Chris Worfolk's Blog

For my seventh project in my Toastmasters Competent Communicator manual, “research your topic”, I presented a talk entitled “Were the Catholics Framed?” This looked at whether the gunpowder plot was actually a set up by the Protestants, to frame the Catholics and increase the persecution.

Much like the arguments made that 9-11 was allowed to create an excuse to invade Afghanistan, the claims against 5-11 are almost certainly untrue as well. Not that there isn’t good evidence, but if you compare it to the Moon Landings, there is what looks like good evidence to suggest they were faked too – but when you dig a little deeper, you soon find the evidence isn’t so good, and you need very good evidence to belief a conspiracy theory.

I felt the talk went well, and managed to see off some good competition to take another Best Speaker ribbon – my fifth overall, and forth in a row. That said, there is certainly some room for improvement.

Part of my talk included a letter, which I read out, but having learned the letter I decided not to glance at it. This was a risky strategy because it might look to some people as if the letter wasn’t genuine, and indeed one person said he had wondered this. The letter was of course genuine, I had just prepared reasonably well, but maybe a few fake glances down at it would have been helpful.

Given the time constraints, I also cut some material out and hoped that it still all made sense. It did, except perhaps for my use of the word recusancy – the act of not attending CoE services, a crime that Catholics were often fined for.

I also felt I could have worked more movement into the speech, though nobody pulled me up on this in the evaluation or feedback. In any case there is work to do – as I write this, we are only 26 days away from the first round of the Public Speaking World Championships – and I haven’t started my speech yet!

Last week, we all gathered round to watch the third most watched sporting event in the world – the Super Bowl.

Actually, I don’t know where those figures are from. The reality is, we have almost no idea what the most watched events in the world are, but if we did, it probably would point to the Olympics. But it’s safe to say a fair few people were watching with us.

While ultimately, my favourite team, the San Francisco 49ers, lost to the Baltimore Ravens, a good night was had by all, and no one went away bitter about the fact that the 49ers only lost because the judges refused to throw a flag for the blatant pass interference against Michael Crabtree on the 4th and goal that decided the match. No one.

As usual at these sorts of events, we made too much food, allowing us to spend another two days living off ribs and wings – and what a happy two days they were.

It is also worth noting that Chris Culliver netted himself $40,000 for his appearance – more than a lot of my friends earn in an entire year. I guess homophobia does pay after all. I hate it when life works out like that.

Happy Darwin Day! To celebrate, why not attend a talk by Professor Steven French of the University of Leeds, entitled “Scientific Theory as Art”. Full details.

Recently, Bill Gates delivered the 2013 Richard Dimbleby Lecture, in which he discussed the struggle to eradicate polio from the world.

The good news is, that it is now only endemic in three countries – Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.

This in itself is no small achievement – polio is a disease that takes weeks to diagnose, which means the percentage of the population you need to immunise is higher, in this case 95%.

Take a country like India, with over a billion people – 75,000 new babies are born every day, and each of them requires several rounds of immunisation. That means that you need 200,000 vaccines per day, that need to be taken to rural communities, while being refrigerated, often that need to be carried for miles on foot by health workers. No wonder it took a staggering 2,000,000 people working on the programme – but they did it!

Unfortunately, you can’t stop fighting it until it’s eradicated, but with only three countries to go, the plan is to read that milestone by 2018. But more than being about one single disease, Gates points out…

Polio eradication is a proving ground, a test. It will reveal what human beings are capable of, and suggest how ambitious we can be about the future.

Together, we can achieve great things.

As a child, I never had a chance. By the time I was 14, soon to discover what an amazing band The Smashing Pumpkins were, they had already split up. But, in 2006, front man Billy Corgan and drummer Jimmy Chamberlin reformed the band with a rotating cast of extras to bring out a new album, Zeitgeist.

Many people weren’t expecting good things, with only two of the original band members together. But this was nieve, as Billy Corgan is so much the heart and soul of the band – indeed, in the early days, Corgan would actually play all of the guitar and bass parts himself, putting Chamberlin’s drums over the top, and ignoring the contribution of the other band members so that the album fitted together the way he wanted.

When Zeitgiest was released in 2007, I wasn’t that impressed though. It was OK, but it didn’t really capture my ears – I’ve listened to it a couple of times since with no strong desire to keep going back to it.

Their new album, Oceania, released last year, is no such disappointment however. Bringing back musical memories of their most successful days, the album is everything you want from a Pumpkins record – dark, soulful, and with a hint of fun.

To install Imagick, you would normally do this via PECL.

sudo pecl install imagick

However, when trying this on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, you may get an error similar to the following.

checking ImageMagick MagickWand API configuration program...
configure: error: not found. Please provide a path to MagickWand-config or Wand-config program

You can resolve this by installing a few extra packages.

sudo apt-get install libmagickwand-dev libmagickcore-dev

Now try re-running the original command and it should be successful.

Chris Ward tweeted this picture.

Last week at Atheist Society, retired Religious Education teacher Margaret Bramham presented a talk on the Gospels. It was an interesting talk, though I couldn’t help thinking about this Mitchell & Webb sketch.

Last week, we headed down to the new steak house located on the Headrow, Miller & Carter.

Despite having just opened, it was actually relatively quiet. We are able to walk up without a reservation, and I would say only about 30% of the tables were occupied – though there were enough people in there to give it some atmosphere.

Was it the best steak I’ve had in Leeds? No. But George claimed that his was. My personal opinion was that it can’t match the top tier of Blackhouse and Gaucho, but it was still an excellent steak, and certainly not somewhere I would be adverse to going back to.

Last weekend, I had the parents over for dinner, which seemed a good excuse to do something other than meat and wedges, thrown in the oven for 20 minutes and then consumed. So we headed down to the market to pick up some fresh fish.

Langoustines, which are used in scampi, were dead easy to prepare. All I did was drop them in a pan of boiling water and leave them for four or five minutes until the flesh turned from a translucent colour to an opaque white.

We got a whole red snapper, that we had cleaned when we bought it (which means removing all the guts) and then rinsed it when we got home. I then stuffed it full of ginger cut up into small cubes, several slices of lime, dill and a block of butter.

We also got a whole trevally jack, which was probably the nicest one of the two, again had it cleaned, and then stuff it with lemon slices, parsley and another slab of butter. I then cut a few slits in the sides, rubbed a little salt in the wounds and wrapped them both in tin foil and stuck them in the oven for about thirty minutes. Seemed to work quite well.