Not particularly Christmassy Christmas miscellany

Busy old time, isn't it? Kept meaning to write something about the whole Copenhagen/hacked emails thing. Can't help being impressed with the way a debate about science seems to depend so heavily on ad hominem arguments. Unfortunately these don't help me much since I find most of the protagonists on both sides of the 'debate' fairly nauseating so I'll have to shelve this one the noo... (Read a post by 'Unity' of LC vs root canal? If you've never read one, you might consider this an easy call. But it isn't.)

Chris Dillow's having a larf at irrationalities in song lyrics, which reminded me of something: ever had an otherwise reasonable song completely ruined because the lyrics make so little sense, you just can't listen to it?

Take one-hit wonders Train, for example...



Quite like this wee tune but there's a couplet in it that ruins it for me:

"Tell me: did you fall from a shooting star,

One without a permanent scar...?"

Leaving aside the implausibility of surviving a fall like this...without a permanent scar? As opposed to those other shooting stars with permanent scars? These would be Glaswegian shooting stars who looked at someone's girlfriend in a club for more than twenty seconds and got themselves chibbed as a result, presumably.

This next item from the world of education is, apparently, absolutely true. The SMT minutes in an unnamed school (say, the one I work in, for example) suggested that bullies should no longer be called bullies but should instead be described as 'pupils displaying bullying-type behaviour'. I presume the idea is that the person shouldn't be defined by aspects of their behaviour. In the same way, it is unfair to describe a murderer as a murderer. Instead they should be a person displaying 'murdering-type behaviour'. Symptoms include blood-stained clothes, piles of corpses in the basement...

Merry Christmas and aura best for 2010 if I don't see you before then. x