Vivat Libertas

So, in the interests of posting something when I haven't done for almost a week, I decided to do my own take on something people who more often than not are childless do: try to pass down their distilled wisdom, or lack of it, to an imaginary child. For various reasons I'd probably be a very, very shitty parent, but I'll try my best anyway. 1. Think for yourself. Always. 2. Everyone is your equal and just as capable of suffering as you are, so treat them well. 3. Don't be scared of an idea until you've properly researched it. 4. Some things may seem like your fault because you were involved in them, but if you weren't the aggressor, they probably weren't. It's difficult sometimes not to blame yourself for them, but remember that they weren't your fault and it'll save you a lot of heartbreak. 5. Things don't get better of their own accord, so work for them now. 6. Somewhere out there are people who love you and support you and woul...

I have a rather awesome Biology teacher. She's genuinely, almost ridiculously passionate about her subject, and about science in general. She did quite well for herself at uni and was going to continue on to a PhD...so not the kind of person whom one would expect to be a teacher, given the "if you can't do it, teach it" attitude. She openly told our class that she teaches because she genuinely likes it - she gets to talk about the subject she loves all day long, for a start, which has to be a plus in any career. Cue me telling her that more people need to talk like that - to which she said that she does give talks to people doing PGCEs. Following on from other random stuff I and many, many other people came up with , it's not good enough just  to be essentially preaching to the choir. We desperately need inspirational teachers - and to get more of them, teachers should speak to students from, say, Year 9 upwards about the benefits of becoming a teacher. I don...

Not all Americans are idiots. Not all Chinese are evil and/or communists. Not all Germans are Nazis. Not all Greeks are lazy. Not all Israelis are fascists. Not all Italians are cads like Berlusconi. Not all Poles want to take your jobs. Not all Russians are communists/corrupt/evil/criminals. I think I've got most of the stereotypes down, but the point I want to make is that you can't generalise about entire nations . In every country there are the cruel, the lazy, the stupid and the greedy, that's true, but there are also the kind, the hard-working, the clever and the generous. That's just the way of people. If you spent time around them, you'd change your ways. Why am I preaching to you about this? Because I hate it. It makes me feel physically sick to see people talked about like that. You do not get an entire country full of fascists. You do not get an entire country full of saints. You have the good and the evil (if there are indeed such things) and ...

This is shamelessly stolen from The Truth About Victoriana , which I highly suggest you check out if you have time - or even if you don't. Common Rationalizations (i.e., excuses) used when applying SOCIAL DARWINISM ... • it is simply the rules of the economic market ... supply & demand! • Business is business! • Since when does Christianity apply to business? You cannot apply the Golden Rule to economics! You apply it to everyone and anything else, but NOT business! • Of course it is okay to take over other businesses and cause owners to suffer! That's just plain business! (he/she wasn't a good business person anyway, they couldn't do ___________, etc.) • Who cares how many unemployed may result from the decision to import those things that local farmers used to grow!? It makes more economic sense to go after a buck! (these are only a few examples, there are TONS of them that were operating during the Victorian Age and, sad to say, these same types of excuses are ...

It's weird how sometimes you overlook the most obvious things, isn't it? I'm an Israeli atheist raised in a vaguely Jewish family and I go to a Christian school in England. It's weird seeing those cultures mixed up...I knew very little about Jesus, or really about Christian teaching, before year 7, yet having sung in a choir I can relate to things which poke fun at churches and perhaps the Anglican tradition in general. I'm quite happy to poke fun at Jewish mothers, then immediately start laughing at the English stereotypes I can relate to (pretty much all of them, then, except I don't like tea). It comes to mind that I wouldn't have been able to link all this were it not for the fact that I grew up in a multicultural society. If I'd never come to England, or if I'd rejected one set of traditions altogether, I'd never have understood some of the things I do today. It's a bit of a random argument for multiculturalism, I guess - opening you...

All right. I'll take some time off from politics and revolution and wind everything down 'til October or so. I'm not going on hiatus, but updates will be less frequent and likely less political, though I can't promise anything. Last night I went to see Crazy for You  at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre...at least, I tried  to see it. As anyone who was also there would know, they had to cancel the performance due to rain. A shame, in other words. Still, what I did get to see of it was sheer Gershwin fluff...right up my alley, in other words, though I'd never admit it. I might be going to try and see it again on Friday - keeping my fingers crossed! Come Saturday I'm joining in with this Voce Sanctis event to sing Come ye sons of art  by Purcell . It's quite a big thing for me, since apart from joining in with the Really Big Chorus one time (and doing a little thing with the Harrow Philharmonic Choir , though that was with some people from school) I...

At the end of the day, at the end of that long road, fine words are just those: fine words. Empty rhetoric. Nothing more. And perhaps for a time they will soothe you and paper over the cracks in your consciousness. But if you've looked into the darkness where nothing looks back...that fine rhetoric does very little. Only logic, a powerful, blinding logic, will help, and that logic is difficult to come by. In other news, I have my results for C2 and P2 - both 100% A*. (Slap me if I'm boasting too much.) The modules do seem to be quite easy, as I know loads of other people with A*s...

OK, this Friday parody really  isn't working. In other news, while our good old British rapture is scheduled for 6 o'clock this evening (and I do  hope someone will bring the tea and biscuits), it seems to be scheduled for 6 o'clock everywhere and there's a map (kindly provided by RaptureFail ) detailing, well...the lack of massive earthquakes and mass disappearances of people everywhere. Sadly, there's little data about what's happening NOW (except for the above mentioned RaptureFail and some news posts), so I don't get to see Harold Camping looking silly yet. Just as well, because he'd probably move the goalposts again and blame it on not looking at the Apocrypha or something. And I haven't been able to find any interviews with him from today...links appreciated, because I want to see him making an ass of himself. On a side note, since salvation (according to Camping) is unmerited and preordained, how hilarious would it be if Richard Dawkins got...

...yeah, I won't torture you with the rest of the song. (Apologies for not having written anything for the past 10 days or so - I've been slacking off and doing nothing  revising fervently for my upcoming exams. For slightly better news, it is Friday aka "beginning of the weekend". And for slightly worse  news...it's apparently the Rapture tomorrow . (Interestingly, the first site I linked to says "best viewed in Internet Explorer"...sigh.) Of course it won't be, but people believe weird things. In the unlikely event that that crazy schmuck Harold Camping is actually right  (as a general rule, anyone saying that the end of the world will happen on such-and-such a date , or using an ancient, largely ambiguous and sometimes contradictory source , tends to be wrong), could one of the 200 million people that have been saved take some pictures and post them on the internet? I'd like to see something before I, as a free-willed sinner, fall uncon...

A story I wrote on a whim. Remember, everyone is Jesus in purgatory . No, I was not on drugs when I wrote this - but I had read The Master and Margarita beforehand. (It's a good book and y'all should read it.)  They sat together like that, man and woman, watching the sunset. He gestured to a decanter on the table, a jug of clear water next to it.  “Wine?” he said. “I’ll water it for you.”  “Thank you,” said the woman, passing him a thin-stemmed glass. Elegantly the man poured in equal quantities of wine and water; her worn hands trembling, she took back the glass and drank deeply, the dying sun shining through the red liquid. “Excellent...is it Falernium?”  The man laughed and shook his head, golden hair flying. “No, it’s Cecubum.”  “It’s really very good.” The woman paused.  “It’s the same wine that your ancestor drank while mine died on a tree.” He pointed to it: an ancient, wizened thing with what looked like bloodstains on its trunk, brownish-black i...

...well, technically what I did yesterday and today, since we started at 5 in the morning yesterday and finished at about 1:15 today (keep in mind I was talking about finishing at 1:15 in the morning and I didn't get any proper sleep...). Important note: Names have NOT been changed, because no-one's done anything wrong. This means you can sue me into oblivion. The reason I'm talking about it is that firstly, it was really fun and secondly, part of it is something you'd want to tell your grandchildren about. You see, the chamber choir (which I'm part of) and CCF from my school were going to dedicate a plaque to old boys who lost their lives in wars at St. George's Memorial Church - incidentally, the chaplain said it was probably going to be the last school plaque dedicated here for the foreseeable future, making it a bit more special for us - and then us choir were going to sing at Menin Gate. I know quite a few choirs sing there anyway, but it's still som...

Basically, you know the "girl language" likes on Facebook? They piss me off, because they're the exact opposite of everything I'd do and they encourage a kind of weird clinginess which I don't like in people. Keep in mind I'm a teenage girl - the exact demographic they're talking about. Granted, I'm one hell of a weird  teenage girl, but having thought my actions through more than most of my peers, I've come to some rather different conclusions. So basically, this is the guide to me not being a total idiot. Me-language: If I don't text you... ...it's not because I'm waiting for you to text me. It's because I don't really text much, and you're better off with an e-mail, a phone call, a message on Facebook or (best of all) a face-to-face meeting. If I'm mad... ...for the love of whatever deity you worship, don't follow me when I storm out of the room in a blind rage. Let me cool down for 45 minutes and talk to m...

Yes, I am alive. I've been reading some of my older posts and they make me cringe...to clarify, that one series I started is on hiatus for the moment, and yes, it will update, just very slowly. But that's for another time. Anyway, I'm doing Romeo and Juliet  for the Shakespeare part of my English GCSEs (both of them). It's not the greatest of Shakespeare's plays (don't know why we couldn't study, say, King Lear  - yes, it is my favourite Shakespeare play - or Othello , but that's OCR being stupid...), but I'd be OK with it were it not for the fact that it's presented as, like, totally the greatest true luuuuuuuuurve story evar. "But Romeo and Juliet  is about true love!" I hear you cry (I have weird voices in my head, don't judge me). "How can you say it's not?!" Here's why. Romeo and Juliet  is not a romance: Romeo's single driving motivation is that he wants to bone Juliet. When he first sees her at the...

First of all, I must apologise for having left this blog unattended for about a week. I've been really busy preparing for holidays...actually, I'm on holiday in France now. The only reasons I'm updating are because 1) this place has wi-fi and 2) I don't like to leave things unattended without an explanation. This is mainly a pointless, rambling post about my holiday, so feel quite free to ignore it utterly. France has been quite good so far - I've been staying in the Dordogne, an area in the south of the country - very pleasant, very rural kind of place. As the cliché goes, it's had its ups and downs and, in the best holiday tradition, it'll continue to have them until Sunday (I'm staying till then). I won't type everything up, so here are the distilled life lessons which I've learnt...now in bullet-point form. Two's company, three's a crowd. There's a reason you don't try and put three people of wildly differing ages together...