Original Thinkers of Our Times

[liadnan]

The Today programme this morning had several slots on various aspects of the obesity report put out yesterday, the very last item being Norman Tebbit and Boris Johnston, not that I could quite understand why (I was in the whosershower when they started).

According to Uncle Norm, the rise in obesity is due to this government "doing everything it can to encourage buggery".

Que? Something about destruction of the family it seems.

Cue Humphries effectively telling him to shut up and Boris coming out with some polite variant on "what a load of rubbish". Oh, and then he started banging on about how it used to be possible to bring up families on one income so the woman (obvs) could stay at home, but mercifully the beeps came. Honestly, why do we give these loonies airtime? And why does anyone care? Same goes for Princess Michael of Kent. Why does anyone care? One can usually get even fairly devout royalists to admit that she's particularly stupid, ignorant, arrogant and unpleasant so why the surprise? The only question is why Her Lizzyness allows a relatively third-rate royal who by all accounts she personally dislikes; with a cloud over her re use of grace and favour apartments and a habit worst than Philip's of opening her mouth before engaging what it pleases her to call a brain; to do these junkets at all.

Heigh ho. Been fairly busy, went to see Almodovar's Bad Education with Anna-who-lives-upstairs Tuesday (worth seeing, full of Almodovar's usual things, perhaps not his best though) and dinner with the lovely Frankie last night.

Was coming out of the Winding-Up court yesterday morning in full get-up and a very cute member of a party of American tourists/exchange lawyers/whatever who were wandering through the costume exhibition evidently thought I looked great. Remind me to see if I can change my vote in the internal survey on court dress to keeping wig and gown... (though it would be better if we came out of mourning for Queen Anne (? I think) and went back to red robes).

Comments

[liadnan]

Standard of living, I think.

[etherealfionna.livejournal.com]

I agree. "Good standard of living" these days includes a whole heap of hardware that just wasn't necessary before: TVs, video players, cars, DVDs, CDs. Plus, these days we pay others to do a lot of things that we could do ourselves much cheaper.

I'm not complaining or harking back to simpler times, just saving money at the moment and realising how much of what I spend is actually unnecessary.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Only thing I could find on Google was a report by the Government actuary which said that average earnings had "historically" (no indication of what period that means) grown by 1% - 2% p.a. above the RPI. A disproportionate amount of the overall increase was post-1990, though. I think that the median would actually be more indicative in this case, too, and then there's the problem that the "basket" for the RPI changes regularly, and changes in taxation and such.

[liadnan]

I suspect it's an almost impossible question to answer properly.

And see http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002730.html for an example of a similar problem.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Thanks!