Covering the news

I came across this rather odd little story today, it's about some people in Egypt who have decided to create a  TV channel that exclusively features women who are wearing the full Islamic veil. Now that the new Egyptian government has "god" on its side I wonder what other religiously inspired stuff will emerge, let's hope Egypt, a country with a long secular tradition, isn't now on some inexorable slide toward becoming an Islamic state like Iran, with all of the associated strife that tends to imply, especially for women.

One point of interest does intrigue me about women who advocate such costumes, presumably they do it in order to adhere to the dogmas in their ancient holy books about dressing "modestly" by not exposing any part of their flesh, which I always thought was a slightly excessive way of interpreting those words. Anyway, as you can see from this picture those same women are still keen on enhancing their sexual attractiveness to the opposite sex by decorating the only part of their bodies visible (for practical reasons), their eyes - why?

Hint: Evolutionary Biology might provide a satisfactory answer to this question, I doubt any religion could.

(No) Bums on seats

To add my own voice to the growing criticism of the Olympic ticket arrangements, after applying twice and getting nothing then buying some tickets last minute from a friend who has a surplus (how?) we went to the games today, only to sit opposite about 1000 empty seats; I switch on the TV and in every event I watch, rows of empty seats, I smell a marketing scam.

Hey teacher, leave them kids alone..

Jesus and Mo right on the money again..

Contrary to local experience

This is the 328th consecutive month with a global temperature higher than the 20th century average; just a fluke?

Church compromise on gay marriage; ‘ladyboys acceptable’

In a surprise olive branch from the Church of England, Doctor Rowan Williams this morning announced that the church would support marriage between two men as long as one of them ‘looked like a bird.’

‘We’ve just been on a church Jolly for the top brass and we ended up at the lady boys of Bangkok show. I didn’t even know they were men for the first half of the show. Afterwards in the pub, we all agreed that if they could fool us, then they would probably fool God as well.’

‘We don’t want people taking the piss though,’ Dr Williams added. ‘They’ll have to look the part. If we end up having brides with big hairy beards and no makeup getting married in church, God will be furious with us.’

It’s thought that the Church of Scotland will be holding off from any such compromise until their own trip to see the Bangkok lady boys later in the week.

Stolen from the wonderful NewsBiscuit

Riff me..

A wonderful assembly of 100 very recognisable riffs from the history of rock, all the classics are here. (that must be some fancy foot-switch he has down there!)

Sweet child of his time

I was saddened to hear that John Lord died from pancreatic cancer today , John was one of the founding members of and keyboard player with 70s rock icons Deep Purple. I remember when I first heard Machine Head (in stereo!) it was different, fresh, alive and sounded simply wonderful to my ears, here I am 40 years later teaching my 10 year old son to play that famous riff on an electric guitar and enjoying every moment of it, thanks John.

Virtual summer..

Ah, now I see the problem, should have built a country based on a more reliable operating system!

Book swapping

I read with some amusement today that a Cumbrian hotel "The Damson Dene" near Windermere has swapped all the Gideon Bibles in it's rooms for the "mummy porn" best seller "Fifty Shades of Grey" Apparently the Hotel manager took the decision to swap the books in response to messages from his 3200 Facebook followers. I'm not sure that the excited seekers of titillation in the book on the right are quite aware of the real nasty stuff in the book on the left, very few deviant stones are left unturned from incest to gay rape it's all in there, just not so well delineated.

Olympic Torch

The Olympic torch ran by my house today, and its not often you can say that! I snapped this picture for posterity, unfortunately no streakers on our leg (like there was in Henley this morning!) that would have provided a traditionally rebellious contrast to the relentlessly corporate road train that is the Olympics these days (I'm only bitter because I was too slow to snatch a free bottle of coke).

Yay 900 posts!

Don't quote me

I saw this nice little quote somewhere today (I can't remember where)

The difference between a cult and a religion is that in a cult there is at least one person at the top of the organisation who knows it's all a scam, in a religion that person is dead.

Good guides

Here's an uplifting little story of human solidarity and secular progress for a rainy Friday afternoon. Girl guides in Australia have dropped their oath of allegiance to the Queen (of England) and also more importantly to that grand-daddy of all conceptual ideas, God. This is a really positive step in my opinion, children are not cannon fodder for religion although religious organisations seem to make this assumption all the time, and the age of empires passed away a century ago, why any Australian child or indeed any child in any country need make promises to entities which they neither understand nor affect their lives in order to sell cookies to old people is baffling in the extreme.

Good on ya, girl guides!

An idea realised

I guess most people would look at this little chart, shrug and get on with something more important in their lives, but don't be mislead by a simplicity of form it shows something absolutely fundamental to our existence. It shows the aggregated results from recent experiments at the large hadron collider and with a reasonable degree of certainty it shows a new discovery, a brand new particle a previously missing piece in the jigsaw of our understanding of our universe, the elusive Higgs Boson, a fundamental particle that causes mass (without which we wouldn't exist). If it's confirmed by further work this is big news and this little chart will probably end up in physics text books for many years to come, it might even give some bright person at some point in the future an insight or inspiration to think something remarkable and that thought may even lead human kind to some undiscovered country.