celebrity lookeylikey of the day

I experienced a jarring moment while reading about the upcoming change in presenter on the Radio 2 breakfast show. I should make it clear that while I do listen to the show, in very specific circumstances that we'll come to in a second or two, I don't really care who presents it, and I find both Zoe Ball and Scott Mills fairly uninspiring as radio presenters. The reason I listen to it at all is that it's the noise that my alarm clock/radio is programmed to make at the appointed hour in the morning, on weekdays anyway. I can't say I actually pay much attention to the show's contents, but instead generally whack the snooze button once and then when it goes off again heave myself out of bed, mostly drowning out the radio with a cacophony of groaning and creaking and farting noises. 

But why Radio 2? The rudimentary reasoning goes as follows: Radio 4 might either be not loud enough to wake me up, or the topics discussed on the Today programme might distract me into shouting at the radio or something and make me late. Radio 1, on the other hand, is probably a bit brash and noisy and inclined to Young People's Music which, honestly, is just shouting with a beat. What about craftsmanship? Ballads? Anyway, Radio 2 it is. The added advantage of Zoe Ball's show in its current form is that she does a sort of version of Thought For The Day (called, if you please, Pause For Thought) just after the first snooze interval elapses, so that gives me a good incentive to get up and turn the radio off before Kate Bottley or someone similar comes on and tells us all about how if Jesus were here today (and of course he is, in a very real but also not actually real sense) he'd be down at the local multi-storey car park doing some sick parkour in baggy shorts and a hoody, or something.

Anyway, I seem to have gone on a bit, but no harm done. The point is that the article on the BBC News website included a picture of what appeared to be a crude and slightly cruel effigy of Scott Mills hewn from shiny pinky-orange wax and then left in a room that was slightly too warm for a couple of hours, but was in fact, it turns out, the actual Scott Mills. The first thought I had was that he looked a bit like those two guys who'd had their chins extended (among various other procedures) so that they ended up looking a bit like Vic & Bob's The Ponderers, only with more terrifying hair and teeth. The trouble was, I had no idea of their names. Luckily I am pleased to be able to report that a Google search for "weird plastic surgery guys" proved instantly fruitful and revealed their identity: Grichka and Igor Bogdanoff, both of whom died within a week of each other of COVID-19 in early 2022. That's Grichka in the photo below, or so the internet tells me, but it doesn't really make much difference.

our father who art in heaven, I lost my mess in pew eleven

One other thing, also tangentially book-related: we went to a family gathering last week and it was held in the Community Centre in the village of Acton Trussell, which we've been to before as it's conveniently located near to several of Hazel's extended family. I see that I mentioned it briefly once before, as the book I was reviewing (William Maxwell's They Came Like Swallows) was one that I'd acquired from their quite extensive shelves on a previous visit. I see that at the time there was an honesty box in place; this seems to have gone now, probably as a result of no-one carrying small-denomination coins around any more post-COVID. Instead there seems to be some sort of loose book-swap scheme in place where you're encouraged to swap in a book when you take one out. Sadly I didn't come armed with any spare books, so I am now in credit to the tune of a couple of slim paperbacks and need to redress the balance on my next visit. 

I was also musing over the name of the village in my head on the drive up as it seemed faintly reminiscent of something I remembered from somewhere else, and it finally came to me in the latter stages of the journey (somewhere on the M6 I'd guess) - the name of the fictitious village of Stackton Tressell inhabited by cross-dressing comedy duo Hinge & Bracket in their various radio and TV programmes (and the occasional sherry advert) in the 1970s and 1980s was (a bit of Googling revealed) based on the real-life village of Acton Trussell, which just happens to have been where Patrick Fyffe, who played Dame Hilda Bracket, was born. George Logan, who played Dr. Evadne Hinge, was born near Glasgow, since you ask. Dear Ladies, which ran on BBC2 from 1983 to 1985, is the particular Hinge & Bracket vehicle that I remember - I would describe it as gentle comedy evoking the occasional wry chuckle rather than any pant-wetting hilarity.

Also spotted on one of the notice boards in the main hall while I was there was this frankly mind-boggling bit of groovy-vicar desperate grasping at young-person relevance and engagement. I mean I genuinely think that if Jesus were with us today - and, in a very real sense, he is, of course - he'd be rolling about in a paddling pool full of custard, or whatever it is that Messy Church implies.

I mean, even if you can get past the Charlotte Church jokes, there's still a faintly sniggery element here, and it would be highly advisable for their promotional video segments to be a bit more careful about phrasing than they seem to have been about ten seconds in here; the phrase "people just coming in all their mess" would probably have best been avoided.

will no-one rid me of this turbulent school

I was inspired by my mention of going to school in West Bridgford in the early 1980s to try and find the two schools I went to. We were only in the area for about eighteen months, and our collective recollection (and I'm leaning heavily on Emma's memory for some of this) is that our school attendance comprised the last two terms of the 1980/1981 school year and the entirety of the 1981/1982 one, which basically means that we moved up around Christmas 1980 and back in the summer of 1982. 

An odd side-note, similar to this (also school-related) one in how it illustrates the slipperiness of memory: I vividly recall being sat in front of one of those old tall TVs on a cart that schools used to have, at my primary school in Newbury, watching (bizarrely in hindsight) a cricket match, which I have mentally filed as being one of the early skirmishes of the 1981 Ashes series but which in fact must have been one of the matches against the West Indies from the previous year. I have equally vivid memories of watching some of the later Tests of the 1981 season in our house in Normanton-on-the-Wolds, which I'm provisionally prepared to accept are genuine, as they at least fit in with the known timeline of reality. The other possibility with the wheelie-TV school cricket anecdote is that it was the 1981 Ashes and I've mentally mis-located it geographically. I don't think so, though.

In fact, bollocks to it, I'm going to do a full list of all the schools I ever attended. Here we go:

• Let's start right at the beginning with Victoria Park Nursery in Newbury - not a school in the strict sense but I would imagine some light learning stuff was probably done in addition to the finger-painting and napping. I mainly include it so that I can also include this tremendous photograph of me (second from right, possibly asleep), my friend Pippa (fifth child from left, in front of the bishop's right knee) and the Bishop of Reading, who I think at the time was a bloke called Eric Wild, although I can't be completely sure as the job changed hands during 1972, which was probably around the time the photo was taken. 

• So then there was St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Primary School, also in Newbury. I'd have gone here during the 1974/1975 school year, just about all of it I think as we flew to Korea around July 1975.
• While we were in Seoul (July 1975 to December 1976) I attended Seoul Foreign School, which I mainly recall being intimidatingly huge (to a five-year-old, anyway) and run mainly by Americans - presumably a legacy of the large military presence dating back to the Korean War and beyond, although that can't be the full story as it was apparently founded as long ago as 1912. It's on Google StreetView, as most things worldwide are, but I can't say I'm struck by an overwhelming sense of oh yeah, that place on looking at it.
• Back to Newbury and St. Joseph's between the start of 1977 and about September 1978.
• Then off to Java and Bandung International School (now apparently called Bandung Independent School and occupying a different physical location), which by contrast with Seoul Foreign School was an endearingly half-arsed educational facility whose teaching staff was largely drawn from the pool of expatriate wives (including my own mother for a while). 
• Back yet again to St. Josephs, up to what I reckon (see above) to have been Christmas 1980 ...
• ... when we moved to the Nottingham area and I started at St. Edmund Campion primary school, or St. Edmund Campion Catholic Voluntary Academy, as it is apparently now named in a not-at-all-sinister way. This would have comprised the last two terms of my last year at primary school, or Year 6 under the current naming/numbering scheme.
• Next up is The Becket School, also in West Bridgford, where I attended for the whole of the first year (again, what would now be Year 7). More on this in a minute.
• Finally, in 1982 we moved back to Newbury and I started at St. Bartholomew's, where I saw out the rest of my school career in relative tranquility after what I calculate to be eight new starts in about the same number of years.

Upon trying to find the two West Bridgford schools on the map I was quickly able to locate St. Edmund Campion, but as hard as I could squint at the location of the Becket on StreetView I couldn't make it tally with my memory. It turns out that that's because it relocated to an entirely new location in around 2010. That's all terrific, and the new buildings are very impressive (if featuring some terrifyingly Goddy exterior decor), but where was the old location? The school's own website is frustratingly vague on the subject and it was only finding this property feature in the Nottingham Post that led me to it. Locate Brewill Grove on the map, drop the StreetView man on the main road looking towards it, and wind the date back as far as it will go - that turns out to be 2008 in this case, but it's far enough - and there it is, just as I remember it. If you apply the same date to the StreetView view at the new site you can see the new school under construction. You can then wind the date gradually forward to see the progression from working school to closed and slightly overgrown school (and a bit of a target for urban explorers, it seems) to half-demolished school to new houses to not-quite-as-new houses with bigger hedges.

The other thing to note about the new-look Becket is that the names of the school houses have changed. In my day there were four: Augustine, Fisher, Gregory, More - I was in More which I'm pretty sure was green. I don't know how new pupils were allocated to houses - I'm pretty sure there was some sort of hat involved, or that may be another misplaced memory. Anyway, the new school has expanded this to six and, in keeping with the new school's exterior decor choices, has really upped the Goddiness factor in a big way by including several people (Edmund Campion among them, but also Nicholas Garlick and Robert Ludlam, clearly taking time out from writing The Bourne Identity) primarily famous for being martyred in spectacularly gruesome ways. 

I mean, I suspect what's actually happening here is that the Goddiness levels in both schools (which I would rate as High on an arbitrary scale that I've just invented) have remained roughly constant since I was there, but that it just didn't occur to me at the time to notice or question it in the same way it does now. St. Joseph's was fairly Goddy as well, St. Bart's less so, and the schools I went to abroad still less. 

four candles

I tell you what, the life of a tedious atheist is not an easy one, especially at Christmas. I know I don't complain much about it on here these days, but only because the weight of the world has crushed my spirit and, you know, what's the point of anything any more, really? Nonetheless there is a fine line to be walked between going WELL ACTUALLY every time anything vaguely religious is mentioned and nodding along in acquiescence to all of it, just for a quiet life. 

A good example is Christmas carol singing, which I quite like, not because I am filled with religious fervour at celebrating the birth of our lord and saviour Jesus Christ, but because communal singing is quite a nice cultural tradition, especially when it's cold and dark outside. The difficulty here is that if you want to do it you will very probably have to put up with quite a bit of religious nonsense interwoven with the occasional carols, since in general even the Christmas Eve singing happens in the context of a religious service, albeit mercifully shorn of the really heavy-duty praying and sermonising.

We decided that it might be nice to take the kids along for a bit of a sing this year and so we decided to go to the afternoon carol service at a nearby church. This turned out to be St. Mark's, a short drive away, rather than St. John's just around the corner, purely owing to scheduling convenience. Both churches are affiliated with the Church in Wales, which is broadly the Welsh equivalent of the Church of England. St. John's does allude on its website to being "firmly in the Tractarian/Anglo-Catholic tradition"; fortunately I neither need nor desire to know what the fuck that means, nor how significant any of these minor doctrinal differences are.

Anyway, it was perfectly nice, and they stuck mostly to the well-known favourites in terms of the carol selection, though disappointingly didn't finish will the usual cathartic bellow through O Come All Ye Faithful. There wasn't a huge congregation, probably 60-80 people at most, and so I did encounter the slight catch-22 situation you can find yourself in here, particularly if your voice is on the low side compared to the rest of the singers: you can't really work out if you're singing in tune without singing loudly enough to hear yourself, by which time it's a bit late. In a larger crowd making a bigger noise you can do it more discreetly, or at least conclude that it doesn't matter because everyone else will be carrying the tune along.

There were a couple of readings and a bit of slightly protracted audience participation in terms of populating the stable/manger diorama thingy they'd set up at the front of the church. Some odd differences in scale aside (tiny cow, mahoosive sheep, etc.) they stuck to the traditional animal line-up, rather than the wildly variable cast of characters you see at school nativity plays - fish, scuba divers, spacemen etc. 

The only thing that was out of the ordinary was that after the main business of the service had concluded the congregation trooped over to the back of the church to participate in some bizarre voodoo ritual involving candles and oranges. Those of you who have been paying close attention to my Twitter feed over the years, or just generally know more about stuff than I do, will recognise this as a Christingle.

Nia went to a Christingle church service with her Rainbows group this morning. I have (at best) mixed feelings about the whole thing, as you can imagine, but mainly just bafflement about what #Christingle is. seems to be something to do with oranges. #voodoo #religion

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) February 3, 2019

"A Christingle" is the correct usage, by the way, as the term refers to the object itself, which is, as you can see, just an orange with a candle stuck in it and four cocktail sticks skewering some marshmallows and raisins. 

The question you might usefully ask yourself here is: why does this tradition, apparently cooked up out of thin air by some guy in Germany (not, as you might have assumed, a guy called Chris Dingle) a couple of hundred years ago, seem so bizarre and the metaphors (the orange represents the world, the skewered sweets the four seasons, or possibly the four "corners" of the earth, etc.) so contrived, while the other stuff more central to Christianity's core belief system (the whole Nativity thing with the wise men bringing gifts, the resurrection, the subsequent water/wine business) is given, if not exactly a free pass, some nodding respect even by non-adherents? Any claim that the latter is different because it's based on stuff that actually happened is dubious at best, so you have to conclude that it's mainly about age. Two hundred years is not enough for bizarre shit to fossilise into unquestioned tradition, so I guess the Christingle thing is still in what I like to call the Scientology Zone. 

Anyway, the kids had a nice enough time without coming away filled with religious conviction. Nia is old enough to find the religion thing quite interesting, from a cultural/anthropological perspective, and we did have a conversation on the way home wherein I explained my theory of religion's persistent cultural "stickiness"; basically that it's useful for a community to have shared "stories" to help identify each other, and it's actually more useful for these to be fictitious than for them to be true. More on this here, mainly in the paragraph featuring the Captain Cavemen image, if you want to skip past all the stuff about Noel Edmonds. 

Overall it was quite nice, my squirmy discomfort with some of the more nonsensical elements aside, like being expected to intone a solemn "Amen" at the end of some craven pleadings to a potentially vengeful deity. I was, as I always am, conscious while singing of the absurdity of some of the lyrics - I definitely got a sideways look from Nia at "offspring of a virgin's womb" during Hark The Herald Angels Sing, and another one at "Veiled in flesh the Godhead see" a few moments later, at which I was presented with a mental image of Jesus wearing Lady Gaga's meat dress from the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards.

Finally, that BBC link contains the following paragraph, inadvertently revealing of the charming innocence of the showbiz reporter in the face of smutty innuendo:

Slashed to the thigh, and featuring a cowl neck, the dress came with matching beefy boots, hat and meat clutch. "I never thought I'd be asking Cher to hold my meat purse," said Gaga as she picked up her award for the Bad Romance video – perhaps unaware that Cher doesn't eat meat.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Let's do another one, this time involving actual people rather than delicious items of breakfast pastry and birds of prey. Here's Robert Z'Dar, your go-to man in the 1980s and 1990s for scary-faced psychotic villains in various movies of varying quality including Maniac Cop and (as pictured here) 1989's Tango & Cash, which I recall paying actual money to go and see in the cinema at the time of its release. Z'Dar's USP was, and there's no nice way of saying this, an absolutely freakin' massive lower jaw (due to a genetic condition called cherubism). Pictured alongside him is another man with a similar (though admittedly slightly less startling) chin: 2022 Masters champion Scottie Scheffler. 

As I said before this year's Masters tournament started, the 2023 version was the first one in eleven years to finish on Easter Sunday, usually a trigger for an outpouring of religious nonsense from the winner. 

#themasters Sunday is Easter Sunday for the first time since 2012. looking forward to some tedious God-bothering from the winner. Bernhard Langer, Zach Johnson and Bubba Watson memorable recent-ish culprits

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) April 6, 2023

As it happens this year's winner, Jon Rahm, was a bit more understated about the whole thing (I mean, he could be a Satanist for all I know), but to counteract that here's Scheffler's own post-victory interview from last year, with much glorifying of God and similar horseshit.

keir and present danger

I had an interesting exchange on Twitter earlier after I saw this tweet on my timeline, which basically makes the claim that, on the basis of a recent interview, Keir Starmer, if he were to become Prime Minister, would be the first openly atheist Prime Minister of the UK. My first thought was: well, Keir Starmer's leadership of Labour may be distinctly underwhelming on a number of levels, but the statement of non-belief here is commendably clear and non-waffly and pretty unusual for a top-flight politician who might actually harbour some ambition of getting to be Prime Minister one day. 

You'll notice the response from Humanists UK, though, basically saying: yes, this is great, but it's actually not that unusual, as there have been plenty of atheist Prime Ministers, and here are a few examples. My original quote-tweet sounded a note of caution, mainly intended to emphasise how unusually direct I thought Starmer's statement was. I would describe Humanists UK's two subsequent replies as "brusquely dismissive" and "slightly defensive" respectively. I should add that I'm not intending any criticism of them as an organisation or their social media team individually here, but it is a useful exercise in proper critical thinking and scepticism not to take statements at face value, even when they are made by people whose worldview and aims you broadly agree with. It would be ironic, after all, if we were to have what you might call "articles of faith" which are recited by rote but never subjected to any scrutiny.

all this may well be true in terms of their private views, but I suspect none of them are on record as making quite such a bald statement of non-belief. I mean, I may be wrong, but on the other hand it takes seconds to unearth public Goddery such as this https://t.co/0jtwJCbf4H https://t.co/UGkVVzXIsI

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) April 12, 2021

Taking Clement Attlee as the first example, just about all the Google hits for "Clement Attlee atheist" bring back the exchange referred to here which is his biographer Kenneth Harris' recalling (at an unspecified later date) of a conversation they had on an unspecified date, but almost certainly no earlier than mid-1950s, i.e. well after Attlee's stint as Prime Minister had ended in 1951, and probably after he ceased to be Labour leader in 1955. Attlee died in 1967 and Harris' biography of him, containing this brief exchange, wasn't published until 1982. I have no reason to doubt the basic truth of Harris' depiction of Attlee's beliefs, but I think that a) 15 years after your death and b) while still Leader of the Opposition and prospective Prime Minister are worlds apart when it comes to expressing them.

James Callaghan was a Baptist Sunday school teacher in his early life, and the standard Google result for "James Callaghan atheist" is a reference to a television interview in the 1980s where he supposedly professed his atheism. Again, I have no reason to doubt that that is true (although I haven't seen a transcript of the interview anywhere), but Callaghan's stint as Prime Minister ended in 1979 (when he was already 67) and he stood down as an MP in 1987.

Ramsay MacDonald seems to have roved about through various flavours of religious affiliation throughout his early life but to have arrived at what would these days be called humanism by the start of the twentieth century, well before his multiple stints as Prime Minister (the first of which started in 1924). In fact he served as President of the Union of Ethical Societies a couple of times in the early twentieth century, that organisation being a precursor to the British Humanist Association who have now changed their name to Humanists UK. 

Finally, what of dear old Winnie, the increasingly problematic saviour of Britain during World War II? Well, again, most of the obvious Google search terms yield results which all point back to the same source quote, which is one supposedly from a letter he wrote to his mother in his mid-twenties which includes the line "I do not accept the Christian or any other form of religious belief". On the other hand if you trawl through his most famous quotations looking for invocations of God and Christianity as key pillars of civilisation which need to be defended against, variously, Nazism, Communism, Islam, you name it, you will find many. 

So I think if you were to ask yourself the question: which of these people had made clear, unambiguous and widely-circulated public statements of non-belief prior to their being Prime Minister, I think you could only really come up with Ramsay MacDonald. On the other hand it's almost unimaginable that any of the people mentioned here would have been subjected to, or subjected themselves to, an interview where such intrusive questions would have been asked. Times change, and I, for one, view this as progress.

blessed are the teleconferencers

Today's pair are our literal actual Lord and Saviour and Redeemer Jesus Christ, and Hollywood actor Chris Evans. 

A couple of footnotes: while Chris Evans has been in many enormously successful movies (most famously playing Captain America in what I naïvely assumed was about three films but actually turns out to have been at least ten) the only thing I have actually seen him in (without the beard, as it happens) was the ludicrously entertaining whodunit Knives Out which I watched a couple of months ago, and which I thoroughly recommend. Evans' performance, like everyone else's, was somewhat overshadowed by a scenery-chewing turn from Daniel Craig who sports a tremendously chewy accent throughout which I assume is meant to emanate from the vicinity of New Orleans, though I couldn't comment on its accuracy.

As for the other guy, the specific picture here is from a leaflet delivered to our house by those lovable old God-botherers and science-deniers the Jehovah's Witnesses. Social distancing rules dictate that it came through the letterbox with a covering note rather than via the in-person route, and I reproduce the note here, as well as the leaflet content - I feel justified in leaving the contact info on as presumably they want to reach as large a potential audience as possible and would appreciate a signal boost. 

Things to note: despite the slightly clumsy wording in the note, I don't think we're meant to infer that Jesus Christ himself is available in person for consultation via the medium of Zoom. Secondly, anyone inclined to skip the linked video (you may even be able to scan the QR code in the image) Why Did Jesus Die? on the grounds that they already know the answer to be "because they nailed him to a tree" should be aware the video probably takes a slightly less literal approach to answering the question. Finally, the slightly baffling reference to a "pearl of high value" in the last image alludes to Matthew 13:45-46; as always with parables the meaning is a bit opaque, but if you assume all parables basically resolve to a) give all your money to the church and b) go and evangelise your freakin' ass off so that others may do the same, you won't go far wrong. 

sexlebrity lookeylikey of the day

The husband of newly-installed White House religious advisor (and, it hardly needs to be said, frothing batshit lunatic) Paula White, and big-haired (and, tragically, weak-hearted) sex guru Daddy from The League Of Gentlemen. Juliet Bravo!

There are many more levels to this than just a superficial and slightly alarming resemblance, though, Firstly, it turns out that Paula White's husband isn't just Some Guy, he is in fact Jonathan Cain, a pretty big deal in some quarters as the keyboardist in Journey, themselves a pretty big deal in the USA in the 1970s and 1980s and mainly famous in this country for their 1981 hit Don't Stop Believin', digitally revived sales-wise in the late 2000s as a result of featuring in various TV shows. You can imagine that a relationship of this kind wouldn't work unless both partners were fully on board with the whole Jesus thing, and Cain's resulting "spiritual awakening" (no, stop it) has apparently caused some intra-band tension.

It's hard to put your finger on why people like Cain look odd, and I think it's partly a visual discrepancy between perceived facial age (Cain is 69) and hair colour, but partly also what I see I once called Rolling Stones Syndrome.

Metallica appear to have contracted Rolling Stones Syndrome, where as rock bands get older their bodies shrink but their heads stay the same size until they are a bunch of tiny wrinkled bobbleheaded gibbons running about on stage. https://t.co/xN8ahW3M0z

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) August 30, 2018

Paula White herself, who is 53, has a slightly curious appearance as well, which I wouldn't like to speculate upon the reasons for, but could be the result of some sort of procedure a bit like this one.

Lastly, the "Daddy" episode (it's episode 4, The Medusa Touch) is from series 3 of the League Of Gentlemen, which, in my opinion at least, marks the point at which the show jumped the comedic shark from the early, funny stuff into the more macabre stuff which eventually morphed into shows like Psychoville and Inside No. 9. That said, The Medusa Touch is one of the better episodes from series 3, not least because of the repeated references to Rummikub as a sort of foreplay device. It just so happens that I played Rummikub for the first time ever earlier this summer on a camping trip and found it to be a) good fun, especially if accompanied by plenty of wine, b) a bit like rummy, as you'd expect, but with plastic tokens instead of cards and c) not particularly erotic.

up your ayers

Interesting to see that the Australian authorities have now banned altogether the hitherto merely frowned-upon tourist practice of climbing to the top of Uluru (formerly Ayers Rock if you're as old as me).

I have mixed feelings about this, for a number of reasons, and perhaps this is one of those situations where it 's useful to examine what you think, to see if you can work out why you think it, or at least why you think you think it. Here's a few things which I simultaneously hold to be true, and which it may be possible to mash into a coherent worldview which gives due weight to all of them:

• the local Aboriginal Pitjantjatjara tribe own the land of which Uluru and the nearby Kata Tjuta formation form a part
• the local Aboriginal Pitjantjatjara tribe also believe various mystical tales involving the rock and its origins, and that the rock houses the spirits of their ancestors in some way
• none of these beliefs is, in fact, true
• climbing up big bits of rock and standing on top of them is exhilarating and fun

In general I'm very wary about rules or conventions which would require people who don't adhere to a particular belief system to modify their behaviour to mollify those who do adhere to that belief system, as you can clearly see how that's problematic in a huge range of situations. It would allow Christian fundamentalists to deny women abortion access, Muslim fundamentalists to restrict women's clothing choices, Jews and Muslims to stop me eating delicious bacon, and I'm sure you can think of a few of your own. Beliefs are not immune from factual examination just because those who hold them are historic victims of oppression (which Australian Aboriginal people certainly are) or have held them for greater than some arbitrarily-chosen amount of time.

On the other hand, you do have to temper the hardline atheist view with some cultural sensitivity, or, to put it another way, consider not being an arsehole just to make a point. I think there's a more obvious anti-arseholery argument against those who decided to strip off at the top of Mount Kinabalu, for instance, and then spend quite a lot of time and effort baiting Malaysian officials about it afterwards. Climbing up on top of a big rock to have a look around seems relatively benign in comparison, and it was pretty much inevitable that there would be a massive spike in people wanting to do it before the ban came into force. It is also worth pointing out that quite a few people have died attempting the climb, some through falling off and some as a result of the heat. Clearly accidents can happen, as demonstrated by the unfortunate young lady in the current Google Maps summit picture.

Obviously an element of this is my own enthusiasm for standing on top of things, and I can say reasonably confidently that if I went to Uluru (which I never have) I would be awestruck and would want to admire it from the ground from as many angles as possible but would also be slightly frustrated at the knowledge that a perfectly feasible route existed by which I could climb to the top but for some people not wanting me to.

I think the best approach is just to see it as a property rights issue and not bring religious matters into it: it belongs to them, so they get to say how it is enjoyed by others. Somebody not wanting me to eat a bacon sandwich is one thing, someone objecting to me devouring one in their front room is something else.

So given that you can't go up it, you have to go round it. Wikipedia reckons the circuit walk is 5.8 miles; that sounds reasonably achievable in a few hours, but I presume that's hugging the perimeter fairly tightly. It  may well be that better views are afforded by going back a bit and walking round keeping a distance of, say, 200 metres. How much further would that make the walk, though?

Well, if you assume that Uluru is sort of elliptical then you come up against a quite interesting mathematical phenomenon that I was previously unaware of: unlike for a circle (and all the straight-sided polygons, obviously) there is no nice neat equation for the circumference of an ellipse, and so you have to rely on approximations. As it happens, while I'd assumed it was either elliptical or a sort of rounded-off rectangle, Google Maps reveals it to actually be more of a lumpy rounded-off triangle that reminds me slightly of one of those prehistoric flint arrowheads (the arrow, in this case, pointing almost due east).

What Google Maps also provides is a distance calculating facility, which I have used before to scope out and assess the feasibility (this is highly company-dependent, obviously) of possible walking routes. Two possible Uluru circuits are presented below, differing by about a mile and a half.

I think that difference is probably slightly less than I would have guessed it would be. Jesper Parnevik's caddy had a very similar experience back in 1999.

celebrity walkeylikey of the day

We've expanded the scope of the lookeylikey posts lately to include things like islands and tubes of effervescent tablets, so it was only a matter of time before we started featuring buildings. And so here's Talley Abbey, near Llandeilo in Carmarthenshire, and from the particular angle portrayed in this picture posted on Facebook doing a pretty remarkable impression of the bow-legged monkey swagger of Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher (itself very probably based on an original walk by Ian Brown of the Stone Roses), as expertly parodied by Kathy Burke here. 

According to Cadw Talley Abbey is a Premonstratensian Abbey. Now you and I might have thought Premonstratensian was a thing the ladies suffered from once a month, but no, apparently it's some sort of sub-division of Catholicism, distinguishable from the gazillion other sub-divisions of sub-divisions of Christianity only by tiny differences in doctrine and practice that those of us outside the loop might find laughably piddling and inconsequential, but which throughout history have proved significant enough to prompt quite a lot of slaughtering.

ms kondo, in the library, with the lead piping

I caught an episode of Open Book on Radio 4 in the car the other day, featuring the lovely Mariella Frostrup and including (at about 7:40 in this link) an item about de-cluttering, and whether books could be considered "clutter" and whether you should therefore get rid of some of them. The catalyst for this was the apparently phenomenally successful show Tidying Up With Marie Kondo, wherein a tiny Japanese woman comes round to your house and tries to persuade you that it's probably not necessary to be hoarding four hundred Tesco carrier bags full of your own faeces. More controversially she has apparently made some pronouncements on the subject of books, which have predictably caused a variety of amusingly outraged reactions on the internet.

I do agree that there is some value in de-cluttering, and considering whether you really need all the gazillion items that are lying around your house, and if you come to the conclusion that your life would be enhanced beyond measure by getting rid of 90% of your books, then good luck to you, as long as you dispose of them in a responsible manner by taking them to a charity shop where they can be sold on (probably to me). Marie Kondo's mantra about only keeping things that "spark joy" is a bit teeth-grindingly cutesy but contains a grain of truth. If your things don't enhance your life in some way, consider having fewer things. My mother, just to provide a real-world example, is reasonably good about getting rid of books she doesn't want to keep, which suits me fine as I end up acquiring quite a few of them (my copy of Wolf Hall came to me via that route, for instance).

It just so happens that my entire book collection sparks great joy in me, and if anyone suggests getting rid of any of them they can fuck off. That said I did actually take half-a-dozen or so books to a charity shop the other day, but only because we were having a general tidy-up and they were books I had more than one copy of. They all count, though. There is a point where I am going to have to consider getting a bigger house, though, as you can see from the photo below.

Nonetheless it is worth considering why you keep books you have already read. Is it because you intend one day to re-read them? Well, perhaps; I used to be a fairly regular re-reader of books back when I was younger (and had fewer books), but not so much lately, partly because I now have a huge backlog of unread stuff to tackle (and blog about). Is it because you want to pass them on to your children? Yes, partly: Nia is a voracious consumer of books and I would certainly hope she'd want to dip into my bookshelves when she's a bit older. But mainly you just have to be honest and say: I'm highly unlikely to re-read most of them but just having them in the house brings me joy. And I'm sure Marie Kondo would be fine with that.

In fact the next Open Book item was a discussion about Franz Kafka, which provides a perfect example of what I'm talking about: I own one Kafka book, The Trial, which I bought and read when I was about eighteen, and have therefore been carrying from house to house for the last thirty years. Am I ever going to re-read it? Possible, but on balance unlikely. Will Nia want to read it one day? Possibly. Am I keeping it just to show off to visitors? I suppose it's possible, but I don't think so. For one thing the library is in the bedroom and we don't tend to usher guests in there unless we're having one of those parties.

Lastly, while this article provides a very even-handed view of the Kondo phenomenon, I must just take issue with a couple of sentences, responding to a claim that Kondo's methods amount to nothing more than "woo-woo nonsense":

Less “woo-woo nonsense” and more Japanese-style animism that comes out of the country’s indigenous Shinto beliefs. [...] In Japan, objects can have souls.

My responses to those two sentences are as follows:

1. "indigenous Shinto beliefs" are “woo-woo nonsense”, just with a bit of cultural acceptability attached by virtue of age and its status as an "official" religion.
2. No they can't.

I hope that clears up any confusion.

break on theroux to the other side

One thing I forgot to mention in the last book review was that Barefoot In The Head is full of allusions to the mystical writings and teachings of GI Gurdjieff and his acolyte and collaborator PD Ouspensky and various associated concepts (kundalini, for instance). None of it makes much sense, to be honest, but that's scarcely surprising since a) precious little of the rest of the book makes any sense anyway and b) the original teachings are a nonsensical mish-mash of stuff stolen from various religions and mixed with a bit of more up-to-date 20th-century self-actualisation bullshit.

One thing I did note on doing a bit of further reading was that Gurdjieff's concept of an enneagram (basically a bit of tosh involving a lot of bullshit numerology) put me in mind of the equally bullshit Scientology concept of an engram, a sub-conscious mental image of a traumatic event from a person's past which needs to be "cleared" before the person can achieve the same terrifying level of insight and mastery as, say, Tom Cruise. I don't think there's actually any etymological crossover between the words, and I have no idea if L. Ron Hubbard was influenced by Gurdjieff, but I wouldn't be surprised, because there are a lot of common themes of self-realisation through force of will and similar hogwash.

A couple of clips from the (still totally compelling and awesome, by the way) Cruise video were featured in Louis Theroux's 2015 documentary about Scientology which I (by chance) caught the other night.

hard to be very optimistic about Louis Theroux's #Scientology documentary when he finishes an article with this: pic.twitter.com/vDdNysPjPq

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) October 14, 2015

I should say at this point that I'm not the biggest fan of Theroux's wide-eyed faux-naif approach to film-making, nor am I the biggest fan of the Nick Broomfield How I Failed To Make This Film  school of documentaries about thwarted documentary-making (and therefore largely about the documentary-maker rather than his purported subject), generally realised by attempting to get access to a figure or organisation who perfectly obviously was never going to agree to it in the first place.

That said, it turns out that Theroux's shtick is perfectly suited to what he ended up doing, which was wandering about trying to start conversations with the various packs of swivel-eyed numbskulls who were sent out to try and obstruct and disrupt his film, while, paradoxically, ending up providing it with most of its material. The bits where he hung out with Marty Rathbun and various jobbing LA actors trying to recreate scenes of alleged abuse by David Miscavige and others didn't really seem to have a point to them, other than to highlight the absurdity of the Scientology "tech" - basically a lot of shouting at inanimate objects. I mean, I myself shout at inanimate objects quite a lot, especially in the course of my occasional DIY activities, but I haven't tried to turn it into a religion.

A couple of quite interesting Theroux interviews (the first, absurdly, longer than the film itself) about the film are here and here. Note how Theroux is much sharper and less bumbly in real life than in the persona he adopts in the documentaries. Anyway, My Scientology Movie is a lot of fun, but ultimately just a series of episodes of amusing trolling of the religion, rather than a serious attempt to analyse it. If you want that you're probably better advised to watch Going Clear, released earlier the same year.

Going back to Gurdjieff, and sticking with the subject of films for the moment, the single fact about Gurdjieff that I knew in advance was his having possessed an absolutely tremendous moustache. Another absolutely tremendous moustache that's been in the news recently is Kenneth Branagh's monstrous face fungus in the role of Hercule Poirot in the remake of Agatha Christie's Murder On The Orient Express.

You'll note that Branagh's 'tache represents a considerable upgrade on the fairly neat and modest effort sported by Albert Finney in the 1974 film, a design emulated fairly closely by David Suchet in the long series of TV adaptations of the Poirot stories. The key consideration in remaking a whodunit, of course, is who dun it, and whether in remaking it you're going to mess with the original story in order to keep your viewers guessing. The answer here seems to be no, or not in any significant way, so if you remember the ending of the earlier film (and who doesn't?) then you're going to know how this ends, broadly speaking.

let there be shite

This (via Pharyngula) is absolutely tremendous: a new film (called, in slightly oh-what-a-giveaway style, Let There Be Light and starring former TV Hercules Kevin Sorbo) featuring an angry (shrill, even) atheist who writes a book purporting to dispose of the God question once and for all, engages in various ranty pseudo-debates with theists during the promotional book tour and is generally mocking and obnoxious towards anyone professing any form of religious belief. Not sure where they got the inspiration for that idea from.

No, wait: it turns out that this guy's son died a while back and in the wake of that he's been (as well as being a hopeless alcoholic and just generally an arsehole) angry with God! Like all atheists, deep down, right? But when he has a midnight joyride around town while swigging from a hip-flask and ranting at Jesus (again, we've all done it) and drives into a brick wall he has an authentic near-death experience (because these are totally and actually a thing) with the white-robed figures and the aaaahhh-ing celestial choirs and his actual dead son and decides, as you would, that God a) exists and b) wants him to give up the sauce, reconcile with his wife (played, conveniently, by the real-life Mrs. Sorbo, so not too much of a stretch) and get out there and evangelise his freakin' ass off.

Kevin Sorbo has some previous in this area, since he also played a shrill and obnoxious atheist in 2014's God's Not Dead (oh what a giveaway, etc. etc.) - a shrill and obnoxious atheist philosophy professor, in this case, who challenges one of his students to argue in class for the existence of God so that he can tear his puny arguments apart for his own amusement but eventually (hold on to your hats) is revealed to be just angry with God about the death of his mother. Unfortunately it turns out atheists are not only terrible careless drivers but also terrible cavalier jay-walking pedestrians and Sorbo's character gets run over. No near-death experience this time, more of an actual-death experience, but not before there's been time for a last-minute conversion to Christianity (via a handy priest who just happened to be passing at the moment of, erm, passing) and therefore presumably also a last-minute avoidance of the burning fires of Hell for all eternity. Basically these are Chick tracts in glossy film form; God's Not Dead in particular seems to be substantially based on Big Daddy?. That one is mild as Chick tracts go; others are considerably more lurid.

The atheist (probably just angry with God, etc. etc.) caving in and converting to religion (or more specifically Christianity given the culture this stuff happens in) is something of a trope in the evangelical community, largely as a reaction to the host of real-life stories of people abandoning their religious beliefs. As I said here I guess we have to accept that there are people who make the journey in this direction, as irrational as it is, but the overwhelming bulk of traffic is going the other way.

I've saved the most delicious snippet until last, though. Let's go back to the more recent film, Let There Be Light, and try to reconstruct the editorial conversation that must have taken place when the writing team were trying to set up some convincing context for Sorbo's faux-atheist rantings. What book title can we come up with that will give our exclusively Christian audience the biggest frisson of thrilling outrage against the unbeliever, and evoke dog-whistlingly as many other traits as possible that that audience also associates with them? Obviously you've got to have the word God in the title, y'know, like The God Delusion, that's a given, so spitball me a few ideas here. Brett? Erm.....Felching God? Mmmm, not sure how that'll play in Peoria, Brett. Remember when they had to change the title of that Bond film because no-one knew what Revoked meant? Maybe keep the vocabulary a bit more mainstream. Chad? Well.....how about Aborting God?

I imagine an awed silence followed, and then everyone packed up and went home. You have to say that within the bounds of the film's own internal logic it's absolutely brilliant. You should know also that not only is there a God's Not Dead 2, not starring Kevin Sorbo but instead featuring Melissa Joan Hart who has evidently given up the old teenage witchcraft in favour of evangelical Christianity, but that plans are afoot for God's Not Dead 3, in comparison with which being barbecued by the fires of hell for all eternity starts not to seem so bad after all.

the holiday delusion

We went on a brief holiday to Pembrokeshire a couple of weeks ago - a week in a cottage that I see from this post we'd previously stayed in in May 2010, back in the glory glory days of NO KIDS. Ah, memories. No, obviously kids are great, and ours are particularly awesome, but it must be said that there's less chance of ending up in Haverfordwest A&E on a wet Wednesday morning with a 2-year-old with a chest infection if you've taken the precaution of not having any kids yet.

But you don't want to hear about that. What you'll want to hear about is my habit of trawling through the bookshelves in holiday cottages to see what books have been made available for the casual holiday reader. I theorise that there are two main categories of holiday cottage book collection: firstly just the books that happen to be in the house anyway, perhaps from when the owners use the place themselves in gaps in the booking schedule, and secondly a collection specifically tailored to offer something for the bored holidaymaker who hasn't brought enough reading matter with him and therefore needs something to divert him on a rainy day. So there'll be a smattering of Tom Clancy, Dan Brown, maybe a couple of Lee Childs or a Norah Roberts or two for the ladies.

Obviously I am not such a fucking idiot as to go on holiday and not take enough books. Nonetheless I find it interesting to snoop around the bookshelves to see what's there, particularly if I detect that we're dealing with Holiday Cottage Book Collection Type A, as I like to call it, i.e. the more organically-accumulated stuff that's just there and presented with a take-it-or-leave-it shrug as if to say: these are our books. Deal with it.

As it happens the book collection at this particular cottage contains quite an eclectic mix of stuff, but a theme does start to emerge on closer perusal of the shelves. The first thing that caught my eye was this:

I'm sure that, like me, your initial reaction is to scoff and assume this is another collection of complaints about people not being able to wear giant dangly crucifixes while dispensing foodstuffs and the like, but apparently it's a more respectable scholarly work than that and more concerned with actual oppression involving actual killing of Christians, which undoubtedly does happen and is profoundly to be criticised and resisted. Nonetheless its presence points to a general concern with Chistian matters. Here's what we find next:

We're in more niche territory here, in particular a concern with religious revivals including the two major Welsh ones in 1859 and 1904/5. That said, while the copies here appear fairly elderly, most of these books remain in print, or at least did until recently.

The whole topic of religious revivals such as these is a fascinating one, involving such interesting concepts as mass hysteria, but I'm afraid I didn't delve into any of the specifics, largely because it was obvious that all of these books took the more standard praise-the-lord angle rather than a sober anthropological examination. In any case I was distracted by the next two:

These two are more in the standard modern religious apologetics vein, it being pretty cool and groovy these days to admit the concept of "doubt", as long as (as I've said before) it's understood that this is merely a ruse to make your faith seem more complex and nuanced and provide the illusion that it's been subjected to some degree of critical thinking, rather than there being any possibility of your "doubt" leading you to say something like: whoa, hang on a minute, this is all ridiculous.

There is an absolutely astonishing amount of this sort of stuff out there; just follow, for instance, some of the "people who bought this bullshit also bought this other very similar bullshit" links from the Amazon page for the Andrew Wilson book. One of the things you will notice if you do that is that Wilson wrote another book called Deluded By Dawkins?, another tiresome addition to the long list of similarly-titled books written as a riposte to Dawkins' own The God Delusion, a list that also includes Alister McGrath's The Dawkins Delusion, David Berlinski's The Devil's Delusion, David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions, Rupert Sheldrake's The Science Delusion and many more. I'm inclined to view these people as utterly mendacious scoundrels just out to make a quick buck, but of course they may be driven by a genuine zeal to (as they see it) refute the misguided arguments that Dawkins presents and save some of their co-religionists from being lured away from faith and possibly (depending on your particular set of beliefs) eventually consumed by the fiery fires of hell for all eternity. I mean, I doubt it, but then again that just reflects my inability to believe that these people actually believe what they claim to believe.

As an aside, it's not just religious apologists who have co-opted the "The [insert thing here] Delusion" thing as a striking title for a book. A quick trawl of Amazon reveals the following:

• The Talent Delusion
• The Disease Delusion
• The Diet Delusion
• The Liberal Delusion
• The Cameron Delusion
• The Free Will Delusion
• The Health Delusion
• The Net Delusion
• The Golf Delusion

- and many more. I don't think anyone's cashed in The Delusion Delusion yet, but I expect it's only a matter of time.

Anyway, moving on. Philip Yancey is quite a big deal in the world of evangelical Christian books, and Reaching For The Invisible God seems to be a sort of manual for those afflicted by doubt - a textbook example of what I was referring to above, in other words. So Christians who are afflicted by doubtful thoughts about God - because, hey, sometimes, it's like he's not there at all, right? - can read this and find some techniques for keeping faith and reality from coming into dangerously close proximity. Again, look at Yancey's list of publications and it's astonishing how much mileage (and, presumably, money) there is in this stuff. I suppose when you're writing about something about which no definitive claim can ever be made (because, to quote Gertrude Stein, there is no "there" there) there's pretty much no limit to the ways you can spin things.

Peel back the skin of a groovy 21st-century Christian apologist, though, and you quickly reveal the same old lizard underneath, however much hey, we're all sinners, right flannel you try to wrap it up in.

None of this means that you should avoid booking a holiday at this particular cottage (in fact you should, as it's very lovely) nor that the owners are lunatics (we met them and they seem very nice), nor even that if you do go you should avoid reading the books, if that's the kind of bag you're into.

check out my monumental mason

I'm just about keeping my head above water blog-wise with the book reviews and the noting of notable things in the worlds of golf, literary death and people saying "cunt" on various broadcast media, but there's been a steep drop-off in the occurrence of blog posts dedicated to other, perhaps more frivolous, topics lately. There are a couple of reasons for this: firstly and most importantly we have a seven-month-old baby boy who occupies a substantial amount of our time, and secondly the ha-ha-here's-an-amusing-thought stuff and the hey-look-at-this-idiot-I-found-on-the-internet stuff tend to get posted on Twitter rather than here.

So here's an attempt at correcting that a bit, although it does involve some crossover with Twitter. Here's a tweet from the amusing Postcard From The Past account that I follow:

Have you used your spray gun yet? pic.twitter.com/pH5eWAZJxW

— PostcardFromThePast (@PastPostcard) June 30, 2017

I was interested to know where the imposing building pictured was, and it turns out (via Google's clever image search facility) that it's the Scottish Rite Cathedral in Indianapolis, USA. Scottish Rite, it further turns out, is a branch of Freemasonry (splitters!) with, presumably, some key doctrinal differences in the rolled-up-trouser-leg, secret handshake and burying-your-tongue-on-a-beach areas. They also have an amusing and frankly baffling hierarchy of titles that can be attained, quite a few of which sound like slightly self-aggrandising euphemisms for one's Old Chap:

• Secret Master
• Intimate Secretary
• Intendant of the Building
• Knight of the Sword
• Prince of Libanus
• Chief of the Tabernacle
• Knight of the Brazen Serpent
• Commander of the Temple

I was intrigued as to why "Prince of Libanus" appeared to be named after a village in the Brecon Beacons, but it's more likely that it's a reference to the mountains in Lebanon from which the Welsh village also derives its name.

Anyway, join me as we dangerously train-surf from this train of thought onto another one travelling in a similar direction via Childish Sniggering Parkway towards Toilet Humour Central. Back in our university days my old mate Mario and I used to use the word "mason" as well as the word "como" as laboured euphemisms for the (itself inherently sniggersome) word "perineum", on the grounds that both can be preceded by the name "Perry". So one would arrive back at the hall of residence, throw oneself down in a chair and theatrically declare "phew, it's hot out there: my mason is awash" or "just been playing tennis; my como is in a right old two-and-eight". Indeed the perineum appears to be a particularly well-served area in terms of euphemisms; you wouldn't think people would need to refer to it directly that often, but evidently they do. 

I was reminded of all this the other day when browsing round the condiment aisle in Sainsbury's and discovering this product:

I see what you've done there, @NandosUK, but it's a little too close to "perineum" for my taste. pic.twitter.com/cSMNrlX1Hz

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 25, 2017

I don't know what sort of focus groups they fed the new name through, and I can see that there is a temptation to follow the existing convention of adding some product-specific prefix to the suffix "-naise" to indicate that you've stirred your product into some mayonnaise, but really it's hard to believe someone didn't raise an objection.

The inherent amusingness of the "peri" prefix in relation to Nando's is good comedy fodder elsewhere too, it seems.