Ideally each post that I write for this blog should be either a self contained entry (like Twilight: Cheaper Than Heroin or Celebrate Originality with Adidas) or part of a series that progress towards a specific goal (There’s No Such Word as C*** was the first post in a series that followed my progress as I quit swearing for Lent.  Down and out in Downtown Stoke is where I first began tracking my progress on the path to a debt-free employed existence).

Most of the time however thoughts buzz around my head like a cloud of flies and while none of them are worthy of a post I need to do something to get rid of them.  That’s when you end up with entries like Laughing in the Face of Brevity and Relevance or Where’s Your Head At?  Here’s another one.

Employment

If you’ve been following the blog recently you’ll have noticed that I’ve been looking for work.  The most useful website I’ve found to help me so far has been reed.co.uk.  Application forms are the most time consuming and tedious part of the job hunt and a part with which reed.co.uk dispenses.  Simply click apply, type out an optional cover letter and then the website will send this and your CV to the employer.  The site also recommends you jobs, and not just positions that no one’s applying for but ones that suit you.

Today I have applied for the following jobs; “Summer Opportunities in Marketing & PR”, “Summer Opportunities in Marketing & Customer Service Events”, “Editorial Assistant” and “People required who have the X – Factor for PR position”.  Tonight I shall completely restyle my cover letter and go for some retail positions as well.  It’s also worth following their man on Twitter, @careerfrank.

Summer Ball

My brain, shot through with cynicism as it is, always imagined the ball to be an overpriced Gobble with additional vomit.  How wrong I was.  The Students’ Union did themselves proud and put on an excellent event with fairground rides, food & liquor, great decor and a good variety of acts.  If you haven’t already, it’s worth checking out the photos on the website.

House of the Dead: Overkill

While this Wii game does little more than confirm my role as a human shield in the imminent Zombie attack, it is fun for all the family.  A family that likes bloody violence and gratuitous swearing that is.  Plus the Wii gun looks like the one out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and this makes me happy.

News

You’re probably well aware of my unhealthy obsession with religion and so it’s no surprise that the headline New Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols attacks secularists on The Telegraph’s news feed caught my eye.  The word “attacks” makes his statement sound harsher than it is in reality, in fact I agree with it.  Especially this bit;

Let us be a society in which we genuinely listen to each other, in which sincere disagreement is not made out to be insult or harassment, in which reasoned principles are not construed as prejudice and in which we are prepared to attribute to each other the best and not the worst of motives.

Unfortunately The Telegraph then followed it up with this paragraph;

The archbishop played a leading role in fighting the introduction of gay rights laws in 2006, which now make it illegal to discriminate against gay couples when placing children for adoption.

This seems like an argument that we should have left behind long ago.  The old testament is a confusing mixture of stuff that applies only to the people in the book, stuff that applies to the culture of the time and stuff that we can still apply today.  While the ten commandments sit side-by-side with rules on slavery only a fool would try and apply the latter to today’s society.

Vincent’s right that religion can cross racial barriers and unite communities but it also has the power to divide.  Alongside the discrimination above I am also particularly unimpressed by Ratzinger unpicking all the good work of the late Pope John Paul II to unite faiths and his preaching against contraception in Africa.

In other news, it turns out that 13-year-old Alfie Patten is not the father of 15-year-old Chantelle Stedman’s baby.  Yes, we knew this a while back (I even hinted and linked to it in this post) but it’s taken the law a while to decide that it’s okay for people in this country to publish the truth.  Turns out it was some 14-year-old kid called Tyler Barker.

By my calculations (Alfie+Tyler+allegedly “five other lads”+allegedly “Five more boys”) Chantelle’s put at least twelve notches on her bedpost.  Tyler “claimed he had regularly stayed at her home, sleeping in her bedroom with the knowledge of Chantelle’s mum”.  This is an ultimate fail in parenting on every level, to let people like this raise children and yet complain about gays adopting is lunacy.

In the words of Chris Rock, “You thought you had a household, no, you got a ho camp.”

Megan Fox

Ms Fox is still gracing my calendar and will be doing so for the next nine days.  I mentioned her in this post and had intended to discuss her more but unfortunately the event was overshadowed by FHM’s 100 Sexiest Women in the World 2009 catalogue of errors.  

Thankfully Guy seems to have picked up the slack in a post entitled The Megan Fox Appreciation Society, he even asked me for a quote when he wrote it (that quote is ““scribbleboy.co.uk wholeheartedly endorses Megan Fox’s breasts”).  While I can’t compete with Guy’s grangerised* illustration I did quite like this photo.

In the off chance that any of you people think like me, here’s a shot of her standing so you can get a better sense of the dress and here’s a photo of the back (with extra bag and shoe detail).  The photos were taken at the Versace show in Milan last year, as to who made the dress I haven’t a clue (the website I found these photos on had filed them under “boneration” and didn’t have quite the commitment to fashion journalism I’d hoped for).

On a semi-related note Guy’s blog now displays correctly in Internet Explorer, so if you like your browsers non-compliant you can rest easy in the knowledge that you can once more read his words.**

I still want to write about Ubuntu and European Elections and the state of my finances but I see you’re tapping the mat so I’m going to stop now.  Night.

* Gingell – That was the word that Stephen Fry used on Twitter that I was trying to think of earlier and, yes, technically it doesn’t refer to websites but I’m expanding the definition.

** Guy had been copying his travel diary posts from Microsoft Word directly into WordPress.  Word had been sneaking a whole load of confusing code into his posts.  The only browser that couldn’t understand this Microsoft gibberish was the one made by Microsoft.