Friday 18 January 2008

Jan 18th

Todays podcast text:

Main Story

An airplane was forced to make an emergency landing at Heathrow. Some passengers were a little bit hurt. The pictures were pretty scary-looking but there wasn’t really much else to the news. That didn’t stop the press though. The BBC interviewed a passing cab driver who commented “it was so low, you would think you could reach out the window and touch it”, mind you he also thought £4.50 was a reasonable fee for waiting two minutes and later added, “That Robbie Williams, he’s gay, mark my words.”

The reasons for the crash are as yet unclear but some experts have speculated that a new trainee co-pilot may have driven the pilot to make the early landing by asking “are we nearly there yet” every five minutes since the plane left Beijing”.

As a result all short haul BA flights from Heathrow to destinations like Manchester and Paris were cancelled for the day. This was a bad move; they should have been cancelled forever. I know it’s not strictly relevant to the news story but really, there’s a climate crisis on, anyone who flies from London to Manchester should be shot and carved up for the rest of us to eat.

Education

A teaching union survey suggests more than half of teachers believe internet plagiarism is a serious problem among sixth-form students. One teacher, a Mrs Cooper from Devon said “I have been handed two identical essays on Romeo and Juliet as well as a piece of work which still contained website adverts”. So evidently standards of cheating have declined seriously since I was at school. A second teacher, a Mr Wells from Norfolk said “I have been handed two identical essays on Romeo and Juliet as well as a piece of work which Play Your Game At Poker 888.com...”

More seriously though, thinking back to my days at school. It seems likely the internet could be putting school swots out of business. Gone are the days when after handing in your own A* essay, you could spelling-mistake it up a bit, take out the clever conclusion and trade it in with a student who valued a B- more than his dinner money.

Technology

A scientist says he has produced embryos that are clones of himself and a lab colleague. Next week he plans to work on a trapdoor bridge over a piranha-filled pond surrounded by an evil robot army.

Hopefully the next clones will be of George Bush and Gordon Brown and after indoctrinating them with liberal pacifist ideals they’ll be able to take over unnoticed while the real Bush and Brown languish in strait jackets twitching each time they hear peace and stability have spread somewhere else in the world.

Politics

David Cameron has responded to the ongoing anger about the death of Gary Newlove, who was kicked to death by three teenagers, one of whom was out of bail at the time, by saying we need to “take a look” at the bail process. Take a look? Don’t we need to reform it so that those who are a danger to the public are kept out of the way? Cameron is starting to sound like a cowboy builder, “Got trouble with your bail system ‘ave you love? I’ll take a look at that for you if you like.” Didn’t politics used to be about policies and manifestos?

Newspapers

The Sun reported health and safety inspectors have clamped down on a pantomime production insisting that six wooden swords, two plastic cutlasses and a plastic pistol be kept under lock and key. Obviously the panto season has long since finished so frankly anyone using the old “it’s behind you” excuse this late into Jan is probably planning a bank job. The Sun’s message as usual is that health and safety is a waste of time and we should just allow companies to save a few pennies for executive bonuses by operating unsafe practices and putting their employees lives at risk. It’s not a joke, I just wish it was.

The Sun usually has nothing good to say about immigrants to the UK from Poland. Today however marked a change in that policy in interviews with Ilona, a trainee beauty therapist from Gniezno and Kamila, a physiotherapy student from Poznan. The Sun said the two women were likely to be idolised by millions. What did they do to deserve this? Yup, appeared on page three with their tits out...

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