Archive for March, 2009

Norm having asked the BHA to provide a speaker for the Humanism session of Perspective he seen got an email from the BHA asking him if we would be able to speak at an A-Soc event at the university. He stepped up to the plate and agreed, so there was our Humanist speaker sorted.

While it was of course BHA brand Humanism it was never the less an interesting session and we got to test the catering urn so given how bad attendance could have been given it was the last day of term, I was quite impressed with how it went.

On Thursday myself and Rich headed out once again, this time joined by Nicola, to do our bit. We were going to do a bit of cooking beforehand but Rich was unfortunately detained at work and so we ended up doing soup again, not that it is overly a bad choice.

There seems to be a fair bit of interest in the group now which hopefully will continue to grow and we can expand our activities.

Wednesday saw me head over to York for the Brights meetup over there. Nick kindly lent me his GPS which resulted in it being rather easier to get there but when I took the suggestion to follow it’s directions on foot things went a little worse. After some serious walking and a quick phone call I eventually found my way to Stonegate though and met everyone else.

The conversations made for some very interesting discussions, while there is usually this in most of the events I go to, the night’s discussions were especially interesting. As ever it also provided me with a good excuse to do some name dropping which is always fun.

Tuesday we were scheduled to watch Morgan Spurlock’s Where on Earth is Osama Bin Laden but Norm hadn’t ordered the DVD on time so we had to switch to plan B. Luckily I had a feeling it was all going to go wrong and so had copied over Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days onto my laptop as a backup.

It ended up going down really well and we got some good discussion afterwards including plenty of discussion in meeting room 3 as we wanted to avoid the carnage of St. Patrick’s Day going on in the bars below.

In the end we ended up sitting outside on The Terrace which altough a little on the chilly side provided a good arena for group conversation in that for once we could actually here each other. And I managed to solve my current Rationalist Week scheduling issue so it worked out well all round.

On Monday we headed up to Durham for the Humanist Society’s Reason Week. We were a bit lacking in numbers with only myself and Sophie going up in the end but it was a great chance to have a good chat with Sophie, especially given I don’t currently have a working stereo after last week.

Ellis delivered an excellent talk over lunch and it was reasonably well attended – around 20 people showed up for it which is better than we normally do on the first day of Rationalist Week. The evening screen attracted only half that but was never the less a good event, who can say no to Life of Brian?

Ellis also delivered me a tour of Durham which is a beautiful city and includes lots of cool bars too so it made for a very interesting day. I was very impressed with however together they are in Durham and I’m sure they will have a very successful future.

Sunday saw us forego our usual restaurant trip in favour of staying in and getting takeaway. Myself and Craig went for Chinese which I feel was a very solid choice. If nothing else it provided me with some salted pork and chicken to eat the next day which is always a winning combination!

I can now also highly recommend the mini spring rolls from Canton Flavour, not that I have ever really had something from there I wasn’t impressed with. It turned out being not much cheaper than our usual night out though definitely worth it.

Saturday was our long awaited awesome house party. Well, I say “awesome”, I wasn’t actually there because it had finished and everyone was asleep by the time I got there. What a rager.

Last Friday saw our GIAG event of the semester, an interfaith panel. There was a good turn out of religious speakers though notably lacking a Humanist one and so just before we got started I was asked to speak for the side of Humanism and so stepped in.

We got some really good questions in the end and ones which generally everyone could answer on. The Humanist view seemed fairly in line with the Pagan view (Pagans, much like Sikhs, are basically just Humanists) though the Islamic view isn’t quite as in line.

I tried to answer a lot of the questions with the best bits of Humanism – for example the large amounts of pre-martial sex and I caught the Islamic speaker (who ironically was sat right next to me) turn away in digust a few times. Still I’m sure I would have done the same if he was as frank about the Islamic teachings as he could have been.

Rich having become increasingly flustrated with the lack of action in Humanist communities suggested that we should really be getting out there and doing good work and leading by example. As such, last Thursday (the 12th) we headed out to feed the homeless.

It was an interesting experience. We took soup and coffee which went down reasonably well although most of them weren’t overly interested in the soup, they just wanted the coffee. It’s also suprising how few of them there actually are on the streets.

Interestingly enough though there isn’t that much support in Leeds. There is one shelter, St. George’s Crypt but that is basically all there is. Maybe it’s just not that much of a problem but it was certainly nice to be able to provide those that were out with a hot drink.

I got woken up yesterday morning by Liz knocking on my door informing me the police were hear. Always a good way to start the day.

Turns out someone had been down the street doing over cars. They smashed my quarter light, realised my car was deadlocked so smashed the passenger side front window and got the stereo. Awesome.

Great time to find out that your car alarm doesn’t work. But Evans Halshaw assured me it has been through the full Network Q check thing, which shows how worthwhile that is (this is after they failed to notice my central locking didn’t work).

So yeah, turns out I’m £200 worse off than I thought I went to bed on Tuesday night. It seems somewhat futile to bother trying to save money or pay off overdrafts, I don’t seem to be getting anywhere.