me in a big diesel-belching truck, but hey! It’s the gesture that counts!
I’ve got some halogen downlighters in the dining room too, and I thought about replacing them as well - until I found out that replacing them with LEDs would be £12 per bulb (there are six) and each downlighter would need a brand new transformer. As the downlighters are switched on once every four months or so, and only then because the dog’s managed to be sick behind something and I need the light for a few minutes to make sure I’ve cleaned it all up (you don’t see *that* in the Andrex ads, do you?), it didn’t strike me as a very smart investment.
But I digress. Back to my brand new energy savers. I popped the new bulbs into the hallway light, and one of them immediately lit up. I popped another bulb in. The first bulb went out; the new one lit. I popped a third bulb in, with no change. So what happens now is that when I turn the light on, all three bulbs light, which is what they’re supposed to do; when I turn it off, one, two or three bulbs will light slightly and/or flicker, giving the house the pleasant ambience of the toilet blocks in Doom 3. Which they’re not supposed to do.
I’ve clearly got a bad earth somewhere, so power’s going to the bulbs when it shouldn’t. It’s not enough to light up the normal bulbs, but it’s enough to fire up the energy savers.
So that gives me a choice: save the polar bears by sticking with the energy saving bulbs, which means calling out an electrician to fix the faulty earth (which may be in the light, or it may be in the lighting circuit, so it’s either going to be very expensive or really, really expensive) - or I could just leave the lights on 24/7, burning seven times less electricity per bulb than before but running said bulbs for roughly 100 times longer each day in order to stop the flickering hurting my eyes. Hmmm. Or… I could do the polar bear-killing, planet raping thing of not calling an electrician at all, throwing the energy saving bulbs in the bin and putting the old, environmentally unfriendly bulbs back.
Ooh, it’s a toughie.
*crashing sound as bulbs hit the bin*
Sunday Times photo competition: bastards
This week’s Sunday Times went into great detail about a photography competition for landscape snappers, but strangely didn’t highlight that you have to pay to enter: £7 for one image, or £25 if you want to send in the maximum of fifteen.
Given that the total prize pot is £20K, if 1,000 people enter 15 images apiece that’s £25K in income. Plus, the AA and Sunday Times - and many, many others - are “backing” the competition - and they’re listed as sponsors, which usually means financial help. On that basis you’d expect the total revenue to be significantly higher.
I smell a rat.