Boiling blood

A comment I left on a blog today in response to the fact that a school board in Canada has removed the Phillip Pullman books from the shelves, AND stopped an order form going out to parents because the book was listed on it:

Imagine if it had been Muslims who had banned this book because of an imagined slight on their religion. Had the book mentioned Islam in this way, I’m sure there would have been cinema attacks and book burnings! For the record I’m an atheist, but even if I believed in something, I would be as incensed by this brainless removal of books. Surely religion shouldn’t have the power to decide what people do or do not read. Remember Nazi Germany, where texts that said anything different were burned? It isn’t many steps from what is happening in Canada to what happened there. Beware. Speak up for the power of free speech!

I truly believe that if people (Christians) start taking away the rights of people to choose what they or their children read, then we are heading inexorably towards a fascist state. Just because they are in the vast majority in North America, and have presidential superiority, does NOT give them the right to make these choices for people. The New World Order is coming to get us with their self-righteous smiles. How can so many imbeciles be so powerful? It makes my brain hurt to thin about it.

What’s all this Golden Compass hoo-ha about?

God this gets me mad! Or rather should I say – Jesus I’m annoyed! Or maybe I have to say – Nothing I’m peed off. Because that’s what I think. That there is nothing out there, no higher power, no guiding all-seeing, all-knowing being. Utter tosh. How can there be? One man and one woman did NOT start all human life in a garden (although the bit about the woman being susceptible to a bit of less-than-subliminal suggestion about something sweet, and therefore being evil is spot on – see chocolate advertising for details.)

So all this fuss about a film that apparently denigrates the entire Christian religion has to be wrong. If there is no God, then surely the boot is on the other foot. Surely they (the God-squadders) are trying to twist our minds by getting us to believe in something that is so blatantly wrong (water into wine – no [unless you add some grapes and wait a bit], walking on water - no, coming back from the dead - no.) So, Christians, show me some proof that you are right (and for every bit of proof I get I’ll show you a fossil, an insect trtapped in amber from millions of years ago, a clear DNA structure linking man to ape), and I might entertain your argument. Even the Turin Shroud, the one piece of ‘evidence’ that has been held up as irrefutable has been exposed as a fake.

So to the film. Yes, in the book there are some blokes in long dark robes and called the Magisterium and yes, they’re meant to represent the church, but so what? If a guy thinks that there’s no such thing as God, why can’t he say so? Why must he be condemned? What happened to turning the other cheek? I’m just thankful the robes were black, not white, and thebook/film doesn’t mention anything remotely Islamic. Imagine the smack down that would bring. Just why people who ‘have religion’ should dictate to the rest of us is quite beyond me.

In conclusion: get down off your high horse/camel and STOP PREACHING TO ME! I don’t believe in anything, stop shoving it down my throat!

For a beautiful love story…

…check out The Big Side Order’s blog from my blogroll (that’s the list of links on the right for the non-bloggers amongst you). He writes an extremely evocative and well-crafted blog about the trials of a long-distance relationship with a woman in a far-away land, where language and cultural differences bring up all sorts of issues. Truly lovely and well worth a read.

For something a little more random and amusing, try A Free Man In Preston. Weird, wonderful and wacky.

These are just two of the blogs I have come across while searching the blogosphere in the vain hope of finding something worth reading. Well, not as vain as I thought actually. You have to sift through a heck of a lot of chaff to find the wheat, but it’s out there, believe me.

Too long have I been away

Wow, that really is a long time between posts, isn’t it? Too long I’d say. Sorry loyal Manc fans, I’ll try and be on top of this in the next few weeks. It’s a tired excuse, but work has been manic, so……not good enough is it?

What’s been going on, I hear you cry? Been involved in a massive competition on a blog I write for work, which had the prize of flight to Las vegas, 5 nights hotel and tickets to the biggest fight of the year, Hatton vs Mayweather.

Speaking of competitions, I was overjoyed to find that I had been selcted from 100s of others in a painting naming competition over at Pollocksthebollocks. Can’t wait to collect my prize, it will look superb in the flat.

Enough for now, stuff to do, leaving drinks (not mine) to go to. More soon, promise.

A milestone has been reached

Today I checked the site, and have received my 1000^th hit. Happy days. Hopefully the snowball will grow and exponentially increase the hit rate until I have a goodly base of people reading my musings. So, what has been going on?

Football – bah!

Weekend – excellent. My parents came down from Manchester and a good time was had by all. Bit of shopping, bit of eating, bit of geocaching (introducing someone to the hobby is wicked, just watching their faces while you explain is enough, but then when they find a cache, priceless).

Busy day at work, so I have to go, but come back soon, and remember – tell your friends!

Special role for Golden Balls?

So Mr. McLaren, for whom I have previously had quite a lot of time, seems to have completely lost it just in time for England’s biggest match since the last one. Robinson, unreliable as he is, has at least had some international experience. Talk about being dropped in it, Scott Carson has his work cut out and has to impress tonight otherwise we’re in trouble. And little Shaun Wright-Phillips plays instead of Becks. Yes, he’s quicker, but can he deliver the killer cross or free-kick at the right time? I think not. Remember that goal from Golden Balls against Greece at Old Trafford? The chances of little Shaun replicating something like that? I’ll give you everything I own if he scores a goal like that tonight.

Maybe we’ll see the birth of ‘special teams’ in football like they have in their version of ‘football’ over the pond. A free kick is won right on the edge of the box in perfect Beckham territory, strangely whoever has been brought down suddenly can’t walk any more. Cue Becks to stroll on and seal the fate of English football for the next few years with one cultured stroke of his right foot (metatarsals not withstanding).

We’ll see.

Also apologies for the lack of posts in recent days, this thing called work keeps getting in the way.

Weekend washout

Our big plans for geocaching yesterday were washed out by the rain. I know walking in the rain is good, and we’re a bit wussy for not going out and getting thoroughly wet through in the name of getting to know the countryside, but the caches we had to find were in the woods. The thought of stomping through thick mud with the geocache machine in a plastic bag didn’t fill me with joy, so we bailed and went to Starbuck’s instead, under an umbrella, -ella, -ella. By the evening, the rain had turned to a sort of sleety-slushy-snowy type precipitation (how English, to discuss the weather in such detail).

Anyhow, whilst getting another couple of stamps on my Brakspear Ale Trail map (visit 12 pubs, have a pint of Brakspear, get a tshirt at the end, joy) on Saturday I passed two women having a natter. Nothing remarkable there, I hear you say. But the snippet of conversation I overheard went like this:

‘…and I said to him “What you need is a clothes peg and a mortgage.”’

What? I have been struggling to think of a context in which this sentence would make any sense. Answers on a postcard, please. A prize (maybe) for the best suggestion. And it has to make sense, unlike the conversation.

And finally a word to Sam who commented on the Pizza Express post. The reason I didn’t take my dear old Mum for pizza on her birthday is because I live 200 miles away, but I’ll take her out (and make her pay) this weekend when she comes down to Oxford to visit.

Pizza off Pizza Express!

Well last night we found Pizza Express in an absolute state. They were so short staffed it was untrue, and they kept filling the tables until well after we had sat down. Our waitress ended up in the kitchen! We waited about 45 minutes after we’d finished our starter before we got our pizza, and I was on the verge of walking out without paying for the drinks or the starter, I was that angry. And that isn’t like me at all. 

And when it came it was yummy. But I have another gripe. Oh yes. The pizzas we chose were of the new ‘Authentic Roman’ thinner base variety. For which we paid a premium of £1 over and above the normal menu price. Now hang on. Thinner base surely equals a lesser amount of dough, or at the very least the same amount of dough just spun out a bit thinner. So I paid £1 for Luigi to spin the dough a couple more times. That is either the biggest rip-off or best marketing ploy ever. And I fell for it. And it wasn’t even authentic, and I know, I eat pizza all the time. In Italy.

And on a cheerier note…Happy Birthday Mum!

Driving traffic

Well here’s a dilemma. I’m goosed, knacked, worn out, but we have a voucher for Pizza Express and I want one of their thin and crispy pizzas. So do I sacrifice a nice night in front of the telly with a glass of red, or go out and have a pizza I’ll enjoy for sure, but will feel massively tired throughout? Hmmm. 

Whatever, I’m definitely going to leave work on time tonight.  

One thing I really want to do is increase views on this thing. Having read about 1 million blogs over the next couple of days, loads of authors blog about blogging, and how they have maximised their traffic, and linked to other blogs to increase viewers. I might try that. The blogs that seem to get the most hits are just bloggers blogging about blogging (MS Word really hated that sentence, one constant wiggly red line). 

So…check out some of the new blogs in my blog roll and maybe I’ll get loads of hits.

First post for a while

Hello Manc fans! Sorry it’s been a while and I know of at least……two people who have been waiting for my mots justes to reappear. Well, here they are. 

At the weekend we went a-caching again, and joy of joys found the one that we set out to find (wonderful machines those are). That one had a clue to another cache not far away, but we couldn’t find it in the gorse and bracken (there was no clue, so we didn’t waste much time). Only problem with the first cache was that it leads you to a massive area, and we were looking for a tree stump. We were in the woods. Go figure. 

Away from hunting for Tupperware boxes, Man United won again, breezing past Blackburn, which was nice. 

And work. Ah, work. Totally crazy mad. Loads to learn very quickly, and tons of writing. Which I really, really enjoy. So that’s nice. 

I promised a marvellous post, and I’m not sure if I’ve disappointed or not, but hey, life is short and I have to get on with the job. See you soon.