A pungent mix of programming, philosophy, pedanticism, procrastination, perplexity, peripheral political polemic, and platters of preposterousness.
The excellent Generator Blog has found the Quango Generator. It’s brilliant! The “Michael Caine Encouragement Regulation Agency” and “Reality TV Assurance Commissioning Task Force” were two which came up when I loaded it up.
It looks like Joanna Lumley is against all the major aggravations that are in store for us, er, citizens.
You have a male son. You must make a decision.
Are you going to leave him with a priest or pastor? Or one of them atheistic scientists?
Well, James Dobson is a very good vote in the ‘stay the hell away from organised religion’ column.
Come on, come on, let’s get a split between the American executive and congress. They’re bth insane bureaucratic idiots, but it’s better that they are at loggerheads than in complete control.
Want to see the latest development in pointlessness? YouTube has thew new BBC One idents (via Tom Coates) - the spots that identify the channel before the programmes. The likelihood that me or anybody else from the “YouTube generation” sees them except on YouTube is pretty low. Remember how we watch TV? I don’t mind them, but then, they aren’t for me. The hippos are cool though. If you want to read more, read this post.
Oh, congratulations to the YouTube guys for the Google deal. Now, I’m tempted to unsubscribe from any of my blogs that use the phrase ‘GooTube’. I’m not linking, though, as a gesture to the fact that everyone else is.
More video, you say? Richard Dawkins interviewed on BBC News. I particularly like this comment by Pete: “Imagine if interviewers were equally as hostile in their approach to religious representatives when they appear on TV. Priests and pastor are most often pandered and placated, whilst interviewing an atheist is always treated as a much more confrontational affair.” Difference is, we can handle it. The BBC seem to give in to religious folks whenever they bloody well want it. If you ever seriously questioned the idea of a ‘soul’ to, say, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor the Church would say you are being seriously bigoted against Christianity - perhaps even a Christophobe.
Deirdre has taken the last two posts I’ve made and summed them in to one - Dawkins on YouTube. Glad you could go - I couldn’t be bothered, to be honest. Dave was bothered, so go and read what he has to say.
Some academics at my college have posted a short essay called The Amish Way. Seven paragraphs and 14 ‘communities’.
A slightly more reality-based reaction in the Guardian: “It’s not just TV and iPods they reject: it is schooling beyond 14, the emancipation of women and scholarship that questions a single interpretation of the sacred texts… when community leaders become the custodians of their own morals and are not subject to scrutiny, all kinds of wrongs can take place and all manner of fundamentalist tendencies thrive.”
Of course, it being the Guardian, the blame is quite plainly on the NRA and guns. The presence of far stronger gun laws in the UK didn’t stop Dunblane back in ‘96. So long as guns exist, criminals and nutcase killers will use them - regardless of what the law says.
My college has decided that livejournal.com is not appropriate for us mere mortals (MySpace, Facebook, Blogger and LJ-style sites Blurty and DeadJournal are fine).
I hate censorware - so, please help me set up tunneling or proxying to get around this rubbish. Proxying/tunneling is something that should be easy enough to be explained in one simple web page.
Gay Erasmus has an excellent post on ex-gay therapy: “I’m sick of the muted response that the community at large has towards ex-gay therapy. Too often we hear the uncertainty of relativism - “maybe it might help some people”, “maybe some people who think they’re gay really aren’t gay and need help to figure things out” - used to describe this unequivocal form of abuse. We need to call it out for what it is - evil - and help as many ex-gay people as possible (and they are minors and baby boomers) become ex-ex-gay.”
