I’ve been having lots of religious and theologically shaped thoughts recently, but I’m not convinced this blog is necessarily the place to write about them, so I’ve been thinking about starting a second blog to cover that side of things. What do people think? Would you be happy to see four page long musings on atonement and justification by grace here alongside all the usual irreverence and irrelevance, or should I fork it off into a page on its own?

This is an utterly fascinating read. Very thought provoking and somewhat irreverant, but a hugely useful piece of critical thinking on free will.

Aside from the occasional bit of sniping at various politicians, I’ve not said much about the election or politics lately. But politics is something I do feel passionately about and I reckon it’s probably time for me to make a stand and say a few words about this election.

Manic over at Bloggerheads has been helping to run the ironically named “Backing Blair” campaign, which is basically aimed at delivering a bloody nose to Tony Blair by getting people to vote for the party most likely to beat Labour wherever possible. Now, I’m not Labour’s biggest fan, and so far as I’m concerned, yes, Blair needs to go. And yes, I understand that the chances of anyone other than Labour winning this election are vanishingly small. So I can understand some of the logic behind asking people to vote Tory if this means that the Labour candidate in their area won’t get in – their claim is that it’s not a vote for the Tories, it’s a vote against Labour. Fair enough. But I’m sorry, I just can’t do that.

I mean, okay, in my constituency, they wouldn’t be asking me to vote Tory anyway, but that’s besides the point. Do we really want to give the Tories any cause for cheer on May 6th? Labour might be bad, but for goodness sake, Michael Howard is actually Satan incarnate. A swing to the Tories will affect increase representation in the House of Commons, so even though they won’t get to form the cabinet, they will have more voting influence over bills in the house.

So, as you might have worked out, I’m voting Liberal Democrat. My conscience will simply not let me do anything else. I’m voting for the one major party who opposed the war on Iraq. I’m voting for the one major party for whom international development is the core of their foreign policy, not just a tacked on afterthought. I’m voting for the one major party for whom civil liberties are not something to be thrown away when it’s inconvenient for the Home Secretary to keep preserving them.

I can’t vote Tory. I can’t vote Labour. I can’t not vote Liberal Democrat. I urge you to do the same.

The lovely people at They Work For You have emailed round requesting publicity in the next week or so leading up to the election, so this is my little bit.

You can get your MP’s report card by clicking here and typing in your postcode. It will give you a summary of your MP’s voting record on a variety of issues, their performance in Parliament, how much they rebel against their party, their expense account, all that kind of thing.

So, uh, yeah. Go and have a look. You never know, you might learn something.

Damn them all! Contributing more to our economy than everyone else? More than paying their way to the tune of £2.5bn a year? Disgraceful, I say.

How much more of a hint do you need, eh?

I got a new toy yesterday, and from my experimentations so far, I’m very impressed. The image below was scanned from a 35mm slide – click it for the full scan (5.1MB JPEG, 4800dpi, giving about 6000×4000 pixels, or 24 megapixels if you’re a digital camera type). The full-sized image is as it came off the scanner – no processing. It benefits from a bit of unsharp mask in Photoshop, but as 35mm film is supposed to be optimised for 3000dpi, I think a little bit of blur is forgivable.

So, anyway, the net result is that you’re probably going to see a lot more photos around here in the coming weeks and months, especially as this baby can do batch scanning.

Indie Tits. I promise you that it’s completely safe for work. And very funny.

There’s an advert for Petits Filous on at the moment. It shows a boy getting all his marbles nicked, and being upset; and then some little girl (who’s just eaten a Petits Filous, and so therefore has had a super-human amount of calcium and has Bones Of Iron, or something) comes along and says “‘Ello zere leetle boy, don’t cry like a big Eeeenglish rosbif baby. We shall go and get zose marbles back for you, zut alors!” or something, and she arm wrestles with one of the boys who nicked the marbles, and beats him and gets the marbles back.

Now, I’m sorry. There is not a single 8 year old boy alive who would have actually allowed that to happen. Having your marbles nicked by a bunch of bullies is bad, sure enough; but the embarassment would be nothing – I mean, absolutely miniscule – in comparison to the life-destroying humiliation of having to get your girlfriend to go and get them back for you. Let’s see: weighing up losing a few marbles against being such a wuss that you had to get a girl to go and get your marbles back.

That kid must have been beaten up so many times after his mates saw that advert.

1. The collective noun for gnus is implausability. An Implausibility of Gnus. That’s just pure dead brilliant.
2. If you’ve not played the bass guitar for three months, playing it for two hours straight is likely to give you blisters on the tips of your fingers.
3. Not strictly learnt at church, but: using the scroll wheel on your mouse when you’ve got a blister on the tip of your middle finger is very, very painful indeed.