Relationships

There are a few people I have known for over 50 years or so. Contact with them is random; sometimes we will exchange emails like a lover and his lass or contact will only happen on a birthday. I had one such exchange today and a bit of the gossip reminded me of a question I wanted to pose.

We discussed a mutual acquaintance who died a short while back. The tittle tattle centred on a relationship he had had with a female. They both referred to it as a platonic friendship. Though a little different from Plato’s original concept of love, in modern times the terms “platonic love” and “platonic relationship” have come to mean a relationship between individuals of the opposite sex marked by the absence of romance or sex. So to put it simply, a platonic relationship is a close friendship between a man and women.

I knew the man and his female friend. He and I had been in the army together. She was a senior executive in a firm that provided office machinery to my employer. She invited me to a corporate hospitality event and introduced me to her friend – my old army mate. When we were alone, I did the nudge nudge wink wink performance; he had been a very keen and successful Ladies Man. He then explained that they were in a platonic relationship.

She was married. Her husband was a medical researcher working long hours over six day weeks. Her job entailed a lot of entertaining and ideally needed a man at her side but her husband was too tired to fill this role. They had discussed what was to be done and he was happy with the idea of a puppy walker. She found Tom, my old friend, through the friend of a friend. She was up front right from the start and made it clear where the friendship started and ended. Tom had made a success of a kitchen design company he started and sold when he was about 37 for several million pounds. He chose to retire. He was a non-executive director for a couple of local firms but otherwise his time was his own to fill. He had a natural charm, was well presented, had good manners and was well educated. Going to theatres, opera, doing the Henley, Ascot and Wimbledon rounds and other hospitality duties was right up his street.

The friendship lasted for some nine or so years. In that time, there were personal events that made their association deeper. Her father died after a long battle with cancer. He had a brother killed in a traffic accident. Then, totally out of the blue and for no reason either could determine, they stepped over the line between platonic and romantic. Just the once; neither felt comfortable about what had happened. By mutual agreement, they ended their relationship.

I have known a couple such friendships. None lasted the nine years that Tom and Shirley had been together. The nearest contender was a woman whose chosen Platonic friend was gay. I believe the gay element was significant. I think that the reason platonic friendships can be difficult is genetics. For a good portion of us, attraction to the opposite sex is genetically “hardwired” into our psyche. There’s no way to avoid it. We find the physical form of the opposite sex attractive, the opposite sex exudes pheromones that we find attractive, even something as simple of the timbre of the voice of a member of the opposite can trigger a romantic response in us. Add to that the fact that nothing makes a romantic relationship more successful then when the people involved are “friends first”, and it’s easy to see why platonic relationships can be difficult to keep strictly platonic.

So, anyone out there with experience or knowledge of a non-romantic association that lasted?

Cunning plan

My writing this is part of a cunning plan. I shall clarify later.

Descending from the flat today I heard a very rorty car exhaust sound. The sort that comes from an exhaust pipe like a 4" drainpipe and with overtones of burble. "Ah ha" I said to myself "that sounds like a  ........ Like a ......... Like a what?"

I knew that the word I wanted started with a S and was a make of car. Suzuki? No. That wasn't it. Try and think of a model - no. Nothing except Vitara so I was back in Suzuki country again.

Drive to lunch took about 40 minutes. All that time I was testing and chasing the mystery S. Total blank. Usually when this happens I leave it alone and the word I want pops up like an otter. Today - nothing. I kept on worrying at this bloody car make beginning with a S.

Coming out from lunch I saw the shape of a car I recognised. Trotted over and examined it - Subaru. At last. I tested myself on it on the way home "What's the name of that car?" "Subaru" "Name a model" "Impreza WRC" So - cracked it.

What has that to do with the point of this post as a cunning plan?  Easy. Next time I forget, I can come here and refresh my memory!  Result!!

Smell of rat anyone?

Office of Fair Trading charges British Airways executives with price-fixing
Smith & Nephew threaten to sue Plus bosses
British Airways four charged with criminal price-fixing
UBS is close to $25bn securities settlement
Citigroup in $7.6bn settlement over auction-rate bonds

Just a selection of the news items regarding action is progress that is connected with alleged defalcation in high value money markets. One day's addition to a long long list that will keep my Learned Friends in wigs for a very long time. Cannot just be these few are the only ones. Just expand the Citigroup story to get the flavour.

Citigroup agreed to a $7.6 billion ($£3.9 billion) landmark deal with regulators yesterday to settle charges that it mis-sold bonds to customers. Hours later, Merrill Lynch announced its own plans to buy back from clients up to $10 billion of the same asset class, known as auction-rate securities (ARS). Analysts described the moves as “another body blow” to the banking industry.

Yukh!

This is an art work that is being produced for prestige sale at prestige price.

To me, it bears a strong likeness to a image created at a pornography site. Or maybe it is just my brain decaying faster than I thought. Whatever, I can see little that is attractive about the arty item when it is a finished object. This adds to my confusion and sense of deja view.

Who would want this?

Sod's Law

One spends time researching the perfect holiday location. Somewhere off the tourist-beaten track. Remote but with luxury. 

And is confronted by an image such as this

In light of recent events .....

Would you pay good money so as to be able to claim this qualification?

Sauce for goose AND gander

I am proud that the Conservatives have committed to policies which will go some way to giving women that choice. We've announced proposals to extend the right to request flexible working to all those with children under the age of 18. We've committed to a flexible parental leave policy which allows maternity leave to be split between both parents. Giving fathers the option to be more involved will give mothers more freedom to go back to work should they wish to. I hope these measures will lead us towards a society in which both parents can choose to fulfil their roles in exactly the way that suits and strengthens their family.

So says Theresa May in a Grauniad article today. I suppose she is basing her opinion as to what men want on an EOC survey.  70% of men questioned said they wished to be more involved in the upbringing of their children.

What I find depressing in such debate is that hardly ever do we hear the employers' response. Whilst I can see that very large organisations have the mass and resources to allow flexible working. When I was a worker, my department had some 30 females of child-bearing age. Almost all of these were customer-facing but were not interchangeable. 

A telephonist could cover for a receptionist but a cleaner could not stand-in for a cook. Apart from anything else, some tasks required health certification and appropriate health and safety training. I cannot see how I would have coped if the flexible working had included dad as well as mum. My budgets and work plans were under constant survey to ensure I had no fat in head-counts. Replacement for flexiworkers could only have come from temporary staff. They again would lack the training and certification. The pressure would have to fall on co-workers exceeding or extending their hours of work. We had a working hours directive. Some of my people - security guards - worked anti-social hours. We had no flexible hours policy and there were sometimes ill feelings when mums had special treatment.

Thankfully, this old slave driver is retired. I still think that a employee has a duty to offer their services to an employer in a responsible manner. If they are likely to find themselves unable to commit to a full pattern of work, they should look elsewhere for employment. I had a keen football player who seemed to incur injury on a regular basis. After a lot of debate with HR, I got them to see he was in frustration of his contract and he was given a choice - conform or ship out. He went and I replaced him with someone who was there to work. The ex-employee broke his leg a short while later and was ruled permanently unable to play. He came back looking for a job and I was able to fit him in. Whether he was just brown-nosing I do not know but he did submit one day what a problem he must have been.

Commercial enterprises stand or fall on their profits. They are not engines for social change. If a company does go to the wall, the flexible as well as the inflexible suffer.

Condom tails

I plead that having held the rank and as I now live in Scotland, I can post this without running the risk of having to run for the border as they come to burn me out!

A Scottish RSM in full dress marches into a pharmacy to speak to the chemist. 
The Scot opens his sporran and pulls out a neatly folded cotton bandanna, unfolds it to reveal a smaller silk square, which he also unfolds to reveal a condom. 
The condom has a number of patches on it. 
The chemist holds it up, and eyes it critically. 
"How much to repair it?" the Scot asks the pharmacist. 
"Six pence," says the pharmacist. 
"How much for a new one?" 
"Ten pence," says the pharmacist. 
The Scot folds the condom into the silk square and the cotton bandanna, places it in his sporran and marches out the door of the pharmacy, kilt swinging. 
A moment or two later the pharmacist hears a great shout go up, followed by an even greater shout. 
The Scot walks back into the pharmacy, and again speaks to the pharmacist. 
"The regiment has taken a vote," says the Scot. "We'll have a new one."

Stay away - well away!

German short-haired pointers have very developed sense of smell. Sure ain't going to tangle with Mr Skunk but that does not mean I cannot let my face show just what I think about things!

That missing child - again. Sorry dear reader

The Mccann inquiry intrigues me. I do not know why. My experience does suggest that searching for the child amongst the living will not lead to a good result. To her abductor, children are cheap and easy to find. Expendable. Had they values that the average man in the street could appreciate, they would not be doing this sort of crime. Where you or I might reach out to a lost or troubled kid for the best of reasons and motives, they reach out with a far darker agenda. My guest blogger, a woman police officer with much experience, makes some good points. Be warned though that one of the links goes to Barry George where exposure has, surely, driven the case into the ground.

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Food for thought

Standing up for seniors

Knol is a recently developed application designed to take over where Wikipedia leaves off. I have been watching and testing it. 

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Sometimes I think it tells us far too much. Back in the day when I would have considered this a problem, I would have been out testing my new ability and not cooped up reading about it. Getting drunk on champagne used to work for me without all the side effects we now get from that little pill drug of choice.

Down the road a piece

I made arrangements. Anybody who's sending me flowers when I die, is getting them back with a posthumous note, "You, asshole. Keep your rotten flowers. I needed them when I could smell them."

No flowers on my grave. Friends and family know.

Disasters are universal

We heard - and saw - much about how the American emergency planning teams had failed New Orleans when Katrina struck. Allegations of corruption abounded. Lack of adequate resources was blamed on racial matters.

I was not there and cannot venture any opinion. Whether the deficiencies existed for the reasons alleged or whether Katrina was so large and violent that it would have overcome the finest preparations cannot be judged by anyone not very closely connected.

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And yet, some places cope with disaster better than others. A gringo speaks.

"To bomb or not to bomb. That is the question"

This is a survey form used amongst engineers and others working on the first atomic bomb. They were to complete it against a situation that was well detailed. 

"This is the straightforward poll of Compton and Daniels which asked 250 scientists at the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory arm of the Manhattan Project in pre-Trinity July, 1945. (Originally published as “A Poll of Scientists at Chicago, July 1945,” in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 1948, 44, p63. and again published in Compton’s Atomic Quest in 1956.) You can take this test anonymously. Please try and keep in mind the time and place of the events unfolding: the Japanese resistance to the unconditional surrender ultimatum developing at Potsdam; the resistance to massive air raids; the tenacious fighting in the islands at the outreaches of the Empire; the thousands of American POWs; the circulating estimates of the coming Japanese invasion casualties (hundreds of thousands of Americans, far more so Japanese), and so on. 

An earlier survey gave the results:

that the weapon be used against Japan at the earliest opportunity, that it be used without warning, and that it be used on a dual target, namely, a military installation or war plant surrounded by or adjacent to homes or other buildings most susceptible to damage.

So, whilst we here and now can only indulge in Monday morning Quarter-backing, it seems that there were proper attempts to validate the use of such a monstrous weapon. What we cannot know of course is how many of those who voted for to wipe a large city off the physical map of the world had any real and practical idea of just what the weapon would do. Of course, the old colonial thinking of "it's not really a big place and it is a long long way away" was still current. 

As an impressionable kid, I can remember that the Japanese were depicted as sub-human slaughterers with whom we had no common values. Far worse than the propaganda image of the Germans and their concentration camps.

I doubt that any survey today would come up with such findings. I would hope so.

I have been to both cities. The destruction that remains - more so in Nagasaki - is extensive but seems no worse than the then current photographs of German cities that had been destroyed in carpet bombing. Dresden and Hamburg casualty lists matched as well. Dresden in just two days "Estimates of civilian casualties vary greatly, but recent publications place the figure between 24,000 and 40,000 killed". Hamburg had a similar death toll but over the duration of about a month. 

Deaths at Hiro were about 78,000 killed and at Nagasaki about 45,000 died. The butcher's bill for the Somme in WWI was about 20,000 for the first day alone.

Mamma mia

The female here is a leading star in the porno film industry and he also is a performer. She is apparently 'over the moon' at achieving pregnancy.
Well, they do say that practice makes perfect!

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Comes to us all darling.

Mountain in labour produces mouse

I do not agree with the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay where they hold terrorist suspects. I do realise that their activities in the War on Terror will produce prisoners who need to be held in custody and that there would be serious problems in trying to hold them in civilian establishments. Whilst two wrongs will never make one right I accept Gitmo was necessary but think it should have served its purpose by now.

My sense of indignation is heightened by the result of the first prosecution of a GB graduate. Of all the baddies they could - surely - have found they start with the guy who was bin Laden's driver. Of all the evil bstards they must have in abundance, they come up with Jeeves.

A six-member military jury found Salim Ahmed Hamdan guilty of supporting al-Qaeda by driving and guarding the terrorist leader. The jurors found him not guilty of conspiring with bin Laden in terrorist attacks. The same uniformed jurors will hold another hearing Wednesday afternoon to determine a sentence. Although the partial acquittal surprised some courtroom observers, the effect is virtually the same as a full conviction: Hamdan still faces up to life in prison. The charge required them to prove that Hamdan "knew or intended" that his support was to be used for a terrorist act. Numerous federal agents testified that Hamdan knew about attacks, if only after the fact, yet still stayed with bin Laden.

We do not know how these federal agents obtained the 'facts' to which they testified; how many gallons of water went over the board to find out if bin Laden sat in the back and whether he belted up. The rules had allowed, in certain circumstances, for evidence obtained under interrogation methods that were "cruel" and "inhuman." An observer commented "We were told that Guantanamo was necessary because these were the world's most dangerous terrorists," said Wizner, who criticized the Pentagon for revealing little in the trial about U.S. interrogation techniques. "Salim Hamdan is not one of the world's most dangerous terrorists."

Even the prosecution's own evidence portrayed Hamdan as someone who ferried weapons for al-Qaeda and knew details of terrorist attacks, but only after they occurred and often based on conversations he overheard. One FBI agent testified that Hamdan emerged from training at an al-Qaeda camp and said he had no interest in fighting. Hamdan's statements were admitted into evidence even though he had not been warned they might be used against him.

This has done nothing to encourage me to put America forward as truly a land of the free and, by the treatment of this man (even less than a pawn) as the home of the brave.

Top of Mum anyway

"Made it Ma. Top of the world"  The closing scene of White Heat as Cagney's character is on the roof of an exploding chemicals company. Looks as if this young gorilla may have seen the film!

Old silverback Dad is not too happy with noisy kids by the look of things.

What happens to Tommy Atkins

We hear "One dead and three wounded" British soldiers. Even old soldiers will have little idea of what 'wounded' constitutes in modern warfare where high explosives get close to soft tissue.

An American medical officer talks of a book that sets out to illustrate what happens but is deemed so graphic that military surgeons are resisting it being available to civilians.

"The average Joe Surgeon, civilian or military, has never seen this stuff," Lounsbury said. "Yeah, they've seen guys shot in the chest. But the kind of ferocious blast, burn and penetrating trauma that's part of the modern IED wound is like nothing they've seen, even in a New York emergency room. It's a shocking, heart-stopping, eye-opening kind of thing. And they need to see this on the plane before they get there, because there's a learning curve to this."

The pictures of wounded children include some of a 5-year-old shot in a vehicle trying to run through a checkpoint. Other pictures show wounds riddled with dirt, genitals severed by a roadside bomb, a rib — presumably that of a suicide bomber — driven deep into a soldier's body, and the tail of an unexploded rocket protruding from a soldier's hip.

There are moments that reflect the desperation in the invaded country: an Afghan in the jaw-locked rictus of tetanus after home-treating a foot blown off by a landmine. And moments that reflect the modern American army: a soldier with unexplained pelvic pain that turns out to be a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy.

No need to go beyond what I have extracted to here. Just read the precis and then read Kipling's verse about how civilians value a man called Atkins. T.

Doggone

A police dog responds to an ad for work with the FBI. "Well," says the personnel director, "you'll have to meet some strict requirements. First, you must type at least 60 words per minute."
Sitting down at the typewriter, the dog types out 80 words per minute.
"Also," says the director, "you must pass a physical and complete the obstacle course." This perfect dog specimen finishes the course in record time.
"There's one last requirement," the director continues; "you must be bilingual."
With confidence, the dog looks up at him and says, "Meow!"

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Old man goes into the hall and starts to get dressed to go out.

"Where are you going?" asks his aged wife. "Gonna get some of that Viagra from the doctor" he says.

Wife says "Wait a bit and I'll come with you" "What for?" the ancient man asks.

"Well" she says, "If you are getting that rusty old thing out, I'm going to get a tetanus jab"

War mongering or scare mongering?

If media reports are to be believed - and that is a big discussion in itself - The Great Satan is determined to kick off in Iran. Just what drives Bush is beyond my simple mind. He should have taken note just how poor his advisors were for the Muddle East over how things panned out in Iraq. It is, I agree, possible that his advice was good but was subverted by the military. In the end, the buck stops at his desk so whether State or Pentagon let him down is immaterial. He made the decision. From what the 4th Estate report, he seems to have learned little from Iraq Part II.  At least he has not sought advice from the Governor of California or we would all be in a state of Hasta la Vista Baby.

I can understand the concerns regarding a Iranian nuclear warfare capability. Like a tumescent teenager, they would have trouble keeping it zipped up and away and Israel is the target of choice. They are not noted for accepting fools gladly and preemptive strike is a phrase they know well and a concept they have used to great effect.

I do see a possible scenario. The warlike language between POTUS and Iran's HadMyDinner is worked up to something where Israel gets very heated and decides to get their retaliation in first. After a long haul, their bombers inflict serious damage - not total destruction - on Iran's 

centrifuge installations. Just enough destruction so that Iran does not have any capability to let the nuclear birds fly loose. America would then tell their puppets they had been very naughty and threaten sanctions in the event of any recurrence. (If the attack is properly planned and successfully executed - there would be no need for Part II) Iran is given a big dose of "Told you so" and offered help in reconstruction of the peaceful application. Any threat of a united Arab reaction to Israel's attack is very small. Possible supporters of Iran are well within range of IDF aircraft.

Reads like something very serious. It would be but exactly the sort of circumstance where preemptive assault is best bet. 

If we carry on with threat and counter-threat, Iran will get to the situation where it might be tempted into a bit of this preemptive action.