Debt of a Nation

With 250,000 homes lying empty in the country why has it come as such an apparent shock to many (including the government, it seems) that we no longer need to continue building 90,000 substandard "homes" and rabbit hutches, sorry, I mean "appartments" each year. Now, I'm no economics expert but surely this is a basic case of supply and demand?

There's a recession on the way, yeah? Great, people might remove their heads from their arses just long enough to see things as they really are:

EXTERNAL DEBT

rank ------country-----------------total --------------------------------------per head of population

-	World	54,310,000	2004 est.	8,141
1	United States	12,877,889	31-Dec-07	42,343
2	United Kingdom	11,502,800	Q4 2007	189,855
3	Germany	4,489,000	30-Jun-07	54,604
4	France	4,396,000	30-Jun-07	68,183
5	Italy	2,345,000	30-Jun-07	39,446
6	Netherlands	2,277,000	30-Jun-07	138,619
7	Spain	2,047,000	30 June 2007 est.	45,287
8	Ireland	1,841,000	30-Jun-07	424,291
9	Japan	1,492,000	30-Jun-07	11,682
10	Switzerland	1,340,000	30-Jun-07	176,019

Ireland owes more money than Japan who have a population of 125 million, compared to Ireland's 4.2 million. Party on.

Monkey Business

Today marks the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin and the now sadly forgotten Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Evolution:

"The joint publication of Wallace's and Darwin's papers proposing the revolutionary theory of evolution by natural selection had astonishingly little effect. The president of the Linnean Society, in his annual report for 1858, stated, "The year ... has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear."

Understatement or what?

hey, teacher... Leave those kids alone!

Who could have guessed teaching English could be so tiring? Well, obviously anyone who has ever taught. So I'm back in the world of the worker. Far out or what? Ok, too wrecked to try to be as funny or sarcastic or as deep and insightful as I usually am (Irony never tires). I used up all the good stuff in class. Tomorrows lesson: OK class, watch DVD "The Golden Compass" while teacher rests his eyes...ZZZZZ