Gair Rhydd

A poetic licence

In an online exclusive, Ruth Dawson asks if the position of Poet Laureate has lost its magic

I hate poetry. There we go, I’ve said it. I do, however, love love love being an idealist living in her own little fairy world most of the time. You’d think that as such I would be wandering as lonely as a cloud all over the place. But no. I just cannot understand what all the stanzas and quartets are going on about. It may have stemmed from those poetry anthologies they used to do in school – you know where everyone writes a poem and they all get published and your parents pay extortionate rates just to see their kid’s name in print? Well, I did them for a grand total of four years and NOT ONCE did I get published. Seriously. How harsh is that? I was the only geeky nine year old to actually want to have her name in a book but nooo, my attempts at writing about telephone boxes were deemed not worthy enough. Pfft.

In Shakespeare’s heyday, poetry was a pretty cool thing but, to be honest, in a world where the English language is being bastardised and corrupted with C U L8Rs I really just can’t see the point in it anymore.

Freewords - Students kicked out

Studentification, or the saturation of communities with large numbers of students, has for a long time been a source of conflict between local authorities, long term residents and students.

Noise, litter, a lack of parking spaces and ‘ghost towns’ arising in summer when all the students leave are all familiar problems for which students usually receive the blame.

Out of arms way

Should the University invest in arms on such a large scale? Laura Harman thinks it ought to stop

We all now know that our University uses external parties to oversee its investments. And we also know that Cardiff has insisted that any investments which are made on their behalf could not contravene their ethical practices.

‘Utter nonsense, of course,’ we cry, idealistic as we are. ‘Cardiff University should be aware of what their ‘third parties’ are investing in. If that is the case, they know they are supporting the arms trade. And if they don’t? Well, something has gone very wrong’.

Canuck in Cardiff

Corey Shefman is watching you

Privacy International is a UK based NGO that releases annual “privacy rankings” assessing how much privacy citizens of various countries around the world are afforded from both corporate and government encroachment. According to their rankings, the UK ranks 33rd out of 36 countries, just four places above Communist China and is described as an “endemic surveillance society”.

Not to boast, but Canada comes in second on that list. Seriously though, one of the biggest differences I’ve noticed between North America and the UK (or at least Cardiff) is that people here put up with an utter lack of privacy, all the while seeming to think that as a whole, the British people value their privacy.

A childish overreaction

What sort of a name is P anyway, asks Josh Morris

By now, even if you have been living under a rock in Merthyr, you will have heard of the unfortunate case of a child being beaten to death by his mother’s boyfriend, and another man. While no-one doubts that this is a truly appalling incident, what is questionable is the reasons it appeared on Prime Minister’s Question Time.

For the first time in months, the words on everybody’s lips have not been ‘credit crunch’. The event upon which Gordon Brown has performed a comeback comparable to Lazarus, which played to his strength as an experienced economist, and against Cameron’s position as a conservative with few well-defined policies. In the relevant Prime Minister’s Question Time, Cameron pressed Brown over why the inquiry into the incident was not independent. The usual bickering ensued, and Brown stated he “[regretted] this becoming a party political issue”, which Cameron demanded he retract, four times in all. Once may have been reasonable, twice even, but four times?

The forgotten vote

Siobhan McGurk thinks the recent success of Proposition 8 in America should concern us all

On the 5th of November, the U.K woke up to the news that the U.S. had elected its first black president, Barack Obama. I don’t think that it’s presumptuous to suggest that most of us students were delighted, and believe that the people of United States have overcome deeply-rooted prejudices to move into a position that would have been inconceivable forty years ago. The world has viewed Obama’s election as a sign of hope for the idea, among others,that minorities can and are being represented.

I hate to rain on the parade, but on the very day that the U.S.A. overcame racial prejudice; a certain minority’s rights were swept away with the tick of a box. What the mainstream British press chose to largely ignore was that three U.S. states were voting not only for their next president, but also whether they believe same-sex couples should be able to marry.

Stirring up a storm

Aisling Tempany wonders if all publicity is good publicity

Cardiff Waterstone’s has recently found itself in the midst of an argument about freedom of speech versus religion. It would have been so easy to write this piece as a foam-at-the-mouth ‘Christian Voice are evil’ piece. That wouldn’t be hard: Christian Voice’s attitude is truly deplorable.

But, like so many things, the Waterstone’s cancellation of the launch of Patrick Jones’ collection Darkness is Where the Stars Are is a little bit more complicated. It’s a situation that leaves me with the opinion that there’s a lot of hot air on both sides, and a book that isn’t worth the attention.

A genius idea?

Would you like to know about your future health problems, thanks to a genetic testing kit? Robbie Wells certainly wouldn't

*Is your crystal ball showing you the wrong future? Are you tired of paying your hard-earned money to backstreet palm readers? Or is that magic eight ball you paid a tenner for in Argos playing up again, and providing you with all the wrong answers? *

Then fear not, eager waster of money, because you can now spend just £270 on knowing every possible disease to which your genes are predisposed.

Heroes and villains

Stealing other people’s ideas is neither big nor clever. Didn’t anybody ever teach you that? If do so in an assessed essay, you can get into quite a lot of trouble for plagiarism. If you do it in real life, you can even get sued for copyright infringement.

So why do Sin Bin think that they can steal my idea and use as a theme?

A trivial pursuit

You know those funny little silver balls that go on top of cakes? They’re called dragées. The weird stringy bits in between a banana and its skin? They’re phloem bundles. Pretty cool, huh?! The proper name for the ”?!” I used just then is an interrobang. God, I love that word.

I was reading an article the other day with names for all of these funny things we normally call ‘thingummies’ and ‘whatjamacallits’ and, I have to say, I thought it was pretty ace.