iblog

Rushda: It might seem a little drastic, but that hasn’t stopped an academic in London getting so annoyed with the spelling mistakes of his undergraduate students that he wants to publish a whole list shaming them and their poor command of English.

The victim of the mistakes is Dr Bernard Lamb, who is a reader of Genetics at Imperial College London. Lamb, who has been with Imperial College for almost 30 years and is also the chair of the London branch of the Queen’s English Society, says he was so upset by the consistently low level of English from his students that he will publish a list of mistakes made by 75 students over the course of an academic year. Examples of misspellings include “sun” instead of “son”, “seamen” instead of “semen”, and constant confusions over “affect” and “effect”. Lamb argues that publishing the list will encourage students to be more careful.

Of the scripts he marks, Lamb has said:

“I correct them but they still get it wrong. They haven’t been trained to be accurate. They haven’t been corrected and a lot of them don’t even think it’s important. This year I just found the errors were so frequent I wanted to get publicity to put pressure on the education establishment.”

As noble as the sentiment may be, I only wonder: who will even want to buy it?

Rushda: In the bid to break the world record for longest time on a rollercoaster, a man has finally succeeded by spending over nine days on the Pepsi Max Big One rollercoaster at Blackpool Pleasure Beach.

The rider, Richard Rodriguex, is an American world record holder who is in fact still on the rollercoaster after beating the previous record of nine days. He already held the world record for nearly 30 years till he was beaten last year. Now, the proud holder once again, he says:

“It feels amazing to be the world record holder once again, but I’m not just going to give up now - I want to stay on for as long as possible and make my record a solid one. The ride crews and all the visitors who have come to support me have been a great help and have inspired me to stay positive during this successful record attempt, so I’d like to thank them all.”

It is astonishing to think that Mr Rodriguez has to spend so many hours on this white-knuckle ride when most people can barely manage one go. He has to eat, drink and sleep on it but gets five minutes every hour to allow him to shower and/or visit the toilet.

Naturally, many have speculated about how this extreme action may harm Mr Rodriguez’s health. As Dr Graham Archard, vice-chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, explains:

“Being on a rollercoaster this long could cause sleep deprivation, which in turn would lead to tiredness and lethargy, and could affect the immune system, making him more susceptible to coughs and colds. Unless he’s wearing a neck brace, it could cause neck problems that may stay with him for life, and aches and pains in his joints from hanging on too tightly. He could also develop a rare condition called ‘mal de debarquement syndrome’, which leaves people permanently off-balance, possibly for life.”

One can only wonder what it is about such madness that appeals to people like Mr Rodriguez. After all, surely the pleasure and fun of a rollercoaster soon diminishes and one is left with nothing but tiredness and overall suffering.

Matthew: I have long been suspicious of people that wear clothes adorned with arbitrary slogans. T shirts with meaningless numbers, emblems of universities the wearer’s never been to and garages and diners that probably don’t even exist. There’s nothing particularly decorative about the number 26 in my opinion. And don’t get me started on those apolitical business students getting ready for a career in investment banking heading down to Topshop to buy a mass manufactured Che Guevara T shirt. People seem perfectly happy to cover themselves in symbols, which if they have any significance, the fashion follower is totally ignorant of it. Some people are even content to have kanji or Chinese letters tattooed onto their skin. Would they even know if the tattoo artist instead of writing ‘Barry Hooper’ had written ‘Ignorant simpleton’? I think not.

‘Where’s this rant going?’ I hear you cry, avid Ibloggers…

Well, this week my suspicions were confirmed, as menswear chain Burton’s came under fire for selling a t shirt whose decoration was Cyrillic script. The chain had clearly not even taken the trouble to consult a Russian speaker as to what the sentence actually said. It turned out to be a slogan of an extreme right-wing Russian nationalist organisation. The slogan was ‘Cleanse Russia of all non-Russians.’ People! Fashionistas! Beware of draping yourselves in symbols of which you have no understanding. You never know what you might be standing for.

Rushda: He may not wear the costume, do funky jumps or shoot web out of his hands, but a man has been nicknamed Spiderman and has been scaling towers all over Germany without any safety equipment… just for fun. The latest one he did was in Berlin and a video of him can be seen here. Too bad, however, that he doesn’t have as much respect as his superhero - his latest feat involved getting caught by police when he descended again!

Rushda: It’s interesting what new things become delicacies, especially those which are particularly yucky. I just read an article in the Times about a special new coffee in Australia which is made of beans that have been digested and excreted by Indonesian civet cats. Costing £21 for a single cup, it has been marketed as “the world’s rarest and most exclusive coffee” and many satisfied customers think it’s absolutely worth the price for its “earthy and musty” (hmm, pooey?) flavour. Customers who try the coffee are even rewarded with a “certificate of experience” as a souvenir for their memorable gulps. Well normally I’m all for the “each to his own” mentality, but really, what’s going on here? I think I’m going to start my own business venture now and start selling sock-flavoured coffee. It’s rare and exclusive enough isn’t it?!

Rushda: Buy a salad and get a toad free. Sound exciting? Well that’s the offer one woman got when she bought a salad in a Huntingdon Sainsbury’s recently, and it turned out to contain an entire toad amongst the leaves. I’m not sure how such a big creature went unnoticed and travelled in the salad all the way from Portugal. More surprising is that when she took the salad back to the store, she got a generous £10 voucher. Hmmm, that’s not fair…not only did she get a new scrumptious pet but she got paid for it too.

Virgil: The world’s highest swing has recently been erected over Harbin city, Heilongjiang province, China. At first glance this record appears more exciting than it really is - this is simply a matter of a fairly normal-sized swing being placed very high. But by very high, I do mean very high. 700 feet high. It sits on top of a massive TV tower, the second largest in the world. And the seat swings right off the edge of the platform, out into mid-air over an uneasy amount of emptiness.

You get a great view, I’m sure, but fittingly the swing is called “Game for Brave People”. As exhilarating as it sounds, the chair doesn’t look particularly secure, and I feel no shame in saying that this doesn’t look like childsplay! I’ve fallen off a swing mid-flight enough times to know that holding onto the chains isn’t a failsafe. And what if the mechanism broke? You’d be safely holding onto the slack chains all the way down to the bottom. I prefer my local park.

Rushda: Here is a video I found of the Queen ‘teasing’ President Bush at a dinner in the US the other day. She started her toast playfully by indicating that she should be saying she was last here in the 1700s (a reference to when Bush made one of his slips of the tongue a while back). It’s cute that the Queen was so cheeky but I must say that despite making me smile slightly I don’t know what the big deal was. Perhaps these kinds of remarks are rare for her, or perhaps we just appreciate anything from her that much. Myself, I’m more amused at the odd pairing between her and Bush: at one point Bush even winked at her, only to receive a reprimanding glare.

Rushda: So many items listed for auction on Ebay have made me chuckle before and today I came across yet another that I thought I’d share. A man is actually selling his “imaginary friend” on Ebay, and quite bizarrely the bid is now at £9,600.00 The advert reads:

My imaginary friend Jon Malipieman is getting to old for me now. I am now 27 and i feel i am growing out of him. He is very friendly. Along with him, i will send you what he likes and dislikes, his favourite things to do and his personal self portrait.

Listed as used, the “friend” will be “conveniently delivered in an envelope” along with a list of his likes and dislikes. As amusing as the whole thing is, I still can’t work out what’s actually going on with the auction. It simply can’t be that the winning bidder actually has to pay for a bit of air right? Am I missing something here? Well the ad can be viewed here along with amusing responses the seller has made to his bidders. Enjoy!

Matthew: Paris Hilton has endorsed a myspace petition that calls for her drink driving 45-day prison sentence to be quashed. The petiton claims Paris is a role model and provides ‘beauty and excitement to our otherwise mundane lives’. I won’t do this absurd comment justice by dwelling on it further, other than saying the only excitement she provides to my otherwise mundane life is the thought of her sharing a prison potty with a thick-necked, tatooed convict, which admittedly gives me palpitations.