I’m off to the lakes to sit in a cottage and stare out of the window at the rain for a week. I will have no connectivity of any kind for a week. I’m a little scared. I’ll see you all in a week, assuming I don’t get eaten by savages or anything.

Got the pictures back. They’re good. Thank heavens.

It occurs to me that I missed the two-year anniversary of me starting this thing that isn’t a blog (it was on the 13th of this month, and I was in Norfolk). I’ll sort some kind of celebratory stats style post out later, maybe.

(I can tell you now that a cursory glance through my logs tells me I’ve had over 200,000 hits, but that includes all sorts of robots and spiders and things)

Now I know it’s a bad thing to rely on Google for everything, but it’s usually a pretty good indication of the way the world sees a particular thing – ie; it invariably returns something involving naked women, and most of the world does seem to involve around naked women.

Anyway, the BBC are doing a series of radio programmes on the subject of regional accents and dialects. It looks quite interesting, although I’ll concede I’ve not heard any of them yet. Anyway, on the TV advert, they present a load of regional variations on everyday words – like “Gaffer” for “Boss”, or “Cob” vs “Barmcake” vs “Bap”. One of the pairs the offered up is “Hedgehog” or “Fuzzpig”.

Google offers up a mere two pages of results for “Fuzzpig“, none of which seem to refer to dialectial variations in the UK, and no results at all for “fuzzpig hedgehog“. So, is this a real word? Has anyone heard it before? Or are the BBC lying to us? I think we need to know the truth.

Pat Robertson is a grade A, 100% pure idiot.

Windows 95 is 10 years old today. And RISC OS still doesn’t do pre-emptive multitasking.

WASHINGTON DC – The US Government today announced the commencement of the War on Abstractions, a unilateral effort to destroy abstraction in all its forms from society and the world at large.

A Whitehouse spokesman said: “We figured that seeing as we’re fighting so many of these wars that don’t have a tangible enemy – you know, the War On Drugs, War On Terror, War On Poverty, all that – that we might as well figure out what the common cause of all this was. We did a bit of digging around and discovered that all these things are what is technically known as ‘abstractions’, so instead of fighting this war on loads of different fronts, we figure that by declaring a War On Abstractions, we can hit the root cause and defeat all these intangible bad guys once and for all.”

The President said he “fully suppported the effort” and whilst he was unsure exactly where – or even what – these Abstractions were at the present time, he was confident that US Intelligence was hot on their case and would soon have pinpointed a location so they could get on with “all that blowin’ stuff up we like to do, even if we’re not exactly sure what it is we’re blowin’ up, or why we’re blowin’ it up.” He added: “But you can be hella sure there’s gonna be some big-ass explosions, whoo-yeah!”

The UN has expressed reservations over the decision, but UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has offered the President his full support in whatever it exactly is they’re going to be doing.

(inspired by this post on BHT.)

Awwww.

That subject line is so going to get me some weird traffic from google.

So, I’m ill, and I decided that rather than slog all the way into work to sit sneezing, sniffling and unproductive in front of my monitor, I’d stay at home and try and do a bit of work via the VPN.

As it turns out, it’s been one of the most productive days I’ve had in a while, even though I’ve got less than half the screen area here and that SlickEdit really doesn’t like displaying over an ADSL connection.

What’s the point in skiving off work when I’m ill if I can still work, eh? Ah well. Means I’m not going to get whinged at by people tomorrow, at any rate.

I think I need to be a little clearer about why I posted the link to that story yesterday, and why I think it’s important.

I primarily posted it for the benefit of my Christian readers (which, as it turns out, is somewhat ironic as the only responses I’ve had – in my comments and privately – have been from non-Christians; very thoughtful and interesting they were, too), as a sort of followup to my earlier posts on evangelism and why I don’t like it. I think this story encapsulates, in a way that I couldn’t, the issue I have with evangelism and salvation-centric theology. Michael Spencer calls it Wretched Urgency – the idea that Christianity is all about converting people, witnessing, evangelising; that unless we get out there and tell the world about Jesus everyone is going to burn in hell, so that should be our number one priority in life. And that story encapsulates exactly why I feel that such wretched urgency is misguided and missing the point.