Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

On Thursday I hosted a New Year’s Eve midnight dinner party which seemed to go down a storm. It just goes to show that cooking while intoxicated, even to the level where you can’t string a sentence together, it is safe and successful idea.

On Thursday myself and Kieran braved the bitter cold to go for a wander round Kirkstall Abbey. A lot of it was unfortunately closed off but we got round the main parts and the visitor’s centre which was informative if a little brief.

In the true spirit of the holiday period there has been a fair bit of drinking within the past week.

Tuesday was Lil’s birthday and as such we went for our traditional Lil’s birthday celebration steak. She wasn’t there or anything because she was busy having a meal at some other restaurant but it was still excellent steak.

Wednesday afternoon Mike went on some kind of mission to get everyone to the pub for a few pints as it was the final time we would be in before New Year. I still had things to do however so I ended up going out for a drink and then back to work!

Finally Kieran arrived in the evening and we headed out for drinks on Call Lane with Rich and Tim. Fun times.

The Saturday before last I worked my last McShift.

It’s very depressing because it’s a clear sign I’m getting older. Not that the fact that many of my work colleagues were 6-7 years younger than me wasn’t a constant reminder of my aging but somehow getting up and moving on with my life really drives the message home.

I’ll miss the place, I’ll miss the people. The people really were fun. I like most of my work colleagues but there is something about the fun and the energy of all been stuck in a crap dead on job (not that I was stuck there, essentially working for laughs but anyway) and making the best of it.

Still, onwards and upwards. I have exciting new work commitments now and new challenges ahead with my charity. This chapter may be over but the book has just begun.

Friday night was work’s Christmas party. If nothing else it produced some good photos 😀 .

Last Tuesday saw the last proper meeting of term one at Atheist Society.

Having screened Morgan Spurlock’s Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden which was a very interesting watch but non-surprisingly very pandering towards the left we headed down to D-Fusion for a night of karaoke.

We recently held the One Life wrap meal to see out the end of the One Life course. I’m not so sure how successful it is, it’s nice to go for meal but nothing is really wrapped up. Even if not I would like to think it brings course participants together but then most people are in A-Soc already. Maybe we just need to change our advertising strategy.

We ended up down at Wagamama which I wasn’t overly impressed with. Their bench seating and place holders that were simply McDonald’s tray liners but without the trays isn’t exactly the hallmark of a good quality restaurant. Food was good, I think, but not really being a fan of it and their refusal to do my chicken in a bun to simulate the idea of a chicken burger didn’t held matters.

Still afterwards we got a long night’s drinking at ‘Spoons so all ended well. Even if it was a bit of a couples fest with Jonni+Kat and John+Lil.

While the new billboard campaign from the BHA at first glance seems to be a final attempt to squeeze a bit more publicity out of the Atheist Bus Campaign, on review it’s quite a remarkable idea – they’ve only actually paid for four billboards and from it have generated a wealth of publicity, that’s rational thinking in action.

The Freethinker published a good news story on the event quoting several religious figures reacting to the news. While it would be easy for me to have a go and those that use it as an opportunity to attack humanists the comment that really draw my attention was this one.

One positive thing that could come from this is if it opens a debate on faith. I am not offended by it, but perhaps the money used for it could have been channeled better into a humanitarian cause.

At first it seems like a harmless, even supportive comment. But of course it isn’t. It’s a grasping desperate attempt to reclaim the higher ground from the bottom of the cesspool religion has found itself in.

Think about what has just been said here – you should stop wasting your money on religious issues and give it to charitable causes. The church, the Catholic Church no less says we should stop channeling money into religious issues and start giving it away to better causes!

From the church who has it’s own sovereign state containing streets lined with gold comes the message that we should stop wasting our money and use it to feed the hungry, build shelter for the poor and help the downtrodden. What a beautiful, humanist message.

This is a much wider issue of course – have you seen how much churches rake in these days? Tithing, the donation of 10% of your salary is still common practice and with the average salary in the UK now being £26,000, that means the average church patron is giving £2,600 a year to church! That’s more than I bet you spend on food.

Luckily though there is a salvation. The figure won’t actually be that high on average because atheists are statistically more likely to be on above average salaries which will drag the average up a bit though not much. But more importantly atheists are earning large amounts, they are more likely to he charitable with it. Just look at the stats on Kiva.

I’ve added a new category named essays to my blog.

It will house all of my long whiney posts that you probably won’t reach the bottom of but should because that’s where the message is. It will hopefully be sufficently different from the thoughts category in a number of ways.

First off, they should be longer and more involved. I’ve gone back and categorised a lot of old posts into the category but rejected a lot of them simply because they were too short even though they perhaps otherwise fitted the bill.

Secondly they should be relevant to the wider audience. A lot of the posts in the thoughts category are just literally stuff I have thought about or which is relevant to my life but anything categorised into essays should have meaning for at very least a group people who don’t know me personally.

Finally they should be on some kind of important topic or aspect of life. As such many also share the categories of politics and religion, but not all of them do.

If you think there is something I should write about, why not suggest it in a comment.

For those of you that aren’t aware, due to some unfortunate events that have befallen my recently I now have a new laptop. This one is going to be named Tolima and is a rather shiny MacBook Pro.

I went for the higher spec 2.5Ghz Core 2 Duo with the extended hard drive and so far performance seems reasonably swish. I haven’t really put it to the test beyond some big installing but it potters along quite nicely and does some lightening fast shutting down.

The battery life is also very nice, I squeezed around 7 hours out of it last night, a small amount of that time it was on sleep but I certainly wasn’t taking it easy installing going on 20gb of programs and I began to put my life back together. It’s also not much heavier than my old laptop while squeezing another inch into the screen which makes quite a difference to the point I wish I could run it at a higher resolution than 1280.

Only time will tell if I love it or hate it but I’m planning to duel boot it anyway as 7 really is a sexy piece of work.