i am sparticus: Words

Predictions For Next Year

Enough of 2005, I'm bored of this year already. Exciting predictions for 2006 follow!

January. Is spent reliving 2005's mistakes. THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF RE-LIVE-O-VISION.
February. Starting what will eventually become the mid-February tradition of Hyrdoenflationsofamass a man accidentally sets fire to himself while floating down a river on a three piece suite. Best not to ask.
March. Fails to happen. Sorry.
April. Summer comes early! Everyone walks around in coats and scarves saying "brrr isn't it cold" so as not to let on the mistake.
May. The classic "May The Fourth Be With You" joke is made. Consequentially 10,000 people die. May is renamed "yousethe" to prevent this from ever happening again.
June. The rapture happens, only this rapture takes place on the basis of works not grace and so everyone's left behind. Coincidentally Bangor gets sucked into a miniature black hole overnight. This still puzzles theologians in a hundred years time, though mostly because it took them that long to notice.
July. Was named for Julius Caesar. Born in 13 July 100 BC Julius Caesar was key in transforming Rome from a republic to an empire. Caesar was born in Rome into a well-known patrician famil... Oh wait. This is meant to be a prediction of the coming month isn't it? Yeah nothing really happens in July.
August. Everything Shrek 3 flops at the box-office including the 100ft tall Shrek Model outside the premiere. When the debris is cleared all that can be found is Cameron Diaz's heart, which has been so compressed that it's turned into pure diamond.
November. Does a job swap with September
October. Bring your shorts! This month's gonna be hot! In South Australia. Where you live it'll just rain as per usual.
September. Reneges on it's promise to November. Consequentially November has to find an extra 30 days to fill somewhere. It out sources them to China and by Guy Fawkes we're all back on track. Some people say they can tell the difference with the new days, but they're the same sort of people who don't give the paper boys who deliver their Daily Mail to them Christmas tips, so everyone ignores them.
December. World ends. etc...

I Want A Famous TV Show Made After Me

The thing I really love about "I Want A Famous Face" is not the nigh on criminal negligence of the issues surrounding self-worth, plastic surgery and financial debt that are raised by the show, it's the fact that none of the background music is playing for more than five seconds before it's cut. Today while channel hopping I heard, quite literally two seconds of "Wonderful" by Everclear before it cut to another song. Which was especially a shame because it wasn't even the best two seconds.

Top Five Top Five's Of 2005

• Top Five Albums
• Warnings / Promises - Idlewild
• Plans - Death Cab For Cutie
• One Time For All Time - 65daysofstatic
• Make Believe - Weezer
• In Your Honor - Foo Fighters
• Top Five Photos I Took
• 
  From when I went to the beach with Ed and Hayles. They're not in this photo, which makes it that much better.
• 
  What's the use of going to France if you can't take photos of things?
• 
  Eating food, buying cheap beer, climbing rocks, enjoying the sun. But the photos are good too.
• 
  I have this on my wall. On balance it's probably too dark to print properly, but it's fun.
• 
  I'm a sucker for anything with sunsets in
• Top Five Valuable Life Lessons I've Learnt Written in the Second Perspective
• You can't stitch as well as you thought
• Follow your heart. It doesn't help you get through life, but it makes for more interesting reading on your website
• Don't mutter under your breath when speaking in church. If you want to be heard then half the congregation will not hear you. If you don't want to be heard then your tie mic is almost definitely still on. Gosh that's embarrassing isn't it?
• Geeky clever things never impress the people you want to impress. Which is good really, because if you feel the need to impress someone then probably one of the two of you is an arse.
• With respects to content, by and large, write whatever you want to write. If you can't read it back afterwards without getting distracted by Shift-F9 then it's probably boring.
• Top Five Useless Life Lessons I've Learnt Written in the Second Perspective
• Foo Fighters have no definite article, though Dave Grohl is still the man. Go figure.
• Wash gets killed off. What the heck? I mean, seriously, Wash? Dude.
• Little Britain is exactly as good as you always thought it was. Which is to say, not very really.
• Finding a decent steak and ale pie is nigh on impossible.
• Fuller's ESB is Da Bomb, as in Barley Wine. Strong Beer is the beer of the future.
• Top Five Things Read This Year
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
• The Bible - God / Various Authors
• Hey Nostradamus! - Douglas Coupland
• The Monarch History Of The Church (series) - Ivor J. Davidson
• The Dilbert Blog

We'll Change The World

So I'm back in Swansea from various travelling across the country and I'd like to say that normal service will resume soon. However I can't, because until someone explains the following comment to me I'm not doing anything (apart from maybe cook tea, as I'm rather hungry). Queuing up to get the bus from Swansea City Centre to my house I dropped one of my gloves on the floor. I started to bend down to pick the glove up at the same time as a kindly old lady in front of me. Me being fit and nimble and not suffering from the various problems an old lady has I managed to pick it up first. Me being nice and friendly though I smiled at her and said "thanks anyway" upon which she replied, and this is the mysterious comment that makes no sense, "you should have let me pick it up so then I could have got the luck".

Before I descend into long and cogent discourse upon why this makes no sense whatsoever, I should point out three things. First of all, she didn't say it in a mean way, just in a ho-hum sort of way. She didn't seem mad at me at all. Secondly, I wasn't particularly lucky after picking up the gloves myself, unless you count remembering that my parent's house alarm code isn't the same as my PIN number after the second digit. Thirdly, and perhaps most pertinently, immediately after she said that she tried to get the bus and was told that actually this bus didn't go anywhere near where she wanted to go and she needed to wait for the other one. Ha! That'll teach you to try and steal luck that was deservedly mine!

If someone can explain to me how this story might make sense I'd be eternally grateful.

Part Finished: Some Final Thoughts

And so ends our fantastic series on the origins of Christmas. To recap, at first no-one cared about when Jesus was born because it wasn't important, then when they decided to celebrate it they decided to celebrate it based upon its religious significance, not on the basis of its date and then when they finally firmly decided on a date, they only used the date of a Pagan festival for convenience and to make a point. In no way can it be said that Christmas was a pagan festival. It may have taken the date from Paganism, but it didn't take the meaning or the celebration.

Which leads me to make some pithy one line conclusion that'll make you all think and go "hmm". So here we go. In all of this, if you take away one thing from all this, take away this; while the date that Jesus was born on is fairly irrelevant to anything, that He was born is of fundamental importance to the entire planet.

A noticable lack of talent

Yesterday I finally discovered something that I have no talent in doing whatsoever. That statement sounds arrogant so let me clarify. I believe that the idea of talent is a useful way of measuring how good you are at a certain activity. Pretty much everyone has talent at pretty much everything, however we only perceive someone as being talented (and therefore good) if their level of talent is beyond a certain point. If you were to give talent a percentage value, a very talented person would be something like 80-90% good at something, a very lowly talented person would only be 10% good at something. Pretty much everyone has some talent at everything even if that talent is as low as 5%. Everyone can improve on how talented they are at something as long as they have something to start from. So only in rare cases are you absolutely talentless at something and only in those rare cases can you never ever improve.

In my case, I've discovered I lack talent at baton twirling. And this is the bona-fide complete and utter zero-percent lack of talent. Yesterday, someone attempted to teach me how to do the most simplest thing possible with a baton. The conversation went like this:

"Hold the baton in the middle.
"No, not there, the middle.
"No. THE MIDDLE
"Look, how hard is it to hold the baton in the middle?
"Okay, whatever. Just try spinning the bottom end round in a circle.
"That's the top.
"That's not a circle
"That's still the top end.
"That's still not a circle.
"Okay, try spinning the top end instead.
"That's the bottom."

Part Five: In Which People Overcome Their Differences With Drink

if you wish to recap

So after all this kerfuffle, at some point in the early fourth century Christmas started happening on the twenty-fifth of December. Why the 25th? Two theories abound. The first is that when the then emperor Constantine realised that Church leaders wanted to move the festival of Christmas to another date he recommended it be moved back to the 25th to coincide with various existing feasts, not least of which was the feast of the 'Sol Invictus', the feast of the unconquerable Sun. Constantine was a big fan of the sun and a big fan of Christianity, so to get them both working together seemed like a good way of having one big mega festival which sounded like a right laugh. The second theory on how the date was decided is that when faced with moving Christmas, church leaders worked out Christ's birthday through some of the aforementioned awkward calculations and arrived quite handily at the nearby date of the 25th of December.

So those are the two theories. The problem is that no-one seems to agree on which one is true. Of the first theory and the feast of the 'Sol Invictus' one book says "it is not, in the absence of direct evidence, probable that the date [of Christmas] was chosen in order to compete with this feast, though as soon as an equation began to be made between Christ and the sun, it was natural to celebrate a Christian feast on the day previously consecrated to the sun"(1) and on The Saturnalia (the other big feast of the season) "It has sometimes been thought that Christmas was intended to replace the Saturnalia. this is, however, very improbable, because the coincidence of date is not perfect, and, in the second place, there seems to be little evidence that Christian writers connected the two feasts."(ibid) Which is all well and good until you read things like this about the second theory "I should say at once that the calculation which assigned the birth to December 25th, which we come upon occasionally among many other similar calculations, can scarcely have given the initiative [for the new date]."(2)

Gosh, two separate theories standing opposite each other, who will decide one way or another and so bridge this enormous gap? Luckily for you I'm a firm believer in sticking my neck out, so I'll give it a shot. Given the above and other books, I'd hazard a guess that they're both at least somewhat right. That Constantine wanted the festival to be moved to the 25th (or nearby) is fairly irrefutable, that Christian theologies could with some legwork 'prove' that Jesus was born on the 25th is also fairly irrefutable. Therefore it seems likely that something along the lines of this conversation happened. "We need to move Christmas" "The emperor likes the idea of merging it with the celebrations of the sun on the 25th" "that's not bad, I'm sure someone said they reckoned that Christ was born on that day" "well, that's that resolved. Another glass of mulsum?".

1) Lake, K. (1910). Christmas. In Hastings, J. (Ed.), Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics. Edinburgh, UK: T & T Clark.
2) Cullman, O. (1956). The Early Church. Norwich, UK: SCM.

Christmas #4

It's the very very final Christmas Competition Face-Off Photo Nonsense Thing! (save for the bonus tacky next week special edition). This is the bit where the grand revelation is revealed. Not wanting to spoil the ending but it turns out that Ipswich Is More Christmassy Than Edinburgh. Oh Yeah.

Notice how Ipswich doesn't need cheap Santa tack to be stunningly Christmassyly pretty.

Notice how Ipswich can still pull of the cheap Santa tack and still be stunningly Christmassyly pretty.

Match. Point. Winner

Friday The 16th

• Last night, a group of people (of whom I was a part of) went ice-skating in the new fancy ice-skating rink outside Portman Road. One of the group (by which I mean me) was actually not bad at ice skating and found out that he knew what he was doing. This is a polite round-about way of saying "we went ice-skating I was absolutely fantastic, especially compared to everyone else ever, who all sucked".
• This morning, while in the shower I created a new game. It's called "make the bar of soap into interesting shapes by dropping it from great heights onto the bottom of the bath". Then I realised I was a grown man who was about to be late for work because I was playing with a bar of soap in the shower. Now I realise I'm a grown man who has just told the world he plays with bars of soap in the shower and that no-one wants to read about this sort of thing. But whatever, it's my website, I'll write what I want.
• Yesterday for work I achieved a monumental coding feat and hacked the user databases of installs of phpbb and wordpress together so that if I upgrade a user in phpbb to the rank of staff, they can automatically write on Wordpress. How geeky is that? Also I realise that no-one wants to read about this sort of thing. But whatever, it's my website, I'll write what I want.
• I've stuck a new design up. It's possibly my favourite design ever, even before the minor tweaks that need doing to it are done.
• Teh Internet spent most of it's day playing dead at work here. Connectivity has just been restored. ALL HAIL THE ALL POWERFUL INTERNET. That last comment makes even less sense when viewed next to the fact that I did more work today than any other day this week. Gosh.

The Trainline

Just so everyone knows, The Trainline doesn't work with Safari, Apple's default browser. According to their technical support the javascript doesn't work properly with it and so can't process the order. To say this is backward is an understatement.

Oh, and if anyone finds this through Google. You can use the trainline in Safari, you just have to go into Safari's preferences and disable javascript.

More Thoughts on Dating

The standard youth worker talk on Christian dating reads something like this:

There shouldn't be any inappropriate touching. Don't lie down with each other. Some level of intimacy is good but don't push it too far too soon. Don't spend an excessive amount of time with them at the expense of your other relationships. Don't be alone in a room with them, or if you do then leave the door open. Be accountable to someone else outside of the relationship. Praying together is a good thing, but remember the whole excessive intimacy thing.

Christian youth workers: When you're advice on dating reads the same as your child protection policy, you've got problems.

Top Five Things That Would Be Top Fives if I Had Five Of Them

• Top Five Madonna songs I like (Ray of Light, American Pie, Don't Tell Me).
• Top Five Radiohead songs i dislike. (Blow Out, Tree Fingers)
• Top Five dead baby jokes that make for good illustrations at church (not even at Advent!)
• Top Five generic pub lagers (Becks)

Ipswich Town

Saw the mighty mighty Ipswich town yesterday.The match had most of the elements for a great game.

• Poor refereeing with the missing of vital fouls. Check!


• Going a goal down in the first fifteen minutes Check!


• Coming back with a lot of form to level the score Check!


• Loud Chav jokes being made about Adam Proudlock ("why isn't Proudlock playing is he in jail?" "nah, three of his kids are being born this week and as he missed the two last week he thought he better try and be there. Just to impress social services y'know") Check!


• Ipswich not going down to a second goal Uncheck!


• Ipswich playing really well for the next half an hour to claw the score back Uncheck!


• Ipswich making an effort in the last five minutes and then scoring at the last minute to level the score Check!


• Copious chanting of "You're not singing, you're not singing, you're not singing any more" Check!


• Leprechauns throwing gold into the crowd Uncheck!

Reality TV Redeemed

There is nothing that sums up the reality of this life better than reality TV. Something practically perfect (tv) is taken and corrupted beyond belief by something moronic and stupid (humanity). There remains something good and lovely about it, but all it serves to do is attract you to and highlight the dreadful mess that is what remains. It's a sad, sad state.

But while we're in this state, I may as well try to cash in. Channel four, if you're reading here is the idea for the second^* greatest reality TV show ever. It starts out in standard reality TV format, a group of people are recruited as applicants and made to do humiliating auditions. This is all filmed (supposedly for the E4 special 'behind the scenes' part) and the people who go the biggest lengths to make the biggest fools of themselves are picked. These people are then told to book off two weeks holiday for some set point in the future and when this time comes are picked up by channel four and put into some sort of reality tv type situation for the two weeks. It doesn't matter what reality TV type situation it is really, as long as they're kept heavily claustrophobiaed and free from any outside contact. In the second week, one person should be evicted / released / removed from the situation every night to loud cheers and a huge (hired) crowd. They'll be interviewed by some famous celebrity and then swept off to a hotel, where they'll be confined until everyone is free and released. All the while they'll be told that the show has had the best ratings of any Channel Four series ever and that people are going mental about the show. On the final night they'll be an amazing coming out awards winner ceremony, with a huge amount of hired in professional crowd screamers and the ilk. Guest celebrities will come in and shake their hands for providing such great TV. The contestants, who were picked for how up themselves they were will believe every second of this.

For the next week they'll be rushed around various press conferences, tv interviews and radio stations, where they'll be told how great they were. They'll be live on air with Richard and Judy, Chris Moyles and if they're really lucky, Jonathan Ross. They'll be on the front cover of Heat, the third page of The Times and the lips of every person in the country. In between appearances they'll be kept in their hotel and forbidden contact with the outside world. Just for the week you realise until the press dies down a bit and they can relax.

On the Sunday evening two weeks after they first set foot into reality tv they'll be driven back to their homes for a glorious family welcome. They'll be dropped off outside their or house and be told that they're going to surprise their family. The TV crews will disappear around a corner so no-one will get suspicious and the now famous reality TV star will walk up to their doorway and ring the bell.

Whereupon a family member will answer the door and say "Where the hell have you been? You said you'd be back from holiday last week!". Because here's the sting you see. They won't really have been on TV. They'll have filmed it all sure, but it won't have been shown. It was all an elaborate setup, they were on Richard and Judy, but it was never shown. The copy of heat they had was a fake. Those phone interviews they did, they weren't with radio producers, they were with work experience guys from Channel Four. No-one thinks they're famous in real life. Hell, in real-life no-one thinks they were on a reality TV show.

The real TV program shall actually be the contestants being secretly filmed trying to get used to the knowledge that they've either been very badly stitched up, or gone very very crazy. The best part is that there won't be a reveal about this either a year or when the first person breaks down and goes mental, which ever one takes longer to happen.

I realise that this idea maybe considered sick and wrong, but hey, the world is a fallen place, so it's not like we're making it out to be something we're not. And if these people want fame that badly we'll give it to them. Oh yeah. IN THE FACE.

Footnote

*: The idea for the best reality TV show ever sits on my computer right now. One day I'll post it, but it needs a bit of work yet.

Christmas #3

It's Friday Christmas Photo Face-Off Time! And I'm assuming because Sarah hasn't posted yet she's given up and gone crying to her mummy. Today's Christmas photos explore the underlying message of Christmas; capitalism! Apart from the first one which is just a pretty photo.

Oh my word? Is that Ipswich? My gosh! I thought Ipswich was just some rubbish town! I didn't realise that it contained the very heart and soul of Christmas in it! Let me pause and bask in the glowing warmth of Christmas!

Until someone lets me take a photo of their January credit card statement, what says Christmas more than Santa Clause in a shopping mall?

This photo wasn't set for a long exposure, that's actually how fast people were moving to get all their shopping done before their banks caught up on their maths and froze their accounts.

Harrry Potter!

Finally got around to seeing Harry Potter yesterday in glorious celebration of finishing my last essay. Obviously vast amounts of it was different to the book, some of it for the worse (Dumbledore being a fool, the Crouchs not being explained and the colour of Hermoine's dress at the ball, good grief what where they thinking?) and some of it for the best. By far and aware the best change was making the Yule Ball feel like a proper school disco not a ball. Balls have people making witty remarks and saying things like "pray tell, how keeps your mother?", school discos have people moping around, sitting in corners and making idiots of themselves. With all that in mind, I was slightly perplexed as to why they kept the Wyrd Sisters in. Okay, so having Johnny Greenwood on stage in Hogwarts was cool, but realistically the band made the school disco scene far more unbelievable. And if you are going to have them, why only show them for ten seconds? Really what they should have done is moved them to another scene and given them more time. Like put them celebrating the end of the tri-wizard tournament, or put them instead of that really embarrassing scene with Hagrid and Mademoiselle I'm A Giant Really, or put them instead of pretty much the entire opening twenty minutes which could then be summarised as "over the holidays, Lord Voldemort's followers got quite vocal about some things and some important plot details for later books were forgotten to be setup."

Angry Angry Man

Angry Angry Man: "You, You're a Christian. Say something objectionable to me that I'll disagree with!"
Me: "Okay! You're an idiot"
AAM: "No I'm not! Shut up! You're a moron! And that wasn't what I meant moron. Tell me something that you Christians believe that I'll find objectionable. What about all those gay same-sex unions, I bet you hate those don't you."
Me: "Meh"
AAM: "Meh? Shouldn't you be out stoking the fires of hell for these people? Your indifference makes me sick!"
Me: "Sorry, I find it hard to get irate by a secular government, who are meant to look after everyone in the country, offering legally recognised unions for same-sex partners. It seems fair enough really."
AAM: "But gay people getting married in churches! Doesn't that make you so angry that you want to go fatwah someone?"
Me: "You still can't have same-sex union's in churches, though if someone did have one I could get irate about that if you want?"
AAM: "No. Don't bother. You obviously aren't a real Christian. Unless, you get angry about late night drinking? Do you get angry at late night drinking?"
Me: "No! Don't be stupid. Do you know how hard it is to get to a pub for last orders when the youth event you are running doesn't finish till 10? Nigh on impossible!"
AAM: "You approve of late night drinking?"
Me: "I am late night drinking! Well, in some deep quasi-metaphorical sense."
AAM: "You make me angry! So angry that I can't even be bothered to think of a punchline"

Would There Be Wooly Mammoths In Heaven?

Short Answer: YES! How cool is that! WOOLY MAMMOTHS!

Longer Answer: No, but there will be wooly mammoths on the New Earth! How cool is that! WOOLY MAMMOTHS!

iamsparticus.com; important theological debates have nothing on this.

Iron Men

I had this thought the other day as we were sat in this car driving back from nowhere. That if human civilisation finally managed to top itself off then all our descendants would have left would be these huge monolithic structures morning our loss. I struggle to imagine what people would make of sky scrapers and shopping malls but which of them would really see the cities that we lived in. What would impress would be the huge gigantic pylons that dominate the sky-line. Statues to men always going places and never stopping. The world scorched and reborn they would still stand there in the sky staring down at the earth never to be toppled.

Christmas #2

These photos need no introduction. Maybe an apology afterwards, but no introduction.

Light, A Star, and A Virgin. Gosh! It's like the photo's trying to tell me the Christmas Story.

If a picture says a thousand words, this one says "Don't Tell The Council, But Santa Pays Cash In Hand For Seasonal Work" seventy-one times.

To me, this photo represents the weight of shopping dragging you down whilst all around you the world spins faster and faster and you realise that someone spiked your eggnog.

Next Week: The Part of this shenanigan where if this was a movie Mark would shake off the initial flurry of punches and throw Sarah through a wall. If *sigh*

Things Overheard in The Pub

q: "In which film did Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon dress up as women?"
pub quiz team next to us: "White Chicks yeah?"

Which while funny is no...
q: "Which pair of brothers fronted the band 'Spandau Ballet'? "
pqtntu: "Oh, that was the Kray brothers wasn't it?"