John Mortell’s blog

Been a long time since I watched wrestling but this is funny stuff…

Brilliant stuff…

Damn but this looks astonishingly good. Especially considering that I believed it was a very bad idea to even consider making this movie…. They had better keep the violence though..

….I was added by someone setting up a bebo site for Madeleine McCann yesterday. For once in my life I choose not to accept the invite. But I’m still not sure why. See, I suppose that on one hand I can appreciate that there are many people who genuinely are touched by this girl and her families plight. Yet on the other hand, it nearly strikes me as being tremendously wrong to even set up such a site.

Twenty Major has hit part of it talking here and here about how ‘wrong’ it can strike you that this family are getting so much money that they don’t really need from the whole incident, but that’s only part of it. My housemate when I was talking to him about it said that the family might not be able to pull enough cash together at the moment (or may not be able to pull themselves together enough), they might need the money for the therapy that Madeleine could need (assuming she’s still alive, which to be honest I kind of doubt) or that they may simply just donate the money to some charity or fund after she’s found alive and well (and to be honest, considering that most people don’t really know where the money they give to charities go to anyway, it’s not like those who have given money can complain).

What disturbs me more in the way that its been dealt with I guess… I mean, there’s the blatant element of ‘she’s a pretty blonde white girl from England and her parents are rich so she’s more important’ going on in this story. I mean,how many people have donated money to ‘help’ who simply ignore the ‘Trocaire’ ads or their equivalent? There’s also the fact that the parents don’t need that money, the fact that there are big businessmen and corporations donating ‘rewards’ and incentives to find her. And who here doesn’t believe that at some point there wasn’t a conversation that went ”the money we offer is half what we’ll get back in free advertising!”

But what also disturbs me about it is the ‘pretending to care’ element. I mean, lets be honest, most of the newscasters, pundits, businessmen etc. don’t care less about this girl. She’s just another person that has gone missing /died that you’ll never meet. Boris Johnson talked about this a bit in his ‘have I got views for you’ book when Ken Bigley came up. As he pointed out, in some ways when that murder happened there was this tremendous public grief of a sort yet he also noticed an element of people rebelling at it (he uses the example of a minutes silence at a football game being interrupted by a crowd who were more interested in the game than in some guy they never met and didn’t care about).

Yes, there is something to be said of the benefits of having her face on the news. The odds are that the more people are aware of the story the more likely that if she is still alive that she may be seen by somebody somewhere and found. But, this public gnashing of teeth disturbs me when its not like most people (if they’re honest) really give a damn.

I know this post has been a bit pointless and rambly, but I still feel that ‘a bebo page for Madeleine’ is wrong and there is something wrong that it would even happen to exist.

From the ‘Shaun of the Dead’ lads… Don’t know what this is from, maybe ‘Spaced’. Fun stuff.

The Amazing Jesus.

Welcome to Hell.

Great stuff.

Had my U.S government exam Friday, went ok except for the fact that I rather stupidly didn’t do all the questions right (well one question). The end result of this is that I am know only going to be marked out of 45-odd % of the exam rather than the 60-odd % that the exam was worth… Still I had 23% already gotten before I went into the exam so… It’s more the feeling of ‘can you spell plonker?’ that gets to me…

So, after the exam Friday I was fairly tired… But I knew a lot of people going out that night so off I went. Big mistake. Apparently, getting up at 6am and not getting to bed until 3.30 the following morning leaves me with a frightful hangover… Even if you don’t drink that much. Now granted I did have to much but I’ve drank triple what I drank that night and gotten up and could function the next day. I spent yesterday in bed trying to sleep it off. And I slept for 12 hours last night, which when you consider that I usually don’t sleep for more than 6/7 hours in a ‘normal’ night is fairly weird..

Today shall be given over to studying for my next exam Tuesday.. It’s going to probably be my second-hardest exam so I’m not looking forward to it… Still though, only 3 to go!

Russian history exam today, American government tomorrow. Damn I hate exams. Still though, I went drinking before the exam and after it and it all turned out grand (fairly sure I got full marks in the short questions so I’ve 32% in the bag between that and the other work during the year), also six pages for the essay so….

Saw bits and pieces of the debate last night, going to watch it again to try and get a better idea of the whole thing (especially as I barely saw the end of it) but my impression was that everyone except Gerry Adams and Mark Little were fairly ok.. Everyone else had some good moments and ’twas all quite interesting. Pat Rabbite’s coverage didn’t get me to change my choice to vote for Labour first while Sargent’s behavior has me possibly more likely to vote for them.. Don’t really care about the tonights debate and I’ll probably end up watching the Sopranos…

Also, courtesy of Warrenellis.com a really good Calvin & Hobbes animation

To be honest, for me this video strikes a tone of ‘Good-bye and good luck’ – probably not the message that was intended. C’est La Vie I guess…

Howard Zinn speaking in MIT. Very interesting stuff, if somewhat ‘heard it all before’. It’s basically an hour long lecture but good to see stuff like this around….