Chatiryworld

Is it me...

...or is the whole Keep Calm and Carry On trend getting ridiculous?  'You always take it too far,' my mum would say to my sisters and I when we wound each other up just that bit too much.  I think that applies here.  And I normally like Pedlars, sort yourselves out folks.

Yuck

I'm going off down to Yorkshire in a bit and so don't have time to write the rant of all rants against Paula Murray of the Sunday Express after she decided to stalk look at the Dunblane survivors Facebook and Bebo profiles.  She was shocked to discover they were acting like normal teenagers and swearing rather than sitting at home piously in silence.

Fortunately Graham Linehan has written a fantastic blog post about the whole horrible episode, telling you what you can do about it.

And should any of you have the misfortune to be involved in an horrific incident, please try not to recover too much from it and be careful about trying to get on with your life as a tabloid journalist might take exception to it.  Especially if you if you are under eighteen and have extra privacy protection.

I want to live where Zoe Williams lives

Quote from an article she wrote about yummy mummy Liz Fraser (written a book with her granny about parenting):

I don't share a number of Fraser's other bugbears: the "sexualisation" of children, for instance. "Why are there so many little girls going out aged seven dressed as prostitutes?" she says, so adamantly that I thought for a thrilling moment she might thump the table. I don't think you do see them in normal life, but on Channel 4, in programmes called "Help! My seven-year-old dresses like a prostitute".

Williams is either blind or lives in a lovely magical place where you don't need to see ten year olds wearing t-shirts saying 'You've been a bad boy, now go to my room'.  What made seeing that worse was that the girl was with several adults who you would have hoped might have put a stop to it.  Sneaking it on when out with your friends is one thing, but parents encouraging this kind of thing?

I'm interested in how parents of young girls deal with this, I'm not sure if I have any readers with girls old enough (ie not toddlers, I know I have readers with toddlers) to have come across it, but I wonder if there is great peer pressure for girls to wear things like that.  How do you get over the 'don't want child to be picked on' versus 'don't want child to be wearing totally inappropriate clothing'?

Teh stupids

There's a lot of it about.  Plane Stupid occupied the taxiway at Aberdeen Airport earlier today.  Whilst I firmly believe we should all be flying much less, I don't like their protest tactics.  Living up to their name really.  Airports in Scotland are often lifelines for islanders.  If you live in Orkney or Shetland and you need specialist healthcare, you need to go to the mainland, and unless it's an emergency, the NHS will send you a scheduled flight.  It's possible to go for an outpatients appointment and be there and back in a day.  Back in 1999 there was a couple on the same flight as me to Orkney from Aberdeen who had just had a baby.  If there's any hint of complication with a pregnancy you'll usually get sent down to Aberdeen where they can deal with a wider variety of problems.  But they'll send you back up as soon as possible.  This baby was only about 2 or 3 days old and the mum had had a C-section.  Our flight was delayed and they had to sit around the airport waiting with the rest of us (I'm sure if she had felt ill she would have been able to go back to the hospital, but still) before going to stay in the hospital in Kirkwall.  People in that position use scheduled flights from Aberdeen Airport all the time. So as well as being dangerous Plane Stupid probably caused more hassle than they thought they would.  But maybe that was the point.

And then there's the CBBC presenter with the missing hand affair.  I'm wondering if the parents who have complained that she scares their children go up to disabled people in the street and ask them to go away because they are scaring their kids?  Or do they just stay indoors all day?  Watching telly probably.  Just as you think we're getting better at combatting prejudice and discrimation around disability something like this shows for some people, there's a fair way to go.

Weekending

Seems to have been a weekend of knitting, cuddling a baby, remembering why I hate Argos and out of town retail parks, online festive shopping and stocking up on magazines.  I also just watched The Science of Sleep and wasn't really that impressed.  It kept lulling me into a false sense of security as there were bits I enjoyed and then it went all strange. 

Not being a driver I don't often go to retail parks, but I wanted to go to Borders to get some festive house p0rn and we decided that whilst there I may as well brave Argos and get blank cards.  I normally save Borders for Glasgow as it's in the city centre there but I'm not sure if I'll be going there over the next few weeks (for leisure purposes anyway).  Fort Kinnaird is one of the bigger parks I've been to, if not biggest.  It even has food stalls in the car park for people who can't walk very far without eating greasy Chinese takeaway.  Couldn't find any maps anywhere though, which didn't help, but I found Borders easily enough.  It wasn't the best stocked branch I've been in but I grabbed some goodies and asked where Argos was, turned out it was the other side of the universe park. 

When I got there there was nothing to tell you what to do if you had reserved items online but I found some computer terminals which told me I could pay there and then pick up.  Turns out reserving an item online only cuts out one of the queues (Argos can only exist in a country where people enjoy queuing, although even that seems to be dying out) so I still had to wait for my ticket to be called, and then go to my collection point and wait for longer whilst everyone else behind me either got served first or pushed in.  And invaded my personal space.  Even the computer announcer started having a go at me - 'Number 641 to your collection point please' - I had been there for about 10 minutes already.

I eventually got the cards and accidentally found another bus stop that meant I didn't need to walk to the other side of the universe park again.  The queue was massive, a kid next to me was having some kind of meltdown regarding paper and his mum just couldn't cope anymore, and when the bus eventually came it featured some girls at the back playing music through their mobiles.  Maybe we should all get mobiles with speakers and start playing really obscure stuff back at them, see how they like it.

Turns out by the time I got home it would have been quicker to travel back from Glasgow on the train anyway, bit more expensive though I suppose.  I was very glad I'd spent a few hours with friends earlier and cuddled the cute baby currently gracing my Flickr account.Having to go through the city centre confirmed to me that I wanted to do the bulk of my festive shopping online, which I did this afternoon.  Not as easy as I thought it would be but saved both hassle and money.

Now I've bored you with rant number 47 in a series of 98 about my loathing of Argos, I'll go to bed.

Hello baby Henry!

A friend just had a baby last week, and as per tradition, he's receiving a hat knitted by me and a copy of The Baby's Catalogue.  It's a fun tradition.  Three more friends are expecting babies over the next few months so more knitting to be done.

In other news, why hasn't Jade Goody been put down?  Why haven't people who comment on The Scotsman news stories been put down?  And if you watched Holiday this evening featuring Lawrence Llewelyn-Bowen going to the Highlands, they aren't like that.  They're better.  Apart from the sleeper train.  That's worse.

The 2006 Torchlight Procession

Was not as good as 2005's.  For us, anyway.  We spent most of the day worrying about the weather but in the end went, and to be fair it didn't rain until we got up onto Calton Hill. 

Last year we were much nearer the front (having been kicked out of a cafe/bar on Cockburn Street we had no choice but to start queuing where as this year we ensconced ourselves in Wannaburger), which means you can hear the pipe band and see the burning Viking ship and you get a greater sense of occasion.  There seems to be a better atmosphere too, this year it felt more like a walk with some flaming torches (a very pretty walk though).

 

And lots of stupid people.  And annoying people.  I wouldn't expect the whole parade to be full of people who didn't annoy me or do stupid things but here's a short list of things we encountered:

• The loud ra-ra male students behind us while we were waiting to set off who did LOTS of LOUD impressions of American tourists and Austin Powers and quoted at great length from Terry Pratchett novels.  We escaped from them asap.
• The guy with the unlit torch wedged in his backpack who nearly set fire to Jon with the lit torch he was carrying.  Him and his mates were leaping around everywhere taking photos and getting excited.  They did not speak English and did not understand my 'be careful' and Jon's 'fucks sake'.
• The people letting their toddler carry a torch whilst sitting in his/her pushchair.  If a child isn't old enough to do the walk unassisted then they are probably not old enough to hold a big stick that's on fire.
• People letting their small children carry torches so the fire wasn't too far from their own faces/coats/other people's coats etc.  Should be an age/height limit on this.
• The woman sitting on the grass on Calton Hill with her child, sheltering under an umbrella.  Nothing wrong with that - except they still had a lit torch that could have set light to said umbrella.
• The idiots pushing through beside me at the front of the fence by the burning boat.  I was quietly taking photos for a minute or two, intending not to stay long, but then they rammed through, torches blazing, so they too could take photos.  On their phones.  Then they started the trend for chucking lit torches at the boat (most of which missed and sat on the grass, good job it was raining).
• All the people standing having conversations in the middle of Princes Street which was closed to traffic BECAUSE of the procession and so it could safely travel through, not for your convenience.  People standing still + lots of people moving in one direction with flaming torches = not good.
• All the people pushing through the procession the wrong way so they could get past it.  Use the pavement, it's why we weren't on it.

The torches you are given are not magical safety ones that won't hurt ever and can be waved about at will.  They are big wooden and wax sticks with real fire at the top That Are Fucking Dangerous.  I kind of like that the organisers don't get too fussy with health and safety (well, within reason), trusting that we are all responsible people who can get on with it.  I'm not so sure everyone is though.

Anyway, less ranting.  It did look beautiful, but we just didn't enjoy it as much as we did last year.  Next year we might not bother with the torches and just position ourselves strategically to watch it and take nice photos.  Speaking of which, here is my Flickr set and here is the stunning one by my boy.  I heart his new camera!

The trouble with The Trouble with Atheism

Watched Rod Liddle's The Trouble with Atheism this evening, bit weak really and missed the point on several counts.  Atheists do not worship at science institutes and I don't ever sit down to read the unholy scriptures of Darwin.  The reason why we may opt for a 'here today, gone tomorrow' attitude is that we don't believe in an afterlife.  That also makes us sound like we just live for ourselves without thought to the wider society.  It's true that there are some die-hard fundamentalist atheists but his parting shot 'there may or may not be a god, why can't we leave it at that?' is at best naive, if we left it at that there would be no religion (is that what Christian Rodd Liddle would like?), or at least there would be more respect of each other's beliefs, whether it be right-wing fundamentalists in the USA or strict Islamic regimes in the Middle East.

Even the question on the Channel 4 forum about the programme, 'is atheism a meaningful alternative to religion?' doesn't make sense to me.  Why should it be an alternative to religion?  What is religion anyway, lots of people believe in a god but don't follow a religion.  You can read the discussions here.

Rod Liddle's previous programme, The New Fundamentalists, was a much better programme (and no, not just because he wasn't attacking my lack of belief). he seemed to take it much more seriously rather than treating the atheist programme as a bit of a joke.  Perhaps it might have been better to have a non-Christian presenting it.

Tuesday 19th December 2006

Somebody (or something) is eating our bandwidth, making it hard to use the internet. Just a photo then today, as it's currently Hannukah, open the door here.

Atheist Blogs Aggregated

Found the above yesterday, makes for good reading plus just adding one aggregated feed instead of all of them makes you less likely to think 'bugger, I have far too many feeds on Bloglines'.

'New atheism' seems to be the in thing to be talking about (especially since Wired covered it), whether you're promoting it or feeling threatened by it.  My thoughts are that this has come about because of all the right-wing Christian crap Bush has been encouraging, and we atheists and agnostics are sick of it.  We've always been here, getting on with our thing, we've just never felt the need to get so loud until now and speak out against the abstinence movement, creationists running schools, the whole intelligent design thing (ok, tell me what's intelligent about period pains?)...  There's no need to worry about us taking over the world, we just want to make sure you don't.

That's my personal take anyway.  Read more about some of the shocking attitudes there can be towards atheists over at one of my favourite blogs, Friendly Atheist.  You might also like one good move, which I read over Jon's shoulder (and am now about to subscribe to).

Oh, and does anyone know if someone did actually start the war on Christmas?  I'm not sure I've read of any non-Christian people wanting to get rid of it, those who don't like it tend to ignore it, in the same way you would ignore all the other 100s of religious festivals that don't affect you.  I've always put Seasons Greetings on cards because it doesn't have any religious connections, and I'm, er, not religious.  Kind of makes sense, to me anyway.  It's not because I think christmas is a bad word causing offence to people who aren't Christians, it's because I'm not a Christian so don't feel it's appropriate.  I only use the word otherwise because saying 'holidays' with a British accent or describing it as the festive season all the time sounds a bit wanky.  See the hilarious Daily Show's take on the whole farce.