Family visit update

So far, am surviving. We've just eaten lunch, and v. nice it was too. The baby hasn't been sick or exhibited any particularly troublesome baby traits. My two 2nd cousins seem happy, which is just as well since the last thing I need is two unhappy petits enfants to deal with. No arguments have broken out - this is so amazing I can barely write this. My family normally maintains at least a sort of low-level bickering that seems remarkably absent today; I can only put it down to the weather. We have a bouncy castle! - a chance for me to regress to childhood and be thankful for my dad's aquaintances; one of them owns said castle and has lent it us. In short, I have very little to complain about. Damn.

DOOM! FAMILY! HORROR!

NOOOOOO! My mothers side of the family is... grief, the bell just rang. Talk about bad timing. HERE THEY ARE - or at least the first four. Let's get this straight. I have no problem with this lot per se. However, an entire afternoon with all of them... There's not enough room for all of us! So, we shall see. If I never enter in this blog again you will know that I did not survive the experience.

Creationist deadheads

Thought for the day: how the hell do creationists keep their beliefs?

I mean really. "Creation science" is not just a joke but a contradiction in terms - science consists of formulating and testing hypotheses in order to come up with one or more possible conclusions, whilst creationism starts with a conclusion, uses the conclusion as a hypothesis, and searches for holes in other arguments. "Intelligent Design" is, generally speaking, creationism in a different guise, and has just the same problems. In fact, it is if anything less believable, since it (officially) has no (supposedly) God-given authority to back it up; how does a non-scientific movement like ID expect to prosper without the endorsement of half-crazed fundamentalist loons?
"Were you there? Were you there? Were you there?" is an oft quoted piece of verbal diarrhoea. A parallel to this that I have seen noted would be the robbing of one's house. You weren't there. Nor were the police. Yet even in the absence of witnesses we are able to use "indirect evidence" - the term thrown at insubstantial and doubtless totally fallible things such as the fossil record, geological evidence, and arcaeological findings which go against creationism - to convict the perp. A creationist abhors carbon-dating and such lies, but loves fingerprints.
I will stop here - I could go on making points till judgement day (grief, not that too) simply because I cannot be bothered to expend effort on refuting, as countless others have already done, creationist bullshit. It is wearing and it depresses me that human beings, members of the one known intelligent species, can nevertheless be so mind-bogglingly stupid and self-delusional. Hopefully, my next entry will be on a lighter note.
The very best, C.E.M.

Shame

Randomly looking through blogs today, I came across this. Specifically, the entry regarding protests at the burial of a Gulf War II soldier by fundamentalist Christians. BASTARDS. I'd like to add at this point that I am myself a Christian; my problem is not with Christianity but this particular group of fundamentalist deadheads. Even if they believe that terrorism and the "war on terror" is a judgement from God on the sinful US, how exactly do they justify invading a funeral and telling someones grieving relatives that God killed that person. I wouldn't have done that to Hiltler's family, not at his funeral. Not because I don't believe him to have been evil, but because just because he was is no reason to punish them by invading their grief. So what makes these people feel that they are justified? Just a bunch of messed-up, credulous, dead-headed, homophobic (note the placard saying "God hates fags") idiots. A quote from Shakespeare suggests itself to me here; "Would that thou wert clean enough to spit upon".
I consider myself fortunate that I live in Britain, a country thankfully free of the "Bible Belt" zealots which plague America. Not all such believers are wrong - most of them are perfectly reasonable, sane people, no doubt - but they contain a small vocal minority who cast shame upon all Christians. Anyone so foolish that they allow their own prejudices, hatred and insecurity to infect the teachings that they follow - whatever those teachings may be - and hence twist and pervert those teachings as they hear them to suit their own agenda, is scum of the lowest order. The person who will not only refuse to alter their views but refuses to even listen to the counterarguments is beneath contempt. I believe I do not do those who took part in that protest an injustice when I say that they are no better than the perpetrators of 9/11. Were they in the same conditions as those terrorists, rather than comfortably at home in the richest country in the world, they would doubtless be the people that our countries have been fighting a war to eradicate. May God forgive them, because there won't be many others who will.

Bastard Exams

NOOO! More exams! My exams started nearly five weeks ago. OK, so I had a week off for half term, but that's still quite a while. What's more, I have until next Friday to go before they are all over. Naturally, study leave ended two days ago, so I'm now having to put up with exams as well as normal school.
Still - never thought I'd say this - it's a bit of a relief to return to school. Something about the orderly routine is, in a way, rather comforting, albeit very dull. Also nice to see my mates again, having been in less-than-glorious isolation for a good proportion of the last five weeks. So... I am now part of the elite (snigger) group of people that make up my school's eldest year. This has its advantages. My school maintains the quaint little prefect system. So, we have to do more work. Doesn't sound great, but, in my case, this amounts to two twenty minute stints organising lunch queues and generally putting the fear of me into the lower years. Ha ha ha, you little brats. Ahem. But here comes the good part. Prefects (the entirety of the upper sixth, ie us) can dish out lines and canteen cleaning duty to everyone else. Naturally, we have to have a good reason for it, but since the year nines never learn, that rarely presents a problem. Haven't dealt any out yet myself, but it comes in handy for ridding yourself of lower-school annoyances. Specifically, one good instance would be the year nine kid who keeps walking up to me, staring unblinkingly into my eyes and grinningly manically from a distance of about half a metre. If not dissuaded in whatever fashion from doing this, he will happily keep it up for a good five minutes. I think that he must have suffered mental trauma earlier in life, because there is definitely something wrong with him. Another related case is another year nine (don't know what it is about that year) who, for some reason best known to himself, insists on referring to me as "Zookeeper". I find that it's generally best to keep a safe distance from this one. Whilst the aforementioned kid has obviously just suffered a frontal lobotomy, the latter is - how can I put this? - more than a little unbalanced and quite possibly dangerous. I worry that one day he will attack me. Given our respective heights - I at about six foot two, he aspiring towards five foot - his teeth are positioned rather to close for comfort to places that I'd rather not have his teeth at.
But back to the earlier thoughts. First prefecty "duty" (hate the word "prefect", makes you sound like some ponce from Eton) was yesterday. Lunch queue supervision, 1:25 to 1:45. Since everyone had either eaten or decided to stuff it and go play football by this point, this wasn't particularly difficult, since there were at no time enough people coming for lunch to necessitate a queue. Therefore, I spent this time talking to a couple of mates and generally standing around doing a large amount of nothing.
Exams! trying to tell myself that they're almost over, but it's not easy. D1 maths tomorrow, which shouldn't present a problem, but next week is Pure maths and Mechanics, neither of which fill me with joy. I can just imagine the sad little creatures who wrote these exams - I mean, writing exam papers as a job? I mean, what on earth would possess any sane person to do that? Bastards. I hate them. Whilst I agree at a rational level that exams are for my benefit, and are a chance to show what I'm capable of, the deeper-down, more emotional core of my being loathes the very word. I mean, "Exams" "Ex" is latin for "out of", isn't it? I bet you that "am" means "the malevolent minds of hell-spawned little imps masquerading as education authoirity figures". Or maybe not. Think I've done OK, generally speaking, with a few setbacks - not noticing the last half a question in Physics was a good one.
I feel absolutely green with envy at my cats at the moment. They get to lounge around all day, eat, sleep, play, be stroked and most of all they don't have to do any exams at all. Wish I was a cat. Mind you, at least I've only got one more year of school. Oh wait. I've got uni next - good, but with harder exams - and then work. Oh dear. Work doesn't sound good. Not good at all. I think I will become a tramp.