This is so amazing! Read the whole thing here!

By the way, read the article on baking classes on today’s newspaper. Organised by Artistiq Sugarcraft and Kitchen Capers… my mom and I are enthusiastically looking for classes to enrol in and recipes. Cupcake decorating is sooo fun!

My mom and I think that she should bake, I should decorate. I told her that I’ll enrol her in the classes and pay for them for her Christmas present! Hehe.

Having attended the launch of the Demos pamphlet “Building Character” a couple of weeks ago, it was quite interesting to see how the findings of the report were covered in the press. Mostly, it seems, it is a sidenote in a hoo ha about lesbian parents.

I remember taking note that there was a journalist from The Sunday Times behind me. Lo and behold in The Sunday Times that week: attention grabbing headline (albeit at the bottom of the page, somewhere in the middle of the paper), “Lesbian parents better at raising children“. Assemblage of bits on lesbian parents, gay adoption, a quote from Mary Cheney, that hadn’t found a home in the print of the Times yet, spun around a quote from Stephen Scott who was on the panel of the Building Character event.

Stephen Scott of the National Academy for Parenting Practitioners, which joint-hosted the event with Demos, did refer in passing to research that suggested lesbian parents were “better” than a man and a woman. Hmm, and then strangely that little juicy snippet was what was most discussed from the whole thing in the papers. Discussed by The Daily Mail and Jeremy Clarkson…

Thing is, Jeremy Clarkson’s column in The Sunday Times the next week pointed quite well to how silly it was to say that, definitively, lesbians make better parents. And (worryingly?) Clarkson was funnier than I thought he was (although still nowhere near properly funny, he was starting from a very low estimation). Similarly, a piece on the blog of the think tank Civitas questions what this research was. Civitas is a think tank that I don’t hold in very high esteem either, and amusingly all the quotes from “newspaper reports” were from that original Sunday Times article, so maybe it wasn’t as “widely reported” as Civitas insinuates. (Shame on me too for only scouring the pages of The Sunday Times for references to something I attended. At least by attending I know that Scott’s mention of lesbian parents was not in a speech *ahem, Civitas*).

Anyhow, it’s come to Clarkson and Civitas (god forbid) to asking what-the-hell-is-this-research?!?!? Shame on you, Mr. most-popular Sunday broadsheet, for such a cobbled-together article.

What I found on the NAPP website was “Evaluating the evidence: are lesbians better parents?“. This, quite rightly, tentatively concludes that:

“Although children with lesbian mothers, on average, do slightly (but significantly) better on some measures than children raised by opposite sex parents, a positive relationship with one’s father is also strongly associated with positive child outcomes… Research consistently and clearly suggests that regardless of parent gender and family structure, children who report a close and positive relationship with their mother and father are more likely to feel good about themselves and do better in school and later adulthood.” [italics in original]

The point about good parent-child relationships was the very point of the whole Building Character event where this recent lesbian parent hoo ha began. It was the point being made when this, rather distracting point, was thrown in: quality relationships matter more than family structure.

The research on lesbian parents, from what I have seen, does seem rather dubious though. I took a look at Golombok et al “Children with Lesbian Parents: A Community Study“, the first cited research in the above menioned NAPP review. Here I’d be inclined to agree with Jeremy Clarkson; “You can’t possibly draw any conclusions after testing 20 lesbians.” The sample was tiny. Not quite as tiny as 20, but a grand total of 39 lesbian-mother families.

As I, and Civitas (hmm), suspected it also appeared that the lesbian-mother families on average were of a higher socioeconomic status that the straight-mother families. The qualities of better parenting were defined as less use of smacking, greater frequency of imaginative play, etc. which also correlate well with middle-class families in general. Findings from elsewhere that daughters of lesbians are more likely to aspire to be a doctor or lawyer or “professions that were traditionally considered male” and children brought up in an all-female household are “more confident in championing social justice” (see that first Sunday Times article), could also readily be attributed to these being more middle-class traits. It does not necessarilly follow that lesbian parents are a causal factor of this “better” parenting. A common sense answer would be that lesbian parents are more likely to be middle-class and these determinants of better parenting are generally reflective of middle-class parenting. Girls from your average middle-class home want to be doctors and lawyers and were most likely not smacked either.

Elsewhere in that Sunday Times (15 Nov- I am so slow in writing stuff. Have a decent memory though) were graphs of the number of women compared to men entering the professions across the last 3-4 decades – they all steadily climbed upward. Annoyingly the graphs aren’t on the web version, but I can tell you that last year 60% of new solicitors were women. But I digress…

Yes, so this study by Golombok et al did not account for socio-economic status bearing an infuence on the results. They got some stats on the socio-economic make up of the sample, but then dismissed its importance. I think it’s important. The covariates the study accounts for are instead just the child’s age and the number of children in the family. I’m not a social scientist (yet…) but I wouldn’t agree that “no group difference was found for social class”  when about 1/10 lesbian mothers had no qualifications compared to 1/4 straight mothers. Surely it may well be something like this that has the greater impact on parenting style and children’s aspirations?

Without good longitudinal studies of gay parenting, which also factors in variables of social class and education, and is done on a much larger scale of 39, we shouldn’t be making any suggestions as to lesbians being “better parents.” And refraining from slipping a remark as Stephen Scott did at the Demos launch wouldn’t go a miss either…

“

The November 22 2009 edition of The Sunday Times did a special story about the rise of online video websites in Singapore. One of the artworks I did for Wacom/Klik made it in.

Here’s the original poster and then some…

Sunday Times has written an article about my book The Little Red Helicopter on 15 November 2009. So happy

Sunday Times article about The Little Red Helicopter

Sunday Times write up about Little Red Helicopter Team

Jordache saw this in The Sunday Times. She sez…

I just finished reading an article in STM (why I torment myself this way is another subject entirely) about the “forgotten children” of Australia who were taken from their parents and put into orphanges. This particular article revolves around two children who were taken away from their mother as a result of her being an alcoholic. So, with this in mind, you can understand my total jaw dropping shock at seeing an advertisement FOR WINE right in the middle of the article. Not only that, but the wine’s tag line is “Where Secret’s Live” and throughout the article this poor woman is describing how she has lived WITH THIS TERRIBLE SECRET her whole life. Is this a joke? It has to be a joke right?

Not the first time New Zealand wine has been featured. Is that a greenstone niple ring?

Il leader del FAIR lascia l’atto di comparizione su un camion presso la fattoria di Slab Murphy

Willie Frazer, alla testa del Families Acting Innocent Relatives, ha cercato di consegnare un mandato di comparizione a Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy, prominente repubblicano di South Armagh.
Frazer ritiene che Murphy sia colpevole dell’omicidio di suo padre, ex soldato dell’Ulster Defence Regiment, colpito a morte nell’agosto del 1975 a Whitecross.
Il leader del FAIR ha dichiarato che questo non sarà l’ultimo atto giudiziario ad essere stato consegnato, ma bensì la sua battaglia continuerà fino a che le strade del Nord non verranno ripulite.
Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy, ritenuto ex Capo di Stato Maggiore dell’Irish Republican Army, nel 1985 venne accusato dal Sunday Times di aver guidato una campagna di attentati dell’IRA, in Gran Bretagna.
Nel 1987, citò in giudizio il giornale per diffamazione, ma senza successo.
Medesima conclusione anche per il nuovo processo, che si svolse nel maggio del 1998.
Murphy lasciò poi cadere il caso nel 1999.
Fu costretto a pagare centinaia di migliaia di sterline in spese legali, a seguito di indagini svolte dal Criminal Assets Bureau nella Repubblica di Irlanda e dalla UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency.
“Non possiamo rincorrere ogni individuo, ma possiamo perseguire i padrini e questo è il primo di almeno una mezza dozzina di atti giudiziari, che saranno consegnati.”
Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy, assente al momento della consegna del mandato di comparizione, avrà ora a disposizione 14 giorni per rispondere.

Traduci l’articolo…


Slab Murphy served with writ (U TV)
Victims’ campaigner Willie Frazer has attempted to serve a High Court writ at the South Armagh farm of prominent republican Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy.
Mr Frazer is claiming damages for the murder of his father, a part-time UDR soldier, who was shot dead at Whitecross in August 1975.
Mr Frazer told UTV the move was part of his campaign to get justice for hundreds of victims of IRA violence.
“Today victims have taken the first step in the fight for justice,” Mr Frazer, the founder of the pressure group Families Acting for Innocent Relatives, said.
“This will not be the last writ served and we will continue to fight for truth and justice.
“We will not rest until we make our streets a safer place,” he added.
In 1985, Slab Murphy was accused by the Sunday Times of directing an IRA bombing campaign in Britain.
In 1987, he unsuccessfully sued the paper for libel in Dublin.
He also lost the retrial held in May 1998.
Murphy, who is also widely believed to be a former Chief of Staff of the IRA, eventually dropped the case in 1999.
He has paid out hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal settlement following investigations by the Criminal Assets Bureau in the Republic of Ireland and the UK’s serious organised Crime Agency.
“I made a commitment that I would do everything in my power to hold the godfathers responsible,” Mr Frazer said.
“We can’t go after every individual, but we can go after the godfathers and this is the first of at least half a dozen writs which will be served.”
There was no sign of Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy at the yard, outside Crossmaglen.
Mr Frazer left the writ in the cab of a lorry in the yard.
The prominent republican has 14 days to respond.

Check out this article from The Sunday Times Magazine on Mariah Carey. Very well-written by John Arlidge and very interesting.

Mariah Carey: The gloves are off

The singer drops the sugar-coated simpering and shoots from the lip about the music industry and her new business model to save it — which could make her the world’s richest recording artist

“Would you like a drink? I’d get you one myself but it’s a little hard for me to get up right now.” Mariah Carey isn’t kidding. She’s lying on her back in a darkened room in the basement of the TV Asahi studios in Tokyo, dressed in a black miniskirt, a leopard-print Dolce & Gabbana trench coat and 8in Gucci bitch stacks. Her stylist, Blair, is “jujjing” her hair to make sure each lock falls “just so” over lashes that are as lacquered as a coffee table. “Go ahead, ruin it,” she says when Blair tugs too hard. “Wait ’til I’m done speaking, dahling,” the singer scolds when her manager, Louise, interrupts to ask what diet she’s on today. The singer is surrounded by Hello Kitty dolls that her fans have customised to look like her, complete with breasts so big the toys look like they’ve got footballs stuffed down their crop tops.

What’s on Carey’s mind? Not whether she can hit the metal-piercing high notes in her version of I Want to Know What Love Is. She’s covering the Foreigner ballad on Music Station, Japan’s Top of the Pops, in a few minutes’ time. No, she is — bless — thinking about puppies. “My dog is having babies,” she says. “Two or three puppies. Can you put that in your magazine?” Well, welcome to planet Mariah, the glittery, kittenish, snowflake place where a girl can do just what she wants, however infantile. In a city where teenage girls — dammit, grown women — dress up as schoolgirls, Carey has never looked more at home.

But then something remarkable happens. Carey sits forward, takes a sip of bitter pomegranate juice and frowns. “Frickin’ idiots! Big, powerful music-industry executives made a giant mistake, and now we’re all paying the price. Frickin’ idiots!” The 12-year-old girl sitting in her bedroom worrying about boys, make-up and simpering over “ickle” animals is gone. In her place is a steely 39-year-old who has just flown in from Seoul, has been working since 6.30am and whose voice is suddenly so hoarse and sardonic she sounds like Alan Sugar at the end of a bad day. “Those stupid executives may have given up on the music business but I haven’t. It’s bleak out there for musicians. We have to do something.”

There are many things you expect from an encounter with Mariah Carey — ear-drum-endangering squeaks, emotional fragility, an unshiftingly winsome gaze, and bowls of M&M’s — just the blue ones. A reasoned critique of the state of the music industry is not one of them. But under the skin of this twittering popsicle is a businesswoman who has sold more singles, albums and downloads in the US than any other female artist, even Madonna. The multi-Grammy-award-winner has had more US No 1 hits than any other soloist dead or alive. Her first five singles each went to No1 — another record — and she has more platinum singles than any other female artist. Three more Billboard 100 No 1s and she will overhaul the 29-year-old record held by the Beatles for the most US No 1s ever.

She’s also one of the few people successfully to screw a major record label. Virgin wanted to buy her out of a multi-album $100m contract after her 2001 semi-autobiographical film, Glitter, and companion album of the same name flopped. She took the label for a cool $49m, put the Glitter away and came back with a critically lauded album, The Emancipation of Mimi, that put her back on the hot list. And if that weren’t enough, she might now — just might — have stumbled upon the secret formula to save the music industry from financial fade-out.

Carey is pioneering a new business model for music. She’s cutting deals with the kind of partners musicians have traditionally shunned, pushing herself into new areas such as publishing, tourism and food and drink. She’s partnering with the biggest retailers in the world. And she’s harnessing the power of the internet, not just to sell music via iTunes, Napster or Spotify, but to market herself using social-networking sites, notably Facebook and Twitter. Simon Cowell, a man who knows a thing or two about making money in the modern music world, believes diversification is the future. He and his close friend, the BHS billionaire Sir Philip Green, are creating a giant music and merchandising company dubbed “Britain’s answer to Disney”.

Carey’s new album, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, is released here tomorrow. She has been in London publicising it. Artists always fly into the world’s biggest cities to sing for their sales but Carey is doing it in a new way. Take her recent trip to Tokyo. There are endless TV spots — TV drives sales; TV means fans. But how to get the right kind of fans; who will look good on TV? And how to get the right number outside every venue where she’s appearing, to make her look like a megastar, but not so many that she is mobbed? If only they could be handpicked.

They can. Online. Carey’s itinerary, which is supposed to be top secret but which an aide has helpfully left lying on a table, reveals that she uses the internet to leak details of each appearance to favoured bloggers and Facebook groups shortly beforehand. This way, only the most devoted fans turn up, and freaks and weirdos are weeded out. The selective leaks also help to make sure there are enough paparazzi but not so many that there’s a scrum. Just before she is due to arrive at the Asahi studios to appear on Music Station, Carey’s aides “leaked the time she will appear at entrance through social online sites, blogs, etc. We are expecting to have 100 fans and some paparazzi”, the schedule reveals. The cybertrickery works to script. Just after 6pm, Carey pulls up in her stretch limousine and steps out into a small but perfectly formed crowd.

That week, Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel is released in Japan. When you buy the CD in key markets you get the usual pictures of Carey in the white dress, in the black dress and in the gold boob-tube to sex up the silver disk. But you also get something else: a copy of Elle magazine. This is no ordinary edition of the glossy; this is “Elle for Mariah”. It’s full of the usual fashion, beauty and relationships stuff but it’s all about Carey. There’s everything you need to “Mariah up your life!” An additional 500,000 copies have been distributed in the US edition of Elle.

It’s marketing, of course, but with the all-important Elle seal of approval. Elle writers wrote it all and Elle photographers took the pictures. Brand analysts say getting an established, credible media partner such as Elle to do Carey’s marketing for her is priceless. Rita Clifton, the chairman of London’s leading brand consultancy, Interbrand, says: “Elle is fashionable and extremely professional. If Mariah Carey is to succeed in marketing products beyond music, it’s critical that she gets stylish associations and polished presentation. Elle can bring those.”

There are ads in the magazine, too, for Angel Champagne, upscale Le Métier de Beauté cosmetics, Forever perfume, Carmen Steffens shoes and the Bahamas tourist board. You can even win a trip to Mariah’s favourite island in the Bahamas by logging on to her official website. Carey is behind those, too. She and her record company, Island Def Jam, part of Universal Music Group, sold the ads for up to $100,000 a page, making far more than the peppercorn Elle was paid to produce the magazine. “I can’t tell you how little money we made on this,” says Carol Smith, the chief brand officer of Elle, ruefully.

Some ads are for Carey’s own products, such as her signature perfume, Forever. Some are for products produced by companies in which she has a stake, notably Angel champagne. Some are for firms in which Universal Music has a stake, such as Le Métier de Beauté. Some are for brands for which she acts as an ambassador, notably the Bahamas. Every time one of Carey’s fans buys one of the products she’s marketing, she gets a cut.

The “product integration” deal has covered most of the cost of recording Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel, estimated at £4m. It has also created new partnerships and strengthened existing ones. And, of course, it gives fans something tangible and unique — but only if they buy the physical CD, where margins are often better than for online downloads. The physical magazine is not available online. Other artists are looking to exploit the advertorial-meets-ads model on forthcoming albums, including the Killers, Rihanna, Duffy and Bon Jovi. Rihanna, for instance, is in talks with brands and advertisers, including Gucci, Nike, Clinique, CoverGirl and the Barbados Tourism Authority. It’s not hard to see why. Merchandising is a huge business. In the US, Disney franchises, including the popular Hannah Montana and High School Musical, raked in $2.7 billion in retail sales last year alone.

Carey knows she is the last person anyone would look to for business acumen. “People look at my image and they see, oh, the curly hair and the little tight black dress. Tra-la-la,” she grins. What’s more, she herself used to revile the very marketing she is now taking to new levels. “When I was starting my career I’d look at certain people who worked with, say, Pepsi, and I was like, ‘Why do they need to do that?’ I had an offer from a soda company when I first began. They wanted me to hit a high note and then the glass bottle would break. I told them, ‘I think it’s stupid. It’s tacky. I don’t want to do it.’ ”

What changed her mind? The traditional business model for the recorded music industry is bust. Has been for years. CD sales are down again this year, by 13%, as online downloads grow, according to the ratings agency Nielsen. The Big Four record companies — Universal, Sony, Warner and the ailing EMI — sell two-thirds fewer albums than they did in 2000. Carey is furious that music-industry executives failed to realise how the internet would change the way fans consume music. And when the penny finally dropped, they let the computer, not the music, industry corner the market. Over time, many more copies of Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel will be downloaded online than bought in stores. Buyers will go to sites such as iTunes or Napster to do so, not to Carey’s own website, nor that of Island Def Jam. The iTunes music store passed six billion sales earlier this year and has also driven sales of Apple’s iPod and iPhone.

“A lot of big powerful music-industry executives made a giant mistake,” she says. “They gave the music business away on the internet. If they had just sat back and said, ‘Maybe let’s figure this internet thing out, it could be something cool,’ we could have found a way to distribute music online on our own terms, not somebody else’s. Prince had already shown them the way. He was so far ahead of the curve, putting out his own records on the web. Everyone else was stupid.”

Musicians have long promoted non-music products. The Rolling Stones marketed Windows 95 with Start Me Up. Michael Jackson did endless Pepsi promos. And rappers such as P Diddy and Jay-Z have moved on from name-checking other people’s fashion and luxury-goods brands in their songs to create their own brands, usually in partnership with their record labels, and promote them instead. But Carey is breaking new ground in three areas.

First, she is turning on its head the traditional model of endorsement. With Elle, for example, she is not endorsing the magazine; the magazine is endorsing her. Yet it is Carey, not the magazine, who is trousering most of the cash generated by ad sales. The way she pulled off such a lucrative deal is nifty. Elle and the US cosmetics giant Elizabeth Arden had fallen out. Arden makes Carey’s perfume, Forever. What better way to bring the two back together — and get Arden ads back in Elle — than in a one-off special magazine celebrating an Arden product and an Arden ambassador? “I’m just trying to share the love,” she says. And corner the market.

Second, when Carey is endorsing a non-music product, she does not simply want to do deals through her record label; she personally wants to own all or part of the company that makes the product. You make a whole lot more cash that way. She is forming so many new companies to leverage her brand equity in make-up, clothing and other new areas that her New York lawyers are fast running out of names. “I set up a new business for every project,” she says. “The businesses are called things like Mirage and Maroon Entertainment. They’re based on silly names that I made up in high school.”

Third, she sees ways to make money with partners that others have overlooked. She has a house in the Bahamas on the island of Eleuthera. She won’t say if she is paid by the Bahamas tourist board to talk about how great the place is but you’d be forgiven for thinking she is, given the amount of time she spends doing so. And even if she isn’t, she probably soon will be. She’s building a recording studio on Eleuthera and plans to shoot videos there with the director Brett Ratner. It’s the kind of publicity a small country dreams of and it would scarcely be surprising if the government there helped out. Carey also plans to team up with the New York tourist board to attract visitors to her adopted home town. When she had her 18th No1, the city authorities lit up the Empire State Building in her favourite colours: pink and lavender. It was good publicity for Carey and for New York. Expect to see “Mariah in New York” advertisements soon. “There are no limits to what we can do,” she says. “The process of creating something should have no boundaries.”

So far, so entrepreneurial. But is it really Carey doing the work? And even if she is, is she any good, or is there someone there to hold her hand? The day after she arrives in Tokyo, she’s sitting in the boardroom of the Park Hyatt. The hotel is best known for failing relationships, principally Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson’s: much of Lost in Translation was filmed here. But Carey is trying to forge a new relationship. She’s meeting a leading cosmetics manufacturer to discuss plans to launch a Mariah Carey beauty line in a top US supermarket chain.

Okay, there may be wine on the table — this is still rock’n’roll — but Carey is focused. She’s brought with her two of her own cosmetics bags, a glittery Chanel number and an acid-pink vanity case, to illustrate what she wants the packaging for her line to look like. She’s also brought an interesting new mini MP3 player she found in Korea that she wants to customise, so that it can be sold as an accessory to the make-up. She benchmarks her proposed line against others: Bobbi Brown, Anna Sui, Laura Mercier. But she listens too. “You tell me,” she says when discussing the colours for the cosmetics. “I don’t want to mess it up by liking what I like and enforcing that because that would be a stupid thing to do. I don’t want to screw up.”

The more you see her at work, the more you realise that Carey has grasped not just how her industry must move from a recorded-music business model to a brand-based model, but also that she is the best person to do it. Ask what her “brand” is, and she replies as well as any Madison Avenue advertising executive: “Optimistic, accessible, universal.” It’s true. Her music is the kind of upbeat, bubblegum pop that appeals as much to teenagers in Tokyo as in Tooting. “It’s R&B but not too R&B. It’s poppy but not too poppy. Hardcore but not too hardcore,” she says. She dresses trendy “but not too trendy. I never want people to think I just wear ‘this’ or ‘that’ designer and that they cannot afford my stuff.” Her team work remorselessly to make sure fans get what they want. “We try very hard to answer everything we get sent,” says Carey. “We mustn’t get remote or ever give people the chance to think I think I’m better than them.”

And then there is her killer app: her image. The daughter of a black father and an Irish-American mother — a classically trained opera singer who studied at Juilliard — she’s black enough to appeal to a black audience. She was one of only two black female soloists asked to sing at Michael Jackson’s memorial. But she’s not so black that she alienates a white audience. She’s also a little Latina. Her father was half-African-American, half-Venezuelan, so she can exploit that market, too. She deliberately plays with her ethnicity, changing her hair to be a little bit more white or a little bit more black, according to what she’s doing and where. “I change ethnically according to where I am in the world. I can be a spokesperson for black, white and Latina. MC could stand for multicultural.”

Being every kind of woman makes her the right person to sell, well, just about anything. But however powerful her name and image may be, Carey is also savvy enough to realise that, if she’s really going to cash in, she must appeal to those who might like her products but don’t like her. That’s why she’s working on a second line of beauty products, clothes and accessories using her nickname, Mimi, as the brand and the logo. “Mimi is an iteration of Mariah Carey. Any girl can be Mimi. If someone is not a complete fan, they don’t have to worry,” she says.

There is a problem with all this, of course. Carey is an artist, and whether you like her music or not, she’s undeniably a successful one. “I’m a studio rat. I love writing and collaborating. The music comes first.” Unlike sports stars, who are not considered cultural figures and who have a very short career to make the money they need for a lifetime, musicians have always had problems moving out of music and into new areas. Even those, notably U2’s Bono, who have tried to harness their music and celebrity for good causes, have been condemned as opportunists. Surely, for her to plaster her name over $3 lipgloss in Macy’s department stores is the quickest way to be labelled — oh, what’s the right expression? — a big, cheesy sellout?

Carey concedes that filling supermarket shelves with anything other than CDs “is not ideal”. Nor does she enjoy working as hard as she is. “Do I want to do 50 things a day that have little or nothing to do with the music itself? No.” But she says the economics of recorded music means she has no choice. The time is right personally, too. Knocking on 40 and just married to the TV executive Nick Cannon, she’s not quite so determined to strive for perfection in her professional and personal life, an attitude summed up in the title of her new album and her new film, Precious, which has just been released in the US and is out here soon.

It tells the harrowing story of a 350lb illiterate teenage girl who is pregnant for the second time by her father and horribly abused by her mother. Carey is unrecognisable as a welfare caseworker, in no small part because she is seen, for the first time, without any make-up — a bold move for a woman who wants to save the music industry one eyeliner at a time. The film’s director, Lee Daniels, offered Carey the part on condition that she show up at the set alone (no entourage) in a taxi (no limo) and freshly scrubbed (no make-up). The film received a standing ovation when it premiered at Cannes and went on to win three awards at the Sundance film festival.

Carey knows her new business model is controversial, so, just in case Coldplay’s Chris Martin or Radiohead’s Thom Yorke accuse her of cashing in when the first copies of her new album are opened here this week, she’s getting her retaliation in first. “I don’t care if the rock-band person thinks, ‘Oh, I’m a sellout’. Well, guess what? They’re a sellout anyway for going to a record company. I’m sorry — you are. You want to just play in bands in bars? Then do that. Or play on the streets. And if someone throws you some dollars, then you can go get a soda. But you could also help somehow merge the soda business with the music business in a way that is creative.”

At which moment Louise, the manager, turns up at the door with the not-so-secret schedule. “We have another meeting back at the hotel,” Carey says, “9pm and still working. And we’re off to LA tomorrow.” She hoists herself up slowly from her chaise longue, asks whether there are any stairs on the way to the limo — walking in 8in heels ain’t easy — and tells a flunky to round up the gaudy Hello Kitty dolls and take them to the limo. “I have to have my little toys,” she gushes. The 12-year-old girl is back. It’s what her emotionally incontinent Japanese fans demand. But don’t be fooled. The woman tottering off down the corridor, putting on her bug-eyed sunglasses before stepping out into the latest perfectly formed instacrowd of fans and paparazzi, is

the music industry’s next top model.

The reason why western democracies have the highest standards of living in the world and why the Soviet Union and its satellites collapsed in economic ruin is that wealth creation is driven by private enterprise.

When the state owns and controls most of the economy the generation of new ideas and products withers. This causes public discontent because they are deprived of the things they need and which they can see being enjoyed in freer societies. The government which cannot face letting go of the control that it has grabbed from its own citizens can only respond by ever more interference in personal choice.

When the Labour Government came to power in 1997 about 33% to 35% of the British economy was owned and controlled by the government. That was an unacceptably high proportion and very damaging to the efficient development of wealth creating companies. The laws we have to control monopolies and to try to stop large corporations from completely dominating a market define an unacceptable monopoly as control of one third or more of a market. On this basis the British Government had a monopoly grip on our economy even in 1997. Since then the government stake in gross domestic product (GDP) has risen to nearly 45% and it is growing at an increasing rate.

According to Dominic Lawson in the Sunday Times there were almost 1,200 quango’s in 2001 costing £20 billion a year to run. By last year the cost of quango’s had risen to £34.5 billion a year. In just seven years the quango bill has risen by 75% at a time when inflation has only been around 2.5% and at the moment it is close to zero.

This government has taken the country into near bankruptcy. We have a national debt so huge that our grandchildren we be left with trying to pay it off and it is still increasing at a rate of £200 billion a year.

Desperate all the time to find more money to finance their lust for control, the government continually increases taxes. The recent increase in top rate income tax from 40% to 50% will actually produce almost nothing if not even reduce the tax take because high earners will move away, but an even more damaging consequence is that the decline of the wealth producing sector will accelerate. This is the road to collapse that killed off European communism twenty years ago.

We need to call a halt before we are all ground into destitution and subservience. A good start is to kill off the quangos.

The Royal Society

In a shocking revelation in the Sunday  Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article6917210.ece  a report was passed to the government in July, only a few weeks before GCSE results were released, when Balls accused critics of exam standards of “rubbishing the achievements of young people”.

The government-backed study has undermined claims by Ed Balls, the schools secretary, that GCSE standards have been maintained, by showing that some science papers include questions so simple that they require no knowledge of the subject.

Sir Martin Taylor, vice-president of  the Royal Society, Britain’s foremost scientific body said:

“If we have science exams that do not test the quality of mathematics needed to do good science, or if we have questions that do not require scientific knowledge to answer them, then we do not have an examination system that is fit for purpose.”

The findings also demonstrated that examination boards were allowing scientifically wrong answers to be marked as correct and that maths was only being tested “in a very limited way”.

"No knowledge required"

Sir Cyril would be aghast at the policy of the Department of Education in Northern Ireland which has removed the statutory requirement for pupils to take GCSE English/Irish or Maths but has made it compulsory for primary school pupils to be assessed using a flawed assessment system form the CEM Centre at the University of Durham.

11-plus practice papers

Richard Pike, chief executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry, said the maths paper was easier than 11+ practice papers from 1960 with which he had compared it.

“That is an extraordinary indictment of the current UK education system,” said Pike. “We cannot continue to live the lie of ever-increasing standards while businesses struggle to recruit staff with numeracy skills, or who understand the quantitative basis of science.”

Richard Pike, chief executive of the Royal Society of Chemistry

Per l’inglese Sunday Times:

Jose Mourinho ritornerà per allenare il Manchester United

di Duncan Castles, 15/11/2009

Dopo il controverso articolo di Patrick Barclay, il Sunday Times risponde a Mourinho.

JOSE MOURINHO ha definito il Manchester United come la squadra ideale per ritornare al calcio inglese, e crede che Sir Alex Ferguson lo raccomanderà come suo successore. Mourinho è alla sua seconda stagion all’Inter, ma non prevede una permanenza lunga in Italia, dove la gerarchia sportiva non si è dimostrata ricettiva nei confronti dei metodi che gli hanno fruttato, in passato, cinque titoli in sette anni.

Recentemente, Mourinho ha espresso la sua intenzione di ritornare al calcio inglese, se gliene sarà data la possibilità. Secondo lui, la Premier League è il campionato che meglio si adatta al suo stile. “Sto pensando al futuro in termini di sviluppo dei giovani e struttura d’età”, ha detto del suo lavoro con l’Inter, “ma l’Italia non è un paese adatto a questo. L’Inghilterra sì, ed il mio calcio è calcio inglese”.

Il suo primo obiettivo è quindi di lavorare al Manchester United. Mourinho ha sviluppato una relazione stretta con Ferguson, ed è plausibile che lo scozzese giocherà un ruolo significativo nella scelta del proprio successore. Anche se Ferguson, 67 anni, non ha ancora una data fissa di ritiro, si prevede che se ne andrà quando vincerà di nuovo una coppa europea. Lo stesso Ferguson ha dichiarato che non continuerà a lavorare a 70 anni.

Ad ogni modo, nella giornata di ieri, Mourinho ha provato a rassicurare l’Inter dicendo che al momento prevede di restare, anche se non ha negato che le parole citate erano le sue.

L’articolo termina con un riferimento a quanto dichiarato dall’allenatore sul sito ufficiale dell’Inter, e rammenta anche che il suo contratto scadrà nel 2012.

Vai alle dichiarazioni di Mourinho sul sito ufficiale dell’Inter, clicca qui.

Vai all’articolo originale del Sunday Times, clicca qui.              

Vai all’articolo di Patrick Barcley, clicca qui.

The silly girl was reading the Sunday Times some time back, when she chanced upon this recipe for the famous Singapore Nasi Lemak by the Wee Brothers. This recipe is for the Coconut rice and the sambal chilli sauce. Have fun making this recipe and serve with the normal ikan billis, chicken wings and fried egg.

Ingredients (Coconut Rice)

370g rice, rinsed

625ml water

10tsp thick coconut milk

3g salt

4g ginger, sliced

3 pandan leave, knotted

Method:

1)      Put rice, water, coconut milk, salt, ginger and pandan leaves in an electric rice cooker. Mix well, cover and cook

2)      When the rice is done, stir it gently with a pair of chopsticks to fluff it up.

3)      Serve with roasted peanuts, fried ikan bilis and cucumber slices on the side

*serves 5

Ingredients (Sambal Chili)
70g fresh red chili

1 large red onion

6 cloves garlic

3 tbp cooking oil

80g ikan bilis, ground to a fine powered

8g salt

18g sugar

Method:

1)      Blend the fresh red chilies, red onion and garlic to form a smooth paste

2)      To a heated wok, add cooking oil and stir-fry the grounded ikan bilis for about two minutes until fragrant

3)      Add the ground chili paste,  salt and sugar and stir-fry for another 15 minutes

Aylward drives home

Professional mutton-head and gombeen, Bobby Aylward challenged the theory that getting langered (a country term for a quiet drink) could have a negative effect on driving skills. The block-headed farmer from the wilds of Kilkenny joined the Institute of Lies (Sunday Times) on a driving simulator last week in a bid to undermine Minister for lack-of Transport, Noel Dumpster’s bid to lower the legal alcohol limit for drivers to 50mg blood alcohol content.

Amazingly enough, this non-scientific study showed that having a couple of pints improved their drink-driving skills. Of course, to be really thorough the experiment should have been conducted over a series of weeks and at different times of the day and night.

Nevertheless, Aylwards alcohol antics could be used as a way of testing government policy in a – way. What about testing the Harney health plan – that private is better than public? We could give each of Aylward’s sons Swine Flu and send one to the nearest Beacon clinic (in a limo naturally) and the other to Louth hospital, by donkey. At least then we would have concrete proof about the efficiencies of both systems. But we shouldn’t stop there. Heartless Harney doesn’t think that the young girls of Ireland need the cervical cancer vaccine. So lets take Aylward’s daughter with one of her friends as a control subject. Give the friend the vaccine and then put the girls through whatever it is supposed to take to contract the cancer (google that yourselves).

Drumm gets his bonus

But we also need to test Professor Drumm’s premise that cancer centres of excellence are the way to go. So, we give Aylward bowel cancer and make him take the trip to Sligo centre of excellence, using public transport, of course. If the cancer sufferers of Donegal can endure an 8 hour roundtrip for treatment then it should be a doddle from Kilkenny. And we give his wife breast cancer or at least we get Portlaoise hospital to diagnose her results and then keep sending her conflicting letters about whether she has cancer or not.

I’m sure we could get Aylward to test other government policy. His wife and sons could be sent to live on the Moyross estate in Limerick. That would kill (pardon the pun) two birds with one stone. Can she survive on a single parent’s income and will the kids stay free from drugs? The daughter could be sent to a reinstated Magdalene laundry just to see if the Minister for Injustice, Xenophobia and Jail-for-all is right in saying that the inmates were in fact employees.

I’m sure there are lots more policies that Biffo would like Aylward to test before unleashing them on the public. What a great public servant this man could be.

I am a bit worried about Alan Sugar this week; I know he will be touched by my concern. There was a fairly unpleasant article on the Sunday Times Review last weekend. A female journalist found she disliked him very much; he was very rude and horrid. Well, he is very rude and, dear reader, as you know what an advocate of good manners I am, you may be surprised at my intervening on his behalf.

But honestly! The Sunday Times saw fit to send a non-business journalist to interview a supremely successful entrepreneur and Mr. Sugar kicked off soundly because she relied on press cuttings for her background and questions.

Press cuttings are all very well but they do tend to focus on ‘I’m an apprentice get me out of here’ or something and Sugar’s famous soundbites. ‘Don’t employ women, don’t employ pregnant women. WOMEN!!!! Who’s looking after the babies? ARGGGGH!’

But the nitty gritty of it: as a very small business, I don’t employ women (apart from me ). In fact – I don’t employ anyone on the grounds that it’s all too complicated. I hire my expertise in from the outside when I need it – but don’t want to run a payroll or HR systems that are essentially a drain on my business resources. Neither, thank you, do I want to outsource it all either. I think some credit should be given to Suralan (as he is known) that he chooses to employ anyone at all in these mad days.

I have just sat in on an interview where a large corporation is unable to sign off a compliance procedure that will guard against a high risk governance scenario as one of the team is unable or unwilling to remember to comply with the regulations. Trust me; they are not difficult regulations either. This is now an HR issue and as HR advises it’s a ‘Performance’ issue and not a ‘Disciplinary’ issue it will take a while to resolve – eternity probably or a disaster strikes.

But the story that I think the ST journalist missed was Alan Sugar’s statement that he saw the opposition as ‘Old Tory’ and that worried him. This was not developed by the journalist as she moved onto Women’s Issues that clearly interested her more and irritated Suralan profoundly.

The Old Tory label is one that I can’t help pinning to the Cameron crowd either. They are immensely privileged class of people and the recession is hurting them far less than anyone as they rightly manage their money very well and across generations. What concerns me is that the Old Tory (pre Thatcher) will forget about small businesses (who don’t make a great deal of money in the scheme of things) and that land and property is once again going to be thing to see people through in the new and difficult economic climate.

Whether you agreed with her or not, Mrs. Thatcher made a profound social change by enabling people to buy their houses. Regardless of whether they were council or not, this allowed many more people other than the professional middle and upper classes, to live very well. The State nowadays, laments the lack of social mobility, but this is a reflection, I believe, that many people had enough to live comfortably where they were, even if they didn’t have vast estates or access to private education at their disposal. They no longer needed to leave back-to-back terrace house and their families in order to get on. By giving us access to money Mrs. Thatcher lessened (she hoped) the need of the State to support us.

But the economic health that underpinned that idea has vanished – almost overnight. We were not governed as we thought, by well thought out institutions who paid more than lip service to good governance; but by fantasists, optimists and dreamers who failed to understand the first rule of business and economics:

• Money is extremely valuable and is never that easy to acquire.

In the midst of these financial governors were extremely cynical and or corrupt people who certainly did understand the value of money and ensure it was directed into their accounts (off-shore).

The old Tory guard sneered at Thatcher – not because she was female (to be fair) but because she was TRADE and run the National Budget like a post-war household budget.

Anyone who has seen the late Mr. Heath’s house nestled comfortably next to Salisbury Cathedral will have no need to wonder about the cultural gulf that divided him from Grantham.

Nevertheless it was the female Thatcher that created the economic climate that allowed Alan Sugar to thrive, move from the market street and employ people – as he acknowledged in the interview.

Mr. Brown always struck me as a man from the seventies and bless him, he has created the economy to match. His very talented and able wife stays at home and nobly supports him while wearing very pretty frocks in a non sexy way. She puts brave little twitters on Twitter to say what a good man he is.

Cameron looks more Heath like with each passing day. I don’t know that he understands the complexities of small business and what they need to survive. I am sure he will sort out Inheritance Tax, repeal the anti-hunting laws and concentrate on the countryside and the needs of farmers. None of this is a bad thing. In fact the wilful neglect of our countryside under this government is shocking.

But both Brown and Cameron believe they know what’s best for me. I beg to differ. I know what’s best for me and I want get on and do it (in the way I suspect Alan Sugar does) without being interrupted by intrusive social policies and councils writing to ask how I now use my loft conversion. – and yes, they have. I plead again for governance, law, sound financial institutions and free trade. I fear we are being led astray by phantoms, the wars against ‘terror’, Swine Flu and old class battle lines will raise their heads again as the unions fight – not so much against poor, unlucky Brown, but the looming figures of the old Tory guard.

But what is interesting on both sides of the party is how the figure of the small businessman has rather mysteriously vanished from the political rhetoric and I wonder now in this changed climate if politicians on all sides would like us to be corporate employees where we are easily tracked, monitored and taxed.

I fear that we are moving into an era that believes we are facing BIG problems that governments think will require BIG solutions: rather as the 70s did. When corporate architects designed massive, concrete solutions and large institutions were going to solve the world’s problems. Oh yes, I remember now: nuclear power stations.

I can’t see a Tory government thinking any differently to be honest. The Old Tory view of a set world order with people in their place seems deeply engrained in the Cameron philosophy.

Reading between the lines of that interview last Sunday, I understand why Mr. Sugar might think there are other things to worry about than motherhood and apple pie. I worry too.

I’m stressing about the Physical Sciences Matric Exams that are taking place on Friday and on Monday. I have thus compiled a list of resources that I found that will help you with your revision.

Physics (P1) & Chemistry (P2)

• Trudon Sponsored Physics and Chem Notes and Videos (Click: Download Science Notes) – CRASH COURSE!

• “What are Ohmic Conductors”: Yahoo Answer Here

• Extensive Revision and Study Material: SmartLearner – Notes by V. Gokal (Simplified, Easy to Read)

• Department of Education (DoE) Curriculum Documents – Past Papers and Exemplars

• Learning Channel Online Resources – Very Comprehensive!!!! (Textbook Style Notes) Support Exemplars and Memos (Sunday Times Exemplars)

I will update this blog if I find more resources, but for now, I think those are quite sufficient.

Update 1

My friend had a problem with this question, I did it and made brief explanations.

Mechanics - Slopes Q6 (Click to Enlarge)

Mechanics - Slopes Answer 6 (Click to Enlarge)

If you have any questions or are unsure about anything, post a comment here with the question and I’ll try work it out and post it up on here.

Update 2

Work Energy Theorem applications ther

Kinetic Energy is Constant on a Slope (Click to Enlarge)

Kinetic Energy is NOT Constant on a Slope (Click to Enlarge)

Mechanical Energy is conserved (Click to Enlarge)

Update 3

Question: “Explain lightning in terms of electric potential and potential difference…”

Answer: Click to Enlarge

I’m quite sure this is what he (Governder on LotusFM) meant when I phoned in.

WATCH THIS SPACE!

GOOD LUCK Matrics ‘09!

Here, courtesy of OH, is the Jeremy Clarkson article that the Sunday Times and Peter Mandelson didn’t want you to read.

I’ve given the matter a great deal of thought all week, and I’m afraid I’ve decided that it’s no good putting Peter Mandelson in a prison. I’m afraid he will have to be tied to the front of a van and driven round the country until he isn’t alive any more.
He announced last week that middle-class children will simply not be allowed into the country’s top universities even if they have 4,000 A-levels, because all the places will be taken by Albanians and guillemots and whatever other stupid bandwagon the conniving idiot has leapt

I hate Peter Mandelson. I hate his fondness for extremely pale blue jeans and I hate that preposterous moustache he used to sport in the days when he didn’t bother trying to cover up his left-wing fanaticism. I hate the way he quite literally lords it over us even though he’s resigned in disgrace twice, and now holds an important decision-making job for which he was not elected. Mostly, though, I hate him because his one-man war on the bright and the witty and the successful means that half my friends now seem to be taking leave of their senses.

There’s talk of emigration in the air. It’s everywhere I go. Parties. Work. In the supermarket. My daughter is working herself half to death to get good grades at GSCE and can’t see the point because she won’t be going to university, because she doesn’t have a beak or flippers or a qualification in washing windscreens at the lights. She wonders, often, why we don’t live in America.

Then you have the chaps and chapesses who can’t stand the constant raids on their wallets and their privacy. They can’t understand why they are taxed at 50% on their income and then taxed again for driving into the nation’s capital. They can’t understand what happened to the hunt for the weapons of mass destruction. They can’t understand anything. They see the Highway Wombles in those brand new 4×4s that they paid for, and they see the M4 bus lane and they see the speed cameras and the community support officers and they see the Albanians stealing their wheelbarrows and nothing can be done because it’s racist.

And they see Alistair Darling handing over £4,350 of their money to not sort out the banking crisis that he doesn’t understand because he’s a small-town solicitor, and they see the stupid war on drugs and the war on drink and the war on smoking and the war on hunting and the war on fun and the war on scientists and the obsession with the climate and the price of train fares soaring past £1,000 and the Guardian power-brokers getting uppity about one shot baboon and not uppity at all about all the dead soldiers in Afghanistan, and how they got rid of Blair only to find the lying twerp is now going to come back even more powerful than ever, and they think, “I’ve had enough of this. I’m off.”

It’s a lovely idea, to get out of this stupid, Fairtrade, Brown-stained, Mandelson-skewed, equal-opportunities, multicultural, carbon-neutral, trendily left, regionally assembled, big-government, trilingual, mosque-drenched, all-the-pigs-are-equal, property-is-theft hellhole and set up shop somewhere else. But where?

You can’t go to France because you need to complete 17 forms in triplicate every time you want to build a greenhouse, and you can’t go to Switzerland because you will be reported to your neighbours by the police and subsequently shot in the head if you don’t sweep your lawn properly, and you can’t go to Italy because you’ll soon tire of waking up in the morning to find a horse’s head in your bed because you forgot to give a man called Don a bundle of used notes for “organising” a plumber.

You can’t go to Australia because it’s full of things that will eat you, you can’t go to New Zealand because they don’t accept anyone who is more than 40 and you can’t go to Monte Carlo because they don’t accept anyone who has less than 40 mill. And you can’t go to Spain because you’re not called Del and you weren’t involved in the Walthamstow blag. And you can’t go to Germany … because you just can’t.

The Caribbean sounds tempting, but there is no work, which means that one day, whether you like it or not, you’ll end up like all the other expats, with a nose like a burst beetroot, wondering if it’s okay to have a small sharpener at 10 in the morning. And, as I keep explaining to my daughter, we can’t go to America because if you catch a cold over there, the health system is designed in such a way that you end up without a house. Or dead.

Canada’s full of people pretending to be French, South Africa’s too risky, Russia’s worse and everywhere else is too full of snow, too full of flies or too full of people who want to cut your head off on the internet. So you can dream all you like about upping sticks and moving to a country that doesn’t help itself to half of everything you earn and then spend the money it gets on bus lanes and advertisements about the dangers of salt. But wherever you go you’ll wind up an alcoholic or dead or bored or in a cellar, in an orange jumpsuit, gently wetting yourself on the web. All of these things are worse than being persecuted for eating a sandwich at the wheel.

I see no reason to be miserable. Yes, Britain now is worse than it’s been for decades, but the lunatics who’ve made it so ghastly are on their way out. Soon, they will be back in Hackney with their South African nuclear-free peace polenta. And instead the show will be run by a bloke whose dad has a wallpaper shop and possibly, terrifyingly, a twerp in Belgium whose fruitless game of hunt-the-WMD has netted him £15m on the lecture circuit.

So actually I do see a reason to be miserable. Which is why I think it’s a good idea to tie Peter Mandelson to a van. Such an act would be cruel and barbaric and inhuman. But it would at least cheer everyone up a bit.

…at his very best in today’s Sunday Times.

This is not very Freo but I can’t be silent when I see blatant racism.

It is beyond me that the Sunday Times today published the racist, right-wing rant of Ralph Peters about the US army shooting, titled A religion of peace? in which he attacks the Muslim religion unfairly for what happened at a US army base last week.

By the time of publication of the newspaper the claim that this was a terrorist attack was not substantiated at all. In fact more balanced media reports suggested that it might have been the case of the shooter having snapped after years of being taunted about being a Muslim by fellow soldiers.

Ralph Peter’s comment incites racial hatred and religious prejudice and has no place in a balanced and serious newspaper. It is terrible tabloid crap and I hope the Press Council will investigate this.

Roel Loopers

As a blogger – who has not studied journalism or a writing course, let alone, a degree – there are quite a number of challenges that one faces. This, especially, happens when one has to quote someone or a particular publication. In most cases, it is quoting that I have recently come across as  very challenging.

In an effert to get help from people who have been in the industry so quite sometime, if not years – whether blogging as a profession or just for fun – I then sent this SMS in seeking help as far as quoting or quotations are concerned, which read thus:

Hi Please Help me with this: I am a Blogger (akanyangm.blogspot.com) in my own right and a regular contributor to certain publications (In fact, MyNews24 online is the only publication that comes to mind) and someone who has not studied journalism, but self-taught through reading extensively, from politics- to media-related publications both print & online.

This also includes, opinion articles, debates and interviews. As a confession for being addicted to Mail & Guardian & Sunday Times especially, and other Online publications & Journals, there is something that I am not sure of or that which makes me wonder who’s right or wrong because all publications mentioned before & those that I will mention later do follow these menthods of quoting, including New York Times & The Guardian and Financial Times, especially at the end of the ‘quoted sentence/wording’.

So which of the two is correct or when should one use either or both methods: “Akanyang. . . to go“. OR “Akanyang. . . to go.”

how ironic, that the Queen has given up on the ‘Royal’ Mail.  reading an article in the Sunday Times on sunday 01.11.09 I was highly amused to read that ‘one is not amused’.

according to the article as the postal strike really starts to bite, it seems even the Royals have lost faith in the ‘Royal’ Mail.    For anything that’s urgent, the Queen has been using DHL.

DHL, which is owned by the GERMAN (?) postal service Deutsche Post, has a warrant to deliver express parcels for the Queen, even though Royal Mail offers a same-day service.   “DHL are used a very great deal by the Royal household,” says Pippa Dutton from the Royal Warrant Holders Association.  “They use them like you and I do.   If it’s something that’s got to get there quickly and you want to guarantee delivery, who else?” (Well the title ‘Royal Mail’ would be the clue there.)

A Royal Mail spokesman sighs: “The sector is particularly competitive.  Obviously ours offers the best value for money and the best service.”

And if you are a particularly valued customer, they’ll even put your face on their stamps.  

so there you have it, become a regular user of the Royal Mail and you could get your ‘head on the block’, so to speak.   However in the meanwhile the Queen has lost faith in her royal postal service and we her loyal subjects have too!  I wonder why she doesn’t do Fedex?