April

QUOTE OF THE DAY30 Apr 2018
refugee crisis, mediterranean

‘Hearts are going out all over Europe’

J D Daley on the refugee crisis.

FEATURES24 Apr 2018
FASHION, DOGS, RSPCA

A novel partnership between celebrity  fashion designer Bella Berlinsky and a well-known dog breeder suggests that we will soon be seeing dogs on the catwalk. Tamsin Duluth reveals how dog breeders are collaborating with fashion designers  to coordinate textile design with the canine fur tones of popular  breeds for the supremely co-ordination-conscious fashionistas.

Category

16 Apr 2018WARFARE, Chemical weapons, MEDIA, YORK COLLEGE, 

‘Our view of chemical weapons is being distorted by ‘pictorial relativism’ according to Borg Petersen, Professor of Modern Warfare at York College, Oxford. In a controversial lecture on Friday, the Professor said that media organisations are deploying a flawed logic when they show footage of adults and children victims suffering in the immediate aftermath of a chemical weapons attack but never broadcast or publish images of victims wounded by conventional ordinance such as bombs and shells unless they are dressed and bandaged.

QUIZ 20 Apr 2018 quiz, perplexus PERPLEXUS: ANSWERS TO QUIZ NUMBER 211

MAY 1 Yeoman of the web (L-6) The first refuge of a scoundrel (Y-44) The weak in Westminster (A-97) Rock baroque ‎(Q-9) Boots in the sky (K-67) Grouse crop (U-53)

NEWS13 Apr 2018SPORT, CRICKET, CHEATING,  BALL TAMPERING, FOOTBALLA leading football club manager has shocked fans with his response to cricket’s ball tampering scandal when he spoke of  ‘football’s dirty little secret’. He said the practice had been a feature of the beautiful game at every level for years. Known as ‘scurfing’ the most common method involved sandpaper but various ‘substances’ were also used.

OPINION

1 Apr 2018SAFE SPACES, INTOLERANCE

‘People need to learn to show some tolerance for the intolerant; they too need their own safe spaces.’

Kimberly Cruse makes a special plea in Monday’s The Second Post.

NEWS 6 Apr 2018 SNOWFLAKE, UNIVERSITY, STUDENTS A ‘culturally appropriated fancy dress competition’ will be among the attractions of a Snowflake Summer Ball being organised by students at York College, Oxford. The committee also promises a Snowflake of the Year Awards ceremony to include a Roll-call of Honour of victims who have been no-platformed with a reading of their offending texts. The UKs least pc comedian Kenny Hawes tops the bill and a Miss Oxford University Competition, ‘open to any gender-rigid female with a bikini and the slightest connection with the university or the town’. They promise a banquet-style menu which will include a number of endangered species.

CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY22 Apr 2018TRANSPORT, lONDON, GRAMMAR

Syntax avoidance or evasion? It is still not clear exactly how the above was allowed to happen. Some say the horror must have been committed by an overseas employer at Transport for London, but this is unlikely – they usually get the grammar right when the native born seldom do. Suffice it to say for several years this brutal solepsism has been inflicting untold suffering on commuters and visitors alike at a number of underground stattions. We say enough is enough. The time for action by TFL has come.

OBITUARY19 Apr 2018OBITUARY, GRAPHOLOGYJEAN WILBERFORCE, Graphologist who produced character analysis from digital behaviour
Those who predicted that the decline of handwriting  would bring about the end of the graphologists art were only partly right as Jean Wilberforce proved. The former PA from the financial services industry was convinced that there was information to be harvested about character traits from a subject’s keyboard use especially if augmented by a video of them in the act of writing. So while being deprived of much of the information yielded through the formation of character – not a character forming experience – she gained through the pace, rhythm and approached yielded by the subject’s stops and starts. Wilberforce reasoned that everything from keyboard posture to the way the shift bar was used and other seemingly innocuous tics and habits  were all indicative of

quote of the day12 Apr 2018salisbury, chemical weapons, RUSSIA, propaganda 

‘It is said that Russia is winning the war of words over the Salisbury poisonings. Far from it – they have merely fired more shots.’

Dr John Chen of York College, Oxford

opinion88 Apr 2018

COWARDICE/ BOMBER PILOTS

‘True, we have some minor cultural differences. They cut people’s heads off with knives; we blow their heads off with bombs.’

Ludo James Professor of Security Studies at York College Oxford argues that the Islamist bombers so often accused of being cowardly in their attacks on soft targets in the West are braver than the pilots of Western warplanes who bomb Islamist targets from a safe height leaving innocent civilians dead and maimed as well as enemy combatants.  In a seminar at the College last weekend on the Rules of War in the age of Jihad James also took issue with the notion that it was a crime to shoot pilots who had baled out of their aircraft. ‘How can it make sense for a pilot to be immune from attack by the very people he has just mutilated, widowed and orphaned?’

OPINION

5 Apr 2018

STUDENT FEES,

Students at the University of West Spalding are protesting about a statement by Colin Diment of the Institute for Economic Advancement who has called for a dramatic reversal of current policy for the repayment of tuition fees. ‘I want any graduate who isn’t earning at least £40,000 within five years of leaving college to pay extra interest on their student loan,’ says Diment.  ‘If they can’t earn that by then they should never have come to university in the first place.’ 

OBITUARY

2 Apr 2018

ORCHESTRA/ CONDUCTOR/ COMPOSER

GAVIN BEWLAY Conductor and composer with a controversial sense of showmanship

It was a precocious young Scottish conductor who first broke from the traditional concert presentation.  Bewlay would begin an evening by signalling the individual musicians and sections of the orchestra to introduce themselves with virtuosi flourishes which was reminiscent of the 20th Century big band era. It enraged the purists and delighted young concertgoers who

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