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dack.com > web > web economy bullshit generator This handy tool should be on the desktop of all in management. It will provide an instant important sounding but meaningless phrase to chuck into a meeting. Promotion beckons for all who use it, I’m sure…

University of Bums on Seats – Welcome My boss sent me a link to this – she thought (rightly) I’d be amused. The trouble is, many of us who work in HE see this kind of thing as only marginally exaggerating current trends. There will come a point when this won’t look particularly like parody.

BBC NEWS | England | Northamptonshire | School gives pupils f-word limitAnother brilliant educational initiative. I wonder where they got 5 as the limit? Is there a sliding scale of punishment? If you use the offending word 15 times in a lesson, do you get twice the detention you would have got if you’d used…

We spent some time staying with friends in what I thought was Surrey this week- except that their local council has decided to call itself Elmbridge, presumably on the basis that it sounds nice, as there doesn’t actually seem to be a place called Elmbridge in the vicinity. But hey, why should that stop a…

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Stones’ Angie in German poll rowIf you thought British politicians were desperate to appear hip, check this out. How pathetic can you be? What’s more, the major political show on German TV – Sabine Christiansen – routinely introduces its weekly topic to the strains of an apt 60s…

This is brilliant, isn’t it? What’s the betting that the father’s reason for stumping up an obscene amount of money for his son’s education was that he would learn some discipline? 400 offences, eh? That’s some going…

This article seems to confirm what common sense would suggest – that allowing longer opening hours at pubs leads to social problems. In the process, it also gives a good kicking to the current management and government obsession with targets, so that’s a bonus for all of us who have to labour under their yoke.

My council has now decided that every time its logo appears, it will carry the strapline “Working together for excellence”. So, what does that mean? Who are they working with? Themselves? And how are they defining excellence, given they were rated “poor” by the Audit Commission? It rivals for fatuity Lancashire’s “A place where everyone…

BBC NEWS | UK | New drink laws ‘lead to violence’It doesn’t take genius, or a judge, to work this out. You have to question why a government originally elected as providing moral leadership (remember the ethical foreign policy that lasted, ooh, five minutes) is promoting this self-evidently disastrous policy in the face of common…

BBC NEWS | Education | Chaucer’s tales become rap songs This depresses me. Why does everything have to be made “relevant”? The excuse given here is that Chaucer’s language is difficult to understand. Yes, it is. Get over it. These children will go away saying they’ve “done Chaucer” – but they haven’t, no more than…