Soccer Match Analogy.

There is a subset of Evangelist trash leaflet, that doesn't really work as a metaphor. Want a quick example, its this sort of leaflet, that gives you an example. (in this case a football match) and ties it into the binary accept Jesus good don't accept Jesus bad.

 It doesn't explain that most domestic football matches the score can go either three ways, a win a lose or a draw (score or otherwise).  And for most of the season the outcome doesn't matter much. In a non league game such as UEFA or FA Cup it does matter so I'm guessing this is the analogy used, but even then I will give you an example where it doesn't matter.

Say in this all important win / lose match you are either red carded and sent off before you win or are substituted off without accepting Jesus and you subsequently win and yes this is the analogy used, accept him and win or don't and lose. Do you end up with an afterlife. Given it's out of your control, do you still win. 

What if you go to penalties and lose because you're English and can't take penalties, do you still win. Like I say it all boils down that heaven is something special (it's not) or that you'll get eternal punishment just because of ignorance / that god sucks. And its why stuff like this doesn't work as evangelism. 

Lithops mix

 Was going to do a few things as a round up today, but as its mothers day today, we went to a garden center for the first time in ages. More importantly, they had a selection of cacti and succulents for sale.

Don't know if this is available in every shop but we'll give props to Polhill for not being so bad and the fact that their farm shop is the absolute bomb, we came away with a Fentiman's Dandelion and Burdock and a half price pot of Lithops seedlings, seeing as most of them were dead.

Back home I did the usual transplant. Which is knock them out, weed out the dead one's and then repot into 2"/ 5cm pots. 

I know I've done this before on this blog, but for those who've bought one of these, and feel like pricking out 100 seedlings into individual pots. Here is my list. 

You'll want some: 

Small pots 

Soil based compost. Not peat or coir. We use John Innes 3 here in the UK. It's probably called something else, elsewhere in the world.

Small gravel. About 1mm in size. Fish tank grit is ideal. 

Small pots. 2" / 5cm are ideal. 

Labels. If you know what Lithops you have.

You'll need about a handful of compost and a handful of grit and mix together. You can add more grit if it doesn't seem open enough. Then fill all pots, make a small hole in the soil and put your Lithops in. Finally add more grit as top dressing and then you can if dry enough, water. 

These instructions also work if you've grown your own mesemb seed either MSG or another society seed and are potting on from the initial pot. 

Billion Dollar censorship.

 There's been a lot in the papers recently about books getting an unsympathetic update thanks to sensitivity readers. Ian Fleming's Bond stories and the Works of Roald Dahl being the one, with a few nods back to the Famous Five stories, which the Mail fails to point out, were modernized in the nineties. Whether you think this is a good thing or not is beside the point. these are period books we're dealing with Especially Dahls work, which is a cornerstone of children's literature.

So what about the Hardy Boys books, were they ever updated for a more modern audience. Yes the were revised for a more modern audience back in the 1960's. Some examples are:

You don't get African Americans working in the service industry anymore, nor them riding to the rescue in a Model T Ford in Hunting For Hidden Gold. Less flippantly you don't get absolute clusterfucks like Footprints under the window throwing every Chinese cliche at you nor gangs of murderous blacks in The Hidden Harbour Mystery. 

More recently, the UK edition of the Firebird Rocket removes the word Abo, when talking about Aboriginal Australians and the revised edition of The Mystery of the Desert Giant has the Haida Indian's speak normally instead of sounding like a heap big stereotype. I suppose a more modern sensitivity reader will have a more positive role for Iola, Callie and Mrs Hardy. As well as possibly making Gertrude Hardy a feminist even if she is already an interesting character.

Anyway a new story dropped for you Billion Dollar Ransom. I'm not going to say who gets ransomed for a cool billion, It'll spoil the story, but the main one involving the boys is them providing security detail for a magic show and looking into strange goings on at the old Opera House.

You can read it here

 

History month

I know this is going to get all the idiots out of the woodwork. Especially those with low reading comprehension. But just hear me out. I don't think black history month should be a universal holiday.

I know what sparked this off in the first place, watching or rather listening to a video by Just Some Guy on Youtube. Covering the comic March, about the civil rights movement in America, essentially Black Americas long march from segregation and racism to acceptance via MLK, Rosa Parks and other Black leaders. It struck me, in the UK we don't have this baggage. It's not that there weren't racists growing up or that they didn't face bad stuff. We didn't segregate people or schools nor have Jim Crow laws or lynching people for spurious crimes.

Which brings me to the main point of it all, what I took away from this is. Our Black history is mostly post war with limited immigration of Africans (Sailors and Mercs mainly) in previous centuries. It didn't amount to many people, whereas we do have quite a large debt to the orient. East India companies exploring India, China, Hong Kong and Malaysia. The Raj and such, why do we need a black history month when they impacted on us so little, when South Asia and the Far east cast a long shadow on UK history.

Even worse is other countries adopting this, does a black history month make sense in Africa or where the reach of the Black diaspora hardly set foot, if at all. I still say its important for America to remember what they did and not repeat the same mistakes. But for the rest of us maybe its time to broaden that definition on who counts as black.

Non white history month anyone.