Comic Clippings - 10 July

Not a lot happening at the moment. Our Look and Learn Picture Gallery should hit 18,000 images this week once I get the next DVD of images into the post. The weekend was taken up with shopping, a party and the 4th Season of Scrubs. Seems I was one of the few people who also watched Live Earth here in the UK, an event I grew more and more frustrated with as it continued thanks to the awful BBC coverage. Started off fine, peaked around Snow Patrol / Kasabian then lurched downhill. Would have picked up again with Keane / Metallica / Spinal Tap if the stupid BBC hadn't kept cutting away from the bands before they'd finished playing. Stupid, stupid, stupid BBC. Stupid. Same could be said for their desperate attempts at "balance" in the face of global catastrophe which seemed to consist of everyone on stage saying "Please save the planet" and everyone in the cosy BBC box saying "I'm keeping my plasma TV" or "Recycling doesn't make much difference."

Sorry, but this kind of "I'm alright, Jack" attitude from some BBC presenters and the people they interviewed really annoyed me. The evidence is overwhelming that humankind, if not causing global warming directly is contributing to it hugely. And of course it affects everyone. People you love and will love will suffer.

You know I like playing with numbers occasionally, so look upon this as a bit of entertaining fun. I met Jonathan Ross a couple of times many years ago when I was doing the Comic Book Price Guide and he seemed like a nice guy. But as he was the public face of the BBC's coverage, let's use Jonathan as our example.

Jonathan was born in 1960 and married Jane Goldman (b. 1970) in 1988. According to the Office of National Statistics report (Mortality Statistics 2001), the average age of death for a male in 2001 was 73.2 years for men and 79.4 for women. So on average we can expect Jonathan to die around 2033 and Jane to die around 2049. Another important set of statistics to take into account I found on the BBC's audience information site which tells me that most men marry on average at the age of 30-years-old and 28-years-old for women. The mean age for women bearing their first child is 27.

Jonathan and Jane have three children: Betty Kitten Ross (b. 1991), Harvey Kirby Ross (b. 1994) and Honey Kinny Ross (b. 1997). What, on average, can we expect for the three Ross children.

Well, Betty might be expected to have her first child in 2018; Honey may have hers in 2024. If they have boys they can expect to live until 2091 and 2097 respectively; girls can be expected to live until 2097 and 2103. These are the firstborn Ross grandchildren. The average birthrate of 2 children per marriage (Central Survey Unit figure for 2005-06) may have fallen by 2025 or so, so maybe we can call the figure 1.8 children for all families with dependent children (thats married couples, lone mothers and lone fathers). Jonathan might reasonably expect almost five and half grandchildren, most of whom will live beyond 2100, all of whom will have their own children. The Ross' can reasonably expect 10 great-grandchildren. So that's 15 or so grandchildren and great-grandchildren alive in around 2100.

So what have they got to look forward to? I'm going to cheat and if you follow this link to Wikipedia you'll find a summary of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. You can find the full report here. Look around the internet and learn more because if you (or I) don't start the ball rolling now because your alright, Jack, your children will be affected and their children are going to reap the whirlwind you're sowing.

You can all play this game at home... I'm destined to die around 2035 if I give up the cigarettes. I'll miss the worst of the mess but, personally, I'd rather like to leave the planet in a better state than I'm finding it in now. If you find all this rather bleak reading, my apologies. I'm annoyed and I have this one forum to express my annoyance on.

A couple of bits of random news...

* Part 2 of the Paul Gravett interview by David Hine at Broken Frontier, 'Settle Down for Gravett'. Part 1 can be found here.

* Kevin Woodcock, cartoonist for Private Eye, The Spectator and elsewhere, died in Leicester on 2 July. A full obituary appears in The Independant (7 July).