Chris Worfolk's Blog

Recently, I took part in the Area 15 International Speech & Evaluation contest. Having won the speech contest at Leeds City Toastmasters, and evaluation contest at White Rose Speakers, there was no relaxing as I had both competitions to do – not that I’m complaining!

Evaluation isn’t my strong point, so I was quite pleased that I managed to make third place (out of five). I did rather better in the speech contest though, winning by a very narrow margin, but never the less proceeding through to the Division contest at York.

Well done to everyone who took part, it was tough competition indeed!

Regardless of what happens in York, it does mean I have a new trophy to put on my shelf, at least until the Area Context next year.

However, the show was stolen by Erik, who provided Michael with dance lessons.

In the third book of the Discworld series, a dying wizard passes his staff onto a baby without first checking the gender. As it turns out, Eskarina is a girl. But there are no female wizards. What a to do.

I was a little disappointed in the content of the book I think, I was hoping for a in depth examination of gender roles and the struggle of a female wizard in an otherwise all male university. But most of the novel was about the journey to Unseen University rather than what happens when she gets there.

Never the less, it was an enjoyable read and featured plenty of Granny Weatherwax, which is always going to be a good thing.

This video was taken at the White Rose Speakers club level contest of the 2013 Toastmasters International Speech Contest. I had already won at Leeds City Toastmasters, so this was just a showcase, but I went on to win the Area level contest as well.

I’ve finally finished watching the new Jonathan Creek.

Overall, I thought it was OK, trending towards disappointing.

Mainly because he doesn’t live in a windmill anymore. That was the best bit. You can make the argument that they can’t just bring it back after a long break and pretend nothing has happened, but if we’ve learned anything from Red Dwarf X, actually you can, and they should have done.

The first layer of the mystery was good, and while it wasn’t as far reaching as “great”, if you watch back on the original episodes, it was only really series three to hit it out of the park – the rest were about as good as this one. The second layer with the secret assassinations seemed a bit over the top too.

I was also disappointed that there was no nice ending where he decided that settling down was all nonsense and he was going back to solving mysteries in a windmill. But, despite the lack of a windmill, he will be returning to our screens next year, in a new full series.

You may get an error similar to the following in phpMyAdmin.

PHP Fatal error: Class ‘PMA_Message’ not found in /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/libraries/Message.class.php

This is caused when Apache is unable to create a session – perhaps because of a permissions issue on the session folder, or perhaps because you have run out of disk space.

I’ve just finished reading the second Discworld book, The Light Fantastic. I can’t work out whether I enjoyed it more or less than the first one.

I found it a bit slow to get doing – Rincewind and Twoflower’s adventures weren’t that interesting to me, but as the book went on, I found the tales of the wizards, and particularly the goings on of Ankh-Morpork drew me in to a to an incredibly imaginative world. I’m hoping this bodes well for the third book, which focuses on the wizards and the witches.

I also liked the increasing use of language tricks employed by Pratchett that made it an even cleverer text than the first.

They’re more difficult to do, in narrowboats.

I had only read one Terry Pratchett book since becoming an adult, which is now quite a long time ago, and I’ve never read any Discworld – so clearly that was something that needed fixing. While some people suggested the first in the series was far from the best, after careful consideration, I decided my OCD was too great not to start at the beginning, so The Colour of Magic it was.

The book starts by unloading a large amount of information at once, and I struggled to put everything together immediately, but as it went on, everything slotted into place and I found myself amerced in a wonderful world, packed with fantasy, magic and ever flowing adverbs.

In fact, I enjoyed it so much, I’ve already made a start on the second book in the series, The Light Fantastic.

Recently, Panorama aired a documentary looking at Sharia Courts. You can watch it online if you missed it.

It was certainly an eye opener, though the sad reality is that many of us might not be surprised. The programme contained Islamic scholars recommending to women who said they had suffered domestic abuse should go back to their partners and perhaps try improving their cooking or making more of an effort to look nice, surpassing even the most distasteful sarcastic jokes you could dream up.

Of course, the programme couldn’t point out the end conclusion – that Islam is a bad women. They extensively pushed the idea that these courts were bad for women, or at least some of them where, but never really dared to suggest that the doctrines they are interpreting might partly be at fault too.

Being a libertarian, I’m not sure exactly how we could tackle this situation even if we wanted to though. A mediation service is perfectly acceptable, and indeed encouraged by our own legal system in order to free up more court time. So given Sharia courts are not legally binding and therefore the women there voluntarily submit to them, we have no right to interfere.

In fact, it’s unclear why the women actually wanted a Sharia divorce, when they had already received a civil divorce – given you’re not actually married if you get an Islamic marriage, why would you need a divorce? Just walk away.

There are some issues that can be and do need tackling though.

Firstly and foremost, any compulsion to use the mediation system. Obviously, this needs to be stamped out. This is a difficult one though because if your entire extended family considers the courts to be the law it must be very difficult to ignore. Sure you can just walk away, but that must be like trying to leave a cult. Unfortunately, it is difficult to see how we could tackle that given it is actually the doctrine, not necessarily the system, that is the problem.

Secondly, we can stop so called Sharia marriages. If they want to have a Sharia ceremony, that is fine, we Humanists do the same thing. But marriage is an actual legal term, and if you’re not actually providing a proper legal civil marriage, then calling it a marriage is deceitful and false and ultimately leads to the kind of situations where people getting divorced have no legal protection because they weren’t actually married.