Signed, Sealed and Delivered In Error

It fascinates me that many European politicians have just involved themselves in getting the killing of seals banned almost completely without, apparently, thinking about the fact that they have just voted to ensure that the competition for the world's dwindling fish stocks heats back up again.

These people want to be able to have childern and grandchildren, all of whom will need to eat and, at the same time stop other creatures that are competing directly for the same foodstuffs from being culled.

Please don't misunderstand me - I would like to insist that no creature's life be sacrificed so that mankind might thrive - especially now that so much of mankind has become so utterly vile. Since I have no living children and never will have any, I am plagued by no conflict of interests in this matter. I can afford to want all living creatures to have equal rights with me.

If I were a parent, matters would be very different. I would be obliged to weigh up the importance of protecting other living creatures against the importance of seeing to it that my offspring flourished and it doesn't take a genius to know which I would choose.

A compromise would have been sensible. The Inuits should have been offered a means of killing seals painlessly - lethal injection perhaps - not told to let all seals live and accept the fact that their own starvation would probably result before too long.

Letting all those seals live will soon result in seas devoid of fish and the seals will respond by starving slowly, just as the Inuits are expected to do in order to save the seals for a slower demise later.

Just as the fox hunting ban was imposed by people who had no idea what the whole thing was about and how much worse things would become for everyone in the countryside, including the average fox, as a result of their meddling, so now the seal-hunting ban will bring misery upon man and beast alike.

Ladies Fashion at LWA US Mall

Well, it comes to something when a visitor has to e-mail you to tell you something about your website that you didn't know yourself (apart from broken links and that sort of technical stuff) and are very pleased to discover!

The things is, that in the bad old days, every single time a merchant produced something new, it was necessary to take away the old store banner and put in the new one. With 1400+ stores in a single mall, that made for a great deal of work. A lot of merchants still use this antiquated method but the ones with their fingers on the pulse have finally realized that it is a great deal easier to swap the new image for the old at their end of the deal. As long as the name of the new image file is identical to the name of the old one, there is a seamless transition from one to the other, with the new one appearing as soon as the server is refreshed.

Of course it can be difficult to persuade merchants to remember that some of us need their images and links to stay consistent with the theme to which they were first applied. You can imagine how irritating it is when a banner that used to display shoes in the shoe department suddenly starts showing nappies or a sweet little cot in the baby department becomes a garden hose...

It is almost as annoying when merchants lump several categories together on one banner instead of making separate ones (I wouldn't mind if they did both! :-) so that one either has to repeat the same banner in several departments or decide against including the merchant anywhere except in one of the stairwells, or 'Main Halls' as they are described...

Anyway, I digress... in the e-mail I was informed, in a very complimentary manner although none of the credit is mine, that she liked the new 'look' of the Ladies Department and some of the new season's clothing was very nice... Since I hadn't changed anything I rushed to see what on Earth could have happened and, sure enough, there were things there that I hadn't seen before either!

I must get around more! :-)