Animals in:1,2,3...4...Check.
Music turned up: Check.
Windows shut: Check.
Treats: Check.
Yep, it's that time of year where we commemorate the attempted Stuart style referendum of parliament via black powder and a swan vesta. I'm sure were Mr Fawkes to try it today he would have no end of offers to keep an eye out for the rozzers and he would be inundated with matches, lighters, sparklers, candles, timers, etc...I hope someone is carefully watching our politicians because an extra 'guy' on the woodpile would not go amiss until it's too late.


















Quiz night and I am hoping for questions regarding the 5th November plot as opposed to where are the x-factor twins from. The latter answer is 'Fucked if I know or care'. Mind you, only a few of us turned up last week so it might be the same tonight. A few beers, conversation and music in an almost empty pub. Fingers crossed for a better crowd tonight.
TTFN.

A colleague at work introduced me to this animation. I'll let you make your own mind up as to its merits but several of us are convinced it shows an incredible imagination but also illustrates the experience of psychosis. This episode is mild but the others become progressively more disturbing.



A busy two days covering both jobs so I am glad to sit, sip a beer and enjoy spotify: Jethro Tull is the current music of choice. The pooch walked and paddled with the added bonus of no fireworks although a brief confrontation with the swans. All rather one sided as she ignores them because they are large and she can only chase pigeons and ducks, coward that she is. However, I'll have to limit the walks to the mornings for the next few days until the town is hopefully firework free.
Last week involved three nights out at the Tap with Saturday night being hugely enjoyable. The band played seventies punk covers with an especially fine rendition of Penetration. It brought back memories of small sweaty pubs in Camden and Islington with lots of alcohol, noise and life in the raw. Sadly I still can't recall many of the bands I saw although I imagine most of them disappeared fairly quickly. It's a short step to 'five pints, a bag of chips and bus fare home and all from a quid' through my rose coloured spectacles if I continue in this vein.
TTFN.

Look...like buses you wait for ages and then two posts come together!













It should have been a longer post but I wanted to get the shopping done which included hair colour and fake blood.I still have to pop out and buy Mrs C. a card & present for her birthday tomorrow. What does she want?...I have no idea. Sadly, it will be cheap and cheerful because she's still unemployed and No.1 son who attends college for two days a week can't find any work. Ho hum, I can't complain because I am still gainfully employed and kept extremely busy at both jobs. The good news is that finally my efforts may be about to pay off and the service manager was singing my praises the other day in connection with another possible secondment. The only downside to it is that it again involves a lot of travelling, another 100 mile round trip commute plus mileage as I perform community visits on top. It is another of these 'fire brigade' jobs where government and NHS policies combine to change services and oops! Where did that great big gaping hole appear with vulnerable clients plummeting through it? Meanwhile, underemployed clueless numpties have been promoted into positions for which they lack experience and commonsense. Amer, moi? Naturellement.* Mainly because I see standards slipping and patients left struggling because of clueless morons who do not comprehend how useless they really are. The job will be several months of plugging the gaps and inevitably dealing with the difficult patients whom other services avoid. The ones I inevitably like which says what a strange fellow I am. Sigh...I am a grumpy old sod tho' and perhaps this is the way of the world as one gets older. Anyhow, the post is not available until next year so I can concentrate on the here and now.
I am no nearer to deciding what present I should buy Mrs.C and perhaps I just need to take a stroll around the town centre. Joy unbounded...crowds and I have no idea what I am looking for. A recipe for disaster.
TTFN.

*Yes I know it should be 'amer je?', but we are talking Franglais here.

Happy Samhain!

We'll be mixing with the witches, vampires, ghosts and ghoulies tonight. Yep, fancy dress at the Tap. Who knows, as we are celebrating perhaps the odd spirit might drop in to sample the warmth and conviviality of the evening as the veil twixt this world and the next is at its thinnest. As long as they get a round in...
TTFN.

One of my favourite songs and after the acoustic night at the Tap I feel in the mood for more beer and music. This is a man who has lived life to the full and squeezed it 'til there was no more juice left...



TTFN.

Courtesy of Dave Clemo's Blog I copied and pasted this article by Dr Taj Hargey (April 2009)...

This week I not only won a libel case in the High Court but a victory against religious fanaticism within Britain's Muslim community. Muslim Weekly, a conservative newspaper, had falsely accused me of belonging to a heterodox sect and therefore being a heretic. I was apparently less of a Muslim than the readers of that paper.

As the head of a progressive Muslim organisation in Britain that is dedicated to an enlightened, egalitarian and erudite Islam, I was victimised, like other forward-looking Muslims, by a campaign of classic McCarthyism. Just as Senator Joseph McCarthy ruined the lives of countless Americans during the 1950s when he and his committee smeared innocent people as communists, the Muslim hierarchy in Britain have used witchhunts to maintain their unquestioned theological power. Any Muslim freethinker is automatically branded as heretical or un-Islamic and excommunicated from the community - and debate is shut down.

I hope that my public vindication in the courts will embolden more progressives, dissenters and particularly thinking women to put their heads above the parapet and challenge the fundamentalist mullahs. Only then can we loosen the deadly grip of the self-appointed religious fraternity on what it is to be a Muslim in Britain.

Unfortunately, Islam in Britain has been taken over by the followers of a warped manifestation of the faith. The Muslim Council of Britain, the main Muslim newspapers and many of the big mosques are dominated by men who subscribe to a virulent and backward-looking brand of Islam that has been exported from the Middle East and the Indian sub-continent.

We need a reformation that saves Islam from foreign-inspired zealots. That reformation is already under way, with Muslims going back to the pristine teaching of the transcendent Koran, not taking on trust the hadith (a compilation of sayings of the Prophet Muhammad recorded some 250 years after his death by non-Arabs) or the corpus of medieval man-made Sharia (religious law). But because this reformation is still in its infancy, the reactionary clergy and its supporters is doing everything to strangle it.

Most if not all the thorny problems of faith that British Muslims face today - whether it is apostasy, blasphemy, jihad, women's oppression, homosexuality, religious intolerance or the democratic deficit in and outside the community - can be traced either to fabricated hadith or the masculine-biased Sharia.

Although the Koran repeatedly declares that God's revelation is conclusive and sufficient guidance for Muslims and that there is no need for any supplementary legal authority in Islam, the traditional Muslim clergy defies this explicit divine assurance. They falsely convince their flock that they cannot be true believers without the hadith. They falsely assert that this source of Islam is at the heart of being a real Muslim. Most Muslims have been told that the hadith are the sacred authentic words of the Prophet, but the plethora of fictitious and forged hadith proves otherwise.

Granted, there may be some useful guidance in the thousands upon thousands of hadith but they need to pass a rigorous double test. First, they cannot contradict the Koran and, second, they must not defy reason and logic. Unfortunately, most Muslims have been programmed to regard hadith as sacrosanct teachings that cannot be challenged. This holds all Muslims hostage to the antiquated prejudices or distortions of the narrators and recorders of the prophetic traditions.

The rampant oppression of women in Muslim society does not stem from the Koran but is chiefly the product of misogynistic hadith. For example, a famous “authentic” hadith declares that there will be a preponderance of women in Hell. But the facts here on earth suggest otherwise - male criminality far exceeds that of females.

These anti-Koranic perspectives will continue to predominate in the British Muslim community as it becomes more directly tied to ultra-conservative and extremist sects - such as the Wahhabi, Deobandi, Jamati Islami and the Tabligh Jamaat. These ideological radicals propagate a highly toxic caricature of Islam. They regard creed and culture as indistinguishable, refusing to grasp that Islam is a global religion, not a faith that is linked to one particular people or place.

Although Muslims have their own specific territorial cultural traditions, there is no such thing as an Islamic culture. Therefore the modern trend among British Muslims blindly to emulate Arab ethnic dress or grow beards or for women to wear the Wahhabi-sanctioned niqab or face masks has nothing to do with the Koran but everything to do with the primitive tribal mores and sexist practices of Arabia.

The relentless importation of Wahhabi-influenced theology and tradition into the body politic of the Muslim community is mainly the result of two factors. First, the Saudis control Mecca and Medina, the centres of Islam. This gives the Wahhabi Saudis both a spurious legitimacy and a captive market to peddle their sectarian poison.

Second, with their petrodollars the Saudis can afford to export the most horrendous brand of Islam around the globe. Here in Britain, conservative mosques and madrassas receive funding from the despotic Saudis and in turn extol their nefarious interpretation of Islam.

It is essential therefore that all thinking Muslims resist this foreign theological imposition and create a British Islam that is not only faithful to the original uplifting teachings of the faith but one that is natural to and at home in modern British society.

Dr Taj Hargey is the chair of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford and the Imam of the Summertown Islamic Congregation in Oxford.

It's important to realise there is a 'broad mosque' of views within Islam and the fire and brimstone Muslims who call for the death of everyone who disagrees with their extremely narrow view of the world is akin to the similar Christian fire and brimstone extremists. They share the same desire to punish all those unbelievers who refuse to subscribe to their viewpoints. I'm happy to remain a lapsed Catholic who doggedly pursues a secular path throughout life and would like that path to continue without the interference of anyone of an authoritarian bent who uses religion as an excuse to try to do so. Or in the case of persil griffiths who uses the excuse of fuckwittery to try and interfere with it.
TTFN.

I guess it is no coincidence that this was published following the QT debate with Persil 'Whiter than white' Griffin. The article made me laugh and is extremely informative as well, especially following the links re. Professor Lenski. Godwin's law will be liberally (no pun intended) applied all over the internet with extremely broad brushes.
I have no intention of writing about Persil Griffin because you can read about it at length on several thousand sites and I have little desire to inflict his truly awful racist views upon the occasional reader who wanders on here by mistake. Sadly, amongst many of the topics ignored by the BBC/panel is that of immigration and how people are genuinely concerned that this continues. It plays right into the hands of extremists such as the BNP and Islamists. For many people such as myself who prefer the middle ground I can only forsee increasing extemism and people having to choose sides unless the next government tackles this issue. I guess by even suggesting immigration needs to be scaled down by at least 75 % I shall be demonised as a racist. Sadly, Labour, the BBC, etc...resort to shouting racist at people who aren't racist and question the 'wisdom' of increasingly allowing people who do not have the necessary skills, language or desire to engage with the mainstream culture to enter the UK. I really do fear the next few years and the Chinese proverb about living in interesting times frequently comes to mind. I see mental health nurses are needed in British Columbia, Canada and perhaps it is time to seriously consider a move.

Little blogging of late because I appear to have hit a hiatus, both at work, financially and in my personal life. It might be SAD although I prefer to think I am just a miserable bugger who is a tad fed up in the run down an increasingly slippery slope towards my half century. This can go one of two ways: Flat cap, terrier of indeterminate breed and develop a boring hobby which I then drone on about at length to anybody and everybody. Or, I panic, dye my hair blonde, buy fashionable clothes, work out at the gym, eat healthy foods, buy a red fuck off convertible sports car and acquire a young blonde nymphet as I deny any possible evidence of my true age. I think I will go the third route which consists of my bumbling along as usual and accepting the reality I see in the mirror. Some gentle exercise may be necessary: how much does a pint weigh and how many times can I bend that elbow?
TTFN.