This whole blogging thing is starting to get slightly out of hand in our household. Little Penguin’s at it and now Mrs Penguin’s at it as well. However thankfully I’ve convinced her to have a proper site a ditch that MySpace crap. Duly added to blogroll or I’ll get it in the neck.
Who knows, might even be able to coax her away from her crappy Windows operating system and get her on to Linux. Well, we can live in hope.
Little Penguin has finally got round to rebuilding his website. Drop by, take a gander, say hi. He’s a little smarty pants trying to upstage his father by sticking bits of AJAX (that’s a technical web thing not the cleaner) in his site.
sticking to the family related posts tonight.
I don’t know if other fathers go through this but following on from the birth of my son I have a strange urge to garden. It wasn’t there before to any large extent but now the garden is turned over to the production of wholesome food for the family.
What is more exciting is when the first shoots of the plants break through the surface of the soil and you know they’re on their way. So just to share my own amazement at the wonderment of nature here’s the radishes:
and the peas:
I think I should take a bit of a rest now. Been in the garden all day and might have picked up a little heat stroke.
Yes, iggle piggle. It’s not often that there is a situation that unites bloggers of varying political perspectives but I have to also include myself with Tom Watson, Dizzy and Mike Ion on this one.
For some strange reason my referrals have been going a bit hectic for ‘iggle piggle’ lately and I haven’t even mentioned them. I have to admit that despite having a young child like Tom and Dizzy our Little Penguin doesn’t seem too interested in childrens TV, preferring to only watch adverts, Taff on Pro Sieben and having an unhealthy interest in German soap operas.
Trying to get him into Sandmann.
As regular readers will know Mrs Penguin went away for the weekend with a friend and I had a brief experience at being a single parent.
Admittedly I wasn’t alone the whole weekend, my parents chipped in when I had to go out and do a few things but jobs like getting him off to sleep, making breakfast, changing and getting him to sleep were very much in my realm. Plus of course things like gardening, washing up, clothes washing and ironing – well sort of.
I managed to get all these jobs done but notably without any actual time to myself. I think that the whole weekend afforded me a sum total of 2 hours free which I used to simultaneously watch the Bahrain GP and make a start on my Lego star destroyer. Sorry, that should be my son’s Lego star destroyer, I am of course just building it for him.
However that was an interesting experience. Actual personal time to one’s self is next to non-existent with a small child when you are on your own. I’ve learned one thing from this experience that the last thing I would ever want is to be a single parent. I can remember the time back in the 90′s when the Tories were vilifying single-parents as being a bunch of sponging layabouts living off benefits and of course the routes of all societal evils, they don’t say much about them these days, after all they’ve found asylum seekers to fill that gap.
I suppose if you are lucky, have a good understanding employer you might be able to be a single parent and work while the child is at school but in the first few years unless you’re on a high income and can afford costly childcare then it is simply impossible to not fall into a position of dependence on the state unless grandparents can be drafted in. It’s certainly not an enviable existence when you consider it.
Anyway, I coped, Little Penguin was happy but the late nights when I normally get my free time weren’t possible because he wanted to curl up and sleep with me. I only failed to do the ironing, not out of laziness but simply that despite being rather nifty at most things electrical I haven’t got a clue how to work the iron so I gave up.
That said, a very interesting and eye opening experience, well worth it.
I know many bloggers have been giving their views on the budget and I didn’t get round to saying anything.
Apart from the different aspects of who will benefit or not etc etc that seems to be the run of things in the media I just like to comment on the comments and positions taken largely by the media.
A common theme seems to be, both in the media and the attack lines from both the Tories and the LibDems that Gordon Brown has tried to pull a fast one and has given with one hand by taking with the other.
Now for the economic illiterate here’s the four possible budgets that any Chancellor can announce.
1. Give lots away, tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts. Works well just before an election, a particular favourite of the Tories in days gone by, leads to a massive public sector borrowing requirement, economic instability and is a pretty crap way to run an economy.
2. Take a lot more out of the economy by raising taxes and don’t spend it. Not a very common type of budget and almost unheard of in the UK but occasionally needed in times where paying off national debt to reduce the cost of servicing that debt is beneficial in the long term, however tends to completely kill off economic growth so the returns are diminished in the longer term.
3. A neutral budget. Maybe bugger about a bit with where you get the money from to encourage certain economic activity and deter/penalise others but fundamentally you’re balancing the books, it’s called good house keeping and promotes economic stability. A very sensible way to run the economic affairs of the country.
4. The neutral budget but a bit more complex. Here you can justify borrowing and or modestly cutting some taxation on the basis that the additional money put into the system or allowed to circulate there will promote efficiency and productivity gains that will in a few years time offset the initial loss of revenue or loan. This maintains economic stability but can have the added benefit of boosting economic growth at the same time which is better in the long run because it increases future revenue.
Yes, pretty much since Gordon Brown has been Chancellor he has done a 3 or 4 type budget. So for all those journalists desperate to fill column inches with crap about the budget, whatever happens you have a choice of 1 to 4. 1 may bring short term booms which will turn to busts, 2 will propagate permanent economic stagnation, 3 keeps things going nicely but doesn’t boost growth as much as 4. So please tell me what exactly all these dipsticks expected Gordon to say?
Oh, and here’s what they would have said: Option 1, Gordon isn’t Mr Prudence any more, he playing fast and loose with the economy. 2, Gordon’s a money grabbing git, 3 or 4, he’s giving with one hand and taking away with the other. So on that basis I’m not listening to anything any economic commentator wishes to say.
On a personal note, my highlight of the budget was that my son took his first few proper steps half way through Gordon’s speech and much as a love economics and respect Gordon Brown, my son took most of my attention away from the event.
It’s my son’s (Little Penguin’s) first birthday today, so I’m doing the family/fatherly things.
Back tomorrow.
Public service broadcasts often get it in the neck for being a bit on the crap side and in many cases this isn’t unjustified. The latest one on the dangers of drinking excessively is quite good, and of course the classic that scared the shit out of my generation was the AIDS advert from the 80′s, still as ominous to watch now as it was then.
That’s why I’d like to share this little one with you. It’s a German advert about the dangers of the internet. OK, it’s all in German but often it isn’t the words that are spoken that convey the message but the imagery used. It’s cleverness is the seamingly normal context in which it is set and is well worth a shufty.
As a parent it makes you think about how and when I would consider it appropriate to introduce my own son to the wonders of the net. It’s not one of those subjects you can seek advice from your own parents about as it simply wasn’t there when I was that young.
For me I’m pretty much of the opinion that to try and insulate children from all threats and dangers in life is a fruitless and ultimately impossible task.
The best that one can hope for is to prepare them by being honest, discussing the issues openly and as much as we might teach our kids the Green Cross Code (is it still called that these days) to keep them safe on the streets, we should do the same for other areas of potential danger.
I for one will be passing on my own techie knowledge so that to use a slightly innapropriate phrase, he will go in to the situation all tooled up and if needs be, be able to defend himself when it comes to the net. The problem is however, that although I have those skills, very few parents will and that’s why I like this advert, it gets the message across and as I believe this is an initiative funded by the EU in relation to The Safer Internet Programme it’s backed up by quite a bit of advice and resources for parents.
In closing, I’ll show my ignorance. I don’t watch much British television so I’d be interested if either this advert has been dubbed into English and used here, which if it hasn’t it really should be or if we’ve done a similar awareness campaign and what was our adverts like?
The environmentally concerned person in me doesn’t agree with the amount of electricity wasted by leaving TV’s on standby and I’m well in the camp that thinks all TV’s should have a proper on/off switch.
However, as Little Penguin has discovered a fascination with turning the TV off (but not back on again yet) then the absence of an on/off button might no be a bad thing.
That’s one to bear in mind for anyone legislating on this. Perhaps an on/off button is a suitable out of reach of small children location would be better.
My son is almost one year old. I now understand the comments of my parents that time flies. It doesn’t seem five minutes since he first came into our lives and he is the most wonderful little person in the world to me.
I now also find myself worrying about what kind of a world he will grow up in, wanting to protect him from harm and always wanting him to be happy.
I also want to know why he has a fascination with turning the TV off and Mrs Penguin’s new mobile phone.
So there you go, a nice personal post for a change just to prove I am a big softy afterall.