47. I believe the children are our future

Results of a survey of 300 teachers by the Association of Teachers & Lecturers, March 2008.
Who do your (secondary school) students model themselves on?
* David Beckham 40.3 %
* Victoria Beckham 36.7 %
* Kiera Knightley 37.7 %
* Paris Hilton 32.4 %
* Frank Lampard 23.7 %
What do your students aspire to be?
* Sports Star 59.5 %
* Pop Star 57.9 %
* Model 32.6 %
* Film Star 29.3 %
* Anything else so long as they’re famous 37.2 %

46. Go to work on an egg

In the late 1950s, this was the slogan for what is now recognised as one of the most influential adverts of all time. Coined by Fay Weldon and starring Tony Hancock, the campaign by the Egg Marketing Board encouraged post-war Britain to start the day with a healthy, protein-packed, nutritious breakfast. Eggs were removed from the rationing list in 1953 and the first adverts appeared four years later: by 1960 average consumption in the UK was five a week per person.
In 2007, to mark the 50th anniversary of the campaign – and in the face of rising obesity levels – the British Egg Information Service planned to rebroadcast the famous series of commercials. That plan was pulled after the advertising watchdog ruled that the classic ads breached rules on promoting a varied diet and that the slogan “Go to work on an egg” did not encourage healthy eating.
Adverts for alcohol, chocolate and McDonald’s remain.

45. Love is an endless afternoon

Love is the only subject anyone has ever created art about. Love of oneself, love of another, love of nature, love of death, love of God. All of art since the birth of Man has been about love: and all of that art has been an attempt to pin down what love is, what love does, what love means. And all of that art has failed. The best we’ve managed is a series of similes, a collection of metaphors. The closest we’ve come is an evocation of feeling, a sense of greatness, a touching of inexpressible emotion: we’ve created art that soars on the airs of love, that gives a glimpse of the possibilities of love... but we’ve never managed to nail the thing itself.
It is un-nailable. Love is an endless afternoon? It’s not a bad attempt – but if it works for me there’s no guarantee it will for you. Love by its very nature defies definition, and the fact that you and I could argue over it forever – and every writer, musician, artist that ever lived has done exactly that – says more about what love is than any art, no matter how beautiful.

44. Short cuts make long delays

Reuters Newsfeed, 25 November 2008:
RIO DE JANEIRO -
Three Norwegian tourists came under fire and one was shot after the satellite navigation system in their car guided them straight into one of Rio de Janeiro’s most dangerous slums.
The three men cut short their vacation in Brazil and headed home on Monday after Trygve Killingtveit, 24, was shot in the shoulder by suspected drug traffickers from one of the gangs that control hundreds of shantytowns in Rio.
The tourists were returning from the beach resort of Buzios about three hours north of Rio on Saturday when they got lost, Brazil’s Globo TV and several newspapers reported.
They reportedly told police their Global Positioning System (GPS) system recommended they turn off a main highway as the quickest route back to the airport to drop off the rental car. But the suggested route took them deep into the Mare slum complex, where their rented car quickly came under fire.
No motive for the attack was given, and no arrests were made.
Killingtveit managed to drive the car to safety despite being wounded. He told family members in Norway that he probably went astray because of a fault in the GPS, Norwegian daily Dagbladet reported.
“As far as I understand, the GPS system in their car showed the wrong information,” his brother, Magne Killingtveit, told the paper.
The Norwegian consulate in Rio declined on Monday to comment on the incident, saying only that the three had returned to Norway.

43. If pleasure remains, does it remain a pleasure?

Nothing is ever as good as you thought it would be. Not after a little while. The shine wears off, the gloss cracks, the veneer fades. Newer models appear, or more efficient solutions, or prettier ones. Obsolescence is an inevitability. And all of this is not the fault of cynicism, or restlessness, or a human inability to stay content. It’s due to age. The banal tragedy of the everyday. The world turns. We get old; things get old; nothing remains the same. Pleasure does not remain a pleasure any more than we remain young and beautiful and brilliant: so be grateful for the pleasures you’ve had – and don’t resent their fading.

42. When troubles come they come not as single spies

This is what people actually mean when they say things are like waiting for a bus. Bad things stack up, troubles come in battalions. Or, as Hamlet might have said, the shit just keeps accumulating.

41. Everything is like waiting for a bus

I remember once standing in the pouring rain on the south side of Waterloo Bridge on a miserable Tuesday evening after a dreary day at work, waiting for a Number 4 bus. The Number 4 bus runs every 10 minutes; it starts at Waterloo Bridge. After 15 minutes I grew impatient; after 20 I was frustrated. When half an hour rolled around and the rain had soaked beneath my coat and under my collar and into my shoes and none of the three buses that were supposed to have started from this stop had materialised, I began to get angry. After 40 minutes, a bus finally showed. Soaking wet and furious with all the impotent rage that standing still in the London rain for two-thirds of an hour gives a man, I asked the driver where the bloody hell he'd been. This was the first stop for Chrissakes: how can you be 40 minutes late for the first stop?
His answer: he wasn't late. He was exactly on time. He couldn't say what had happened to the three buses that were supposed to have preceded him. It wasn’t his responsibility what they did and if I didn’t like it I could get off and wait for the next one.
And this is what waiting for a bus is really like. It's not a case of waiting 40 minutes and then four come at once. It's waiting 40 minutes and then one limps along chronically late without apology or explanation.

40. A stitch in time saves nine

Another way of saying that knowing the future saves time when the future arrives. Undeniably true... and undeniably pointless to say so. Next!

39. Clothes maketh the man

Once every six months you should turn up to work in an impeccable suit: razor-sharp creases, pressed shirt, silk tie, gleaming cufflinks, shoes you could see up a skirt with. Make sure you’re seen. Make sure your clothes are noticed, commented upon, conjectured about. Keep the bastards on their toes. Keep them thinking you’re dressing for a reason, like you’re getting up and getting dressed for a reason, like you’re actually making the effort to impress for a reason. Make them think there is a reason and they’ll believe there is a reason.

38. Respect your elders

Watch footage of old Top of the Pops shows from the 1960s. Don't watch the bands: watch the audience. Those kids in black and white, moving and grooving, jiving and jitterbugging, arms akimbo or else wrapped around each other, combing their hair and looking so hard. The young and the restless a generation or two ago, the erstwhile rebels, the one-time dropouts, tuned in and turned on back before you and I were a twinkle in the proverbial. Watch... and weep. Cry for what became of them, despair for all the dreams that faded, all the seemingly limitless ambition that went the way of the songs they danced to. There’s nothing so sad. There’s nothing so awfully, terribly, heartbreakingly tragic as the very ordinary and utterly democratic fact that we all grow old and can no longer shake it on Top of the Pops. Respect your elders: they were once far cooler than you.

37. A little learning is a dangerous thing

“It was gloomy, and one could scarcely see to read; a taste of fog grew perceptible in the warm, headachy air. Such profound discouragement possessed her that she could not even maintain the pretence of study; heedless whether anyone observed her, she let her hands fall and her head droop. She kept asking herself what was the use and purpose of such a life as she was condemned to lead. When already there was more good literature in the world than any mortal could cope with in his lifetime, here was she exhausting herself in the manufacture of printed stuff which no one even pretended to be more than a commodity for the day’s market. What unspeakable folly! To write — was not that the joy and the privilege of one who had an urgent message for the world?
“Her father, she knew well, had no such message; he had abandoned all thought of original production, and only wrote about writing.
“She herself would throw away her pen with joy but for the need of earning money. And all these people about her, what aim had they save to make new books out of those already existing, that yet newer books might in turn be made out of theirs? This huge library, growing into unwieldiness, threatening to become a trackless desert of print — how intolerably it weighed upon the spirit!
“Oh, to go forth and labour with one’s hands, to do any poorest, commonest work of which the world had truly need! It was ignoble to sit here and support the paltry pretence of intellectual dignity. A few days ago her startled eye had caught an advertisement in the newspaper, headed ‘Literary Machine’; had it then been invented at last, some automaton to supply the place of such poor creatures as herself to turn out books and articles? Alas! the machine was only one for holding volumes conveniently, that the work of literary manufacture might be physically lightened. But surely before long some Edison would make the true automaton; the problem must be comparatively such a simple one. Only to throw in a given number of old books, and have them reduced, blended, modernised into a single one for to-day’s consumption.”
George Gissing, New Grub Street

36. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger

Is this what we’re supposed to subscribe to? A kind of Darwin-meets-Management-Manual philosophy: bad breaks are good breaks in disguise, failing teaches you how to succeed, blah, blah? Is this what’s supposed to get us through it all?
Or do all the bad things that happen to us, all the unlucky breaks and missed chances, all the accidents and aberrations, the defeats, diseases and deaths, the tears and the losses, do all these build up into an accumulated weight so heavy it crushes us all eventually?
What doesn’t kill us is not going to make us stronger. It’s going to be one more burden to carry, one more load on our already straining backs, our already bowing heads. At best what doesn’t kill us can teach us something, at best we can learn to avoid making the same mistakes again... but our fate is assured nonetheless. What doesn't kill us now will nevertheless contribute to our death one day.