Maybe campaigning for things does work

The death penalty is totally stupid, so well done Maryland for repealing it.

Thank you for contacting me regarding your support of repealing the death penalty in the State of Maryland. As you may be aware, the General Assembly passed Senate Bill 276 - Death Penalty Repeal - Substitution of Life without the Possibility of Parole (Chapter 156 of the Acts of the General Assembly of 2013), and I signed it into law on May 2, 2013. This bill repealed the death penalty statute and makes life without the possibility of parole the harshest sentence available in the State of Maryland.
In 2008, the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment, led by former United States Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti, found that the administration of the death penalty clearly showed racial bias and that no administrative fixes could end the racial disparities. In addition, it reported that the cost to taxpayers of pursuing a capital case is three times as much as the costs of pursuing a non-death penalty homicide conviction. Lastly, the Commission determined that the risk of executing an innocent person was extremely high and that the statistics did not prove that the death penalty was a deterrent. The death penalty did not make us stronger or more secure as a people. Nor did the death penalty make our laws more effective or more just. Capital punishment was expensive, and it did not work.
Your feedback and opinions are important to me I benefit greatly from your thoughts. Working together, we will continue to protect our shared priorities of expanding opportunity for more Marylanders rather than fewer, strengthening and growing our middle class and small businesses, securing public safety, and improving the health of our environment.
Sincerely,
Governor O'Malley

A return to the blog

Wow, I thought I'd taken this blog down. But I guess not. It's right here, just as it always was. And I think it's time to start writing again. The 3 year embargo of all things social media related can end now. I have my doctorate. There is no more thesis to write. Only the rest of life to be getting on with. And that's pretty nice. So before I think of something actually relevant to write about, here are some interesting things I have learnt since logging back into here: 

1. You no longer have to actually log in. Google owns the internet, so once you've logged into one thing, well, you've logged into it all.
2. I have FTP blogs. I don't know what those are exactly, but it's sign of being old skool I think. Anyway, they are to be migrated. At some point.
3. Blogger has stats! I love stats! So I have found out that there have been 8,843 page views of this blog, the majority from the US but also a large number recently from Russia. This creeps me out. Russia is a scary place, as far as I know. 
4. Also, you can see the search terms people use to get on this blog. Whilst a lot of people seem to actually search for the blog by name, other people are looking for "circle time" resources, which is something I used to use with my tutor group. And yet more people are looking for pancake recipes, and ways to eat pancakes, specifically with nutella. I don't remember writing about this, but I guess that was popular.
5. I suppose the rest of the people who looked at it were trying to find some help with their teaching, or maybe just wanted to feel that they weren't the only one who found teaching pretty damn hard. I hope it helped them.

Ok so just to get you back into the spin of things, some updates about me:

1. I am now 29.
2. I am still a Virgo looking to ramble and rant. And I still have the lovely X by my side.
3. I have moved from Oxford back down to good old Walthamstow, where I went to school myself and where I taught before (I figure enough time has passed since leaving my school to risk saying where it was).
4. I have a post-doc at the University of Manchester, at their new ethnicity research centre. So I am gearing up for academic life. Sort of.
5. And I'll be writing about all sorts of things on here, when I remember.