Smoke and mirrors
I used to quite like William Lane Craig. I obviously didn’t agree with him and found his arguments laughably simplistic, but he’s an articulate and reasonable sounding chap, he comes across as likable and the sort of fella who doesn’t get all shrill and shouty which is the key problem of most debates about religion. Then I found a few YouTube clips of him being arrogant and dismissing those arguments against him as “unsophisticated”. Yes, some of them are, but then you don’t need to be sophisticated to knock down one of Craig’s arguments, it’s child’s play.
Here, let me.
Labour should cut its “Ed” off
Labour are shockingly shit at picking leaders.
Being a party leader is three jobs in one. First, you have to lead the party; then you have to lead the opposition and challenge the government, appearing like a Prime Minister in waiting; and third you have to lead the government and be a world statesman, actually be a Prime Minister. These are three very different things.
Let’s go crazy
They should put all of the crazy US states first in the primary season. Places where they believe the garbled bigoted ignorant hypocritical rhetoric of Iowa runner-up Rick Santorum. The kind of states that would take Sarah Palin seriously. Seriously, they should do that. Seriously.
I don’t want to be a man anymore
Having read with utter shock the Reddit thread where a 15-year-old girl is “threatened” with anal rape, using her own blood and tears as lubricant, I have had to rethink my stance on sexual equality and feminism. The thread is beautifully summarised here by Skepchick.
Blood is mother nature’s lubricant (horayforlogic)
I always thought that we lived in a post-feminist society: that feminism was the last generation’s issue, something people my age didn’t think of anymore. Case closed, mission accomplished, job done. This extraordinary testosterone-fuelled feeding-frenzy on Reddit proves me wrong.
BITE THE PILLOW, I’M GOING IN DRY (Hbeck22)
With a few of the dads
I am sitting in the car reading my book. My daughter is inside at art class, all the other parents huddled in groups outside, killing time chatting. I don’t care. I am increasingly disinterested in talking to people unless they are interesting, and most people aren’t interesting, so it’s not worth the effort. The probability of a positive pay-off from any random conversation is too close to zero to take the risk. A poor choice and that’s 40 minutes wasted. You can’t walk away either, you can’t back off from a humdrum conversation and go and get in your car and read in plain sight. You’ve got to make the decision up front and stick to it. People will soon start ignoring you, assuming you to be aloof and antisocial. That’s what you’re aiming for. If you get there, you’ve cracked it.
Pay rise for everyone
A noisy bus full of chanting protesters whistled and hooted passed me the other day. It moved slowly up Madrid’s Gran Vía, its sides hidden by banners demanding a universal increase in wages. It seemed unlikely that there was an economics graduate aboard and I wondered if they’d seen a newspaper since late 2008.
A pay rise for everyone? Who’s going to pay for that then?
You can’t beat the system
The only thing in my bag of tricks which is unflinchingly manly is my liking of football. Apart from that I’m all about books and music and politics, drinking coffee and reading newspapers, going to the theatre, listening to the radio … these are lovely things but they don’t pad out the pages of Nuts and similar mags pointed keenly at the male demographic.
Itchy feet and fading smiles
I always had a desire to travel. It was the one thing I knew I wanted to do since I was kid, travel felt like I was achieving something: to see the world, or at least those parts of it with stronger hygiene records, was equal to some sort of personal success, like I’d done something worthwhile. I’d have felt pretty inadequate had I not done so, like I’d failed.
Now I barely want to even leave the house.
Road to nowhere
I love Talking Heads. The song “Road to Nowhere” is playing now. They were big in the 80s, cool people liked stuff like “Remain in Light” when the quartet were still relatively unknown because it’s always way cooler to like bands when they’re unknown. Cooler still is to like only a band’s first album before they make it big or try something different. I thought the 80s had the pop fans (Duran Duran, Wham! etc) and the cool hard rockers, but actually proper cool people liked things like Sonic Youth and Blondie, The Minutemen and Violent Femmes. I was not cool in those days (in stark contrast to today). I was into progressive rock and heavy metal: a badass rebel type, and, had my mother allowed me to, I would have had long hair and some heavy metal studs and patches sewn on to my denim jacket.
Getting away with murder
As Max Hastings cleverly and rightly pointed out, public sector workers are rubbish. They’ve been “getting away with murder“! Actual murder. No exaggeration. No hyperbole. No lazy resort to clichés. Public sector workers are all murdering lazy bastards who don’t deserve gilt-edged pensions and crazy-money salaries. Thank goodness for top intellectuals like Hastings and Clarkson to help us keep cool heads as we debate what could be (and should be) the most fundamental restructuring of our political, financial and economic systems for generations.
Jeremy Clarkson: Monumental Arse
Life’s hard lessons
I think street beggars should make more of an effort to remember who I am quite frankly. I’m tired of slipping the odd quid to some guy with no legs only for him not to recognize me the next day. I don’t wish to be unkind but it’s a poor do if I can’t get to feel good about myself for a few short moments by getting a well-earned friendly nod, a little recognition that I’m one of the good guys, someone who kindly and selflessly sheds a few coins from time to time.
Not as clever as I’d like to be
I was rating books on Goodreads, and thought that I’ve got to be honest about what I think, I’ve got to just click the star system in a way that reflects my experience, not worry about what Other People think. Then I got to Salman Rushdie. I’ve only read one Rushdie (“Midnight’s Children”), the winner not just of Booker, but the Booker of Bookers, which means that it is officially Dead Good … yet, despite this fact made of pure science, I fucking hated it. I felt like I was wasting my life as I picked it up with a downcast air at the end of a long and tiring day. Eventually I just put it on my shelf to impress visitors but really only managed to wade wearily through the first third or so of its clogged and stodgy pages.
Losing my religion
I grew up in a typical English Christian culture, went to cubs and much as I hated going to church, I did believe in God. I never believed in the Bible though; even as a little kid I could see that Adam and Eve and Noah’s flood were clever stories, but nothing more. I quite enjoyed religion class: we called it Scripture, I liked it because it was good stories. I would lie with my head on my crooked elbow and close my eyes and listen with the same contented mindset as when the teacher read us fairy tales last thing on Friday afternoons.
Poppy cocks
FIFA are shit. They are incompetent, foolish and arrogant, stupidly making shit decisions about things they barely understand. Shit, shit, shit. It’s another unnecessary own goal in what is a long list of Very Shit Things. That this bunch of corrupt shits continue to govern the most popular sport on the planet is shit. Astonishingly shit.
Atlas said “meh”
I’m about halfway through “Atlas Shrugged”, the Ayn Rand novel about heroic industrialists fighting the corrupt spineless softies in 1950s America. I’m greatly enjoying it, it’s a good story and I like the writing style, but the political premise (Rand’s theory of Objectivism) is so damn clumsy it’s getting quite infuriating.
Specky four-eyes
I’ve got new glasses. My ears are killing me and I’m feeling sick, the world is swimming around me in nauseous swirls. The bridge of my nose, worn to a bump by years of thick-framed specs, is an uncomfortable dot of pain. My head hurts. A sickly hollow headache stuck at the front, above the eyes. I need to lie down.
People who already know everything
There’s a point in a child’s development when they realise that people can know different things. Before they reach this age, they don’t get that you can not know what they know, or that they can know what you don’t. Hang on, that’s the same thing, I mean that you can not know something that they know. Is that the same again? Anyway, this is why they’re so shit at hide and seek. Eventually they start to realise that everyone has different knowledge and different perspectives. This is when lying becomes such a tempting exit from trouble spots, fortunately they’re still naïve enough to believe that their nose grows when they tell fibs, so you get to know when your kid is lying because they learn to hide their nose.
Load of balls
“The News Quiz”, Radio 4’s flagship comedy vehicle, a mediocre show but a welcome relief from the alternative (the dire “The Now Show”), disappointed the other day with its cheap mocking of CERN. It’s a good sign that a leading physics lab is sufficiently well-known to be ribbed in popular comedy, but it’s a poor do when satire is reduced to knocking the concept of physics as “rubbish” and playing dumb to suggest that clever things are just a waste of time, as if aspiration to intelligence and knowledge were a nerdy pursuit to be discouraged: a distraction from proper cool things like TV and alcohol.
Pillar talk
It’s hot. October 12th and it’s hot like summer. Today is a day off in Spain, it’s the day they commemorate the apparition of the Virgin Mary on top of a pillar by the River Ebro in Zaragoza. She did this, despite actually still being alive and living in Jerusalem at the time (and I guess probably not a virgin any more). She appeared to Saint James – son of Zebedee! – who, according to some versions, was also in Jerusalem at the time. Anyway, details details, the point being that there’s now a beautiful basilica in Zaragoza around this holy pillar, and God knows how many Spanish girls with the first name Pilar. I wouldn’t name my child after a building support, but after a while you stop seeing that and it’s just a name.
The curtain continuum
A woman plonked herself down next to me on the train. I just had time to snatch my trailing bag strap which had strayed on to the seat she claimed. There was an empty seat between us, and the set of three opposite, facing back towards us, were empty, so I didn’t feel crowded. Then she moved. She switched to the bank of six in front, sitting with her back to the train’s motion, in the middle of the three, with the two in front of her on either side occupied. In no one’s world did her new position outrank the previous one. So why did she move?
Neither Josh nor Toby
Josh was emotional, charming, energetic. Toby was cool, brainy and aloof. Watching The West Wing (which I still miss!) I used to veer between the two. I’d want to be like Toby, then like Josh. I’d go to work and pretend I was one or the other. I even tried to emulate the environment by fixing up a bank of TVs set to 24-hour news channels, except my office only had an old black-and-white portable and the coat-hanger hanging out the back of it couldn’t pick up CNN.
America should be ashamed of herself
An innocent man, Mark MacPhail, died in 1989. Another (assumed) innocent man, Troy Davies, died last night in Georgia at the hands of the state. The actual killer is still free. This is justice. Two dead innocents and the guilty walking free.
Would you Adam and Eve it
In this startlingly unconvincing piece by John Gray on the BBC website, he argues that thinking religion has got anything to do with belief is missing the point. Religion – he argues – is about what you do, not what you believe, and therefore the atheists are missing the point by unpicking the beliefs of religion. How very convenient.
Rioting and poor manners
I worry about the human race.
Stop bloody moaning and start getting better
I don’t usually go to McDonald’s. This is not just for health reasons, nor even from a strictly food-quality point of view, it’s really more about my thinking that I’m better than that. It doesn’t fit my over-inflated self-image to muck in and eat rubbish like McDonald’s – even though there are times when a quarter-pounder with cheese is just the ticket. This morning was one of those occasions, starving hungry and wilting from lack of breakfast, the craving for the high-sugar fatty offal on offer at McD’s was altogether too tempting. Now I feel fat and sick.
Chavic underclass
David Cameron is a simplistickerizer. His analysis is a simplistic twisting of reality to support what he thought anyway. Using the recent riots to prove his silly point about broken society is maybe not entirely without foundation, but is obviously a crow-barring of reality into what he wants to be true. JImmying the real world to fit his theory. The fact (?) that some by-standers joined in the looting is proof of very little. Those by-standers were still a minority, there were more by-standers who didn’t join in the looting. I wouldn’t have, for example, and not just because I couldn’t be bothered to carry a stolen TV, but because I genuinely believe it’s wrong to steal things, even during riots (unless delivery is included). I believe that, despite being a liberal atheist, some things are morally wrong. Cameron might be right about some people’s morality, but he’s not right about mine. There were yet more people who chose not to even be by-standers. Are they broken too Dave?
Tortellini with gorgonzola and walnut sauce
I had tortellini with gorgonzola and walnut sauce last night. As I get older I get more appreciative of good food and less appreciative of business travel. I never used to look forward to a meal with such naked relish as I do these days, yet never did my heart sink so low upon entering yet another hotel room as it has done lately.
The blessed truth
Yesterday, as the taxi nudged through the busy Barcelona traffic down Avenida Diagonal, my colleague sneezed. It wasn’t a big explosive sneeze, it was a tightly controlled rasp, caught in a ready sleeve, but it was unmistakably a sneeze. Protocol demands an immediate kneejerk and meaningless response of “bless you”. This was my big chance to try out my new anti-bless-you policy. I said nothing.
Currant affairs
If I were a suicide bomber, and I got to heaven, having done my duty and detonated a bomb and taken out dozens of infidels, I reckon that to be rewarded with heavenly young virgins is not great considering that you’ve just blown your cock off. If I were blown to smithereens, my flesh ripped to shreds by a massive explosion, I would not appreciate a reward of the flesh, a reward which can only truly be appreciated if you’ve got a cock. That’s just salt in the wound. I read that this version of heavenly reward was anyway a mistranslation of the word “virgin” (as is supposedly also the case in the Christian Bible with the “virgin” birth). If this is so, at least according to Richard Dawkins, then the reward is actually “pure white raisins”. That would be disappointing to anyone pumped up expecting the virgins. I mean, raisins? They’re okay, but I think I’d prefer the virgins, cock or no cock.
Successful weekend
I am generally pretty rubbish at being a man. The traditional things that men are supposed to do, like car mechanics or drinking whisk(e)y from a small hip flask, are closed books to me. I added water to the windscreen wiper wash thingy once: it never worked again. I only added water to a container of water. It’s hard to see at what point in the chain it went wrong. If I drink whiskey I feel sick, then I am sick, then I need to go for a lie down with a damp flannel laid across my aching forehead.
Change resistant
I just paid a bill of €10.41. This means I got 9 cents change from €1.50 I gave. What the hell use is 9 cents to me? What the hell use is it to anyone at all? It is of no use whatsoever. It adds up, but even if I paid ten bills of €10.41 today, I’d only have 90 cents change left. It adds up, but not to very much. If I paid a hundred bills over the course of a month, each transaction leaving me with an average 9 cents change, I’d have only €9. Not enough to even pay for the 101st bill. In fact I’d have to pay 116 bills to get a single one free, then I’d still get an annoying 4 cents change back!
If takes the subjunctive
The thing about learning Spanish is that they have a whole different approach to grammar – I don’t mean just different grammar, I mean a different attitude to grammar. It’s not like you can just say anything, get it more or less ballpark right, mess up a few verb endings, and expect them to piece together the meaning from the scattergun of poorly pronounced clues thrown out. They need it pretty tight, pretty correct. Not 100%, but knocking at 100%’s door. You’ve got to get your verbs and other sentence shrapnel all in a line and singing from the same sheet. You start chucking in the wrong tense and you’ll be met with puzzled looks. Where English is a cheeky mongrel and therefore more quick-witted and agile, Spanish is toy poodle pedigree, more beautiful perhaps, but take it out of its natural habitat and it looks as silly as an … er … toy poodle.
People are very annoying
Everyone is annoying. Open-plan workspace means that anyone’s noise is everyone’s noise. Someone on the phone, not two metres from my desk, has rendered me useless with their perfectly normal conversation. I just have to stop and wait till they finish. I can hear the hubbub down the corridor, the next-door team are chit-chatting while they file. I can hear the low murmur of a conversation in the neighbouring office. Private conversation behind the closed door of the one person on the floor important enough that they don’t get to benefit from all the positives of open-plan working.
Smells: good and bad
I met a guy today who smelled. There was an aura of fart on him. To steal Frank Skinner’s line, he wore the smell “like an ermine cloak”. This made me think much less of him than was strictly fair (I know him to be intelligent and lovely), his aroma really had nothing to do with the nature of our relationship and as we were both officially heterosexual males, no part of that relationship was officially actually based on physical attraction. Had he been ugly, say, I might have looked a couple of times to make sure I’d clocked the ugliness correctly, but it wouldn’t have made me think less of him. Had he got a silly voice I might have thought him a silly man, but I’d have got past it, that would have been that.
High standards
I have just torn a hot floury chapatti in two. I always try to eat Indian food when I’m back in the UK. I have a thing about restaurants though, I don’t like places that are too crowded. Or too empty. Or grotty. Or too posh. Nothing dirty and cramped. I hate canteens and plastic furniture. I am a little fussy when picking a place to eat, I like the clean and contemporary feel, classy but not silly, spacious but charming. The sort of place that cleans the table between customers.
Come together
I’m sitting on Abbey Road. I can see the zebra crossing, crowded with tourists rushing back and forth between the traffic, hastily snapping photos. The EMI studios next door are covered in graffiti but, in a rock’n’roll kinda way, they don’t seem to mind. I’ve never been here before. It’s weird, there’s nothing here, nothing but people, people who care about music and The Beatles. It was nice, like a bonding moment. I got quite emotional.
Faith heads in the rain
Madrid is full of faith heads. They’re everywhere. I couldn’t sit down on my train this morning, so cramped and crowded was the carriage with unwashed young Catholics with their bad hair and awful clothes. Not even the rain could wipe the blank self-satisfied smiles of inner calm and blissful ignorance from their youthful spotty faces. One had a guitar. My heart sank. I prayed that there’d be no religiously-inspired sing-songs. It was not even 8am and being happy before 8 is just not on.
Castles in the sand
A Frenchman in tight speedos carved a lion from sand into the beach. It seemed to take him only seconds to shape the wet sand into the bulk of the squatting feline, then a lot of fiddling about to get it just so. My daughter, always quick to get in the thick of things whilst simultaneously staying slightly aloof, got him to carve a mermaid next, which he did, spending just a little too long getting the breasts right, but you can’t knock a chap for that.
Rings and things
My little daughter, just a sprig of a kid, saw Saturn last week. She slept out under the stars on a school trip, and they all gazed through telescopes at the night sky before plunging in the pool for a midnight swim. She saw Saturn, clear with its rings, and has talked of nothing else since. It’s amazing to see her taking an interest in science and things as wonderful as astronomy, albeit from the pretty-rings angle.
Water and no chips
Suddenly I hit a motivation streak. Suddenly, out the blue, out of nowhere, I was broadsided by an overwhelming desire to sort my life out. This isn’t the first time: I’ve had mini-motivation surges in my desire to go out and get the career I want, I’ve felt the urge in my not-sufficiently-strong-enough desire to get thinner and fitter and more attractive to women, but never before had I been walloped with such naked determination.
Unrealistic expectations
I’ve just watched an episode of Caillou with my five-year-old daughter. An infinitely patient family of wholesome Canadians. That’s the problem. My kids come away from watching this sort of thing and have a whole different idea of quality parenting standards that those I tend to display. It gives them unrealistic expectations: there should be an episode of Caillou in which the Father barks a frustrated world-weary exhausted “what?” in response to the seventh whiny “Daddy” plea, then Caillou spends the best part of the morning on the naughty step hurling abuse at his parents.
Do everything very quickly
They say that you can choose your friends (although this was before Facebook) but you can’t choose your family. They don’t say much about work though: you can’t choose your work colleagues, and worst of all, you can’t choose your boss. Not only that, you can’t always even choose the organisation you work for, and so can often get stuck with a boss and organisational culture that fits like a poorly tailored straitjacket. If everyone around you in a macho lout, it’s hard to be decent chap and expect to succeed, to them you just look like a stick-in-the-mud.
Paying for education
The UK is proud of its universities: the best in the world. Apart from America, that is – so really: Second-best in the world! The problem is that the funding structure is unsustainable so the government have got rid of tuition grants to students and replaced it with fees which the government pays initially – along with top-up grants to the Universities. In other words, we have a system whereby each University’s income is to a large part insufficient and out of their control, students run up huge debts and the government has to shell out even more in the short-term.
Spain goes blue
A sea of light blue flags waved with glee outside the Spanish conservative PP offices. Smiles everywhere. Sickening for those of us who abhor their politics of privilege and corruption. They were celebrating the electoral victory which delivered pretty much every single region and major Spanish city into their hands. They were 10 fat points ahead of the centre-left PSOE and loving every minute of their victorious moment.
Rubalcaba
Many ways to ruin a child
It’s easy for me to run through my childhood and pick out the bits where it went wrong. There’s lots of places it went right too, and lots of places I thought it went wrong but now realise actually my parents were probably right, or at least more right than I was. I was brought up in a typically English middle-class home by parents who were raised mainly in the 50s. Their lifestyle compass was calibrated when Enid Blyton was writing and people wore petticoats and rode penny-farthings. Their world seems wistfully more charming to me than the one I grew up in or the one my kids are currently navigating. This didn’t mean they were old-fashioned, but they did see things through the prism of their own generation.
Vile bodies
Either I’ve increased my overall corporal mass by a good 30%, or Iberia are trying to squeeze so many extra seats onto this Airbus A-320 that the gap between them is now so inadequate that it would cause a cigarette paper to breathe in. I am sitting diagonally askew, thankfully the middle seat is unoccupied. This dinky little netbook is at such a squashed angle because the seat in front prevents it from opening that I can only type with my left hand, my right being painfully wedged against the seat back. There’s more room on EasyJet. There’s more room in your average sardine tin. I can’t even read properly, my arms and elbows awkwardly biffing into each other, the seat, the window.
