Well today I handed over £4 and became tenant of allotment no 16. The elderly Yorkshire Oracle of the Allotments surveyed the weedy plain with me (and this pic doesn’t do the jungleiferousness justice):

and advised me to ’scut it off’: to hack off the top few weedy inches, pile them to rot down and work the soil beneath. Here is what an hour’s scutting off and twenty minutes turning over looks like: I probably have ten or twelve times that area to tame, and there are weed roots like bloody pythons down there. It came with the decrepit shed you can see, and divers piles of nettle-tangled crap, rusting wheelbarrows and bits of lichen-covered garbage deposited by the previous tenants who fled also leaving a mysteriously padlocked trunk.

Why am I shoving an allotment into my already crowded life? Because the voices are telling me now is a good time to get the hang of growing ones own food.

We must be tret with ‘deep esteem’, quoth the Cardinal (who hid a paedophile priest from the law when he was Archbishop of the Diocese of Arundel, btw. Fuck all respect for the law, then, eh, Cardinal?)

On he blithers ” Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor called for more understanding and appreciation between believers and non-believers.” Jolly good! You can believe that Jesus is the son of a loving God who let his parthenogenetically conceived bastard son be nailed to a cross for our sins, was resurrected after 3 days, and giving his disturbed follower Peter and his corrupt successors a teaching magisterium to interpret God’s word to the faithful.

You believe that, but keep it out of my life, out of kids’ schools and out of public policy and we’ll get on just fine. Even though I think it’s babbling from the padded cell.

And then he says…” a ‘hidden God’ was active in everyone’s life.”

No, Murph (it was in a miserable grey church of yours in Godalming, Surrey that I finally lost my faith by the way) you say respect us, then respect what we know: there is no God, revealed or hidden.

Update: welcome to those of you from Greg Laden’s recommended reads the last time he linked to me was when I blew a gasket about religion, too.  Now pop over to Gruts‘ natural history lovechild  The Red Notebook and follow the link to hear Dawkins tearing the BBC’s leading ‘Rottweiler’ interviewer a new one over his kid gloves treatment of religious interviewees. A delicious three minutes of radio.

made great play of the Heartland Institute’s conference and its article: “500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares” (caps rage theirs).

Some of the listed scientists have contacted the Institute and given them beans at being misquoted and their work misapproriated. Story of an eminent scientist thus traduced and links here.

A few annoyed scientists write:Why can’t people spend their time trying to identify and evaluate the facts concerning climate change rather than trying to obscure them?” — Dr. James P. Berry, Senior Scientist, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

They have taken our ice core research in Wyoming and twisted it to meet their own agenda. This is not science.”
– Dr. Paul F. Schuster, Hydrologist, US Geological Survey

Please remove my name IMMEDIATELY from the following article and from the list which misrepresents my research.”
– Dr. Mary Alice Coffroth, Department of Geology, State University of New York at Buffalo

(H/t the splendidly hatted Island of Doubt)

Quote mining and misrepresenting science is straight from the creationist playbook of dishonest tactics. What strange habits these brain donors learn from one another in bed.

The window cleaner arrives. I could clean the windows myself, but he needs the work and I don’t need the hassle. He’s been hit by the changes in Gordon Brown’s last budget, only by a few quid a week, but - and some well-paid cabinet ministers don’t seem to get this - to some people a few quid really matters. Will he vote for Gordon again, I ask. His face clouds, his reply is expletive-laden. If I were a Labour canvasser I’d put him as another Strong Anti.

More electoral anecdote: Gordon Brown: you’re fucked.

the ITV filum of the book.  Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.  CGI does not plot and character replace.

is bloody knackering.  They never tell you that in the Sunday supplements.  And the weeds are already back, laughing at me.  Bugger this, I’m off to buy poisons.

The prime minister of Britain has been taking a terrible kicking of late. He has led the Labour Party to its worst local election performance in 40 years, and the MPs who conspired and got rid of three time election winning Tony Blair must today be looking at the Somme-like devastation with sphincter-loosening dismay.

The myth that Gordon Brown was all the Oracles and Philosophers rolled into one was coined by Gordon’s acolytes and spread by an uncritical media. The only exception I can think of: Matthew Parris in The Times whose political bullshit detectors picked up the whiffs emanating from Gordon Brown long since.

His piece on the aftermath of the government rout on May 1 is really, really worth reading.

Some years ago, I tried politics. Not long after being elected, I realised that I didn’t have the attributes needed to make a successful councillor far less to go on to become an MP - persisting would have destroyed me and let down ever more people. I am sure that I could have screwed something to a sticking point and become that other person, I suspect it is what many politicians do.

We have to have politicians, although I am not sure we need so many, nor so robotic and biddable as we have today. Listening to the hordes of Labour ministers parrotting risible excuses (hello Harriet Harman, David Milliband, Yvette Cooper, Hazel Blears, Tessa Jowell, Jacqui Smith) this weekend has been dispiriting: they’re talking shit, lying out of straight faces to our faces in many cases. We know it, the interviewers know it and they know it. Sometimes you can only say ‘what the fuck?’ (Although I have to congratulate the Labour women on facing up to the media shitstorm: Brown’s little boys like Ed Balls, Douglas Alexander and Ed Milliband junior have been conspicuous only by their absence.)

I admire people who make those sacrifices, who expose themselves to the fickle electorate’s approbation and rejection in such a public and raw manner. I’ve been the candidate at a losing count: it doesn’t feel good. Which is why I’m reluctant to join in the personal pasting of Gordon Brown, but after seeing him on TV today, desperately trying to excuse a shitty electoral performance that can only be laid in a great steaming heap on his doorstep, I could only think that he should go now before he further damages himself and Britain. He looked a wreck of a human being on TV today. The Labour party needs to reconcile itself to two years of failing in the polls, another long dark night of the soul and eight years out of power.

It’s a huge chance for the Labour Party: I think Britain (and to be honest the world) is waiting for leadership
from a mainstream party on how to change the country to cope with the coming global warming/low oil world. I mean real leadership, not the meaningless shit talked about all parties including my own.

Of course, all I’m doing here is a spleen-dump. I don’t expect any notice to be taken, far less advisors to rush into Gordon with laptops open saying ‘Prime Minister, bad news. Lunartalks has called for you to go. The game’s up.’ But I think for all our sakes and his the men in grey suits need to pay him a convincing visit before it’s the men in white coats.

Spleen vented. I’m off to the beach.

Chad Orzel is talking sense about science communication at Scienceblogs.

Meanwhile Jeremy Clarkson is making a tit of himself about science in the Sunday Times (and I like the man’s irreverent style, I suppose it was inevitable that one day looking at a day’s science output would strike him as being a good idea for a column).

An unfortunate headline from the BBC.

is no fun.  Well, sitting on the loo with the world falling out of one’s arse is no fun.

Now, visiting London as I have been one eats out: breakfast at 8 am at a good friend’s home seems blameless - toast and marmalade.  Lunch: sloppy giuseppe pizza at Pizza Express Euston Road. Unlikely as a source of food poisoning.

6.45pm, roast veg and stuff sarnie Foo Go sarnie bought from WHSmiths Kings Cross Station (for later), 6.50 a Mexicana Bagel bought from Ixxy’s franchise, King’s Cross, eaten at 7pm, the sandwich eaten at 8.30.  I suspect it’s one of the last two that is the source of my current unpleasantness.  This will probably be over by the morning, but I’ll be contacting Camden (?) Council’s Environmental Health and King’s Cross management in the morning.

Someone has not been washing their hands, and my arse is running like a glassblower’s nose.