act 6 scene 1

I like the Big British Castle and I like Radio 4.  This evening I caught this weeks The Moral Maze (you can listen again from there) which was a debate roughly centred around religion vs. science.  As with everything it had extreme viewpoints but I felt that Lord Wilson had a fairly sensible balanced opinion.

Towards the end the point was made that the science and religion divide is in fact a false dichotomy.  In my opinion this is generated by an over-exposure in the press to extreme fundamentalists from both ends of the spectrum with a lack of coverage given to the very viable middle ground.

If you are at all interested in this debate then have a listen - it’s a great introduction and plenty of food for thought.  

Here’s a question for debate: Where is the moral maze podcast?

Once in a while Have I got news for you is hilariously funny.  Tonight I saw a repeat from last week with Jeremy Clarkson chairing - quite simply it was one of the best I’ve seen for ages.  He also did an amazing take on Ground Force earlier in the year for Sports Relief - if you get the chance to see that on repeat then do so!

It’s been a week of clarity.  Most literally the sky across London was stunningly clear today.  From my work place near the top of the Gherkin it was possible to see for miles and miles and not think that London was choking in a cloud of mutation creating poison.

On other fronts I’ve been doing ‘productivity’ in work most days, visiting potential flats, following up leads and even going to (a new) church for the first time in ages.

A quick book review must be inserted here - since I keep meaning to do a round-up and it will not happen for a while.  So… A Short History of Christianity by Stephen Tomkins.  Given how long, convoluted and damn-right silly the church and Christianity has been, this book is remarkably short and concise.  Following in the footsteps of the Bryson book from which the title has been adapted it is similarly careful in the events that are picked out and also sarcastic, witty and very observant.  This was a book on Christianity that makes no assumptions and is, by all accounts, objective in it’s telling of the story.  It covers approximately eight years on each page which takes us through the early church, the repeated adoptions by Rome, the Renaissance and Reformation, various revivals and the decline of the western church.  I’ve learnt much about history in general and both the good and bad parts of the faith that I naturally profess.

Very interesting and my last fortnights commute would have been the worse without it.

well well…  as you may know, I was in India last week to do some work.  On my only day as a tourist I was driven down to Agra to see the Taj Mahal.  This is my attempt at a slightly atypical picture of the vast place.  It really is quite staggering - particularly given it is simply a tomb.  This wasn’t what I am planning to write about - but I felt the need to upload at least one photo….

so, onto bigger things.  this evening I suggested monopoly as the game to play and for the first time in years it wasn’t rejected as a stupid idea by family members who associate the game with losing repeatedly.  being more mature I plumped for the oranges, the set of properties that statistically provide the best returns on investment.  I also got the reds, but never quite got around to developing them.  I continue to insist that I was unlucky and my sister was lucky - and to an extent it was true.  I went bankrupt fairly soon after I put my third houses on my orange properties.

about an hour into the game we were talking about how different it would be if you could apply to the bank for a credit card and use it to buy houses.  later on community chest cards may just force you into consolidating your debt into huge crippling debts for bank fees of £200.  Monopoly: Credit Crunch Edition?  You heard it here first.

colourful india - orange turbans, blue skys, green and yellow taxies, purple saris and red tape…

one of the main reasons i’m in india is to receive a shipment of computers from the uk so that i can commission them before i leave.  they flew out on sunday night to join me, in theory, on tuesday night.  it’s now thursday night and we won’t see them until at least tomorrow.

on the way into the country customs issue each shipment with a unique number.  in fact it is a dusty computer that carries out this task - a task that it has happily carried out for many years.  when this system was written, by the india government’s internal it team they decided that this unique number would be six digits long, in the form of 100325 for example.  sometime early this week, before our shipment arrived, the dusty computer spluttered out the rather magical number 9,99,999.  shortly afterwards, following a few more coughs the computer gave up squeezing 10,00,000 into six digits and bluntly refused to allocate a number for my computers.  think of it like a year 2000 problem.

i’ve told this to two groups of people - those in i.t. and those who are not.  the former group know the punchline before i tell it, and the latter usually don’t…

anyway - they administered some cough syrup and it’s all better now, except that the computers brief period with the nurses has caused it to forget the exact location of my 600kg crate of computers in a vast warehouse.  so here we are on thursday night with very little we can do except cheer on the people who are gently tugging, pulling, moving and cutting at the red tape surrounding indian customs.

maybe tomorrow…