Park Life

She's seven. One of the girls Maria has moved in on ParkyJnr mates just recently and seems to be causing friction and undermining her and talking down to her. Maria is probs one of the most dominant. The mother is a bit of a monster from E Germany originally, the father seems alright. Thinking about it the mother has never spoken to me. Was thinking of speaking to them and also the teacher in the morning. I'm really fukcing angry. I won't let this shit pass.

Is getting bullied at school and it's really making me angry. She was crying again tonight and has been down for a week or so. She spilt the beans tonight. What's best to do?

Is there no oversight?

How much on average are people spending on drink a week?

The economy Unemployment remains high, at 9.4%, but Obama kept a core promise of reforming Wall Street. Then he broke his promise to repeal Bush-era tax cuts for the very rich, in order to win over Republican support. ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ Healthcare The White House was forced to make compromises on healthcare reforms. Their future is uncertain, with Republicans pushing to repeal it and public opinion divided. ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ Fix 'broken politics' in Washington Obama promised to hold monthly meetings with Republicans in Congress. He held only five of them in 2010, and partisan rhetoric grew more heated than ever. In a display of unity, Democrats and Republicans are planning to cross party lines and sit together during tonight's speech. But there is little sign of a new spirit of civility, even after the attack on Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson. ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ Repair America's image in the world Obama had a last-minute win when the Senate ratified the New Start arms reduction treaty with Russia last December, and attitudes to the US have improved in Europe. But Afghanistan is looking unstable, along with neighbouring Pakistan. There is little to no progress on dealing with Iran's nuclear arsenal or the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ Planet in peril Obama's climate change bill failed amid accusations that the White House had not lobbied aggressively enough. He also faced criticism for his handling of the BP oil disaster. But he continued to move forward cautiously on new rules for industry and cars. ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ 'Don't ask, don't tell' Obama promised in last year's state of the union address to do away with the law banning openly gay people from serving in the military. Congress voted to end the law at the end of December over the objections of a number of Republicans, but the repeal has yet to come into effect. ★★★★★★★★☆☆ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/2...ama-report-card

By Andrew Gilligan 10:10PM GMT 24 Jan 2011 281 Comments Official figures show that, under Private Finance Initiative [PFI] schemes, British taxpayers are committed to pay £229 billion for new hospitals, schools and other projects with a capital value of just £56 billion. Several contracts are due to run for 60 years, documents released under freedom of information requests show, meaning taxpayers will be paying for the projects for generations to come. Private contractors who agreed PFI deals with the Government are set to make billions of pounds in profit, with some due to see returns of up to 71 per cent. In the first of a series of reports, The Daily Telegraph discloses the heavy costs and administrative burdens caused by PFIs. The deals are a way of building large public projects using private finance, which were relied upon by the Labour government. The disclosures will lend weight to MPs calling on PFI companies to refund a share of their profits to the taxpayer. The PFI deals include: • A hospital which charged £52,000 for a job that cost £750. Demolishing a shelter for smokers resulted in the PFI contractor charging £2,600 a year for the “extra cleaning”. What the fuck is going on? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics...rs-of-pain.html

"Blue-collar comedies, eh? Problem is, of course, it's never entirely straightforward what that means: do we mean comedy by the working class, for the working class, or about the working class? But given this obvious cavil, the man does seem to have a point. Porridge, Bread, Birds of a Feather, Brushstrokes, Rising Damp, Steptoe and Son, Only Fools and Horses, Till Death Do Us Part . . . those were great comedies with working-class settings, except for Brushstrokes, which just had a working-class setting. Where are their equivalents now? The simple thing to say is that since a working class doesn't exist in the form it did 40 years ago, sitcoms depicting it as if it did aren't to be expected. The notable successes in recent years – The Royle Family and Shameless – both portrayed a working class unrecognisable to the Galton and Simpson generation. Perhaps what Cohen's trying to do is caution against comedy that forgets class exists and assumes We Are All Middle-Class Now: not because it's unrepresentative, but because it's less funny. The best British sitcoms have tended to probe the deepest British anxiety: that is, class itself. Hancock's Half Hour, maybe the greatest sitcom of all time, was marinated in class anxiety – as were Keeping Up Appearances, The Good Life, Rising Damp, Are You Being Served? and Fawlty Towers. Snobbery and inverted snobbery, aspiration and pretension, the struggle of the individual against a collective destiny: these are great engines of comedy. From Malvolio mincing cross-gartered to Del-Boy Trotter dreaming of a big score, we recognise ourselves in the snobs brought low and the wide-boys thwarted of class-based comedy."

Frank Skinner imo is a working class comic writer. In a restaurant outside London's Royal Festival Hall, Skinner is tucking into devilled kidneys on toast, which he will follow with a portion of mutton pie. Round his neck is a chain bearing the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose shrine he visited in Mexico. "There's a level of devotion there that spooked me out for a couple of days. I thought: 'Is this a mad superstition?' but then I thought it was just another manifestation of worship," he says. "I did a week in Lourdes with a mate of mine. We walked around like a couple of gay curates."

I was going to write a long and well informed article debunking Chris McGlade’s view that the comedy circuit is dictated by class but unfortunately I’m from a working class background and don’t have a degree so when I started writing I got distracted by a butterfly. And besides, I had some windows to lick. I also tried to read Bethany Black and Matt Price’s intelligent, well-measured responses but couldn’t understand all the long words and there were no pictures. I think the sarcasm above sums up what annoyed me most about Chris’s article. That is that it while clearly being intelligent himself; he suggests that the rest of the working classes are stupid, which I find highly offensive. I grew up in a council flat in South London with working-class parents who for various periods of my youth were out of work and on benefits. That meant that for a large portion of my life I couldn’t even claim to be ‘working’ class but was actually part of the underclass that look up to those in low paid jobs. Despite this, I managed to do OK at school but never cared enough about it to go on to higher education. I did a collection of jobs following school before I drifted into comedy. If Chris’s article is to be believed, this background means ‘it is virtually impossible to get a break, get on TV or be accepted on the comedy club circuit’. Yet in five years of doing comedy I have won and been nominated for a number of awards, been on TV and cemented myself on the circuit. Now either Chris has exaggerated the extent to which we working class comedians are kept down or I am living some sort of comedy Oliver Twist story? If anything, the comedy industry has welcomed me and allowed me to be a success in a way that none of my previous jobs allowed. Obviously the common argument from people that make these claims about comedy being middle class is that it is the content as much as the performer that dictates which class it is aimed at. Again this does the working classes a disservice as it suggests they don’t have the brain capacity to understand anything other than pure base humour. Chris himself says of good old fashioned comedy: ‘The comedy wasn't highbrow, there were no long words, you didn't have to think about it to get it.’ So what he is basically saying is that in the good old days, the working classes were no more advanced than children! If that is the case then I’m glad they don’t put that old shit on television anymore as it suggests that at least now commissioners have a modicum of respect for those at the bottom of the social ladder and give them enough credit to be able to think and laugh at the same time. The suggestion that the modern comedy circuit somehow lacks diversity and we all sound the same is quite frankly ridiculous compared to the circuit of 30 years ago. I think there are still prejudices on the modern circuit against female and ethnic acts that need to be addressed, but compare them to the old working men’s clubs and most modern comedy club line-ups look like a United Nations meeting. I think Chris has been unfair in his depiction of the comedy scene and also the viewing public. One of my many jobs before I started stand-up was for a company that compiled television ratings and it was there I saw that the statistics that go into TV commissioning are more often than not aimed at age groups. You often hear of shows aimed at the 18-25 demographic etc, but I assure you it is rare that a show is aimed at a particular social class. Chris, I genuinely wish you all the best in Edinburgh as I know that it can be a daunting experience (as I will be there again this year too and should probably be working on my show right now!) and I hope you haven’t taken this as a personal attack, but merely a disagreement on a few points. My tip from one working-class comedian to another is that you go up to Edinburgh not thinking of it as a middle-class festival where everyone will judge you based on class but as a comedy festival where you can do whatever you want to do. Last year, I had a couple of reviews that suggested my material wasn’t clever or thoughtful etc which is fine as I’m the first person to say my comedy is pretty stupid, but at the end of the month I was nominated for an Edinburgh Comedy Award (as was Kevin Bridges who, as mentioned in Matt’s response, is a young, Scottish and working class). This goes to show that yes some people do want highbrow intellectual comedy but at the end of the day, even the judges for one of the most prestigious awards in comedy just want to be made to laugh. Read more: http://www.chortle.co.uk/correspondents/20....#ixzz1C3IPCt5I

LOWER CLASS/WORKING CLASS Stereotypical qualities: ignorant, rude, no-nonsense, unimaginative (and yet good at tinkering, like in Wallace and Gromit), heavy local accent, or, alternatively, cloth-capped, decent, honest, faithful Types: yob, spiv, cloth-capped, salt of the earth Names: traditionally Burt, Fred, Arthur, Doris, Flo - now, Stacie, Sharon, Tracy, Kevin, Rickie Houses: terraced houses, council houses in council estates or inner-city tower blocks, again, council owned MIDDLE CLASS Stereotypical qualities: ambitious, officious, snobbish (the more snobbish the more ignorant), un-manly, mean, pushy, sometimes camp Accent: straight or affected upper class, can also be strong local accent, especially with industrialists and “self-made men” Types: social climber; nerd, or, alternatively, blokish/laddish; managerial/bank manager type Names: Cassandra, Georgia, Patricia, Oliver, William Houses: semi-detached, detached, bungalow UPPER CLASS/ARISTOCRACY Stereotypical qualities: silly (hee-hawing laugh) drunk (as a lord), easy-going, generous, stylish, confident, sometimes masterful, sometimes camp Accent: camp and hee-hawing, or, indolent and drawling or, alternatively, clipped military accent Types: army officer, drunken lords and judges, Champagne Charlies (like Andrew), upper class twits (like Edward), bounders and cads (Terry Thomas) sometimes camp Houses: country estates, expensive town houses Names: traditional – Charles, William, Elizabeth These are merely some of the traits and stereotypes we look for and recognise in classic English comedy. In my seminar I shall be showing short video clips illustrating how these stereotypes are exploited in some of the best known English comedies: Monty Python, Mr Bean, Only Fools and Horses and Dads Army.

Working Class,' Deadline reports. The show stars Melissa Peterman ('Reba,' 'The Singing Bee') as a single mom who buys a house in a pricey neighborhood so her kids can get a taste of the good life, but she can barely afford the place on her blue-collar salary.

The Python team were all Oxbrige non?

Think there is a strong working class component in Peep Show, was just thinking about that.

Middle-classes 'enjoy more sophisticated comedy shows' like The Thick Of It, new survey finds By Tamara Cohen Last updated at 1:05 AM on 8th April 2010 In comedy circles it gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'a class act'. For it seems a preference for Paul Merton over Roy 'Chubby' Brown over reveals much about your place in society, a survey has found. Middle-class people use humour to try and demonstrate their superiority, it claims. The University of Edinburgh research found they enjoy more sophisticated comedians than their working-class counterparts. For example, they tend to laugh more at Paul Merton, pictured, or the satirical BBC2 series The Thick of It written by Armando Iannucci and the Oxford-educated comedian Stewart Lee. They look down at the 'lowbrow' humour enjoyed by the working class and use their taste in comedy as a 'veiled snobbery'. Working- class people were most likely to enjoy traditional gags from comics such as Brown, Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson who use humour based on everyday life with straightforward punch lines. Sociologist Sam Friedman questioned 1,000 people at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe about their taste in comedy followed up with a full interview about their education employment, and their parents social background Jim Davidson found favour with working-class respondents, while Stewart Lee was more popular with the middle classes He found middle-class interviewees had been introduced to 'abstract and intellectual forms of art' by their parents and this interest had been further developed at school and university. Among their favourites is the satirical Channel 4 show Brass Eye, a spoof documentary series aired in the late 1990s. In contrast Mr Friedman found working class people had received hardly any exposure to high culture in their upbringing and education and found this sort of humour gave them 'a sense of intellectual insecurity'. Interestingly a small group of comedians appealed to both classes - such as Eddie Izzard, and Frank Skinner. It may sound like the basis for a terrible joke but middle class people use humour to attempt to demonstrate their superiority.

I'm sure it'd be tons better with the real deal, but I just used lamb stock cubes aye. Didn't put in as many as the good people at Oxo want you to ("1 cube to 190ml of water" gets a bit daft when you're making up 2.4 litres of the stuff), I think I used 7 or so and that was fine. You want to taste the veg as well as the stock/salt after all... If you use the juice from the mince the stock ain't that important. I always use a dark veggie stock cube anyway.

I'll do that. But I will chuck loads of corriander on it and no one can stop me.

Rubbish.

Got mince left over from yesterday (spag bog), need to use it up tonight. Ideas?

Does w/c comedy have to be written by working class writers?

Not even sure where Wigan is tbf.

Curb the banks? The government has propped them at every opportunity Here's the story of how Cameron and Osborne secretly tried and failed to kill tougher European rules on bankers' bonuses It's bonus season, the time of year when bankers show us what they really believe. As soon as they get their money, they spend much of it on land and houses. They know that these are safer investments than the assets in which they trade. If they trash the economy again, they at least will survive. This year the frenzy will be almost as bad as ever. But it could have been worse. Here is the story, revealed by a leaked document, of how our government covertly tried – and failed – to kill tougher European rules on bankers' bonuses, and how the chancellor of the exchequer appears to have misled parliament. Before I explain what the government did, let me remind you of a few of the statements the Conservatives made about bonuses while in opposition. In February 2009, David Cameron announced: "Where the taxpayer owns a large stake in a bank, we are saying that no employee should be paid a bonus of over £2,000." Stephen Hester, the chief executive of RBS – 84% owned by the taxpayer – is now said to be lining up a bonus of around £2.5m. In October 2009, George Osborne announced that he was calling on the Treasury to stop retail banks "paying out profits in significant cash bonuses. Full stop." Bob Diamond, the chief executive of Barclays, is due to make around £8m this year, half of which is likely to be cash. In April 2010, a Tory policy paper observed: "News that bank bonuses this year are expected to total £7bn shows that Gordon Brown's claim to have ended the era of the big bonus was ridiculous." Bank bonuses in 2011 are expected to total £7bn. A fortnight ago, a Downing Street spokesman admitted that the government would, after all, make no attempt to limit the size of bonuses. This much we knew. But what the leaked document shows is that even as the government claimed to be seeking strong international rules to curb the bonus frenzy, it was secretly lobbying to prevent them from being passed. The document is, or should be, big news, but so far it has been covered in just one place: Tribune magazine, where the freelance reporter Ben Fox broke the story. As Cameron pointed out before he took office, the UK's bonus culture "encouraged short-term risk-taking instead of rewarding the long-term interests of shareholders and the public." This risk-taking helped cause the financial crash. The EU wanted to prevent it from happening again, by reducing the incentive to chase short-term gains. It hoped to update the Capital Requirements Directive, to ensure that bankers could take only a small part of their bonus as an immediate cash payment. The rest of the bonus would be a mixture of cash and shares, held over for up to five years. If, during that time, the bank did worse than expected, some of the promised money would be clawed back. This would force bankers to think about the future as well as the present. The European draft proposed that no more than 30% of smaller bonuses and no more than 20% of larger ones could be paid upfront in cash. The British government had other ideas. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/20...propped-them-up It's a giggle innit?

The new controller of BBC1, Danny Cohen, has apparently decided there are too many middle-class sitcoms and not enough working-class ones. Sources say that he feels the Beeb is "too focused on formats about comfortable, well-off middle-class families whose lives are perhaps more reflective of BBC staff than viewers in other parts of the UK", and that we need more of "what he describes as 'blue-collar' comedies". Blue-collar comedies, eh? Problem is, of course, it's never entirely straightforward what that means: do we mean comedy by the working class, for the working class, or about the working class? But given this obvious cavil, the man does seem to have a point. Porridge, Bread, Birds of a Feather, Brushstrokes, Rising Damp, Steptoe and Son, Only Fools and Horses, Till Death Do Us Part . . . those were great comedies with working-class settings, except for Brushstrokes, which just had a working-class setting. Where are their equivalents now? Their equivalents are burnt on arrival by snooty BBc readers and commisoners I imagine.

Papers reveal how Palestinian leaders gave up fight over refugees • Negotiators agreed just 10,000 to return • PLO agreed Israel could be a 'Jewish state' • US suggested Palestinians live in Latin America Palestinian refugees, who fled the besie Palestinian refugees, who fled the besieged camp of Nahr al-Bared in north Lebanon. Photograph: Ramzi Haidar/Getty Palestinian negotiators privately agreed that only 10,000 refugees and their families, out of a total refugee population exceeding 5 million, could return to Israel as part of a peace settlement, leaked confidential documents reveal. PLO leaders also accepted Israel's demand to define itself as an explicitly Jewish state, in sharp contrast to their public position. The latest disclosures from thousands of pages of secret Palestinian records of more than a decade of failed peace talks, obtained by al-Jazeera TV and shared exclusively with the Guardian, follow a day of shock and protests in the West Bank, where Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders angrily denounced the leaks as a "propaganda game". The documents have already become the focus of controversy among Israelis and Palestinians, revealing the scale of official Palestinian concessions rejected by Israel, but also throwing light on the huge imbalance of power in a peace process widely seen to have run into the sand. The latest documents to be released reveal: • The then Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, repeatedly pressed in 2007-08 for the "transfer" of some of Israel's own Arab citizens into a future Palestinian state as part of a land-swap deal that would exchange Palestinian villages now in Israel for Jewish settlements in the West Bank. • The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and other American officials refused to accept any Palestinian leadership other than that of Mahmoud Abbas and the prime minister, Salam Fayyad. The US "expects to see the same Palestinian faces", one senior official explained, if it was to continue funding the PA. • Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state under George Bush, suggested in 2008 Palestinian refugees could be resettled in South America. "Maybe we will be able to find countries that can contribute in kind," she said. "Chile, Argentina, etc." • Livni told Palestinian negotiators in 2007 that she was against international law and insisted that it could not be included in terms of reference for the talks: "I was the minister of justice", she said. "But I am against law – international law in particular." The scale of the compromise secretly agreed on refugees will be controversial among Palestinians who see the flight or expulsion of refugees when Israel was created in 1948 as their catastrophe (nakba) – while most Israelis regard the Palestinian right of return as incompatible with a democratic Jewish state. Condolizard the fucking witch.

What was he thinking?

Working out is like a drug when you get into it. I do it a bit for a couple of months at the start of summer, didn't really get addicted. Bit boring really.