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Brief Notes
1. Possible taxes have been in the news just recently. First, there was the Scottish GP who wanted to tax chocolate to tackle obesity. The basis for his reasoning seems to be that fat people eat a lot of chocolate, therefore if you tax it so that it’s more expensive then they won’t eat as much of it, and they’ll lose weight.
Of course, that’s a load of bollocks. And it’s worrying that a GP would think that the problem of obesity is caused by chocolate alone and can be solved by making chocolate too expensive to buy.
2. The other tax being proposed – by none other than the Chief Medical Officer – is another tax on drinking. Well, to be fair, not a tax as such – a minimum price per unit. Again, this is intended as something that will be good for us and stop us all drinking so much. And, again, it’s complete bollocks. The problem isn’t – and never has been – the price of the alcohol; it’s the minority who can’t drink responsibly. You know who I’m talking about, you’ve seen them on a Friday and Saturday night puking up in the street or kicking the crap out of some poor passer-by.
Both of these misguided attempts at restricting our personal freedoms ignore one small but important fact – the majority of people are not obese and are not irresponsible drinkers. So why should they have to pay extra to try and solve the problems of the minority?
3. A recent survey found that six out of seven dwarves are not Happy.
4. Congratulations to Robert Webb for winning Comic Relief’s dancing contest. His interpretation of ‘Flashdance’ was just hilarious.
5. Oh no! They’re going to make a film version of Stephen King’s It. Well, at least it can’t be any worse than the TV version, which had John Boy Walton as the lead good guy and a totally unrecognisbale – and miscast – Tim Curry as Pennywise.
For me, this is one of those books that’s just not filmable; too much has to be sacrificed to make it fit the time scale demanded by a film audience. All you end up with is the fight against the (rather lame) alien, and the book isn’t really about that. It’s about the nature of friendship and how it changes as we get older, and how you can’t ever regain what you had, however much you try. The alien bashing is really secondary.
Comments
3 Responses to “Brief Notes”
Wolfs Helpers
I’ll let you steal my jokes!!x
Not stealing, sharing.
What’s mine is yours. It made me chuckle again.