Guru

Being a sophisticated chap when it comes to aural stimulation, Guru has always shunned the worlds of insipid pop, anti-social hip hop, trashy thrash and over-hyped heavy metal, preferring instead a soucon of Chopin or a truffle of Tchaikovsky – with figs and absinthe whenever possible.

What with all the debate raging about the fact that women still earn around 17% less than men and with the government unwilling to find extra cash for equal pay claims, Guru felt the urge to come up with a solution to help our babes out of the woods and into the Garden of Eden that is pay parity.

Who would have thought his inspiration would be a 'leggy' former glamour model having a nervous breakdown on global TV.

Poor old Heather Mills – or Lady Mucca as the UK press would have it – broke down in tears on GMTV on the way to implying that alleged living god Sir Paul McCartney was possibly a bit handy with his... er... handshake. She then went on – after a swift leap across the Atlantic - to bemoan the fact that his daughter, fashion designer Stella, had done some "evil, evil things". Not being a fashionista, Yours Truly has only seen what Ms McCartney has designed in the pages at the trashier end of the publishing spectrum, but to call her 'Slate Wool Tufting Murta' big cardigan thingy 'evil' is kind of extreme. Fair enough, it wouldn't suit Mrs Guru, but then most thinks don't.

Does Mills secretly have the ear of Mad George Dubya? Is Stella McCartney the latest

As prank calls go, Guru likes to think it was up there with Ian Botham calling umpire Dickie Bird during a Test Match, and Century FM DJ Mike Maguire calling then England manager Sven Goran Eriksson pretending to be his predecessor Kevin Keegan.

Yep, Yours Truly would like to take the credit for phoning immigration minister Liam Byrne on his mobile while he was driving down the Tyburn Road in Birmingham on 6 July.

USA Track and Field caused a stir last weekend by banning competitors in the famous New York marathon from listening to iPods while they run.

A spokeswoman for the fully starred-and-striped body said the ruling was "a safety issue". Apparently runners wearing iPods are often unable to hear announcements and other competitiors, causing dangerous multi-runner pile ups and the like.

School leavers addicted to their PSP, XBox or Wii (pronounced wee Guru is reliably informed) may now be able to find the perfect job... as an airport baggage screener.

They may even be actively encouraged to maintain their gaming habit as an effort to improve performance, after researchers at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, discovered that playing computer games gives people a sharper eye for finding things on a cluttered computer screen, even when the target objects rarely appear.

Guru hesitates in categorising today's entry as science because, as many know, neuro-linguistic programming — NLP — has always struggled to shake off its pseudoscience tag.

A supplier news piece on personneltoday.com however means Yours truly feels compelled to write on this topic. Before he begins though Guru admits to thinking that some NLP theories hold some water. Most however hold it like a sieve. A broken sieve.

It was with some surprise that Guru found this rather timely video of the Liberal Democrats' Lorely Burt talking in her front room about flexible working.

Partly because previous trawls of YouTube have not uncovered it already, but mostly because he cannot understand why the Lib Dem's would ever think it a good idea to use a set of net curtains as a backdrop to a serious political message.

Ian Blair and his Met Police colleagues can count themselves extremely lucky that they work in England rather than Italy, Guru muses.

As riots raged across Italy over the police shooting of a football fan, Blair woke up to a strongly worded letter from a Liberal Democrat MP in the wake of the Stockwell shooting.

Fresh from the excitement of paying cash to Bulgarian Bob for fixing his leaking shower, Guru was amused to see the uproar over the latest illegal immigrant scandal at the Home Office this week.

Apparently, home secretary Jacqui Smith knew four months ago that thousands of illegal immigrants were not just in this country, they were earning a wage... from Whitehall... in security jobs.

However, according to reports, she kept shtoom and the situation evolved to a state where prime minister Gordon Brown's car was guarded by an illegal immigrant.

Being a man of the world, Guru was shocked to hear that a high court judge had been kicked out of court over an inappropriate remark about something as insignificant as a rug.

While understanding how certain people might be offended, Yours Truly found it hard to understand why a comment about a hair-piece would cause such alarm.

There is only one thing Guru hates more than being told what not to wear, and that’s being told what not to wear by two ugly women with the combined fashion sense of a blind tramp talking to a German dog. Suffice it to say, then, that he is no fan of Trinny and Susannah.

However, he was alerted to a recent episode of Undress The Nation by none other than that beacon of educational rigour, sector skills council Skillsmart Retail.

Guru is please to announced that his blue bonce has showed up on the radar of the world-renowned Times newspaper.

Timesonline lists Yours Truly in its top 10 list of favourite work blogs, second only to two heavyweight academics – not involved in tomorrows blog posting, despite persistent rumours that top boffins actually do eat a lot of cakes.

While slightly miffed that he's not atop the list, it is welcome recognition for Guru's tireless promotion of the all things related to work as well as being confirmation that the HR profession is making a sizeable dent in the 'blogosphere'.

Guru is sure some of his more innovative postings have actually fed the imaginations (rather than the unquenchable appetites) of the voracious boffins of this world and would personally like to thank all his disciples for helping him to achieve this heady level of stardom and would encourage them to carry on sending in their stories of the from the weird and wonderful world of work.

Having recently been busy on 'fact-finding' missions around Europe, Guru can sympathise with work and pensions secretary who has decided to take on the 'sicknote culture' in the UK.

Hain's decision to personally intervene follows a report showing that there are 2,000 people refusing to work on the grounds that they are too fat to do anything other than eat cakes. This apparently renders them 'disabled' as they are unable to walk more than 400 yards.

As a man of the world, a master of his own destiny and an all-round champion of getting the most from life, Guru rarely has cause to get angry. Today, however, Guru is angry. Very angry.

It has not been a good week. It started off with the government losing all his personal details because they don't understand how the postal system works (forget fraud, Guru just doesn't want anyone knowing how many children he receives benefits for, least of all Mrs Guru). Then it rained so much he forgot what colour the sky was supposed to be and how it felt to wear dry clothes. And just when he thought life on this sorry little island couldn't get any worse, he witnessed the most humiliating football performance since, well, the last time England played. At least he could drown his sorrows with a few over-priced, warm beers in the local chav-infested pub. England is great.

News that a teenager has been arrested in The Netherlands for stealing virtual furniture from a networking site highlights just how wrong the world of onlineness can be.

Apparently, he ‘walked off’ with £2,800 of… um… ‘furniture’ from some ‘hotel rooms’, presumably leaving lots of virtual saddos to sit on their virtual backsides on their virtual floors.

After a full English breakfast this morning, followed by two rounds of toast, another pot of tea and a danish pastry, Guru started his working day by checking his emails. The first one he read told him that the UK loses £8.1bn each year through lost productivity due to people skipping breakfast.

As everyone knows, there was only one event to be at this week - but after being thrown out of the Oxford University freedom of speech debate, Guru made do with visiting the CBI's annual conference in Islington.

And what a contrast the two events provided. At one, scruffily dressed people made feeble protests against men who run shameful political parties and publish damaging lies. Meanwhile, at Oxford...

Guru had a Eureka moment when he heard the news that the third of six 7,300-tonne destroyers has been launched at Govan shipyard in Glasgow.

According to reports in the UK’s most-read national newspaper – the always balanced and fair and ‘intellectually’ stimulating Sun – this state-of-the-art vessel is equipped with the most up-to-date anti-aircraft weaponry and top-secret ‘stealth’ technology.

However, the reason Yours Truly had to spend half an hour mopping up the bathroom floor was the jaw-dropping news that the ship’s radar ‘can track a cricket ball moving at up to three times the speed of sound, and has a range of hundreds of miles’, according to the Sun.

Being in a ‘Sun’ frame of mind, it occurred to Guru that there are far more practical uses of such a ship, or indeed for the whole fleet of six the Royal Navy has planned.

Guru realises that the House of Lords is not the most dynamic of places at the best of times. In fact there is probably less faffing, muddled thinking and postponed action on a wet Wednesday afternoon at the Women’s Institute Philosophy Society.

But even in the dusty world of Parliament’s upper tier, the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs must have wished it had never invited the opinion of its great rival in dullness the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Although good for playing percussion on mod-rock tracks, and driving expensive cars into domestic watery areas, Keith Moon has not, to Guru’s knowledge, hitherto been cited as an HR expert.

However, training consultancy Innerbeat has used the legendary Who drummer as an example of how they get the most from employees.