» Political Correctness Gone Mad

I'm a Christian.
Apparently this offends people. Without even knowing me, people can hear that phrase about me and immediately decide I'm objectionable, yet for some reason this doesn't count in their heads as prejudice or discrimination.

Just mentioning that I'm one of yer actual born-again happy-clappy God-botherers, who goes to church on (some) Sundays and does that praying thing sometimes, is enough to set most people off.


Yes, some of my lot believe in 7-day creation a few thousand years ago*.

Yes, some of my lot don't believe in sex before marriage**.

Yes, some of my lot don't believe in sex with people the same sex***.

Yes, there are a lunatic few who get the placards out at Jerry Springer The Opera, abortion clinics, section 28, Harry Potter book launches (wtf?) and God knows where else you find a few militant fools.


But the point is, none of that matters. The clue's in the name. It's not about any of that lot. The thing that makes me (or any of my lot) a Christian is that Christ business. Believing that that Jesus bloke, that a bunch of historians wrote of about 200 years ago, was more than a "nice man" or a "good teacher" or a "troublemaker" or "political activist" or whatever who upset a few people and got nailed to a cross, how sad; believing that he actually meant what he said. The rest is all cultural.

It's not about trying to be nice or that ridiculously patronising phrase "christian values" - don't get me started on all that - if you're not going to acknowledge there was a bloke who professed to be the Christ behind it all, don't think that just trying to be nice to people is "christian" any more than it's "ghandian", "guevarian" or "Jimmy Saville-ian".

It's not about Christmas or Easter (particularly). Jesus wasn't born in the middle of winter, nor is it possible he got nailed to a cross on the first full moon after the vernal equinox. Most of my lot wouldn't care if you swapped them round, changed the dates or just combined the two and called them Santa's Winterval Excess of Rampant Consumerism.

But don't patronise me. If you haven't studied it, if you haven't thought a bit about it, don't assume you know more about it than me. Any more than I'd presume to say to a Muslim, "oh yeah, but that Muhammad bloke, right, he wasn't really all that, he lived in a cave and slept with his aunt, didn't he? I read that in the Ramadan Special in the Mail..."

I don't care what you say about my beliefs. Because they're my beliefs. I don't think you should care and I don't think I've got any right to be offended by what you think.

I don't think you should be forced to believe the same thing any more than I should be forced not to believe them. I've had a bit of a think about it, I still question everything, I like to debate it and I know what I believe. Don't lump me in with a whole load of people with no muscles in their arms who wear sandals, grow beards and ring bells. It's not about them and it's not about me. As I said, the clue's in the name.



Length? Might have ranted there a bit...



...and if you don't click on "I like this" it means you're a politically correct bigot. ;)


EDIT: forgot to add the stars, sorry -

* I'm not convinced either way. Both poles of the argument seem to rely on a bit of a leap of faith of some sort, and I don't think in the end it matters too much.

** Like I said, the rest is cultural. Look at a bunch of repressed twenty-somethings trying not to acknowledge that they have genitals or feelings about them and compare them with a bunch of twenty somethings sticking their genitals in or around anything that moves, and I reckon you'll find something silly about both of them. Said Jesus bloke didn't say "wait until you get married to have sex," so I didn't.

*** I don't think the accumulated cultural prejudices of generations of church-goers should have any influence here. For the record, I don't much fancy the cock. Some of my male friends do. Said Jesus bloke said nothing on the matter, and it certainly doesn't bother me. Or them.
(Sat 24th Nov 2007, 9:24, More)

» I Drank Meths (pointless teenage things you did to shock)

The Sixth Form Revue
I was the youngest and most obnoxious kid in the year, basically an irritating little fuzzy-haired shit who often did things to show off but rarely even got a laugh from my peers because, frankly, I wasn't funny.

Aged sixteen I included myself in the cast of the end-of-year sixth form revue: a collection of sketches, impersonations and general school in-jokes that only occasionally held any humour to anyone else. Having written several terrible sketches, most of which were rejected, I decided I needed my moment of fame some other way. I wrote a sketch in which the leading character gets electrocuted off-stage and runs across the stage with his head on fire. Like all my other sketches it was rubbish, but the stunt appealed to the upper-sixth producers and it was accepted.

Because I usually got in the way of things and there were plenty of actually funny things to prepare for the stage, my sketch was never rehearsed. Thus, on the night, we all realised it was my sketch but nobody knew their lines. The curtains opened, there was a pause and the others involved decided to abandon the sketch.

Undeterred and ever attention-seeking, I promptly poured about half a can of lighter fluid on the top of my head, soaking my fluffy hedge of hair, put a match to it and ran shouting across the stage.

Apparently it was quite a spectacle. The audience genuinely screamed at the sight of a short spotty, be-spectacled kid with four-foot flames (lighter fluid) and black smoke (burning hair) billowing from the top of his head, and I earnt my few seconds of infamy running around the stage in a state of very convincingly growing terror. The watching teachers were completely aghast but I ran off-stage before anyone attempted to intervene.

Mercifully, we had plenty of fire extinguishers backstage and I grabbed a CO2 can and promptly froze my remaining hair to my scalp. Through another miracle of fate, my remaining hair was booked to be cut the next day (a Saturday) and the barber somehow managed to produce a messy style that covered my bald spots and burned blisters.

Monday morning, I ambled into my form room and was greeted by a massive round of applause for probably the only time in my school career. The later bollocking for irresponsibly using fire on-stage was probably harsher because I didn't appear to show any injuries, however it was worth it for the few moments of utter panic I appear to have caused.
(Thu 19th Jul 2007, 17:13, More)

» Crazy Relatives

Bob.
My late grandfather used to have a problem with cats crapping in his prized garden. He hated them so much that he would keep a water pistol filled with bleach by his back door. He'd watch through his kitchen window and, upon spotting a moggie, grab the squirter and dash out of the back door to attack.

When he discovered that this didn't do his roses much good when he (usually) missed, he bought not one but _two_ air pistols. He'd keep them loaded and developed an amazing technique where he held one in each hand, could quickly cock both, and burst out of the back door firing them together, John Woo-style.

He continued this until about two months before he died aged 88.



P.S. as far as I know, no cats were actually harmed during the making of this story. He was brilliant to watch, but a lousy shot.
(Thu 5th Jul 2007, 23:54, More)

» I Drank Meths (pointless teenage things you did to shock)

not teenage, but anti-authoritarian
I was also a cocky child, precociously bright.

I was six years old and acting up. My infant school teacher loudly asked me in front of the class why I couldn't be more mature.

I giggled and said, "mature, ha, that sounds like manure."

My classmates dissolved into laughter, as did the teacher. I won that one. :)
(Thu 19th Jul 2007, 17:15, More)

» Why should you be fired from your job?

I was too honest in my quarterly review.
It's more of a "why should you have been fired from your job?", but I hope you'll forgive me.

I worked for a now-bankrupt part of the Public-Private Partnership responsible for cocking up London's Underground network. Let's call them Metro... Web.

It was a terrible, terrible place. Two floors of very high-up office tower were entirely devoted to creating files, counting files, pushing around files, amalgamating files and filing files on all the bits of the underground that didn't work: knackered bridges, tunnels about to cave in, rickety platforms, leaky sewers, loose rails... you get the picture. There were probably about 50 people devoted to this task, and around 30 000 files (yes, there are _that_ many problems with the underground infrastructure).

This was balanced by about 8 people whose actual job it was to get down the tunnels at night (when the tube stops running and they turn the power off), inspect said problems and oversee the repairs. They were horribly underpaid and seen by a lot of the office staff as the lowest rung on the ladder: after all they had to get their hands dirty. It was a classic management-heavy case of too many chiefs and not enough indians.

While at first I thought my job there was a cushy number - I was actually told to sit at my desk and try and look busy for my first week while they tried to think of something for me to do - after a while, it was truly awful. Morale was depressingly low; there's only so much bureaucracy a claustrophobic office can tolerate, even if it's self-generated. Any email or internet access was closely watched, even though there was painfully little else to do while at one's desk.

I tried: I came up with more efficient ways of dealing with reports, I actually read the files and started eliminating duplicates; I worked overtime to archive old files and I even found a way to more or less automate my given job by creating a couple of very fancy Excel files.

My first quarterly review finally came around, five months after I'd started working there. I was given a couple of sheets of paper with the usual banal "how have you progressed" questions and asked to scan them and email them to HR once done.

(Another example of how the place worked: HR was on the floor below, where they would print out my scanned, emailed forms and pore over them before giving them to a data entry clerk to read and type my responses into a spreadsheet.)

I was pretty fed up with working there, it had been a bad week and I rather foolishly gave some truthful answers to their questions. I described in a lot of detail how I'd contributed to the company while I worked there; I highlighted some areas in which I felt I needed training; I pinpointed parts of the department that could be improved - all well so far. Unfortunately I also let slip that I'd spent my first week trying to "look busy" and explained just how much of my day job was now completely automated by a self-written chunk of Visual Basic Excel geekery.

Two days later, when called to discuss my responses with a dense, cheap-suit-clad manager and two very humourless HR drones, I realised I'd shot myself in the foot. By the end of the meeting I knew I'd be leaving that day: I was asked what my favourite part of the job was and, after a long think while looking out of the window, I could only reply "the view."

I was told I was no longer required later that week.


Length? From the 34th floor, by my repeated, desperate calculations it would have taken about 3.9 seconds...
(Thu 9th Aug 2007, 20:01, More)