Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

Much as we would like to have been able to leave the bathroom well alone after our last experience with a plumber, it’s starting to look like we’ll have to undertake a more major upgrade to the bathroom and possibly something really major will be needing done to the kitchen as well.

That being the case we’ve started revisiting the bathroom faucet issue once more. Although we had all of these replaced earlier in the year if we’re needing to redo the whole bathroom this time then we’d be wanting to take a little more time over the issue rather than going for the quick fix option that we did the last time around.

Regardless of the work needing done in the bathroom, the kitchen is definitely going to need some quite major work done on it over the next few months courtesy of the leak (or, probably, leaks) that we’ve developed. Quite where we’d start on that though is an issue for another day!

Last night Britain’s got Talent rewrote the rules of auditions for itself by allowing Hollie and her mother to get another, undeserved, chance to perform her act. Well, her second act I suppose you could say.

That’s really no surprise as the judges this time around seem to be completely biased in favour of the “cute & vulnerable” where a child performer was involved. Hollie merely took this advantage much further than the other children on the show already have.

Whilst it wasn’t a surprise that they’d do this, it does show just how much the show can get taken in by that cute & vulnerable label. That would be fine if the child concerned was very good but Hollie just isn’t. Whether she’s got the potential to be, I don’t know, but at the moment it just looked like a pushy mother wanted her little girl to succeed regardless of anything else.

Although it’s notionally all down to a public vote in reality the judges by their comments can exert a lot of influence on which acts will go forward. They’ve made no allowances for lots of very professional acts in this and previous editions of the show but then they didn’t fall into that cute & vulnerable category.

Sadly this time around a poor performance from Hollie knocked a very good one from Greg Pritchard. That’s just not right.

Let’s face it, many people would love a job where they could sit out on the beach and claim that they were working.

Whilst it’s clearly not an option for everyone, there’s getting to be quite a growth in information jobs which would let you do exactly that. Well, in principle anyway: as always, it’s rarely so simple as it might appear.

If you consider the very popular route of blogging, you’ll find that the vast majority of blogs don’t make any sizeable amount of money. Why? Well, the normal route of using adsense doesn’t work particularly well with sites with dynamic content as it usually takes adsense a couple of days to get the keyword targeting right by which time your blog will have moved on and a different set of keywords would be relevant. Secondly, you need major traffic or very well targeted traffic for affiliate schemes to work.

However, there is the option of doing sponsored posts which can be profitable even with relatively low traffic volumes. Typically you can make around $20 per day on a site with PR2 or above by writing three or four articles each day of, usually, 50 to 200 words each. If your blog gets to PR5 or over you can do really well with this option.

Other potential options are selling e-books or charging for subscriptions which are popular with some making money online blogs. There’s even SubHub which might eventually evolve into a worthwhile venture for the participants although at the moment it’s mainly an article repository for Internet business articles with a sideline in running up and hosting custom blog templates (at a rather exorbitant price).

Naturally, you don’t need to choose one single route to making money online. Personally, I do sponsored posts on blogs and also have a range of adsense funded sites with subscription options.

Everyone and their dog tends to look for aliens from outer space but the number of people looking for time travellers is very much smaller. There isn’t really a good reason for that on the whole. After all, absolute proof that time travel was possible would cause just as great a stir on earth as would absolute proof that aliens were out there.

It would be impossible to find a time traveller though, wouldn’t it?

It certainly would if they were really careful or even if they were careless but took the trouble to remove traces of their visits after the event. Would either situation apply though? Somehow I just can’t see it applying on all of their trips nor for that matter on any of them so long as their target time period was well before the invention of the time machine itself. After all, why bother trying to cover your tracks when anyone who knew about you would be classed as a nutcase?

If we take it as read that they wouldn’t bother to cover their tracks to any great extent then how about trying to find them? Where, or rather when, would you look?

I suspect that we can also take it for granted that they’d be visiting ever famous event over the range of their time machine but realistically we’d never know for sure that they’d been to any time much before the 1900s because the documentary evidence that we would need to detect them simply isn’t around. They might well need to be more careful any time from about 10 years ago when CCTV became commonplace too and, of course, the requirements for providing ID might make extended stays in the past more difficult too.

However, there is one event that would fit our requirements ideally and probably fit theirs too.

That’s the Titanic disaster.

Why? Well, it’s very well documented so we have the potential of discovering them and they would like well documented events too so that they’d know where they could go and, in this case, who they needed to be. The plus point for us is that if we assume that their time machine goes back with them and they need it to return home, then they have to be one of the survivors (on the assumption that at least the mark #1 time machine would be a fairly sizeable piece of equipment).

So, in principle, all we need to do is to check through the records of those survivors to find someone who a) doesn’t have a past more than a few days prior to them getting on the ship and b) disappeared after they returned to England (or Ireland). That task is easier than you might think as the Encyclopedia Titanicia has biographies of all of the survivors and, of course, you can ignore the first class passengers (too famous) and those who were part of families which narrows down the field somewhat.

So what’s stopping you?

So long as you haven’t chosen a gite buried in the depths of rural France, chances are that you’ll have a great selection of nightlife to choose from. Naturally, the very best selection is in Paris and, of course, there’s the daytime attractions too.

You’ll naturally want to see the Eiffel Tower (take the stairs to the first level then the elevator to reduce your queuing time) although the views from the top don’t look much like Paris as obviously the Eiffel Tower itself isn’t in them! Museums are incredibly thick on the ground and the best are the Louvre, the Musee d’Orsay and the Pompidou Centre. Whilst, in theory, you could do all three in one trip you’d be crazy to consider it as after a few hours even the finest Matisse just gives you an “oh hum” feeling. There are just too many magnificent works of art to see to do justice to even one of the museums in a single day.

In Paris, hotels are all over the place and with prices ranging from around the EUR 30 range way up to thousands depending on where you choose and how fancy the place is. Don’t neglect “serviced apartments” either as they are often in very well placed locations.

Since the Paris Metro system is fantastic you can easily choose hotels in the suburbs and be at the centre very quickly. They’re usually considerably cheaper than hotels right in the centre and often in much quieter areas. The only time when you can’t do this is on July 14th when a number of key Metro stations are closed.