Loving Uni!

I have had the best few days!!!!!

I spent yesterday on the beach in the sun taking pictures for Media Skills which I am looking forward to editing tomorrow :) Today we had a radio news day... and even though I am a retard who said "regulation" instead of "relegation" in the football news... I enjoyed it :) :)

Life is good right now...

Why I Write...

I have just finished reading the 1946 short book by George Orwell, 'Why I Write', and to be honest... the book has had me questioning myself and why I write... which I guess is the point.

George Orwell believes that there are four main reasons that people write. These are;

1. Sheer egoism - the desire to seem clever and wanting your work to be talked about.

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm - desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.

3. Historical impulse - desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

4. Political purpose - desire to push the world in a certain direction and to alter other people's idea of the society they should be striving towards.

So which of these, as young budding journo's do we categorically fit into? Well the answer is up for debate but I believe that all of the reasons can be applied to some of us and at least one to everybody else.

Reading everybody's blogs I would say some of us are very interested in our work being noticed and praised by the lecturers (and in the working world, a publicist). Others are passionate about getting a point across in which they think is too valuable to miss to their peers. (Lucy Pilgrims attitude to grieving in her blog is a good example of this). Some are written with historical impulse to gather facts and indeed others are written with political purpose. (Andrew Emmerson :D).

I did notice that there is one reason for writing that Orwell did not mention directly in his book. This is writing for money. Having little passion for writing as such... just wanting to make a quid or two from it. He did however argue that egoistic writers share the same charicteristics as scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, successful business people etc. I think he may have been trying to say that egoistic writers are the ones in general who make a living from writing.

I'm still not sure why I write... maybe because if I didn't I would have a hard time passing this degree?? Answers on a postcard!

Gordon Brown holds cabinet meeting in Southampton

It was by pure coincidence I realised that Gordon Brown was holding a meeting in Southampton today. I happened to walk past the Southampton civic centre to witness the british home secretary, Jacqui Smith leaving the building. For the fourth time since Brown has been in power there has been a cabinet meeting held outside of London. Today the meeting was held to discuss more apprenticeship places being opened in hospitals and schools... but it is thought Brown took a minute to praise the British success at last night's Oscars though... good to see he has his priorities right at a time of a major economic break-down.

A-priori and Empiricism

Last weeks People and Politics lecture moved away from what I would call "safe territory" and we moved onto full on economic theories and concepts from the 17th and 18th century. I, like I'm sure most of you in our group spent the lecture very very confused trying to grasp on to the few aspects I actually could comprehend.

I didn't get most of it first time round but upon some brief nerding this is what I have come to understand;

Empiricism - A view that you can not believe something until you have experienced it first hand. Empiricism is often contrasted to rationalisation. Refusing to believe before seeing Vs Using common sense to eliminate the latter. I would say that today's society has both empiricist and rationalised values alike but today we lean towards empiricism in my opinion. In 1920's newspaper journalism, a big story about UFO's being spotted and a mediocre photo showing a dark object in the sky which may or may not very well be a UFO... would probably be believed and cause a local uproar. Todays newspaper consumers are much more active whilst reading the news. We have an opinion, we have our own views. We also have grown up in a world where crop circles, bleeding statues and ghosts have been created by hoaxers. It is easy to see why today as a community people choose to believe something is real after they have seen it, touched it, smelt it, sensed it.

John Locke is thought to be the founder of British Empiricism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InO9xLuutuU this is quite useful to explain empiricism furthur... apologies for the cheesy music!

Ok and now the harder concept to grasp of the two. I am actually going to go into this in the most basic terms as it has been a bitch to get my head around.

A-priori - The view that something will be believed to be true without evidence until there is reason to believe otherwise. I would like to suggest that religious people all hold a-priori views. Religious folk all believe in a God being present without evidence. There is no solid reasoning that suggests there is a heaven/hell society after death but if you are Christian I presume you believe regardless of any social doubts... I guess that's why it's called a "faith". But also it seems to me to seem A-PRIORI.

That Politics Lecture...

The inspiration for this blog was brought to you today by; NME The Essential Bands

So yesterday we had our first People and Politics lecture. I must say I was rather dreading it as I have never really taken much of an interest in politics before. It wasn't quite what I expected. As the lecture began I was actually finding it interesting!

Chris Horrie was explaining how 'The State' is the "Monopoly of Legitimate Violence". To explain this in simple terms, what I think he meant is that The State (Hampshire County Council in our case) can use some violence, restraining citizens who do not adhere to the rules. Or to quote Chris's theory "At the end of the day if you don't pay your train ticket... you will be killed!" I'm thinking a little bit of a exaggeration but the general point was... there is always a next stage of punishment and if a citizen was to refuse to co-operate continuously they may finds themselves to be subject to treason eventually- in which case it is (though unlikely) possible to be executed.

Ok so that wasn't really explained in simple terms...

The main part of the lecture was based on the philosophical side of politics so were introduced to the likes of Aristotle, Plato and Machiavelli. But the part of the lecture which was of most interest to me was Darwin's 19th century theory of Evolution By Natural Selection.

Darwin argued that all species derive from a single organism. Some grew wings and bred this characteristic into their offspring enabling them to fly, hence making birds... while others grew fins and bred fish and eventually we had; cats, dogs, rats, monkeys, humans etc etc. Natural selection is the preservation of a functional advantage that enables a species to compete better in the wild.

Natural Selection is still being used today in dog and cat breeders. Favoured characteristics will be bred while the animals born with... say... 3 legs, different colour eyes, wrong colour, blind, deaf etc etc will not be used for breeding until those unfavoured genetics eventually die out.

I would like to end this blog on a thought by Machiavelli... So Darwin realised that we all evolved from breeding by natural selection and we were (apparently) derived from Apes...

How will humans evolve to the next stage of human evolution?!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCXzcPNsqGA&feature=related

Bad day!

Ok, I really am not a fan of people who rant about how bad their lives seem to be so I promise I won't make a habit of this but MY GOD I need to get all this off my chest, so here it is, my bad day.

So I went out last night to Let's Kill Disco at the SU bar to see all my lovely chums I have missed over Christmas. Had a few drinks, had a boogie, just had a general laugh. I got home and a little worse for wear managed to snap the lense of my digital camera... now I am not a massively materialistic person so if I had bought the camera myself I wouldn't have minded so much, unfortunately it was a Christmas present from my parents so I was not keen to have to tell them I had broken it ALREADY. There was only one thing for it... I was going to have to get it repaired somehow.

So this morning off I trudged with my broken camera and a brave face (I was trying to sell the "I'm not hung-over" bit to my housemates) to get into town and see what could be done. After a highly soul destroying encounter with a Jessops camera expert in which I was told a repair was more expensive than buying a new camera I decided I should probably just tell my parents... I got the "aww we're not angry, just disappointed" speech which everybody knows is 100% worse than angry. It's like a dagger through the heart when you hear those words. You have FAILED.

But hey-ho nothing I can do so off I go to run my next miscelleneous errand. Which was... go to Boots and recover last nights photo's to put up on Facebook for friends. (Does anybody else have 'Facebook friends'. People who dart round you when you have a camera so they can be tagged the next day?) Uploading my pics took an hour so I decided to multi-task and use that hour to have my fringe cut, it was sticking in my eyes and I was beginning to resemble a member of Hanson. Found a place quick enough to fit me in but I didn't quite explain what I was after clearly enough and the hairdresser cut slightly more than I wanted off. I know hair grows and everything but girls are all about their hair!

So after that disappointing experience my hour wasn't up so I thought I would sit in Starbucks with a hot chocolate until the pictures were ready, please note I am still running with the "I don't have a hang-over" attitude... I took one sip- went pale- gagged- ran to toilet. Managed to stifle being sick but I became very upset at this point that I was out alone and feeling poorly! So clearly a dairy based beverage wasn't the way to go...

Still feeling thirsty I went to a newsagents and bought a Sprite (I know the Coca-Cola company is evil but you gotta hand it to them... their drinks are gooood!) and sat on a random bench to compose myself, watching the people of Winchester pass by and feeling quite sorry for myself. I managed to waste enough time until my pictures were ready but standing up I dropped my open handbag on the floor, contents you don't even want to know about rolling around while I scrabbled around in a retarded panic trying to pick it all up before anybody saw (apart from the withdrawn emo girl sat across from me but I thought she probably had her own issues and is insignificantly affected my my tampons on the floor!).

So after all that I get my pictures and am feeling a little better and who approaches me? A flipping kid's charity person trying to get me to donate. My boyfriend once said I have a face that asks to be approached by those nut-cases and I'm starting to think he had a point! "No Thank-you" I said before he had a chance to open his mouth but he was going on and on about kids dying of AIDS in Africa but he could see I was itching to leave so I made a lame excuse about meeting a friend and left... then ruined my alibi by later walking past him again, alone :

So that was my bad day. I am glad to have gotten all that out of my system... even if I am the only person who ever reads it haha!

2.25am... should probably get some rest for that Law exam tomorrow...

Night! x

A new year, a new start?

Sooo we're all back to Uni from the Christmas holidays and do you wanna know what my New Year's resolution was? (aside from burn off the post-christmas fat of course!) Yep that's right... to start a blog to accompany my fantastic course which is the mighty Journalism. I have avoided such an activity until now because I am quite the procrastinator but after some gentle persuasion from one Thomas Hobbs and one Lucy Pilgrim (and also boredom from revising for our upcoming Law exam... sorry Chris!) I have decided to go for it!

So what is this post about? The new year! I love new year, I really do, I find it amusing. Each new year feels like a slate being cleaned where all goals seem achievable and you honestly believe 100% that you WILL; start losing weight, drink less, exercise etc etc despite repetitive failure to do so year upon year... but HEY this is 2009 so it's bound to work this time, right? Um, no. And I think I know why. Surely if you want to do something to improve yourself you wouldn't wait until 1st January to kick-start it into action. If a person wants to do something and is serious about it they will bite the bullet and do it when they realise they need to make a change. New Years resolutions are all about what people think they should do and not about what they want to do.

The problem is people take on a resolution that means little to them just for the sake of having a resolution. They have no substance to them, no deeper meaning and for that there is little motivation for them to achieve it. It's simply an empty vow for the sake of it being January. So I have something that might work...

This year I will be starting my healthy living plan in March... maybe.