Samuel Shiro

News in Briefs 21/05/12

At the time of writing, Chelsea have just won the European Championship for the first time in their history and their ultimate goal of buying every major club trophy has come to fruition. Obviously, its sport that’s dominated the latter end of the week, but Greece decided to pop up yet again and ruin everybody’s economic recovery.

Political Oops of the Week

My political oops of the week may actually be a tad controversial as I’m choosing the G8 commitment to keeping Greece in the Euro and promoting growth. Let’s look at what they are trying to do. They have a country on its knees without a stable government and they want to pump more and more money into it in order to promote growth and help it recover.

Now, this is just looking at the problem on paper. On paper the solution works and everything should be fine and dandy, however it doesn’t work like this. We live in a world of capitalism, and capitalism can only grow if private investors invest in that country. What moron is going to invest in Greece? Nobody will trust that country at all as it has no growth prospects and nobody is attempting to take the first move.

Pump — Keep pumping, maybe one day it'll work.

Politicians can spill their silly words as much as they like, but no investor with any ounce of success will buy into it. Eventually, this is going to collapse like a pack of cards. There can be no recovery without a reset button. It would be best to let them collapse and then use the money we would have used pumping cash into a pointless cause to save Europe and limit the collapse. But they won’t do that. Within a few years we are going to be on our knees with the rest of Europe, and there will be a lot of violence.

The Painful…

Will Smith was in the news this week as his Men in Black 3 premier in Russia turned violent when a reporter attempted to kiss him on the lips. He didn’t take too kind of this so a swift backhanded slap ended the reporter’s crusade to kiss a black, American film star. But the shocking thing was that Will Smith actually apologised in his next interview, which is kind of strange since he was the victim here. If a random guy tries to kiss you on the lips then you punch him in the face immediately.

TMZ.com reported that this wasn’t an incident which is out of the ordinary for the Ukrainian reporter in question, though, as he apparently makes his name by attempting to kiss unsuspecting celebrities.

…And the Pointless

Do you remember those times where we see someone from reality TV, especially Big Brother, and you are internally screaming “Please, for the love of humanity, please just die.”? I do, in fact that’s why I stopped watching that sort of stuff as it makes me go a little crazy, but the medication does help. Jade Goody was famous for passing on when she was under 30, and it surely wasn’t going to be the last victim of an early death if we look at the lifestyles some of these celebrities lead today.

It happened again quite recently actually as a Big Brother star from series 10 died. Sophia Brown, a Lupus sufferer (for those who don’t know, it’s an ulcerative skin disease), has reportedly passed away at the age of 30 (yes, another one who couldn’t make it over 30). As of this writing, the cause of death was unknown. However, the way I see it is that it’s just removing a small skid mark from the underwear of the world, and yet it’s received massive coverage over multiple news websites. It’s quite amazing how someone so irrelevant can gain more coverage than a heroic individual saving someone from a burning building, for example.

The so Outrageous that it’s Borderline Hilarious

Some things are just not supposed to appear in a meal. These things are known as meal breakers. Lately, a hash brown from McDonalds had a deep friend giant insect baked into it, but 14-year-old Ryan Hart had a meal breaker of his own as he found part of a human finger in his meal. The Arby’s restaurant in Michigan admitted that the finger had most likely come from a worker who had injured themselves and then left the area. Although, it does confuse me exactly how no worker noticed that somebody had just chopped their finger off in the first place. Still, if they did then we wouldn’t be able to see one of these meal breakers in action.

McDonalds grill — How in the blue hell did nobody notice that?

A Positive Outlook for the Week

I’ll be honest, this is going to be a terrible week for me. Firstly, people are still going to be worrying about the Eurozone, and then handling it badly. But at the same time I’m going to have to watch a load of utter tosh about the Olympic Relay. Yes, we get it, the torch is going around a large part of the country. It doesn’t need a news bulletin every few hours, seriously. Oh and the Jubilee again. 60 years of sitting on one’s behind, waving, and pretending to care about poor people through a charity doesn’t warrant millions and millions of pounds for a celebration.

So next week will be as bleak and irritating after all…

Student Loan Debt, Insert Sarcastic Slow Clap Here

We all remember the student protests and everything else that came with the government’s decision to boost tuition fees up to £9,000 a year. And the Liberal Democrats are paying for most of it. But there was something that was forgotten in the debate over education: the government promised that these additional costs to the state would peak at about £50bn in 2030.

Well that may have been a little bit of a miscalculation/error/blatant lie as a new study by Andrew McGettigan, for the Intergenerational Foundation, has revealed that it could be around the £100bn mark instead. And he did this by measuring the potential impact of allowing students to pay back only if they are earning at least £21,000 a year.

If this is true – which at the moment it looks like it’s turning out to be – then we can easily see why. Let’s look at why there are so many people going to university in the first place. This originally started a few years ago when the Labour Party thought it would be a good idea to get around 50% of all British teenagers into university. So they did that. But when the economic situation deteriorated they realised that allowing so many students to enter university at £3,000 a year wasn’t really that sustainable anymore as universities generally can’t afford to take on that many students at that level whilst sustaining themselves.

So the latest government took a little bit of a u-turn and decided to let universities charge up to £9,000 a year; with only a few universities with special consideration being allowed to charge the full price. So what happened? Inevitably, the main universities charged the full amount, but then everybody decided to follow and “special consideration” seemed to melt away like recent voter turnouts. Ok, that didn’t go to plan. That then led to a 9% reduction in the number of people applying to university on the next application cycle.

But the problem is they have also raised the level at which students have to start paying back their £9,000 a year student loan, to £21,000. This would be fine if economic times were great and people were riding to work on golden horses, but that’s not the case. So now the government is lending out £9,000 a year to students who won’t be able to ever pay back that loan.

Let’s look at the facts. £9,000 a year + maintenance loans for many = £27,000 minimum for the minority of students who didn’t need maintenance loans. Students need to have a job paying £21,000 a year in order to start paying back their student loan. Now take a look at the starter jobs these days. Those jobs are offering salaries of between £16,000 and £18,000, most of the time. So the student would have to remain in that job for quite a few years before hitting that £21,000 threshold.

The government now has to wait for their loan.

Another problem, though, is that many students have been misled. They are taking degrees that are completely worthless. And, yes, media studies is a worthless degree, and no I don’t care about which teacher made themselves a success from it, they are in the tiny minority. Those degrees won’t get them jobs. And that’s not all, even those students who are doing a degree that happens to be worth a damn have been misled as they believe that a degree warrants them a job. This means they will have absolutely zero experience as they are thinking that they are going to swagger in the door and kick that poor uneducated, working class buffoon out.

I read a BBC report last year that talked about how many employers find that graduates are not ready for the real world of work and can’t even do basic things. That sort of thing is rife, and it’s precisely why many graduates are out of work. Employers are rarely interested in students with a degree and little experience. A degree is a piece of paper, and not a lot else.

The unemployment rate for young people in this country is disgraceful, and many of them are graduates. So how does the government think it’s going to get its money back anytime soon? The economic crisis isn’t going to fix itself, and developments in the Eurozone only look to be making things worse. The answer is that the government won’t be getting its money back at all. Instead, the burden will be shifted back to the public, so now you’ve just increased the deficit due to your pathetic handling of the student loan situation.

It makes me wonder why they just didn’t keep university funding up and then leave the fees alone instead. Or, alternatively, they could have just stopped promoting the idea that every teenager should go to university. That’s nothing but a blind effort to get these young people off of the unemployment figures. The lower the figures the better the political situation for the government. You have to pity the saps who fell for it, though, don’t you?

What do you think about the current situation with university education, and how do you think they should have gone about it?

A Lack of Dental Implants Can Cause More than a Broken Smile

It’s true. If you need dental implants and your dentist doesn’t offer them then you are in trouble. And this is not just because you are stuck with a broken smile that vaguely resembles the keys on a piano. Now you have to go through the arduous task of finding someone who does, but if there’s only one or two people in your area who can do it then you could end up paying out a lot of money.

But why don’t more dentists offer dental implants as part of their itinerary? Well the Dental Economics website sheds some light on this in an article by Anthony Sclar, a Miami-based oral technician.

Inferior supporting team.
More training.
Some dentists just don’t enjoy it.

Ok, if the dentist doesn’t enjoy it then there’s not a whole lot you can do about any of this. Most dentists tend to work in private practice so they are entitled to pick and choose which procedures they offer.

Broken teeth — This is probably why some dentists are not into this stuff.

In some cases, if an inferior team is present then there’s not a whole lot they can do about that either. If they have the ability to bring in a new team then that would be a good idea, but does the hassle really warrant the increased revenue? Some will say yes and some will say no.

Finally, let’s take a look at the dentists who just can’t be bothered. It’s their right to decide on what procedures they offer, but this might say a lot more about your dentist than you think. If they are too lazy to take a few training courses then maybe they’re too lazy to really care about your child’s toothache?

What will be the future of dental implants, though? Well the dental implant industry all around the world is on the up as more and more people are able to pay for this procedure. For example, the 8^th of May 2012 saw a press release from Healthcare Global talk about how ceramic dental implants are now available in Maryland, U.S.

But the future of the dental implant industry is already bright in the UK, because despite the fact that this country is dominated by the public healthcare industry, in the form of the NHS, the dental industry bucks the trend as it’s nearly completely privatised. So finding dental implants in Sheffield, London, Manchester, or Birmingham is not actually that difficult since many dentists prefer to keep away from the NHS.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Magic Poo Machine

It sounds like a great title for a book does it not? Ok, maybe it’s just me then. Even though the title sounds too unreal to possibly be believable, it’s true. There’s a poo machine on our planet right now. And no, it’s not your grandmother or your bald-headed cousin fresh out of the womb. It’s actually in a museum in Tasmania.

Australia can be a strange place and this is just one of the reasons why. Dubbed as an ‘adult Disneyland’, the Museum of Old and New Art features a number of works, such as Egyptian mummies and pieces of art by young artists from all over the world.

However, none of these is the main attraction. And that is the legendary poo machine. Created by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, this machine is designed to replicate the human digestive system. It does so through a number of glass receptacles that hang in a row. The machine is then fed from one end and the device steadily digests its meal and then ejects it at 2pm daily.

The truth is that many visitors can’t handle the smell and some even throw up. I’ve no idea where they get its fuel from, but I’d like to think that it’s not from the staff. Surprisingly, the machine is actually hated by many visitors, and yet it also gets the most visits.

Now this certainly does challenge one’s interpretation of what art is. To me it seems more like a piece of engineering genius than anything else. If you look at the picture we have provided here then it looks more like an elegant machine than art. I would even argue that it could be used as a teaching tool to demonstrate the digestive system. Obviously, it wouldn’t be a live demonstration due to health and safety, however I think that a video link would be good.

This is not the only machine like this, though. This machine, which is actually named the Cloaca, is part of a series. Apparently, there are about five similar machines that have already been created by the artist. One of these poo machines will actually be exhibited at the Louvre in the very near future. Just don’t put it anywhere near the Mona Lisa or her facial expression will turn into a frown!

News in Briefs 13/05/12

When we do the ‘political oops of the week’ it’s normally a metaphorical oops, but this week it’s a literal one. We also have painful mixed with stupidity, as well as lots of other news. It’s actually quite a good week for this column because we had to cut stuff which would have made it last week, the week before that, etc.

Political Oops of the Week

As promised, this week’s oops is literal. Have you ever been watching the television only to find out you just won an election to become the mayor of the town? No? Me neither, but one Italian man did just that. Isn’t it strange how it always seems to be a town in the middle of rural Italy that comes up with these stories?

50-year-old Fabio Borsatti rose to fame in the mountain town of Cimolais as he became the mayor of the town. The truth is he actually just stood as a candidate as a favour to a friend who was the reigning mayor of the town. The reason for this is that he thought that it would seem a little sketchy if he was the only candidate, and therefore winning by default.

But run he did, and through all the odds he overcame everything and found out about it when somebody rang him up to congratulate him whilst he was watching the football. Mayor Borsatti even admitted that he didn’t even want to become mayor, however he was stuck with it.

You can’t really begin to understand how unlikely this occurrence was until you find out that his own family voted against him.

Good luck running a town like Cimolais when you didn’t even have any policies to start with, Mayor Borsatti!

The Painful…

Some people are just destined to be morons. This latest moron is British woman Jane Beirne, 57, who just had major surgery to reattach her heel after she slipped off a jetty that had no handrails in Israel. She hit a piece of metal and it left her heel hanging off of her foot. Naturally, she had no travel insurance so she had to pay around £10,000 to have it reattached.

She is now attempting to sue the mayor of Ma-alot Tarshikha in Israel because of her injury. If you can’t already see the flaw in her plan then let me enlighten you.

First of all, she is trying to sue the town on the basis that there were no handrails on the jetty. This would be completely understandable if it happened in this country, however there are no such rules over there. So she is now attempting to apply our rules and standards to another country. Fail number one.

Now, she honestly believes that she can use the solicitors of Britain to sue a town half a world away. And this is despite the fact that legal advice has told her that she would be unable to lodge a successful claim. Fail number two.

Finally, the fact she is out of pocket is that she forgot to take out travel insurance in the first place. She booked the holiday online so she is either just plain stupid or this is a convenient excuse to attempt to sue somebody. My verdict is that she tried to save money and is she now looking for a convenient excuse to get her money back. Fail number three, and you’re out!

…And the Pointless

This week it was the TIME Magazine cover which held a picture of a three-year-old breastfeeding that sparked controversy this week. Supposedly, people were upset because of the age of the child. But my question is why does it matter?

And the concept of breastfeeding is not the only reason I’m talking about this. I’m talking about this because people still seem to think that it’s their place to tell people how to raise their child. Now I’m not saying that inciting hatred or beating them is right as they are blanket issues which come into contact with the law of the land. But this breastfeeding picture in TIME Magazine seems to imply that people should be able to tell other people exactly how long to do something for, when to do something, and if they don’t do it they judge them.

Take a look at the slogan on the front: “Are You Mom Enough?” Already it’s implying that those who don’t breastfeed for this long are in some way inferior to other mothers. The article inside might not imply that, but the fact is that people are going to glean that sort of impression when they read the front cover.

Seriously, mind your own damn business!

The So Outrageous Yet Borderline Hilarious

Cockfighting is illegal in every US state, however it still goes on in places like California due to the fact that getting caught for illegal cockfighting only incurs a misdemeanour, whereas in other states it amounts to a serious criminal offense. The cocks (pun intended) got their revenge this week, though, as one man felt the full force of one cock (pun is still intended), and simultaneously suffered the consequences of breaking the law on cocks (pun will always be intended from now).

During the illegal cockfighting in the central California county of Tulare, the two animals had sharp knives attached to their legs; which is common practice. But Jose Luis Ochoa, aged 35, who was attending the fight, got more than he bargained for when he was attacked by one of the participant’s cocks.

The cock stabbed him in his leg with one of the knives and he was pronounced dead when he arrived at the hospital two hours later. At the moment, they are debating whether it was the fault of the people present that he died as he wasn’t given immediate treatment, but the fact is that he’s dead and it must have been a serious injury.

The coroner’s report reads “sharp force injury” to the right calf of Mr. Ochoa. Animal lovers will be smiling everywhere right now.

A Positive Outlook for the Week

Do you remember the time when you find a comedian who you really love for years and years and years, but as he gets older he steadily gets worse. You stay and watch him, but eventually people tell him he needs to stop. He doesn’t stop, though. He continues until you just want to kill him with a rusty hammer made out of the tears of the mass unemployed. Jeremy Hunt is like that, although he was never loved. But this week, I think he’s going to finally go.

So maybe next week won’t be so bleak and irritating after all…

The Multimillion Pound Art Sale and the Joke that is Contemporary Art

If you take a look at the picture I have provided you just below this paragraph then what would you say about this example of contemporary art? Painted by an eight-year-old, bland and boring, basic and amateurish? I would say all of those things, but what would you say if I told you that someone paid £53.8m for it?

Red, Orange, Yellow — The 'masterpiece' on show.

It’s no joke; somebody broke the record for the highest price ever paid for a piece of contemporary art at auction.

The piece itself was painted by Mark Rothko and is entitled “Orange, Red, Yellow”. And if you look at some of his other work then you will discover that he has made a fortune on the same idea. This is just different shades of colour on a canvas in quite frankly basic and pathetic shapes.

When I want to see art I want to see skill. And that’s what one of the dictionary definitions of art is: “Skilled.” Leonardo Da Vinci, Picasso, Cezanne, Botticelli, all of these were skilled at what they did. This is an insult to art and this is precisely why many people believe that contemporary art is utter trash. I’m one of these people and I just hope that whoever paid for this realises how stupid he is.

And I know that fans of this are going to try and put people off with their elitist rhetoric about how some people are too stupid to see the true meaning in it. But you can find meanings in anything if you like, it doesn’t make the item you are taking a meaning from art, though.

Take a stereotypical yellow, number two test pencil, with eraser, and here is my meaning for it:

“This pencil demonstrates the transitioning of the past to the modern day as this tool has been transformed from the creative purposes it was once instilled with to the rigid structuring of modern day life. The point is the crowning glory of what can symbolise the pointlessness of the modern educational system and the stifling of creative thought. And, yet, at the same time, the fact that it creates these feelings is a demonstration of artistic genius in itself.”

I could go on, but it demonstrates that you can see a meaning in even the most mundane things.

I’ve also noticed something else quite interesting as well. If we look back to the past, and I mean centuries prior to this one, the skilled were praised. The skilled were praised in a society that was rather primitive. And those skilled artists of today are still incredibly difficult to replicate in our modern age, without the aid of computers. But as we have advanced throughout the ages we have actually opted for more primitive forms of art; and this is what we call contemporary art.

The only thing that is skilled here is the fact that Mark Rothko managed to convince someone to pay that much for something that was most likely painted within a day.

This is nothing but a few colours splashed on to the page in a childlike manner. As we advance further, are artists just going to debase themselves further in a sad attempt to seem different?

That’s something that has always bothered me about the art industry. They are so desperate to move away from mainstream society that they are willing to damage their own art because of it.

This further enhances my view that contemporary art is based off of nothing but connections and who has the most cash. Granted, to an extent, it was always like this. But no artist can succeed with things like this without having powerful and influential connections and lots of money to do the talking.