h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

And welcome to Edward the Bonobo! Driven out of lurk mode by a need to comment? I agree with you that the original remark needs defending.

Ag, what Mr. Dreadful said.

And now to work.

>>I have actually overheard pregnant teenage girls boasting about the free house they're going to get.

Hmm. I'm still sceptical. Leg-pulling? Epater la bourgoisie?

I am usually at the top of the who's online list whenever I'm online, but I attribute that to a lot of people having streamlined their activity on h2g2 and/or the odd times I get on (I haven't seen an italic in ages).

My test results:
You scored 100% Beginner, 100% Intermediate, 100% Advanced, and 99% Expert! (BTW, I wouldn't have used the last comma in that list, but I think that's an American thing - to have a comma before the last item while elsewhere that comma is usually left out).

I will take this opportunity to bring up (again no doubt) Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
I know what I got wrong. It was the very last question and I say blah to semantics.

I am a friend of the semicolon, however I have had a long-standing love affair with the comma. I use it too much I'm afraid

And this is a little late to the goulash front, but I just remembered that I took a picture of the last batch I made. It might turn some people's stomachs but it looks good to me:

http://www.sporky.net/archives/000652.html

I have to admit that I agree with Edward. I grew up in Skelmersdale, which is one large council estate. The only difference is that there were more council houses than needed(most people leave the area, because there are no jobs), you didn't need to get pregnant to get a house or a flat - and yet they've still got a high teenage pregnancy rate.

Birmingham still has a high teenage pregnancy rate here, and when I was working for the council as a summer job we were giving away Council flats (admittedly dreadful ones) to single people who wanted them.

The pregnant girls may be boasting because they are pleased that they have been able to organise some where decent for thier child to live. And if they are too thick to use contraception then surely they didn't have any choice about getting pregnant?

Anyway that's it, I get on with Mr D far too much to want to argue!

I have brought the New Fedora Distrubtion of Red Hat Linux on Linux.

Happiness is a new Linux system

Okay... maybe I made the problem in Swindon out to be worse than it is. Obviously there are those who had kids and then the father buggered off for one reason or another, and there are those who had kids because they'd been duped by the father (e.g. "you never get pregnant the first time you do it."). I just get worked up about these thinge because Swindon seems to be a kind of black hole for unsuitable mothers.

Item: Heavily pregnant woman in the pub so drunk she could barely stand on her own, her other kids playing outside.
Item: Girl on bus with baby and toddler to another girl with a baby: "I'm gonna dump the brats 'round their gran's tonight and then I'm gonna go out get well pilled up all weekend. I'm f**king sick of having no life since these two little sods came along.

Both Mr. D and Edward (welcome by the way!) have good points. That said, for these young women, the decision to have a child early on so they can get a free house...well, there are two sides of that.

One is that they are simply reflecting the life they've seen. Their parents and friends may also have been young unwed mothers, and it's hard to get out of that mindset without someone to emulate, of which there are far too few. For these girls, going to college, moving out of the council housing (we call it the projects here), etc., doesn't even present itself as an option.

That said, there's something to be said for actually trying to better one's self. Hard, yes. Impossible, no. I've had friends who have had children young and wound up on welfare. Of them, only one has become a permanent "welfare mother." The rest all used it the way it was supposed to be used, as a temporary stopgap measure. Several used their time to go to college, ensuring that they could get out of poverty and make something of their lives.

The one who didn't was the one who had grown up in a welfare home, who had never been taught the value of education, and who truly believed that living off welfare and getting subsidized housing was a right, not a privilege.

Oh, and Ag...my suggestion, call your sister and tell her to back off. Explain, not very nicely, that it is YOUR wedding, and YOU, not she, is the center of attention this week. She'll probably go crying to your mum, but it'll make you feel better, and maybe, just maybe, she'll get the none-too-subtle hint.

For a stateside person - What is a council house?

We always had a problem here in Ohio regarding young ladies perpetuating the welfare system by having babies. Now that there is a limit of five years there seems to be a slow down in that area. My daughter is completing a special course offered to single parents in need of employment in which she will have received 6 cetificates covering areas such as Disater cleanup, OSHA rules (set of rules regarding workplace saftey) and whatever the others are. Then they are having a job fair where city and private companies can review your skills and learnings for possible jobs. She also has one - one thousand dollar scholarship to add on to her education from her attendance and testing. She missed a second one because she was out ill one day. (I keep telling her to quit eating her own cooking but she never listens to me.) They are going to have a graduation downtown at One City Square but as much as it hurts me, I won't be able to make it. It will probalby hurt her too, but we are going through a totally new accounting system this week and it would be unfair to my employer to miss this and would make my job more difficult.

I think council estates are called projects in the US... but don't quote me on that!

Mr Dreadful.
It is a sad state of afairs in this country where sometimes it is too easy to get handouts and avoid having to work for a living.
young, fit people sitting on the dole for years and bragging about it being so easy to get away with it....and even ready to brag infront of a T.V camera.
Surely the younger you are, and in an area where there are jobs, the shorter time you should be allowed to claim benefits.
Cleary if you have genuine problems then you should be allowed to claim for longer.
Personally, I think that a large increase in investigators into dole cheats, etc would be more than paid for in payouts saved.

Let's see...

A loobrush for you, Marv . I hope you're feeling better after the car accident.

Happy Birthday Joanna!

Hello Beeblefish and Edward the Bonobo!

If I missed anyone else, I'm terribly sorry. And no offense, Ag and kelli, but reading your posts about the problems behind your upcoming weddings have firmly placed me in the elope to Las Vegas camp. You guys are sweet and far more patient with family, food, decoration and clothing than I would ever be in this lifetime or any other.

I went to an International Food Festival on the University of Montana campus yesterday. It was hosted by the International Students Association and over 40 countries were represesnted by food booths. I ran out of money long before I got to try even a fraction of what I wanted but I did manage to have some French crepes, Laotian egg rolls, Indonesian chicken satay with saffron rice and spicy peanut sauce, Greek chicken souvlaki, Swedish meatballs and rosettes and something else which just entirely escaped my memory. Was it African? Chinese? Estonian? D*mmit, I can't remember.

Oh, and: <> Really? It never ceases to amaze me that some parents complain about their kids as if said children magically appeared one day to make their lives miserable. I guess these parents were never taught the facts of life, let alone common sense. A former coworker of mine was a single mother with two small daughters. She constantly complained about the constrictions these two babies placed on her life. I got sick of hearing the whining one day and asked her if she ever considered having an abortion. She replied "Oh, no, I don't believe in that!" To which I responded, "Well, then, how about using birth control?" "Oh," she said "I don't like birth control. It's too expensive and annoying." Gee...and children aren't?

I had not been aware till I purveyed some research, yesterday, that the hue and cry about "welfare queens" in the US began not long after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. That's the mid 1960's. That's when the South stopped voting Democrat. Did you know Dick Cheney voted against having a national holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Council housing consists of houses and flats (apartments) owned by the government and apportioned out according to a family's means.

Projects means, in the US, subsidized housing for black families. That is what it means in the lingua franca, never mind what it may have been for, officially. I remember from when I lived in central Florida, how the projects were all centered along MLK Blvd, north of a certain highway. "Yes," observed a friend of mine wryly, "We still practise apartheid in Lakeland..."

As to the "problem of young women having babies", as MoFoLo put it, yes, there is a problem. The school where I worked actually had a program for teaching unwed mothers, 14-17, complete with day care for the babies and toddlers. The racial split was about 60% black, 40% caucasian, but I don't remember ever seeing any Hispanic girls. And Florida has an extremely healthy percentage of Cubans and Mexicans (immigrant labor for the orange crop).

This suggests to me, purely from unscientific observation, that the problem is one of culture, not of race. I couldn't answer as to whether this cultural problem includes laziness.

When I talk to my littlest sister's friends (15-16-year-olds) they always SAY that girls who sleep around and don't use contraception are silly little tarts etc etc. But then you ask them about boys that sleep around and don't use contraception.. well, they are popular, and don't use condoms becasue it 'ruins it' for them. And they seem utterly unable to see the glaring glaring problem. Poor little mites. I butt in and say quite a bit about these boys being irresponsible and selfish and disgustingly slutty, and that if they won't use a condom they don't deserve so much as a peck on the cheek etc etc, but the whole teen universe seems geared towards boys getting what they want when they want and girls being both responsible for any problems and the only victims of said problems. As if a teenage boy in rut was an act of God. It makes me furious.

Luckily my sister has Aspergers syndrome (yes, in this case luckily!) so she is utterly impervious to peer pressure and I have heard her giving a boy who gave her friend a pregnancy scare such a dressing down smack bang in the middle of Victoria Station at the top of her young healthy lungs. Bless.

She also endearingly told my Mum she doesn't want to wait until she's 16 to have sex with her boyfriend because 'it feels really nice' but will wait if Mum thinks it's that important (Mum jolly well does). I think I'd've sooner boiled my own head than mention any such thing to any adult, let alone my Mum, at 15. But little sis is utterly incapable of dissembling. Double bless.

Hello Edward.

Courtesy

Welcome Edward

Oops, sorry, meant to say: 'Hello Edward' too.

There. Now I've said it.

Greetings Edward.

Why is MLKJ (blvd/st/rd/way/ave) always in a bad neighborhood?

In SLC MLK blvd and Ceaser Chavez drive are both in a bad neighborhood.

Probably to provide 'inspiration' for the suppressed masses, Marv. The only places closed for MLK day around here are the schools and government offices. Everybody else goes to work. It's interesting to observe how different federal holidays are observed/not observed.

Hi there, Beeblefish and welcome back.

Welcome to you, Edward. I hope you stay around the salon. Your postings around hootoo are invariable well-considered and well-expressed. *Wonders if her use of hyphens is correct, hasn't found time to take the grammar test yet.*

Happy belated birthday, J'au! Have some more .

Sorry for missing out on other important stuff... it's been crazy in my neck of the woods and I'm barely treading the backlog here.

Belated Birthday Greeting, Joanna and 'Welcome' to Beeblefish and Edward the Bonobo.

Those mugs were , Lil - I particularly like the blue one with the stars. In fact, if its owner isn't currently in residence, I'll happily keep it warm for them.

Ag - you need a huge, big . I agree with the advice about marking your sister's card re her behaviour - but can't see you doing it; you're far too gentle and kind.
You didn't happen to hear last Friday's Afternoon Play on R4 - The Wedding Vortex? I think you might be able to get it on Listen Again, although it'll take a fair bit of trawling the site to find it.
The bits in the dress shop were amusing - as was the name of the wedding planner, Miss Haversham.

[Amy] -- with six digits whichever way you look at it -- doing battle with geometry