A Time of Magic

In principle, it sounded like a good idea. Other countries have organised debates between their potential leaders in the run-up to an election, so why not do it in the UK too?

For one thing, by the time they’d gotten around to running with the idea, the UK had saddled itself with three separate regional governments in addition to the Westminster parliament and therefore there needed to be four separate debates running in the pre-election period. Not a big deal to be sure but it meant that the heavy-hitters in terms of presenters were snapped up by the main debate so the other debates seemed very much a down market affair in comparison.

The biggest problem though is that we don’t actually elect those leaders directly. They’re selected from amongst all the people we’ve already elected around the country in the regional assemblies and in Westminster. Those regional assemblies are a problem too because their election periods aren’t in sync with those at Westminster so there wasn’t a lot of point in having the regional debates on air now.

But then it descended into silliness with the little worm thing going across the screen as the second debate progressed. What was the point of that? It was driven by people the TV companies had selected from amongst the “I want to be on TV” crowd (we noticed several on the programme who’d clearly joined that bandwagon some time ago). That in itself wouldn’t be so bad but it ended up with a reliability that must be close to zero given that the TV people had “balanced” the audience controlling the thing thus making it highly skewed towards minorities (the “token white” syndrome) but did they really think that everyone would remain alert to what was being said throughout the long and tedious debate?

Perhaps if it had been a debate, they might have but it seemed more like isolated presentations for the most part, particularly in the regional debates.

All it really showed was that the leaders are quite good at making presentations and that leaders of parties with no real hope of forming the next government can really let their total lack of responsibility run wild.

If you have the space for it, a home gym is probably one of the most cost effective improvements that you can make to your home.

It might sound expensive when you splash out for your own elliptical but that’s a one-off cost which’ll pay for itself within the year in terms of gym memberships not needing to be paid for. Moreover, you can use it more often than you would do in a gym. Not only is there no queuing time but there’s no travel time to factor in either which can seriously eat into your exercising time over the course of a year. In my own case, the closest gym I was ever at was about 15 minutes away which sounds like nothing but when you consider that 30 minute round-trip against a one hour exercise that’s a whole lot of lost time.

Having said that, you do need to build up your own staying power with a home gym. It’s really, really easy to drop out of your exercise programme when you don’t have the incentive to get fitter than the other people around you!

One of the problems with trying to sell a whole host of products these days is that some of the stuff that you could sell really profitably isn’t legal to sell.

That’s why you’ll find that whilst human growth hormone isn’t on the shelves you can find hgh for sale but in the form of a number of products which aim to stimulate your own body to produce it. They have the advantage of being both legal and a whole lot safer to use too: no complications of worrying about the purity of the sources of it for one thing.

How far can such marketing go though? Would it be legal for instance to sell something that caused your own body to manufacture heroin for example? Possibly yes or at least yes to getting your body to produce a natural high (that’s what happens when you exercise a lot).