Chris Worfolk's Blog

Emily Barran has written an excellent feature on how capitalism is being blamed for the economic crunch in the October 24th edition of LS2.

While it’s easy to blame banking executives, she rightly points out people aren’t pointing the fingers at themselves after taking out 100% mortgages that realisticlly, they could never really afford. I was listening to a woman who is now a single parent complaining the bank was repossessing her house. Of course they are. Indeed, as a shakeholder in Nothern Rock now it has been nationalised I insist they do repossess your house to get their money back. You can’t afford your house, move to a cheaper one, they are desperate to sell them at the moment.

And what exactly is the result of the credit crunch anyway? Having discussed it on my podcast, neither myself nor Gijsbert said we had changed our lifestyle because of it. How has it really affected your life? Probably not that much. A capitalism economy fluctuates, that doesn’t given you an excuse to take out a massive loan then complain when you can’t make the payments. That just makes you an idiot.

4:30 in the morning I started work today!

I mean seriously, who isn’t asleep at 5am? Apparently nobody because we didn’t get any customers until nearly 6am.

I remember back in the day when being on an open meant you had to get up early. Now you’re just getting up in the middle of the night. And it’s dark for the first four hours which is wierd. Still due to ridiculous over staffing I was done by not long after 12 so it all worked out I guess.

Once again Friday saw a well attended One Life course where we were discussing ethics. It was an interesting session, we spent most of the night with me arguing in favour of objective morality to get the debate going which was fun 😀 .

Photos of the event can be found on Facebook.

I was listening to George Lamb on 6Music on Monday who commented that he had a special matress for shielding him from electrosmog. I don’t know if this was a joke but if it isn’t, that is certainly interesting.

For those who are not aware, electrosmog is the term for all the radiation flying about from electromagnetic fields (EMFs) emitted by computers, mobile phones and other such electronic devices. People suffer from a range of symptoms because of it when they develop a condition known as electrosensitivity. Which is interesting because, it doesn’t exist.

As The Guardian discusses, there have been over 30 scientific studies into electrosensitivity, all of which concluded that there was no such thing. Whatever they are suffering from, it certainly isn’t electrosensitivity, at least as we know it.

Just ask the World Health Organisation. Back in December 2005 they concluded

There is no scientific basis to link ES symptoms to EMF exposure. Further, ES is not a medical diagnosis, nor is it clear that it represents a single medical problem.

It’s almost enough to start another campaign over.

With colds running rampant throughout wider society particularly on campus, last night’s podcasting suffered from the fact that almost everyone involved was either ill or had lost their voice.

Never the less we battled on and made some rather interesting shows including a long discussion about the potential of parodying jazz cafe with a slightly less clean focus 😉 . We also managed to get Fonze to speak at this one, mainly due to so many other people bailing so it’s worth listening to to hear him break his long time silence.

I went for a meal with my parents on Wednesday night. I mean, that’s like a thing to do when you’re really old isn’t it?

I was hoping it would result in a fairly reasonable night in terms of sleep given I left at like 8:45ish so I could get to Tesco for 9 but by the time I had shopped (including 38 litres of drinks 😀 ), got home, unpacked, had a shower it was like 11 and I still had a load of work to do which saw me into the early hours. Oh well, better luck next time.

Genius. Absolute genius.

Tuesday came and it was time for another exciting A-Soc meeting. We bashed our way through quite a number of issues at the committee meeting before heading down to set up for our screening of Jesus Camp, a film about the Evangelist summer camps for young children to prepare them to “lay down their lives for the Gospel” in the same way Muslims are.

It is a scary film. Some of the one liners in it are incredible.

Attendance was following our usual numbers of popularity, I’ve also got almost everyone’s name now which I’m quite pleased about. It was good being able to put names to faces. The real bonus though is the amount of people that have signed up for London – we’ve sold almost all the places now, there is like one or two left.

The social went on long into the night and I ended up getting home at like 1-1:30 or something with a very drunk Michelle and Liz in toe.

It’s possibly the end of an era. The Crusader has closed down! No more pub quiz on a Sunday night 🙁 . At least for the moment, the pub is up for sale but it’s been up for sale for a long time and apparently built up quite a lot of debt while they were unable to find a buyer and so has now been closed down.

Every cloud has a silver lining however and this has been a bit of a catalyst for ideas as to what else we can get up to on a Sunday night. The quiz wasn’t that important, mainly because we lost every week, so maybe this is the start of something new.

As a result the first of our new ideas for night’s out was to go to Xscape in Castleford to shoot some pool. I’ve never been to Xscape before it is a fairly impressive place in terms of size and facilities (complete with a 24 hour Friday Saturday McDonald’s just over the road) and the pool was good, £4 an hour all you can play.

It’s a good enough replacement to fill the void left by pub quiz, we got plenty of conversation in as I hitched a lift down there with Zoe, came back with Rich and had a phone call with Scoj live from Ireland too. As usual Becky ended the night on the floor too. Fast times indeed.

I’m really struggling to keep up with my blogging at the moment. Not that I am not managing to do it but I have so many events to blog about that I haven’t got round to, I have drafts awaiting completion and other ideas which I really want to talk about.

I’m not sure sure why though, while my life certainly is busy, I’m not sure it is really any busier than it used to be. And I don’t think it’s apathy as I have been blogging on a regular basis regardless. Maybe I’m just getting old and can’t quite justify blogging at 2am when I have to be up for work a few hours after?