Hat tip to Ian for highlighting an interesting article in New York magazine called “Are Kids Copying Their Parents When They Lie?”. The article is pretty long, but very detailed, and covers research into how and what children lie about at all ages, and relating that to how often they see their parents lie about something. There is also some interesting analysis over what messages childhood stories give – for example in experiments The Boy Who Cried Wolf actually reinforces lying in order to avoid punishment.
Category Archives: General
Packing Differences
An amusing example of the different ways people pack. We spent yesterday afternoon over at a friends house, and their two daughters were going to spend the night with their grandparents. Becky sent the two girls off to pack, and one quickly came back with a bundle of clothes and her toothbrush, and proceeded to put all of that into a Tesco bag. Then there was a clumping noise from the stairs as sister number two struggled down the stairs with a wheeled suitcase with probably enough space for a week… She certainly had enough space for her sisters Tesco bag…
The Gratuitous Vote for Me Posting
I’ve signed up for Fuel My Blog which is basically a bloggers community, which a couple of other bloggers whose blogs I read have signed up to.
Anyway, along with discussion forums and other stuff they also have recommendations for blogs, and the ability for people to vote for favourites, so I’ve added a vote link to the side of the page, and another link on this post, and this is the entirely gratuitous vote for me posting. 😀
Feel free to click the vote button or the picture on this posting and vote away…
No Snow for Us
Metcheck has been saying all week how difficult it is to predict where it will snow – but has had a forecast of snow for us all week, until this morning. It now looks like we’ll have snow to the north, but this far south the snow will only hit the west country. Will still be ‘bitterly cold’ – for our Canadian cousins, that’s an overnight of -2… 🙂
Money Saving Expert
I’ve been signed up on the Money Saving Expert mailing list for a while, but looking back, I don’t think I’ve ever recommended it here.
The site is run by Martin Lewis, who turns up on all sorts of magazine programmes talking about money. Amongst other things he has been influential in campaigns to get people to reclaim unfair bank charges, and more recently in getting people to check and appeal their council tax banding – something we’ve done successfully in the past.
Perhaps what he is most influential for now is his website Money Saving Expert, where his stated aim is to redress the balance between the consumer and the big corporations. As he says in his introduction to the site, we live in an adversarial consumer society, where the primary purpose of the companies out there is to make as much money from us the consumer as possible. Indeed companies will spend large amounts of money on flashy advertising campaigns to get us to by their products, ensure they have highly trained salespeople in order to sell us stuff we don’t want, and yet what do we as consumers have?
The site is a gold-mine of useful information – in the past I’ve used the tips on the site to find the cheapest telephone service for calling Canada, found cheap flights, and so on. It has won several awards, and indeed has been cited on a couple of occasions in parliament for it’s influence. Essentially the site brings together tips from Martin and many other users, all geared towards doing exactly what it says on the tin – saving money.
There is also the mailing list I mentioned at the top, which sends out details of special offers and deals, and keeps you updated when recommendations change. There is a real mix of stuff from simple two-for-one offers, to more specialist tips which would probably only be of interest to a small number of the more than a million subscribers to the list – in that vein we actually applied for another credit card at the weekend primarily due to a tip on the list, as by using the new card for a couple of months we can get 20,000 free miles for my BMI Diamond Club card – a good chunk of a free trip to Canada.
You’re not going to take advantage of every offer, indeed probably not most of them, but there are always one or two that can save you either a little, or a lot of cash, and certainly it is well worth heading over to the site and signing up for the e-mail.