Do any of you know how to put a header on your journal? Mel, I think you gave me the code once, but I've lost it and i'm not sure how to put a header for my new layout

Thanks
 

The Bejing Paralympic games finished on Wednesday after 2 weeks and a spectacular closing ceremony. I have to admit, I didn't watch as much of it as I would have liked to - I watched highlights of the equestrian discipline online and brief clips of wheelchair racing, but that was it. Even so, you have to admit that the coverage of the games, in comparison to the Olympics was extreamly shoddy.

Apparantly the BBC has some of the best coverage of the Paralympic games in the world. If 'the best' consists of a 1 hour highlights programme on an evening, 1 slot on the red button interactive service and coverage of the opening and closing ceremonies (in comparison to the breakfast and live coverage of the Olympics for more than 3 hours every day, 4 slots on the interactive service, headline news and live coverage of the opening and closing games) then I would hate to think what the coverage is like in other countries - I've heard that in the USA they have no coverage of the Paralympics at all!

The Paralympic games began in 1948 as a way of getting WWII veterans who had gained injuries and disabilities during the war to get involved in competitive sports. Now it involves people who have many different forms of disability and like the Olympics there are many different sports you can compete in.

A lot of people seem to have the opinion that 'Para' in 'Paralympics' means ' for those who are paraplegic' but infact it is supposed to mean that these games are parallel to the Olympics. Unfortunatly with the coverage it doesn't seem to be the case, but according to athletes like Tanni Grey Thomson this seems to be changing.

Team GB won 41 Gold medals this year and 103 medals in total placing us 2nd in the medals table behind China. This is more than triple the amount of golds Team GB won in the Olympics (where we won 13 golds and came 4th in the medals table) and although there may be less competing countries in the Paralympics than the Olympics (I'm not sure) this is an amazing achievement....

...And yet they've hardly been praised for it. When the Olympics had finished the news that we had won 13 Gold medals gained 1st place on the headline news, the front page on every newspaper, athletes got many TV and radio interviews and there were celebrations with open top buses. When Rebecca Adlington won the 1st GB freestyle Gold in the swimming since the 1960s she was on the front pages of every newspaper and many people were raving about it. However when 13 year old Eleanor Simmonds won Gold in the 100m Swimming (the youngest Paralympian to ever get Gold) this was placed towards the back pages and the news that team GB won 41 Golds just got shown in the 'and finally...' part of the news.

I can understand in many ways that the Paralympics is not as popular with the general public than the Olympics, probably because it hasn't been going as long and also disability is something which quite a few people are still reluctant to face in the UK. However I still think it is unfair that it is treated in some ways to be 'less worthy' than the Olympics.

Yesterday I was reading a 6 page pull out about the Paralympics in the Sun newspaper (a tabloid which is known for being sensational and low brow) and as an introduction they had Rebecca Adlington discussing what she thought of the Paralympics ( www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sport/article1703628.ece ). Now I might be taking things a little too far here ( I am often this critical seen as I am an english and film studies student) but I feel that by having an Olympian (and a 'hero' from this years Olympics) being the first to comment on the Paralympics in the article, it gives the impression that the Olympics are far superior to the Paralympics and that the Olympians are more worthy of their medals whereas the Paralympians are just 'inspirational' for taking part and winning something.

There is another thing which annoys me about the coverage of the Olympics (and the portrayal of disability in the media generally) is the way certain disabilities are exaggerated and disabled people are portrayed as brave people who struggle with their disability everyday and 'triumph over adversity'. Again in the Sun's 6 page pull out there was an article about equestrian competitior Sophie Christiansen who, like myself, is 20 years old and has Cerebral Palsy. I often find it annoying how CP is portrayed in the media. It is often the case that the more servere cases of CP are reported (when the person affected cannot walk or talk and so appear to have learning difficulties along side - which is not always the case!). This case is not always pointed out to be severe eaither so many people could view this to be the norm. The affects of CP are also sometimes exaggerated and explained wrongly. Once I read somewhere (again it was the Sun) that CP is a wasting disability - i.e. that you will eventually worsen and die from the disability, which is certainly not the case!
 In the Sun article about Sophie Christiansen it described Cerebral Palsy as a disease! This is far from the truth! As far as I'm concerned CP is a condition which arises from part of the brain being damaged. It is not contagious and not life threatening.

I feel it is wrong that disability and people who have disabilities are portrayed like this. At least explain the causes and affects of disability correctly as this may lead to people having the wrong and possibly prejudice conceptions about disability. Perhaps as a disabled person I have to work a lot harder at everyday tasks than 'able bodied' people have to, but I have had this condition all of my life, I don't consider myself 'brave' because I don't know anything else and I don't think I could have done things differently.

It would be difficult and in someways unfair to merge the Olympics and Paralympics, but I still think that the Paralympics needs much more coverage to show that people who have disabilities are just as capable as everyone else!
 

Its awful! Just bloody awful! I hate the fact that you have to click on little tabs to see different parts of your profile. The main thing I think people would want to see when they see other people's profiles is information about them, not their wall so why is that the default?
I bet a lot of people would end up quitting facebook because of this silly layout, but I don't think I'm one of them yet because I just love browsing it too much ;)

Remember the entry I wrote a week or so ago about the "last" Anne Frank photos?
Well it turns out (thanks to 'dreem' on the Anne Frank Forums who contacted the Anne Frank Huis about it) that those photos I talked about were actually taken in 1941 and there were photographs taken in 1942 such as this one taken in May:


Its strange though, because there are still quite a lot of publications about Anne Frank that state that those were the last photos!? Why don't the Anne Frank Fonds and Anne Frank Huis prove them wrong?

You will probably be surprised to know, considering the Anne Frank fan that I am, that I have only just got round to watching the 1959 film version of The Diary of Anne Frank starring Millie Perkins as Anne. 
To be honest, I had my reservations about the film because I heard rumours that it was wildly innacurate and that Anne was portrayed to be like a 1950s American teenager rather than the 1940s Dutch girl which she was.
However, I got round to watching it yesterday after renting the DVD out from the uni library and I have to say I was somewhat suprised.
There were some things which I felt were more accurate in this film than Anne Frank: The Whole Story (which is widely regarded as the most accurate of all films made about Anne Frank to this day) such as the fact that they pronounced most of the names closer to the Dutch/German pronunciation, such as 'ah-nuh' instead of 'an', 'ay-dith' instead of 'ee-dith' and 'pay-tuh-r' instead of 'pee-tur'. However, the way they pronounced Margot annoyed me (especially the way Millie Perkins said it), they said 'mar-get' instead of 'mar-g-ho' which I think is how her name was pronounced.
As the film was based on the published version of the diary (by that I mean the version edited by Otto Frank which mainly consisted of version b - Anne's rewritten diary) the names used in the film were psudonyms rather than actual names, such as Mr and Mrs van Daan instead of Mr and Mrs van Pels and Albert Dussel instead of Fritz Pfeffer. What surprised me though was that they left out the helpers Bep Voskuijl and Jan Gies (who was Miep's husband). They also merged Mr Kleiman and Mr Kuglar (known as Mr Koophuis and Mr Kraler in the published version of the diary) into one person - Mr Kraler.   

Another thing I thought they did well in the film was the fact that they did location shooting in Amsterdam for the outdoor shots of the Prinsengracht and the Westerkerk. This they didn't do in Anne Frank: The Whole Story - possibly because of the fact that they couldn't get permission to quote the diary and so maybe they didn't have permission to shoot outside the house eaither.
Another thing they did in The Diary of Anne Frank which they didn't do in AF:TWS was play the sounds of the Westertoren bells in the background often throughout the film, and also the sound of bombs. They did do this in AF:TWS but they only really did this in one or two scenes, which actually focused on these sounds, for example, the scene in AF:TWS where Anne is gazing at the Westerkerk from the attic window.

Apart from these however, there were many parts of the film which I thought were highly exaggerated. 
I can understand why they played on the romance between Anne and Peter a lot in the film, it was only made a few years after the Holocaust, therefore fresh in peoples memory and so they could have used the romance plot as some form of diversion away from the horrors of the Holocaust. Even so, the relationship between Anne and Peter, I believe wasn't that romantic at all. Anne was a skilled writer, and a teenager. She could have easily exaggerated the relationship in her diary to give a sense of excitement in her mundane life in the annex. The 'relationship' which Anne describes ended before they were discovered in August 1944 anyway, unlike in the film which shows them together till the end.
Another thing which annoyed me was the portrayal of Mr Pfeffer (Dr Dussel in the film). As Anne portrayed an unflattering portrait of him in her diary, they showed this on screen too. Dr Dussel was a comic interlude with no real backbone, a character which reminded me somewhat of the cowedly lion in the Wizard of Oz. In real life, I doubt Mr Pfeffer was like that at all. He was a father, had a girlfriend who he had to leave when he went into hiding and who he only had limited contact with, and he had no family in the annex, unlike the rest of them. How horrible it must have felt in his position. Thankfully, he was portrayed a lot better in AF:TWS, but I still feel he deserves a better representation.
Millie Perkins portayal of Anne Frank, also really annoyed me. I think it did live up to the expectations as she did look more like a 50s American teen than a 40s Dutch/Jewish girl. Her voice got on my nerves a lot too. It sounded like she had a cold and had a blocked up nose all the time. She appeared to be excitable and happy all of the time, even when she was writing her diary, which I think was when Anne's mood used to change.
It annoyed me as well that in one scene where Otto was comforting Anne after she had the bad dream about Hanneli (who was actually Sanne in the film) , Anne actually said the 'bundle of contradictions' entry of her diary (which was the last one on 1st August '44) to her father! Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought she kept all that to herself and didn't tell anyone in the annex about it, apart from maybe Peter and Margot. 
The final thing I want to talk about is the arrest scene. In reality what happened was they were all going about their daily routine on 4th August 1944 when the Gestapo came into the office and got Kugler to show them where the hiding place was. Kugler was then forced to open the bookcase and as he opened the door, saw Edith Frank and muttered 'gestapo' to her. 
In the film, the people in hiding are aware that the gestapo is here and they can hear the phone ringing. Otto, Mr van Daan and Dr Dussel decide to go out from the hiding place and then they all get arrested.
I thing the first one and the real one is much more dramatic don't you?

Thats the end of my review. Please reply to it, because I don't write things on here to get no replies!

Eurovision was the usual cheesefest. The UK came nowhere near the top (as predicted) and it seemed like the other countries were voting politically - AGAIN!

I thought the Ukraine had the most hilarious but really bad entry with a group of futuristic looking camp Nazis and with a lead singer who looked like 'Sue Pollard on speed' (which someone posted on DigitalSpy.co.uk and which I found so funny that I had to put that quote here!). They came second, and Serbia (whos lead singer looked like a stereotypical lesbian) won, with a rather average and boring song.

Now that the Eurovision song contest is begining to be overrulled by all of these east european countries that I didn't even know were part of Europe and must be countries which have only just split from other countries, I think that all the major European countries - UK, France, Spain, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Italy, Poland, Austria and Switzerland should all quit Eurovision in protest over how political and stupid it has become, eaither that or the UK should enter as England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Isle of Man and the other Islands off the coasts of England and Scotland just to show them that if you can enter as little countries, then we can too!
I've never considered countries like Russia and Israel as Europian countries (and I know they've joined the EU) and it just seems so wrong that they can take part in Eurovision.

One thing I do like about eurovision is Terry Wogan taking the mickey out of it all. The presenters of the show and those doing the results from each country always seem to take it so seriously by saying things like 'congratulations on a great show tonight', but its better to take the mick out of it!

I've gtg now, my mum and dad are here, we're off out again today!