QUOTE OF THE DAY. TRIPPS ORIGINAL

[Tizer]

Israeli author Amos Oz on `Start the week' was explaining how the Palestinian and Israeli people want their leaders to get on and find an acceptable solution to the division between them. His analogy was:
"The patients are ready for the operation, but the doctors are cowards".

[Stanley]

I liked it when, talking about meetings, he said the Arabic coffee was better than the Israeli's.

Listening to the Obama result I can't help remembering the NY political boss who was making a concession speech after losing an election. He ended by saying "The people have spoken!" but as he turned away he was heard to add "The bastards!"

[Tizer]

Historian Simon Schama on the Today programme this morning:
"The US Republicans make the British Conservatives look like something out of Mary Poppins."

[Stanley]

I heard him and he's right. This is what we escaped. LINK Romney made it quite clear he was going down the same path, repatriating jobs and retrenching.

[Tripps]

From the blog of Paul Flynn MP.
Tweeting and 24 hour media cheapen politics. The greatest achievements of the past 60 years were those of Clement Attlee who read the papers only for the cricket scores. Without an incontinence of exposure, he created the NHS and modernised the Welfare State. Attlee's achievements endured for half a century: Cameron's for a half a day.

[Nolic]

"Without an incontinence of exposure"

Great phrase that. I'll try and remember it. Nolic

[Stanley]

Dead right David. Well put, I have nothing to add to it. Part of the problem is that the totally laudable and welcome improvements in modern communications mean that everyone has power in their hands. In some cases it is like giving a delinquent child the keys to the gun cabinet. Mind you, just look at what the church thought about printing with moveable type!

[Stanley]

"Here's me. Brain the size of a planet and what do they ask me to do? Open and close doors!"
Marvin, the Paranoid Android.

[Tripps]

From TV last night - emergency call centre in Blackpool......

Call operator - "are you bleeding"?
Caller - "yes"
Operator - "where are you bleeding from"?

Caller - "Poland"

[Stanley]

"The banks were rescued, now it's time for the people to be rescued"
From a vox-pop on a London Street enquiring into attitudes to falling wages in the private sector.

[Stanley]

A spokesman for President Mohamed Morsi announced that "President Morsi has left the building" during the siege of the presidential palace by the mob. Shades of Elvis!

[Tripps]

Roberto Mancini Manchester City manage after last night's defeat - (not verbatim - but accurate)

But if you want to win games you have to score - if you don't - then you will lose or get a nil -nil draw.

How perceptive, and surely well worth the £50.000+ a week wages.

[Tripps]

From 2011 census - reported in today's Daily Telegraph. Can this really be true?

"More than 2.8m people in Britain live in households where no adults speak English. "

[Tizer]

It could be misleading and some people might register it as meaning 2.8 million can't speak English. If they are large households with, say, 2 parents, 2 grandparents and 3 children (total 7) then it would represent 0.7 million households where no adult speaks English. There are about 23 million households in total, therefore my example calculation would mean 3% of households in England & Wales had no adult speaking English - which is more than we'd like but the figure is a lot less impressive than the big number at the beginning!

[Whyperion]

When the wife was teaching , one child (an Indian ) was sent to school , she (and family ) spoke no English , problem was despite a high Indian Sub Continent numbers of children in the school NONE of them spoke her particular Indian Language- I think she was from a part of South India, and I am not certain how she/ family managed, but she was bright and picked things up well - and was very good at maths from day 1. Tizer's calculation probably about right given the number of different countries everyone has come from , and I wonder if it is also the Scots and Welsh (Irish?/Cornish!) being a little bit nationalistic with some returns refusing to acknowledge the speaking of English-indeed I would imagine a minority still where no English spoken and in Wales thats probably increasing. Whats the proportion / returns as Split by the 4 countries

[Stanley]

"I thought it was the safest place in America"
Said by a mother as she collected her eight year old child from the school in Newtown, Connecticut.

[EileenDavid]

I used to date a guy who was from North Wales and didn't speak English until he was 7 but learnt in school so he could go out in the big wild world and come over the border into England. I think that if people want to live here they should at least learn to speak the language. We have to try at least when we go to France but these people don't even try and we are forced to accept it. Look at the Asian post office manager who refused to serve people in his shop who wouldn't speak English and was prosecuted. Milliband was spouting yesterday with his vote catching theory that the immigrants make Britain a better place, that coming from a Russian immigrant family will have to be taken seriously. I am not a racist before anyone refers I am but am sick of being a second class citizen who can't speak their mind. I only know I am a law abiding English citizen and when broadcasts and the pressmake statements on those breaking the law the facts are that at least 90% are not indiginous to our shores so how can they be making it a better place as far as I can see all they are doing is draining our resources. Eileen

[Bodger]

One of the reasons we moved in 1968 to Ireland was that our children in school at Hyde, Cheshire, were being asked to recite Muslim prayers, that and a developing drug culture in the area led us here, we were based in the Connemara Gaeltacht, Irish speaking area, and our C of E children were educated in a Catholic convent through Irish, my wife & I both attended Irish lessons, and to date i think it assisted us in intergrating into the Irish society

[Travis]

"An eye for an eye will make us all blind". Ghandi. Just seen this on a top 100 Christmas moments on some obscure Sky channel.

[EileenDavid]

Bodge I don't blame you for moving one of my friends moved to Gloucestershire and she was appauled that her daughter taught in a mainstream school knew more about other religions than she did about her own Christianity faith. On the Christmas card front has enyone else noticed that the nativity scene has seemed to have disappeared from the scene and the Victorian Church concept. Eileen

[Stanley]

"The world is a comedy to those that think and a tragedy to those that feel"

Walpole, in a letter dated 16 August 1776.

[Stanley]

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." Chairman of the National Rifle Association in the US.

[Stanley]

"The log was burning brightly, Twas a night that would banish all sin For the bells were ringing the Old Year out and the New Year in"
From 'The Miner's dream of home' by Will Godwin. One of my favourite old songs from the days when we had sing songs round the piano.

[Tizer]

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." Chairman of the National Rifle Association in the US.

When I first heard this I thought: "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is to not let him have a gun in the first place".

[Stanley]

Quite Tiz but in the US over 50% are in favour of the right to carry guns, it's a cultural thing embedded in society and I doubt if it will ever be eradicated. There are traces of it here in the UK. I was surprised when I found that there was a shop in Rochdale where you could buy such things as a Colt .45 Magnum revolver quite legally if you had the necessary licence. In those days I knew a man who always slept with a revolver under his pillow, as far as I know he is still doing it.... There are strange people in this world.