Marble madness

Via the Guardian, a video piece on the great British hope for the World Marbles Championship. He's eleven and he doesn't seem to care that his friends think he's loopy, spending his time practicing his shots. Let's hope he does well!

Vocational versus Theoretical

Today's question: are some qualifications worth more others? My grandmother said that she thought that it was a good thing that vocational diplomas were improving the balance between practical and theoretical subjects.

For no good reason, other than to be difficult, I argued that the idea was founded on a false dichotomy propagated by literary intellectuals and that it was quite clear that the scientific subjects were superior, involving as they do a combination of both pure and practical reason, versus the purely practical reason of the vocational and the purely pure reason of the theoretical.

Needless to say, I wiped the floor with all comers and left a trail of broken intellectual corpses in my wake.