Chris Worfolk's Blog

In November, I travelled down to Colchester to compete in the District 71 humorous speaking contest finals. I lost in the semi-finals which was pretty disappointing. I was happy with the structure and quality of my speech, but I didn’t get the laughs the other contestants did, so more humour is probably needed. Our short stay at the conference was enjoyable though – unlike the Riviera Renaissance conference everything was in the same hotel which made it a lot nicer.

This is me receiving my certificate of participation.

The purpose of these is to fill time while the votes are being counted.

When we were looking for venues for the Sunday Assembly I visited Temple Works. It is located just down at the bottom of town and was once the biggest room in the world. It really is massive. When I was shown it it was like a moment out of Star Trek when you see a huge space station for the first time – it just went on and on! A mega-cool venue that I hope we can work with some day.

For more details, see their website.

Do you like american football? Want to get more exercise? Don’t fancy the idea of a crippling injury? Then flag football just might be for you! Flag is a faster-paced non-contact version of the game in which instead of tackling people you have to strip a flag from their waist. No blocking or kicking either – so you have to move fast!

The Leeds Tornadoes flag football team is starting in January and are now looking for people to get involved, either as players or as coaches, volunteers, cheerleaders and fans. You can sign up to the mailing list on their website or find them on Facebook.

We held off until the Friday to hold out Halloween party, being proper adults with jobs and all. It was of course fancy dress.

In October, we launched Sunday Assembly Leeds with the help of London-founder Sandison Jones. 120 people turned out for the event as well as BBC Look North, BBC Radio 4 and plenty of other media too. We held it in the beautiful St John the Evangelist’s Church next to the St John’s Centre (surprisingly).

Yes, it’s real.

Farewell to a man who changed the world.

Last month John Fletcher presented a talk entitled “A Skeptical Look at Statistics” at Leeds Skeptics. It was great to see people there who were really interested in stats. It was also the first event we have held at the Hedley Verity and while it isn’t perfect, it is certainly an acceptable backup venue.

Following on from the video I posted yesterday regarding Amazon’s air shipments, Gareth pointed out Waterstones have announced plans to start delivering books by trained owls.

Looks pretty cool. I’m still expecting to find the bit where they say “only joking of course”.