The Greek Bailout Explained

(A jolly little piece which is currently doing the rounds on the Internet)

It is a slow day in a little Greek Village. The rain is beating down and the streets are deserted.

Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.

On this particular day a rich German tourist is driving through the village, stops at the local hotel and lays a €100 note on the desk, telling the hotel owner he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night.

The owner gives him some keys and, as soon as the visitor has walked upstairs, the hotelier grabs the €100 note and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.

The butcher takes the €100 note and runs down the street to repay his debt to the pig farmer.

The pig farmer takes the €100 note and heads off to pay his bill at the supplier of feed and fuel.

The guy at the Farmers' Co-op takes the €100 note and runs to pay his drinks bill at the taverna.

The publican slips the money along to the local prostitute drinking at the bar, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer him "services" on credit.

The hooker then rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill to the hotel owner with the €100 note.

The hotel proprietor then places the €100 note back on the counter so the rich traveller will not suspect anything.

At that moment the traveller comes down the stairs, picks up the €100 note, states that the rooms are not satisfactory,   pockets the money, and leaves town.

No one produced anything.

No one earned anything.

However, the whole village is now out of debt and looking to the future with a lot more optimism.

And that is how the bailout package works!

I Wrote a Song in My First Song Writing Class

 I Wrote a Complete Song in My First Songwriting Class

I never knew I had it in me, until I wrote a poem years ago about the Fire at Alexandra Palace. It had a chorus, and was very repetative, and people at my poetry group said it had the makings of a good song, and I ought to get it set to music. Of course I never did, and it languished as an unrecognized lyric.



However, a few days ago a friend asked me if I would like to go to a free songwriting class at our local library, and, ever-curious, I went.


First we were asked to do some physical loosening up exercises as a prelude to singing a song.  I was a bit disconcerted, as I consider myself as being useless at singing - one of the reasons I never bothered to continue guitar lessons was because it didn't seem much good if I couldn't sing along to my own strumming.
Anyway, I did the arms above head and down to the ground, wriggle around, blow through your lips like a sperm whale and so forth.


Then we were given an explanation writing a simple song using AAA format. This is, basically, three similar verses or stanzas, no chorus, no complications.


We were shown a song by Bette Midler, "The Rose", which was in this AAA form. Then we sang it, reading the words from the song sheet.  A bit tricky for me really, as I didn't know the tune. However it was pretty easy to pick up, and, although I merely droned without proper singing, I didn't disgrace myself more than averagely.


Then we talked a bit about travelling and were asked to write something ourselves, in class, something personal, maybe about a journey, using some rhymes.


The man next to me (whose name shall not be revealed here) is already a seasoned musician and song writer, but he said he couldn't possibly write something there and then, and preferred to write something at night.  That left five of us, including our teacher, ready to get writing. 


I had something down on paper quick as a flash. I'm used to doing this in poetry group (which I no longer attend) and at home - you get something down in writing, anything, and then you can always go back and polish it up - indeed revision is an essential part of writing poetry.


The man who wasn't writing was chattering away, and said something about throwing a line. This got incorporated into my poem. I was only marginally bothered by this diversion, but my friend, who is also in the poetry group, was well put off, and asked him to desist, as she couldn't concentrate.


I wrote quickly, and finished quarter of an hour before everyone else. Surprisingly, I was the only person to write a complete poem, the others having varying success. Inspiration just came without much head-scratching.  One man could only think of  two lines, another wrote a lot of very existential philosophical stuff, which was clearly going to be the best one of all once he found the words to finish it off, and my friend and the teacher wrote competently but needed to take their pieces home and do work on them.


So that was a good experience.  I managed to find suitable rhymes, and although one or two of the rhymes were rubbish and had to be revised at home, I was reasonably happy with the result. This is what I wrote:

                Travelling to Dover

      As I travelled on the train one rainy morning

      Tired and wet, I couldn’t stop my yawning

      Looked up and saw what surely was a warning

      Hooded eyes that set my heart a-warming

      I turned away and stared into the mist

      But all the while I held a secret wish

      That I’d put out a line and catch this fish

      And he’d be mine forever on a dish

      He moved to sit by me and I moved over

      I sensed that one day soon he’d be my lover

      And give me hell because he was a rover.

           I caught him as the train pulled in to Dover

© Diana Grant                       16^th November 2011

Humor and Jokes

There are some very funny humorous jokes going round the internet.

This is a selection of really good jokes and humour which I have received in my e-mail. These jokes often seem to start in one country, maybe England, and end up in the USA, and sometimes even travel back again. So they are a mixture of British humor jokes and American humor jokes, depending on which side of the pond they originated.

Humour is certainly alive and kicking amongst my friends and relations.

They are all clean jokes, and there are several simple jokes - I would say they are suitable funny jokes for children, depending on their level of understanding.

Some of them are really funny jokes, and others just observational humour. There are a couple of humorous short jokes, and one or two long jokes.

There are religious jokes, well, actually, just a Jewish joke and three Christian jokes, so no Muslims will be offended. In this way, I hope to avoid flag and effigy burning, the throwing of shoes and issuing of fatwas. There is also a political joke and a joke about lawyers

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a17t2s

English Tongue Twisters

A tongue twister is a set of words which are specifically designed to be difficult to say. English has some difficult sounds to get your tongue round, and tongue twisters are good training.

They are particularly helpful to public speakers, such as actors, lawyers, and people who give corporate presentations, speeches and lectures.

The tongue twister will also help you if you are a student of English as a Second Language (ESL Students), giving you practice in improving your English pronunciation.

Ten tongue twisters, ranging from the world's most difficult tongue twister, to fairly easy ones. One or two are in verse, and there is even one I made up myself. Try them, and have a laugh.

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a17odz

Letter of Complaint to Parking Control - Poem

Do you ever despair and think the Parking Wardens are out to get you?

This is one of a series of letters I wished I'd sent. As I never did send it, I felt free to put it in poetic form. A bit over the top? Moi?? NEVER!!

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/a151in
 By the way, if you ever feel that a parking ticket was unjustified, and you have a reasonable reason for what you did and where you parked, it is always worth objecting, because, even if your reason doesn't fall within a category specified on the parking notice, the local authorities have discretion to waive the fine. Of course they don't usually use this discretion, but you need to know that it is available, and that you do have a little leeway to appeal.
 Just remember, the local authority has a financial interest in issuing parking tickets and insisting on payment. They are not acting as independent arbiters of your case.

What normally happens is that the Local Authority rejects your objection and continues to insist that you must pay your fine.  They then send you a formal Notice, and you are given  a specified time in which to pay up or appeal in writing to the local Independent Parking Offence Tribunal.  You may feel that it is pointless to persist with your appeal if the Local Authority have rejected it, but this is not the case - provided that you can produce the evidence appropriate to your circumstances (e.g. a photograph, badge or whatever) and set out your reasons logically in a written statement or letter, you stand a reasonable chance of having your appeal accepted by the Tribunal.  If it is still rejected, they must notify you that you have a right to appeal to the Appeal Tribunal.  A date is then set for you to present your case in writing or in person.  You don't have to take a day off work, because it can all be done in writing.
 A very high proportion of Appeals are accepted.

A Day in the Life of Diana - Trouble Down at t'Mill

Morning:

Yesterday morning I was having a bit of trouble with my Symantec Norton 360 Version 2.0. security system. It was showing a message saying Symantec Service Framework has encountered a problem and needs to close, and whatever I was doing on the computer, the message kept on flashing up and wouldn’t be silenced. I spent a considerable amount of time checking the support webpages, trying to get free advice. I found that the Forum and online advice was free but that if I wanted support by phone, it would cost me, so I decided to go it alone. I found a string of about 200 comments (honestly, I’m not exaggerating) about this exact problem on the Forum, many by the same person, who had clearly tried everything from FAQs to detailed assistance by other Forum users ,as well as technical support over the phone. I had a sinking feeling that all was not well in the state of Denmark, and that if this poor man had had such trouble, what hope was there for me, a non-techie?

Mid-Day:

So at lunch time I emailed Technical Support and received an immediate acknowledgment that they would reply fully within 48 hours..........Well, who wants to wait 48 hours when you’re in the middle of doing something?

So, being impatient, I decided to fiddle.

According to our man in the Forum thread, it didn’t sound as though it was worth spending time trying to fix the problem, because nothing seemed to work for him. I pondered over whether I should uninstall and then re-install my Norton security programme. It felt like taking an awful risk leaving my computer exposed to the elements if it didn’t go well. But then I reasoned that I could always download a free firewall like AVG or Firefox to tide me over, and I found a Norton webpage which reassured me that, if I did uninstall, I would not lose my year’s membership licence (which still had six months to run).

Afternoon:

I ran a back-up on to a DVD and that took me several hours, because I couldn’t find the DVD’s and, after looking in various biscuit tins and boxes, I discovered lots of my old cassette tapes, and many of my partner’s too, and lots of empty plastic cases, so almost seamlessly I found myself matching tapes to boxes, and sorting them alphabetically as they had lain all jumbled together for years and I could never find anything – indeed I had acquired so many from other people that I didn’t even remember what I had. By the time I had organized them, which included reviving many memories (not all of them romantic) and my room in chaos for a couple of hours, a vision of the location of the pack of blank DVD’s suddenly flitted through my mind.

I abandoned the cassettes to insert a disc in the computer.

Evening:

I was a bit disconcerted that the disc tray had not opened automatically when I ran the back-up programme, but shrugged it off as a random quirk. After another hour of fiddling about and getting the same failure warning flashing up on the screen , closing the sign, and getting it replicating several more times, and having the whole back up programme freezing on me, I took out the DVD, closed down the computer and started it up and ran the back-up again and after a suspenseful hour got a message that it was only partially completed, because I had left my Outlook programme switched on. I didn’t know how to do an incremental back-up, or indeed whether it was even possible to do this on a used DVD, so I ran the whole thing again, and this time everything ran smoothly.

Then, quaking in my virtual boots, I uninstalled Norton, my friend of three years’ standing, and reloaded it, restarted the computer and waited to see whether it had interfered with any of my work done early in the day. All was well.

Night-Time:

So I returned some twelve hours later to checking all my Earrings web pages to tally them up with what earrings I had actually got – I didn‘t want to offer my wonderful hand-crafted earrings

 for sale if they were no longer available. That sort of went all right. I have been carrying the earrings round quite a bit recently, on a big cork notice board wrapped up in red satin, to trade at North London Local Exchange Trading Scheme socials and trading nights, and apart from those I have actually traded for pledges (the NLLETS local currency), I was shocked to find out how many earrings I had actually lost – they must have dropped off in the street or at the venue, leaving me with the other half. And of course, I now had to check every earring entry on my website, gloriousconfusion.com to find out what was missing. I’m a bit new to all this as I have only just started selling them, and haven’t got an organized system yet. Indeed, as I am more of a hobbyist than a serious merchandiser, I may never get round to it.

Midnight at the Oasis:

Then, just after midnight, what do you think happened? You’ll never guess, so I’ll tell you: I received an unimaginably helpful email from Norton Support. Without any ifs or buts, they offered me a free upgrade from Norton 360.02 to Norton 360.03 which came out this March, and told me how to do it. I must confess that once I had got over the pleasure of a productive response and the annoyance of having mucked about all day for nothing trying to fix it, my first thought was “why would they want to do that?”

It’s not easy being a cynic.

This train of thought led me to Google various websites to compare the two programmes including the price, benefits of the upgrade, and why there might have been a problem fixing Norton 360 Version 2 for me. And what I found will be the subject of my next article, blog, lens or what-have-you.