Did ya see I fixed the blog? No more big empty spaces. I selected a new template and then customised it again cos I got sick of waiting for blogger staff's promise to be fulfilled to fix the code for all us poor schmucks affected by it.

Bet it's better from your side of the screen as well.

Today I felt like I've been crapped on by elephants. Well, I am guessing that I felt as I would had I been crapped on by elephants. I should check with Mark - he is sure to know what elephant crap feels like.

I hopped into bed for a wee snooze at 9.30 last night, expecting to get up again a little later (as I commonly do) and instead woke up at 5.30am. Of course, at the time I nodded off I was feeling like I'd been crapped on by some other very large, shitty animals as well.

I'm not very keen on shit sandwiches and my plate appears to be quite full.

I've been burning things on Ol' Shitbox's new DVD writer and I'm using Nero to do it. I always hated Nero. So far I have copied a movie and next I have to learn more about authoring karaoke files for Reg and burning them to DVD. I'm wallowing (or is that drowning) in trial software downloaded for that task and while there may be a lot of apps out there to choose from, it seems that 90% of it is fit only for bypassing the recycle bin (and that's where an awful lot of it has been ending up).

Speaking of Nero, throughout history this one time Emperor of Rome has been accused of setting alight the city on July 18th 64AD and playing silly buggers while it was reduced to ash. Hasn't everyone heard that "Nero fiddled while Rome burned"?

This little gem has never been proved, in fact there are reports that say he did exactly the opposite - that he helped direct efforts to put out the flames. Mind you, they did live strange lives and die exotic deaths back then.

Nero is an interesting character (if you like blokes that wear laurel wreaths in their hair and fiddle with themselves). He became Emperor at the age of 16 and shortly thereafter killed his wife and mother, watched Rome burn at the age of 26 and killed himself at age 32 when the Roman Senate denounced him as an "enemy of the State."

Boys will be boys. These days, we don't even let them have the keys to our car at 16, let alone keys to the Empire.

I have been reading Adam's file today. It's a record of his classroom progress, tests and projects and stuff. All duly marked and commented on by his teacher. In it is a project he did a few months ago about family and ancestry, the family tree and stuff like that combined with a trip to a cemetery to look at gravestones and record "data" to analyse and present their findings in a graph.

On the marking sheet, there is is an assessment of how well he knows his "whakapapa" and I am severely pissed off about it for 2 reasons.

#1 is that with his father currently all but persona non-grata here and not easily consulted with prior to that, Adam doesn't have a lot of knowledge of, or access to the answer to a question about the names and birthplaces of his father's parents and grandparents. And that would, of course, be assuming that anyone in this house gave a flying fuck anyway.

So how do kids get on that Mum just popped a bundle as a result of some drunken one night stand and no one even knows who Daddy was? And since when did knowing your family tree have any relevance to anything remotely important in a school setting to the point where it is marked as having been "achieved"? I thought they were there to learn maths and spelling and English and social studies, not some ridiculous Maoritanga and their "whakapapa".

#2 is this whole "Whakapapa" thing.

Adam is of European decent; Irish/Scottish/Scandinavian/German yada yada yada. Good pedigree European mongrels with NO Maori in there. I'm not Maori and I don't have a whakapapa and neither does Adam. I have a family tree and I have a line a thousand years old too (one that doesn't include cannibalism, I might add), so why the hell do we need their interpretation and their bloody name for it?

I find all this bogus Maoritanga political correctness creeping insidiously into everyday life bloody offensive.

But the biggest piss off of all is her commenting on his lack of spelling progress whilst boldly proclaiming his name, incorrectly spelt on the spine and the title page of his official class file.

I find that pretty damned offensive as well. Stupid cow.