WRITTEN ON May 20th, 2005 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Uncategorized
The morning’s Ruth Kelly radio interview leads to a “thought for the day” meditation about mortification of the flesh and its role in good government – see below.
I know very little about Opus Dei but I guess a busy married education minister who’s also a Mum would be supernumerary rather than a full-on celibate numerary wearing a cilice. She’s already being interviewed by Humphreys – how much discomfort will a woman willingly undergo?
But what if she was wearing a pain-inflicting device? Could it not be e-enabled?
Would constant pain focus Ministers’ minds so they came up with better policies? We hear the PM had an antinflammatory injection for his bad back. Is it right that our elected representatives seek to control their own pevels of pain? Surely in an e-enabled state, in which they are the servants and we the people the masters, the level of pain inflicted should be a matter of popular feedback (via an electronic devices wired hardwired into some mass polling system)? They seem to be happy to accept evidence that comes from torture. Perhaps the same works for policy.
That would make them listen. Then we’d see respect.
To make interviews fair, Humphreys would have to be wired up too, to stop him interrupting.
Humphreys (interrupts) – “But surely -” *BBZZZZZKKK!* “Agh! Sorry Minister, please finish your point..”Kelly: “Thank you John. I was just saying that once our educational standards working task force has reported back to the broad stakeholder group – - ” **BBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZKKK!!!! BZZK! BZZK!*** “……aaaaagh! What I meant was yes of course we’ll simply allow heads to get on with running their schools as they think fit with accountability to local parents…we can offer some central help and support if they ask for it….”
Interview proceeds courteously as studio web cam is obscured by the smoke from burning flesh and undergarments…Hallelujah!
“Ideally,” all interviewers would be fitted with electric shock devices, controlled by the listeners.
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THAT book was included in the UK NLB’s technology trial. The text was converted automatically to synthetic speech and recorded onto CD in the DAISY format. The result was good but the American dictionary used by the computer program produced odd results:
All “foreign” (ie. non USA) words were mis-pronounced: THAT book has lots of “foreign” words and names.
Some words and abbreviations were wrongly expanded: “Mass” was pronounced as “Massachusetts” and “St. James” was pronounced as “Street James.”
You get similar results using machine translation on web pages. (Today, I had fun with a German web forum.)