One of the most useful devices I have in my study is my trusty Fellowes cross-cut shredder.
Sadly it’s not quite so hardcore that it handles CD-ROMs or credit cards but here’s a video to show you how to cut up your credit cards so that they cannot be used to glean any personal data from it.
My friend Iain has applied for what is being dubbed “The Best Job in the World“: The Caretaker of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.
Not sure how it can be, to be honest, given that the best job in the world is to be working within the Web Team at the University of St Andrews!
Anyway, that dispute aside, potential applicants are asked to upload a video, photograph and video of themselves (no longer than 60 seconds) to the website.
Here’s Iain’s … erm, offering. Check it out, it’s a work of genius!
Or you can check it out within the context of The Best Job in the World website.
I discovered this video (Money as Debt) embedded on Dave Gorman’s blog this week, and have only just gotten around to watching it — it lasts about 47 minutes, but it’s certainly well worth it — and if true … wow! Then the situation is more scary than I feared. There’s a website too: www.moneyasdebt.net.
I always thought that money worked like this, and this is part of what I said on Sunday in my sermon.
I’m going to have to be honest with you here, I’ve never really understood money beyond the fact that I have a bank account: I put money in to the bank, I take money out and sometimes, somehow, the bank uses the money that I’ve deposited to make them — and me — more money. I have no idea how that works!
To me, it’s a bit like those films where your children’s toys come to life after dark, like Toy Story: you put the action figure in the toy chest, in the morning it’s still there exactly where you left it … but during the hours in between it’s been on some daring and crazy adventure.
But it would appear not. It would appear that banks simply create new money almost out of thin air, and that money now simply represents debt.
“Each and every time a bank makes a loan, new bank credit is created – new deposits – brand new money.”
Graham F. Towers, Governor, Bank of Canada, 1934-54.
A few interesting quotations from the movie that gets you thinking:
“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit.
Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of a nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men.
We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world, no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.”
Woodrow Wilson
President of the United States of America, 1913-1921
“All of the perplexities, confusion, and distress in America arises, not from the defects of the Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.”
John Adams,
Founding Father of the American Constitution
“Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of sovereignty of Parliament and of democracy is idle and futile…
Once a nation parts with control of its credit, it matters not who makes the nation’s laws…
Usury once in control will wreck any nation.”
William Lyon Mackenzie King
from Prime Minister of Canada
(who nationalized the Bank of Canada)
And perhaps the most scary quotation, which closes the film:
“We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years.
It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years.
But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”
David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission,
in an address to a meeting of The Trilateral Commission, in June, 1991.
Perhaps it’s time for us to stop being complacent and find out how this whole money thing works (or doesn’t) and do something about it.
But of course, we’re all busy. And I’ve got work in the morning. And there’s the grass to cut, and I have a to do list as long as my monitor is high. Perhaps it would be best just to leave it to the bankers. It’s their area of expertise, after all. They know how it works, and how to fix it … maybe we should just leave it to them …
First of all there was this 12seconds clip from Documentally, about a dog and a field mushroom:
Mushroom The Size Of My Head on 12seconds.tv
… which later prompted this parody from AndrewJHolmes, about another canine and a fairy-tale mushroom:
documentally mushroom on 12seconds.tv
While you’re there, check out AndrewJHolmes’ answer to the 12 challenge: If I could hang out with any famous person it would be…
12 challenge: If I could hang out with any famous person it would be… on 12seconds.tv
Another new Metallica song — their first single — from their forthcoming album Death Magnetic: The Day That Never Comes.
To me it sounds like a combination of songs from Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, … And Justice For All, and Load/ReLoad.
I’m really looking forward to the album’s release …
In the UK there’s been a long-time medical TV series called Casualty; the YouTube video above shows you the opening titles from Series 15 (2000-2001).
The show is filmed in Bristol, but is set in the fictitious town of Holby — around which have sprung up two other series Holby City (set in the same hospital as Casualty, but on the wards rather than in A&E) and HolbyBlue, about the Holby police.
Anyway, with the non-UK readers catered for … I’ve often thought that it would be really cool to have an episode or two of Casualty each series directed by a guest director.
What would an episode directed by Quentin Tarantino look like? Or Ridley Scott? Or Tim Burton? Or how about Woody Allen?
Q. Who would your director of choice be and why?
I’d really like to see a Quentin Tarantino episode, I have to be honest. I’m just intrigued to know how he would handle it. I imagine there would be quite a lot of implied violence, mixed with the most intricate detail and trivial conversations. You can imagine, for example, an in-depth and heated conversation between two paramedics about the best glue to use for DIY tasks at home while attending a really gruesome train wreck.
The other episode I’d really like to see is the quiet episode, the near-miss episode, the episode where everyone sits around in the A&E department not knowing what to do with themselves because it’s so quiet.
That’s one of the great things about Casualty: you always know that something awful is going to happen.
I didn’t say I wrote Casualty! But you get the idea. Well … in my episode:
That’s my idea. If you’re a writer for popular BBC TV show Casualty, please feel free to use any of those ideas … on the conditions that:
I’ll waive my consultancy fee and EVERYTHINGâ„¢.