My E-Speakers' Corner

[Fair] WARNING: This is not a rant, just a growl. Read at your own risk.

I feel as if I've spent my whole week being angry because of tiny details, but with enough straw all backs break.

I've been annoyed by insignificant things - and yet... They are not that insignificant because, in my book, they reveal much, much deeper things, things that would make most people snort at me, but that I find important.

So, in no particular order, I give you:

-   I’ve caught several articles in Irish, British and American newspapers that were referring to the Duchess of Cambridge as “Kate Middleton”. That’s funny, because I seem to remember some big wedding months ago. 
 So, what is it? Is it that readers are too stupid (lazy?) to adapt to her new surname and title, or is it one of those sexist things where she’ll always be the commoner who married into the Royal family? 
 If you can call Miss X, “Mrs Y”, after her wedding to Mr Y, then you can do the same for the duchess. 
 I know it’s going to sound barmy, but I feel the urge to contact editors and ask them to do their jobs properly and/or volunteer my eyes to edit their papers because, Merlin! I’m not out of work soon if the current state of writing is any indication.

-         I’ve had a few problems in my classrooms this week: one student thought I was too stupid to spot that he’d copied and pasted a full page from the Internet (I’m an adult, so I must be stupid, right?); apart from the fact that he thinks that I wouldn’t notice that his first page was full of mistakes, whilst the second was almost perfect, my classroom rules clearly state that plagiarism is a thing that automatically makes a student fail. Perhaps the student will learn to spell ‘ouch’… 
 Mind you, I caught another one cheating, and the student was barely embarrassed as in ‘Oops, yea, I did that’; I didn’t even get an apology. 
 Icing on the cake, a friend of the cheating student cannot keep his mouth shut, so much that I’m left wondering if the precious one is smoking the bad lawn or inhaling some glue (seriously, there’s something odd). Well, that’s three students who’ll have to come back to class next semester for the same thing – Oh, joy of joys! *headDESK*

-         I see that our victim-blaming culture is alive and kicking. After the tragic death of the poor nurse who put the prank call through to her colleague in charge of the Duchess of Cambridge (if you want to read an excellent account of what happened, go there), I’ve seen a few people say that there was a security/privacy breach and that there was to be more to the story because no one dies because of a prank. Whatever happened to ‘Who gave these idiots the right to call the hospital for so-called fun?’? Um??? 
Let’s not forget that a young woman’s health was in the picture, too (I’ve also seen people says ‘Pfft! She’s pregnant; that’s all!’, but all these twats forget that all pregnancies are potentially lethal and that the condition that had her shipped to the hospital is quite serious). 
Perhaps I’m wrong, but if someone calls, pretending to be her Majesty at 5:30 in the morning, I’d probably go: ‘Yes, Ma’am. Whatever you want, Ma’am.’, which takes us back to the ‘Who gave them the right to do this?!’. 
And to the heartless bipeds that think there’s no reason to die over a prank, I’ll say that they’re not the victim of a callous stupidity that went virally global, that they can’t know how bad the nurse felt for falling for that prank and that they basically don’t know (or care about) how she felt after this. 
Two people thought that it was funny to make a prank call because, somehow, they think that they’re entitled to make fun of and/or profit from a charming young woman only because she’ll be a queen someday. 
Like gossipers, pranksters consider that they’ve got the right to do what they do, but they do NOT, and today the world has lost a woman (a wife and a mother) to heartless arrogance and complete stupidity.

-         On Twitter, I started following the Sea Shepherd group. 
I might have to start buying more tissues: I’m watching the preparations to dolphins’ slaughter in Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, live. 
I have to take short breaks, or I’d kill my keyboard by soaking it. Dolphins are either murdered or sold to aquariums. 
In the live feed, you can hear the dolphins’ cries, and it’s so incredibly sad. I’d rather starve to death than harm a dolphin (and yes, I mean that), and I can’t understand how anyone can do that. 
I’ll go a step farther: the murderers are very lucky that I’m not over there because I’d try to stop them. Over the past minutes, I’ve been dreaming of baseball bats, and even if I dream of a Klingon ship coming to help, I know it’s unrealistic… but I do dream of snipers. Awful? Yes, but I’m on the side of dolphins.

There are days when I wonder if my DNA mutated, or something, because I really don't feel related to most of  this Earth's lazy, heartless, brainless, greedy bipeds.
I'm going to stay on my soap box for a while, if you don't mind...