Zombie

Ahem, no-one's compelling anyone to take the slightest interest in the forthcoming attraction, so he's not exactly foisting anything on anyone Ahem, "European sexual culture" isn't the the same as US sexual culture, for example nudity is widely seen as sexual in the US and widely seen as not sexual across Europe. Also it hasn't (yet ) been standardised by the EU

Whaat??? This is 2013 not 1813 There's no place for archaic old farts being granted job security for under performing anywhere, let alone a taxpayer funded public institution. And if it's not publicly funded then it's a business. No modern efficient well-run business would allow its customers - er, that would be you - to pay good money in order to be knowingly shafted by incompetent staff. Even if the guy was Einstein if he can't teach or grade exams fairly then he is not competent to do his job - those are basic minimum competencies. See if you can get the student union on your side, get their representatives to request metrics, or survey the student body, to prove your case, maybe get them to present these to the governing body and advise them if they fail to take effective action these metrics will be published on social media in the most damaging way, naming the members of the governing body for putting vested staff interests ahead of their students' interests. Also check out the school prospectus for any claims about their commitment to deliver excellence to students and use these against the governing body. Unless you are on a full ride scholarship they are not giving you what you paid for. Maybe it's even breach of contract.

I don't know definitely that this is the position in all other countries - but I suspect it may well be - but in Britain adoption is a one-way trip. It is permanent, it is absolute, it is irrevocable. No-one can undo it. To give an example, a few years ago two parents were accused of killing their baby based on evidence of an "expert" medical witness and their remaining child was snatched by the council, placed in foster care, and legally adopted through a rushed process when the council discovered the birth parents were making a legal appeal and challenging the "expert" medical witness. Soon after the rushed adoption was completed by the council the birth parents won their case when the court ruled the "expert" had knowingly given dishonest / flawed testimony and the original ruling against the parents was quashed and new medical evidence confirmed "cot death" was the reason their baby died. Imagine that - they lost not one child through death but they lost their other child too because of the council's forced and deliberately rushed adoption. The adoption was irreversible and they were denied any restitution or further contact [until the child becomes an adult] despite the admitted wrongdoing and gross miscarriage of justice. For the same reason there is no process for adoptive parents to "give up" adopted children. It is final. As previous posts have pointed out things can go badly wrong with any parent / child relationship but adoptive parents must work through these problems with available welfare resources in exactly the same way as they would with their birth children. I think even non-parents like me understand the challenges of child rearing - we were all children once - and that is why adoption agencies must be tightly regulated and rigorous processes must be in place to weed out prospective parents who cannot reasonably demonstrate their suitability for such a huge and potentially life changing responsibility. Respect to those that can and do rise to this challenge.

There again if we knew everything it would be a tad dull

problem solved http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/fart-proof-pants-invented-using-2479966

That was quoted merely to illustrate the nature of the commitment being made - children are adopted for good or ill. In fact the adoption undertaking is more permanent and more serious than the marriage vow - you cannot legally divorce or abandon dependent children, natural or adopted. As for parents "just giv[ing] them up." or "giv[ing] their kids away" that may happen just like people rob banks and mug old ladies - some people choose to become criminals. That's why there's a legal system to right those wrongs as far as they can be righted. The tragedy is, as has already been noted, the terrible damage that is caused to children who are treated this way that the system then has to pick up.

OK, I re-read the article which has a link to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome but there was no indication that this particular child suffered from this. However, where there is any mental or physical issue with a child then surely this will have been noted by social services prior to the child going into care and while that child is in care, and all US adoption agencies must surely be legally required not only to disclose fully every material issue to the prospective parents but also to make additional checks - beyond those they would already have to do - to satisfy themselves that the prospective adopters fully understand and have the capacity and resources to cope with those specific issues? And surely there would be appropriate follow up by social services - frequent in the early stages - to satisfy themselves that all was going well? Adoption is largely about effective communication and matching needs and expectations - the needs of the child and the expectations of the prospective adopters. Once that whole process has been carried out - and maybe there are serious flaws in US adoption process? - then an adopted child becomes the adopting parents' responsibility. Just like the marriage vow - "to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health". Children are not acquired sale or return.

I'm guessing, Percy, you'd be pretty pissed of if you read The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim by Jonathan Coe which is a kind of "road" novel about a salesman with personal problems that escalate during the narrative and seems to be building to some kind of personal crisis climax when, after 300 odd pages, the MC meets an author figure who informs the MC that he's not real and is in fact just a character in a book the author has made up and it's finished and the MC protests ‘It can’t have finished… I still don’t know how it ends’ and the author replies it’s easy: ‘I can tell you just how it ends,’ and clicks his fingers ‘Like this.’ ‘Like this’ are the two last words of the novel

I don't think this is particularly an issue of modern parenting, rather it's about people who choose to become criminals. Often this is more a function of personal inadequacies, personality disorders, stupidity, ignorance, greed - or all of these. These "parents" are simply criminals who will be dealt with by the justice system and their children will have to be taken into care. Very sad for the children, but delinquent parents are probably more of a social problem than delinquent children. Maybe there's also an underlying problem with the fitness and competence of adoption agencies and their failure to adequately vet prospective adopters, do effective background checks and so on

I never knew it was so complicated ...

For me "gay culture" only exists as an umbrella term that embraces all the gay sub-cultures. Graeme mentioned some but there are many more sub-cultures, much more diverse than just sports, rugby etc. [which really are little different from mainstream sports culture]. These multifarious sub-cultures would include things like gay transvestism, leather, fitness / body image and so on - I'm sure someone can come up with some more - and these sub-cultures may or may not have counterparts in het world, like str8 transvestism, BDSM, gym bunnies etc etc. I wouldn't call "arts" a gay sub-culture. It's both a cliche and a truism that arts do attract gays but I think an interest in arts is more to do with temperament than sexuality. To sum up, then, you can be gay without belonging to or self-identifying with any of those sub-cultures, but to belong to a gay sub-culture I think you have to be gay, or at least a bit queer

Every day this week we've seen on the nightly TV news more of the devastation in the Philippines caused by Typhoon Haiyan. For someone who lives in a developed country where we moan when broadband speed drops, and where the 80mph winds of last month were a big news story, I cannot begin to imagine the scale of loss caused by the 190 mph typhoon winds that people in the Philippines experienced, are experiencing this minute, and will continue to experience for many months, if not years. £30m has been raised just this week in Britain and the UK govt has promised to match this pound for pound in addition to other help, but that's really just a drop. Aid is only now beginning to arrive, a week after the destruction, but getting this to the estimated nearly 2 million displaced people who need immediate help is going to be a massive challenge. Homes, schools, hospitals have gone, roads are blocked, there is no power, no cell phones - all the infrastructure we take for granted as part of our modern way of life gone. Tens of thousands just have the clothes they were wearing and this week they have literally just been surviving. In the affected areas where everything has been wrecked they have no fresh water, no food, no shelter, no functioning resources and medicines to help the injured and stop them dying of infection. They have a critical and urgent need for immediate help and the Philippines just doesn't have the resources to deal with this and deal with it now. Because help is needed urgently - no-one can survive long without fresh uncontaminated water and food. Old people, young children and babies are the least resilient and, tragically, there are going to be more deaths in the coming days. Some govts have responded quickly - the US is taking a leading role - and all the major aid agencies are responding as well, but individuals like us can make a difference with collective donations that will help not just with immediate and urgent needs like fresh drinking water and food and shelter, but in the months to come to help rebuild the vital infrastructure that was swept away last Friday. I'm sure many here have already responded, but I thought it might be helpful if people could post links to where donations can be made in your countries. Here in Britain I used the Disasters Emergency Committee website http://www.dec.org.uk/?utm_source=38Degrees&utm_medium=Link&utm_campaign=A014&utm_content=Link1 Just click on "Donate" or phone 0370 60 60 900 if, like me, you prefer not to go through PayPal. Donations through the DEC will be matched pound for pound by the UK govt. So if you have similar links for your own countries perhaps people could post them here? Thanks for reading. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24954011

Starts in the 1930s at school and follows the two main characters as they grow up to adulthood and military service during the war. Well written, it evokes a feeling for those times and makes you care about the characters and their fate *shan't give any spoilers *

O. M. G. She's gonna stroke :funny: .

Gay IT biker amateur detective mystery series? Gay WWII relationship saga? Gay .... Where to begin?

This is an interesting thread subject When should the author bail out? Do all the ends need to be tied? After all, the characters "live on" after the story - unless they're killed off by a callous and cruel writer - allowing the author to write sequels / flog a dead horse or, as addy and Mann have already said, the reader to "play with possibilities". There are no rules just the writer's skill in judging when it's done, knowing when the reader will be satisfied as they close the book or switch off the Kindle. Perhaps the most famous loose end ever written is from amateur writer Margaret Mitchell's only novel Gone With The Wind ... she raised her chin. She could get Rhett back. She knew she could. There had never been a man she couldn’t get, once she set her mind upon him. “I’ll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day!”

Maybe he wants readers suckered in to the sequel .

OMG palindromic numbers! No, wait, palindromic primes!!! *begins to hyperventilate - gropes for meds ...*

There always been a lot of macho posturing going on with tall buildings (mine's bigger than yours! ) and One World Trade Center's only snagged the title because the antenna has been included (the building - I assume intentionally - is the same roof height as the original WTC North Tower, 1368 ft). This is termed "vanity height" and the Chrysler Building is a good example from the 1920s where the spire was secretly constructed and raised at the very last moment to snaffle the record from a rival building that had just claimed the title So if needles count then Canada has held the title of America's tallest building [OK it's not an office block] since 1976 with Toronto's CN Tower, standing firmly erect and proud at 1,815 ft :funny:

He who hesitates is lost - you know what you have to do

Ah yes Addy, numbers are important, they hold strange mystical powers over us It's like cracks in the pavement - you never tread on those do you?

Yes very boring LBO - logic always iszzzzzzzzzzzz

For us Brits who do it the proper way heheh *hides* we get this next month 11/12/13 [11 day of the 12th month of the "13th" year] Then it will never happen again for us in our lifetimes .

Oh my dears, that is just sooo last century Paysage fautif [Faulty Landscape], Marcel Duchamp - 1946 (seminal fluid on Astralon, backed with black satin. Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan) Interesting stuff, rustle But is art about the creative idea? Or is it about the realisation? Or must it be both? And need the creative idea and realisation belong to the same people? And does art cease to be art because of the use of technology? Does it degrade art because it makes the creative effort easier? Or because it makes new things possible that couldn't be done before and those new things are therefore not art? And is art about the creator and the creative effort, or is it about the audience and their response? So, if there's no audience there's no art? If the audience says it's not art then it's not? Music is a good example. Today the score exists on a printed page, but in earlier days it was manuscript. The art isn't in the score - although that can be beautiful - but in its interpretation and realisation by others, the musicians and maybe a conductor. And the sound made by the instruments is a product of technology - a piano key struck by Murray Perahia or a 5 year old at the same velocity will sound exactly the same. So is the art in the composer's mind, the printed score, the technology of instrument mass manufacture, the musicians, the composer, or the audience? Or all of the above And I haven't even started on electronic music production technology and recording And there are many other examples in the visual arts. I don't have the answers, rustle, but I am interested in the questions .

For all child witnesses - under 18 - there is a presumption that they will give their evidence in chief by video recorded interview and any further evidence by live link unless the court is satisfied that this will not improve the quality of the childs evidence. However a child witness may opt out of giving their evidence by either video recorded interview or by live link or both, subject to the agreement of the court. If the child witness opts out then there is a presumption that they will give their evidence in court from behind a screen. Should the child witness not wish to use a screen they may also be allowed to opt out of using it, again subject to the agreement of the court. In deciding whether or not to agree to the wish of the child witness the court must be satisfied that the quality of the childs evidence will not be diminished. http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/s_to_u/special_measures/ The Magistrates' Court acts like a filter for the Crown Court to ensure there is a case to answer not to try the case, so there are no witnesses. The charge will relate to a statute which will specify whether the case can be dealt with by Magistrates - less serious - or must be referred to the Crown Court, or sometimes the defendant has an option, so you'll need to research which offence(s) [may be more than one] he/she's being charged with.