On 15th Feb, I went to Skeptics in the Pub to see my friend Martin Robbins, from Layscience and a contributor to the Pod Delusion deliver a talk on the 10:23 campaign.
It had the right mix of fact, laughs and swearing. Excellent.
On February 14th, I went on the London for a Secular Europe protest, most unexpectedly. I was only planning to turn up for a few minutes at Westminster Cathedral, grab some audio and run off, but I ended up going on the whole protest.
Obviously I covered this on the Pod Delusion, and got a horrifying interview with some bigots:
On February 13th, I went to the Tate Modern. I don’t really like modern art.
Aside from the permanent tat, in the Turbine gallery there was a big black box which you could walk into. I thought it symbolized despair.
There was also some weird anime type thing.
Afterwards I went to Wapping, briefly.
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On Feb 11th, I went to the Darwin Day lecture at Conway Hall, which was this year given by Professor Chris Stringer from the NHM and introduced by Richard Dawkins.
I covered it for the Pod Delusion and INTERVIEWED RICHARD DAWKINS. Listen here:
On February 10th, I spent the day in my suit at an important Internal Communications conference for work, hanging out with people many times more important than I, from various FTSE100 companies. I point this out because the evening proved to be an amusing contrast.
In the evening I went, still in my suit, with my housemates Jim and Ally to a benefit gig in aid of Haiti at the Cross Kings, near, er, Kings Cross. It was the most left-wing thing ever, apart from maybe the squat party I went to once.
Comedians included Robin Ince, Jeremy Hardy (from the News Quiz), a lady who’s name escapes me, Shappi Khorsandi and her brother (in what I think was his first stand-up gig?), and… one of the musicians who was at Robin’s Godless Christmas gigs, who’s names escapes me.
Obviously it was very funny and enjoyable, but what did amuse me was that it was so left wing that it started off with the organisers criticising the aid charities in Haiti, and explaining how they money raised is going to go directly to the workers. I’m not educated enough to know about the relative merits of aid distribution, but y’know, some aid can’t hurt, and there’s a time and a place for advocating revolutionary socialism and I’m not sure directly after the worst earthquake in modern history is exactly it.
On February 8th, I went to Westminster Skeptics in the Pub, where they’d invited Paul Staines (Guido), Jonathan Isaby (ConHome), Sunny Hundal (LibCon), Mick Fealty (Slugger O’Toole) and non-blogger Nick Cohen to talk about whether political blogging actually matters.
As you might have guessed, I loved it all, as a political blogging nerd, and a card-carrying skeptic. I also got to meet Pod Delusion contributor Mark Thompson (not THAT one) for the first time.
There’s probably many better accounts of the evening on the internet, so this is really a note to say that I WAS THERE.
On Saturday 6th I watched some old episodes of Doctor Who at Liz’s house with some people. It turns out the pacing is a little different to the modern Doctor Who that I know and am a critical fan of. By “critical fan”, I mean I’ll slag it off, but I just keep watching it as it is a net enjoyable experience to do so. Even if a lot of it is terrible (I’m looking at you, the last two episodes of series 4).
We watched some Tom Baker episodes which were interesting because I realised that I know someone with a very similar voice and intonation to Tom Baker. I daren’t tell him this, though.
On February 5th, I took a trip to Kettering to see that leg of the Rebel Alliance Records tour featuring three of my favourite bands. It was a rotating headline thing, and on this particular night it was opened by Mouthwash (who I was largely unfamiliar with before), who turned out to be awesome to the point where I bought their CD, followed by Chris Murray (who should have headlined, I reckon), and then Random Hand.
It was really good. I can’t really be more descriptive than that as I’m writing more than a month after the event, and all I can really remember aside from the bitchin’ tunes that night was being charged £1.50 for a glass of Coke poured from a large supermarket bottle of Coke…
On February 4th I interviewed Terry Sanderson, head of the National Secular Society about the proposed visit by the Pope to the UK, and Cherie Blair putting her foot in a rather large mouth. Hear it on the Pod Delusion:
Had a relatively quiet evening on Tuesday 2nd Feburary. I watched the film “Churchill: The Hollywood Years” at Liz’s house and it was most enjoyable. Somehow I missed it at the time, but it’s only a few years old and stars pretty much every British comedy actor you can think of. It had a nice balance of WWII and Hollywood references. Excellent.
