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.

—

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.

—

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.

—

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

—

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.

—

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.

—

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.

—

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 [↩]

Something of a manic day today, what with last-minute deliveries, wrapping, present deliveries and carting a car full of…I don’t know what, really, but it sure as hell was the entire car…over to my parents’. Finally all done, and I’m just settling back to relax for the evening. Phew.

Tomorrow will be even crazier, with ten of us plus a 3-month-old baby, a 5 year-old and a labrador. I may have to escape with Megan for a while once the madness starts; she’d like a walk, I think.

I had a comment read out on Radio 2 earlier. Ken Bruce was asking for reasons to play ‘Santa’s a Scotsman’, so I texted in saying I’d made my guitar teacher tab out the entire solo, but I’m not sure he believed it’s ever been on the radio. I am famous! I expect to be invited to all the New Year celeb parties. 

Watched Muppet Christmas Carol yesterday. I am now of the opinion that MCC is the perfect Christmas film - it’s one of the few that somehow never gets old, no matter how many times you see it. At least tying with Miracle on 34th Street (the b/w version), anyway.

Merry Christmas to anybody reading - hope it’s a good one.

Meant to be Christmas shopping, but instead getting annoyed by the radio. The Jeremy Vine show is incredulous that Richard Dawkins, avowed atheist, enjoys singing Christmas carols. They interview him. He explains that singing is nice and means nothing. Vicar retaliates that singing is inherently an act of worship. Which is stupid.

Penn Jillette put it well: I’m not in your club, so I don’t have to follow your rules. Rumour has it that senior Freemasons wear special rings - junior members are not permitted such jewellery. But I’m not a Freemason, so I can do what the hell I like. Any senior Freemason objecting to my wearing their special ring is going to get laughed at. You don’t get to impose your own club rules on the rest of society. Christians think singing carols is an act of worship, and that’s fine - go ahead. But don’t tell me what I can and can’t think, thanks.

A Guardian cartoonist stood up for good sense, but briefly took a wrong turn, imho, when he started to argue historically. It’s used frequently, but I don’t much care for the argument that Christmas was a pagan tradition so it’s ok for atheists to celebrate it, or the debates over whether the Christmas tree is a traditional Christian thing. Doesn’t matter, for two reasons:

1. The meaning of any particular tradition is entirely relative - if I like the tradition, I can appropriate it without dragging along all the historical baggage. The Guardian columnist pointed out that his favourite ink was used to stamp people in concentration camps - should he boycott it for this reason? No, that’s silly. It’s ink. Culture is a great big amalgam of unpatentable ideas from throughout history. Christmas trees look good - I like decorating my home with them. I don’t care whether some Christian came up with the idea, or what it means to religious people. I just like having a pretty tree, it’s nice! Some would raise politeness at this point - if Christians get offended by my having a tree, isn’t it polite to avoid it? No! People can declare offence at anything; bending over backwards to accommodate beliefs that make no sense never a) works b) leads to anything good.
2. Religion appropriates nice things to attract people¹. It’s a trick. A toffee-sprout. “Look, we sing nice songs, decorate our homes and all meet up once a week - these are all unequivocally nice things! Also by the way guy-came-back-from-the dead-angels-demons-witchcraft-magic-crackers-floods-smiting-gay-people-bad-also-snakes-don’t-ever-have-sex-unless-we-give-you-permission, and you only get to do all the nice things if you believe all that. This applies to everyone”. No. Get lost with your manipulative crap. I’ll take the yummy toffee, which is nothing to do with you, and leave the sprout for anyone who wants it.  This isn’t all that different from #1, actually - free-floating ideas can be netted by anyone, and nobody gets to claim copyright.

I like carols too. Don’t care that Christians consider carols an act of worship. Tell you what: if you can do that, I’m going to declare doing the vacuuming a rejection of god. From now on any Christian who hoovers the hall is a hypocrite.

1. not necessarily maliciously, but probably just through cultural natural selection - memetic, if you will [↩]

Think of me as your last minute personal shopper. Nobody in your life would be disappointed to unwrap this.

Removed today’s advent calendar image after a request from the original photographer who, indeed, briefly took the image offline to prevent it being shown. First time this has happened in the couple of years I’ve been doing it and…well, I think I’ll stop there, but I will of course do as requested. Replaced with a quick shot I took in Willesden last week.

Buying Christmas decorations on your own is no fun. I always forget this until I’m actually there, though, and this afternoon I headed to Notcutts to pick up a tree. I usually treat myself to £10 worth of decorations too. For years they’ve had an enormous room full of trees, lights and sparkle, and I always look forward to walking around it, alone or not - it’s just a pleasant experience.

Unfortunately this year it was like an Edgar Allen Poe Christmas nightmare. Not because of crowds, but because of the sounds. It started with the background music, which was repetitive and quiet - all you could hear was a regular chick beat. But not in a nice way - it was like music from a thriller, as the heroine is creeping down a dark corridor, looking for the intruder. It set you on edge immediately.

Then there was the ringing. Oh god, the ringing. Something, somewhere, was making what was probably intended as a festive trill, but it sounded like an unanswered phone. I counted, and it was ringing about three times every two seconds. When I have nightmares they’re always heavy on endless repetition - it’s just something I dislike. And it never stopped.

I could maybe have ignored the ringing and the music, but then came the tunes. A group of ornaments contained little village scenes in glass domes under which snow was regularly sprayed upwards while some easily recognisable midi carol played. But all of the ornaments were playing at once, so four different tunes in four different keys intertwined in a horrible mixture of tunes just-comprehensible-enough-to-be-recognisable while simultaneously merging into something awful. You could imagine it being the chaotic, atonal soundtrack to a scene where Santa goes mad as a wide-angle lens 20cm from his face spins as he reels around a workshop of broken dreams. Nasty, nasty, nasty.

But that wasn’t all. Another display contained a revolving carousel on an ice-rink. Every few minutes the children on board would yell in delight. On its own it would have been fine, but with the atmosphere of everything else in the room the children were simply screaming. It was like some fairytale hell.

And then, finally, I saw this:

Is it my brain, or has Santa has hung himself from a Christmas tree?

I picked out some baubles, found a baby tree and got the hell out of there. Ugh.

Just found this while searching for today’s advent calendar image:

Love it. Apparently it’s the front of Science Fiction magazine from December 1954.

Just saying.

Back to the non-Christmassy theme, then. Looks boring, doesn’t it? I’ll have to try and spice it up a little.

I’m back at home now after nine days at my parents’ house. It occurred to me in the middle of last week that nobody has any contact details for me, so the flat could have been hit by a custard ICBM and I’d have been clueless. Given that something has gone wrong the last few times I’ve been away I was a little nervous about returning, and when I opened the door to hear voices I was somewhat startled. Thankfully I can pretty much survey the entire flat from the front door, so I confirmed I was alone before the automatic ninja defence moves kicked in. A power cut had turned on the freeview box and speakers, so goodness knows how long they’d been chatting away to themselves. I later discovered that the main radiator’s thermometer has devolved to the binary settings of ‘hotter than the sun’ or ‘off’. It took me a while to realise as I was cooking and tidying up, and the flat was rather warm for a while.

My head’s still spinning from the heat of said radiator and I’m concerned I’m not making sense, so here are a few posts I’ve enjoyed recently:

• Bad Astronomy on the real meaning of ‘day’ and ‘year’ - I didn’t know about ‘tropical years’.
• Tom Hamilton on the Daily Mail and the BNP.
• The Partially Clips webcomic, via Pootergeek.
• A discussion of what constitutes the Worst Argument Ever, which inevitably quotes Intelligent Design advocates, including the brain-busting:

  Secondly, even if your thesis were accurate at least it is verifiable. When one dies, he returns to dirt. I have yet to hear of one dieing and returning to a monkey.

• Via Mur (who now has a posse), The Evil Monkey Guide to Creative Writing:

  For all of these reasons and more, writing is perilous work. It is more deadly than special ops. It is more boring than selling insurance. It is more exhilarating than jumping out of an airplane without a parachute. You may die from writing, but more probably you will be disappointed. That is okay, too. Disappointment, as we all know, builds character.

Right. Washing up or Torchwood? Torchwood, obviously. Oh, all right then.

Yesterday morning: I’m in Argos, picking up some gifts my sister reserved online. I pay, leave the shop and am accosted by a monk. He notes that I am carrying bags. I agree. He asks for money for the homeless. It being Christmas Eve, I throw some change into his bag, figuring that at least he hasn’t asked me to set up a direct debit. He hands me a small book, and asks whether I am an artist. I say that I’ve done some writing. He suggests I try meditation and yoga to improve, then wishes me happy holidays and leaves. My mind wanders onto a million other things as I head home.

Yesterday evening: My sister isn’t able to pick up the gifts, so asks whether we can wrap them for her. Dad says yep, and hops off to dig out the wrapping paper.

This morning: My sister and her boyfriend come over. She gives him his presents. He unwraps and looks bemused at the first: a copy of Civilization and Transcendence by His Divine Grace A.C Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. My sister and father are entirely confused. My mother and I are in fits of laughter. Turns out that my saying “Jane’s presents are in the Argos bag on the side”, while accurate, wasn’t the whole story. I’d wondered where I’d put it.

I write this annually, but it’s still true: today’s definitely the best day of the year. It’s just…nice. I watched Scrooged this morning while wrapping presents (normally I can’t stand slapstick, but I love it when she hits him with the toaster) and am just back from delivering them, Santa-like but for the beard, to friends in the area. It’s my favourite job of the week.

I’m staying with my parents for a while as I can’t be having with waking up alone on Christmas Day, plus they have large amounts of chocolate…It is of course good to see them too Tomorrow eleven relatives will descend upon us, including a three-year-old and Megan, so it gets somewhat manic. I think I’ll escape upstairs to watch the Christmas specials of Doctor Who and Strictly. As for now, I feel A Muppet Christmas Carol coming on…

The code in the post title is a gift item in the iTunes Store, so the first person to redeem it will receive a few Christmassy songs from me. Merry Christmas to anybody reading!

Last year I bought a demure little Christmas tree for my flat. It fitted the table well, and sat just in front of the window without bothering anybody. I planned to get something similar this year.

Um. They didn’t have any.

Is big. It’s not all that clear on the photo, but it spills over the sides rather a lot. If you try to watch tv from one side of the sofa you get a face full of bauble. On the upside, it’s visible from the street
I also managed to break a set of lights. They flared and went out after I turned the plug on, despite working fine before. I thought the point of parallel cables was for that not to happen? I’m sure that was what they told me in GCSE physics…

The Sun and Daily Mail are apparently going mental over something this month - can you guess what? Yep: political correctness. It’s ruining the Christmas of millions across the UK. It’s a war. You see, Birmingham and Luton have renamed the holiday season, and hospitals are banning Christmas CDs, and people are being told to take down decorations, and and and…

All of which might be reasonable, were it not for a few awkward facts. Luton does not have a festival called Luminos. It does not use any alternative name for Christmas. When it did, once, five years ago, hold something called Luminos one weekend in late November, the event didn’t even replace the council’s own Christmas celebrations, let alone forbid anyone else from doing anything. Similarly, Christmas is not called Winterval in Birmingham. The Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Sick Children never banned a Christmas CD for mentioning Jesus. And Chester council’s “un-Christian” Christmas card says - as cards have done for decades - “Season’s Greetings” [...] Perhaps the most notorious of the anti-Christmas rebrandings is Winterval, in Birmingham, and when you telephone the Birmingham city council press office to ask about it, you are met first of all with a silence that might seasonably be described as frosty. “We get this every year,” a press officer sighs, eventually. “It just depends how many rogue journalists you get in any given year. We tell them it’s bollocks, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference.”

It’s too funny. The Guardian article debunks the whole thing. Thanks to the Labour Humanist (get well soon!) for pointing this out. I’d have no problem with people choosing not to celebrate Christmas if that’s what they wanted, but doing it so as not to offend is pretty silly. But it’s not happening anyway, and I like that too. Me, I love this time of year.

What, people have asked, am I doing celebrating Christmas at all? Why would secular humanists have any interest in Christmas? I’d point out that you can’t really ask why secular humanists as a group do anything en masse - they don’t, that’s the point - but it’s nevertheless a reasonable question to ask any individual, given the obvious conflict between secular humanism and religion. There are two answers, I think.

Firstly, Christmas doesn’t actually have all that much to do with Christianity. It’s no coincidence that it coincides with the winter solstice, and the traditions of decorations, trees, robins, snowmen, receiving and giving gifts, holly and mistletoe all pre-date Christianity and are very much Pagan ideas. Christianity later added stars, carols and obviously the name, but the flaming plum pudding is still a clear symbol of the sun. Embracing Pagan ideas makes no more sense than embracing Christian ideas, of course, but the idea of celebrating the turning of the world towards spring makes sense. But this is only partly satisfactory. It neatly sidesteps the Christianity issue, but for me it doesn’t address the underlying question - what’s the point of celebrations of this kind?

The answer is they’re nice, and people enjoy them. I do. I like the lights, the music, the atmosphere. I like sending and receiving cards, thinking up and shopping for gifts and eating large amounts of chocolate. I like the tv specials, the many films, friends coming ‘home’ for the holidays and having a few days when Mum and Dad aren’t working (although with over 300 tax returns due in during January they don’t get much time off). Whether you think Christianity latched onto these things because they’re pleasant or it inspired them in the first place, the end result is that things happen that make people happy.

I see no conflict between my secular values and extracting and enjoying the best parts of Christmas tradition. As mentioned previously, most of Christmas isn’t inherently religious anyway. Many of the traditions make me happy, but enjoyment doesn’t imply any acceptance of the religious aspects, just as I can appreciate the beauty of religious music without thinking the words make any sense. I don’t think Christmas as celebrated in the UK has all that much to do with religion, and, despite the tabloid press, it’s not particularly evangelical either. Only the strongest of evangelicals would say that I must accept their doctrine in order to enjoy its results - the vast majority of Christians are perfectly happy to read a deeper meaning into Christmas without demanding everybody else does too. And I am too, just with other meanings.

People come together to relax and enjoy themselves for a few days - what could possibly be wrong with that, if it doesn’t harm anyone? I have far more worries over the endless pressures of work than I do over commercialism, and for all the complaining about the latter (whining which I think is pretty stupid, but that’s another post) there’s a kindness around the exchanging of gifts that you don’t find elsewhere. From a humanist perspective, that’s great - look what we as humans do, when we choose to. Of course it’s not good for everybody: if you’re lonely, or homeless, or simply don’t like the season, it’s undoubtedly not much fun. And we should (and often do) try to help out people. But, nevertheless, for many Christmas is something to look forward to, and I don’t think that can be easily dismissed. But what about the religious aspects? Should I have any qualms about those?

I think the Christian elements of Christmas are relatively benign, unlike creepy Easter. There’s the frankly weird nativity tale, but it doesn’t deal much with doctrine and I suspect most children simply like the story. Admittedly there’s virgin birth in there, which is a pretty stupid thing to tell a child is true (how do you do that without mentioning sex, btw?), and I guess there’s a magic star, but there’s nothing of any real-world substance behind either of those. It’s not like they’re anti-gay metaphors. There’s a touch of original sin in there, and maybe the idea of Jesus as superhero starts with the romantic tale of his birth, so I imagine it could be argued that it aids in the indoctrination of children, but I think it’s pretty far down the scale of things to worry about. I suspect the number of people who actually think the nativity tale is true is far lower than one might expect, too.

I see no reason why a secular humanist shouldn’t choose to celebrate for any reason he or she wants, if it makes them happy. And if everybody else is doing the same thing at the same time, even if it’s for different reasons, all the better. I know there are people who get annoyed by the festive season, and I don’t know what to say to them. I’m just lucky that I like it. The decorations are going up here over the next few days. I hope you like the festive blog theme - there’s always the rss feed otherwise

I was out for a walk on Thursday afternoon, and as I approached the town centre I heard a choir. I love listening to street carol singers around Christmas, and headed towards the noise, only to find it was the town’s Christmas lights switching-on ceremony (there must be a better way to write that). A children’s choir and orchestra sat in front of the town hall, and a large crowd had gathered to watch.

I hurried home to grab my camera, and arrived back just as the songs ended and the speeches began.

It was not, you could say, the best ceremony ever. At least one street’s lights were on already, the vicar’s prayer was greeted by indifferent hubbub, and the town hall display, proudly switched on by its schoolchild designer, sadly failed to work. Most of the main lights flickered to life a minute before the switch was officially thrown, too. Still, they made an attempt, and the choir and orchestra were great. Santa arrived a few minutes later, in a unique sleigh:

He briefly said hello, then walked across town to his grotto in the pedestrianised area, followed by many families. There was an enormous queue when I walked past it later. I always like wandering around in the dark with the Christmas lights, so did so for a while. They seem to have put in a lot of effort this year, although sadly there’s nothing by the river as yet.

There are rumours of an outdoor ice rink, which would be great, but I can’t find any details yet. I don’t know what it is about outdoor ice rinks, but they appeal to me greatly.

I was quite pleased with the pictures. Even my f1.8 lens couldn’t cope without a flash, though, resulting in one turning out all Sean of the Dead:

That’s just scary.

After a very fast turnaround my non-murder mystery The Strange Case of the Disappearing Presents is up for sale at Kids’ Mysteries. Here’s the blurb:

The people of Spruce Valley were nervous. Two days of heavy snow had kept everybody inside their houses, as well as cutting off the town from the outside world. Nobody wanted a third snow day to spoil preparations for the Christmas celebration. Happily, the weather broke early on Christmas Eve morning, and snowplows began clearing the town’s streets even though the roads into and out of town were still clogged with snow.

People went about their business. There was much to catch up on! The festivities were to take place in the town square with its huge Christmas tree. Every year, Hamley-Schwarz, the largest toy shop in town, wraps 100 presents and arranges them beneath the tree. After carols and Christmas cookies, the much-loved Mayor Bailey, dresses as Santa and arrives on a sleigh, then hands out the presents to the town’s children.

By six o’clock everything was ready, and a soft snowfall welcomed the townsfolk to the beautifully decorated square. The town clock chimed six times, and the music began.

But behind the scenes is panic. Christine Cringle, the person in charge of the presents, has discovered that all of the presents have vanished! Only a small group of people knows about the theft, and it’s hoped that the case can be solved without having to cancel everything.

Everybody is a suspect, and Christine has asked a group of trustworthy citizens to quietly investigate the incident. Mayor Bailey is due to arrive at 7:30 and nobody wants to let him down.

How could this have happened? Who would be so cruel as to steal the children’s presents on Christmas Eve? It’s up to you to solve the mystery and save the Christmas celebration.

Like the others on the site, this lets ~25 children take part. Eight perform as characters with written answers to the questions asked by everybody else, who are designated as investigators. It’s not 100% my copy - when I’m done writing I hand it over to the owner of the site, who Americanises the dialogue a little and checks over the plot etc. - but is pretty close.