Messages

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Jason Donovan today raising the question of what Kylie must look like beneath the makeup...http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/1810000/images/_1812717_donovan150.jpg">

Damn fine icon.  Good name, too.

I am sorry that Dudley's buggered off for the weekend thinking that I was having a go at *him* though, because I wasn't.

Matt

*He's also a former Mr Birmingham

OK, so that's all good after all (PHEW!)  Was vaguely worried by the Mr Birmingham comment until I realised the asterixes were in a different part of your post  ;)

[didn't]

I'm watching in dismay as this goes exactly the way I didn't mean it to go.

Seriously, Matt, my post didn't take a viewpoint on religion - if anything, I insulted those people who started the "Christianity fucked" thread you're talking about.  I thought this was an exercise in logic and/or rationality that was interesting to me for the fact that it was balanced and thought-provoking.  There's no attempt to make anyone "justify their belief" - coming at it from the non-believer's perspective I found this very challenging to my whole idea of morality as well, showing up some of the shallow bases on which it sometimes rests.  

Very seriously, I've reread my posts on here and can't see the things that are making you pissed off.  The game should let anyone talk about their own ideas/beliefs rather than slagging off anyone else's.  Please tell me where your anger on this comes from.  

I'm not sitting here asking people to come sing Kum by-fucking-ya with me and I'm getting more than a little bit pissed off with people who think it's ok to have a laugh at other people's beliefs.

Truly wasn't the intention of starting this.  As my post said, I wanted to head off the anti-religious crap that does seem to come up regularly.  I just thought this was an interesting "test".  And, as I said, it proved my views (and like any atheist I like to pretentd that they're ultra-rational) are totally contradictory.  Mind you, I disagree with them on a lot of points of logic, but there you go.

Bou - you and I are going to have a major barney in the Spring, but I'll leave the reason why till then ;)  Enjoy Halloween.

In a vain attempt to prevent the next board uprising of anti-religious bigotry, or indeed the very occasional piece of religious bigotry, I thought it'd be fun for everyone who cares to put their beliefs to the test.  This is for both believers and atheists, though it does rather seem to depend on monotheistic belief.

I did extraordinarily badly on this, would love to find out how others beliefs stand up to the test.

Link: http://www.philosophers.co.uk/games/god.htm" target="_blank">How rational are you?

Congratulations!!

Hope you've wet the baby's head already, but if not have 1 on me.

[girlfriend]

That's Steve Sampson's girlfriend???  Lucky vastard!

Despite everything, I have a bit of a liking for 82.

But 74 gets the vote as the best comics cover.

the Royal Mail should put all the "strikers" on disciplinaries & dock thier wages for the hours they were "striking"

Oh, don't worry, they're planning exactly that sort of thing.  That's why we call them "evil incompentent capitalist pig scum".


GC - nice icon BTW - we aren't a democracy.  Elective dictatorship, with a sovereign who still has limited but real powers, isn't the half of it.  How about the fact that no party can win office without a fighting fund of about ?12M, thus ensuring that every politician has to be in the pockets of big business?  Or the House of Lords, not even vaguely improved by getting rid of the hereditary element?  Or the enormous and disproportionate power of the (privately-owned) press, egged on by the lack of privacy legislation and relatively mild forms of censure for out and out lying?

We need a written constitution, state funding of political parties, replacement of the House of Lords with an elected body, and newspaper controls simlar to those on television channels, at the very least, before we can call ourselves a democracy.

As the Beeb points out, since the union didn't authorise the strike it can't actually order people back to work.

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3236031.stm" target="_blank">http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3236031.stm

Well, private delivery is a pilke of crap wherever you are in the country - you should be glad you weren't there when we were trying to get John Lewis to deliver our wedding list gifts.  

Postie stories.  I like our postman.  He has a fag hanging permanently out of the side of his mouth, he never delivers before half one, and I've twice had to chase him down because I was at home when a "We did not find you at home to deliver this parcel" notice was pushed through my door.  I would hate him, but he so blatantly doesn't care it's actually quite admirable.

EastEndLife is pretty good for a freesheet, I'd guess they might even be telling the truth  :0

[all]

junk mail? dudley? what do you do ?

I sell people's names and addresses so that other people can send junk mail to them, or junk telephone sales calls.

I'm proud of having done this disgusting job (well, this disgusting job and advertising sales) long enough to have helped my wife through her PhD.  My time in this job is drawing to a close.

All the email spam you're talking about is almost certainly nothig to do with anybody in the UK, though - the code of rules is so tight everyone's giving up on email marketing right now.  40% of all email traffic is down to just 150 firms, mostly located in Florida, that do nothing but trawl the web all day for your email addresses.

like any of us would really begrudge having to pay an extra two pence for a first class stamp

Yeah, but it's not the domestic users who matter in that case, it's the business users.

E.g. one of my clients, Halifax, sends out approximately 4.5 million letters a month.  So 2p on postage, even with bulk discounts, would increase their monthly marketing costs by at least ?50K, or ?600K p.a.  With the government in thrall to big business, as all governments are, Tony "history will judge me" Blair gets scared by the very idea of fighting a group made up of MBNA, Capital One, Loans Company UK, Lloyds TSB, American Express, Barclays, Halifax, Saga Services, Morgan Stanley and DFS (the top ten mailers last month), plus just about all other banks, charities, mega retailers, etc etc.

Totallt agree with you on the mismanagement side, though.

There's a very real possibility that the Royal Mail could go under and it won't be your humble postie who's first in line for the payouts if that happens...

Just to chuck in a bit of inside info - I had a long talk with the head of DeutschePost UK, and according to him there is no interest (either from DP or SwissPost or AnPost or even TNT) in taking over consumer delivery.  They're all poised to grab a big slice of business postage (the stuff I deal with), but consumer post in the UK is too badly run, they'd have to guarantee to deliver to small islands as well as the juicy London contracts, and both Tory & (spineless) Labour governments have made it clear that they feel they'll have to side with the consumers in any struggle over rights.  And none of these companie think the game's worth the candle.  He could have been giving me corporate bull, but it didn't feel like it.  You get occasional fly by night operations, but nobody has the investment available to replace Royal Mail.