Veils

Abdula: 'Hey everyone guess what I've just invented?'

Everyone: 'Dunno. What?'

Abdula: 'It's called Islam right? And it's stuff that God says you have to do.'

Everyone: 'OK cool. What like eating loads of stuff and snogging?'

Abdula: 'Er no not exactly. Chandari you're a woman right?'

Chandari: 'Yes.'

Abdula: 'Well God says you have to cover up.'

Chandari: 'Eh? But I've got a dress on.'

Abdula: 'No no. God says he's very offended having to look at you and you need to cover up completely. And if you don't I get to beat you with a stick.'

Chandari: 'Sayed! Have you got that strait-jacket you invented? I think Abdula might need to try it out.'

Abdula: 'Less of your lip. My friend Ezekiel the Christian said if I'm going to invent a successful religion I need to subjugate women. In his church women have to shut up, cover their heads and make the tea.'

Chandari: 'So God invented women but he doesn't want them to be seen or heard?'

Abdula: 'You got it. And there's more. My friend John-Paul says that you can't use contraception and abortions are a complete no-no.'

Chandari: 'That's it. I'm out of here.'

Abdula: 'Oh come on Chandari. Everyone? Hello? Come back!'

In Praise Of Autumnwatch

The great thing about UK TV these days is that there's so much of it. With a simple freeview digibox you can get 30 channels of junk instead of just five. But nestling in amongst the dross of 'Big Brother' and 'Emmerdale', you do still find the odd gem.

Enter 'Autumnwatch', a programme which looks like somebody made it up on the back of an envelope, and lavished a budget of £43 on it.

I'm old enough to remember when Bill Oddie was a third of anarchic 70s comedy team; 'The Goodies' (and who can forget Graeme's Garden's wooden performance of 'The Funky Gibbon' on TOTP?) and rather worryingly he looks exactly the same today as he did then.
The show consists of Bill making observations about British wildlife, humoured by his long-suffering lady co-presenter, with some contributions from various sidekicks shipped off to the Outer Hebrides to watch stags rutting and seals frolicking.

Doesn't sound like a good TV format? Maybe so, but by gum and ecky thump it works.

In this digital age of micro-celebrity and the global village, it's almost a shock to discover that there's a whole world out there that doesn't revolve around the minutiae of human existence. Rather like the Americans ignoring the world beyond their borders, most of humanity is blissfilly oblivious to the other occupants of the planet, and it's just great to see programmes like Autumnwatch attempting to redress the balance.

Migrating birds, swans, seal pups and roe deer, all portrayed in their natural habitat, tribal spats and all. It put me in mind of a cartoon I once saw of several giant seal-pups armed with cudgels swaggering into a kids dormitory after lights out, with the delightful caption; 'it's about time we culled these little gits.'

Autumnwatch is a great little programme and actually worth some of the licence fee. On the other hand, that useless prat Jonathan Ross, whose salary would keep Autumnwatch running all year round, would be the perfect subject for a BBC cull -- I'll take the first swing.

Humans? Who needs 'em?

Kent Hovind -- Charismatic Preacher or an Interesting Wacko

''One world government is coming very soon. I think they are going to worship Lucifer. And I think there are not very many people who realise that the Catholics, and the Muslims and the Masons are all tied together at the top. It is just a few hundred people running all three organisations and they're all Satan worshippers. All of them - Luciferians - even George Bush is involved in that - worships Lucifer.
Truth Radio 11 July 2006 @ 14:40 (Tape 1)''

Where do you start with this one? The man is clearly delusional, paranoid and attention-seeking. He needs professional help.
His university 'degree' (why he calls himself Dr.) is a degree in Christian studies -- he has no scientific qualifications. He refuses to pay income tax because he is 'working for God' -- he does not however live in a tent on bread & water.
He advocates gun law (plenty of crazy quotes available), not to mention killing abortionist doctors and doing away with democracy.
If this man told me that it was raining I would have my doubts.

He is adept at trying to make sense from nonsense -- his idea for instance that Noah took two of every TYPE of animal rather than variety of animal into the ark is laughable -- but let's just say that we accept it for a moment. Noah was living in the middle east -- how did he manage to get penguins and sealions? How did he catch all those types of birds? How many cages did he have to build to seperate all the various species that would eat each other? How did he prevent disease? Where did all the excrement go? And where did all the flood-water go afterwards? That amount of evaporation needed would require a heatwave lasting years.

And if God was able to create all the hundreds of species of dogs (dingoes, wolves, Irish wolfhounds, corgis etc) from just two animals in only a few thousand years, this could only be described as evolution. Not that that actually happened of course.

Mr.Hovind's claim that there are dozens of 'flood myths' all over the world conveniently ignores the fact that most of them are completely different in content and were written / originated at wildly different times. There are also dozens of vampire and werewolf myths but he doesn't mention those conveniently.

Surely it's better to accept the flood myth as a biblical allegory, rather than insult everyone's intelligence by dressing it up as literal truth?

A fairly recent idea is that the bible is literally true. Even the Roman Catholic Church have never claimed this, as indeed have many branches of the Protestant church. And that's not surprising because it isn't literally true, and to try to prove that it is means tying yourself up in the sort of knots that Mr.Hovind finds himself in.

The bible quite simply can't be literally true for several reasons.
Firstly it was translated from Greek and Arabic. No translation is ever perfect and 10 translators, no matter how skilled, will always come up with 10 slightly different translations.
Secondly, many of the books included in the bible are of dubious date and origin. Many others were left out of the original 4th Century bible, as they were considered 'heretical' by early Christian scholars. Amongst these scholars was St.Eusebius, who had a less than glowing reputation for honesty. Some books were included in the Roman Catholic bible, but omitted from the Protestant one. Why should we suppose that the Protestant bible, after translations, interpretations, early church subterfuge & error & middle ages 'reformation' is the perfect article?

It simply isn't and never claimed to be. It was clearly written by ordinary men and is a mixture of ancient myths, lineages, archaic laws, conflicting accounts of the life of Jesus and various pronouncements and letters from Paul, topped off with a delusional almost psychedelic rant called Revelation.

As a snapshot of the life and beliefs of those writing it, it is a fascinating document. As a historical volume of the time, it leaves much to be desired. As an infallible book supposedly chronicling the word of God, it simply doesn't work. The very fact that there are so many branches of the Christian church, all differing on some point or other of doctrine, indicates that this could not be the pure word of God. If it were, it wouldn't be as vague or open to interpretation as it clearly is. Unfortunately for Christianity, it's all there is.

I suspect that Mr.Hovind will be consigned to the dustbin of history in a short time, dismissed as just another attention-seeking crackpot with wacky ideas.

My Top 100 Albums -- Surprisingly Most Are From The 80s

Position
Artist
Title
1
KILLING JOKE
BRIGHTER THAN A THOUSAND SUNS
2
MARILLION
CLUTCHING AT STRAWS
3
PINK FLOYD
THE WALL
4
ULTRAVOX
RAGE IN EDEN
5
FISCHER-Z
RED SKIES OVER PARIDISE
6
SILENT RUNNING
SHADES OF LIBERTY
7
MARILLION
FUGAZI
8
BUGGLES
THE AGE OF PLASTIC
9
KATE BUSH
THE DREAMING
10
TALKING HEADS
REMAIN IN LIGHT
11
ENO & BYRNE
BUSH OF GHOSTS
12
SIMPLE MINDS
NEW GOLD DREAM
13
GARY NUMAN
THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
14
SIMPLE MINDS
SONS AND FASCINATION
15
KILLING JOKE
OUTSIDE THE GATE
16
GARY NUMAN
NEW MAN NUMAN
17
SISTERS OF MERCY
FLOOD LAND
18
ULTRAVOX
VIENNA
19
BUGGLES
ADVENTURES IN MODERN RECORDING
20
TALK TALK
IT'S MY LIFE
21
NEW MUSIK
FROM A TO B
22
KILLING JOKE
PANDEMONIUM
23
MARILLION
MISPLACED CHILDHOOD
24
FRANKIE GOES TO HOLLYWOOD
LIVERPOOL
25
ULTRAVOX
LAMENT
26
TALK TALK
THE PARTY'S OVER
27
KATE BUSH
NEVER FOR EVER
28
JAM
VERY BEST OF
29
TEARS FOR FEARS
THE HURTING
30
GENESIS
DUKE
31
PROPAGANDA
A SECRET WISH
32
TUBEWAY ARMY
REPLICAS
33
ABC
THE LEXICON OF LOVE
34
NEW MUSIK
WARP
35
HUMAN LEAGUE
TRAVELOGUE
36
NEW MUSIK
ANYWHERE
37
PETER GABRIEL
3
38
SISTERS OF MERCY
FIRST AND LAST AND ALWAYS
39
MERCURY REV
DESERTER'S SONGS
40
THOMAS DOLBY
THE GOLDEN AGE OF WIRELESS
41
VISAGE
VISAGE
42
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
THE RISING
43
GARY NUMAN
PURE
44
EWIGKEIT
BATTLE FURIES
45
KILLING JOKE
DEMOCRACY
46
A-HA
SCOUNDREL DAYS
47
FAITH NO MORE
ANGEL DUST
48
TALK TALK
THE COLOUR OF SPRING
49
ULTRAVOX
QUARTET
50
SISTERS OF MERCY
VISION THING
51
DIE KRUPPS
THE FINAL REMIXES
52
TEXAS
WHITE ON BLONDE
53
MADNESS
COMPLETE MADNESS
54
MANIC STREET PREACHERS
BEST OF
55
SOFT CELL
THE ART OF FALLING APART
56
BLUE NILE
A WALK ACROSS THE ROOF TOPS
57
PINK FLOYD
THE FINAL CUT
58
GENESIS
A TRICK OF THE TAIL
59
POLICE
GREATEST HITS
60
MINISTRY
TWITCH
61
GENESIS
AND THEN THERE WERE THREE
62
DANSE SOCIETY
HEAVEN IS WAITING
63
YELLO
STELLA
64
MARILLION
SCRIPT FOR A JESTER'S TEAR
65
MERRY
THOUGHTS PSYCHO CULT
66
TUBEWAY ARMY
TUBEWAY ARMY
67
U2
ZOOROPA
68
KILLING JOKE
NIGHT TIME
69
KATE BUSH
HOUNDS OF LOVE
70
VISAGE
THE ANVIL
71
DEF LEPPARD
HYSTERIA
72
ADVENTURES
THE SEA OF LOVE
73
POLICE
SYNCRONICITY
74
SISTERHOOD
GIFT
75
FUN BOY THREE
WAITING
76
MARIANNE FAITHFULL
A CHILD'S ADVENTURE
77
ERASURE
I SAY I SAY I SAY
78
MOBY
PLAY
79
ERASURE
THE INNOCENTS
80
GARY NUMAN
BERSERKER
81
DURAN DURAN
RIO
82
CHAMELEONS
WHAT DOES ANYTHING MEAN BASICALLY
83
WAS NOT WAS
WHAT UP DOG?
84
SHREIKBACK
OIL AND GOLD
85
YELLO
ONE SECOND
86
NEW ORDER
LOW LIFE
87
SHREIKBACK
JAM SCIENCE
88
ELO
DISCOVERY
89
KRAFTWERK
THE MAN MACHINE
90
SKIDS
THE ABSOLUTE GAME
91
ASIA
ALPHA
92
HUMAN LEAGUE
DARE
93
OMD
ARCHITECTURE AND MORALITY
94
SIMPLE MINDS
EMPIRES AND DANCE
95
TEARDROP EXPLODES
KILIMANJARO
96
FISCHER-Z
GOING DEAF FOR A LIVING
97
BLUE NILE
HATS
98
OMD
ORGANISATION
99
TEARS FOR FEARS
SONGS FROM BIG CHAIR
100
U2
THE UNFORGETTABLE FIRE

9/11 Conspiracy Theory

When I worked at the local Sunday market, there was a bloke in the next aisle who operated off a van. He would gather a small crowd round him and then invite people to give him a £10 pound note. Hardly anyone did. One bloke who did was immediately rewarded with a portable TV – a second got a stereo system. The crowd started to get interested. A third person got a digital camera. ‘Who else will trust me with a tenner?’ shouted the bloke. Several dozen tenners were shoved at him and collected by his helper. Each person got a big package. Inside they found a pen or a minature radio, retailing for about £1. The bloke disappeared inside his van and a couple of bouncers made sure nobody complained too much.

This happened several times each Sunday, week after week, month after month. The people who got the ‘good stuff’ were all working for the guy in the van. He was raking in the cash. He’s now retired to somewhere sunny.

How did he do it? Well he certainly had the ‘gift of the gab’ all right, but that wasn’t it. He knew the basics of people’s personalities. Looking around at the people throwing away their tenners, they weren’t all ‘knuckle-dragging low-lifes’ – most of them were perfectly normal members of the public. What the guy in the van knew was that people would suspend disbelief in an attempt to get a bargain. Those people wanted to believe this wasn’t a scam. They wanted to believe they’d stumbled on something special, where they were going to get a £150 TV for a tenner.
I found the whole thing very entertaining and watched it regularly. I quite missed the guy when he left. He once said to me ‘ you’ll never go bust if you appeal to the stupid side of people’s natures.’

And he was absolutely right. Just look at the thousands of religious cults that are thriving all over the world. Look at the Indian caste system. Look at people buying lottery tickets every week. Look at the conspiracy theorists. Whoops.

Let’s have a look at the 9 / 11 conspiracy theory. Broadly speaking, this is what they reckon happened:

The US govt or it’s agents decided to carry out a massacre of it’s own citizens, for reasons best known to itself. It ‘dummied up’ several cruise-type missiles to look incredibly like passenger airliners and sent them, at different times, to three high-profile targets. The first one hit the north tower of the World Trade Centre at 8.46am – only one film had been released of it striking the building. The second one hit the south tower at 9.02am and was filmed by literally hundreds of cameras from various angles. The third one hit the Pentagon and caused a relatively small amount of damage. The two towers collapsed, due to controlled explosions in the lower floors. A third building WTC7, collapsed later that afternoon. A fourth missile, also looking very like an airliner was shot down over a field by US fighter jets. The End.

The gaping hole in all the above is two-fold. Firstly, there’s no evidence that this was anything other than a highly successful terrorist attack. Secondly, there’s absolutely no motive for the US administration to have done this.

Was it an isolated incident?
In terms of scale (so far) yes. But Al-Qaeda had already carried out several attacks on US interests and have carried out others since, equally as barbaric (7/7, Bali, Madrid), just smaller in scale.

Did Al-Qaeda have motive?
Yes. They have shown themselves more than willing to carry out suicide bombings before and since. They hate US foreign policy on Israel & the Middle East. They regard the US as a corrupt, aggressive super-power and would be happy to destroy it.
The hijackers mainly came from Saudi Arabia, where extreme Muslims regard the presence of US troops on Saudi soil, particularly female ones, as an insult to Islam and against the teachings of the Koran.

Did the US administration have motive?
Hardly. Since 9 / 11 they have attacked and invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. Neither aggression required 9 / 11 to be carried out. Neither have gained the US anything. They have in fact weakened it.

Carrying out the crazy scenario detailed above would have required incredible ingenuity, technical compotence, imagination and risk, all in front of the world’s media & the biggest audience ever. To achieve what? You tell me.

But the conspiracy theory makes for good fun reading, particularly in the US where it was a shock to many citizens to discover that the rest of the world actually existed, never mind could successfully attack them. The US is an insular state and many seek insular solutions.

The conspiracy idea, when looked at carefully, is every bit as much of a joke as the idea of people handing over their hard-earned tenners to a market trader in exchange for a 50p biro pen.

1980s Music

OK call me an old fart. And I'm sure you will. But back in the 1980s, music was important.

Take 1981. There were three TV channels -- BBC1 which featured the Two Ronnies, the 9 o'clock News and the test card, BBC2 which featured the Open University and ITV which featured Coronation Street and lots of adverts.
Not even the most imaginative sci-fi writer had thought of the internet, computer games consisted of a ball pinging round a screen and pocket calculators were hi-tech and expensive. So expensive in fact that my dad paid £16.00 for mine one Christmas, and so hi-tech that Kraftwerk wrote a song about them.

In short, there was nothing to do. So when The Jam or Motorhead released a new single, it was genuinely exciting. And when Shakin' Stevens or Bucks Fizz released one, it wasn't.

There was nothing to beat the thrill of trekking to your local record shop and forking out £1.10 for your own personal choice of 7" single., complete with full colour picture sleeve, and (if you were really lucky) coloured vinyl. Then off home to play it to death, check out the B-Side, and wonder if the LP might be any good.

Nowadays of course, everyone under 25 downloads their music or copies it from their mate's CD in 60 seconds. Blank CDs retail for about 20p and when you're sick of the music on it, you throw it in the bin and forget about it.

In the 80s, 'home taping was killing music.' Actually it wasn't. You taped your mate's LP, wrote the track-listing on a crappy little inlay card and more often than not ended up buying the LP anyway.

But was music actually better in 1981? OK you had the New Romantics, Synth-Pop, The Jam, David Bowie's last decent year and some good quirky indie singles, but was it really any better than the Arctic Monkeys and the Scissor Sisters? Well no probably not, but the difference is that it was cherished. Balding blokes in their 40s still cherish their record collections, but kids nowadays just see it as downloading data and having a temporary background noise. And even when you look at the physical format of the CD, the supermarkets have turned them into baked beans. All the little record shops are closing, hit by downloading, copying, online sales and Tesco's selling chart product at below wholesale price.

But against all this, vinyl is making a comeback. Yes vinyl! That stuff that was declared dead and buried 15 years ago. Check E:Bay if you don't believe me. CDs that barely fetch a fiver are fetching over £30 for their vinyl equivalent. Why?

It's simple. The vinyl LP is a 'proper product'. It can't be downloaded or easily copied. It's a great big chunk of 'something' in your hands -- something that is both pleasant on the eye and the ear. Look at artistic LP covers like Genesis 'A Trick Of The Tail' or ELPs 'Brain Salad Surgery'. On CD they looked like postage stamps, on LP they were a work of art.

And the LP has that 'hands-on' feel to it. Rather than clicking a mouse or watching your CD disappear into a tray, the LP has to be manually cued, and turned over halfway through. And of course there's the whole 'warmth of sound' debate too.

So in some ways, the past is coming back. Kids are actually seeking out vinyl (sometimes by new artists, sometimes by old) and getting a kick out of owning real physical product. What this means for the future of the CD is of course less clear.

But one thing IS clear -- people of all ages still want music, and there's still room for all formats. Well apart from the 8 track cartridge. Whatever that was.

Are Religious People 'Crazy?'

I formulated this reply in response to a question asked by one of the contributors on the 'Slugger O'Toole' blog.

Sadly I have had considerable experience of religious people down the years, and I can broadly group them in three sections:

1. The ‘learned it by rote’ brigade. Brought up with it, went to school with it. It’s second nature and not something you question or rave about. It’s just there. On the surface this group are fairly harmless. Many will refer to themselves as being ‘lapsed’. Underneath they’re deeply tribalist and feel that any attack on their faith is a personal attack on them. Whether or not they are regular attenders at mass, church or mosque, they remain indelibly stamped with their tribal marking.

2. The ‘late convert’ brigade. These people have generally had little or no experience of religion in their formative years, but ‘discover’ religious faith later in life through marriage, peer group or a life-changing event. They tend to over-compensate for their ‘former life’ by seeking to convert everyone in sight to their exciting new findings. This group tends to be more suggestible to extreme ideas.

3. The complete fanatic. Driven by an insatiable urge to ‘live’ their faith, these people are often relatively normal on first meeting, but tend to be obsessive to the point of mania in matters of religion. They refuse to acknowledge any other viewpoint, see their holy book as being infallible and impose their particular ‘moral code’ on their immediate family and anyone else within their sphere of influence. In my opinion, they represent the ultimate, perhaps logical conclusion of that strange phenomenon called religious belief.

Whether all religious people are ‘crazy’ is a highly debatable point. Having had regular experience of an individual with acute paranoid schziophrenia, I was struck by the similarities of the more bizarre psychological aspects of their condition with the unquestioning spiritual ideas of the religious. Obviously this is itself proves nothing, but several scientific studies have suggested that religious experiences can be induced by manipulating various parts of the brain, as indeed of course can mind-altering drugs.

None of this is intended to suggest that all religious people are ‘crazy’, but it is rather puzzling that ‘miracles’, prophets and intense religious experiences such as documented visions have almost entirely ceased since the early centuries AD. It must be remembered that a vivid dream in biblical times could be interpreted as a vision from God, a natural phenomenon such as a flood or earthquake was considered to be aimed at ‘sinful’ mankind rather than being a random occurence and that organised religion was a highly effective tool in controlling an often lawless and volatile population with promise of cake tomorrow for good behaviour today.

Rather like alcohol, religious belief is relatively harmless and can even be beneficial in small doses. However, when it begins to seep into government, schools and hospitals and forms itself into a world-view, as in violent Islam or fundamentalist Christianity, it becomes a malevolence that is closed to reason.

In my view, it is the duty of government to ensure that all religious belief is kept well away from the statute book, and that men, women and sexual minorities are given equal standing in all matters. Children should be allowed to be children, and the classroom is not the place for dispensing one-sided religious dogma. If the chosen ‘faith’ of the parents is really as strong as their church leaders would contend, there is nothing to be lost in providing all children with a well-rounded secular education and allowing them to experience religious ‘instruction’ outside school premises.

New England Goalkeeper Following Croatian Result

England have announced the identity of their new goalkeeper for future fixtures. The challenging position has been awarded to a large cardboard box. Apparently the box has proved immensely successful in recent training sessions. It's secret is the ability to blow unpredictably across the goal mouth and has saved every shot that the best English strikers, plus Wayne Rooney, have tested it with.Manager Steve McLaren revealed that of 20 penalty shots from the English strikers, 10 had gone over the bar, 6 had gone wide, 3 had hit the post and the one on target was saved by the cardboard box 'no problem.'He refused to comment on reports that the original proto-type had been destroyed by Wayne Rooney when he lost his temper after failing to get anything past the box. 'Wayne very rarely gets anything into the box, never mind past it' said Stephen Gerrard, who wished to remain anonymous.FIFA have welcomed the move, pointing out that it will save a fortune in wages, make the game more competitive, and stop people complaining that there are too many foreigners in the premiership. 'We're using a Bovril box made in England' revealed McLaren, 'and the added bonus is that I'll be able to sleep in it when I get sacked next week.'FIFA also revealed that the box will have more charisma than the rest of the team put together and that there is no way for a ball to run over the boxes foot and into the goal, as 'boxes don't have feet.'In a seperate move, we can reveal that the application for the entire England team to join Northern Ireland has been turned down. 'None of them are good enough' said manager Lawrie Sanchez. 'If any of them played for Hartlepool reserves like our lads, we might consider it, but they're all in poncy clubs like Man U.'England's crisis deepened as David Beckham ruled out a return to the squad, revealing that his tears in the final world cup match against Portugal had been because 'I broke a nail' and 'one of those foreigners stood on my toe. I'm not going back never never never.'Former manager Sven Goran-Erikkson, speaking from his palace in the south of France, confirmed that the team's problem was 'they were a bunch of wimps and mummy's boys, not hard and street-tough like me.'England's next fixture is against San Marino reserves. Steve McLaren warned the nation that they should 'brace themselves for a heavy defeat.' The cardboard box was unavailable for comment as it was 'getting it's hair done.'