I'm so fed up with being force fed shit C list dancing celebrities and Simon Cowellesque shit music performed by a bunch of attention seeking Billy No-Mates. Not to mention the non stop barrage of pretentious soap operas pretending to provide a narrative for the lives of the ignoramuses that invest their time trying to find a story line to which they can relate, so as to give their otherwise trivial lives some sense of purpose.
To the TV Program controllers:
F*CK OFF and put on something vaguely stimulating for those TV licence payers who actually have more than two brain cells to rub together.
Me and my wife visited NZ in 2005 and fell in love with the country. We have always wanted to go back, and today we saw a migration consultant and have decided to make the move. We also have a 2 year old and a 4 year old who we don't want going to school in England. However, I have just been reading this thread britishexpats.com/forum/showthread.php
and it's scared me. I really, really want to move my family to NZ, but im not so sure it's the right move any more, any advice would be gratefully received.
My scenario
I'm a polytechnic lecturer and my wife works in administration. I have a post graduate diploma in Education (soon to be a full Masters) and my wife has an NVQ3 in business admin. We have been told that together we should have about 125 points without a job offer for me. I have no intention of moving down to NZ without a job offer, but my main fear is that even with a good job I will not be able to provide a comfortable living for my family. We have a lot of creature comforts here, but we are not really material people. Personally I'm quite happy with a load of books and my telescope to keep me company. My wife isn't a crazy shopper, and my kids are too young to have been programmed by the UK consumer market. That said, I don't want to live like a pauper.
Finances
I've been told to expect a salary of about $50-70k, and I might have about $25k for a deposit for a house. I would like to buy a small 3 bed house, and I don't mind were I live in NZ as long as it's not much colder that the UK! We did love North Island.
Do you think a family of 3 could live on that salary? What might our quality of life be like? Will we be living in bargain basement bins, or will we be able to shop at supermarkets? As I said, I would hate to live like a pauper, all I'm looking for is a good quality of life with no stress.
I would really appreciate any advice anyone can give me.
Thanks.
I was watching a program with my students today when a bisexual man came onto the screen and immediately one of my students shouted out that he should be killed. All the students agreed, and it was not a joking agreement, it was a dead cold agreement. I stopped the program and asked them why, and all 18 Muslim students said it was what God wanted because it was not natural because animals do not display homosexual behaviour. I showed them proof that animals do display homosexual behaviour and it therefore it is totally natural. One student said that just because animals do it, it does not make it natural. I asked him to explain when people engage in homosexual activity they are being possessed by Jin (the supernatural) and therefore they must be killed so as to kill the Jinn at the same time. Another student said that Muslims believe that all animals have souls and pray to god, and the animals displaying homosexual behaviour must be the ones that pray to the devil! When I asked them were they got these views from they all said their parents, the mosque and the Quran. I tried to say that this homosexual was not a Muslim and surely he should be free to follow his own sexuality, and they responded that because God can see what he was doing he should still be killed! One then added that just because scientists say it’s happening in nature it doesn’t mean that it is, and that God trumps science anyhow. So I asked him that if his child was dying of diabetes and he had the choice to give him insulin or prayer but not both what would he choose. He said the prayer every time. So I told him that parents in America had done just that and their children had died. His response was, “at least they’ve got God on their side”!
Now the problem is that I’ve been told by my college to tackle discrimination, promote equality, and respect students beliefs and cultures. But how can I do that when the students’ beliefs and cultures seem to be promoting the very discrimination I’m supposed to be challenging? These are 16-19 year old male students who are displaying extreme bigotry and hatred towards other human beings just for having a different sexual persuasion.
As a side note the only two students who did not care about the homosexual said they also did not believe in god.
Sam Bell (Rockwell) has a three year contract to work for Lunar Industries. For the contract's entire duration, he is the sole employee based at their lunar station. His primary job responsibility is to harvest and periodically rocket back to Earth supplies of helium-3, the current clean and abundant fuel used on Earth. There is no direct communication link available between the lunar station and Earth, so his only direct real-time interaction is with GERTY, the intelligent computer whose function is to attend to his day to day needs. With such little human contact and all of it indirect, he feels that three years is far too long to be so isolated; he knows he is beginning to hallucinate as the end of his three years approaches. All he wants is to return to Earth to be with his wife Tess and their infant daughter Eve, who was born just prior to his leaving for this job. With two weeks to go, he gets into an accident at one of the mechanical harvesters and is rendered unconscious. Injured, he awakens back at the station in the infirmary, he assumes assisted by GERTY. GERTY tells him that a rescue team named Eliza will come to the station to clean up the aftermath of the accident. After his recuperation, he takes an unauthorized trip back to the broken harvester, where he makes an unexpected discovery. Because of his find, he begins to doubt his sanity, then his true identity, then the company and GERTY's willingness to do what is best for him. Because of his resulting beliefs, his sole mission becomes how to get back to Earth on his own.
This was an excellent movie that just relied on an amazing story and really solid acting. No CGI, no explosions, no naked women, no slow-mo bullet time action shots, just a great story and brilliant performance from Sam Rockwell. A proper Sci-fi film at last. It actually felt more like an Asimov story then the awful I Robot. How sci-fi films should be done.
In a few weeks time there is going to be a special event held for members at the Birmingham University observatory were we get to use the main 17inch cassigrain! I have never used such a big telescope before.
The major differences between the elections:
- In the American election only the results of Florida were contested, in the Iranian election the entire countries votes are being contested
- When Bush won the American election Gore's aides were not rounded up and arrested or beaten
- There were no mass riots in American streets with hundreds of thousands protesting everyday at and getting beaten by the poilce
- Bush didn't ship in tens of thousands of his own protestors to fight against the oppositions protestors
- There was no shutting down of cell networks or internet access in America
- Bush never imposed a media blackout
- There were no reports of voters being denied access to ballot boxes
The tripod is a little bit flimsy but when the accessory tray is added it's a little more stable. However there still seemed to be a healthy wobble visible at high magnitudes. The motorised mount was really nice to use and very user friendly. The eye pieces were not so good (i think) because I could hardly see any detail on Jupiter (probably because I thought it was Saturn and spent my time trying to see the rings), but I could make out a browny orange disk. When I used the 10mm with the 2xBarlow there was just too much shake in the scope for me to bother with them for long. All the Messier objects I found were just grey blobs, and I could only make out their shapes by looking away from them and using my peripheral vision, and even then they were faint. I tried to look at them through the 10mm and 2xBarlow but the scope shook too much when I turned the focusing knob. I do wish that the clap holding the scope onto the mound had 2 tightening screws instead of one as this may have eliminated some shaking. I will be attending the Birmingham Astronomical Society meeting this Wednesday to get some advice on using my scope and general observational astronomy tips.
Explorer 5.1inch reflector
10 + 25mm lenses
2x Barlow
Turn Left At Orion book
Red bicycle rear light
Comfy chair
Warm Coat
Finally I got a chance to use my telescope last night and it turned out to be a really amazing 2 hours, but it did start of being very dissapointing. Saturn has to be the planet I was most excited about seeing, so I had a look at where it should be in the sky and found out it was just to the right of a bloody street light at the front of my house. I set up my telescope and focused on what I thought was Saturn and I was very dissapointed to see that I couldn't make out the rings at all. Even more annoying was that everytime a car drove past the front of the house my telescope started wobbling and the planet would wobble in and out of view. I eventually got the scope focused and upped the magnification to 10mm and then added the 2xBarlow (130x) but I still couldn't see any rings. I was gutted. After about 20 minutes I decided to quit on Saturn because I realised that I was basically standing on my drive with a telescope pointed in the direction of my neighbours. So I took my scope into the back garden.
After sitting for a while and readjusting my eyes to the sky I tried to find the Ring Nebula (M57) in Lyra, but no success. I then tried to find the globular cluster in Hercules (M13), but again no success. I was starting to feel really gutted that I couldn't actually find anything I was looking for. I decided to just enjoy looking at the Milky Way through the scope for a while and that was really cool. Eventually I had another look at Turn Left At Orioin to see what else I should be able to view and realised that Alberio was supposed to be a double star, and when I focused on it with my 25mm I could actually see it clearly, one white star and one blue one. It was pretty amazing! I then looked for M13 again and this time whilst scanning the sky throught the eye piece I noticed a faint grey smudge where M13 should have been. When I looked at it directly it almost vanished, but when I looke at the stars around it I could see it clearly as a faint glowing ball of light. I was so amazed that I spent the next 10 minutes looking at it. Most people would probably think im an idiot for being excited about a little grey smudge, but its amazing to know that im looking at a cluster of stars 25,000 light years away from me! All of a sudden I got on a roll and I found M57 and even found the Dumbbell Nebula (M27). They were exactly where the book said they would be, it just took me a while to realise what I was looking for. I suppose I made the classic mistake of expecting tiny versions of what you see in magazines, but even though in reality they look nothing like that, it's awesome to know that what I was looking at were real deep space objects with my own eyes.
To make matters even better, this morning I found out that the reason I couldn't see Saturns rings was because I was looking at Jupiter!
I can't wait for more clear skys, but as usual Englands got plenty more rain forcast for the rest of the week.
I bought 'Turn Left At Orion' today and i've got a list of things im going to try to see tonight seeing as it's forcast to be a clear sky, but I can guarantee the clouds will turn up just as the sun sets.
A summary of Labours mistakes (in no particular order)
- 10p Tax mess
- Bringing in ID cards
- NHS supercomputer fiasco costing £12b
- Millenium Dome £200 million + wasted
- Cash for peers
- Selling of half of the national gold reserves for the lowest price in 20 years after officially being advised that this was a 'serious misgiving' from the bank of England, and then trying to block the Sunday Times publishing what they did.
- Establishing hospital league tables
- Taking the police of the streets to fill in paperwork, and then employing Joe Public to do walk the beats instead(CSO)
- Inflating enormous debt bubble
- Raiding the public pensions purse
- Creating the biggest trade deficit in 10 years
- Totally fucking up the housing market by not regulating mortgages.
- No EU referendum (as promised)
The last few weeks have been very exciting for me. Last Monday I thought I spotted Cygnus and Lyra and maybe even Hercules, but I wasn't too sure so I took some slow shutter pics of what I thought were these constellations. When I opened them in Photoshop and adjusted the light levels the constellations became really clear and I realised that I had actually spotted all three constellations correctly! I went back out on Tuesday and Wednesday to try and spot them again and by Friday I had even found Draco, Bootes, Corona Borealis, Cassiopiea and Cephues!
It's inspired me to look up details about these constellations and I've since found out that there's an amazing nebula in the bottom half of Libra. It's amazing to actually know what I am looking at, rather then just staring random stars. It really gives me a sense of my place in the universe (as an ant looking out of an ant hill).
I want to try and get up to Clent hills this weekend for a late night stargazing session, but it just depends on whether or not I can convice any of my friends to join me.
Pros..
Watching 4 of the fittest girls in the UK dance around on the stage in outfits that got progressively skimpier as time went by.
Cons..
I've now got their shit songs stuck in my head. Watching ridiculously muscly blokes dance around the stage with them. (Why didn't they pick fat dancers instead, at least the blokes in the audience wouldn't feel so bad.)
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