A mixed bag and a rant

Today was a light day filled with tiredness, ass dragging, wrestling, trying to stay awake, and fitting shelves. That list is not in order. I have to warn you that if you want to read on about my training, you should skip the next, very long, paragraph.

I’ve been accused of being perspicacious in the past, verbose even. (I’m being facetious right now) I’m never offended by that, but today I was particularly pleased to be described as sceptical. Apparently teenagers now have a vocabulary of about, wait for it, 20 words. Okay, that’s not what the story actually says. But what it does say is that teenagers use about 800 words a day and that 20 of those words are used in a third of all their communications. Does that seem surprising? It probably doesn’t surprise you if you’ve spoken to any teenagers today. Why am I sceptical? Well it seems the study was commissioned by that well known bastion of scientific research, Tesco. You didn’t misread that. Tesco. Now either they’re due to open their new chain of micro-Universities in your apartment block, or they’re trying to sell someone something and this is a nice way of nabbing the headlines. A rudimentary reading of the rest of the article gives you an insight into their motivations. They’re concerned that their interviewees are thicker than they used to be. It seems the applicants for their shop assistant positions don’t exhibit enough higher brain function, particularly in the area of language. Maybe they should try paying more, or maybe even face up to the fact that firms like theirs have been continually deskilling even the most basic of jobs for decades to the extent that now we have to scan our own shopping. If a simple machine can do the job, is it any surprise that you’re not getting university graduates to your interviews? Now I read the headline like this: One of the industry leaders in the race to the bottom are complaining that they’re winning convincingly.

That being said, in spite of having a Literature degree, I managed to describe my hand pain the other day thusly: “The pain in them is sore”. Not my finest hour it has to be said, and it probably takes away from my rant above. Slightly.

So on to my training then. This will be a shorter paragraph I promise, as today, I just wrestled. It was smaller class than last week but we did some good work on breaking grips and some finer technique for the arm drag, and of course, we wrestled. End of training for the day. End of paragraph.

Finally I encourage you all to go and purchase Heligoland by Massive Attack, which is available for pre-order on iTunes right now. I’m not one for forcing music on people but this is their best since Mezzanine. If they’re touring, I’m there. Two of the best gigs I’ve ever been to have been these guys, and the other time I saw them was ruined by bad weather and malfunctioning speakers. Of course you might ask why I’m encouraging you to buy it when I’ve clearly downloaded it. I will buy it when it’s released, I just really wanted to listen to it and couldn’t wait.