Diana Watch

Basically we should just write this week off. We were never going to win. Most of the papers care not for the crimes carried out by or covered up by the Catholic Church and neither do the television news programs. They have God on their side so that is such a massive positive that all other things are swept away. That is the right God by the way, not one of those funny foreign Gods.
Try this thought experiment; a Muslim leader wants to come to Britain for a bit a stroll around. He has been accused and has been shown to be, with documented evidence, to have known about and actively helped to cover up sexual crimes committed against children. Do you think that he would have got a visa? How much fuss would the Murdoch press and his TV news channel have made about that? You just have to look at the Fox news coverage of the not-a-mosque-that-isn’t-at-Ground-Zero story for a bit of a hint.
Do you think that the Mail and the Express would run glowing editorials about what we can learn from him and what an all round good egg he is? Do you think he would be allowed to compare a significant number of people in this country to Nazis because they think that his unpleasant views on homosexuality, abortion, woman, other religions, contraception, reporting crimes to the Police and how important people who believe in the same sky fairy (but only if they worship it in the correct way) are and should be listened to more than others, are wrong and harmful?
To be honest we are winning anyway, there are only about 5 million Catholics in the UK, which leaves about 60 million of us that aren’t. In a fight I think we will have them.
Their numbers are also declining (as are the circulations of the papers that support them credulously but so are ours) so if we wait around a while and let them continue to shoot themselves in, what seems like an extraordinary number of, feet then they will, hopefully, dwindle away to nothing and we can go about our lives, living them in an inclusive friendly way without these nasty little bigots having a say.


Again stolen from the BBC website.

Please don’t get me wrong, I am not anti any religion, you/they have as much right to worship who or what you want as I do to not do it, but the double standards, hypocrisy and outright lies of the Pope, the Vatican and most of the British Press is becoming a little wearing.
Modern Religions have not given us our morals, these existed before these religions, the oldest of which is about 2000 years, and they merely wrapped their philosophies around them. The general principles of being nice to each and not killing others make basic evolutionary sense to preserve the group.
Whilst we are at it, lets have a look at those 10 Commandments shall we?

ONE: 'You shall have no other gods before Me.'
TWO: 'You shall not make for yourself a carved image--any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.'
THREE: 'You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.'
FOUR: 'Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.'
FIVE: 'Honor your father and your mother.'
SIX: 'You shall not murder.'
SEVEN: 'You shall not commit adultery.'
EIGHT: 'You shall not steal.'
NINE: 'You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.'
TEN: 'You shall not covet your neighbour's house; you shall not covet your neighbour's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbour's.'

The first 3 aren't even about morals, just God. No mention of marriage being about between a man and a woman, nothing about dodgy employment decisions against woman.
The continuing argument from the Churches, especially the Catholic one, is that Atheists have no morals and are bad people and, as I would imagine that most people who read this ARE Atheists, we know that this is just blatantly untrue.
During his sermon at Westminster Abbey, following being on the front of every paper all week, he said to an audience made up of the Prime Minister and various Ex-Prime Ministers, various leading politicians and other important types, that the Church was being side-lined. That after having private meetings with all 3 party leaders.



Sorry about the ranty style today, when the week started I really wasn't that fussed about Popey coming here. OK, I didn't think we should cough up the money for it but I wasn't to upset about it. Now however, you have no idea how filled with righteous anger I am now.

Let's do some awards to help dissipate my rage,

The Award for Making Sure Your Child Hates You and Will Definitely Get Bullied,

Congratulations to Jamie and Jools Oliver on the birth of their healthy new son.
Just one little thing, and I know that it is a little lazy to have a cheeky shot at celebrity baby name, but Buddy Bear? Really? That is what you want to call him? Sure?

The Award for Most Deserved Coming 14th in a Survey of 117 Towns of the Week,

The high street of Dorchester has been dubbed a “clone” after we came 14th in a survey of the country’s blandest high streets.
Obviously this has offended local shop keepers but the survey is quite right. Whilst there are a few independent shops, if you came here you wouldn't be enthralled by the dazzling range of artisan stores, unless you really like mobile phones.

I think that will do for today. Significant Other has written a review of our weekend at the End of the Road festival here. My podcast is here.
Have a lovely week, the Pope goes home today, I think, which will make it nicer for everyone.

Guerrilla Gardening

I’m not sure if this should go on the Allotment blog or my general one so I’ve put it both, I’m not sire what I’ll do in the future.

 So I've been doing a little more Guerrilla Gardening. There is some bare soil near my house and so I had put plants in it.

 On the Guerrilla Gardening website there is a section on how to create seed bombs but I didn't want to do that. The small area is “looked after” by someone who is a supposed professional but can't tell the difference between weeds and plants and has already removed other things that I have planted there that were in flower. This then would need some stealth and cunning. And then I had a thought, plug plants.

 I still have some trays left from some Lobelia that I had bought and would be perfect for my little plan. There was a packet or two of wild flower seeds hanging about, under the sink I think, so a little compost in the tray and a sprinkling of seed on top. Now water in and leave for a few weeks, with some regular water obviously, and then you will have little pods of wild flowers that you can plant quickly and with minimum fuss.

 Under the cover of darkness, well the middle of a Sunday afternoon anyway, I went over to my little plot around the tree and to the bare earth patch that I wanted to bother and within 15 minutes my work was done and my little plugs of wild flowers were watered in. Give it another couple of weeks and they will be flowering and giving a little joy to all who see them, well that's what I rather egotistical hope.

 Oh and for the person who regularly returns this area to bare earth I have made these little signs,

Diana Watch

“Yeah, Significant Other was admitted on Friday evening, yeah, had emergency surgery on Saturday” “Oh really? Yeah I didn’t fell too well on Saturday either”

This is going to be another short one this week as things really haven't improved that much, oh and work was a bit busy yesterday morning when I usually do the shaping of this so I couldn't get much done. Damn sick people with their health needs.

I don't really want to go on about strikes, click here and here for details, because quite a lot of people seem not to agree with me but I would like to say support the workers because one day it might be you that needs their support. When your employer tries to fuck you over and you cry for help, who will listen to you and support you. We must stick together.

If you were going to choose some really powerful Ex-ministers you really wouldn’t go for Hoon, Hewitt and Byers would you? I mean, they were all pretty useless, I looking specifically at you Patricia Hewitt, as Ministers.

 It seems they have claimed that they can manipulate Government policy in return for money. There seems to be little doubt that they said it but these lobbyists clearly don't know that much about British politics if they think that these 3 have any real influence. To be honest I didn't know that they were still MPs so quiet have they been. Oh but there was that short lived plot thing that they tried earlier in the year.

 Why are we so surprised that they have turned out to be self-serving, money grabbing tossers? They had already tried to shaft the Party early this year, they aren't good Party people.

 What I like about this story is the fact that people are getting so worked up about this, it's sweet. It's nice that we still get so worked up about minor political scandals. In the US, for instance, this is how their law making actually works. My point being that our politics is actually relatively clean, but we must carry on being vigilant and getting stroppy about it so that it doesn't get any worse.

Dorset really doesn't get into the news that so it's nice when it does, although when it does can you please print a picture of the right place please (no, that is Gold's Hill in Shaftsbury not Maiden Castle) or the locals are behaving like, well, locals or extras from Brasseye.

 This week Dorset County Museum in Dorchester has won its battle to save a collection of play scripts and stage set models by Thomas Hardy. They were collected by one of the original Hardy Players between 1908 and 1924 and the Museum has been trying to raise about £60,000 in order to buy them and stop them being taken out of the Country. They should stay here, Dorchester is the home of Hardy, or least that’s what we tell the American Tourists.

If I ever start another “bit” on here with the phrase “A survey says”, or similar, you have the right to poke me in the eye because this will make me as lazy as the journalist that copy and pasted it from the press release in the first place.

 I know that those who write for our papers are over worked, I have heard that they have to write 4 times as much stuff, I believe the correct term is copy, as they had to 20 years ago, but, never the less, printing everything that PR companies E-mail you is just lazy.

 Take this “study” from the Daily Mail a few weeks ago. It is about eggs. It is claiming that the humble egg is a “superfood” (there is a term I could do with never hearing again) but do you know who it is sponsored by? Look there, right down at the bottom. Yes, there it is, the money has come from the totally dispassionate and completely neutral British Egg Industry Council. No, I didn’t know that they eggisted either. Ah hahaha, egg pun! It’s not a “study”, it’s an advert.

 And then we had the Sun giving us a sex survery on Friday. Have a look at the slide show on the webite here and see if you can work out who it is advertising, I mean sponsored by. Now there are plenty of problems with it as a survery but basically, it's an advert.

 The essential problem with this sort of “story” is that some people don't read down to the end of paragraph 4 or 5 to see who has paid for the article and they take it as at face value and as a proper survey, resulting in them being massively ill-informed.

 Whilst this isn't too much of a problem because most of these “surveys” are about pointless things there is a drip, drip effect. One day they are telling you that coffee is good for you and the next that it is bad. This ends up with people not taking any notice of proper dietry or medical advice because they think that “scientists” are always changing their minds, that they don't know what they are on about. No they are not. PR companies are trying to sell you stuff and newspapers are making it easy for them.

Let's have some awards of the week because I've got things to do,

The Award for Looking Fantastic of the Week,

 It's time for another one of those staggering admissions that I make from time to time. I think that Lady Gaga is fantastic. There, I've said. I don't care for her music, although Bad Romance was alright, no, what I like is the fact that when a stylist says to her “I've got this idea, do you want to give it a go?”, she says “Yes, yes I will”. She will wear absolutely anything and take it very seriously. This I like. See, for instance (as long as you are over 16, it's a little saucy and they do kill quite a lot of people), the video for her new single “Telephone” in which she wears, at one point, an outfit made out of “Police, do not cross” tape and in another scene has Coke cans as rollers in her hair. If you can't get on to YouTube because you have an old browser that won't automatically update and you are using Linux and are not sure how to do it manually (only me then?) then you can always look at the Daily Mail website (although I wouldn't recommend it, it will just annoy you.) which seems to be on a commission from Gaga's PR company as they seem to print at least one picture of her every day.

 It seems that I am not alone in my enjoyment of her style as Lady Gaga has now had over a billion hits on You Tube. Now that is quite a lot. I was really happy when my posting about “You and Yours” in the week was linked to by Ben Goldacre and I got an awful lot more hits than usual, can you imagine how happy I'd be if I got a billion hits?

The Award for Some Pretty Top Architecture,

 Ladies and Gentleman I give you Le Centre Pompidou-Metz. It has been built in Metz in France and will be opened on the 10^th of May. It's propose is mostly as an exhibition space but I don't really care about that, see what it looks like,

Now that is what a modern building should look like.

 Now I'm not saying that all the Tea Baggers, sorry, Partiers are tiny minded, racist fuckwits, that would be unfair and I don't want to tar all those nice people with the same brush, but if you don't condemn it then you condone it. Is that what they want?

You may remember that last week I tried to start my own religion (sort of) in order so that we could claim that absolutely anything could be claimed to be a tenet of the religion. Well now we have progress. We had a bit on the Pod Delusion podcast (which is embedded just on the left there, I am right at the end, after the credits), we have a website and shop, a facebook group and a Facebook fan thing. Go on, go and see them all.

I hope you all have a lovely week.

Bruno's Bottom

When we went to see Harry Potter on Wednesday we noticed this,



Oh yes, Dorchester censors Bruno’s bottom.
It should look like this,



When questioned Chris MacDonald, cinema manager said: " You just have to be a little careful, it doesn't bother me personally but some people in the town might find it offensive. I've just done it so people don't complain and I don't want to give them the chance. You've got a predominantly retired population here who may take offence from it, and the last thing I want is someone coming in and complaining about it."

He went on to say: "If the poster wasn't suitable to put up [the film company] wouldn't have published it. But you can't please everyone, you never can."