Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

So, Liz is now officially a lesbian.

So, Zoltan is now dating a 15 year old.

They’re both great openings so I’ll let you pick which one you prefer.

This weekend was of course Atheist Society’s Weekend Away 2008 and with a total of 22 people we headed down to London on Friday afternoon. We arrived shortly before 4pm and checked into the hostel without much problems. I managed to get some work done on the train down there which was useful.

We first headed out to Smithy’s, a local pub which used to be a blacksmiths and retains many of the original features and character. We ended up on two seperate tables, the other table ended up getting kicked out. They claimed it was because people weren’t buying any drinks though I suspect it was because Tom was far too drunk and his renditions of Oasis songs were distracting other customers 😉 .

I left with that table to guide them to another pub only to find that the table I had just left got kicked out soon after because Nicola started causing trouble by throwing candle wax around. So after a quick stop at the Euston Flyer we made it down to Pizza Express for dinner. My meal was quite nice though I have to say Nicola’s meat feast looked even more appetising.

Afterwards we headed out to Sin City at the Electric Ballroom which was absolutely amazing! It took us a while to find it, I ended up having to phone Leeds Nightline to give us directions lol but we made it there in the end. Unfortunately Jenny took a blow to the head near the end of the night and had to go home but I had a brilliant time, they played such a fantastic playlist, every song was good.

Myself, Mike, Gaz, Sophie and Jon made it to almost the end of the night and had an interesting walk home running into a crazy Irish man who insisted on telling us lots of jokes while he was “raising the price of a hamburger.” We also found a phonebox full of prostitute adverts so picked up a few as you never know which way these weekends will go 😉 .

Meanwhile Rich and crew headed to the gay club Heaven. Yep Tom, John and Heini were at a gay club until 5am. And not particularly quite when they got back in either, Rich burst into our room with “I don’t know what the fuck you were doing, he was a gay man.” Apparently Nicola had pulled when a guy mistook her for a man in drag.

Downstairs Liz was apparently even more loud on her entry waking most of the room up which wasn’t exactly helping matters as Norm and Michelle had already made Zoltan cry by not letting him go to sleep. As I mentioned in the intro, while Liz hasn’t explicitly come out, staying at a gay club till 5am has to be the final proof really.

Saturday
We kicked Saturday off with a visit to Conway Hall where we meet Tessa from the NSS as they prepared for their AGM. We then headed over to the Natural History Museum with a quick stop for lunch in which Heini managed to work his way through a large big cheese and bacon meal (the new Big Tasty sized promotional burger) as well as another big cheese and bacon burger on top of that!

The Natural History Museum wasn’t quite as good as I was expecting but never the less still good – the Darwin exhibit we were booked onto was well worth a visit and we got plenty of good pictures so I’ll count that as a victory.

Just as it was closing I finally ran into Kieran so we got a quick chance to catch up then. We got seperated on the underground however and by the time I made it to the pub we were meeting at there were only ten minutes before we had to go for dinner so in the end I only got about 20 minutes to chat to Kieran. Still, I’m sure we’ll get chance to catch up at new year.

Dinner was courtesy of Nando’s and despite half the group bailing on it, the staff were friendly enough towards us and it was a damn fine meal. Unfortunately we didn’t find a brain this time but there is always next time.

After dinner we headed down to The Big Chill which Norm had managed to wangle us free entry to. It was rather disappointing when we got in there, it was rather packed and music was blasting out – not exactly chilled out, at all. Never the less it was a good place to grab a few drinks in, heading home about 1ish, once again with myself and Mike being the last people there along with John and Liz in tow.

Sunday
We had to check out Sunday morning so a bit of an earlier start which we then headed over to Speakers’ Corner to see what was going on. There were quite a few good speakers there, neither Mary or Jay Smith showed up but a number of other good speakers were there and I got a good crowd when I got up on my ladder and started talking about the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

So much so in fact that everyone left the Muslim speaker to come listen to me at which point I added a rather cheeky “where is your god now?” in his direction which I’m not sure he appreciated too much 😀 . He also turned down the opportunity to have a debate with me but there you go.

Afterwards we headed over to Blackfriars where the Church of Scientology was and found a nice pub to grab a few drinks before our appointment. I decided to walk it and found myself going down Fleet Street and past the Royal Courts of Justice which are some amazing buildings and then down onto the waterfront which was fantastic.

After a quick drink or two in the pub we headed down to the Church of Scientology where we were shown round the building and exhibition centre which explained about Scientology and what they do. I picked up a copy of Dianetics which I am looking forward to reading 😀 .

Afterwards we decided to split up to find somewhere to eat as we weren’t booked in anywhere. We found a nice pub that I believe was just off Farrington if that sounds like a real street in London, myself and Gaz tooked into some very nice rib eye steaks meanwhile Nicola decided to have meat balls in flat bread.

Continuing our history of running into random people I know down in London, while we were in the pub Hind Hassan, formally equality and diversity officer at Leeds University Union spotted us.

As we were leaving Norm was elsewhere checking train tickets and realising that the train in fact left at 22:10 not 22:30 😀 . So after a bit of a mad rush back we safely made it onto the train and back to Leeds. It was scheduled to arrive at 1:30 and Liz was so confident of this she proclaimed she would perform a sexual act on the platform if it got in an hour early. It got in at 12:30…

While I will blog far more extensively when I return to Leeds, having finally got onto the wifi network at my hostel I feel the need to blog. London has been an interesting bag of tricks so far, the Natural History Museum was a bit disappointing but Sin City was amazing and I meet up with Kieran even if our catch up time was brief. Stay tuned for more stories.

On Thursday we headed over to the University of Bradford for a talk entitled “Secularism – The Big Discussion” which was sort of a debate slash discussion about religion but it was all fairly wishey washey and never really got on topic. Not that, that made it a bad event. It was good.

One of the speakers was the chair of the Humanist Philosophers’ Group Peter Cave who we ended up going for a pint with afterwards! He’s actually a fantastic guy, not only does he know his stuff (which is to be expected) but he is also incredibly quick witted and entertaining.

Well worth the trip. Even if I didn’t get to bed until 1am while still having work the next day. Like every day really I guess.

Friday was the long awaited session of One Life – no, not the Gijs’s, mine of course! The subject was “leading a better life” and was your typical group discussion though scaled up for the fact that we would have a lot more people there, having sub-groups which then fed back to everyone else.

It being AHS weekend we brought in loads of takeaway food which despite quite disappointing attendance we still managed to eat our way through it all. Which I think is testament to the hedonistic lifestyle led by most of our society members. And believe me, it’s good 😀 .

Having got out of work earlier than planned I headed over to The Terrace to meet Raby have have a bit of a catch up as we’d not seen each other in a month or so. All seems well in the School of Computing, the closure of 24 hours labs is more a change in official policy than something that has actually happened.

Afterwards we headed over to The Park Horse for the talk organised by the Philosophy Society entitled “atheist arguments aren’t much good.” The room was packed out which made for some fantastic photos to add to the A-Soc gallery (what, it was an A-Soc event to attend the talk :p ).

The talk was very interesting and I was impressed by how fast moving it kept with the basic premise being that atheist arguments don’t really work because disproving a specific god doesn’t disprove the idea of a god, it simply disproves that god but you can simply change the definition of god to get round that (for example, he doesn’t need to be all powerful, as this is never said in the Bible, he could just be rather powerful).

Of course this argument doesn’t hold up because if you accept there may be some kind of god but choose not to believe in any of the specific gods then you’re an atheist. It isn’t Atheism with a capital T (or positive atheism or whatever you wish to call it) but it certainly is atheism but regardless it was an interesting talk and well worth attending.

I’m not sure John took too kindly to my thoughts on philosophy as a subject though lol.

Having escaped work at about 1:30 I headed over to Sophie and Jon’s house party which was still in full swing. What I found was an orgy of drinking, sex and hedonism the like of which only atheists can truely practice.

Liz making out with random boys, Michelle making out with random girls, everyone drinking some kind of mixture that looked far too much like sewage water and all of this culminating in a human pyramid which made for some excellent pictures.

Good party guys, well done!

Norm currently being struck down with illness, it fell to Sophie to lead this week’s session of One Life.

It went quite well, we got a good turn out as usual and the discussion kept rolling on around this week’s topic, science and critical thinking. The lesson I really took from it comparing it to the sessions I led was that you really need a critical mass in order to really get good discussion going which this year we thankfully have always managed.

Lil also did quite a good job as head chef for the evening so all in all things went very well.

So much for the awesome fireworks display happening outside of my window, it was hidden behind the houses next door. Gutted.

Not that anyone else seemed to actually make it down there, despite many promises. Rumour has it Si was too busy getting his birthday present from Izzy too? 😉 .

I was very impressed by the Roundhay Park bonfire though it’s been literally a decade, probably longer since I’ve last been but they started building it last Wednesday. Last Wednesday! It was like a wooden pyramid by the time they had finished it.

Anyway, happy birthday Si.

Well, it’s over. America has a black president. A very white black president but a black president none the less. And rightfully so too, Obama is the man for the job.

We held somewhat of an election party to watch the results come in last night. With the projector hucked up to project accross our lounge wall and the sound system hucked into it too it was more than big enough to enjoy a life size picture of Christopher Hitchens when he appeared on the BBC’s panel.

Having work I went to grab some sleep not long before 4am and everyone else had dispersed by the time I got up but never the less it was a fun night. And I’m now loaded up with several litres of energy drinks at work so I should be able to make it through the day 😀 .

Good news girls, Norm is back on the market.

Discussing last night with my housemates I mentioned everyone had bailed on me at Nicola’s party (because they’re all rubbish). What I didn’t know is that Liz hadn’t actually home last night but had instead gone over to Oli’s despite having a taxi waiting to take her home.

Perhaps some context is required. Being back on closes last night I had work in the afternoon which due to the fact nobody turned up for work yesterday, took far longer than it needed to and I didn’t end up getting out until about 2:30.

Having finally got away I headed over to Nicola’s party which was still loving along with about ten guests or so remaining. I was a little too sober to really join in the festivities at this point though and given everyone else had left, I went home after about an hour. I did get the amusement of watching Zoltan try to play Twister however 😀 .