Blogs: Pandammonia 
The world that revolves around Caity Ross.
Two birds; one stone.
We have two problems in Britain (amongst others):
- child obesity: the kids here are stuffing their faces with crisps and not doing enough exercise;
- recruitment problems in the military.
Why not solve both problems by re-introducing National Service? This time, it could be for both boys and girls, possibly those who don’t continue into further education (i.e. 16-year-olds). I am aware that many teenagers are too fat too join the army; how about a special fat branch, where obese teenagers can go until they have a sensible weight, and then they can join the army proper, as it were. I’m sure they wouldn’t be there for too long.
Problem sorted.
As an aside, the army uses the body mass index (BMI) to determine obesity. The problem with this measurement is that it takes a ratio of height to weight and does not take into account what that weight consists of; it may be muscle or it may be fat. A much better system would be to measure percentage body fat, although I’m less convinced than I used to be about this: the percentage changes depending on whether you tell the scales you’re male or female, yet you still have the same amount of body fat. If you’re a man, you’re a lot less fatty than a woman. This is certainly true for my bathroom scales, anyway.
Damien Ryan at Monday 13th November, 2006 @ 2.21pm GMT Europe/London
You are now officially old.
Cancel your subscription to the Guardian and take one up with the Daily Mail.
pandammonium at Tuesday 14th November, 2006 @ 12.49pm GMT Europe/London
*tunes the radio in to Radio 2*
Damien Ryan at Wednesday 15th November, 2006 @ 2.03pm GMT Europe/London
You’ve flown straight past to Radio 3.
pandammonium at Thursday 16th November, 2006 @ 4.16pm GMT Europe/London
Well, I suppose that gets me out of having to listen to Jeremy Whine.
ferg at Tuesday 28th November, 2006 @ 8.23pm GMT Europe/London
As soon I turned old enough to not be eligible for any forced labour, or national conscription if it ever came in, then I became in favour of it!
A mate of mine in Spain went through a few years ago. He said it would be cool apart from things like knack all pay, absolute and complete boredom, and not even being allowed to learn cool stuff like shooting guns, as they only had a allowance of a bullet a month!!
Send them down the mines » Damien's Irishperson in Exile Diary at Tuesday 2nd February, 2010 @ 10.25pm GMT Europe/London
[...] it my turn to call for national service to be [...]