Here comes the pride

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Once again I am compelled to begin my post with an apology for the complete lack of any kind of ranty, word-based intellectual comestibles over the last few weeks. I’m afraid things have been stupidly busy around here again, with a large proportion of my time spent building a website for my dad and his recently published book (go there now and buy it, particularly if you like wizards, quests, and magic, and especially if you have kids). With all the running around (well, sitting down, if I’m honest) trying to organise things – server upgrades, domain registration, installing software – getting everything set up, and making absolutely sure that the whole thing was perfect and ready in time for an immovable, near-future release date, it sometimes felt like I was involved in planning a bloody wedding. And, do you know, that gloriously ham-fisted and clunky attempt at a segue leads me very shoddily on to what it was I wanted to talk about this week? The ongoing and now, thanks to certain presidents, very high-profile worldwide campaign for LGBT marriage equality. …

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You label me, I libel you

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Despite having spent much of my time since the beginning of the easter weekend in and out of the vets with a conveyor belt’s worth of poorly pets (the full exciting story of which can be read in last week’s post), I’m in a relatively good mood … so much so, in fact, that I thought I’d make this week’s offering a bit of a special one by giving you this site’s first-ever actual proper interview (not with me, obviously, that would be mindlessly self-indulgent and bizarrely schizophrenic). Joining me almost live via email is Vaughan Jones, sceptic blogger and lifter of heavy things who found himself neck-deep in lawyers recently when a christian author sued him for libel over reviews he’d written on Amazon (as well as a few comments) telling everyone that his book, a supposed satire on the religion versus science debate, was crap. So, grab yourself a cuppa and a few jaffa cakes, pull up a comfy chair, and I’ll try to set the scene before asking Vaughan some (hopefully) interesting questions. …

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Science, bitches: it works

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Disgracefully, I haven’t written a blog post in a little over a month; predictably, I have an excuse; surprisingly, it’s a really good one. Since easter weekend my partner, Raven, and I have been engaged in a seemingly never-ending battle against the forces of contagion present in the numerous furry creatures we’ve chosen to take on as pets. As you may be aware, we are the proud keepers of a number of rats, and since Good Friday we’ve been trying desperately to manage an outbreak of respiratory infection that spread through the colony faster than internet rumours about John Travolta’s predilection for man-handling the occasional man-handler. As we spent many an hour trying to persuade our collection of adorable nuisances to take a variety of different medicines, weighing them to ensure correct dosing, measuring the amount of food and drink they were taking each day to make sure they were getting enough, and looking for changes in both their behaviour and demeanour, it occurred to me that we were, in a very real way, demonstrating successful application of the scientific method. How do I know it was successful? Simple … it got results. …

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Dead Jew On A Stick

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As a sign of how increasingly eccentric and silly a place to work our office has become, one of our colleagues had organised a massive easter egg hunt on Thursday. While sofa cushions were upturned and coffee jars emptied in a desperate hunt for hidden chocolate, I was reminded of two things; first, that our office is peopled exclusively with adults who turn into overgrown children with the appetites of a cluster of super-massive black holes whenever sugar-heavy goodies are made available, and, second, that none of the traditional symbols of this apparently christian festival have got anything to do with christianity. Forever dodging the questions of exactly what relevance the eggs and bunny rabbits of the pagan celebrations usurped by Team Carpenter have to easter, they will instead try to divert your attention to the one and only symbol they have got; a symbol of the boundless love that the one true god (apart from all the others) has for anyone prepared to devote themselves to his service in perpetuity – a half-naked, Palestinian torture-victim nailed to a tree. …

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Stupid Cult

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Despite being totally with it, up-to-the-minute, and “down wiv’ da kids” – the kind of guy people always come to for “the word on the street” when either Huggy Bear or the Highways Agency road-painting crew are unavailable – I didn’t become fully aware of the whole “Kony 2012” video phenomenon until I saw Charlie Brooker’s segment covering it on “10 O’Clock Live” on Wednesday night. As a dedicated denizen of Twitter (follow me now, you bastards!) I’d naturally heard of the video, knew what it was about, and was vaguely aware of Invisible Children, the organisation responsible for producing it, but I hadn’t looked any further into the details. As the segment unfolded, Invisible Children, and its co-founder Jason Russell, were starting to come across rather scarily like the kind of sinister, child-recruiting religious cult they were condemning Joseph Kony for running, only with fewer guns and more dance numbers. Raves and I wondered to each other how long it would be before clean-cut, god-humping, goody-two shoes Russell would be caught either huffing poppers while getting felched by a gay prostitute, or perhaps running around the street in his underwear with his cock out, wanking at passing traffic? “About 12 hours” was the answer, apparently. …

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