Minimalist poet, minimalist lifestyle

I've just been reading a report about proposed rule changes to rugby union in order to reduce the importance of penalties and drop goals and encourage the scoring of more tries. Well rugby isn't my favourite sport, I prefer football/soccer and cricket, but still enjoy watching the sport, although I don't fully understand the rules and tactics. However, the aspects of the game I enjoy the most are the drop goals and penalty kicks at goal; I find most tries just end up as an untidy pile of bodies on the try line.

Maybe my preference is because rugby union isn't my favourite sport, but if the sport's administrators are considering changing the rules, maybe they should bear in mind the views of people who only occasionally watch the game; otherwise it's not likely to become more popular with the general public.
The

This morning my brother started his workfare placement and for the next eleven weeks he'll be working at a charity shop in Barnsley. He'll be working thirty hours a week (plus two hours each day travelling on the bus) and he'll receive his benefits, plus £6 and a free bus pass - in effect he'll be working for £2 an hour, not much more than a third of minimum wage...yet some people genuinely think that all benefit claimants are skivers.

Of course he'll hate it; he doesn't like socialising with people - and what on Earth is he expected to know about women's clothing?

Three years ago I did my workfare placement, but at least I enjoyed what I was doing, and because I'm claiming housing benefit I ended up working for about £4 an hour - still significantly less than minimum wage.

And they claim that Labour is the compassionate party - what a fucking joke!

There was an old story about the early days of computer translation. The CIA was interested in translation programs because of the tremendous volume of information they had. There simply weren't enough transcribers with linguistic training to transcribe them. One of the major computer companies came in with a program that was supposed to translate from English to Russian and Russian to English and solve the problem. To test it, the representative of the company said, "Just speak into the microphone. On the screen you will see what you have said." So, thinking for a moment, the CIA guy went over and said, "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak."
The machine cranked and groaned and there in Cyrillic letters across the screen was some Russian. Well, he didn't speak any Russian so he didn't know whether it translated it accurately. "Can you make it translate back into English and we'll see whether it got it right?" he asked. So the guy went over to the keyboard, pushed a couple of keys and translated it back into English. Only it said, "The vodka's O.K. but the meat is spoiled."