Breaking radio silence to note that my good friend and occasional collaborator Tony Whitmore has launched his wedding photography website. Tony’s a genuinely lovely bloke and I’ve no doubt that he’ll be an excellent wedding photographer as a result of that. My only regret is that he didn’t realise that this was what he wanted to [...]
Aug 29, 2011 | Categories:Photography | Tags: friends, radio silence, tony whitmore | 2 Comments »
I should be asleep. I should, by rights, be exhausted, because it's been a long week of too-ing and fro-ing and I seem to have not stopped for any decent length of time, unless it's when I've been asleep, which hasn't been much. Anyway, back from London, done a couple of days work (but disjointedly [...]
Sep 11, 2009 | Categories:Photography, Uncategorized | Tags: bert stephani, canarywharf, friends, richmond, workshop, workshops | Leave A Comment »
Happy Goth Christmas, everyone. I’m exhausted. It’s been a long two weeks and, though I was supposed to be going to the the Canonical Halloween party at Canonical Towers tonight I decided that, due to lack of sleep and general grumpiness on my part, I would be better off concentrating on finishing the Halloween story [...]
Oct 31, 2008 | Categories:Uncategorized, Writing | Tags: friends, halloween, story | Leave A Comment »
Very quick post because I’m supposed to be going out to photograph most of London (this may be an exaggeration; we’ll see) before too long. Of course, it would have helped if I’d actually done some organising of said photo walk; that may cause problems. It’s been a good, if very tiring week. We – [...]
Oct 25, 2008 | Categories:Photography, Uncategorized | Tags: canonical, friends, launchpad, launchpad epic 2008, london, neil gaiman, news, photo walk, planet ubuntu uk | 2 Comments »
It won't have escaped your notice that I started to write a comment piece on this news story but my blog client (which I really do need to write something about in the not-too-distant future since it's something that I've written and could possibly turn out to be quite useful to a fairly small subset of the Open Source community) fell over. Before it retired to that great stack trace in the sky, however, it managed to vomit up the beginnings of my post onto the internets (a fact about which I have filed a bug) and as a result managed to make me look like both a bit of an idiot and a bit of a bigot. I'm used to the idiot part. I don't like looking like a bigot.
Anyway, since it had made it onto my blog (and I never bothered to check that it hadn't, it also ended up propagating across the interwubs to LiveJournal, where a good friend of mine commented:
Interesting case. If they were only leafleting, though, I can't see the harm, and even if they were preaching in the street, I think asking them to leave was a bit severe. People can quite easily walk past and seal up their ears (as we do every day to resist free newspapers being thrust into our hands) – and Jehova's Witnesses have been door-knocking for years without being asked to leave certain streets. The "Be a winner, not a sinner" man who yells his (Christian) faith down a megaphone in the middle of Oxford Circus every single day is seen as a local landmark, if a slightly irritating one once he starts going on about how buying stuff on a Sunday is a highway to hell.
I don't believe in thrusting religion down people's necks, but we accept the marketing of coffee, newspapers and shampoo samples readily enough on the basis that people can take it or leave it, so why ban people expounding on their religion in the same way, as long as they're not being aggressive or harrassing people?
On a similar theme, I got handed a flyer today about a man who's riding a horse from Texas to Jerusalem (the tricky bit with the ocean wasn't explained) in the name of Jesus, to spread the Gospel. Fair dos, I thought, before turning my thoughts to how he was going to get the horse across continents.
All of which, plus the fact that it was late and I was tired and lacking in the brain power necessary to sling a sentence together, let alone make a point about religion, left me thinking that I should probably re-write the post, or at least some of the post, and actually make clear my thoughts on the matter, which, exploding blog clients aside, I'd hitherto failed to do.
Jun 08, 2008 | Categories:Uncategorized | Tags: annoyances, atheism, comments, friends, human rights, in the news, me, opinion, posts that started out differently, religion | Leave A Comment »
My colleague and friend Matt Revell has a nice summary of some of the reasons for rising domestic fuel prices in the UK at the moment. A phrase that particularly caught my eye was this one: Wind power, also, is not reliable nor particularly efficient and requires generation from other sources (coal, gas, nuclear, for [...]
Feb 22, 2008 | Categories:Uncategorized | Tags: blogs, friends, in the news, matt revell, news, politics, power, science | 1 Comment »
My pal Matt Revell has posted the following glorious titbit: BBC Watchdog – the consumer programme – said tonight during a piece on con artists using a psychic front: “…because of course there are genuine psychics out there.” What?! Come on. Surely, even if you’re being kind, this is debatable. I thought Watchdog’s purpose was [...]
Jan 23, 2008 | Categories:Uncategorized | Tags: friends, stupidity, television | Leave A Comment »
A friend just posted a link on Facebewk to a petion to the Prime Minister's Office to: … cease the creation of more faith schools, take existing public-funded faith schools from the control of religious bodies and convert them to unbiased schools for all. A worthy cause, I think. Go and sign it, if that [...]
Nov 29, 2007 | Categories:Uncategorized | Tags: friends, government, links, petitions, religion | Leave A Comment »
Your word for today: Mumblefuck (MUM-bul-fuck), n.:That which happens between sleep-fuddled lovers on a Sunday morning. Invented1, in a roundabout sort of way, by your humble author and his friends. Use it at your pleasure. Verb forms are also acceptable. I have lots of work to do tonight and absolutely no inclination to do any [...]
Nov 23, 2007 | Categories:Uncategorized | Tags: friends, humour, word soup | Leave A Comment »
That religion stuff, and what I meant to say about it
It won't have escaped your notice that I started to write a comment piece on this news story but my blog client (which I really do need to write something about in the not-too-distant future since it's something that I've written and could possibly turn out to be quite useful to a fairly small subset of the Open Source community) fell over. Before it retired to that great stack trace in the sky, however, it managed to vomit up the beginnings of my post onto the internets (a fact about which I have filed a bug) and as a result managed to make me look like both a bit of an idiot and a bit of a bigot. I'm used to the idiot part. I don't like looking like a bigot.
Anyway, since it had made it onto my blog (and I never bothered to check that it hadn't, it also ended up propagating across the interwubs to LiveJournal, where a good friend of mine commented:
All of which, plus the fact that it was late and I was tired and lacking in the brain power necessary to sling a sentence together, let alone make a point about religion, left me thinking that I should probably re-write the post, or at least some of the post, and actually make clear my thoughts on the matter, which, exploding blog clients aside, I'd hitherto failed to do.
Jun 08, 2008 | Categories:Uncategorized | Tags: annoyances, atheism, comments, friends, human rights, in the news, me, opinion, posts that started out differently, religion | Leave A Comment »