If you aren’t aware, today is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Darwin was a brilliant scientist that who moved our knowledge of the origins of life on uncountably despite the controversial nature of his work. Happy birthday Charles!
Well that’s it, I’m now a card carrying Humanist.
On the plus side, it would seem people are fairly receptive to moving the HSoWY meetings to a different night so we can finally end the clashing between HSoWY and A-Soc.
Last night’s talk was by Rich on Neodarwinism which was interesting. Meanwhile Norm lead a group discussion on Darwin at A-Soc, both events seemed to go down fairly well. Afterwards we converged in The Terrace so it was all good.
While I’m on the topic, congratulations to John and Zoltan who have been elected onto the committee at the EGM.
With a last minute lack of turnout on Monday night, I headed down to Club 360 at HiFi with Chris T to check out Subculture who had invited me down to watch them play.
There are quite a number of bands playing, each with their own unique style shall we say 😉 . I was impressed by Subculture, they got the crowd going and the music was good which is all you can really ask for from a gig.
Did someone say recovery steak? My my yes.
Sunday saw the day start with a trip to the Deer Park for lunch with Si. Norm and Kate also joined us as well as Liz who I would describe as being hyper and never stopping talking, but she wasn’t hyper, that’s just Liz at baserate.
This was followed by an evening trip to Louisiana Bar & Grill at which my earlier mixed grill prevented me from making the obvious choice. They also had a 20oz steak which was very tempted but being resigned to trying something new and exciting I went for the swordfish steak. It was fairly disappointing to be honest but never the less an experience.
The best part of the restaurant was the table cloths you could draw on though. Clearly there was only one thing on our minds 😉 .
I reiterate my horror of town on a weekend. 30 year olds still wearing the same outfits they were wearing 10 years ago, people so illiterate they can’t understand the difference between male and female toilets, drunk hookers lying in the middle of the ice covered road trying to light up their last cigarette. It’s just not a place you want to be.
That having been said, once you blank it all out and look at it on a microenvironmental level, things can be fun.
Having enjoyed a nice meal at Colton Mill Harvester (I didn’t go to the salad cart so sadly I’ll never know whether Morgan Freeman was working it) we headed in town and did the rounds at Wetherspoon’s, Sports Cafe and Walkabout. Of course, the night finished with the obligatory trip to Subway.
The real suprise of the evening though was that Crabs was still standing upright by the end of the evening. First time for everything I guess 😀 .
Last night saw the second session of Perspective at which we welcomed John Halsall to talk about Buddhism.
As with last week out speaker delivered an excellent talk and I came away thinking I had really learnt something. He also led a short mediation session in which we were encouraged to focus on different parts of the body in term and try to consider what was going on in each of them. Though to be honest it just got me thinking how many parts of my body hurt lol.
Yet again we packed out the room and so next week we might have to reconsider how we lay the room out or maybe even try and move to a bigger room. It’s not easy being so popular.
Be warned, ice may reduce stopping distances. Which is a bad thing when my car is parked up a little beyond your usual stopping distance.
Last night saw us hold a fairly informal debate prep meeting ahead of the upcoming debate with the Islamic soiciety later this month. They are bringing in an external speaker so we thought it best if we gathered our heads together a bit.
Despite our actual speaker for the debate not turning up we got a few good ideas down though a lot of it just needs a bit more research really. Never the less it should be a debate that is going to be very interesting indeed.
Yesterday saw us repeat a debate we ran at Atheist Society last year, “do the benefits of religion outweigh the negatives.” Initially we had five people volunteer to speak but three of them having pulled out at the last minute, myself and Nicola ended up arguing for the oppisition.
We won, and while this is to be expected I thought it would have been a closer debate given we were just winging it. Perhaps it is just too much of an easy argument to win? Though I did have an idea of what I wanted to say, having argued for the opposition last year.
Afterwards we headed down to OK Karaoke were it was indeed free entry – but there wasn’t any karaoke. I mean seriously, what karaoke bar doesn’t offer karaoke? At least, you would think that is the kind of thing they would have mentioned to Sophie when she spoke to them on the phone. They did however mention drinks offers, to which there weren’t any.
So we prompted stormed out and headed to Courtyard for a drink or two. Unfortunately Courtyard being dead as normal, decided to close at ten so we were only there for less than an hour. So all in all a bit of bust, but we’re still smiling so it’s all good.
Sunday, it snowed. It snowed quite a lot.
Monday, it snowed. That is quite a lot of snow, for us.
I gather the south had it even worse though to be honest, I think this is much of a case of it snows every year in Britain, why aren’t we prepared for it?
Not that I think we were overly unprepared for it up in Leeds, it remains to be seen as to whether we will get a second downfall that will really cripple us but on the whole things managed to keep moving, everyone in our office managed to make it in despite several of them living in the middle of nowhere.
For anyone in urban areas there was no real reason why those who live and work up north could not get to work on Monday. And given the roads were entirely clear by Tuesday there is certainly no reason why anyone would skip work by then.
