Mike's musings

Muppetry and book tagging

Muppetry is the act perpetrated when you're a muppet.

The muppet's 25th anniversary album arrived today. Quite appropriate, because I was a bit of a muppet today. New laptop arrived, and after lots of setting up, I couldn't get it to connect to Wifi. I reinstalled ubuntu, in the end, and it still didn't work. Took me a while to work out it was because of MAC filtering. D'oh.

Jo loves the muppet album. Lots of good dancing music ("mee-mic!"). She also loves her car.

Book tagged

I've been tagged by Sally:

• One book that changed your life: Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein. Read it when I was 15 or 16, and it got me thinking very hard. I've recently reread it, and it's disappointing, but it made me realise that you could question pretty much everything (it's a critique of, among other things, organised religion).
• One book that you've read more than once: SnowCrash, by Neal Stephenson. Fantastic cyberpunk, and I made Moo read it on our honeymoon. She nearly divorced me over it: she couldn't see any value to it at all.
• One book you'd want on a desert Island: the Bible, probably. Maybe the complete Shakespeare.
• One book that made you laugh: Night of the Avenging Blowfish: A Novel of Covert Operations, Love, and Luncheon Meat, by John Welter. It's as weird and funny as the title suggests.
• One book that made you cry: Antony and Cleopatra, by William Shakespeare. Not officially a book, but I first read it in book form in my upper sixth year, and sobbed my way through the last scene of two.
• One book that you wish had been written: so many stories of so many illiterate or just inarticulate people. Margery Kempe's story is an eye-opener into what we've missed from so many people down the ages.
• One book you are currently reading: Models of Contextual Theology, by Bevans and Schreiter. For ERMC, of course, but it's really good.
• One book you wish had never been written: I'm not sure I wish that about any book. Some books do damage, but I can't think of a book that had never been written. Hvaing said that, if Far from the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy had never been written, then I'd have suffered less at O level (and this has got to wind up Gary).
• One book you've been meaning to read: The Dream of the Rood, by an anonymous mediaeval poet.

Tony Blair

I voted to for Tony's Blair's Labour government at the last general election. In fact, I've voted Labour at every election since I met Moo. But, if he's still in power, or if his successor doesn't condemn the policies that have brought us to where we are in the Middle East, and within our own country, then I won't be voting for them next time. Look at the news, the papers, the web, and look what's happening to Lebanon. Look at Iraq and Iran.

It taken me a long time, and I'd hoped at some point that there would be changes, but the lack of condemnation of what Israel is doing it too much.