Hooray, a 2:1 for Anni!

I don't think she reads our blog so there's no point congratulating her here, but I'm very proud, so I'm going to boast that my sister has got her degree anyway! With 2 surprise pregnancies, and settling to live in another country, it could have looked as if she wouldn't return her final year, but after months of weekend plane journeys (due to her husband and kids temporarily living in 2 different countries!) and a lot of hard work- she's done it. Wowser, Anni, you're insane but brilliant!

Given myself a challenge

I have decided that I need to re-get my French up to scratch (as I'm teaching mostly German these days, and certainly no French above Year 9 level), and to practise, I have begun my third, yes, third blog (stupid man). It's at http://lexperiment.over-blog.com/, and will be not much more than a diary in French, but if you understand said tongue, why not take a look and comment in whatever language you prefer? And if you don't, but you know online French speakers ('internautes' as they are sometimes referred to in French), please put them in touch with my site so I can get some interaction going.

Merci!

Grrr, flippin' Flickr!

I decided today that, since Mark was woefully behind with uploading our photos to Flickr, I'd have a go at figuring out how to do it. By golly, it's so blinking easy I don't know how I failed to do it sooner. Of course, because we're just subscribed to the free account I didn't make much progress - I only got up to August last year - so, bizarrely, our 'most recent photos' are all almost a year old! Annoyingly, though, all the photos that Mark had previously uploaded have now disappeared, and even the first few I uploaded today aren't even in the archives. Any ideas why.....?

World vision advert banned! Can you believe it?

I was horrified to discover how innocuos the advert was, and the reason why it was 'disallowed', so I've copied this from the World Vision website (I hope that's legal, if you all go on their site and watch the advert, maybe they'll forgive me!)

World Vision ad banned

It costs £49 million to sponsor the England football team and only 60p a day to sponsor a child in the developing world - this is the message of a tv ad, deemed "an unfair attack on football" by the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre, the body responsible for approving television adverts.

The advert follows Masidi in Malawi as he makes a football from maize, plastic bags and string.


Also, check out this really easy and not at all expensive way to fundraise for WV.

Chasing Butterflies

Check out this blog/fundraiser. It's personal, and worth supporting! Hope it goes well Colleen xxx

Doctor Who wusses out

When I discovered they were planning an episode focussed on the devil in this season's run, I was curious to know what would happen. Well, sadly disappointed but not surprised was the final verdict after Saturday's episode of Doctor Who. If you haven't yet watched it and plan to, read no further, as I will spoil the plot.

So we had what appeared to be the devil threatening the existence of the universe by trying to break out of the prison it had been put into eons earlier, and the Doctor coming face to face with the possibility that spiritual beliefs/superstitions might actually exist in reality. Unable to rationalize this as a scientist (which, by the way, he hasn't really been all that much since the new series re-started last year), he uses logic and faith in humans (specifically, Rose) to defeat the monster, and together they sort everything out and help most of the rest of the cast live happily ever after. And in the final shots, in the TARDIS, we discover that the Doctor's inability to accept what he can't explain leads him to simply put it out of his mind. This is beyond me, and anyway human life is better, so it doesn't matter/can't even possibly be worth considering. Humanism proudly displayed for all those 8-year-olds with no spiritual input to speak of to lap up without realising that's what it is.

I guess it's easy to see the Devil as something to be defeated, but what if the Doctor were to discover God, with all the great qualities of humans magnified to the nth degree, and more on top? What would he make of that? The other thing that this series is showing again and again, though, is that Tennant's Doctor clearly considers himself the end of the line when it comes to moral questions and what to do about evil: he basically thinks he is God, and so if he has found the Devil on an asteroid (which, of course, it can't actually be, because only God can ultimately defeat Satan), then this challenges his position as the all-powerful Doctor, cos surely God exists somewhere if Satan does.

Like I say, I wasn't surprised that this was the conclusion come to by producer Russell T Davies and his writers, as it is so totally symptomatic of the times we live in and the attitudes his work has displayed in the past (The Second Coming, mini-series with Chris Eccleston a few years ago). I was saddened though that the existence of God was never even suggested or considered - none of the crew members even prayed, which under stress like they were, wouldn't have been weird.

This isn't really new for Doctor Who, but has never been so explicit before: past stories with Devil figures always turned out to have some sci-fi explanation (The Daemons is a good example). Also, no previous doctor has been quite as arrogant as David Tennant's - I'd like to see them go somewhere with that, and there be a come-uppance of some kind. I'd love him to discover that his faith in humans is misplaced, and particularly his faith in Rose - that would be fantastic. What am I saying - that I want one of my childhood heroes to fail and fail abysmally??!! Yes, I think so - but it sounds shockingly like realistic sci-fi...

Very frustrating...

...having half term and being the only well person in the house. Out went our plans to sit down and go through transferring approx. 3 years worth of home video onto DVD, and in came several nights of very little sleep and me feeling like I should be working while I have the chance but not wanting to at all. And I'm there again now, blogging while I know my briefcase is not getting any lighter.

A generally flat week has followed a rather miserable weekend, with the highlight being dinner & evening with Dad, Lorraine, Clarkes, Evanses and Esther & Ben on Tuesday (see Sarah's blog for evidence). We did watch Peter Jackson's King Kong, to not a massive amount of excitement. Bought Rob Lacey's The Word on the Street this week (formerly called The Street Bible), and am very much enjoying digging into it - it's a version of the Bible (though Lacey stresses that it is not the real thing, but a pointer towards it) told in more or less today's language (but more effectively than The Message, in my opinion), with religious jargon replaced with something that your average Jo(e) might understand. Also good for those who've been reading the real thing for years and need a bit of adrenaline injected into their Bible reading. Prophets are called couriers, Paul's letters are in the form of emails, that kind of thing - it might sound silly, but it works.

Spent some time with 2 bathroom companies over the past 2 days too, as we're looking to completely re-vamp ours. White, white, white, clean and white...