Ok, this may seem a little strange, but I’ve got Capital Radio playing beside me, and there was an advert on for using condoms, and so I thought that I’d have a look at their website (as I said before, I’m still waiting on the nightbuses starting up). Now, as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t mind hard hitting adverts. But taking the ’sex lottery’ quiz to see whether I could have picked up an STD by guessing which woman I wanted to, ahem, fuck, was a bit of a waste of time. For a few reasons - firstly, out of 13 attempts, I apparently picked a woman with a genital disease 11 times. Which is a bit crazy, since 4 of them apparently had genital warts, although a quick bit of googling showed that the infection rate is around 4 percent. So although the NHS is trying to get a point across, it’s rather over-egging the pudding, and so loses the impact (and anyway, I’ll eat my hat, coat and muddy rugby shorts when I next have the choice of three woman to shag).

But absolutely unbelievably, I need to leave. Cause for the first time ever, I’ve been sprung by Security. I honestly can’t believe it. Damn. I didn’t think they even came up this far in the building. Time to go home, I guess.

Well, I guess I’m just a sucker for a ‘good deal’. It was another Bar Footsie night in the Union tonight, where most of the drinks’ prices are projected onto a convienient wall, and vary through the night, flucuating and crashing as if it were a real stockmarket (funnily enough, there was no inexorable slide towards a sensible price/earnings ratio, but now I’m just being a smartarse). Once again Dave Parry (our Union Finance Manager) was fascinated by the price fluctuations, since it gives him ‘good ideas’ as to what drinks are underpriced in the Union. Needless to say, the price of Lowenbrau is unlikely to rise, but I digress.

As an aside, you’ve really no idea how hard this is to type.

So I decided that, based on last term’s experience, I’ll have a nice sober evening. Although I’m generally fairly good at getting served, I struggle during the crashes, and am too tempted by just buying expensive beer due to cronic impatience. So all was going well, until the point that I won (ably abeited by Mona) the paper aeroplane competition - with a helicopter. You’ve no idea how much that makes me chuckle. Nevertheless, all of a sudden there were lots of things that seems a ‘good deal’, since I could get served whenever I felt like it - courtesy of The Hat. And the idea of having a vaguely sober night (since I got pissed on Tuesday {hi Ginny, hi DramSoc}, and on Wednesday {hi Gardeners}, and am planning on getting pissed Friday and Saturday {hi Dan and hi Nia respectively}) went straight out the window.

As an aside, I think I’ve used the delete key twice for every character typed here.

So now I’m trying to waste away the forty five minutes between the number 49 bus finishing and the N207 starting, by typing this in the DramSoc storeroom. Which doubles as my own personal cloakroom when I feel the need (and when I have the keys to the building). Sad really, if you think about it. I try not to.

So the question on everybody’s lips (well, perhaps not quite everyone) is whether or not ‘Prince Albert’ was being satirical with this Live! article. A few people (including Sam and Someone Else) seem to have taken it at face value - that some insanely arrogant prick really thinks this kind of thing (fair enough, since arrogance is a known problem round here). Others responded to the article congratulating the author on a well made attempt to cause such a reaction - known around the web as a troll posting. Myself, I’m not too sure which is the case. I’ve a feeling that the author will be thinking that he was being satirical (or will be thinking that he’s being ironic, but only if he doesn’t know what ironic means), yet I suspect that deep down he actually believes this kind of thing. Perhaps not to the same extreme as he has written - when someone I know recently said "Oh, just bomb them all, they all look the same to me" (free pint to the first to guess who was talking about Iraq), he was only joking - but that doesn’t mean he’s a holier-than-thou foreigner hugger.

I’d like to take this opportunity to clear up a few misconceptions about what went on at Ed’s party last night. Namely;

• I did not get very, very drunk
• I did not drink a whole load of wine, a whole load of (greenish) vodka, and some beer for extra measure
• I did not fight with the majority of my flatmates present
• I did not spout crap all night
• I did not have really, really geeky conversations about the information density of DNA
• I did not redecorate Putney high street on the way home
• I did not take five different night bus routes to get myself home
• I did not wish death upon the bird that was twittering outside my window this morning
• I did not wake up with a really, really sore head

So there.

I saw another Australian road safety commercials last night on Tarrant on TV, and unfortunately haven’t been able to track it down online to link to it. The Australians have a no-holds-barred attitude when it comes to making harrowing adverts - just watching this one had me on the verge of tears, even though I knew perfectly well that it was just actors. Anything that you think is harrowing on British TV just doesn’t measure up to the Australians. Instead of the usual shakey cam, quick cut away from an impending accident or a fade to the take-home message, this advert showed a car slamming into a flat-bed truck, killing the drivers fiancé and leaving him screaming in agony; cutting to girl’s father talking about never forgetting about picking his daughters coffin, and then back to paramedics dragging the dead woman out of the car while the driver was screaming in physical and emotional agony - but I can’t do the advert justice by describing it here. This was the second Australian road safety advert I’ve seen, the first showed five people being burnt alive in an overturned car, again pretty harrowing.

I saw on the news last week that there are actors in cinemas in London involved in a new campain. During the adverts at the start of the film, an ‘usher’ comes in and tells a ‘member of the audience’ (both actors) that her husband has been killed in a car crash - the audience only find out afterwards that it is staged. One member of the public’s reaction was that they shouldn’t do this kind of thing - she was upset since this was every person’s nightmare to hear that a loved one has died in a road accident. Yet there are still too many people speeding on the roads and drink driving (one of my friends is currently banned for being twice the limit), and neither threats of taking away your license or going to jail seem to deter enough people to prevent the thousands of deaths per year on the roads. So I’m definitely in favour of the hard-hitting style; make these adverts as harrowing as you like, and maybe some more people will take notice.

Well, I was trying my best today to piss some people off, athough they probably misinterpreted me when I walked into a room full of sabbaticals and student officers watching a live broadcast from the House of Commons. Realising what our esteemed leader (Mr Blair, that is) was talking about, I declared loudly "Oh, it’s all this tuition fee bollocks again", and walked back out. Now what I didn’t make clear was that I think the issue of tution fees is very important, but that I think the Union are doing a fantastic job of cocking up our policy.

The primary channel for informing the student body has been a marvelous set of "press releases". From the overly hurried Student Fees - Union’s Response (response to what exactly? I know the answer, but that’s not a good press release), moving on through the unanimous rejection of tuition fees, through a wonderful MORI poll (given the choice of certain death or a kick in the teeth, 70% of the UK population asked for dental attention), we finally (if only) come to the latest report - Student Reaction to Higher Education White Paper. I saw them drafting this press release, and I think that they must have got confused - surely 28 bullet points, and no paragraphs, would be the draft itself?

I could compare some of the bullet points with the quote by Sen - I got the feeling of déjà vu, but at least Sen used the word ‘compromise’, whereas the official press release uses the phrase ‘dumb down’. I know the release is allegedly written by Sen, but nothing here happens without a committee sticking their oar in, so I’ll not blame the hideous choice of phrase on him alone. The graduate employment section is fabulous - exactly how would I not benefit the UK by working in the City?

I was there when the Union decided that they were absolutely opposed to graduate taxes, and the solution to the funding crises in Higher Education was to convert universities into vocational colleges but keep the same HE budget (and then the solution to the funding crises in Further Education would be…), so what has happened? Instead of continuing the blanket opposition, they are scrabbling around with ideas like you don’t have to pay graduate tax until you earn more than the national average, which, seeing as some people earn an awful lot of money, means that you won’t have to pay for your tuition until you earn more than most people. Huh? Perhaps, as I might have mentioned already, the graduate tax policy that the Union decided on wasn’t thought through properly.

Well, at least some people will be pretty pleased with what the Union has achieved. The students involved obviously will be congratulating each other, but I would reckon that Downing Street will be quite happy with our press release too. I wouldn’t be losing any sleep over it, if I was a government official reading it over and working out a game plan.

And don’t, whatever you do, get me started on the Tuition Fees Working Group Mantra that was attached to Sen’s door for the past few weeks.