Jenjie

1970. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065528/

& some stuffing

LADIES' nights could become a thing of the past when new European equal rights laws come into force, according to a licensing expert. The EU directive aims to make sure goods and services are offered to men and women equally. This means ladies' nights - where women get into bars, pubs and clubs free while men have to pay - could be in breach of the new laws. Advertisement your story continues below The UK and other EU member states must adopt the equal treatment rules by next December. Lisa Sharkey, a partner in solicitors firm Poppleston Allen which specialises in licensing law, said she expected ladies' nights to die out because they discriminate against men. Promotions which offer women cheaper drinks than men could also be in breach. "Ladies' nights would have to stop as soon as this legislation is enacted because men and women must be treated equally," she said. "I think most people, depending on the level of fine, will change their policy. I think the directive is extremely clear." Framework The directive describes its purpose as being to "... lay down a framework for combating discrimination based on sex in access to and supply of goods and services, with a view to putting into effect in the Member States the principle of equal treatment between men and women." Single-sex private clubs and sports events may still be permitted if they are justified by a "legitimate aim", the directive says. Jon Collins, spokesman for the Bar, Entertainment and Dance Association, said: "Ladies' night promotions are nowhere near as popular as they were in the 1980s, but can still play a role in boosting business. The promotion attracts ladies, the ladies attract gentlemen. "Surely a female paying less for a bottle of Bacardi Breezer than a male customer should not be treated with the same degree of severity by Brussels as an individual being denied promotion on grounds of gender." Features editor of pub trade magazine the Morning Advertiser Rosie Davenport said: "Many pubs have been running these kinds of promotions responsibly for years without any problems. "It's just another example of Brussels taking political correctness too far." A UK spokeswoman for the European Parliament said: "As far as penalties are concerned that is up to the individual countries in their implementing legislation." http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk

A LIBRARY worker is being investigated by police after thousands of pounds worth of rare books and documents vanished from Manchester's Central Library. The losses came to light after someone approached Manchester council - which runs the library - to say some of the books had been advertised on the eBay auction website. The police were called in and took hundreds of books from the employee's home. At least one of the missing books is thought to be over 300 years old and worth more than £20,000. The total value of the missing volumes is thought to be in the hundreds of thousands of pounds. The worker was arrested following the search and released on bail while police continue to sift through items recovered from his home. A police spokesman said: "A man was arrested in relation to the theft of a number of books from Manchester Central Library. "The man from Hulme has been bailed until June 28, pending further inquiries." The library, built in the 1930s, is home to thousands of books, boasting extensive archives and valuable reference materials. In 2000, precious archives were unlocked for a major exhibition celebrating 150 years of public access to archives at the library. The exhibition included a copy of the first Radio Times, a hand-written songbook from George Harrison and a Manchester theatre programme listing Dickens as a cast member. Several manuscripts, including volumes from the Manchester Concerto Partbooks, acknowledged as an important source of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, were also displayed. Manchester council has declined to comment on the investigation. http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk

Completely off topic now!!! Try the Donnie Darko discussions here

they'd be fine. when they're first born they're teeny & pink with really soft white bristles. suppose then you'd say they look ore like the end of a toothbrush!!!!

:dozey:

Bless them, they look like little scrubbing brushes!!

Right. I've edited this thread to remove the racist remarks. There are other posts which, whilst not directly contravening the board's terms & conditions, come close to that point so for the moment I've left them.

I've seen this posted on a million message boards. Its advice we could do with using on here at the moment. There are certain people in the world who think its hilariously funny to join message boards, post spammy messages, and just generally try their hardest to annoy the other members. The best way to deal with them is to ignore them. Respond in anger to their messages, and you give them food to continue. Ignore them, and eventually they'll get bored. This board has the facility where you can actively ignore trolls. Add them to your ignored users list and you won't see the drivel they are posting. Then you're not even tempted to respond.

Tuesday!

My God!! I knew fashions came round again, but the dummy sucking one???? In 1992, when we went on our school exchange to Paris the in thing was little, jewellery-sized dummies in all sorts of shades of plastic!!

Jack's monday report:

16 days later & jack's still here! :D

you sure it wasn't one of those exams where they take them on a laptop?

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro Its really good so far. Picked it up because I'd heard it was about organ donation, and had seen good reviews of it. Also has the same sort of concept to it as the film The Island.

its not just that one person. there's more than one person at it, and Ian knows exactly who they are.

our secondary school ones were related to the teacher. so one year you'd have 1K, 1E, 1L etc, the next year you might have 1D, 1F, 1Z. (this was before we adopted the US version of numbering the school years) once they merged schools they had a better idea. 6 classes per year? lets use letters from the school name so you had 10S 10A 10L 10E 10G 10R and there was the potentila for more on years you might need an extra class or two

Romeo, according to one 14-year-old sitting his Shakespeare test, drowned on the Titanic. Another teenager, asked to explain how Shakespeare handled the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, said: "They jump in the swimming pool." These are just some of the howlers made by secondary school pupils answering questions about Shakespeare in national curriculum tests for 14-year-olds. The first respondent had obviously confused Leonardo DiCaprio's starring roles in Romeo + Juliet and Titanic. The second pupil had taken the director Baz Luhrmann's modern film version - in which the balcony scene is set in a Los Angeles apartment block, complete with swimming - as gospel. And, according to his teacher, probably never bothered read the original text by the Bard. The teacher said: "Watching films of the plays doesn't always pay off." It is not just the mistakes that have been singled out by teachers on an online chatroom for the profession. They have also made efforts to use teenspeak in explaining the great man's works, and even added a sprinkling of drugs and sex into some of hismost famous plays. For instance, Macbeth, on hearing of his wife's death, according to one pupil,"goes into full-on soliloquy mode". Another says that the Scottish noble gets his revenge because "as my mum always sez 'wot goes around comes around'". A third pupil adds that Lady Macbeth - after the murder of Duncan - "ses to Macbeth 'sort your head out'". Two youngsters, according to their teacher, appeared to have been watching too many adult films. One pupil spoke of Lady Macbeth having "a desire to have Macbeth on the throne", and the other said that she asked him "to show her his manhood". In one essay - written as part of a classroom exercise before the test - a pupil dealt with Macbeth's three witches and the appearance of the dagger used to kill Duncan by saying: "Macbeth had been smoking up and imaged them all." The answers are on a website for teachers which was set up by the Times Educational Supplement. They are not all bad, though. One pupil wrote: "Macbeth is like a snail shell without a snail when Lady Macbeth dies." At least, though, the howlers can be considered on a par with some of those made by students in earlier years. Past GCSE answers include one student who believed Miguel Cervantes, a contemporary of Shakespeare's, wrote the book "Donkey Hote". And went on to write: "The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained." Back to Romeo and Juliet, and one earlier student wrote of their love affair: "They lived in Italy. Romeo's last wish was to be laid by Juliet." Another howler from an earlier GCSE exam said: "The greatest writer of the Renaissance was Shakespeare. He was born in 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. "He wrote tragedies, comedies and hysterectomies - all in Islamic pentameter." Then again, for a question on Julius Caesar, a pupil wrote that he had "extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul". A second wrote that Caesar had been murdered by the Ides of March and that his dying words were "same to you, Brutus". Romeo, according to one 14-year-old sitting his Shakespeare test, drowned on the Titanic. Another teenager, asked to explain how Shakespeare handled the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, said: "They jump in the swimming pool." These are just some of the howlers made by secondary school pupils answering questions about Shakespeare in national curriculum tests for 14-year-olds. The first respondent had obviously confused Leonardo DiCaprio's starring roles in Romeo + Juliet and Titanic. The second pupil had taken the director Baz Luhrmann's modern film version - in which the balcony scene is set in a Los Angeles apartment block, complete with swimming - as gospel. And, according to his teacher, probably never bothered read the original text by the Bard. The teacher said: "Watching films of the plays doesn't always pay off." It is not just the mistakes that have been singled out by teachers on an online chatroom for the profession. They have also made efforts to use teenspeak in explaining the great man's works, and even added a sprinkling of drugs and sex into some of hismost famous plays. For instance, Macbeth, on hearing of his wife's death, according to one pupil,"goes into full-on soliloquy mode". Another says that the Scottish noble gets his revenge because "as my mum always sez 'wot goes around comes around'". A third pupil adds that Lady Macbeth - after the murder of Duncan - "ses to Macbeth 'sort your head out'". Two youngsters, according to their teacher, appeared to have been watching too many adult films. One pupil spoke of Lady Macbeth having "a desire to have Macbeth on the throne", and the other said that she asked him "to show her his manhood". In one essay - written as part of a classroom exercise before the test - a pupil dealt with Macbeth's three witches and the appearance of the dagger used to kill Duncan by saying: "Macbeth had been smoking up and imaged them all." The answers are on a website for teachers which was set up by the Times Educational Supplement. They are not all bad, though. One pupil wrote: "Macbeth is like a snail shell without a snail when Lady Macbeth dies." At least, though, the howlers can be considered on a par with some of those made by students in earlier years. Past GCSE answers include one student who believed Miguel Cervantes, a contemporary of Shakespeare's, wrote the book "Donkey Hote". And went on to write: "The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Then his wife died and he wrote Paradise Regained." Back to Romeo and Juliet, and one earlier student wrote of their love affair: "They lived in Italy. Romeo's last wish was to be laid by Juliet." Another howler from an earlier GCSE exam said: "The greatest writer of the Renaissance was Shakespeare. He was born in 1564, supposedly on his birthday. He never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. "He wrote tragedies, comedies and hysterectomies - all in Islamic pentameter." Then again, for a question on Julius Caesar, a pupil wrote that he had "extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul". A second wrote that Caesar had been murdered by the Ides of March and that his dying words were "same to you, Brutus". http://education.independent.co.uk/news/article624166.ece

well it always used to confuse me. I never understood why i was a little blue but could never be a big blue! little blues = reception, started school jan/feb big blues = reception started school sept oranges = Year 1 greens = Year 2

Coming down to breakfast in your nightie shows you really feel at home. Unfortunately, it can also show a little more flesh than others might feel comfortable seeing. Which is why students of St Hilda's college at Oxford University have been ordered to dress properly for breakfast. Some were arriving for their morning cup of tea wearing the naughtiest of nightgowns. Or pyjamas that left little to the imagination. They claimed that with no men in the all-female halls of residence, there was no need for decorum. But the kitchen staff - particularly the handful of men among them - hardly knew where to look. Revealing nightwear best left to the boudoir has now been banned. The order to cover up has not gone down well with students, however, who claim breakfasting in their nightclothes is one of the privileges of studying at an all-girls college. Arielle Goodley, a 20-year-old English literature and psychology student, received a written warning for wearing a lacy nightie and skimpy dressing gown after the ban was imposed. 'This would not happen back home. I think they are being too prudish,' said Miss Goodley, at Oxford for a year as part of a four-year degree at Wellesley College, Boston. 'Back at home we can go to breakfast wearing whatever we like. You can wander around in whatever clothes you choose and no one bats an eyelid. 'I thought St Hilda's would have the same modern attitude, but it seems to be stuck in the past. 'Surely one of the benefits of not having men around is that we can turn up for breakfast wearing whatever we want. 'They are claiming that it makes the young male serving staff uncomfortable, but we know that's not true. 'Whenever we've asked the men themselves, they say it doesn't bother them at all. 'In reality it's the older women working there who seem to be making a fuss.' She is the latest to receive a sternly-worded letter from college dean Dr Amanda Cooper-Sarkar advising her to 'dress appropriately' for breakfast. But she claimed she was picked out unfairly. 'My nightie was hardly revealing,' she insisted. 'I mean, it wasn't buttoned up to the neck but it wasn't that bad. 'It was the kind of thing you would wear during the day and certainly a lot less revealing than anything that you might wear to go out in the evening. We all go to dinner dressed ready for going out and there's a lot more on show then.' Miss Goodley admitted some of the students had pushed the boundaries to see what skimpy outfits they could get away with, but added: 'No one's gone to breakfast naked yet.' One however, was said to have arrived wearing so little that fellow students were 'able to see everything'. Dr Cooper-Sarkar defended the decision on the basis that the kitchen staff felt uncomfortable. She said: 'It's not just see-through dresses, it's draped sheets or even draped bath towels. 'It's in response to a request from the kitchen staff who are embarrassed. 'The code is simply that students dress as they would outside the college.' http://www.dailymail.co.uk

mental really. although our primary school used to call us by colours!! you had little blues, big blues, oranges & greens in the infants!!

Who'd swap places with today's overexamined, insecure, drug-tested, antidepressant-popping schoolchildren? “SO, I BET you can’t wait to finish your GCSEs,” I said to a friend’s daughter this week in that special, patronising voice that adults reserve for children and small pets. “Just think — the whole summer off! You don’t know how lucky you are.” The instant that the words had left my mouth, of course, I realised that not only were they horribly fogeyish, they were dishonest. Because schoolchildren today are not lucky. I wouldn’t be one of them for all the iPods in Curry’s. The friend’s teenage daughter was quick to remind me why. Far from having a carefree summer, they will be issued with reading lists longer than an Andrex toilet roll for next term, together with even longer lists of dread reasons why “this will be their most important year ever” — just as they were told last year and the year before that. These are children who have been prodded, scrutinised and tested with standard assessment tasks (SATs) and cognitive ability tests (CATs) since the age of 7 — yet even if they get straight As at A level their achievement is belittled. We sneer that “exams are getting easier and easier” and newspapers publish exam papers from the 1970s to parade the difference. If they aim for university degrees (which, incidentally, are also now derided as “ten a penny”) they must saddle themselves with mega-loans that they cannot hope to pay off until middle age. It felt too cruel to point out that after that it gets even worse. Rocketing house prices mean they will struggle for years just to get a toenail on the property ladder. They will have little job security and at the end of it all will have to work until the age of 70 because of the pensions crisis. Recent figures showed that a 25-year-old will be significantly worse off in 25 years’ time than a 50-year-old is today. As an extra kick in the goolies it emerged this week that all schools are set to swab pupils’ mouths randomly in a drugs “crackdown”, magnifying the cloud of suspicion and perpetual surveillance under which they now live. No wonder children want to escape, slouched and uncommunicative, into a fantasy world of computer games. Some adults will have little sympathy, arguing that at least children are not getting rickets or being sent up chimneys anymore and should be thankful and stop bleating. But I wonder how many parents look at their teenaged offspring today and genuinely envy them? True, they don’t make do with a few cheap skittles for Christmas but instead get a slinky mobile phone on which they can access the internet. But would parents really swap the relative freedom of their school years for the hothouses in which their children sweat away their formative years? We strive to make our children happy, yet look what has happened: prescriptions of antidepressants for 16 to 18-year-olds have trebled in the past decade. Sabrina Broadbent, a teacher and novelist, wrote movingly in The Times this week about how she made one of her pupils cry simply by asking what her plans were for next year. The pupil, like her classmates, was miserable, frightened and exhausted by the endless pressure to succeed. They never had any fun. School, they said, was preparing them for a trap: they had to get good grades to get to university to get a job that would allow them to pay off a student loan and crippling mortgage. One pupil told her: “Your generation had better watch out, Miss, because our generation is totally wrecked. We’re so depressed and stressed out that half of us aren’t in a fit state to take care of your lot.” And there’s the problem. By 2050 there will be only two people of working age for each pensioner, so who is going to fund the NHS and everything else? The young have seen the future and it is more of the same — working themselves to a frazzle so that they can support wrinklies who had it easier than them. As David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, said recently, babyboomers who enjoyed free education and affordable housing have shaped an environment that works very well for them: “A young person could be forgiven for believing that the way in which economic and social policy is now conducted is little less than a conspiracy by the middle-aged against the young.” Perhaps we should remember this and not be so surprised when sometimes they want to flee their hi-tech bedrooms and get off their faces on WKD. Carol Midgley. Comment http://www.timesonline.co.uk

A school has changed the names of its primary one classes after complaints that they left some children feeling inferior, BBC Scotland has learned. Bonnyrigg Primary School had called its classes 1a and 1b but some parents of children in 1b said it left the youngsters feeling second best. The classes will now be known as 1ar and 1ap, incorporating teachers' surnames in the new titles. One Midlothian parent dubbed the move "political correctness gone mad". The man said he was surprised when he read about the change in a school newsletter. He told the BBC Scotland news website: "This shows how far political correctness has gone in Scotland. "I thought this policy was simply astounding. I have to admit that I am surprised that the headmistress has bowed to, and thereby endorsed, this." Eleanor Coner, Scottish Parent Teacher Council information officer, said she was "flabbergasted" by the school's decision to rename its classes. She said: "There is a long history of giving classes names and therefore it seems logical to go with the start of the alphabet. "These parents need not be so sensitive and should think whether it is not their actions which are highlighting this inferior idea surrounding class names. "It all sounds a bit silly to me and is on a par with the situation which brought us the changed nursery rhyme name of Ba Ba Rainbow Sheep. "I think these parents need to get a grip, it's a ridiculous request, which has left me flabbergasted." Councillor Peter Boyes, Midlothian Council cabinet member for education and lifelong learning said: "The school was approached by some parents of primary one pupils last year who expressed some concern about the use of primary '1a' and '1b' in case 'b' was perceived as being second to 'a'. "This is clearly not the case in the school where the two-stream, primary one classes are allocated by date of birth. "However the headteacher took the pragmatic step of renaming the classes '1ar' and '1ap', as the new class identifiers, where 'r' and 'p' are the initials of the class teacher's surname. "This practice is used elsewhere in primary schools and is not unique to Bonnyrigg Primary." http://www.bbc.co.uk