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Douglas Alexander Gets Three As And Two Bs

DOUGLAS Alexander, the international development secretary, is celebrating an impressive set of exam scores although he had to wait an extra day to get them after problems with a new online results system.

The minister, a close ally of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, was awarded three A grades and two Bs under the Scottish Highers system.

Alexander got As in English, Maths and French and Bs in Physics and Chemistry. He had hoped to learn his results earlier in the week using the new internet service but forgot his log-on details and so had to wait for notification to arrive in the post.

He said: "I worked really hard for this. My dungeons and dragons career has suffered and my realm points have fallen to less than 8000, but it has all been worth it.

"I'm so grateful to my teachers, my family and friends and my civil service team here at the Department for International Development who worked with me on Catcher in the Rye and some of the trickier French verbs. Edinburgh University here I come!"

Alexander has received letters of congratulation from more than 20 Commonwealth prime ministers and the President of the World Bank.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon added: "Douglas is a fine, hard-working boy. I am sure he will make many friends at university."

Alexander plans to spend the rest of the summer visiting his pen pal in Bulgaria before beginning his degree in Being a Creepy Little Shit.

Do we really need ambulances?

By George Monbiot

THEIR screaming sirens, their back-to-front writing and their dirty deisel engines have become a fixture in our modern lives, but does anyone ever stop to think if we actually need them?

Allow me spell it out for you. Ambulances are notoriously inefficient in terms of fuel consumption. They are either screaming along dual carriageways at more than 90mph, on their way to some self-inflicted ’emergency’. Or they are plodding along carefully at 30 because they are carrying some fascist polluter with a fractured spine.

I performed a peer-reviewed calculation on my phone and discovered that British ambulances make up 0.00023% of our annual CO2 emissions. Look at that figure again and tell me you don’t feel an overwhelming sense of shame.

We must re-order Britain as an ambulance-free society. It won’t be easy. De-ambulancification never is. But we must reach down to the very roots of our being and rip up everything that allows the ambulance to prosper.

Why do we need ambulances? Because people hurt themselves. Or get sick. Therefore our first step must be to stop using things.

Hoovers, Magimixes, television sets and angle-poise lamps are not just power-sucking planet-killers, they are death traps. I use none of these things and yet I am still able to go about my day and make a comfortable living writing articles about ambulances. Why can’t you do the same?

More than half of all UK heart attacks are caused by easyJet. Peer-reviewed fact! Every time you fly you are causing a heart attack which requires the dispatch of an ambulance to take the fat polluter to hospital where it is hooked up to electrical machines, only to recover and go on yet another holiday to one of easyJet’s 74 European destinations. And so your filthy, gassy circle keeps turning.

Those of you who have ever been so complacent, so self-absorbed, so willfully ignorant as to allow yourself to be carried in an ambulance should ask yourselves this question: Am I really good enough to go on living among people like George Monbiot and some of his friends from university?

 

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