“[…] he [Letts] has written a book on Fifty People Who Buggered Up Britain. He rails against the removal of corporal punishment from schools, that Britain is broken and the European super state is coming, when what we need is some more church going.”
What a complete and utter buffoon this Quentin Letts is! The last time I was truly miserable I was in a church! Admittedly, it was for a funeral service, but I found absolutely no comfort in the surroundings, the mythos behind them — and certainly not in the bumbling bloke in a frock up front.
I was an atheist long before I even knew who Richard Dawkins was. But Richard certainly reinforced my ability to argue from a position of a lack of belief. And in so doing he did not weaken my happiness. With books like Unweaving Rainbow, he did, in fact, the exact opposite.
Quentin Letts is unoriginal, facile, thick as pig-shit and clearly deluded in more than one sense of the word. And he isn’t funny.
Death comes to us all. There’s a cheery thought for a Sunday afternoon. The Grim Reaper gives a swing of his sythe and before we know it, that’s that. It’s little use bemoaning or denying the fact, one day — hopefully far into the future — we are all destined to cop it.
So what can we do in the meantime but laugh at the possibility? After all, if you don’t laugh at the ridiculousness of it all, what else is there to do but hope for an afterlife? (And you all know my views on that!)
With this in mind — and in an attempt to lift your spirits after such a depressing opening — I thought I’d share some of my favourite famous last words with you. I’m not sure just how genuine they are and, frankly, I can’t be arsed verifying them (it’s not like they’re going to sue me, now, is it?) So take them with a pinch of salt and bear in mind that I’m sharing them because I believe that if they aren’t true, they bloody well should be!
“I’ve never felt better.” — Douglas Fairbanks Sr.
“I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that’s the record…” — Dylan Thomas.
“Woe is me. Methinks I’m turning into a god.” — Vespasian, Roman Emperor. (I always find such ambition impressive!)
“I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.” — Richard Feynman. (I couldn’t leave Richard out now, could I?)
“Damn it . . . Don’t you dare ask God to help me.” — Joan Crawford. (Once a bitch, always a bitch — good luck, God!)
“I do not have to forgive my enemies. I have had them all shot.” — Ramon Narvaez, 18th-century Spanish politician and general.
“Tomorrow, I shall no longer be here.” — Nostradamus. (Now why couldn’t he be as clear and concise with the rest of his sodding prophesies!)
And finally…
“Do you know where I can get any shit?” — Lenny Bruce.
I’m sure it’s nothing new to anyone out there who’s been online for any length of time, but people search for the strangest things. From ways to blow up cars to Elvis Presley reading lights. Today, however, one search term really made me sit up and take notice.
Someone had actually hit my site after searching for…
… “una stubbs upskirt”!
I mean, no disrespect to Una Stubbs, but why would anyone want to look up her skirt? And, perhaps more to the point, who would want to?Cliff Richard reminiscing about the happy times they had whilst filming Summer Holiday, perhaps? Or simply someone with an Aunt Sally fetish?
Whoever it was, they’ll have been disappointed; I’ve searched everywhere and still haven’t been able to find a single upskirt Una Stubbs shot!
I did, however, find a girl called Abby who wanted to sell me her used panties.
Having finally completed Tolstoy’s War and Peace — I approached it with much trepidation, paced myself far more sensibly than I normally would, found some of the final battle sections and philosophising rather tedious and unnecessary, but, on the whole, thoroughly enjoyed it — I today started reading Bythe River Piedra, I Sat Down and Wept by Paolo Coelho. I bought it on a whim after ordering Jostein Gaarder’s The Orange Girl via Amazon and having their service recommend it to me (quite often a good idea, I find, if you want to discover something you might otherwise have missed), and I have to say that, so far, I find it rather unimpressive. Coelho, whilst not exactly proselytising, seems intent on pushing his own religious/spiritual views on life — and whilst I don’t especially object to this, I find, because of the simplicity of the novel, the sketchily drawn characters, that it’s quite overpowering.
With novels like this, and with my own particular position on such matters being so… well, founded in the rational, and even though I do have those “spiritual” moments of connection with the world around me (usually when I’m out in the countryside), it’s very difficult not to let the author’s agenda develop more weight than he might have intended. I’m very conscious that it may well be my own bias that is spoiling the work for me, though I truly don’t think that it is. There’s a naivete about it that I feel I should like, but somehow it doesn’t feel quite sincere.
It isn’t a difficult read, though, so I’ll give it a chance and try to keep an open mind.
It seems I’m pulling in quite a few new readers at the moment. My daily page hit count has been around 184 over the past week or so, jumping up to 233 on one occasion. Not exactly in the same league as some out there, but a definite improvement and rather gratifying nonetheless.
So, I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank you all for helping my blog to grow. Your comments are always welcome (in fact, if you’re a new reader, please feel free to treat this as an opportunity to say hello — pimp your own blog, even, if you wish!)
Because so many new people are dropping by I thought it might be fun to look back at some of my earlier articles. I’ve picked five of my personal favourites. If you’re a regular reader and there’s an older article of mine that you like which I haven’t mentioned, please feel free to shout up!
Five of the Best.
Drawing the Line. February 25, 2008. I like this piece because it gives an insight into how I write and, in particular, how I wrote Children of the Resolution. It was good for me to read it again. Especially at this “between-projects” time.
Disability in Fiction. February 16, 2008. Another writing-related piece concerning expectation in writing.
You Can’t Say That. June 23, 2008. A rant on our ridiculous fear of causing offence. In part a tribute to the late George Carlin.
Elvis, Marty Lacker… and Me. August 3, 2008. This is one of my all-time favourites because it provided me, quite unexpectedly, with the opportunity to exchange emails with one of Elvis Presley’s closest friends, Memphis Mafia member Marty Lacker. I may have a further update on this story in the not too distant future.
Well, I think that’s all for now. Take a look when you have time and enjoy. These five post probably epitomise pretty well just what I am about — or what my blog is about, at least!
As some of you may have noticed, I didn’t get round to writing a summary of the final episode of Richard Dawkins’s Channel 4 series “The Genius of Charles Darwin.” The truth is, I’ve only just got round to watching it myself — and forgot to make notes!
To make up for it, I’m going to suggest that you read the excellent summary provided by John over at Homo economicus’ Weblog. You could do a lot worse than add this blog to your feedreader. John has excellent credentials and his blog is always a good, well-informed read.
One thing I would like to talk about regarding this particular episode, however, is the attitude of teachers in British schools to the teaching of Darwin/evolutionary theory. In the course of this episode, we are introduced to a gentleman called Nick Cowan, who is a science teacher at Liverpool’s Blue Coat School (the school isn’t named in the documentary, but this gentleman didn’t take much finding!)
Mr Cowan can be seen in this segment, about seven and a half minutes in, and in the following segment — and if you haven’t already seen the documentary, or if you haven’t guessed, he is a creationist.
Watching, I was utterly dumbfounded. At one point, Dawkins asks the viewer if he/she would want someone like Mr Cowan teaching their children, and it was like being five and at a pantomime all over again! I actually shouted “no!” at the screen, that’s how strongly I felt about this issue.
Choosing my words carefully, I have to say that from where I’m sitting Mr Cowan’s credentials as a science teacher of any kind are completely undermined by the nonsense he spouts during this segment. If I had kids and this man was teaching them I would have been waiting at the school gates on Tuesday morning suggesting very strongly that he should be dismissed.
Now some might argue that because he isn’t teaching creationism as part of the science curriculum (he teaches it in a general studies class), I shouldn’t have an issue with this. But the man is a scientist, for God’s sake! (Yes, that was deliberate.) A scientist believing in God is bad enough, but I can just about accept that. But a scientist (okay, a science teacher — not always the same thing!) believing in creationism?… no, it’s too much of a dichotomy, and whilst he might be able to live with that and rationalise it using the unscientific intelligent design copout, I certainly can’t.
It is extremely depressing. People like Nick Cowan are potentially damaging our future understanding of science and quite possibly contributing to shortages of properly qualified scientists in science-related industries. Evolutionary theory is a fundamental part of biology. It’s vital that these kids have an accurate and truthful understanding of it, that they know just like I know, just like Dawkins knows, just like many, many of my regular readers know that it is a fact. The evidence is so overwhelming that it is now, in spite of what creationists and intelligent design proponents might claim, simply absurd to “believe” otherwise. It is a fact, as Dawkins points out, in the same way that gravity is a fact.
As my former headmaster, Phil Willis MP, says concerning the creationist packs that were sent to five thousand secondary schools in the UK back in 2006,
In April of 2006, the Royal Society summed it up quite perfectly, however. I leave you with their comment and the first segment of Episode Three of “The Genius of Charles Darwin”.
“Young people are poorly served by deliberate attempts to withhold, distort or misrepresent scientific knowledge and understanding in order to promote particular religious beliefs.”
As I sit at my desk, looking out of the window and trying to think of something to blog about, the sun comes out on this otherwise quite miserable and rainy day and quite suddenly I see it. A rainbow. And I am reminded once again of the uniqueness of every viewed rainbow — the fact that if you and I were side-by-side looking at it together you would be seeing a different rainbow to the one I would see. In fact, my left eye sees a different rainbow to the one that my right eye sees. The explanation is fairly simple, but I don’t really want to comment on that. Instead, I want to share a quotation with you that this phenomenon brought to mind — a quotation that admirably expresses how I feel about science and life in general.
“The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver. It is truly one of the things that make life worth living and it does so, if anything, more effectively if it convinces us that the time we have for living is quite finite.” — Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow.
I think Dawkins hits the nail on the head with this passage and I would seriously recommend this particular volume to anyone out there who hasn’t already read it.
The Yesterday Tree.
The chapter outlines for the next novel are still progressing steadily. I have about ten chapters outlined in, for me, great detail. It is opening out in a slightly different way than I would have expected, but at heart it’s still the kind of novel I want it to be — psychologically intense, dark, Kafkaesque, character driven but with a pacey, thriller-style plot. I will be glad to get the outline out of the way, however. It’s a pretty labourious process at times — write a bit, check a few facts, write a bit more, research police murder procedure, write a bit more… you get the picture — but it will make the whole process of writing the novel far less stressful. I’ll be able to concentrate much more on the language, on creating the feel I want.
It’s all in the preparation — isn’t that what they say?
RT @jimalkhalili: An excellent, sober assessment of the physics behind the stupid screaming headlines claiming 'physicists create negative… 3 years ago
