Archive for January, 2009

If you’ve been keeping an eye on the news today you may have seen the story that a bus driver refused to do his shift because he was given a bus with the new atheist advert on it.

I mean seriously, what the hell?

This is a clear case of discrimination against atheists. If an atheist tried this stunt with one of the many, many Alpha adverts that can be found on buses he would be ridiculed, told to stop being stupid and ordered back to work. But when the tables are turned it’s suddenly acceptable to walk off shift?

But it gets even more offensive…

“I was just about to board and there it was staring me in the face, my first reaction was shock horror.” “I think it was the starkness of this advert which implied there was no God.”

Horror? What horror is caused by this? An advert which has gone out of it’s way to accommodate religious people (it could have read there is definitely no god, now shut your cake hole). An advert with has already been approved by the Advertising Standards Agency.

What this really shows is the massive intolerance bread by religion. Who ever heard of someone refusing to drive a bus with a political party advert on which always push the boat out and get personal and yet as soon as something goes on that isn’t even offensive, the atheist community is suddenly under attack. Disgraceful.

I introduced a new regular segment into the podcast tonight entitled “a bragger’s tall”, hence the title. Basically I will make a claim, for example “I caught a fish that was a foot long” and the guests then have to brag about far more exciting, lavish and over the top stories to better my tale. Overall it went rather well.

The point is that podcasting is well and truely rolling again. And this time we finally remembered to take some pictures even if we did only get them of myself and Lil.

Labour MP Graham Stringer and sparked quite a debate by describing dyslexia as a “cruel fiction” invented by big wigs in the education system to cover up the fact that they can’t teach very well.

The charity Dyslexia Action hit back with a statement and claimed that six million people in the UK suffer from it. To be honest though I’m not really convinced such a figure really helps their case. For example the facts don’t really stack up if this figure is true and you take Mr Stringer’s point that…

“If dyslexia really existed then countries as diverse as Nicaragua and South Korea would not have been able to achieve literacy rates of nearly 100%.”

He also makes the interesting point that given there is so much finance support for the condition, it essentially creates an insentive to be bad at reading and writing. Personally I’m not convinced this actually much of an affect but it is certainly plausible that it does.

For further reading you may want to take a glance at the BBC’s coverage and Mr Stringer’s column itself.

Last night I headed down to the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire for Moz’s talk on religion in Pre Christian Britain. While it was mostly an excuse for Moz to show off the quality of pictures his very expensive camera can take, the talk was never the less etertaining and brought up some up some very interesting facts about the suprisingly rich heritage of Britain before the Romans arrived.

As I had suggested, Paul invited everyone to Joseph’s Well for a drink and the uptaking was very impressive, by Humanist Society standards anyway, we must have had a good fifteen of us stay for a drink compared to the usual quick evaporation of meeting attendees that traditionally takes place.

Having had a drink there I headed up to the union to meet the usual A-Soc crowd which had somewhat increased since the meeting first began, clearly people were in need of a good pint to calm their pre-exam nerves.

According to one of SitePoint’s year reviews, 2008 was the year of Twitter and 2008 having come and gone I decided it was probably overdue that I gave it a go. I have never been an avid use of my Facebook status but the more flexible nature of Twitter looked far more promising.

Perhaps more importantly, though, Twitter has not really spread outside the geek community yet and on the off chance it does, I need to be able to tell people “yeah, I’ve been on Twitter for ages.” Echoes of recent conversations along the lines of “yeah, I’ve been on Facebook for three years now” no doubt.

I am quite impressed with how easy it was to set my phone up and begin using it too. I’m a little disappointed I don’t seem to be able to add multiple phones but the idea of being able to update my Twitter while I’m awkwardly sat in a pub by myself waiting for whoever I’m meeting there to turn up is very appealing if only to give me something to do.

In any case, if you’re already Twittering (is it a verb yet?) then point me in the direction of your page. Mine can be found here.

Continuing our tour of a different restaurant each week which is still going strong now well into it’s second week 😉 , we headed over to Frankie & Benny’s for this week’s exciting Sunday night meal.

Unable to find anything new and interesting on the menu to try I decided to settle in for a nice mixed grill featuring a mere 23oz of meat. Rich also joined me with the choice though it turns out that 23oz isn’t actually that much meat and we both managed to work our way through it.

It was quite a nice restaurant, the staff were very friendly and the waitress even volunteered to take a group photo of us which I thought was more than tip worthy but apparently, I wasn’t allowed to leave one :o. Still, as was pointed out, we don’t get tipped at work so it’s personal preference I guess.

All in all, it was a good night even if I did eat a little too much lol. Roll on Mexican next week…

I’ve finally got round to adding email notifications to further comments being posted on my blog entries. So if you comment on one of the entries you can now opt to be notified by email if someone posts a follow-up comment on that same entry.

Many of us having gone back to work this week, it got to Friday and there was nothing else to do but hit the pub. Plus with it being Kieran’s birthday it was a good reason to celebrate, even if Kieran was a few hundred miles away in Swindon.

It was a rather good turn out in the end with myself, Si, Sarann, Michelle, Greg, Nicola and Kate turning up. Not that I got chance to speak to anyone other than Si or Sarann but I’m sure I will get chance to at some point in the next week.

Last night saw the long awaited work’s Christmas party.

Turn out wasn’t particuarly good, we got about 20-25 people of the 50-odd we have on the books and indeed some people were stuck at work with us being unable to find cover (how rubbish is that!) but I think it was far more noticable because from my generation either simply don’t work there anymore or have lost interest in such ventures.

Still there were enough people there to provide ample conversation and in any case we could at least enjoy a fun night of watching Crabs (who, the best way I can describe her alcoholic type behaviour is to say she is like a young Michelle, though not quite on the same level yet) try and stay on her feet having had a little too much to drink 😀 .

There was also a rather large buffet, to the tune of £800s worth of food which had been laid on. I think I saw one person go up there, so money well spent really. As I explained to someone I think was Emma the regional manager, if they aren’t going to bother to lay on hot, fresh food then we’re just not interested. Though that didn’t stop us from taking a plate home at the end of the night!

All in all it was a pretty good night though personally I would have prefered it if it was just our store as I think would quite a few other people. Good times none the less though, and I’m most looking forward to tooking into my left over chicken 😀 .

The observant of you may have noticed that there are some new header images on rotation on my website and blog. These are in keeping with the original header images – one stock shot, one hero shot and one collage. I’m planning on expanding the amount of images in rotation over time though I only want to do it when I have interesting images to add.

The first one is just an image I picked up off iStock which I loved.

The second is a photo of me blogging, I might re-shoot this at some point in the future as it didn’t come out exactly how I wanted it but then I thought it somewhat of a lost cause to translate my imagination into photography and so got as close as I could.

Finally the collage is a few of my old school pictures from back in the day when I was at high school, or at least six form. Given appropriate aging effects, of course.