Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

The first of our weekly summer socials for Atheist Society rolled round last Tuesday and with many of the undergraduates having left for the summer it felt just look old times. It was a really good night in the end and The Library were still serving food when we got there which is always a good thing.

Last weekend was the AHS national conference 2009 hosted by Warwick Atheists. It is an interesting setup they have down there, it is a campus university based in the middle of nowhere as most of them are – but most of the students don’t live on campus. That seemed the point of a remote campus university to me but there you go. It’s also not in Warwick, nor in Leamington Spa were we were all staying lol.

We did however get the pleasure of spending some time in Leamington Spa as well as visiting my first 24/7 McDonald’s (though I’m sure most of you can’t really appreciate how exciting that is for me :p ), it’s good to know what where ever you are you can always really on Wetherspoon’s for a cheap pint.

Warwick’s campus was quite nice, they have a great bar there called the Dirty Duck which serves what I can only describe as duck steak – it’s like a full size big steak rather than the breast fillet you get from chickens and was absolutely delicious. They also do a fine carvery which we sampled on the Sunday.

In terms of AHS stuff we now have an exciting new committee with Jenna as president, Adrian as secretary and Stuart as treasurer. A number of other appointments were also made, congratulations to all who got positions! I am stepping down as webmaster as I believe I can better serve the AHS as a trustee so Michael will be taking on the web duties.

All in all the coming year is looking pretty bright for the AHS.

Tuesday saw the End of Year Ball which this year saw several of the freethinking societies in and around Leeds unite. While it was mostly an A-Soc affair we got people from Skeptics, York Brights, the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire and HAG there, even if this is mostly the same crowd lol.

We kicked things off at Spice Quarter where I managed to get through a reasonably respectable five plates though I believe I was significantly trailing Zoltan who was on a mission to eat everything they owned.

The made in front of you stir fry had to be the winning dish as you literally can just pile everything on your plate and get them to stir fry it. Interesting, despite what sause I asked for it all seemed to come out of the same pot but it actually tasted like what I asked for so I’m not going to complain.

Afterwards we headed to Bourbon for their Mix Tape Project night which was really good if people did start disappearing – the last people to leave the place where myself and Paul! That’ll show those kids who can really party… :D.

In the end we had 34 people turn up which I think is quite respectable.

Tuesday night saw us screen Dogma for another relaxed night of de-stressing between revision periods. This was of course followed by the usual social at The Terrace though I think the best attended all evening was actually the committee meeting.

Yesterday I headed over to York for the monthly York Brights meetup.

While it wasn’t overly attended the conversation was interesting as always and the real shocker of the evening was that I managed to make it to York and back without GPS and without getting lost! Now that is a successful evening.

On Tuesday I delivered a short series of talks to Atheist Society on evolution. It focused on some of the fun facts of evolution and strange twists which don’t seem to make sense at first but then, when you actually find out the answer, it makes perfect sense. The enemy of the god of gaps if you will.

Last Sunday we headed down to The Mill to celebrate my dad’s birthday. It being full though we decided to leave. True story. We ended up at the Brown Cow, now known as the Brown Cow & Dragon for some Thai food. Not that I got Thai food of course but it was nice to know I had the option.

Afterwards I headed down to grab a quick drink at The Mill with friends from work before heading for an early night, of starting work 🙁 . I ended up getting to bed just before 4am but caught up on most of my work. Fun times.

Well that’s it kids, Rationalist Week 2009.

What a week. If nothing else it has been incredibly tiring, I arrived on site at around noon on Sunday and didn’t leave until 2am Wednesday! Not to mention it ended in a 22 hour shift on the Friday. I haven’t had time to catch up on sleep yet and given it’s now 1:30am and I have to be up for work in six hours and still have loads of work to do first it doesn’t look like that will be happening any time soon.

In terms of attendance we probably hit the same numbers as last year, the weather was great which was really nice in terms of keeping us warm and be able to setup and take down in nice sunny conditions but probably didn’t do us any favours in terms of attendance.

Unfortunately the week was tinged with an ugly side as members of Leeds Islamic Society mounted a campaign of hate, violence and attacks against us but beyond that the week passed by with no major problems.

I will probably blog more about the various events we ran throughout the week but for the moment I would just like to say a huge thank you to everyone who helped out during the week to make it just a fantastic week!

I was heading down to the April meeting of Leeds Skeptics in the Pub when I came across the Sikh new year celebrations on Millenium Square. Having got down there quite early I decided to hang around and snap a few photos. It seemed quite well organised and attended though I did like the fact their PowerPoint presentation on the big screen used the generic ocean theme we use for everything at A-Soc 😀 .

Heading over to the April meetup of the York Brights group I was finally able to get there while it was daylight. Therefore I took the opportunity to get a few photos in as I walked past the Minster.

The group meetup itself was excellent as usual and rather well attended this month so it made for plenty of interesting conversation. Plus it was a chance to talk about Rationalist Week to a whole new group of people 😀 .