Urbi et Orbi...

Not your standard Papal Balcony affair, I'm afraid - just a few Easter things I need to get off my chest.

Stop moving it around...

It's confusing and inconvenient. Last Easter Sunday I was here...

(...where, coincidentally, it was also snowing)

...but that's not twelve months ago to the day - it was actually on April 8. Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. This year it's about the earliest it can ever be because the spring equinox was on Thursday and the full moon was on Friday, so here we are. No wonder Tesco had to have their Easter Eggs on display by Boxing Day...

It was stolen by Christianity...

As we all know, the days used in the calculation - spring equinox, all druids and Stonehenge; full moon, all witches and werewolves and magic - are totally pagan things and nothing to do with the crucifixion or the resurrection. This is because Easter was happily going on for donkey's years before Christianity hit Britain - as a celebration of spring, new life, fertility etc... hence bunnies, eggs, chicks. It was a celebration of the goddess of spring and fertility Estre (or Oestre or Ishtar) and the word comes from her. As does the word "Oestrogen"...

"Do you wish to remove unused files?"

I went to Church of England primary school, so stored away in my brain, taking up valuable space, is...

There is a green hill far away
Without a city wall
Where the dear Lord was crucified
Who died to save us all.

We may not know, we cannot tell
What pains he had to bear
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffer'd there.

He died that we might be forgiv'n
He died to make us good,
That we might go at last to heav'n,
Saved by his precious blood.

I will never need this for any useful purpose again in my life (ie. beyond blogging and quizzes)and yet I can remember it verbatim. I didn't look it up. Some kind of brain clean-up facility is needed, along the lines of the excellent example here...

Even at the age of 8, I remember being bothered about "without a city wall" because I thought that it meant it hadn't got one. It was only a green hill far away, why would it have needed one? Only as my grammatical understanding progressed did I realise it meant "outside the city wall..." (Makes mental note to use this construction more often in everyday speech to confuse people... "Where's Starbucks? Just down the way, without the front doors...")

I'm still bother'd by the whole rhyming of "forgiv'n" and "heav'n" and the sing-them-as-if-they've-only-got-one-syllable thing, both of which happen loads in hymns. I suppose it was because the tunes and the words were probably written by different people, maybe centuries apart, and someone had to crowbar it all together. Maybe if Rice and Lloyd-Webber had done it instead...*

Open the bloody shops...

Why are they closed?

It can't be to force people into church, because it doesn't work...
It can't be an objection to making profit, because all the little shops can open...
It can't be an objection to trading per se, because of car boot sales...

It must just be to remind us about suffering...

Sod health and education and social justice, in the next election I'm voting for whoever sorts the Sunday Trading laws out. Or moving to Scotland.


*Oh...

"Tell me Christ how you feel tonight
Do you plan to put up a fight?
Do you feel that you've had the breaks?
What would you say were your big mistakes?"

They did...

The Emperor's New Clothes...

OK.

In reference to a recent post, sometimes, it takes Marcus Brigstocke from The Now Show to make you see the light...





...and, although it pains me to admit it, he's actually right.*

*About the Marmite, not about America

So much hot air...

Spurred on by others' green credentials and guilt about how much CO₂ my flying to New Zealand (and back) dumped into the atmosphere, I had a go on the Carbon Calculator website. If you put in details of where you've been and how you got there, it will tell you how much pollution you caused. I think even by walking to the kitchen you can destroy a sizeable section of the ozone layer. I'm staying on the sofa.

The upshot is that flying half way round the world and then coming back covers 38 572km and produces 4.2 tonnes (metric with an "...nes" on the end) of carbon dioxide...



...but it's not the end of the world (either literally or metaphorically) because I can buy trees to the value of £31.08, almost a forest, and everything will be OK and I will sleep at night. (If I'd only been to New York I would've got away with a measly £8.88 worth of trees. Which is a small tree in Durham somewhere.)

And I was actually going to do it!

But it seems trees are out of stock at the moment...



You see, this is what you get when you try to be holier-than-thou. If there are no trees left to buy, then there's probably something more wrong with the world than my £31.08 will put right...

Blog Day 2006...

Apparently it's International BlogDay2006 today and it's all about the sharing...

1. Find 5 new Blogs that you find interesting, preferably different from your own culture, point of view and attitude
2. Notify the 5 bloggers that you are recommending on them on BlogDay 2006
3. Write a short description of the Blogs and place a a link to the recommended Blogs
4. Post the BlogDay Post (on August 31st)... etc etc (Blog Day Website)

Like I've got time to do all that...

For a start, there's the whole "interesting" debate. I find about five blogs interesting, primarily because they are not different to my own culture, point of view and attitude, because they are written by my friends. But this probably makes me insular and short-sighted and monomaniacal, so I shall broaden my horizons and recommend...

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Found this because she was wittering on about mobile phone masts and I thought she was doing so from an "I-don't-use-a-mobile" standpoint. She didn't, but now she does. So she uses a mobile but objects to the masts. Apparently, mobile phones worry her because "common sense tells me that they can't be good for you."

If you use a mobile phone at all, you can't object to the masts. Even if they're near you.

End of.

Well not quite, because you also have to eat nothing but raw food, be open to "infinite possibilities", discover your "soul purpose" and "upgrade your life"....

Blog off.

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Yup, it's well-known right-wing Daily Mail/Moral Maze/Question Time rent-a-gob Melanie Phillips. I disagree with virtually everything she says, particularly when she witters on about how crap education is in this country.

She's got a bit bogged down recently by only slagging off anything she might consider pro-Islamic, mainly, I guess, to publicise her latest book, Londonistan. (Not providing a link, in vain attempt not to publicise it any more..)

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Found by chance, Alice's Rabbit Hole. Great rant about Virgin Mobile customer service with points of agreement on pedantry and an admiration of Lynne Truss.

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Number 4 is Nottinghamshire Notes, which I just happened to find when I was looking for pictures of Mansfield Market Place. I'm from Mansfield and I just spent a week there with my family, walked through the market place twice and didn't notice that they had done anything to it. I must pay greater attention next time.

It's also got links to places I know I ought to have been to again and haven't for ages. For example, the Crich Tramway Museum looks like there's more to it than when my Gran and Grandad took me there 30 years ago...

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This is the badscience.net blog, by Dr Ben Goldacre who writes in the Guardian. It doesn't really follow the recommendation rules, as I agree with most of it. Particularly about Brain Gym and Gillian McKeith... (And about mobile phone masts...)

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About 9 months late...

When I was in New Zealand last summer (did I mention that I had been???), I took some short film clips using the rudimentary video function of my digital camera. I tried to upload them to the NZ Blog at the time but the technology was having none of it, so no-one got to see them.

Well, now there is You Tube! There may have even been You Tube then, too, but I hadn't got around to how it worked... Well, now I have, so here are two short clips from New Zealand last year. The Maori Experience and the The Bloody Hell That's A Long Way Down Skipper's Canyon Experience...



A much more interesting use of You Tube, as Andy pointed out to me in email, is the ability to scavenge other people's videos and forcibly remind others of them. Most particularly, very bad 80s pop music, such as this...



Oh yes, it's the slow motion doves, the billowing curtains at the open window of the moonlit country mansion, the inexplicable martial arts dancers, the back-combed, backlit hair, the strange alien people with light up eyes. Enjoy....

Niece to see you...

I am an uncle and I am very excited about it!

My first niece arrived a bit unexpectely at around 1.20pm on Wednesday 30 November. This was a little inconvenient of her as she was actually due on my birthday, but she obviously didn't want either (a) to share or (b) to wait until the end of February.

She was delivered by section and weighed in at (or just "weighed", as she isn't a boxer) 2lb 2oz. (Google Calculator says that's 0.963883786kg, just in case European law applies to blogs.)

Here she is...



...with Mum and Dad.

I think she looks a bit like Great Grandad Hayes did. Compare...



This would be unsurprising, as she has already demonstrated herself to be an awkward Saggitarius!

Roger (Zoe's Dad) firmly believes in his Scottish roots, thinking he is, in some way, William Wallace reincarnate...



...so it's quite fitting that she should be born on St Andrew's Day. She shares her birthday with:

• St. Gregory of Tours, chronicler/bishop (538)
• Mark Twain, author of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn (1835)
• Winston Churchill, never, in the field of human conflict, etc (1874)
• Ridley Scott, director, Alien, Blade Runner (1937)
• Billy Idol, nice day for a, white wedding (1955)
• Ben Stiller, actor (1965)
• Des'ree, rhythm and blues singer with stupid name (1970)

...and loads of other people you've never heard of, because they are American, and therefore unimportant.

She's a Rooster, according to the Chinese Calendar (Obliging, pioneering, brave... well, definitley the last one, if not the first!)

Her birthstone is Citrine (which I have never heard of, and sounds like lav cleaner...) although it might be Topaz, depending on which highly reliable, based-in-fact, scientifically accurate website you look at.

News on her birthday suggests she will have to work until she is 69...



(which at least she will get to three months before she was supposed to) and important things happened on her birthday in the past too. Madonna was number one in the singles and album charts, the moon was the last day of a waning crescent, this is what the weather was like, and no-one got voted off I'm a Celebrity.

An auspicious day indeed.

Grandad Taylor already has her driving round in this...



...and at £799, she has 17 years to save up.

I will be meeting Zoe for the first time in a couple of weeks, and won't be thinking of anything else till I do. Not even Christmas!* Until then I'm keeping up-to-date with her autobiography. She's very technologically literate already, as are we all our our family. Even Roger, who I suspect has something to do with it.

*Well, maybe Christmas a bit!

The other side of the story...

After telling the story of meeting up with my friends Gill and Andy on the New Zealand trip, they've started a blog, so that (and presumably not only so that) you can read their version of events too!

Where has New Zealand gone?

I've finished posting to the New Zealand blog now I'm back, but you can still see it here, or by clicking the link on the right. I posted a few things when I got home, so you might need to catch up!