Seriously what is wrong with a judicial system when it states ’not about deciding whether he is guilty or not guilty’as the Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpfdid? Since when was it not about him being guilty of being a rapist? Since when was it not about him raping and sodomising a young girl? If it is not about that then what the heck is it about?

I genuinely feel sickened by this. Roman Polanski admitted sex with the 13 year old girl as part of a plea bargain before fleeing the US. The fact that he even got the chance to plea bargain to that charge after having drugged and abused a child is beyond belief. And now, years later when he is captured and able to be transported to face trial for his crime, he is released by a Swiss court and told he is a free man.

Now I am guessing that if if someone drugs and rapes Eveline Widmer-Schlumpff’s 13 year old grand daughter then she might be considering that it is in fact an arguement of whether that man is guilty or not guilty. Maybe if Roman Polanski were to do that she might slightly change her view on all of this.

I am guessing that in the end this all comes down to Polanski being famous and powerful with many friends able to lean on (who I am guessing by this time are all in dier need of spider vein treatment) and ’advise'those responsible for this decision to set him free.

Meanwhile somewhere in America is a family who did have their little girl raped and who never did get justice for her. She is now grown up and has no doubt been forever haunted by the incident.

It all just makes me sick to the stomach.

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I remember my secondary school years rather well now. Everyone had fun, messing about in class, laughing at the teachers and their names and accents, then after school hanging around the corner shop in “New Era"caps which were banned in class.

Then suddenly it all changed. It must have been in the fourth year when we were getting ready for the GCSE’s. We had to study many things for them, be it quadratics or even DNA Testing. I had the urge to mess about, have a laugh and a giggle, yet I actually began to take things seriously. I didn’t know why all of a sudden, but it was a transition we all had to make. I knew one guy who made this transition in his first year, he had a laugh and made loads of friends, yet he was more absorbed in his studies pretty early. There were a few who wern’t so lucky, acting like kids even during exams, no revision just hanging about, which resulted in them not going to college and having to take crappy low paid jobs like painting and installing loft insulation in the houses of pensioners. I was actually afraid of failing and I was prepared to change at that point. Then GCSE’s came, did great, then A-Levels did great too, and now in Uni I had a look at myself. I’m no longer the 12 year old kid who blew bubbles with gum with crooked teeth, I am an older guy with stress wrinkles and bags under my eyes worrying about my next assignment.

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In today’s society if you are on television or on the radio you are expected to set a good example for children. If you are young you are expected to be a role model and have no indiscretions or questionable moments. For many years people have viewed Miley Cyrus as being one of the pure girls in Hollywood. Miley is no longer a little girl and a lot of people are finding it hard to grasp.

Miley is an amazing actress. She has been the star of the long running Nickelodeon show Hannah Montana or many years. She was in her early teens when the show started and now she is 17 years old. She was often showed fully covered up with little to no skin ever showing. In one episode she was even featured wearing a sweater with a cat on it.

Coming from musical roots Miley is also an amazing singer. Her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, has always supported her through her musical and acting endeavors. She has many songs that have soared up the charts. She has been filmed without her knowledge and shown dancing with an older man at one of the private resorts she and her family frequents. She has had questionable pictures released of her that sent parents into a tizzy. Sometimes, because they are in the spotlight we forget that these are just teenagers. Teenagers like we have sitting on our couches, eating cheese curls, and leaving prints on their jeans where they wiped their hands.

She is a great singer and actress. Her music is completely relatable and fun for kids and adults. Her albums are being sold in large numbers. She has proven herself to be a force to be reckoned with. She is going to grow up and we as society need to realize that. She can only stay young and innocent for so long. Let’s embrace her growth and support her into her journey into womanhood.

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I walked in to a snooker club with my friend. The evening was set to be an embarrassing series of small disasters piled-up on one another. Firstly not knowing where the balls went, then hitting the balls, then not managing to pocket any at all. But I felt safe and confident in myself. At least I’m not old, I thought, at least I’m not a high trouser wearer!

That was when the youngsters descended on us out of nowhere…youngsters in a snooker club…what next? I thought, ’Pimp My Cue’ on TV? Suddenly, the smile fell of my face as more and more arrived…Tens of them with their own custom-built snooker cues–walking with swagger and with jeans much lower on their hips than I. And it was then that I noticed in the mirrored wall what looked like an old man wearing high trousers. He had my face, this man, and believe me when I say I wanted to kill him.

As the embarrassing disasters piled-up, compounded by the fact that every attempt to hit a ball meant leaning in a certain kind of way which only hitched my trousers up higher, I began to cry inside. I’m doomed! I thought. I’m properly, properly doomed!

But at that point luck shined brightly: the main leader of the low-slung youth gang, his jeans fell down in front of everyone! There, under the spot-lights, I put my hands on my hips and said, “who says wearing trousers around your nipples is a stupid thing to do?”

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I miss sixth-form days; I’m now in the Nose reshaping business and despite rumours to the contrary, breaking someone’s nose for the hundredth time is not as much fun as you’d think. University is great and everything, but seriously, if I could I would beam myself back to three years ago–the day I walked in to the sixth-form college and realized that it was different from school. I felt like William Wallace must have, I felt like I was a true warrior of academic freedom at last!

We all thought it wouldn’t be that different from school, you see. We all thought that it would be like school, only with more work. Turned out there actually was more work, but it was nothing like school. There was this awesome thing called a free period. Sometimes you got a few together and it became a whole afternoon off. And what better way to waste your time than study, of course, in the magnificent library. Only joking! Like we really did that! No, as soon as we left class my friends and I would head on out to look (make that OGLE) at the large number of very beautiful women that adorned every single corridor. Especially in the art block–

The art block was where all the best females were located. There just seemed to be something in the water there that made them a bit different. That much more pretty. So that’s why I miss sixth-form. I made good friends there too, it wasn’t only about the art girls, just mostly.

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I am about to make a few statements. None of them are particularly shocking. You may even find yourself reading and thinking I hate to admit it–But that’s me too! Goodness me I’m glad nobody can see inside my head right now, how embarrassing that would be–

1) When I go to purchase a new laptop computer, the last thing I am wondering is how energy-efficient it is. No, I am a girl and a busy girl at that. Therefore I am wondering about if it comes in pink, and if it does, what shades?

2) When I look at computer stuff in general, I don’t see plastic, I see computer stuff. That may sound like a fairly dumb thing to say, but it’s the marketing, you see. The companies have two options: a) tell us how damaging plastic is to the environment or b) don’t bother and sell more computer stuff. Which makes more business sense to you?

Fortunately not everyone has their head in the sand when it comes to thinking about how we can make computer stuff more eco-friendly. In fact, hit the link and you’ll be taken to an Enigin blog which is especially amazing at thinking and discussing out loud all that stuff.

Now I’ve been there I can safely say that I get it. Until I read those facts I had absolutely no idea that there were whole ranges of computers that are now striving to be eco-friendly. And if you find yourself still asking: but why is it so important all of a sudden? Then hear this – it’s always been important, we should have done this ages ago–

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Students get a raw deal, I think: raw like buttock surgery . Yes they have their problems, as every group in society does, but come on now, aren’t you forgetting something people? Yes, that’d right: students are also the future politicians, doctors and astrologists of the world OK, astrologists might not be much good to you in your day-to-day life, but what about when you fall off your bike and knock your teeth out?

A small minority of students are responsible for bringing the great student curse. These students don’t deserve to bear such a name! With their constant drinking and their too-much-noise making they should be the ones who suffer the consequences, not all of us others who knuckle down daily to do the work we know to be so important!

As you can see I feel quite strongly about this issue.

And as for the whole scrounging money debate, I dare not even speak of it. I mean–How is a loan scrounging? One day, just like every person with a loan, we have to pay it back. So the idea that we are getting a ‘free ride’ is preposterous!

But there is one thing that people do have right about students, of course, and that is that they do like to pay for things which cost barely anything with a cheque. I have to admit that I’ve even done it before, but then, what other form of attack do I have against the world as it goes for the necks of us students?!

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I used to work in a call-centre, so I know what it’s like to be the guy on the end of the line who gets shouted at three thousand times a day. And you’d think that the insults get boring after a while, but they never do. Because there are so many insults out there it’s unreal. And the more people you get told to F off by, the more you realise that insulting people in a smart way is really a bit of an art-form.

It bothered me to begin with, being called every name under the sun and a few behind the sun that would make Einstein scratch his head. And surprisingly, the best insults came from the poshest people. After a few months at the call-centre it became a game: a board was put up and the person to get called the most imaginative insult would get to claim a prize.

The problem with this weekly game was that a) the prize was hardly worth having, which wasn’t much of an incentive, and b) the more weeks passed by, the harder it got. For example, in week 4 it was fairly original to cite ‘bottom dwelling sess-pit eater’ as the most orginal insult, but by the seventh week that insult was a common one and it’d be something like ‘big beach bags full of the opposite of the best thing ever and then caked in parasitical liquid poo from Tony Blair’s underpants’ that won. So after a while the game just got too hard, and we all started to give up.

Eventually the game gave way to a new game: see how many compliments you can pay a customer before he / she threatens to sue. Not that we were worried about actually getting sued. We only had outgoing lines and they didn’t know who we were.

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Some people simply don’t know how to punctuate their sentences properly when they speak and there really is nothing more annoying than that especially when you’ve been working with English grammar and punctuation for fourteen hours straight and the last thing you want to see is all your hard earned education and expertise slandered in the open air by someone who couldn’t care less about language and probably doesn’t even realize the aggravating effect that they are having on what was once your decently-going day.

See how annoying it is? Good! Chances are, using the laws of statistics, that at least one in ten of the people who read this are inept in this way. Well hear this dear reader! The world has enough problems without you adding to it by being a confusing verbal diarrhea mess that barely anybody can understand.

And technology doesn’t help those who seek to abuse our great language, does it? For example, the world is only getting faster by the second. Time is everything, speed the number one concern (apart from in some pursuits such as watching paint dry contests and important football-games where a well placed lie on the floor can make all the difference). And for that reason we are given no choice but to keep our speed up. Fighting against this machine is impossible, and I suppose some people use this rubbish excuse to write non-punctuated messages, emails, and talk at you as if you are a dust-bin ready and willing to accept a long stream of words without their rightful organization in to proper, manageable, sections which actually make sense.

It begins at school, of course. It begins with children having to talk over one another to be heard, and then it descends in to chaos by the time sixth-form is reached and every Tom, Dick and Harry is forced to try and attract a mate by using a deep booming voice.

I have just updated the text on the homepage for bio diesel supplier, I know that it might surprise you that I am working on some things for an oil company; but I don’t think they are as environmentally unfriendly as I once presumed. Plus, I’ve sold out, I need the money!

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Spring is a beautiful season, the trees begin to bear leaf, the birds start to sing and there is a general sense of renewal in the air that can bring a smile to the grimmest of faces. What I most love about this time of year however is the four unparalleled days of excitement taking place in the South West of England: the Cheltenham Festival! I have gone every year with my sister, ever since her intial interest in Locum vet jobs.

The Sport of Kings has two distinct varieties: flat racing and jump racing. Flat racing aficionados love the Royal Ascot Festival but to my mind the jewel in the crown of the jump season, that incredible week, at Cheltenham is the one truly unmissable sporting occasion of the year.

A quarter of a million people will be milling around this corner of the Gloucestershire downs over the four days, unfortunately I won’t be one of them this year but I will be watching avidly at home with a form guide within easy reach. Unlike its more formal cousin Royal Ascot, all top hats and pimms, there is a much more down to earth atmosphere at Cheltenham, and it is all the better for it.

Guinness is the drink of choice at the Festival, an astonishing 220,000 pints will be supped at the numerous course side drinking establishments. One of the main contributing factors to this Guinness frenzy of course, is the Irish invasion that takes place. Tens of thousands of punters will cross the Irish sea for their annual pilgrimage to horse racing heaven, and every Irish winner will be cheered on with deafening appreciation. St Patrick’s Day also falls during the festival this year and so the party atmosphere will be ratcheted up one more notch, if that’s possible!

The sheer quality of racing on show is the main attraction for the racing purist, and this year does not disappoint on that score. All roads are leading to Friday, and the showpiece race The Cheltenham Gold Cup. Hot favourite Kauto Star is looking to emulate racing legend Arkle by winning the race for a fourth time, but it will face stiff opposition from stablemate Denman, winner of the Gold Cup himself in 2008. My advice to everyone out there is take some time off of work, get the drinks in and treat yourself to four days watching the Cheltenhma Festival – just don’t blame me if you lose the shirt off your back!

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