CW is not impressed with my fitness plans. He thinks it's the start of the mad narcissitic road to "using fake tan and waxing your arse".
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According to the BBC news, the government is worried about school students cheating in exams. Let's think about that for a moment.
Scenario 1: You are a school student taking exams. You are told (falsely) that the better your exam results, the more chance you have in getting one of the scarce worthwhile jobs. You know that some other students will cheat, and simply studying harder is not enough to beat them.
So you can either 'level the playing field' by cheating too, or be 'honourable' and effectively punished for it. Chose one.
Scenario 2: You are a headteacher running a school. You want your school to be as high as possible in the league tables. You institute practices that try to minimise student cheating. A competing school has the same policies, but only enforces them tokenistically.
The students in the competing school get away with cheating, get higher grades than your students, and push their school up the league tables.
So you, as headteacher, have a choice: turn a blind eye to cheating and rise in the tables, or reduce cheating and get left behind by those who don't. Choose one.
This government seems to want it both ways - to have intense competition in every sphere of life, and have everyone play fair. It's not just the current Blair government, obviously - this failure to think through the consequences of competition is centuries old.
But for a government that believes so passionately in creating artificial scarcity and introducing market fear into every part of our lives to adopt the moral highground when schoolboys crib each other's notes, that's a bit rich.
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If you think that was a rant, go here.
Now I've got to spent the next six hours installing software for music and sound. And if there's another virus at the end of it, I shall be ever so slightly annoyed.
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