Wednesday

I worked at home again yesterday - I managed to get loads done - but probably could have done more - it's easy to get distracted working at home - I read a lot of news sites.

There was a time where there was a reasonable political spectrum within the UK press - Telegraph at one end - Guardian at the other, Daily Mail just outside the orbit of Saturn etc - but now they are pretty much all the same. I seem to increasingly find reasoned, well written articles in the Telegraph that have a balanced, equitable point of view - and ranting, childish and arrogant right wing drivel in the Guardian. I don't read the Daily Mail.

The radio is much the same - radio 4 gravitating between silly puff pieces and poorly managed interviews with self important guests and even more superior interviewers. At least I don't listen to radio phone-in's - I'd kill myself. Looking across the pond - there seem to be an increased number of insane, mind boggling reports about Republican candidates and their supporters and the shite they come out with 'Women don't get pregnant after REAL rape' - 'AIDS came from airline pilots having sex with monkeys' (seriously - here, this is a real person, on the telly and EVERYTHING) and "women who get pregnant after rape are being given the baby by Jesus as compensation' - which is nice...

Watching some of the more 'fruity' 9/11 conspiracy films on Youtube has been a joy - and horror, they are mostly wonderfully entertaining - but frighteningly stupid at the same time, actual facts ignored in favour of supposed nuance or wished for intrigue. There are quite a lot of short, simple, decent science based films that explain the collapse of both buildings in very simple terms. Essentially - you fly a very big, heavy jetliner full of fuel into a very tall, heavy building full of stuff that burns - and it never ends well. People's capacity to accept the insane and fantastical over simple facts is staggering.

One of my friends had a knock on the door yesterday - it was two elderly women from the Jehovah's ( he assumes ) who tried to convince him that the earth was 6000 years old and that fossils were all fakes placed there by evil atheists, or possibly God trying to 'test' us. ( we live on a particularly fossil rich part of the coast - which includes as stunning petrified forrest ) - fortunatly - they called this week, when he was sane, sober and mature enough to ask them to leave before he started shouting - if they had tried last week when he was in the depths of a manic crisis and came close to bering hospitalised against his will - I'd have feared for their safety.

Mind you. we can't have it all our own way - never go to a humanist group meeting - all the dullest people you have ever met with nothing to talk about because they don't believe in anything - torture.