Sam's Survey For YOU!

Hullo boys et girls,

I'm doing an investigation into Taboo Language for my English Language course. I was wondering if you could copy and paste the below survey and then copy and paste it back into a Word Document and send it me on samlarner@painterschronicle.co.uk. I would also be grateful if you could you also ask your parents to fill this survey out (as well as long as they're over 40).

I know it sounds like a lot but you could all be famous in the linguistics world.

Mucho Appreciation.

Sam Larner

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Taboo Words in Daily Life and the Media

Investigating whether age and gender affect how people view taboo words. 

1. Age: 16-25 (   ) 40+ (   )

2. Gender: Male (   ) Female (   )

3. What are your attitudes to swearing? 


Strongly dislike (   ) Dislike (   ) Find it inoffensive (   ) No problem hearing it or using it (   )

4. Do your views on swearing change with the context of the swearing? 
(For instance would you find swearing more acceptable in a comedy club and less so around children?)

Strongly agree (   ) Agree (   ) Disagree (   ) Strongly disagree (   )

5. How often do you use taboo language?

Never (   ) Infrequently (   ) Occasionally (   ) Frequently (   ) Very Often (   )

6. For the 40+, do you swear more often now than you did in your childhood?

No (   ) Yes (   ) Don’t know (   )

7. For everyone, would you adjust your swearing around a person of the opposite age group?

No (   ) Yes (   ) Don’t Know (   )

8. Would you adjust your swearing around a member of the opposite sex?

No (   ) Yes (   )  Don’t Know (   )

9. Do you find swearing more offensive when coming from one of the groups in this survey?

16-25 male (   ) 16-25 female (   ) 40+ male (   ) 40+ female (   ) No (   )

10. In your opinion is swearing cool?

Yes (   ) No (   ) Don’t Know (   )

Thank you for completing the survey!

An Intriguing YouTube Video

I have just been shared the link of the above YouTube video by Painter's Chronicle reader Ben Topham, a video that I am extremely grateful he showed me. It's a fantastic watch, and I guarantee that it will get you thinking, it certainly had me thinking and I will be making a response later on this week. Enjoy!

*PS - I'd reccomend making it full screen to get the most from it.

Patrick Munsie

It is with great sadness that to hear about the passing of Patrick Munsie on Thursday night. Patrick was taking a gap year from education and travelling through America and, at the time was visiting Colorado; all of this before attending university in Kingston, London next year to study Law.

Patrick was dearly loved by all who knew him, both as a friend and acquaintance. He was a really genuine, comical and down to earth character known by many throughout the Calder Valley and whom had great skills and talents in many areas, most notably debating and writing. I am proud and privileged to have known Patrick and worked with him during the Mock Trial competitions and through The Painter’s Chronicle.

His presence and personality will be very sorely missed by all and our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends at this time.

Billy Painter

Stand up for Students

URGENT: Browne Review recommends massive increase in tuition fees. Act now!

As you may have seen in yesterday’s news, the Browne Review has recommended massive increases in student tuition fees to fund higher education. Labour Students have always fought to stop rises to fees and the creation of a market in higher education – and now we need your help as a member of Young Labour.

Every Lib Dem MP signed a pledge before the general election promising that they would vote against any increase in tuition fees. Now it seems that the Lib Dems have betrayed students with a massive u-turn by agreeing to abstain while the Tories vote through this monumental tuition fee hike. We are now calling on all members of Young Labour to join our campaign to expose this hypocrisy and stop these recommendations from becoming a reality.

Do five things right now to help:

1  Sign our online letter to Vince Cable here at www.standupforstudents.org.uk

2 Forward this email to 10 friends and get them to sign the e-petition

3 Pledge to attend the national demonstration on the 10th November – more details atwww.demo2010.org

4 Write to your local MP to ask them to vote against any proposed increase in tuition fees

5 Ask your local newspaper to challenge your local MP about this policy

Please do everything you can to highlight this campaign around and sign your friends up – together we need to show the Lib Dems that they cannot lie to young people and get away with it.

Vote Patrick McCallion!

After your support in the first round, Patrick McCallion has made it through to the semi-final of the Yobi Sing Competition.


So, check out his below message, his entry, and VOTE!


Hey All,

The Yobi Sing Semifinals are now ON! You can view my entry at http://yobi.tv/yobising/semifinalists/view/417 and if you like the entry (at the bottom of the page) you can vote for me!

(If you didnt know Yobi Sing is an online Singer/Songwriters competition with a top prize of $25,000 and VIP Grammy tickets!)

So Please give us a vote!

Patrick xxx

Billy's Ugandan Journal

Day 4 - 17th July

Monday had finally arrived; we were ready to start our work in the schools and community. Like everyone I could not wait and was buzzing with excitement about what laid ahead for the rest of the trip.  I cannot start my day four journal without first mentioning the Sunday night entertainment the rest of the team thoroughly enjoyed throughout the entirety of Sunday night. Jody and Louis were kind enough to give us a musical masterpiece of coughing and sneezing all night long, although incredibly frustrating for one and all, I must say that the synchronisation between coughs was first class and that the duo would not look out of place performing on ITV’s ‘Britain’s Got Talent’.

After a reasonably early start and another healthy breakfast full of fruits completely new to me, we walked up to an area called Mbuya to meet the organisation we would be working with out in Uganda, Reach Out.  Reach Out is an organisation set up in Uganda to help spread the awareness surrounding AIDS and to support both the current and next generation on how the illness can be best countered. To find out more about what Reach Out does and some of their background I recommend that you logon to their website.

To be continued on Tuesday... 

Billy's Ugandan Journal

Day 3 - Sunday 18th July

After the first decent night’s sleep in a few days we were all much more spritely and ready for day three of the trip. The accommodation we were staying in was much better than what I expected. I was very worried at first when I saw the amount of mosquito nets and precautions, but, they weren't as bad as first expected luckily. Although the room was very basic, it had all the necessary ingredients to make it homely and fit for purpose; 17 enthusiastic people from the Calder Valley.

The site we were staying at was entitled 'Red Chilli Hideaway', and was used exclusively for people visiting Uganda, so as you can imagine there was quite a range of nationalities present, all doing various different projects during there time in Kampala. Without doubt the biggest attraction (in both aspects of the word) at Red Chilli was the resident pig. Myself and the other six lads were especially amazed, constantly standing and staring at what truly looked like a freak of nature. It didn't take long either until we gave the beauty a nickname, David Hyatt I believe naming it 'Pigdebayor', presumably due to it's relation to the footballer Emanuel Adebayor, exactly what that relation was I do not know, but the name soon caught on. I can guarantee that this won't be the last you hear about Piggy...

We were using this Sunday as a day to adjust and acclimatise to our new surroundings before starting our project on the Monday. This was important, as we'd literally turned up to somewhere a million miles from home, where there are very few similarities. We just needed to get a grasp of the way people communicated, what the weather and climate was like and a bit of an understanding of the local area. With this in mind, we ventured into the city centre of Kampala. From where we were staying it took a good 20-25 minutes drive to get into the centre, this was because of the amount of traffic on the roads of Kampala and the amount of stoppages too due to the lack of traffic facilities. One of my favourite times of the day during my time in Uganda was the travelling believe it or not. I felt that winding the window down and coasting along the roads gave everyone a good outlook of the street life in Uganda, and how the different areas varied. I don't think I ever looked away from the window when I was travelling from place to place out there.

We'd all seen the impoverished conditions from just travelling around since we'd landed on Saturday morning, but the first time it really did home and sink in was during our journey to Kampala on Sunday morning. We stopped in a stand still of traffic approaching the city centre, and with everyone's windows wide open, we were open to passing by Ugandan's communicating with us, as a car full of Mzungus (white travellers) wasn't something that would be seen very often at all in Uganda. It felt a little intimidating at first, but we soon realised, after talking to our drivers and Erin, that it was due to the rarity of white people in Uganda and therefore nothing to be worried about. Whilst the vehicle was stopped we experienced a rather unpleasant and awkward incident when we were approached by a young child stood in the middle of the road who asked us for money. I don't think I've felt as bad and awkward before, it felt horrible, luckily I wasn't the person to make contact with the child because I wouldn't have known how to react there and then. I cannot talk for everyone else, but I have quite a large lump in my throat for the next five minutes whilst I thought about what we'd all just experienced. But this would be the kind of problem we would have to front up to for the next two weeks.

We spent a couple of hours in Kampala, mainly just touring round and looking at some of the sites. We had a look at a market, but the most memorable place we visited was the Church. We managed to walk in to the usual Sunday morning service, and at first I was gob-smacked by the turnout, it was packed. However, the mood seemed very sombre, and for some unknown reason there were several television cameras in the church. Now, unless they were doing the Ugandan version on Songs of Praise, this wasn't a normal Sunday morning service. 

The bizarreness then rose to the next level when the King of Uganda, escorted by security walked into the Church and pulled up a pew. This was all too surreal, we had to find out what was going on. We found the Vicar, and we could not believe it when he told us that this service was in fact the funeral of the King's Mother! Oh dear. How inappropriate could it be? 18 mzungus walking into a Church service unannounced, sitting down, poorly dressed  in shorts and t-shirts whilst the rest of the congregation, close friends and family were sat down, dressed immaculately in black, waiting for a very important service to take place. What are the chances? We waited until we left before we all had a good laugh about the mistake we had just made. Classic. And this was just day 3...

My Musical Biography

Seamus Barnett has been involved with The Painter's Chronicle for almost a year now, performing at The Big Night In and the Ramble ‘n’ Rave. His extensive band history includes Paintseamusyellow, Pink Elephant fish, Sense Offenders, Political Suicide, as well as appearances on Phoenix FM. In this new series of fortnightly posts Seamus shares how he found music, how it has affected his life and how it is shaping his plans for a musical future.

Chapter 1 – Discovering Music

I sit here, writing this, listening to music. I like music. 

Music means different things to each person, to some it is about the musicality, so the harmonies and how good it is technically, to others it is about the style, for example pop, which is very much about creating not musically challenging but mainstream average records, a lot of pop is about the image given by the band, Lady Gaga for example. Please do not think that I do not like the bands I talk about unless I explicitly express it. A lot of people might see me calling Lady Gaga mainstream all-about-the-image band is a bad thing, but it is not.  

I found music in two different ways, firstly through my brother who influenced greatly my musical taste, he showed me Metallica, who were my first favourite band. Slowly he developed my musical taste, and then I began to develop my own musical taste through that. This was all heavily influenced though after I started to play guitar, I wanted to play guitar to these songs, and Metallica was perfect, I then got into bands like Children of Bodom and various other thrash metal bands (including embarrassingly enough dragonforce, who I THINK ARE BAD!) the other major influence was concerts, at an early age I was told by my Brother what bands were good and what were bad, for example Trivium – bad and Marilyn Manson – good. But all that changed when my dad came home one day asking if I would like to go and see Trivium live in Bradford, as this would be my first gig even though I had been taught to change the channel when Trivium came on TV I leapt at the opportunity, and started to listen to them lots, realizing I did actually like this music and learning all of their songs! The gig was incredible, and I was a convert.  

From there I then went on to discover various different types of music through different ways, partly through media like magazines and TV, radio, and sometimes through people, especially girlfriends i’ve found! So now I like almost any genre of music! To give you a sample of just how varied that is I will quickly do a totally random shuffle on my i-Tunes and be totally truthful with the results. 

Paintseamusyellow (my band!), Lostprophets, Michael Jackson, Trivium, Arctic Monkeys, Glen Hansard, Kill Paradise, Bullet For My Valentine 

A lot of the music isn’t as mainstream as that bunch, but a shuffle is a shuffle!(N-Dubz totally just came on!) 

So that was how I first discovered music, the internet has helped greatly. Next time I will tell the story of beginning to write music and learning guitar.