Archive for October, 2009

On Sunday evening I got a phone call from Daryl informing me he had accidentally booked Atheist Bus Campaign creator Ariane Sherine to speak at the next Skeptics in the Pub meeting.

So on Monday I headed over to Batley (where Daryl resides into what is essentially a small castle) to discuss ideas of how we could re-launch the group with more exciting speakers and a better format. We began hunting for venues and next thing we knew we were driving back to Leeds to check out The Living Room on Greek Street.

By the end of the evening we had a new venue lined up, a new format in development and a plan to make Leeds Skeptics bigger and better than ever. Win.

I also have to say that Daryl has a very impressive collection of comics. I can’t say I know that much about them but he has box after box of them and all of them looking fancy and collectable. Top marks to anyone who has a replica Lightsaber in their lounge too.

Sunday afternoon we headed down to Shaky Jakes in Headingley for some sundaes to celebrate Viv’s birthday. They literally have every chocolate bar you can think of available to make into a milkshake or sundae and if there is something they don’t have you can even take your own chocolate down and have them use that!

Despite feeling rough on Sunday I endeavoured to make it down to Cuthbert Brodrick for the usual Sunday lunch. This week saw Kate extend her usual diet of chocolate cake to include a bowl of chips too – to which ended up being combined into some radical new version of the chocolate chip.

Today I delivered a talk which sounded ominously like a Channel 4 documentary to Leeds Skeptics in the Pub. It went reasonably well and discussions went on well into the afternoon so over all a good event. From now on we’re back to proper guest speakers too so things are looking quite good for Skeptics at the moment.

Friday saw us kick things off with One Life, this week’s session being about ethics. As John was running late I started the session as chair for the first half an hour or so raising a few topic discussions before the real content matter was entered when John arrived. Unfortunately we didn’t have enough plates and cutlery for the committee ended up eating out of a cup with a spoon!

Afterwards we headed up to City Church on Headingley road who were running re:fresh, a free BBQ and hot drinks session to catch drunk people Otley running it. We would have had a few drinks in the old bar first but as they were Christians they had to go to bed at 11 so we had to go there first 😀 .

Having come direct from One Life we were of course in our Atheist Society hoodies which made for a fun time – of course they were very welcoming though the hoodies did get described as inappropriate by a girl on a fancy dress Otley run dressas as a Roman which we didn’t find at all ironic. After all, what have the Romans ever done to Christians? 😉

As Paul in our office had a rather big birthday coming up (I won’t mention which one), we decided to head over to the pub on Thursday for a bit of lunch and a drink to celebrate. As such I really couldn’t say no so took a day off from cutting back on my spending.

In the end though Rob put the company card behind the bar so it didn’t actually cost me anything – therefore when it came to Friday and everyone was still up for the usual Friday lunch at the pub, I had effectively saved a pub lunch’s worth of money so technically I wasn’t spending any more than I would have 😀 . Good times.

Wednesday saw the first official meeting of the trustees since formation.

It was most productive with us talking long into the night over possible ideas and strategies for the organisation and out of it has come some really productive action points. I can’t talk about what these are yet but hopefully we’ll have more news on these soon!

We have also established regular trustee meetings now also so things should start moving forward at quite a pace.

This evening A-Soc held a fundraiser for Amnesty International. It was reasonably successful – we got around 30 people there and raised over £100, the winning idea of the night being the raffle to which Jonni had secured us some amazing prizes – including tickets to the Four Nations final which I walked away with! I understand it is some kind of sporting event, I will ask the guys at work to explain more tomorrow.

For those of you who haven’t heard of the English Defence League (I hadn’t until today), they bill themselves as “peacefully protesting against militant Islam” so you can fill in the blanks. Anyway I was linked to their website via UAF’s website and had a quick browse around. They don’t have much content but they do have some interesting Google Adwords on their forum registration page 😀 .

As usual we headed down to Cuthbert Brodrick on Sunday for lunch. It saw a much overdue return of Sarann and Moz and a lengthly session of gossiping about a number of individuals. It also somewhat disturbed myself and George that we only left the pub a meer 36 hours before returning – does anyone know what the frequency of visiting a Wetherspoon’s is before you’re officially an alcoholic? Not that I was even drinking today but I’m not sure that cancels it out.