Friday 26 February 2010

Fun With Numbers

From The Metro:

A single mother who had sex with a 12-year-old schoolboy 191 times – and rewarded him with a pair of trainers when he reached the 100 mark - faces jail.

Angela Sullivan, 36... had a ten-month fling with the boy last year after first seducing him by getting him drunk and performing a sex act on him, Teesside crown court heard.

Sullivan, from Middlesbrough, admitted ten charges and her had case adjourned for psychiatric report before sentencing next month. She could be jailed indefinitely.


UPDATE: she was jailed for nine years, which seems to be totally disproportionate to me, but hey.

Is the reader supposed to do a Carol Vorderman-style job on all those numbers and end up with 69 or something vaguely relevant?

13 comments:

Uncle Marvo said...

Sentencing, surely?

Mark Wadsworth said...

UM, well spotted, I have updated.

Uncle Marvo said...

I was only joking :-)

Any 1 4 10 is?

The Times always has these lists of numbers by an article. Why?

Mark Wadsworth said...

UM, I'm baffled now. What's 1 4 10?

Uncle Marvo said...

Say what you see. It's an old Victor Borge sketch :-)

Mark Wadsworth said...

UM, damn, I am outstmarted yet again.

Antisthenes said...

Just idle thoughts.

All human behaviour is instinctive.

We are members of the animal kingdom (specifically mammals) and our behaviour is governed by the same laws as every other animal on this planet.

They are:

A.

1. Survival
2. Procreation

How we achieve these two fundamental laws is dependent on:

B1.

1. Genetics
2. Environment

B2.

1. Accumulation
2. Dominance


The animal world is kept in balance by:

C.

1. Disease
2. Resources
3. Conflict
4. Predation
5. Disaster (gradual or sudden)
6. Diversity of species
7. Environment

All animals attempt to use and/or restrict C to achieve A. For billions of years natural selection was the means by which all species that we see in our world today survived.


Because of natural selection humans (Homo sapiens) have evolved genetically to be more dextrous and intelligent and able to live in a greater diversity of environments than other animals.

Although human beings on the face of it have free will in reality that free will is restricted by our acting on instinct, so our free will is constrained by our obeying the basic laws A and B2.

Because of how we have evolved we are better at manipulating C but for all our apparent intelligence we have failed to recognise that manipulating C is counter productive because by natural law C must always be in balance. If we are good at controlling diseases then resources are put under stress if we then increase resources the environment and diversity is put under stress and so it goes on. Human intelligence it appears has not evolved sufficiently enough to tackle the conundrum of being of the animal world and all the laws it must obey and how to break free from those laws without succumbing to those laws.

formertory said...

from Middlesbrough

'Nuff said.

Lola said...

Some kids have all the luck.

dearieme said...

Which brand of trainers?

John Pickworth said...

I'm utterly outraged!

When I were a lad, this would have been a pair of plimsolls. The youth of today, huh.

James Higham said...

I was molested at 12 but by a man. It was pretty awful so I'm thinking about a woman. There was a woman had a go at me and I freaked. If it had been an 18 year old girl or even a thirty year old woman who didn't look half bad - it might have been OK. After all, I had a ten year old girlfriend at that time. At 15, I sept on the back seat of a bus with a 19 year old girl. Who seduced whom? I have no idea.

12, with her game playing? Jail I think.

Tim Almond said...

Looking at her photo on the BBC website, I can only assume that he gave her a biscuit every time.