When McDonalds are in the news, especially when they’ve got the Prime Minister discussing them on breakfast TV, I generally assume they’ve done something hideous like keep children in their basements making milkshakes out of battery chickens all night. So you can imagine my surprise this morning when I saw the golden arches on the cover of the paper because of a story not connected not to ethical scandal, not even to the nauseating reality of their Mc Ground Cow Teeth and Spinal Chord Deluxe with Cheese Flavoured Latex, but about offering their staff a qualification equivalent to an A Level. Of course this is going to cause a stir. People love going on about how easy education is these days, how qualifications don’t mean anything and so on and on and on. I’ve seen people smash their own faces into slabs of pavement because they’re so disgusted that there is such a thing as a degree in Media Studies. They’d actually rather be unconscious than accept they live in a world where you can study telly and that. I don’t see what all the fuss is about really. They put smack in their burgers to make people stay buying their food (probably) so why not launch a qualification that means you’ll only ever be able to work at McDonalds? Good staff retention scheme, that is. Plus it’s not a bad qualification when you look at it. It’s better than an A-Level in working at KFC, their A Levels don’t even look like A - Levels, they’re kept in tiny cages and never even see daylight.
Time must be flying by, Chris Langham is out of prison already - feels like he’s only been in there a couple of months. Oh no wait, he has. Apparently downloading kiddy porn isn’t that bad afterall, certainly not worth ten months of someone’s life. Well, not someone whose on telly anyway. With these high profile celebrity court cases it’s always nice to think that judges are aware of the example they’re setting to others when deciding sentences for the various crimes commited by the rich and famous, but it’s hard to believe that’s true. Unless judges want to spread the word to paedophiles everywhere that if you get put away for downloading category 5 child porn images (the category reserved for the most base and explicit images) in the summer, don’t worry - we’ll get you out by Christmas. Of course the official main reason for Langham’s early release was the remote possibility that he was telling the truth and the images were downloaded for research. That stage of a writers research where they’ve just downloaded all the porn their going to write about, but haven’t quite got around to writing any notes, performing any other research or mentioning the project to anyone else yet. But the accusations being thrown at the descision by child welfare groups seem to have an ounce more credibility - Langham was released early because he’s famous. If this is true then Langham today walks free and joins the likes of Paris Hilton and Pete Doherty in the Hall of Fame-means-we-serve-far-less-time-than-we-should-for-the-crimes-we-commit. But he’ll have to clime his way into the A list before he can join Micheal Jackson and OJ Simpson and be too famous to be tried for his crimes at all. Meanwhile us lowly normals better carry on trying to stay out of prison the good old fashioned way - by not committing crimes.