December 2007

The Observer reveals that Creationists plan British theme park. This was picked up by Pharyngula, the Dawkins site, and some of the other usual suspects in atheist blog-land. Prophecies of doom were uttered, comparisons made to the creationist nutters in the USA, and so on.

Nonsense like this makes you despair at the state of investigative journalism in this country. The AH Trust seems to be a project of the Zebra agency, a TV production company. I say that partly because they both have similarly illiterate websites filled with nasty javascript menus, but mostly because the same address is used in both domain registrations (that of a location which looks, from Google’s aerial shots, like a private house near Wigan). The Charity Commission’s registration documents for the Trust tell us that AH stands for “Assembly Hall” and that they originally had a site at christianassembly.co.uk, which now appears to be defunct.

The Trust’s annual report makes interesting reading for many reasons. The Trust reports that their income from donations was about £300 last year, and that they had £311 in the bank at the end of September 2007. (It’s possible, looking at the graph on page 7, that we’re meant to multiply these figures by 1000, but you’d have hoped they’d indicate that in the report somewhere).

The Observer tells us the Trust is talking to “a number of rich backers”, who I can exclusively reveal are called Mr Desk, Mr Chair, Mr Pen and Mr Stapler (Offler bless you, PTerry, stay well as long as you can), as well as a pair of investors to whom I am intimately connected.

For heaven’s sake, lefty journos, leave Christianity in this country to die in peace, with a bit of dignity, instead of writing yet another scare story about how we’re about to be over-run.

Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with “a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer’s“. Damn. As minnesattva says, “Even more than it’s excruciating for any person to “lose his/her mind,” it would — will — be a tragedy to lose the specific and wonderful mind that calls itself Terry Pratchett.”

At the end of his statement, he writes:

I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as ‘I am not dead’. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think – it’s too soon to tell. I know it’s a very human thing to say “Is there anything I can do”, but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.

The Pain is a web-comic which I keep losing and finding again, so I’m mentioning it here so I’ll know where to find it, and also because I like it.

The Top Ten on the archives page links to many of my own favourites, like Jesus vs. Jeezus and Scientists Riot!.

The later comics themselves seem less funny than the earlier ones, but the written “Artist’s Statement” beneath them is often good stuff. There are reflections on certainty and doubt in What Else They’re Calling “Mohammed”, lost love and breakups in How to Win Her Back, Christianity and Islam in Contributions of the World’s Religions, Part I, and the similarities between the political clout of liberals and evangelicals in Part V.

While I’m here, if you like Roy Zimmerman, you might enjoy the Agnostic Gospel Song.

I’d like to remind them that as a trusted radio personality, I can be helpful in rounding up fanficcers to toil in their underground salt mines.

Yes, the Russians bought LiveJournal. Either it’s a plot, which has been planned for over a year by the oligarchs, to destroy the free speech of the large number of Russian LJ users; or perhaps it’s just that Six Apart got fed up of all the complaints.

Theories abound: some people blame the sale plans for recent attempts to clean-up LJ, like the Strikethrough debacle and the recent introduction of the “denounce” button on everyone’s journal. (hairyears has a good posting on the latter, by the way, arguing that it’s an entirely sensible move on LJ’s part to prevent them from being sued by right-wing nutjobs).

Other good sources: Metafilter has some discussion, Encyclopedia Dramatica has some links to the stupidest responses so far, and vladmuthafucka records the thoughts of Putin himself.

I’ll stick around and see what happens, at least. ljdump runs every night here, just in case, but it’s far more likely that I’d use it to recover from some technical failure at LJ than to recover from a censored journal.