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About Me

Scruff
Retired software designer living in Leeds. I teach bridge. I'm a staunch atheist and republican and card-carrying member of the Women's Equality Party.

Favourite Films:

  • Blade Runner
  • The Icpress File
  • Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
  • Leon
  • Once Upon a Time in the West
  • The Hunt for Red October
  • Three Days of The Condor
  • Hannibal
  • Amelie (aka Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain)

Favourite Books:

  • The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins
  • Botanical Latin, William T Stearn
  • Selected Poems, T S Eliot
  • The Dairy Book of Home Cooking

Favourite Foods:

  • Meat and Potato Pie
  • Goat Curry
  • Beef Stew and Dumplings
  • Leek and Potato Soup
  • Macaroni Cheese
  • Lemon Meringue Pie

Favorite Drinks:

  • Tea
  • Chablis
  • Grapefruit Juice
  • Akvavit

Anti-bucket List:

Things I hope I will never have to do in my life.
  • Holiday on a cruise ship
  • Watch Strictly Come Dancing
  • Visit Blackpool
  • Caravan holiday
  • Play golf
  • Go skiing
  • Eat KFC
  • Go to a pantomime
  • Go to a circus
  • Morris dancing
  • Holiday on a canal narrowboat
  • Spa weekend
  • Watch The Sound of Music
  • Eat surf-and-turf of any kind

Popular posts from this blog

Ridiculous Snooker Competition Format

  This year the format for the Championship League Snooker competition is very inequitable. It works like this. There are twenty-five entrants, of which seven are placed in Group 1. They play a round-robin tournament and the top four then play a knockout to decide the winner of the group. The winner qualifies for the Winners Group, and the remaining other four of the top five progress to Group 2, joining three other players from the original twenty-five. The bottom two are eliminated from the competition. This whole process is repeated until Group 7, when only the winner qualifies for the Winners Group, the other six players getting eliminated. The Winners Group then contains the seven players who won a group. Again, they play a round-robin and the top four play a knockout for tournament winner. Players win money by winning frames, getting through to the play-offs, winning a group or being runner-up, and by making the highest break in a group. The rates for these are differen...
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Rescuing People from Cults

It isn't hard to imagine a child being brought up by parents within a small community of bizarre cult beliefs. The child would initially accept the programming without question no matter how damaging, because that is what small infants are hard-wired to do. Later they might begin to question the ideas, but everyone they know would profess conviction and it is easy to see the difficulty of snubbing their entire community and becoming a social outcast. If we were able to rescue the victim from the grip of the cult, then even as an adult it would be difficult to reverse the damage. We would need to train the critical thinking skills that all cults must suppress to exist. Our efforts might well look like the popular notion of 'brainwashing'. This is precisely what the Chinese are being accused of with the Uighurs. Some are calling it "psychological torture", and even the BBC are calling it "systematic brainwashing". "Wait a minute," you say, "...
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Reducing Regional Funding, and Calling It Levelling-Up

The most important part of addressing regional inequality in the UK is funding. The new UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF) is due to launch in April 2022. But what the government seem keen to hide is that this is just a replacement for EU structural funding that will soon end. The EU's European Regional Development Fund and European Social Fund are allocated by looking at per capita GDP by region, and then member state governments have discretionary powers to reallocate some funds between regions. The UK used these powers to reassign some funds from England to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. We also had an agreement for funds to be administered by our devolved governments. These two funds together support innovation and research, information technology, small- and medium-sized enterprises, employment-related projects and vocational skills training, including youth employment, as well as the promotion of a low-carbon economy. For the seven-year tranche of funding 2014-2020, t...
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