"I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad..."

I've heard three ludicrous things recently which, if true, make me wonder about the sanity and the priorities of some of those in authority.

1) One of the reasons that the RNLI doesn't qualify for huge amounts of lottery funding is to do with the fact that as an organisation it doesn't deal with enough ethnic minorities.

Whoever is responsible for allocating the funding presumably thinks that if the person drowning is not white then lifeboat crews turn around without picking them up. Or maybe it's to do with the fact that the proportion of people from ethnic minorities who volunteer for the RNLI is too low. This, I would imagine, is largely because there is a low proportion of people from ethnic minorities living in some coastal areas. I wonder how the one such family living in one such village feels about the implication that by not volunteering for the lifeboat station they've ruined the statistics and denied the RNLI funding.

2) Scottish Universities don't charge fees for Scottish students. English students attending Scottish Universities have to pay fees as per the system in England. However, under EU law, other EU students must pay the same as Scottish students, i.e. nothing. So if I happened to be French I could attend University in Scotland for free (doubtless at the expense of the British taxpayer). It might help compensate for the fact that my wife would have hairy armpits, but honestly...

3) People with diabetes must now be called just that and the term 'diabetic' has been outlawed. I wonder how much NHS funding it took to implement that decision.

Can anyone confirm these stories?

I've been away from the blogosphere for a while because I've had a lot to deal with, not least on the work front. I'm really struggling with a piece of coursework at the moment, and it's got to the stage that upon reading "we say that f is globally Lipshitz if..." I feel that it's all Lipshitz to me.

If this post hasn't given you enough to comment on already may I suggest you name the *artist* whose song I took today's title from. It'll be interesting to see what people come back with...

Comments

Anonymous said…
The song continues 'that the best dreams i have are the ones in which i'm dying' or something similar. Its called mad world and there was a remake that was christmas number one a few years ago!! i think. no idea who its by though!
Hope you're feeling less stressed soon. i hear you're having housing trouble?
Maria
Anonymous said…
The song was originally by Tears for Fears, but was rearranged by Michael Andrews and performed by Gary Jules for the film Donnie Darko, it was indeed Christmas No.1 a few years ago for Gary Jules.

Brilliant song in both arrangements.

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