Chris Worfolk's Blog

Last weekend, myself and George headed up to Weetwood to watch the Leeds Celtics american football team play.

It was dry, but never the less very cold and due to what we suspect was the ambulance getting lost, the game didn’t kick off until an hour after it’s scheduled time – a risky move when you have so little day light these days.

By this point, we were too cold to watch the whole manage, but in the first half Leeds Celtics scored two touchdowns, both with two point conversions, against the Northumbria Mustangs.

Having finished chairing the Leeds Skeptics meeting, I sped up to North Leeds on Wednesday to join the end of White Rose Speakers’ final meeting before Christmas, which, for a holiday celebration, was being held at one of the member’s houses (who happens to have a large house).

The reason I was so keen to get there was that the group had very kindly agreed to do a collection and raffle to raise money for the Humanist Action Groups 2012 Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters.

Once there, they sprung a table topic on me, the song title “Merry Christmas Everyone”, to which I talked about how you can’t call an event this time of year a Christmas event as people get upset, so you have to end up calling it about a dozen different things in the title to keep everyone happy.

We came away with bags of stuff, and plenty of money from the raffle too! Thanks to everyone donated, your support is very much appreciated!

A massive thank you to everyone who contributed to the Humanist Action Group‘s 2012 Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters! Last Sunday saw the (almost) final day of what has been six nearly two months of hard work, planning, coordinating and executing the project and we’re pleased so that in total, we raised in-kind donations worth a brilliant…

The donations went to three local homeless shelters, two of which are direct access – this means that service users are able to turn up, often coming in just for a day or two to escape the cold – so being able to give out a box containing food and some warm clothing is invaluable to such organisations.

You can see all the photos from the event on our Flickr page.

This month at Leeds Skeptics, John Wilson, founder of Wilsons Solicitors, presented a talk “do we get the legal system we deserve?”

He argued that the legal profession was in need of a shake up. He used an analogy of the opticians industry, that thirty years ago was hidden away in offices, where nobody really knew how much anything cost, everything was slow and customer service was just shockingly bad. Today, after reform, you can walk into an opticians on the high street, get an eye test and select from a huge range of glasses, should you need them. Shouldn’t be going to see a solicitor be just as simple?

John argues that it should, and I imagine most of us will strongly agree with him! It was a great talk to round out the year, and one that I found extremely interesting.

This month at the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire, Simon Wellings presented a talk on Positive Money: A Simple Solution to the Debt Problem. It is a talk similar to the one he had given at Leeds Skeptics, though truth be told, I enjoyed the Skeptics talk a little more.

It was certainly thought provoking as Simon laid out the problems with the monetary system, and much debate followed the talk, though one of the members, who works in a bank treasury, strongly disputed some of the facts in the talk.

Ultimately there were two possible take home messages from the talk – you need to overhaul the monetary system and completely change the way the financial sector operates across the world. Or you need to start a bank.

If you are trying to install YAML via PECL on Lion, you may get an error such as the following.

configure: error: Please install libyaml
ERROR: `/private/tmp/pear/install/yaml/configure --with-yaml' failed

Some solutions on the internet suggest installing it via a package manager.

rvm pkg install libyaml

However, although this process will claim to work, when you come to run the command again, it will fail at the same point. Instead, you need to download libyaml, which you can do here, then extract it, cd into the directory and run the following commands.

./configure
make
make install

You don’t need to sudo. You should now be able to run the install command again.

sudo pecl install --ignore-errors yaml

This time it should be successful.

Today is the day! After six weeks of hard work, the Humanist Action Groups 2012 Holiday Food Drive for local homeless shelters ends today. We’ll be gathering everything together, boxing everything up, and delivering it to shelters throughout the day.

If you missed the deadline, you can still support our work by making a financial donation to the group. You can do this via Virgin Money Giving, or see our website.

Photos will be posted after the event – stay tuned.

Last week, we held a fund raiser at Strawberry Fields, to raise money for the Humanist Action Group’s 2012 Holiday Food Drive. A big thanks to everyone who came, everyone who provided baked goods for the bake sale, and the venue for being so accommodating.

It’s hard to believe that us non-believers have now been getting together for six years to celebrate the holiday season with a meal. This year saw us visit an old classic – Spice Quarter.

They were surprisingly quiet for the Christmas period – I thought it would be rammed but someone even got a walk up table while we were there.

There was also a chav-tastic moment when we spotted a young lady wearing what I can only describe as a “magician’s assistant” leotard, covered in a thin net skirt that didn’t cover anything.

For a long time now, the monarchy has been entirely out of step with modern Britain.

If the monarch had multiple children, the succession would be given to the eldest boy, rather than simply the eldest child. For the grave sin of being born a woman, you would be passed over by your younger brother, because men are obviously generically predisposed to be better at ruling a kingdom.

But no more! A new royal succession law is passing that removes said gender discrimination, meaning the eldest child, regardless of gender, will now inherit the Crown.

I have to say though, I can’t really believe we spent parliamentary time on this.

Ending discrimination is always a good thing, but the reality is that almost nobody is affected by this. Indeed, even if you look at the past thousand years, how many people would be affected by it? My guess is, it’s very, very few people. You would be able to count them on one hand.

That is far less than the amount of women who are going to be raped in the next 24 hours, or the number of transwomen who will be murdered in the next month. Maybe that would be a good place to spend some parliamentary time?

You can then argue that it is the principle that it is important – that the monarchy are the head of the UK, and indeed the Commonwealth, so it is important we show from the top that we don’t discriminate on gender.

This is a much better argument, but if we are going to recognise that the monarchy is a ridiculous unfair archaic system, why are we still tolerating it? Why not finally make the move to a republic? The phrase polishing a turd comes to mind, because we still have a system where 99.9999% of the population are excluded because of the circumstances of their birth – we have hardly fixed discrimination in this area – this isn’t a victory for women, it’s a victory for Kate Middleton’s daughter. That we spent our parliamentary time on.