TK's cartoons

A couple of seasonal cartoons from TK. Sorry, I don't know where they came from originally but I thought they might raise a smile. They can be clicked on to enlarge.

Christmas madness 2008

I had to do some more Christmas shopping yesterday. I didn't want to, not because I don't want to give presents, but because at this time of year, it's all about fighting your way through crowds of ill-tempered, stressed-out people. Elder Daughter used to get most annoyed with me whenever we went shopping together, as I used to insist on going early in the day to avoid the crowds. "Mother!" she once said, completely exasperated, "If there are more than nine people in the shop, you think it's crowded!"
However, yesterday morning, I was counselling, so I didn't get out until lunch-time. Off I trundled into town to find not one free parking space in the central car parks, so I decided to cut my losses and go and park in the Matalan car-park. (Yes, I did go into Matalan as well, so I was parked legitimately.) On my way home I passed a lengthy traffic queue, not queueing to get into Tesco but waiting on the road to get into the queue for Tesco's car park!
It was December 12th, almost a fortnight before Christmas Day, or have I done a Rip van Winkle and slept through the final run up to the big day?

Welsh Blog of the Year

I had a lovely surprise the other day when I visited Yorkshire Pudding's blog and discovered that he had very kindly given me an award, not just any old award, you understand, but the prestigious and highly sought after 'Laughing Horse Yorkshire Pudding Blog Award 2008'.


Need I say more? (Cheque's in the post, YP.)

Communication?

I, in my innocence, would presume that an important, if not essential aspect of a politician's role is to be a good communicator, which means, surely, that he/she needs to give a nod in the direction of plain English. So, is this really what Ed Miliband thinks he is doing when he says,
"There will be some people saying 'we can't go ahead with an agreement on climate change, it's not the biggest priority'. And, therefore, what you need is countervailing forces.
"Some of those countervailing forces come from popular mobilisation."
Yes, well... You can see the full article here.
And just in case you need any help, look here for a definition of 'countervailing.'
Don't you get tired of the way our language is so surreptitiously being infiltrated by meaningless jargon?

Maths and psychology

I was quite intrigued by this article about procrastinators. I can do task avoidance with the best of them but I would never have made the association promoted here that procrastination is due to being a perfectionist. As far as I am concerned, and speaking personally, it's all down to laziness or just not being in the right mood!
Or is that just too simple?
Mind you, the maths equation is interesting. U=EV/ID.
The 'U' stands for utility, or the desire to complete a given task. It is equal to the product of E, the expectation of success, and V the value of completion, divided by the product of I, the immediacy of the task, and D, the personal sensitivity to delay.

OK, maybe not...