Day Timetable

Set your alarm if you are on a exercise kick, trying to get pregnant or want to see a ghost because science has provided us with a timetable of the premium times to do the things that we do each day.
Scientists who study our daily habits and body clocks reckon the hour of the day we do certain things can make a huge difference to how much benefit they give us.
6am-8am is the the best time of day to exercise if you want to burn fat as our blood sugar levels are lower and, with an empty stomach, we will burn more fat reserves.
Our hormone levels peak at 8am and it is also the time when a man’s sperm count is at it's highest which makes it the best time for child seeking couples.
After the exercise and the sex, it's 8.30am and time for breakfast as taking the first meal at this time will stop your body thinking it isn't going to get any food and enter starvation mode which makes you even hungrier and binge eating as the day goes on.
9am to noon is the best time if you are to have an injection as our hormones that deal with pain are at their peak and if you time it so you are in the waiting room at 11am, you can do the crosswords in the magazines as this is the time when our brains are at their most efficient.
If the opportunity arises between 1.30 and 2.30pm, this is the best time to take a nap because our bodies are beginning to tire and the body temperatures dips so a 15 minute snooze will recharge the body and mind for the late afternoon workload.
2.16pm is coffee time as this is the time our energy levels hit bottom and the metabolism starts to wind down and caffeine is a great pick me up.
The work day may be over over but at the clock strikes 5pm, this is the best time to do cardio-vascular exercise as our lungs use oxygen more efficiently and we are at our most co-ordinated..
After all the exercise its down the pub but not before 7pm and make sure we are gone by 8pm as between these hours our liver is working at optimum level which means we can process alcohol most effectively.
After the pub it's home by 9pm for the evening meal just as the sense of taste and smell are at their sharpest and then sit down with a language course CD or revision notes by 10pm which is when our nucleic acid levels peak which aids long-term retention of information.
Finally it's up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire and the land of nod at 11am which is the optimal time for our bodies to relax and achieve the deep sleep to rejuvenate us.
If you are awoken by a bump in the night at 3am there is a good chance it was some member of the spirit world as this is the time when paranormal experts report the most ghostly goings-on.

Les Mis Made Me Miserable

I'm not really sure how to approach this blog post because every time i have mentioned this today, i have got gasps and been vehemently disagreed with but here goes, i thought the film version of Les Miserables was rubbish.
There i said it, i sat through the whole 158 minutes of the new version of the Victor Hugo classic, and thought it sucked.  
It wasn't the actors and actresses so much, Hugh Jackman and Sacha Baron Cohen were great, it was that there was just too much singing in it.
I never realised before the film started that every single word of the dialogue was sung and it just sounded wrong to my ears, why not just speak it so we understand clearly what is being 'said' and they don't have to mangle the words to make it fit the tune.
It's a real shame because i had been looking forward to it ever since it had been announced that they were making it but i came out of the cinema with a real sense of anti-climax.
Another draw-back was the songs, with the exception of 'I dream a dream' and the Landlord song, the songs are just not that exciting.
Maybe i was expecting too much, maybe it was ruined by my reading the book a few times and having the scenes in my minds eye or maybe it's just too long and Russell Crowe isn't a particular good singer but i was expecting the odd song, not one continuous one that lasted almost 3 hours.
I have never really understood why the Les Miserables novel was chosen to be turned into a musical in the first place, it isn't as if when reading the story you think that chapter would be ideal for someone to put to music.
So either i'm completely wrong and the one idea of the film that everyone saw as a highlight completely went over my head or i am alone in thinking if i was at home watching it on TV i would have turned over to Mrs Brown's Boys after the first 10 minutes.
I will stick to the 1998 version with Liam Neeson, Geoffrey Rush and Uma Thurman which despite not really staying true to the original book, has nobody singing in it. 

Stocks & Shares

As someone who doesn't know their Arbs from their elbow when it comes to financial matters, i have always steered clear of stock markets and shares and all those kind of investments but as my pension pot is currently being used as a cookie jar, i really should looking into making sure that when i retire my income doesn't depend on the generosity of the tooth fairy.
Where to start though because the financial market is pretty daunting for someone whose only financial transactions are with shop assistants where i walk away with a tin of beans afterwards.
You can ask at your bank but bankers are about as trusted as the people who send out those emails telling you that you have won millions on a foreign lottery and banks tend to want to give a lecture on what exactly a share is and which markets are the best value when all you really want to know is what shares should i buy to make myself rich.
I have decided to depend upon the wisdom of the Internet but before i dip any toes into the shark infested waters of men who wear braces and shout down the telephone to each other, i plan to spend an imaginary £1000 and see where i am at the end of the year.       
So who does the Internet tell me i should be spending my pretend grand on?
The name Vodaphone has cropped up a few times and the London Stock Exchange website puts the shares at 170p which is reportedly cheap and expected to do well so i'll have some of them. 
Another name mentioned on several sites is oil company Amerisur Resources. Its shares are tipped to soar this year from the 47p they presently stand at so they go in the basket as well.
A strong tip from the Independent newspaper is Thomas Cook (48p) who apparently have weathered the storm of last year when they nearly went out of business but under the new Chief Executive, a revival in the company is forecast and the shares are undervalued. That's my third choice.
A share in Parkmead is presently 14p but they have poached a new CEO from another more successful oil company and they are expecting shares to top 50p each at the end of the year so they become my number four.
My fifth and final selection is Utilitywise at 94p, apparently they are undergoing a huge expansion in the UK and forecasts are for a whacking great increase in revenue and therefore share price.

My portfolio therefore looks like this:


Vodaphone 170.00  x 250 = £425
Amerisur Resources 0.47 x 277 = £130.19
Thomas Cook 0.48 x 286 = £137.28
Utlity wise 0.94 x 275 = £258.50
Parkmead 0.14 x 350 = £49

All together it comes to £999.97p and i will come back at the end of the year and see if my imaginary £1000 has made me an imaginary millionaire.

Answering The Talking Heads

The Talking Heads song 'Once in a lifetime' poses the question 'well, how did I get here?' and that's probably the most asked question which we never get an answer to.
I assume David Byrne didn't mean his kitchen or living room, i took it as the Universe and us standing on the 3rd rock from the Sun. Deep stuff for a Sunday morning i agree but i have woken up in a philosophical mood and besides, it has always bugged me that the band never got a proper answer to the question they asked 31 years ago.
Those of a religious bent will mention God creating the heavens and the earth and everything and everyone else will mention the Big Bang and the Universe and everything in it exploding out from a central core.
Great, but God and the mass that everything came from didn't just blink into existence, so what came before them according to those theories? 
Luckily i have a Reverend living opposite to pose just such theological questions to and after a tactful 'That's a very good question' answer and some time buying while he went to find his lighter and make a coffee, he came up with some babble about time being a human concept and before God there was no time until God created it so there was no 'Time' so no definition of before, only an after. Or something like that which is a bit of a fluffy answer and if i am being honest, the idea that a Deity creating things is a bit far fetched for me anyway so i am looking towards science and mostly the Internet.
One theory is that the Universe is continually expanding and then it will reach a point and then a Big Crunch will occur and it will shrink back into that one mass again somewhere in the middle and then rebound out so the Universe is a continuous process of Big Bangs and Big Crunchs but still, that mass never just happened, it must have got there somehow to be able to expand and contract.
What existed before the big bang? Nobody seems to know, the focus seems to be on how the Universe was created but very little is asked about how the stuff that it was created from got there in the first place.
It can't just be nothing because you can't get something from nothing and we are here so there must have been something.  
So to answer the Talking Heads, we don't know but a piece of advice is if you do ever find you are telling yourself 'this is not my beautiful house' and 'this is not my beautiful wife', it is a good indication that you are probably at the wrong address.

Liar, Liar, Pants On Fire

Hitler had a theory that you could get away with telling a lie, no matter how big the lie was but mostly because it was so big, people will believe it if you repeat it enough because a big lie is so unlikely, people are more likely to accept it.
Probably before we even came down from the trees, we have lied, faked, forged, hoaxed, deceived, defrauded, and scammed each other but there is a range of lies that run from a little white lie to a partner to spare their feelings to massive, huge lies that results in widespread death, but what is the greatest lie ever told.
My mind immediately goes to the Trojan Horse, we even have a saying today about not trusting Greeks bearing gifts but as i start to write this post i think of Bill Clinton saying 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky' and the stained, blue dress that appeared shortly afterwards that showed sexual relations were had with that woman after all.
The problem with trying to consider the biggest lie ever told in history is that it depends upon your ideological stand point. I can imagine if i asked a wide enough range of people they would choose either Christianity, Communism, global warming, Iraq, Roswell, Capitalism, 9/11, the moon landings, the Koran, Santa, Capitalism, Evolution, Socialism, the Bible or plenty of other things they consider have been used to dupe us so i gave up on it as far too big and controversial subject.

Instead, here are some of the stupidest things Ronald Reagan said: 'Trees cause more pollution than automobiles', 'All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk', 'I've noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born', 'I went down to Latin America to find out from them and learn their views. You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries' and 'The Russian language has no word for freedom'.

Should We Regret Removing Gadaffi?

Colonel Gadaffi claimed all the way through the Libyan conflict that the rebel movement he was fighting was linked to Al-Queda, a claim backed up by numerous reports that stated the same people the West were fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan were the same ones we were now aiding in trying to replace the Libyan leader.
In their wisdom the International Community ignored them and became the rebels air force and arms suppliers, allowing them to take Tripoli and assassinate the Libyan dictator.
Spin forward a few years and those same rebels are using those arms we gave them against the West in Mali and Algeria and the British Government are urging Brits to get out of Libya due to specific threats against Westerners which makes you wonder was, Gadaffi right all along?   
Although the Governments of those nato countries who helped to remove Gadaffi have been trying desperately to portray his removal as positive, the unfolding story we are seeing proves it is anything but.
Murders, kidnappings, torture, the destruction of religious buildings and prosecution of minorities are being carried out by the same people our leaders were labelling as freedom fighters a short time ago.
Without the resistance offered by Gadaffi and the Libyan army, the groups have spread across Libya and are now exporting their violence to other North Africa's countries, as we have seen in Mali and Algeria recently where Westerners were targeted in the hostage taking at the gas plant close to the Libyan and Algerian border last week.
A similar pattern is emerging in Syria, where Bashar al-Assad continually tells us he is fighting terrorism and again many agencies give credence to his claim that the rebels contain strong Al Queada links, but the West are obsessed with the short term success of removing the Syrian leader and giving no thought to what will come next.
Now David Cameron is making increasing noises about taking us into another war, this time all across North Africa but we should stop and think if any of the recent places where we have intervened, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are actually better for it and are we safer due to our military action.
From where i am sitting the answer would have to be a resounding no, we have created a situation where Al Queada and its supporters can go into the power vacuum that we leave behind and car bomb, shoot and terrorise whole countries and we are threatening to do it again in Syria.
The unpalatable question is are the people of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, and their neighbouring countries, better off without Saddam, the Taliban or Gadaffi at the helm and have our military interventions and regime changes just resulted in spreading the terrorism further around the region?    

Go Go Ho-Gan

There may be a well known saying that goes 'No Sex please, we're British', but it turns out that not only are we not doing it but we are not watching other people do it either.
A report which analysed the traffic data of the Internets best know pornographic videos site shows that of the 4,851,384,493 visits worldwide in 2012, only five percent of those (248,211,766) came from the UK.
The country that viewed the most was USA, then Germany, France and Italy then the British and Canadians but the cities where the most viewers came from are all European, Milan, Rome, Paris, London and Berlin, Athens and then Munich.
But who were those 4 billion fans of porn searching for, you ask?
The names that were entered the most into the sites search facility were Kim Kardashian, Sara Tommasi, Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson, Megan Fox and Hulk Hogan. Yep, that's Hulk Hogan.
The average time spent on the site was 10:22 minutes but the British were the quickest to lose interest, spending only an average of 7:51 minutes per visit and Americans were the most attentive, spending an average 24 mins per visit studying the material.
So what can we abstract from this information apart from the fact that if you ever go to Milan or Rome you should give the keyboard a good wipe before you use it?
Hopefully a sense of outrage that this kind of thing is available on the Internet at all and there should be laws introduced that ban such things that nobody should have to see. I mean, Hulk Hogan, it's outrageous and enough to put anyone off their stroke! At the very least someone should hide his web cam.

Why Star Trek Doesn't Suck

Trekkies: the final frontier. These are the voyages of Lucy on a 4 week mission to explore strange new people, to seek out their strange life and normal conversations, to boldly go where no non-trekkie has gone before.    

I am sharing my office at the moment with a couple of the IT team while their office is being overhauled, scrubbed down and probably decontaminated and it's best described as an experience.
I know nothing about what they are speaking to each other about 99% of the time and we have already christened one Sheldon and the other Leonard which they seemed quite happy about, i knew we should have gone with Penny and Amy Farrah Fowler but it's too late now.
Anyhoo, apart from The Big Bang Theory, what we would do if we could time travel and the TV show True Blood, we have very little in common and Sheldon and Leonard seemed disturbed when i failed to get as excited as they were about the news that scientists have invented a Tractor Beam just like in Star Trek. 
After a quick discussion which began with me asking what the...they were banging on about and ended the same way, it transpires, apparently, that our lives have been advanced in many ways by the TV series about the adventures of the Starship Enterprise.     
Obviously noticing my disdain for the statement, Sheldon then went on to explain how the 'Hypospray' used by Bones which sees inoculations sprayed deep into the skin so no needles are used is commonly used by medical types today.
Then Leonard chipped in that the communicators pre-dated mobile phones by several decades, and the cool flippy motion that activated the device was designed with a nod to the Trek.   
Now they have came up with a Tractor Beam which is, as far as i understand, a laser beam that acts like a tow rope and can be used to tether one thing to another thing.
I congratulated them on their knowledge and agreed that Star Trek has indeed contributed to science, technology and medicine and left them alone to gloat.
Then i stuck their new copy of 'Call of Duty' in the microwave and left it to fry.

Prevent Flooding By Building Snowmen

With the changing climate and the threat of floods now becoming a part of the British way of life, the Environment Agency have come up with a way to prevent the rising river levels, make snowmen.
With the moving of the jet stream and the arrival of a milder weather front, the snow from last week is set to become a memory but what comes with that is the thaw draining into rivers and the inevitable sight of water covered streets once again. 
The Environmental Agency have come up with an unorthodox solution though, urging everyone to build a snowman.
'"Ideally, if everybody built themselves a snowman that will slow the thaw down a bit' said Roy Stokes, a spokesman for the agency, pointing out that tightly-packed blocks of snow, such as snowmen, tend to stay colder for longer, thus helping to regulate the flow of water.
'If you notice, when people clear their drive the snow thaws away but the compacted piles stay, which will give a balanced thaw, which would be helpful' he said, 'when snow is compacted, as it is when you build a snowman or drive over it in a car park for example, it melts at a slower rate'.
Great advice but before i could get my coat and gloves and begin rooting around in the fridge for a carrot, another Agency spokeswoman was correcting the earlier advice, saying 'While building snowmen is great fun, sadly it is unlikely to make a significant difference to the overall rate at which the snow melts across the country and won't protect your home from flooding'.
I'm sure the original spokesman was making a light-hearted, semi-serious comment but it's too late for me anyway, the bit of snow we had last Friday was gone by Saturday evening but i have done my bit by storing a snow ball in the freezer which i plan to throw at the kids in the summer, therefore delaying the release of a snow-balls worth of water until June.
No need to thank me flood prone South West England, I consider it a public service.

Hazard Kicks Ballboy

If you are going to kick a ball-boy in the ribs, it might be better to do it when the TV camera's are not on you.
I look forward to a Chelsea public relations onslaught now and the ball-boy being pictured with Frank Lampard holding a Chelsea shirt.