This Wednesday Dr Evan Harris MP will propose an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill that abolishes the offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel. It’s about time.

Right now, if Blue Peter named their teddy bear Jesus, Gethin Jones could get sent to prison. Muhammed? Free speech. Buddah? Bulletproof. But Jesus gets special treatment, as the blasphemy laws cover Christian belief only. Isn’t this alone reason enough for a repeal?

There’s a danger that we might head the other way at some point. Rather than repeal the law, why not add cover for Islam? And, while we’re at it, jews and hindus would like their religion protected too. Oooh, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Scientologists would also like a piece of the action, please, and they have an army of lawyers to ensure it happens. This clearly wouldn’t work. Isn’t a level playing field the only practical, as well as moral, solution?

This is no secular attack on religion. The legal system works on the basis of individual rights, yet this law protects opinions, not people. A law forbidding criticism of atheism would be just as stupid. If anybody doesn’t like what we see on television, they get to say so without fear of being locked up. This is simply the decent way to behave.

It’s true that there hasn’t been a blasphemy prosecution in a long time. But it’s a law, and not something that should be taken lightly. Christian Voice tried to attack the BBC using the blasphemy law. The BBC fought back, but small theatres, publishers and media outlets don’t have this luxury. It’s reasonable to be intimidated when the law says you’re not allowed to criticise certain beliefs.

It’s archaic and ridiculous, and no part of a modern democracy. The Law Commission recommended its repeal back in 1985, and even the Church of England no longer opposes its abolition. Let’s ditch it.

I’ve written to my MP. It’s easy to do, just go to http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp and enter your postcode - you’ll be sent to a page where you can directly email your representative in parliament. Only takes two minutes - so why not?

I am going mental for the dancing. Lynsey and I will have been learning for three years next month, and it’s starting to feel graceful for minutes at a time, rather than just occasional moves. The waltz is probably the best for this, although the quickstep is getting there. Then, at the recent Christmas Ball we managed to complete a foxtrot without stopping. I cannot emphasise enough how big an achievement this was The foxtrot has been our nemesis for a long time, and to do it ok and feel vaguely elegant at the same time was fantastic.

We’ve been greatly helped by starting private lessons, which we began after my university course began in October. Getting to London just wasn’t compatible with a dance class the night before - catching a train at 2130 wasn’t great as we had to leave the class after only 25 minutes, and I then ended up walking down deserted high streets at gone midnight. Didn’t like that very much. So after a few weeks we decided to go for private lessons instead, this time on a Tuesday. It was a shame to leave the group of people we’d been with for so long, but there wasn’t much choice.

As it happens, the Thursday class has now pretty much folded. A bunch of people left after it became obvious the rest of the group wanted to hone existing moves rather than learn anything new, and most of them were only turning up one week in three anyway. We got out at the best time, I think.

The lessons are obviously better than a private class, as we get one-to-one help. Our every move is dissected. Shoulders down. Move with the waist, not the legs. Look up. Etc. It’s sometimes tough, but you improve quickly Also, we’ve progressed more in a couple of months than we did in a year at the class. We can pick up new moves fairly easily, and it’s nice to be able to set our own pace.

The only thing that’s missing is a practice session. The hour’s tuition is good, but we tend to stick to one or two dances. At the class we’d get a chance to practice all seven (don’t really go for the Paso Doble, sadly) every week in a general music session after teaching, but now it can be a long time before we get around to our weaker ones. At the most recent ball I did the Samba entirely from muscle memory. We’ve found a few Saturday-evening dances, which should help (if I’m around) and there are rumours of adding a practice hour to Tuesday nights. That’d be perfect.

We’re starting a six-week intermediate jive class tomorrow. It’s half an hour’s drive away, but I won a competition so the lessons are all free. Should be great. The jive is my favourite of all the dances, and definitely the best exercise. The DJ at the Christmas Ball tried to kill me by playing two jives, followed by a 4.5 minute Viennese Waltz. I confess I had to have sixty seconds rest between the two, but a 3.5min Viennese Waltz isn’t too shabby.

Dancing is totally unlike anything else I do, and I love it. I never expected to be this enthusiastic, but I want to work on the medals too. Happy to progress until we hit the stage where fake tan is necessary, anyway.

The new series of Torchwood starts a week on Wednesday. Ra. The writer of the second episode said:

If you don’t usually watch the show, give it a chance, the first episode is kickass, and I’m incredibly proud of my one. Haven’t seen the other eps yet, but from everything I’ve seen so far, it’s going to rock hard. In fact, on a scale of 1 to Rock, Rock being the highest, I’d have to give it a solid Rock out of Rock.

This guy writes the incredibly depressing kind of blog where even the least interesting posts are twice as witty as anything I’ve ever said. His episode should be worth checking out.

Writing project finished! First draft, anyway. Thank goodness. I agreed to do this work a few months ago, but haven’t, and the guilt level has been rising and rising ever since, to the extent that I’ve regularly denied myself the chance to do fun but pointless things on the basis that I should be doing something more important. Hate that. Don’t know why I can’t just get on and complete these things, given that I’m not genuinely not lazy or scared of work, rather than letting them rise into mountains of worry in my head. Trouble is, my happy relaxed mode has kicked in this evening, when I could really have done with it two weeks ago. Ah well, the relief outweighs that minor annoyance.

Speaking of entertaining but pointless pastimes, I had a chance to properly get my teeth into Guitar Hero this evening. The easy skill level is generally appropriately described. Medium is challenging, and where I spent most of the night. Hard is chaotic, but I can see how it’d be possible with practice. Extreme is utter insanity, and nobody in their right mind should even think about attempting it. Still stupidly fun. It is a good job I don’t have it at my flat, or it would suck up hours.

This is what happened when Aimee saw the coat I bought her for Christmas:

Apparently red’s not her colour.

Still going with the cold and needing aspirin to get through the day, but I no longer care as it could be much, much worse.

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I’ve been working on a writing project for the last couple of days, and made a breakthrough late this evening. I’ve no idea why I find it so much easier to work after 2200, but I’ve done as much work in two hours as I have the rest of the day. Hopefully I’ll finish tomorrow, and it’ll be an enormous guilt-ridden weight off my mind. Then I’d best start working on an essay due into uni on the 14th. Have left that waaaay too late, but such is the way of things sometimes.

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I finally bought the £40 Student version of Office 2007, as it was becoming far too much of a hassle to deal with uni stuff in .doc format. Having used the new UI for a few weeks, it’s really quite the thing¹. Everything’s just there, in the expected place, and it practically forces you to use proper styles, rather than individually formatting headings etc.. A massive improvement, imho.

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I would like to register my distress at Kevin dying in Eastenders, as he was one of the few characters I actually liked.

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I’m aware I link to almost everything Ben Goldacre does, but that’s because he rocks and I’m not sorry at all. He’s released a podcast of a lecture he gave on:

how attractive we all find it, as a society, to dodge important social, political and personal problems by reducing them to mechanical and sciencey-sounding explanations involving serotonin or fish oils

He finds this more of a danger than homeopathy / the usual band of other actively anti-science treatments, as it encourages the classification of the ‘deserving sick’ by making us believe people can solve their health problems if only they looked after themselves properly. I hadn’t thought of it that way before. Definitely worth a listen.

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The blog is now de-Christmas-ified, which makes me sad. I’ve fixed up a few things that needed doing, like updated the blogroll to come straight from Google Reader, finally fixed the Grazr link etc.. I’d like to work on a new design. I’d also like a pet monkey. It’s on the list, anyway.

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Via Damian, a Guardian columnist’s experience of tagging along with various paparazzi following, amongst others, Amy Winehouse:

She darts into a shop. I stop and catch my breath. And then, all of a sudden, a great wave of revulsion crashes over me. I’m stalking Amy Winehouse. What am I doing? This is weird. And what if she sees me? It’s so cold that I’ve worn a furry Russian hat. She saw me earlier in the newsagent’s, so she’s bound to recognise my stupid big hat. I am mortified, and desperate for Hammond to get here so that I can hide. I could stop and turn around - only by now I really like him and don’t want to let him down.

And then it dawns that what I’m experiencing is precisely the same emotional spectrum every pap describes: predatory adrenaline rush, horrified shame, professional dissociation.

It’s fascinating, and not nice.

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Finally, I’m making an effort to learn more words. If I’m honest, this is more due to admiration of Russell Brand’s lexicon than anything else. Here are a few I’ve looked up today:

• operculum: A lid or flap covering an aperture, such as the gill cover in some fishes or the horny shell cover in snails or other mollusks.
• hermeneutic: serving to explain
• esoteric: intended for or understood by only a particular group / not publicly disclosed (no idea why my brain is incapable of remembering this one - I’ve looked it up so many times)

1. especially when you turn on the black theme [↩]

The Arecibo telescope in Arizona watches the sky for extra-terrestrial broadcasts. It’s the largest telescope in the world, and has recently been upgraded to generate more than 500 times the previous amount of daily data. SETI now needs to sift through a daily 300gb, and they therefore need more users to install their software, which analyses batches of data whenever your computer isn’t doing anything else. This is a million miles from UFOs and all that nonsense - it’s actually incredibly likely that civilisations exist elsewhere in the universe, it’s just detecting them that’s difficult - so if your computer is wasting time doing nothing, why not head on over and give them a hand?

The New Year’s Eve party on Monday night was completely dominated by Guitar Hero III. Coincidentally, everybody at the party had clubbed together to buy it for the host as a Christmas present, and we were keen to see it in real-life. I’d heard tell of this much-beloved game, and read plenty of reviews to check it was worth buying, but hadn’t seen it in person before. I was blown away.

For the uninitiated, here’s the premise: you hold a guitar-shaped controller, which has a movable strum bar on the right and five coloured buttons on the fretboard. On-screen, identically-coloured dots fall at varying speeds and frequencies. You have to press the appropriate button(s) and strum the bar as the dots pass a particular point.

It is a ridiculous amount of fun.

The game does an excellent job of making you feel resplendent, and I think a key element is the sound. The (sometimes covered) songs have all the required layers and sound accurate, yet somehow your single notes (in easy mode, anyway) aren’t amateurish as part of the whole. Combine this with the tactile experience of pushing buttons really fast and ‘playing lead guitar’ over the top of a decent song is, somehow, a genuinely exciting experience. I imagine the higher skill levels are a hell of an ego-trip.

While not even close to capable on a real guitar, I was hoping that three years of practice would give me an advantage over the others. I don’t feel bad about this at all, since it is no exaggeration to say I suck at all console games¹, and it’d be nice to actually be good at something I wasn’t anything special, but the greater brain mass devoted to controlling my left hand meant I probably scaled better with speed, at least until everything went mental half-way through Knights of Cydonia.

Two people can play Guitar Hero simultaneously (one on lead, one on bass) but the main disadvantage is the cost of the guitar controllers - at £40-£60 each it’s hard to justify buying an additional unit, so the bass guitarist has to use a standard controller; this requires as much skill, but isn’t quite as much fun. Which is interesting, really: you’re still pressing five buttons in a particular order, and it’s still difficult, but the act of pretending to play guitar-shaped-thing is that much more enjoyable.

Rock Band, as yet unreleased in Europe, provides guitar, bass guitar, drum and microphone controllers, so four people can play simultaneously. Costs a fortune, but must be bloody great.

It’s quite a while since I’ve enjoyed a new game this much; I think the original Wii Sports are the closest anything’s come. I don’t have a console, and certainly can’t justify the PC version at £45, so shall instead invade my friend’s house at every available opportunity And, you know, play my actual guitar.

I wonder whether properly midi-d guitars could be theoretically hooked up to a more complex version with scrolling tab and background music…The gaming aspect would be a cool way to practice. Update: apparently there’s one on the way.

1. all right, possibly not Wii Sports, but even there I hit average and stop [↩]