Bore

I keep wanting to write a really short post , one or two words to see what happens, if it causes any reaction, but as you can see it's not going to happen in this one. I once saw a blog where every post was just a link, I don't know if it was paid links but there was no description so it seemed a little pointless although if it was a pay per click link that could be lucrative if robots actually count as clicks.

This blog has links to Amazon as you will see from the strib at the bottom , plus Google ads that pay me about a pound a week,  and links to Topcashback who give me £7.50 if you join and sign up. These days that's about it. Amazon however keep introducing more rules not to pay, but this is after it becomes so integral to your site that it's more hassle to remove them than just leave them in.

I've sort of decided that I want to hit another annual record for posts but we shall see if that happens, I need to post about 25 times a month til New Years Eve.

This must rate as one of the most pointless, uninformative, boring posts I've ever done because it tells you nothing interesting or outside of my life bubble.

I am a quarter of the way though "The God Delusion" and Dawkins is currently pointing out the glaring error that are the various bibles which the historical inaccuracies and the the scriptures that were deemed "not good enough" (ie  too ridiculous).

6Music music played something from Penguin Cafe now led by Arthur Jeffes since the sad death of his father and have dropped the Orchestra part of the name. I went to their site and found this fifteen minute Tiny Desk Concert which is very good. I love the brilliant use of repetitive motifs in their music which continues their sound in an almost hypnotic fashion. I counted four "Peaky Blinders" caps in the video

So it it turns out that I did find something worthwhile to include in this post.

Have a great Saturday.

Satellite

At the current rate of views I will have had 300K visits by mid October. The Feedburner boost is still continuing so I'm getting more than a thousand visits a day. This is a huge surprise but do wish it would translate into actual followers or something, but what the hell SevenDaysIn is popular with someone or something.

I wasn't going to write this, like I wasn't going to write the last post, but I am feeling weirdly tired but also wide awake. I think my mind is tired and so is my body , but my body does not want sleep, it wants to keep doing things, hence the fingers to keyboard causing this bog post to take shape. I am expecting maybe a hundred words or so then I will crash into bed and fall asleep maybe.

This morning when the alarm went off I was in some kind of deep sleep state and I really did not want to leave my bed, but, as always, I did and crawled to the bathroom still wanting to turn around and sleep.

Stepwise I hit 17.5K steps today that's about  five and a half miles.

I heard the sing "Satellite" by The Hooters today and it is still brilliant taking it out of the televangelists so sort of appropriate given I am reading "The God Delusion".

So before Saturday comes I will share this nugget of prose with you.

Connection

I'm just writing this to share a great song which I heard on the Warner Brothers Music Show compilation that I bought for 59p on vinyl when it first came out, and to be quite honest every song on it was, and still is, excellent. The song is Montrose's cover of The Rolling Stones' "Connection" and is a universe away from the dreadful "Insania" by Peter Andre that I shared in my last post.

"The God Delusion" is providing a lot of thought provoking entertainment, and it's shots are mainly at organised religion, which mostly has as it's foundation an unquestionable belief in a God with an evidence free existence. Richard Dawkins just listed a few or the reasons given supporting the existence of God with a full list here

It's Friday morning and time for work. I know this is very short but I really couldn't get motivated to write, but also wanted to share the Montrose song and would highly recommend that LP if you can play vinyl. You should be able to pick it up for a fiver.

Have a good day.

Spiderversary

I don't know where that title came from. Maybe it was wandering past Be More Geek the other day. Add that to the Spiderverse that I know nothing about apart from it's something to do with Spiderman  but it's another area of Marvel Comics that loses me , along with the DC rivalry. It's a way you can extend and make up words the "verse" bit obviously taking me to "adversary" / "anniversary" . Peter Andre would be proud.

Really starting to enjoy "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins and was surprised that his seven point scale from Total Theist ("I Know God Exists, I Don't Need Evidence") to Total Atheist ("I Know God Doesn't Exist, I Don't Need Evidence") I'm at the same level that he puts himself, level six where on the evidence so far there is no God but if he turns up I will change my mind because that would be hard evidence.

My Google Pixel phone just took an age to update to Android 10 so we will see if anything changes with that. It took quite a long time and the download size was 1 Gigabyte which is fairly hefty especially over wifi.

So I am tempted to use Peter Andre's "Insania" because he was so proud that he'd "made up a word" but good taste says that I should not include such trash, but then I love trashy music and film so that says I should include Peter Andre.

So why not, we will have Peter Andre's "Insania". I've just realised that this will be the first time I've ever heard it I think. I may have just blanked the horror of it from my memory though. Listened to it and it is bloody awful ☺

It's also National Talk Like A Pirate Day and Lambchop have a song to celebrate that. I only just found that out. C'est La Vie.

Enjoy Thursday.

Alarm

Is there anything more disappointingly annoying than waking up warm and in the dark, checking the time to see it's one minute before the alarm is meant to go off, then do you wait, switch it off , get up or what? I waited.

Continuing on "The God Delusion" and the treatment of atheists is absolutely disgusting bry religious zealots and idiots. We are seeing this is the USA today where Christianity has been engineered as a power grabbing money making machine and woe betide anyone who questions it. One example was an atheist who wanted to protest against a faith healer who was telling diabetics to throw away their insulin and cancer sufferers to stop their treatment and pray for a miracle. He contacted the local police department about protection from the faith healer's supporters and was threatened in no uncertain terms by everyone in the police department because he was questioning "god's work".

I keep using a lower case "g" for god because in my sixty one years I have yet to see any evidence of a god, though seen plenty of evidence of the harm caused by religion.

It looks like another cold but bright day today and I was surprised to see that I was up to series five of "Parks and Recreation" so still 55 episodes to go but a lot nearer the end than I thought, and thoroughly enjoying it.

So this weekend Sky Arts are screening a celebration of the 40th anniversary of the film of "Quadrophenia" and to be honest I have never watched it, although I love the album and thought the classical version with Alfie Boe in the was very good. I will be recording all the Sky Arts programs and will get round to watching the film which one of the many unwatched films in my DVD collection.

So we will go for a live take of "The Real Me" the opening song from the the "Quadrophenia" album.

Answer

I am enjoying, if that's the right word, "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins but seems to be more against  organised controlling religion and by extension the monotheist "god" which is the focus of most religion. I'm a tenth of the way through the book and think that at some point he will take aim and my own belief that evolution won't waste our consciousness but I have no evidence or reason to believe that, but you can never satisfactorily prove the non-existence of something, and also the fact that we cannot explain something means we have not found the answer. I couldn't really explain how a plane flies but it's not supernatural, magic or the will of god.

Also I wonder if Richard Dawkins would have a problem with people who worshipped the Earth and believed when they die become one with the Earth. He couldn't really argue with the basic premis.

Often religion is a search for "the answer" and two books spring to mind that provide the solution.

The first being Douglas Adams' "Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy" which gives that answer as 42 but the tells us you need to know what the question was.

The next is "Venus on the Half Shell" written by Philip Jose Farmer under the pseudonym Kilgore Trout, a creation of the amazing Kurt Vonnegut. Basically the protagonist is searching for God to ask, in his opinion, the ultimate question:

Why are we born to suffer and die?

Through many adventures he eventually comes face to face with God and asks his questionand God answers:

Why Not?

A great ending to the book.

And just a thought, why doesn't the Christian God have a proper name? It's like calling your dog Dog (ironically a palindrome of God) and what the heck is the Holy Ghost ?

So what to go with this morning , maybe "Converted" by The Alabama 3 from "Exile on Coldharbour Lane" which my friend Tom glared at me as they broke into the chorus "Let's Go Back To Church* but by the end of the gig even he was converted.

Follow

Just a short post about an odd thing. I didn't really use twitter until Google ditched Google+ and I looked for new ways to share my blog post as Facebook also seemingly stopped feeds. I'm not sure how many I followed or how many follower I had (this blog after twelve years has FIVE followers) so I am not the most popular person on the planet, but I am sure I had about seventy followers and followed a similar number of people.

Every few days I get a new follower but the number of followers I have seems to remain at a constant 77 (just checked it's now 78) which is a lot more than this blog (despite it's now daily 1-1.5K visits (and yes I know a lot will be robots and apparently French people (Merci, Merci pour les visites)  so overall that is a success and it's only since sharing the blog on Twitter that these visit spikes took off. Below are two images showing the spikes and the fact that France is the source of a lot of visits.

Big In France

Big In 2019

So since twitter , Feedburner picked me up and that I think is the main reason for the reason hike in hits. I would like to hit 300K by the end of the year and at the current rate that could happen by mid October , but that is assuming I sill get over 1K hits a day.

So I though I would just post this listening to the Giorgio Moroder album "Deja Vu" , and while it's OK it's not as adventurous as I expected although "74 is the New 24" is quite good and the first song that would fit with the "From Here To Eternity" album which is one of my favourites. That was followed by an excellent take on Suzanne Vega's "Toms Diner" with Britney Spears, which shows it's always good to listen to a whole album. Not as good, in my opinion, as "From Here To Eternity" but more than listenable with some good points.

I've also realised that Giorgio Moroder's moustache is almost as iconic as Frank Zappa's (see below)

So "74 is the New 24" would be a good one to share with you and the video is cool too.

Enjoy your Sunday.