I haven’t been blogging much, lately. Silly me.
This is mainly because I (a) haven’t got enough time, and (b) sometimes can’t think of much to write about. Annoyingly, these two criteria are never both fulfilled at the same time.
However, I shall try and combat both of these problems with a new weekly news round-up, issued on the Friday of every week (well, every week I can be bothered.)
A small note – this is not likely to resemble the ‘real’ news. It represents news that I find interesting and relevant, from around the Internet, and from around the world of these carbon-based bipeds (and, if relevant, quadrupeds, or cephalopods if PZ Myers has upset a lot of people that week.)
And, somewhat fittingly, we begin this week with exactly that: PZ Myers has angered several Catholic lobbyist groups by making a joke about a communion wafer. Prof. Myers was writing about a rather ludicrous situation where some idiot removed a communion wafer from a Catholic church – presumably just to irritate the congregation. Little did this (admittedly idiotic) person realise that he would receive death threats over the matter. He wrote that the wafer was a ‘goddamned cracker’ and suggested that later he would find a cracker and desecrate it, just to annoy these people.
Before long, he had received personal hate mail, including demands that he be fired and death threats. The right-wing Catholic League has set up something of a witch-hunt for him, and both sides have started letter-writing campaigns to the president of the University of Minnestosa, demanding for him to be (or not to be) fired.
I personally think the situation is summed up in this comment:
That said, I hope this thing blows over soon — the kid who kicked this whole thing off was a douchebag for stealing the cracker, the (very few) Catholics who issued death threats were exponentially bigger douchebags, and this whole thing seems to be on the edge of exploding into a supernova of gratuitous asshattery.
(Yes, it’s just a cracker, but it’s a cracker that some people find very important, and the cracker-worshipers were doing their thing in a church service where the cracker-stealer didn’t have to be, so there was no point in taking the damn thing except to piss a bunch of people off)
To my mind, it seems that Prof. Myers made the comment as a geniune joke. I sent a personal letter, via air mail, to the President of the University of Minnestosa today, in support of Prof. Myers. I spent 56p and missed some of Golden Blockbusters to Fifteen to Twelve to Three to No Deal, or whatever is occupying the Channel 4 daytime slot this week.
Anyway, in other news, iPhone chaos! iPhone 3G customers have been infuriated to find out that their local AT&T/O2/Rogers/Telecel/PhoneyCompany store has not stocked enough iPhones, despite the fact they pre-ordered them. First-generation iPhone users trying to upgrade to iPhone OS X 2.0 have had problems too: Apple’s servers have buckled under the load, and iTunes has gone down.
This has the side effect of stopping the iPhone from reactivating itself once the firmware has been updated, therefore bricking the iPhone (albeit temporarily). My advice is just wait, before going out to buy an iPhone, or updating the firmware.
And, in yet more news, Fake Steve Jobs may or may not be dead. I sadly suspect the former. It seems Dan Lyons was getting tired with the character – but not to worry. A book of the best of the blog is being published.
Or maybe, Real Steve Jobs may decide to take up the baton. But, of course, he’d blog using iWeb, and the brand-spankingly-new-launched MobileMe.
In politics, David Davis has won the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, which he induced. Labour and the Lib Dems, and even the BNP, didn’t even put in a candidate – presumably as damage limitation. However, turnout was only ~30%, and this may come back to bite Davis in the future.
And in yet more news, Mock the Week is back on British TV, as is Would I Lie To You? The latter of which starts in five minutes or so – so, with that in mind, good night, don’t fall out of bed and accidentally hemmorage the floor and/or yourself, and have a fantastic weekend.
