It’s about twenty to four on a Sunday afternoon. Having spent an hour in Boots frantically but unsuccessfully searching for what I need, I am now in my local pharmacy. This pharmacy stocks literally every product under the sun and is open seven days a week till ten p.m. Do you have a minor skin ailment on the underside of your left knee-cap at certain times during the month? This pharmacy has a multitude of creams and lotions for it. Do you find that your child resolutely only speaks German whenever your second cousin comes round? The person behind the counter will prescribe you something, trust me. I’m taking my time, sidling around the shop, looking extremely casually through every shelf. Then I find what I’m looking for. The contraception section has, very cunningly, or so I think, been shelved next to the oral hygiene section. ‘Aha!’ I say to myself (silently)’. Someone here has a warped sense of humour, and has slid the dental dams in next to the condoms, but on the oral shelf. Brilliant.
Category: General (Page 19 of 27)
On a flight just before Christmas, my pilot was a woman. I had never thought about sexism in the airline industry – but I instantly realised that it must be an issue because of how unfamiliar the words “this is your captain speaking” over the intercom in a female voice sounded. In fact the issue is a serious one. A little research reveals that the number of women pilots in commercial airlines is about 7,000 out of 115,ooo total according to good estimates (~6%), or about 4,000 out of 130,000 according to bad ones (~3%). These are terrible figures. There can’t be many industries with such a vast gender gap, especially among ones where no one would argue that women are inherently less qualified (whether there are any jobs for which this is genuinely the case is itself doubtful). The numbers are worse when you look at women captains. My flight home from holiday – which, I might as well say, landed very smoothly despite an icy runway and thick fog – was helmed by one of only between 450 – 800 women pilots in the world!
Watch the way you walk, my boy
And straighten up your style.
A feeble posture may well foster
Talk about you child.
First of all you drop that smile
The muscles of your cheeks fall down;
You will not convince anyone
Unless you wear a frown. Continue reading
Christopher Hitchens is one of the most ardent supporters of atheism ; in the manner of Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, he is a very efficient pamphleteer against superstition, obscurantism and the excess of religion in general. Unlike Dawkins, however, Hitchens is only a pamphleteer with a journalistic backgound ; he doesn’t have the expertise on zoology the Oxford professor has, nor he is educated in philosophy and astrophysics like Victor Stenger, for instance. Most of the time, he makes up for this lack of expertise with his enthousiasm and passion for secularism, making him a very efficient soldier of the atheistic army against religion.
However, there is one subject on which Christopher Hitchens differs greatly from most atheist thinkers. He is, as well as a secularist and a humanist, a supporter of the pro-life movement. Continue reading