![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
curiouswombatI have three things to share with you - One is inspirational, another makes me just want to beat someone's head against a wall, and the third is a gloriously silly WTF moment!
Thing 1. The first thing is an article posted by the BBC World Service. It just wonderful, inspiring, fascinating - and also has some of the most wonderful photographs I've seen. I could just look at THIS for ages.
Also - I have just got to include something like that into a story somewhere.
........
Thing 2. This is about a very, very, ignorant man who actually managed to make it to being Mayor of Swindon. There have been reports in a number of the newspapers, and on the BBC, about him being asked to apologise for something he said in a 'semi-public' place - i.e. a training meeting for councillors.
What he said was shocking in itself - what was worse was that he really didn't seem to understand why he was asked to apologise.
What the Mayor of Swindon said was “Are we still letting those mongols have sex with each other?”
Just think about almost every word in that sentence for a moment...
Now consider his 'apology' which was to say that he apologised “for using a word I shouldn't have”. But, he added, it was a word he “was brought up with” and that the problem was simply that it was “not a modern word”.
O...K... Let's just, for a minute, substitute the 'modern word' into his sentence and apparently he thinks it is then a perfectly reasonable thing to say... “Are we still letting those people with Down's Syndrome have sex with each other?”
And he simply doesn't understand that the words 'we' are 'letting' is insulting before we get any further! And then he insults everyone with any disability by suggesting that they shouldn't have sex...
And he really doesn't seem to understand the problem. The BBC report is here if you want to read it - and there is an article in The Independant here written by someone who had the same thoughts as me when he read about this - but puts it better! I am so pleased for the people of Swindon (of whom there is at least one on my FL), that this ignorant man has now resigned.
.........
And Thing 3; Today I got an e-mail from Amazon about something that was part of an order I made a couple of days ago, explaining that
Unfortunately, due to delivery restrictions on such items, we won’t be able to send you this item and have cancelled it from your order. This is because this item contains flammable, pressurised, corrosive, environmentally hazardous or otherwise harmful substances classified as dangerous goods under the European Agreement concerning the International Carriage of Dangerous Goods by Air.
Although the amount of these substances in these products is usually quite limited, these products need to be transported in a certain way to ensure that they are handled with care and are therefore assigned to a specialist carrier. Unfortunately this means that we can’t dispatch this to any destination outside of mainland UK.
We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused and hope to see you again soon.
What do you think I might have been ordering? It sounds dangerous, doesn't it?
Actually it was a bottle of Avon Skin so Soft in a non-pressurised pump action bottle. I only added it to the Amazon order as there wasn't anything else I wanted from Avon at the moment.
That seems pretty silly in itself - but the rest of the order arrived in the post this morning - including this... Which is a high pressurised container of a rather more likely substance to be any or all of the above!
Thing 1. The first thing is an article posted by the BBC World Service. It just wonderful, inspiring, fascinating - and also has some of the most wonderful photographs I've seen. I could just look at THIS for ages.
Also - I have just got to include something like that into a story somewhere.
........
Thing 2. This is about a very, very, ignorant man who actually managed to make it to being Mayor of Swindon. There have been reports in a number of the newspapers, and on the BBC, about him being asked to apologise for something he said in a 'semi-public' place - i.e. a training meeting for councillors.
What he said was shocking in itself - what was worse was that he really didn't seem to understand why he was asked to apologise.
What the Mayor of Swindon said was “Are we still letting those mongols have sex with each other?”
Just think about almost every word in that sentence for a moment...
Now consider his 'apology' which was to say that he apologised “for using a word I shouldn't have”. But, he added, it was a word he “was brought up with” and that the problem was simply that it was “not a modern word”.
O...K... Let's just, for a minute, substitute the 'modern word' into his sentence and apparently he thinks it is then a perfectly reasonable thing to say... “Are we still letting those people with Down's Syndrome have sex with each other?”
And he simply doesn't understand that the words 'we' are 'letting' is insulting before we get any further! And then he insults everyone with any disability by suggesting that they shouldn't have sex...
And he really doesn't seem to understand the problem. The BBC report is here if you want to read it - and there is an article in The Independant here written by someone who had the same thoughts as me when he read about this - but puts it better! I am so pleased for the people of Swindon (of whom there is at least one on my FL), that this ignorant man has now resigned.
.........
And Thing 3; Today I got an e-mail from Amazon about something that was part of an order I made a couple of days ago, explaining that
Unfortunately, due to delivery restrictions on such items, we won’t be able to send you this item and have cancelled it from your order. This is because this item contains flammable, pressurised, corrosive, environmentally hazardous or otherwise harmful substances classified as dangerous goods under the European Agreement concerning the International Carriage of Dangerous Goods by Air.
Although the amount of these substances in these products is usually quite limited, these products need to be transported in a certain way to ensure that they are handled with care and are therefore assigned to a specialist carrier. Unfortunately this means that we can’t dispatch this to any destination outside of mainland UK.
We’re sorry for any inconvenience caused and hope to see you again soon.
What do you think I might have been ordering? It sounds dangerous, doesn't it?
Actually it was a bottle of Avon Skin so Soft in a non-pressurised pump action bottle. I only added it to the Amazon order as there wasn't anything else I wanted from Avon at the moment.
That seems pretty silly in itself - but the rest of the order arrived in the post this morning - including this... Which is a high pressurised container of a rather more likely substance to be any or all of the above!
