I haven't really said much on here lately. I don't imagine anyone's been bereft and heartbroken at this, but in case I should explain myself, I've been rather more chatty over on my other blog lately. Which may or may not be a great idea, if I'm going to start blathering about rape or gay rights as if I knew anything about either of those things, as I have done lately. But it's what's keeping me occupied. And I am still spending more time being casually dismissive of all your sacred beliefs than anything else, so, that's fun.

Also, today the woman behind the Atheist Bus Campaign called me a bumhead. <3

(Slightly pre-emptive) Happy New Year, yous guys.

I'm not really one for resolving things, especially when we've just had Christmas and it's nearly my birthday, but if I were going to have a resolution for 2009, it'd probably just be "More words". I actually did pretty well in 2008 in most regards, not least finishing a draft of a whole actual book, but getting more words written is the most obvious way that 2009 could aim to improve on its predecessor. Trying to keep up the daily blogging thing a bit more consistently would be one way to make that happen, so, I'll see about giving it a shot. Maybe it'll work well and really get me creatively motivated. (I give it a month.)

Let's make a start now. ( Cut for longitude )

Briefly summarising the rest of the year: Not long after the show, I went back to visit the family for Christmas, which was great, and nobody else turned up for me to have to socialise with, which was even better. And now I'm back, and it's New Year's Eve, which means my one resolution kicks in, in about four hours' time. Since writing the first paragraph of this particular overlong piece of blather, I've decided on my only resolution for 2009 being "More words than last year", and to that end, I've added a layer of accountability by getting myself one of them there Twitter accounts. I'm yet to completely figure out how it works, but my username is writerJames, which I think means that if you go here you can start following me. The plan is to tweet daily updates about how much I've written, and anyone is encouraged to become a follower and poke me if it doesn't look like I'm working hard enough. I like the idea of having followers. They're practically minions, really.

Anyway, that's quite enough for this year. 2009's not far off. Good luck, everyone.

So, the three-part channel 4 series Make Me A Christian has just finished airing. There were some likeable people there on both sides of the aisle, but in the end, I think pretty much all of them got it wrong.

The concept of the show is that a bunch of non-Christians live the Christian lifestyle, and try to conduct themselves according to the teachings of Jesus, for three weeks, under the guidance of four clerics of varying degrees of sympathy, hard-nosed intolerance, and hotness. Some of the volunteers were more open to the idea than others, and some had lifestyles supposedly very much at odds with the Christian faith, or at least with these four people's idea of it.

For instance, there was Laura, the slightly muscular gay chick (I don't know what it is with me and somewhat-but-not-too butch girls-loving-girls, but rawr), who had a whole bedroom wall's worth of pr0n confiscated at the start of the experiment, as well as The Big Book Of Lesbian Horse Stories. Most of her journey involved being lectured at about her sexuality, and not getting any good answers to her questions about how she's supposed to love a god who hates what she is. She was amazingly tolerant throughout the attempted education of her sin, which included being taken to a fairground to experience the atmosphere of being around families and children. Because, she probably doesn't get to see many straight people, being so sequestered away in her own gay lifestyle as she is. And what with how gay people are totally different and don't love each other like straight people. And of course she was entirely convinced by this, and decided at that moment that she would choose not to be sexually or romantically attracted to her long-term girlfriend any more.

Or not. She also visited an ex-gay preacher, and learns that all he needed was for some helpful Christians to point out to him that gayness is a sin, and all the desire for hot sweaty man-love vanished, just like that. Eventually, she found someplace called the London Metropolitan Church, on her own time, which is much more accepting of alternative lifestyles and more genuinely focused on Jesus' message of love. But, of course, they were "in error", and twisting the message of the scriptures. In the end, she was never really convinced that she could be both a lesbian and a Christian, but hers was the approach that most impressed me, and she seemed to get more out of it than most of the others.

Many, many more thoughts about this over on my blog. Sorry, you only get a teaser here this time.

Wow. That was fun.

My boss is a True Christian. I hadn't been aware she was religious at all until some weeks back. We'd been working together for a few months, and somebody else happened to bring up a meeting they'd been in, where my boss (let's call her Iris) had got quite upset at a casual joke someone else had told, because she'd found it religiously offensive. Religion had never come up in office conversation before in any form, so I guessed she was just at the tolerant and unpreachy end of the scale, but it sounded like she still took it fairly seriously, so I was curious as to whether it would ever come up more directly.

I'm leaving work at the end of this week. I very nearly missed it.

Nobody came to blows or anything, but it seemed like it was getting pretty heated for a while there. The clerk from the Tribunal (let's call her Myfanwy) was in today, and the hearings weren't too complicated to prepare and set going, which means Myfanwy was left hanging around in our office without much to do for most of the afternoon. It was a quiet day, so we didn't have much to do either. So they were chattering away about stuff, I was playing Kingdom of Loathing, and all was right with the world.

I missed the conversational detour that took them onto religion, but I think any discussion between two Christians, about Christianity, when it's something very important to both of them but they have ever-so-slightly different ideas of what it means, has the potential to be enthrallingly explosive.

All it really amounted to is that Myfanwy doesn't always follow God's law, in such matters as drinking to excess, but Iris knows that there are no half-measures when it comes to Jesus. You're either following his path, or you're not. These aren't her standards, they're God's standards. She's not religious; she has a personal relationship with Christ. We're just not Saved.

I could say something sarcastic about how good it is to see an original and evocative thinker expounding on such unexplored topics, but I can't entirely claim the higher ground here. I was thoroughly enjoying my role as spectator for about twenty minutes, but couldn't resist injecting myself into the discussion when she gave me such a perfect opener:

Iris: ... but, I don't really know anyone who doesn't believe in anything, who's just a complete atheist...

Me: *waves* Hello!

That was fun to do, but did rather put me under the spotlight. And although I like to think I can support my convictions on any subject that's important to me pretty solidly, given half an hour with a keyboard, a text editor, and Google, those of you familiar with my boisterous, lively personality may guess that I'm not so hot with the spontaneous debate.

So yeah, turns out as well as being the only white and/or male in the office, I'm the only one who subscribes to the theory of evolution. And did a fairly lame job defending it when questioned. Nobody was giving me the third degree or anything, I just fluster under pressure, take my time finding words, fail to build up any rhetorical momentum, and sound very unconvincing. I could've offered to elaborate my views later in a reasoned and properly considered essay, but meh. I could do that, and have done for various people before, so I know the foundation of my worldview isn't quite as shaky as it probably seemed.

But I sort of want to, in a way. It'd be nice if I could see Iris actually starting to understand what evolution is, and why her other deeply original thoughts - that it takes more faith to believe in evolution than in God, that the world seems so complex that it couldn't have come about by chance, that surely we should be evolving into something else by now - don't actually do as much to undermine it as she thinks. I had a fair stab at it, but these three together (let's-call-her-Frida was around too, chipping in with a less passionate and slightly more moderate view from time to time) were all talking over each other and managing to keep a rigorous debate going with hardly a pause for breath, even without me, and butting in has never been a strong point of mine.

So, meh. Not the most productive dialogue I've ever engaged in, but they're all basically good people, and just talking about their own values, so it was definitely on the entertaining side of head-deskery.

And they've moved on now. They're currently talking about a TV show apparently called Sister Sister. Doesn't sound very holy.

And as an addendum, after I'd typed all this up, I noticed I'd been humming something without really noticing, and after a few moments recognised it as shortlived Italian dance-pop outfit Eiffel 65's minor hit, Too Much Of Heaven. My brain is cryptic in its instructions, but I think it wants me to shut up about this now.

It is finished.

Remember PZ Myers? He's the biology professor and big-time internet scienceblogger I talked about a while ago. You know, the dastardly, God-hating atheist. The one so appallingly, unspeakably evil that he kicks puppies steals people's ice cream regularly abuses children and uses his hugely influential global institution to cover it up and escape prosecution dared to suggest that death threats might be a bit of an overreaction to some kid not eating a small piece of bread when he was supposed to. But in spite of this atrocious wrong-doing, the many Catholics who perceived themselves the injured party forgave him with typical Christian kindness took reasonable steps to address the issue offered some sort of reasonable resolution acceptable to all parties sent further death threats, by the hundreds, to PZ and his family. But this act of loving charity, of which Jesus would no doubt be proud, was not enough to soften his cruel heart, and earlier this week he went ahead with his abominable hate-crime against another equally precious and valuable small piece of bread.

Okay, I'm all sarcasm-ed out, so I'm just going to segue clunkily into lecture mode. In the end, all he did was stick a nail through it (inspired by this image of a similar blasphemy by those insidious Jews) and chuck it in the bin, along with some other generic rubbish. By strict Catholic doctrine, this is probably a Very Bad Thing to do. Even outside of Catholic doctrine, this could still be quite a dick move, if meant as nothing more than an offensive and deliberately provocative gesture of contempt to something that means something to some people.

But that's not what it was, and this is where so many people are missing the point. Myers wasn't simply saying "Ha, this is what I think of your sacred cracker," and spitting metaphorically on something precious to many people. This wasn't an attack on Christianity, or an assertion of hate or disrespect to all those who practise it. I can't speak for PZ, but it seems clear that he was trying to highlight the triviality of the whole controversy, and of the one action that kicked it all off, and of the staggering lack of perspective exhibited by anyone who thinks their outrage gives them such moral superiority that they can start calling for people's murder over a small piece of bread.

As he's been saying all along, it's a frackin' cracker. "Desecrating" it means nothing. Zero material harm has been done here. You're welcome to your unusual, unorthodox, or just plain wacky ideas about what any arbitrary object means to you, but you can't expect anyone else to have even a modicum of respect for these ideas if they're not founded in reality. This cracker - either one - was nobody else's property, nobody else's domain to decree what may or may not be done to it.

He also threw in a few pages of the Qur'an into there along with all the other trash. And a few torn-out leaves from Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion, too. Because why the hell not? It means nothing. No ideas have been demeaned, no belief systems have been weakened, nobody's moral centre will tumble down. I could totally rip up an entire Dawkins book and throw it out with the days-old lasagna I've got lying around. It'd just a symbolic gesture to demonstrate that, you know what, I can do this, and it changes nothing. And unless their ideology is dangerously running amuck, then so it should be with Catholics and their Jesus-wafer. When people are making death threats over a small piece of bread, this seems like a gesture worth making, if it can help remind ourselves of what actually matters. And if it takes a cursed heathen atheist to do the job and stand up to the dangerous ideology in some small way, then that'll just have to do.

I think he said "Blessed are the cheese-makers".

Turns out the Pope is unequivocally against child abuse. Well, that is reassuring. He must be a man of truly impeccable moral fibre to take such a bold stand.

Dubai bans cross-dressing. Well, that's the headline, but the second paragraph says that anyone "who behaved like the opposite gender in public" is in trouble. I hope the actual law defines its terms a little more clearly, otherwise there could be big problems. Also, this was supposedly sparked by a British couple being caught having sex on a public beach. Quite how the horrific evil of a bloke in a dress relates to this, I cannot tell. Also, no way is "tranvesiticism" a word.

Some Bishops are accused of promoting a "false teaching that justifies sin in the name of Christianity". Yeah, those damn sinners who insist on working on the Sabbath, eating figs, wearing garments made of two different kinds of cloth... oh wait, not those kinds of "unbiblical" practices. The ones you don't like. About women and gays. Gotcha.

Another Nazi very nearly bagged and ready to be brought to captivity, where he will be placed in a zoo and encouraged not to breed. I just love the idea that there are people in the world today who fill out official forms to read "Occupation: Nazi-hunter". It just makes you picture a guy with one of those big game hunter hats, creeping through foliage with a tranquiliser gun following swastika-tracks, doesn't it?

And through Pharyngula, news that the mayor of Aberystwyth in Wales wants to overturn a ban on the film Monty Python's Life of Brian, which was imposed by the town in 1979 when the film was first released, and is technically still in place. Yes, it's been a while, and it may seem an odd time to be doing something about this now all of a sudden. One of the precipitating factors may be that the mayor, Sue Jones-Davies, was in the film. She played Judith Iscariot, Brian's girlfriend. That's her there, in a somewhat NSFW state of attire at around 2:02. Awesome.

So, I'd really suck as any kind of a skeptical blogger if I let this one slip through the net. A university student recently went to a Catholic Mass, and rather than eating the little bread thingy they hand out so that you can engage in the ritual cannibalism popular in that faith, he snuck it out as part of a wacky student prank.

Because of this outrage, people now want him dead.

Now, I don't know a single religious person who wouldn't agree with me that calling for the execution of another human being for stealing a small piece of bread (and then bringing it back apparently unscathed a week later) is a little over the top. But there's a significant and vocal proportion of your religion who are like this. This is why we make fun. It's because there are a bunch of nuts out there, large enough to be scary, whose wacky beliefs have a significant crossover with yours, who are shrieking "hate crime" at somebody for being given a piece of bread, and then taking it away with him. And there are major news organisations giving this significant airtime and serious internet space as if it were a real story with actual controversy and multiple sides of the argument to be discussed.

(Couple of short asides here. First, anyone else notice the "Obama & Infanticide" link to their page on that subject on the Catholic League's main page? You can just tell these guys are classy. Also, it's reported on their Chatterbox page, whatever that is, that a British MP has claimed that the League "bullies and intimidates anyone who dares criticise the Catholic Church, shutting down any dialogue on the Church's political methods or doctrine". The League's very next words in reaction to this? "We are happy she took note of us!" Wow.)

Anyway, then it actually got sillier. PZ Myers reported on this story, and in an effort to highlight the (one would think) obvious lunacy inherent in getting so apoplectic over someone stealing a small piece of bread that armed guards are now presiding over the Sunday Mass there, he offered to disrespect, abuse, profane, and basically inflict as much "hate crime" as it's possible to lay upon a small piece of bread, if anyone could provide him with some host from an appropriately consecrated source.

So, of course, now people want him dead too.

( Remainder of diatribe hidden for your convenience )

Hat-tip to Shakesville, Pharyngula, and good ol' Billy D. Crossposted over here.

Obligatory Eulogy Post
or, In Which I Find Myself Standing Up For Christian Fundamentalists

So, George Carlin died yesterday of heart failure at the age of 71. The interwebs have been collectively expressing their remorse at how much this sucks.

I think I was born a couple of decades too late to have grown up idolising him as one of my great heroes, and wasn't really that aware of him in any more than the vaguest terms as "that guy from the Bill And Ted movies" until a few years ago. But the impact he had on comedy, politics, and the acceptability of religious irreverence, was hard to miss even when people weren't fondly eulogising him all over the blogosphere.

His routine on "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television", as well as getting him arrested for performing it, led directly to a landmark decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that established indecency regulation in American broadcasting. That's pretty awesome.

So it's sad he's gone, but I'll let those who know him and his work far better than I do to pay tribute in more depth. I will comment on one thing that struck me about one of said tributes, though, made over here on ScienceBlogs. This blogger (who I'm not that familiar with, and who seems fairly anonymous) points out that - as is reliably the case whenever someone passes away who was prominently not a member of a particular religion, or who ever said something just a bit too tolerant for some fundamentalists' liking - there are people discussing the fact that he's in hell now for not accepting Jesus.

Now, bullshit though this might be, I think ERV and most of the commenters so far are being kinda harsh. When people who devoutly believe that Jesus is the only path to salvation (any of the billion or so of them on the planet) are discussing a late non-Christian, what should they really be saying about it? They could've been celebrating, cheering in triumph, revelling at another damned blasphemous sinner being banished from this world and getting his eternal come-uppance - and I imagine somewhere on the internet there are people excitedly doing just that - but these particular nut-jobs aren't doing anything that worth getting angry about.

(As a brief aside, is anyone else amused by someone on a fundamentalist Christian message board using an animated icon of Hugh Laurie pulling a face, taken from the show House, in their signature? Both the actor and the character in question are quite outspokenly atheistic.)

One of these Rapture-Ready members says:

"Years ago I was a huge Carlin fan. He could be funny. But over the years he got angrier and angrier and I didn't think he was funny anymore."

Which actually sums up my own thoughts to a not insignificant degree. He did seem to get pretty cynical and bitter in later years, and not so much with the funny. (Watch either of those two clips and tell me, if either of those routines wasn't being performed by just some guy ranting on some obscure stage somewhere, you wouldn't be rolling your eyes and calling him an ass.)

The religious nuts on that board are all expressing sadness at the loss of this soul; the thread starter optimistically opines that maybe he had "a last moment change of heart" and might have been saved. Given the world-view they're working from, this strikes me as about the least cynical and most compassionate response they could provide.

But some of Carlin's fellow blasphemers almost seem to be spoiling for a fight. "The cunts always deliver", in ERV's words. And maybe I'm overreacting a little, and this was just a tongue-in-cheek excuse for some fun obscenity in Carlin's honour. But it's usually quite a challenge to make me take those cunts' side on any matter. Maybe it's encouragingly healthy that I can do that once in a while, but still, I feel icky now.

Ah well. Be excellent to each other. And party on dudes.

(He was in the Bill And Ted movies. That's some win that doesn't run out.)

(Cross-posted over here.)

New statistics are out revealing that atheists are no longer the least popular religious demographic among the American public. Awesome. Our overall popularity is now up to a staggering -32. Public opinion across the pond is clearly massively swinging in our favour. Whatever we've been doing to bring people around to finding us tolerable has been working with a resounding success (on 13% of the population). Scientology, on the other hand, languishes 13 points behind, with only a 7% positive rating and 52% negative.

This might, in fact, not seem like quite such a strong result as you would expect. Who are these 7% of people out there who still like Scientology, for one thing? That's about 1 out of every 14 people who you pass in the street or catch the bus with every day, who have nothing against Scientology, who don't just not care, but who actively approve of it. I'm kinda surprised it's even that many.

But despite this, and even though barely even half the people surveyed could muster up the ridicule or distaste to register any kind of negative feelings for it at all, this is still a proud day indeed. Phase One of our mission is complete; the mechanisms set in motion to discredit Scientology and thus boost the profile and public opinion of atheism have become entirely self-sustaining, and we can now move on to the next step.

I know technically I shouldn't be talking about this in such an open forum, but I think I can trust you, my hypothetical readers, not to let word get out. It's true: the anti-Scientology protest group Anonymous was an atheist conspiracy from the start. Some months ago, in response to statistics (which I can't find a link to) suggesting that atheists were the least trusted group in the country, our Grand High Rulers decided that the most effective way to address this matter would be to systematically destroy the reputations of anyone currently seen as more acceptable, more trustworthy, or sexier than us.

Scientology was the most obvious place to start, and turning them into a laughing-stock was a relatively easy task. (Tom Cruise was of huge assistance in achieving this, though I'm not at liberty to say whose side he's really on.) It will get harder from this point on, but some day, everyone will hate everyone else more than they hate us. And what a beautiful world that will be.

Next stop: Mormons.

(Hat-tip to The Friendly Atheist.)

A few scattered thoughts on a popular and alluringly aliterative argument regarding this supposed "Trilemma". Jesus - you know the one, long hair, Jewish chap, bit of a hippie, died tragically young in a freak woodworking accident - claimed, in the Bible (Mark 14:62), that he was God, albeit neither as often nor as unequivocally as other people claimed it for him (Matthew 26:63-64, Luke 22:70). But if he did make the claim, then there are three basic ways to take it.

One is that he was a no-good rotten liar. He ain't no omnipotent deity, and his daddy ain't no omnipotent deity, and he knows he ain't all that. Much like the far more interesting Zaphod Beeblebrox, Jesus was just this guy, you know? There were some prophecies, someone got the wrong idea, this mythos started to grow up around him, and he ran with it because he guessed he could get a pretty sweet book deal out of it. Basically, imagine Brian as a cynical, manipulative bastard who's up to no good. Sounds like the sort of thing which could possibly have happened to someone a couple of thousand years ago.

Or maybe he was a nutter. Perhaps someone did set the ball rolling by misinterpreting an ancient prophecy, but rather than consciously attempting to work the idea to his own personal gain, Jesus was a paranoid schizophrenic who incorporated it into his delusions, and started to believe that his mum really was a virgin, and he could get sloshed on a couple of bottles of spring-water. If this is the case, then he's had phenomenal success in drawing other people into his fantasy. Certainly far more than any of the people in the hospital I work at who also claim to be Jesus (yes, there really are a few). But, in more credulous times, it's by no means completely out of the question.

And, of course, we mustn't neglect the possibility that he really was the Christ, the Messiah, the One who is Anointed, the Lamb of God, the King of the Jews, the King of Kings, the Emmanuel, the Son of Man, the Good Shepherd, the Top Dog, the Big Cheese, the Head Honcho, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Magical Mr Mistoffelees, and the Fantastic Mr Fox. Just like it says in the Bible.

(Cut because I do go on, and on, and on...)

Well, I figured it's about time I had a go at this whole social commentary malarkey, and tried throwing my own quirky and hilarious take on some much-discussed current affairs. Or something. Anyway, to that end, I finally watched a trailer for Expelled, Ben Stein's new Intelligent Design propaganda film. It was seven and a half painful minutes, and now I get to share them with you.

My first thought was to wonder whether I've misunderstood the hype, and if this is actually a horror film. There's some spooky music playing. We see a dim hallway, with a badly lit janitor sullenly cleaning the floor. Then a classroom, with rows of empty seats, and the sinister mantra "Do not question authority" being chalked onto the blackboard, over and over, by some short stubby bald guy. Then the voiceover starts and totally undermines the whole eerie atmosphere they'd been building up. Even Ben Stein's voice is lame these days.

Ben Stein, we soon learn, has Big Questions. One of these Big Questions is, "Are we, the Universe, and everything in it, merely the result of pure, dumb fate and chance?" Which is a pretty badly phrased question, but just wait. There'll be plenty of time for the science to get misrepresented and misrepresenteder soon enough.

Steiny is of the opinion that "everything was created by a loving God. Rocks, trees, animals, people..." I can't tell whether he's being deliberately patronising, or he's explaining things this way because he doesn't expect his audience to understand the concept of "everything" unless he really spells it out, or whether that's just how he talks. Absent from his list are malaria, HIV, parasitic worms that eat through people's eyeballs, and city-levelling earthquakes and tidal waves, which presumably also fall under the umbrella of "everything". Just sayin'.

Obviously there is some disagreement on this matter, however. Fortunately, The Steininator is here to boil all thought on the subject down into two simple categories, helpfully biased so that you'll know which one is right. Isn't it nice when other people do all your thinking for you?

(Something funny about this LJ-cut...)

I've just watched an official Scientology orientation video. It has probably the largest terrifying-hilarious product of anything I can remember seeing. The footage isn't great quality, having been taken by someone with a hand-held camera in a theatre somewhere. This makes me wonder whether the person who shot it went this far, and got this involved with the organisation, just to obtain the footage for the purposes of mockery, or whether they were initially interested but put off when the insanity became apparent very shortly into the screening of this film, or whether this was uploaded with the genuine intent of being an instructive and informative recruitment tool. I'm going to guess the first one.

The following paragraphs are among the thoughts I had while watching the video, in no particular coherent order.

( So many movie stars can't be wrong! )

I'm back, and still don't really have anything interesting to say. Got some temp work lined up for the next few weeks, at fucking last, and hopefully some editorial work experience, but still nothing concrete and long-term. My life remains directionless and incoherent. I have, however, consumed 3.8 units of alcohol this evening and it still doesn't taste horrible. I might be onto something here. Been test-driving my new cocktail glasses courtesy of aredhel_72, though not tried experimenting with the tequila yet. Just saw a shiny colourful bottle of something fruity while out shopping for bread and acted impulsively.

Number of people alienated today by my endorsement of YouTube videos of people running into bookstores at five minutes past midnight this morning with a megaphone and shouting "********* KILLS ***** ON PAGE ***": 1. (Spoilers edited to prevent that number rising further.) (Is it any good, by the way? I've read through a detailed synopsis online and actually saw the leaked epilogue a week ago, but I'm wondering whether to bother slogging through the whole thing itself.)

Anyway. Here are some other things that have amused me lately which I'm stealing in place of being entertaining myself in a proper journal entry. Enjoy.

*****

Fundamentalists: believe 2+2=5 because It Is Written. Somewhere. They have a lot of trouble on their tax returns.

"Moderate" believers: live their lives on the basis that 2+2=4, but go regularly to church to be told that 2+2 once made 5, or will one day make 5, or in a very real and spiritual sense should make 5.

"Moderate" atheists: know that 2+2=4 but think it impolite to say so too loudly as people who think 2+2=5 might be offended.

"Militant" atheists: "Oh for pity's sake. HERE. Two pebbles. Two more pebbles. FOUR pebbles. What is WRONG with you people?"

*****

The relationship between religion and war is much like the relationship between Ant and Dec: you could have one without the other, but I'm not sure anyone would see the point.

*****

( Cut for embedded YouTubeness. No spoilers in these, don't worry, just thinking of the f-lists )

Ding dong, Jerry Falwell's dead. He was one of the more significant evangelical, homophobic, racist, Bible-bashing, Teletubby-outing, "lesbians caused 9/11"-bullshitting fucktards to have sullied the reputation of those fine United States, for anyone who didn't know him. And once again, as is generally the case in response to national tragedy, the internet totally wins. Ah, such merriment.

I had a dream last night in which Neil Gaiman saved the world while looking like Jared Leto.

Then I had another dream about going back to the school which I'd once partially destroyed by setting off a thermonuclear explosion, and being increasingly late for whatever lesson I was supposed to have because of all the things I need to rush around and get done first. The latter part is a commonly recurring theme for my subconscious, but the thermonuclear part was original.

Then, back in the rather more mundane real world, I wandered into town and noticed a shop called Pronuptia which, from the perhaps slightly misjudged positioning of its signs, appeared to be selling "Bridal menswear". Fill in your own punchline.

Those are the headlines. Under the cut, edited highlights of my recent adventures into religious-themed chat-rooms with my glamourous assitant Mia. Plus, which Firefly character am I most like? The answer may surprise you. We'll be right back.

( Back to you in the studio, Tom )

You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip
In that bed

You scum bag
You maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas yer arse
I pray God
It's our last

And the boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing 'Galway Bay'
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas Day

That's what it's all about. May all your Christmases be white. (Except gravityfirenze.)

And, as bouncy_penguin observed, Xenu bless us, every one.

So the other night I wandered downstairs to make tea and ended up chatting to elfbystarlight and miztruzt about magic until 2am. It's something I've been meaning to look into for a while, but never really got round to asking much about, but now miztruzt has offered to try giving me a tarot reading, and they seem willing to talk me through some basic exercises in energy focusing and whatnot. Now, it's a fact well-known to those who know it well that I don't believe in anything. Especially not any of this witchcraft malarkey. The reason I'm so keen to try it out is primarily because the psychology of it fascinates me, and I think some first-hand experience would do so even more. (Also, there's the outside possibility of being proved wrong, which is always a good thing. That could happen. But let's face it, I'm not. I mean, c'mon. Magic? Honestly, now.) So, I lack faith, but it is a subject which genuinely intrigues me, and I hope my sarcasm is not construed as any particular disdain or lack of respect, because I'm sarcastic about everything. I try not to act too dismissively, and not to laugh in any obviously visible manner.

However, if somebody's put together a voodoo doll to try and make some sort of a point, you can fuck right off. I woke up at 2.30am this morning going "ow ow OW OW FUCK OW" at my leg, and again an hour or so after getting back to sleep, and it's still uncomfortable. Something's up with the muscle along the back, just below the knee, if I try flexing that leg too much at all it feels unnaturally tight and starts to feel like I'm being stabbed. I'm hoping I just wrenched it somehow in the middle of the night and it'll sort itself out, because it's seriously disconcerting as well as hurting like fuck. I think the rest of my week should probably be spent sitting quietly and playing with my new geek toys.

There was something else, I'm sure. I'll come back to that.

ETA: This wasn't it. I wear through socks at a rate of knots, and bought a whole pack of new ones lately so I can finally throw out the remains of pretty much every other pair I own. Only I've just realised that these have the days of the week written on them, so I now have one pair for each day. I may have to make a point of making sure to always wear two different socks, neither of which corresponds to the day it actually is. Just to be difficult.

I saw a newspaper headline today reading "KENNEDY BLAMES MING THE MERCILESS". Before I remembered that there is in fact a significant member of the Liberal Democrats party known by that name, I did briefly wonder whether the alcoholism was in fact just the start of his mental difficulties, and he'd hammered the final nail into his political coffin by beseeching Flash Gordon for help at this difficult time. So, yeah. Thought that was worth sharing.

Just one more thing. There's a programme on channel 4 on Monday called The Root Of All Evil? in which Richard Dawkins - biologist, author, fervent atheist and all-round legendary genius type - argues that the entire concept of religion should be abandoned. Whether or not you think he's gonna have a leg to stand on, I think it'll be very interesting to see how he argues it, and he's always been a guy who knows what he's talking about in my experience. But also, is anyone else somehow very heartened by the existence of such a programme? One of the most famous and passionate atheists in the country is getting two hours of prime-time evening TV on one of the major networks to tell you that God doesn't exist and that religion is a redundant and destructive concept. Given some of the popular controversies lately, isn't that pretty cool? I just can't really imagine it happening in America. It'd be a hard sell to most networks, to say the least. First we wage a godless war against Christmas, with devastating effect, and now this. Damn heathens.

Anyway, I'm watching awful unoriginal clichéd TV dramas and downloading porn music, so. Yeah. Bye.

George Best and Mr. Miyagi in one day.

Dark times indeed.

So, despite the fact that I'm supposed to be writing a 2000-word essay on how doubts about the status of the parallel postulate led to the development of non-Euclidean geometry and what if anything this tells us about the nature of the universe we live in, there appears to be fiction. I really don't know how much sense it makes - this was one of those pieces which I dashed off in about half an hour to give me something to do, then closed the book on it straight away. It was inspired, as have a few other pieces of mine been, by a random phrase which popped into my head, unprovoked and unexplained; in this case, the phrase was "Three centuries was all it took". God knows where that came from. I haven't bothered with stuff like revisions or rewrites except for a few minor points of grammar, and I very much doubt I'll develop it beyond this unless I can think of anything worthwhile it might turn into. So, it's brief, bizarre, and probably crap, but it amused me a little more than trying to talk about spheres of imaginary radius and infinite numbers of parallel lines. If anyone knows what the hell any of this (the story below, not the mathsy stuff) might mean, please do let me know.

This entry is dedicated, incidentally, to miztruzt, whose birthday I was totally oblivious to until shamefully late in the day. I was just happy to be offered alcohol and cake, it really didn't occur to me to question anybody's motives. I really don't think I've been here these last couple of days. It's all Euclid's fault. Sorry about that. (She also seems to have suffered a great deal of emotional trauma at the hands of the Hitchhiker's Guide film, for which I am somewhat responsible. Sorry again.)

( Seriously, what is any of this about? Answers on a postcard )