I had chicken pox as a child, I remember Camomile lotion and being given The Three Little Pigs Ladybird book to read, so I was about four. All three of my kids get all their jabs per the official schedule.
There was a recent flap about HPV vaccination for teenage girls. The Government planned a €30 million programme, but then ran out of cash and cancelled it. This reminds me that I must look into it: it's about €400 a pop privately, I believe.
C. Wingate @ #524:
"He did something immoral first!" is not an excuse. Most people learn that before they even go to school.
Lila, habitual bullies are like habitual criminals: they've dealt with the system for so long that they know well what they can get away with.
This doesn't mean that the schools or indeed the police are all sympathetic ex-bullies and criminals, it just means it's harder for decent people to deal with them.
Conjunction my hole, that was an occultation!
Xopher, I don't think that telling bullies that their victims might turn on them will work, because they are usually good at picking on people who won't. Bullies who aren't good at that get the snot beaten out of them.
I agree with abi that it has to be a social thing: it has to be "not ok" to be a bully. Most kids aren't bullies, and bullies only thrive where most kids look the other way.
The boys schools I attended were all places where bullying and even fighting were not OK, despite a certain amount of "Rugby Player = Not as Uncool As His IQ Would Suggest" attitude from the authorities.
Margaret, the church was completed in 1937, and these windows were not designed by Harry Clarke himself, they were designed by Richard King after Clarke's death. The windows were commissioned by Dean Crowe, the parish priest, who had very firm ideas about what he wanted to see in each window, which King was happy to execute.
The commissioning of the windows is described in the book by Murray I referenced, who goes into the personalities involved in rather more detail than he discusses the actual images in the windows.
Regarding the two cyan angels, I do believe they are Michael and Gabriel. Here they are again in the Jesus window, with their sword and lily, flanking the angel Raphael and Tobiah with his fish. Here is Michael with his sword again, and Gabriel with his lily, both in the Joseph window.
I don't know what's with their halos in the Mary window.
Lawrence, the story I heard from Italian connections was that Mussolini did try to make the international trains run on time, as that was a matter of national pride.
Iain writes:
It's an issue of the price we're willing to pay to maintain a particular foreign policy position, that's all.
One particular foreign policy position: a racist, no-win, blood-soaked, criminal, mass-murdering, useless, pointless position. But terrorists want us to stop, so we must continue.
To quote Tony Blair:
I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er
This is only incompetence if you accept that Rumsfeld was trying to do what he said he was. I think he achieved exactly what he really wanted: he made Bush a war-time president, boosted his poll ratings several times, and ultimately got him re-elected. Mission accomplished.
I quite like the definition which says any body big enough to be spherical under its own gravity is a planet. If you want to add that it's only a planet if it's not a moon of another planet, OK, since moon is a well understood term.
So Pluto stays in, Ceres is back in, Xena and friends out in the Kuiper belt are in, but Titan, Ganymede, Triton and so on are out.
So is Charon a planet or a moon? I vote planet, under this definition.
Wooden houses are increasingly common in the UK and Ireland. At the bottom end there are mass-produced wood-frame houses, and at the top end the imported-from-Scandinavia jobs.
Which reminds me, that tower is called St. Patrick's tower. If you look closely at the full size image, you can see the St. Patrick-shaped wind vane at the top, with his mitre on, a crozier in one hand and a big cross to catch the wind in the other.
The mysterious tower in the Guinness Brewery is a former windmill, once the largest smock windmill in Europe. It powered a distillery before Guinness took over the whole area.
Serge, I have a very low expectations for Hollywood SF, but I very seldom actually scream at the TV when I realize how the movie will end. Here, the big surprise was that You Can't Change History.
Only that's not a surprise to anyone who's read more than, say, two time travel stories. It's a cliche, a canard, a really, really dumb thing to pull out after an hour and a half of pretending that the characters and the plot and, you know, the story, actually matter.
I watched a whole movie to see that cliché trotted out at the finish?
YAAAAAAH, I say, YAAAAH with flying Pringles.
It's true that was not Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys. I liked The Time Tunnel, an unashamed riff on every pulp time travel notion ever.
Twelve Monkeys only had one notion, and it was a deeply stupid riff on it.
That ambigram particle is cool.
I particulary like:
Have~A
Nice
Day
which when turned upside-down reads:
Go
Fuck
Yourself
Dropping t's at the ends of words is common in many Irish accents, parts of Dublin and lots of the midlands for example.
Wha's tha'? Tha's a ca'. It's too fa' to be a ca'! It's jus a really fa' ca', righ'?
Here in Athlone, I correct my kids all the time, so they probably get beaten up at school. No, they probably will end up with two accents, one they only use in front of me, and one like tha' sample I gave.
Oh he love, he love, he love
He does love his numbers
And they run, they run, they run him
In a great big circle
In a circle of infinity
3.1415926535 897932
3846 264 338 3279
Sadly, it appears that Kate loses it after only 53 digits.
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