I don't think I'm racist, per se, I just think stereotypes make great comedic characters, and racial stereotypes are still stereotypes. But some people get offended by this idea.

( Possibly racist... but funny. )

If this still offends you, imagine Chris Rock saying it. Then you'd think it was hilarious.

This whole thing is still troubling me.

I'll admit, I did kind of have an agenda when I started asking about reasons for believing one myth over another.

The reason is this:

( Why do these get so long!? )

So, although I don't doubt that many of you will post long discussions about other points I've made (which I of course welcome, and find a delight to read) I want to end this with a simple question:

How much does your faith define you as a person?

If the [insert-chosen-spiritual-authority-here-but-I-will-settle-for] Pope stepped out and said "Look it's been a riot, but it's all rubbish, you realise that, right? Me and the other [again-insert-clergy-of-choice] Bishops have decided to come clean, it's all made up. Frankly we're surprised you didn't figure it out yourselves. We all want proper jobs, this chanting is boring as hell." or for whatever reason the authority behind your faith were to collapse, leaving you with a lifetime of made up stories.
I don't know if you could even imagine such an event powerful enough to destroy your faith, but for the sake of argument lets say that your rational thought processes simply would not let you believe any more because of some new knowledge.

What would you do differently? Would you be different? Would you do or feel or think anything differently?

I'm reading the replies to my last post with interest. There are a few points I'd like to dig deeper into. I'm using the bible as an example in the first two, because I'm having these thoughts in the order that I read the points, and the first few were quite Christianity focused:
( this got long fast )

If you don't want to read everything above, then I'll pose this in a more succinct way, a question posed by the great Bill Maher:

If when you were young, you were read the stories of Adam and Eve and Noah's arc, and Jesus' exploits as fairy tales and told that Jack and the Beanstalk, The Boy who Cried Wolf, Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, and other such fairytales - all of which contain a morality tale comparable to bible stories - were the real deal, would you now believe in them, if everyone else did?

If the answer is no, then my original question stands, why choose the bible over the brothers Grimm?

If the answer is yes, then how do you justify your current choice, knowing that in different circumstances you'd have gladly prayed to your fairy godmother?

It's this latter part that really gets me because on an objective level, both sets of stories seem equally whimsical to me. And not just the Christian bible, all of the world religions require such suspension of disbelief.

What is it that makes me different from a largely theistic world? Am I just curmudgeonly?

I'm worried that maybe I come across as a little smug sometimes, and I hope that doesn't happen now, because I have a serious honest question to ask to anyone reading this with firm religious convictions.

Really it's something I just want to understand.

Given that regardless of your religion, the only evidence you'll have is either verbal stories or a series of books, and assuming that most of you have heard and read lots of stories in your time, I just wonder what mental processes you use to objectively differentiate between fictional tales, such as Harry Potter or Lord of The Rings, and those you accept as fact you read in your holy books or as told by your spiritual leaders?

See the method I use to differentiate won't let me believe any religious scriptures, frankly they all seem utterly fantastical, but being able to believe in these things seem to make people happy and I'm desperate to know where my process is going wrong...

Derren Brown predicts the Lottery result.

Well... pretends to anyway.

I watched his show on Wednesday, and his program tonight. Camera trickery, without a doubt, but what was amusing is that he used it as a way to look at the nation's attitudes towards probability and gamblers' fallacies.

If you didn't see his show Friday 11th Sep but intend to, don't read this, it's a little spoilerific.

You know who was a great magician? Jeremy Beadle. Damn he was good. He understood something very few audiences do. Reduced audience sets. Not a lot of people realise that Candid-Camera style show Beadle's About was actually a magic show. It was a magic show in which the audience at home was not the audience to the trick. It reversed the roles of standard magic by allowing the magician's assistants, those 'in on' the trick to vastly outnumber the desired recipient of the trick.

It's like if Paul Daniels did a trick where he and the whole audience knew what was happening and how it was done, but Debbie McGee had no idea how she'd gone from one box to the other.

Derren gets it too. I didn't realise it until I saw tonight's show, but he gets it. So what if the live draw was a camera trick. We weren't the desired recipients of that trick. The desired recipients were a bunch of randomly chosen people 'trained' by Derren to pick out lottery numbers.

Using the premise of the Wisdom of Crowds, Derren creates a mechanism by which a group of 24 people honestly believe that they are producing a lottery prediction without actually knowing what numbers they have generated until some numerical process is applied.

Derren then takes their prediction out of the room without showing it to them, using a very scientifically worded version of "If you see it, it'll jinx it" regarding the psychology of greed.

He does his camera trick watched live by the whole nation, including those 24 people.

Those 24 people then honestly believe that they have predicted the results of the national lottery... and go utterly bonkers. That was the payoff of the trick. Not us, watching from home.

I like Derren. The point behind his tricks is often obfuscated, even beyond the bounds of the show.


So next week he's going to 'Control the Nation'. And he is. And he probably thinks he will have and audience of 1... himself.

But he'll have an audience of two. I'll be watching this one. When I say 'audience' I don't mean the people watching the show. There will be millions of them, but they're part of the trick.

He will play a subliminal video to make people unable to leave their seats... and in doing so he will achieve control of the entire television audience. He will make them stand up.

It's quite ingenious really. The stuck to the seat hypnotism is an old trick, Paul Daniels used to do it as a stage hypnotist, but hypnotism requires more feedback than most hypnotists like to reveal.

One of Derren's more frequently used tricks is to try to convince someone to do something by trying to tell them to do the opposite. I watched all of Derren's Wednesday night slots of his other shows and reverse psychology like this appears in all of them. Like when he showed the square, triangle and circle in The Gathering and says "I want you to pick a shape, and I won't try to push you towards any of them, it's all fair and square", getting a laugh from the audience and pretty much guaranteeing that the square isn't picked.

He's a clever bugger.

So yeah. Next week Derren Brown is going to make everyone watching his show stand up, by telling them that they are unable to. I'll be watching, I'll be standing... and I'll be utterly amazed if I can't.

Bedtime.

This post is about atheism, death and oblivion. I like to think it's rather uplifting but your mileage my vary if you're near the start of your spiritual awakening or something.

( How I learned to stop worrying and love the bottle )

With that in mind... I'm going upstairs to play video games.

Peace, all.

On Sunday, Becky and I went to Snetterton market.

I'd skipped out from going to Harmuni on Saturday, for reasons unknown even to me, and was feeling a little down about life, so Becky thought it would be nice to get out of the house.

After looking round the market (which has a bitchin music shop - I'm going back next week to prepare for my meteoric return to filk) Becky suggested we go to Great Yarmouth, which was quite close.

So we went to Great Yarmouth, and ate some chips, and wandered up and down the seafront and Becky suggested we go on the big wheel. I hadn't been on a big wheel for a while, and it seemed like a romantic idea so I agreed.

Then at the top of the big wheel she proposed.

And I said yes.

So for those of you not paying attention the sequence was:


Saturday: Bored
Sunday: Engaged

I should get bored more often.

I got bored and drew a comic in Inkscape.

( The beat of the Bard )

So I think the most awesome creature on the planet is the octopus... but I'd never looked into the varieties out there or even researched what a baby octopus looks like... so seeing todays writers block question, I googled for baby octopus.

About 2/5ths of the results on google images were baby octopus pickled, frozen, steamed, or otherwise prepared for food.

So to prove a statistical point, I did the same search for "baby rabbit"

None of them were cooked, or even dead.

The whole thing seems unfair, octopodes (I am assured by Derren Brown that this is the correct plural) are remarkably intelligent creatures.

I did however find a great video on youtube :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVCSVYJBKPY

I have had it!

I don't mean to gripe but I'm so freakin' busy these days that it seems I have barely the time to read my LJ friends list, let alone actually post to it, and frankly this situation is exacerbated by the fact that my friends list is now seemingly awash with people who, rather than sitting down to post a well thought out post, simply route their twitter feeds onto their LJ.

"I'm watching TV"

"I'm on a Bus"

Fucking pages of it.

If I wanted to read your twitter feed... I WOULD READ YOUR TWITTER FEED!

Hell, if I wanted to read your twitter feed, I'd have it piped to me in real time on my smartphone. But I don't. I doubt any people do.

So, I don't want to single anyone out but this is my ultimatum:

Later this week I'm going to go through my friends list and anyone who is posting regularly automatically generated uncut posts is OFF. Gone. Vamoosh. No longer a planet in my solar system.

Put it behind a cut and you'll be spared. Better yet, stop trying to cross the streams.

Thankyou, that is all.

I've been reading my way backwards through Sinfest, forgot how groovy it all was.

Anyway, chanced upon this comic: Clicky!

Which basically is a short story about the artists pets, believing his comics to be distress signals posted to the internet for the provision of supplies, making their own comic to get better food.

And the centre panel cracked me up so much it needed iconification.

I bought some shoes. They're the same make as the last pair of trainers I bought - Converse AllStars.

My last pair were white with a sort of Little red riding hood theme about them, which was nice for the first month but got dirty fast. My new pair are black... but an interesting thing happened in the shop.

See I picked up the shoe I wanted, but it was in a size 3, so I took it to the counter and said "Do you have these in a size 7?" (Yes I have size 7 feet).

She went to her co-worker and after some searching, no they didn't have that in size 7. She offered to order some in, which to me seemed bonkers, I'd traveled 55 miles to get to that store as part of a big shopping day out, if I wanted to order shoes I'd go to the Schuh in Cambridge.

We went back to the shelf and I said "Do you have any of the darker designs in a 7. Turns out all the designs on that shelf were size 1-6, and they didn't stock any higher. They only had sizes above 6 on the other shelf. I looked over and saw a shelf full of Converse shoes in larger sizes, some of them identical to the ones on the shelf I was looking at. Okay, I said, there's a black on on THAT shelf in a size 7 which is identical to the one I showed you. Can I have THAT shoe in size 7?

Yes, yes I can.

And here's the kicker : That shelf was men's shoes.

The rather bizarre truth about converse trainers. The men's and women's shoes from converse are identical in design (although not availability of patterns) so regardless of the size of your feet, you can get a nice plain pair of them to fit. However, if your feet are size six you will be wearing a pair of women's shoes and if you wear size seven you will be wearing men's.

Why they can't just launch them as what they are, unisex trainers, is beyond me.


And I thought that was the oddest shoe situation I'd encounter.

You know the majority of people in the world have one foot slightly smaller than the other but stores will not sell you a pair of shoes of different sizes.

Becky has this problem see, she takes a 6½ on her right foot and a 7 on the left. Well... really she takes a six and a half but some shoes are on the edge in terms of the sizing, and her left foot is ever so slightly wider. If the 6½ was slightly bigger or the 7s were slightly smaller it wouldn't be a problem, but because they're right onthe edge, she could only fit these shoes indifferent sizes.

She insisted they wouldn't sell them as it would leave them without a pair, but the shoe department frankly looked like a bomb had hit it, there were literally piles of unpaired shoes strewn this way and that. I said we could buy them if we were brazen enough. Derren Brown probably would have managed it. I had suggested that we could swap labels to get them looking like a same size pair but Becky initially refused this tactic, so I went to just go and buy them openly and honestly.

She then sent me a text message whilst I was in the queue, saying to take one label off... in plain sight of the checkout and the rest of the shoppers.

I went for total honesty, and we were told it was "against policy". I pushed to say it was discriminating against people with different sized feet and they said it's not discrimination, it's just policy.

The problem with people at that level of retail is that although they're generally witless enough to outsmart, if they notice that one shoe has a red sticker and the other has a yellow sticker, they call the manager, and the manager will just quote company policy without a single thought about the loss of a sale versus the sheer volume of shoes they get in.

Truth is, they had the mass purchasing to say "We've ended up with one too many left shoes in this size, could we get a half pair?" Because for them to order a massive bulk of shoes in differing sizes would be a trifle. for a single purchase however, the only option is to either be dishonest, or buy four shoes and simply throw two of them away.

Here's my official policy from this day forth as a consumer:

Fuck honesty. The economy is in the shitter. Intelligent companies must adapt to survive and I have no qualms about thinning out the herd.

If you have different sized feet, you go to the shop, find a quiet corner, and swap labels to get an apparently matching pair. If there's too much surveillance, you buy both pairs, take the ones you want, remove all labels, then take the other pair back demanding a refund because they don't match, and be sure to point out that you're very very upset, and have already bought a replacement pair of shoes elsewhere.

Essentially, the policies of retail companies are starting to seriously fuck me off, and after my being told that Jesus loves me at the checkout in Primark, I no longer care for the individuals manning the registers either. If you work retail and you aren't willing to bend the rules for a legitimate sale - Fear me.

So I was in Primark two nights ago. I bought about £95 of stuff and just after putting my pin number into the debit card payment thingy, the cashier said "Have you heard the good news?"

"What good news?" I asked.

"Jesus loves you." he said.

It's a funny thing, really, I was telling Mel about my shopping trip and she just said "Aw..."
It seems that she had thought it was all rather cute and cuddly. Inoffensive.

So I was in Primark two nights ago. I bought about £95 of stuff and just after putting my pin number into the debit card payment thingy, the cashier said "Have you heard the good news?"

"What good news?" I asked.

"Islam is the light." he said.

But ultimately it's just a slogan. A form of religious tag line, and Christians have quite an easy time of it because of this fluffy image they carry.

So I was in Primark two nights ago. I bought about £95 of stuff and just after putting my pin number into the debit card payment thingy, the cashier said "Have you heard the good news?"

"What good news?" I asked.

"Great Cthulu shall rise up from the depths and free us of our mortal bonds." he said.

To me though all these collected mythologies carry equal weight and I just see it as him using his customer facing position to proselytise to the masses. Frankly it's just not on.

So I was in Primark two nights ago. I bought about £95 of stuff and just after putting my pin number into the debit card payment thingy, the cashier said "Have you heard the good news?"

"What good news?" I asked.

"Satan lives, in his might and glory." he said.

I would hope if anyone in my workplace says something like that to one of our customers, there would be hell to pay. I wonder how many people complained about it in Primark, and how many just rolled their eyes.

So I was in Primark two nights ago. I bought about £95 of stuff and just after putting my pin number into the debit card payment thingy, the cashier said "Have you heard the good news?"

"What good news?" I asked.

"There is no God, you can stop worrying and get on with your life." he said.

The insane thing is that despite religious activists telling us Atheism is just our irrational belief, we have no right to be outraged by this... I hope he says it to a bonkers fundamentalist who kicks up a real shitstorm.

So I was in Primark two nights ago. I bought about £95 of stuff and just after putting my pin number into the debit card payment thingy, the cashier said "Have you heard the good news?"

"What good news?" I asked.

"You are going to look fab in this skirt" he said.

"Aww, thank you!"

.... I wish.

So I'm watching a TV show called "Deborah 13: Servant of God"

( Stacy 27: Servant of Logic. )

I think I might get back to starting that new religion...

Not that I have any beliefs to push... it's just the only way I can be sure of being allowed to say this kind of stuff in public.

Quick one because I'm going up to bed innaminit.


I've decided my birthday officially last from leaving work today to arriving at work on the 12th.

Tonight I went to see Watchmen. Good story, fucking visceral. I assumed it was an 18 because you saw Dr Manhatten's cock a few times, not because you see flesh torn from bone and such. Oh well.

Birthday really started at 5pm when I won a copy of smash brothers for the game cube on ebay.

Havent obtained any of the other things I listed because I have no idea what anyone is buying me for my birthday. I'm hazarding a guess at not much because I didn't throw a party. Silly me.

Becky bought me a lovely watch. I've only ever had 3 watches that I really really liked. This is one of them. I think is probably the more expensive of the three.

Tomorrow I take cake to work for everyone.

Right now... I guess I go to bed.

Not a lot of people know it's my birthday in six days time.

Usually I would force upon you all a list of things I demand for my birthday. But I'm not quite so self centered anymore.

This year I have been asked to list the things I want... kay.

This year for my birthday I would like:

An R4DS
Not the robot from Star Wars, ratherthe special cartidge thing that lets you play home brewed apps on the DS. I'm writing some.

Outliers
It's the new book by Malcolm Gladwell. I enjoyed his first two and think that this one could be just as good.

Amplitude/Frequency
I loved these two games, and now I have a PS2 and can't find them anywhere.

One, Two or Three Gamecube Controllers
I have one controller and I am attempting to get hold of some multiplayer experiences for the gamecube... thinking of which

Multiplayer Experiences for the Gamecube
I'm bidding on Smash Brothers Melee on eBay but it's unlikely that I'll get it at a reasonable price. I'll know in two days. Meanwhile there must be some other avenue that two or more people can use for a little retro Nintendo fun?

Um... I can't think of anything else... I guess I must be feeling fairly fulfilled in general.



I'll add more if I can think of any. Teatime now!

The first five people to respond to this post will get something made by me! My choice. For you.

This offer does have some restrictions and limitations:

- I make no guarantees that you will like what I make!
- What I create will be just for you.
- It'll be done this year. (no guarantee you get it this year though!)
- You have no clue what it's going to be.
- I reserve the right to do something extremely strange.
- I make no promises as to timeliness.

The catch? Oh, the catch is that you have to put this in your journal as well. We all can make stuff!

So it´s Wedñesday, speñt most of Moñday feeliñg ill beçause I over façed myself. Silly girl.

So far we´ve speñt every day iñ the same part of Teñerife, the Playas de las Americas, whiçh I assume is Spañish for "Ameriçan Players." Frañkly I´m touçhed that they ñamed part of their islañd after oñe of our soñgs, eveñ if they did get it slightly wroñg.

Moñday I stuffed myself with food añd that ñight I seriously felt it. I slept for ñearly 12 hours solid añd had a very small breakfast. Tuesday was Beçky´s turñ to feel ill añd she had a çouple of feinty spells, bless her. She forgot to briñg her statins with her so today we went and bought some and she feels a lot better now. Much of Tuesday was a blur beçause we kept goiñg baçk to the hotel for a ñap.

The plañ was to go see Blaçk Laçe last ñight. Agadoo añd all that. Wheñ we arrived at the Drop Iññ however, there was a gruff çoçkney twat oñ stage añd Çoliñ Gibb of Blaçk Laçe was stood at the bar lookiñg miserable. After he left, the stage ´Eñtertaiñer´ stated that Çoliñ had turñed his ñose up at the sight of so few people at the bar.

I thiñk it´s far more likely that the çoçkñey arsehole was somehow owned or employed by the bar, añd that the bar itself had said there wereñ´t eñough people there for Çoliñ to be paid his full fee.

Inçideñtally, the reasoñ I´m beiñg so dowñ oñ the fat baldiñg pilloçk oñ stage is that he was añ utter fuçkwit añd a çomplete arse, or to put it less subtly, a homophobe. I have ñot heard the phrase "Shirtlifter" siñce I was about 14. We left very quiçkly to esçape what frañkly felt like a very hostile eñviroñmeñt.

I always woñdered what happeñed to that type of çomediañ wheñ deçeñçy laws ousted them from the UK. Turñs out they dispersed to foreigñ holiday resorts.

But the ñight wasñ´t a total loss. We eñded up in a Jazz & Blues bar çalled Joe´s, where we had a marvellous time añd the live musiç was woñderful.

Tomorrow´s plañ depeñds on Beçky feeliñg a little better, añd involves gettiñg a reñtal çar in whiçh to tour the islañd.

I hoñestly cañ´t remember the last time I had this much fuñ.

Adios!