Chris Hansen’s blog

You may remember my post on this wonder of the world of flora. Well, like all politicians, the Borough President of Brooklyn is determined to ensure that his name is eternally linked with the Corpse Flower. I think that it’s quite natural to link a politician with something that smells to high heaven and attracts numerous flies.

My friend Bill wrote me a letter (an actual snail mail letter!) to tell me he would be in town this week and next. We decided to have dinner last Thursday, and HWMBO and I went to Earls Court to join him. We went to Balans West, which we hadn’t been to in ages. The food was just OK, the bill was decidedly elevated. But, the food aside, Bill asked me what would make a good day trip. I suggested Salisbury (you get two items in one: Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral) and Dover. He picked Dover, and asked whether I would join him. HWMBO needed to study during the weekend, so I decided to get out of his hair and take a day trip.

Dover is about 1-3/4 hours away, and I’m sure everyone’s heard of The White Cliffs of Dover (thanks, Dame Vera Lynn and World War II). We were greeted on a very dull day by this seagull commuter.

So we started our climb up the hill. Dover Castle is on one of the most awesome hills you’ll ever see. Not quite a mountain, but not a small hill, it towers over Dover. Here’s Bill in front of the hill, with the castle at the top:

After climbing the hill, and establishing that, being a member of English Heritage, I could get in for free rather than pay

How many metro systems have you ridden? Here’s my total. Thanks to gmjambear for the link.

Get it at b3co.com!
Update: Added “Shanghai” after our June trip.

Came across these in a posting in alt.obituaries. And yes, I promise I will post about the busy weekend in Dover and East London. But for now, some light relief:

They’re moving father’s grave to build a sewer
They’re moving it regardless of expense.
They’re moving his remains
to lay down nine-inch drains
To irrigate some rich bloke’s residence.
Now what’s the use of having a religion?
If when you’re dead you cannot get some peace
‘Cause some society chap
wants a pipeline to his tank
And moves you from your place of rest and peace…
Now father in his life was not a quitter
And I’m sure that he’ll not be a quitter now.
And in his winding sheet,
he will haunt that privy seat
And only let them go when he’ll allow.
Now won’t there be some bleedin’ consternation,
And won’t those city toffs begin to rave!
But it’s no more than they deserve,
’cause they had the bleedin’ nerve
To muck about a British workman’s grave.

Brooklyn Botanical Garden’s corpse flower is about to bloom. Wanna see it? Here’s the webcam. The flower, when it blooms, is said to smell like rotting flesh, which attracts the flies it needs to be pollinated. Luckily, there is no websmellcam

Well, I know. I cost USD 85.83, to the penny, and the receipts prove it. The average weekly wage was about USD 67, so I cost a little more than a week’s wage.

The deposit receipt:

The final bill (while it isn’t marked paid, I hope it was; if they charged 7.5% interest on the outstanding balance it would be USD 3,503 today):

Happy National Day to you all!

…comes from YouTube, where Eddie Izzard discusses the beginnings of the Church of England.

On my website I talk a bit about my family background. My grandmother, Alice Fredericka Westman Adams Hansen Phillips (tra la!) was born in Buffalo, Wyoming in September 1888. I would estimate that this picture was taken between 1905 and 1908. In the lower right-hand corner (invisible in the scan) is embossed “The Fuller Studio, Sheridan, Wyo.”

Her father was a drunkard and a horse thief. Oddly enough for those times, he was not hanged for it. But when I told my father that he was a horse thief, Dad laughed and said, “Did they hang him high?” I answered: “You really shouldn’t joke about it: they named you after him.” His name was Orin James Westman and his wife, Mary Dawson, divorced him and married John Adams (no, not that one). She married my grandfather after corresponding with him because their teachers knew each other. She moved to Marblehead, and when my grandfather died in the late 1930’s, she married Mahlon Phillips, an engineer with the Boston and Maine whose usual run was Boston to Portland. He died in the early 1960’s, and she moved to live with her daughter and son-in-law in Alabama, where she died in 1979, aged 90.

It’s about 53-1/2 years too late, but my birth announcements will finally go out. When my father died we went through the stuff in his bedroom and found, among other things, my birth announcement cards. Some actually had a 3-cent stamp on them (but were never mailed–God only knows why). They are in my mother’s handwriting. So, without further ado, here I am!

Front of card:

Inside of card:

I have been slowly retouching pictures of my parents’ wedding. They had a photographer, and got the proofs, but never had enough money at that time to get the pictures printed. So the proofs are all that remains. Last year I did one, and today I set my hand to a second one. I’m not very good, but the picture turned out pretty well, I think. Here it is. My grandfather is in the centre, with my grandmother arranging his bouttoniere and my Mom to the left.

…is a Mother Goose and Grimm that is, well, grim.

I know lots of people who might benefit from this new pharmaceutical. Unfortunately, the only organisms to benefit so far are mice and fruit flies.

Perhaps we could get a ton or so of them and send them to Washington DC and Whitehall, London, for our Fearless Leaders.

Nah. It would never work.

You better believe that the cops were onto this reported crime. I wonder if they got a reward from the grateful business owner.

I gave another sermon at St. John’s Larcom Street this morning. Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, so I talked about change. We had lunch for about 15 afterwards (buffet): one of the many reasons I love preaching at St. John’s is the lunch afterwards.

Here it is, for those of you who like this kind of thing.

August 6, 2006 Feast of the Transfiguration
Sermon delivered at St. John the Evangelist, 10 am.
Readings: Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14; II Peter 1:16-19; Mark 9:2-10

In the name of God, the one, the Undivided Trinity. AMEN.

A woman was talking to her Vicar about the transformation that religion had brought about in her life. She declared, “I’m so glad I got religion. I have an uncle I used to hate so much I vowed I’d never go to his funeral. But now, why, I’d be happy to go to his funeral any time.”

The Greek word that we translate as “transfiguration” in the Gospel is “metamorphosis”-a perfectly sound English word. Caterpillars go through metamorphosis to become butterflies-did you ever wonder how they do it? I looked it up. The caterpillar sheds its skin and becomes a chrysalis, and then busily disassociates its cells each from the other. It digests the cells it won’t be needing as a butterfly, and uses the nutrients to build up its new body. A few days or weeks later, it emerges with a new, more glorious body.

This change is fundamental in the life of the insect. Without this change, the insect cannot reproduce, and were it not to happen, the species would die out. I can’t imagine that it’s very pleasant: having much of one’s body dissolved and digested doesn’t sound very good to me. But for the butterfly, it’s crucial. The caterpillar must effectively die in order to be transformed into the butterfly that will mate, lay eggs, and produce young caterpillars again.

Change in our own lives can seem as traumatic as metamorphosis must seem to a caterpillar. We have recently seen on our TV screens the upheavals that have taken place in the Middle East-wholesale change from a relatively prosperous place to one that is unsafe for civilians to live in.

But change can also be exciting and stimulating as well. Many of you will remember when the tired old government lost the election of 1997, and a brand-new energetic government emerged. How exciting that day was! We all thought it was going to be a new beginning, and a change that would make our lives better.

So when Peter, James, and John accompanied Jesus up the mountain and saw him transfigured before their eyes, it must have been exciting and scary as well. It is interesting that the only transfiguration the Gospel tells us about specifically is that which affects Jesus’s clothing. The Gospel doesn’t tell us whether Jesus himself changed into something different, although we assume he did.

So what is the reaction of Peter to all this. Instead of falling to the ground and worshipping Jesus, or shading his eyes from the dazzling light, or recording what Moses and Elijah were saying to Jesus (were they discussing the weather up on the mountain, perhaps: Moses might have compared it to the top of Sinai), Peter assumed that Elijah, Moses, and Jesus would be up there for a while. The festival of Booths comes just after the Day of Atonement, in mid-autumn. It’s a harvest festival, and a booth is constructed for each Jewish family with a roof of branches; they eat their meals there and in some cases sleep and study there as well. At the meals, it’s customary to invite symbolic guests to the table, such as Moses. These are given a special chair and celebrated by the guests. Perhaps Peter was mindful of this custom and assumed that Jesus had invited his symbolic guests to the festal table, thus he felt it was important to build the booths under which they would be living for seven days.

Once Peter spoke, the spell was broken and the voice from the cloud tells them who Jesus is and commands them to listen to him. Moses and Elijah disappear, and Jesus loses the dazzling white colour of his clothing and reverts to his look from before.

So the change was not permanent, but temporary. Change is even more unsettling when more change is seen to be around the corner. The question for us all is: how do we cope with change?

One way of coping with change is to try to avoid it. People often try to stave off change as long as possible. They resist it. People often sit in the same places in church every week, and feel slight resentment if a visitor is sitting in “their” seat. They get even more agitated if a fellow parishioner has sat in “their” seat, and may ask them to move. Church furnishings that are moved around or that disappear create havoc in the parish: why is that lectern over to the right; it has always been on the left! How many sextons does it take to change a lightbulb? Two: one to change the lightbulb and the other to say how much better the old lightbulb was.

We can get set in our religious ways just as easily. When change occurs, in our lives or the lives of others, do we pray for the status quo to return? Do we pray for the strength to endure the time of change? Or do we pray for the strength of mind to welcome the changes, and almost joyfully integrate them into our lives?

I suppose that a caterpillar about to become a butterfly sees that radical change as natural, and something to be welcomed. Not only is he going to be freed from the bonds that have tied him to earth, but he is going to be able to fly from plant to plant, drinking nectar and looking for a mate to perpetuate his species. How would we react to such a radical change in our lives?

Not all change is good, unfortunately; our lives may be changed by disease, unemployment, or death. Those kinds of changes need to be endured, not normally welcomed. And yet, these changes can bring out sparks of the divine in people; who has not heard of persons enduring a debilitating illness with great dignity and strength of character? A story in the newspaper this week told of a couple who were blind from an early age but in spite of that raised a large and healthy family. Blindness is a change not to be welcomed; however, the changes that blindness brings to a person may coax hidden reservoirs of strength from the person who is so afflicted.

Most of us are familiar with Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, but only with the first three lines:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Most people aren’t aware that it goes on like this:

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him forever in the next.

Change is indeed scary, but at the end of this life, a change we cannot avoid will come; the whole of our life is preparation for that change, and we trust that, like the caterpillar, we will be changed for the better, forever.

Amen.

…in which Rowan Atkinson shows why the English public school system is so loathed.

…in this video. I have the beta but haven’t installed it yet because it wants me to uninstall (not just turn off, uninstall) my anti-virus software. Do I trust Uncle Bill to protect my machine while the anti-virus is uninstalled? The hell I do!

…is here. It makes Diary of a Nobody look positively rip-roaring…

I wouldn’t have thought of it, but this artist in Australia uses a unique tool for a brush. Thanks to Mrs. Candy’s Amateur Cock Review for the reference.

from, of all places, the Daily Torygraph:

Three Texan surgeons were playing a round of golf. As they’re walking down the fairway, they strike up a conversation and the first surgeon says, “I reckon I’m the best surgeon in the world”. The other two enquire why and the first surgeon says, “I had a patient brought to me recently who had lost both his hands in an industrial accident. I sewed them back on and today that man has an audience to play the piano for Her Majesty the Queen”.

The second surgeon scoffs at this and says,”that’s nothing. Why I had a patient who lost both his arms in an automobile accident and I sewed them back on. At the last Olympic Games that man won a Gold Medal in the Field events”.

The third surgeon says, “that’s nothing. Several years ago a cowboy, high on alcohol and drugs, was riding his horse down a railroad track and collided with an oncoming express train. All I had to work with was the horse’s arse and a cowboy hat. Today that man is President of the United States.”

…from soc.org.freemasonry:

In the late 1960’s a US Navy cruiser anchored in Mississippi for a week’s shore leave.

The first evening, the ship’s Captain received the following note from a wealthy society matron:

“Dear Captain, Thursday will be my daughter Melinda’s Debutante Ball. I would like you to send four well mannered, handsome, unmarried officers in their formal dress uniforms to attend the dance. They should arrive promptly at 8:00 PM prepared for an evening of polite Southern conversation. They should be excellent dancers, as they will be the escorts of lovely refined young ladies. One last point: No Jews, please.”

At precisely 8:00 PM on Thursday, Melinda’s mother heard a polite rap at the door which she opened to find, in full dress uniform, four smiling, handsome, black officers.

Her mouth fell open, but pulling herself together, she stammered, “There must be some mistake.”

“No, Madam,” said the first officer. “Captain Goldberg never makes mistakes.

Those of you who, like HWMBO, enjoy solving sudoku puzzles owe your enjoyment partially to this gentleman.

NATHAN MENDELSOHN, SCHOLAR 1917-2006 Absent-minded polymath who taught mathematics at the University of Manitoba for 57 years made his name in combinatorics, a dazzling bit of science that no Sudoku puzzle can be without

RON CSILLAG Special to The Globe and Mail

TORONTO — Nathan Mendelsohn may well have been the absent-minded professor from central casting. He would go to work by car and return home by bus. His wife would send him shopping and he would come back with the wrong items (“I’ll cook what he brings,” she once said with a shrug). And there was the time he took his family to the movies and agreed to stand in the rain to buy the tickets while his wife and two sons took shelter indoors. Prof. Mendelsohn decided he didn’t want to see the movie after all, so he drove home.

Then there was the brilliant mathematician who saw beauty in the abstract. The Order of Canada member who made his own furniture, jewellery and wine, and delighted in performing hypnosis and magic tricks. The one who never wrote anything down because he didn’t have to. With his sly sense of humour, he would appreciate the designation of polymath.

Prof. Mendelsohn taught mathematics at the University of Manitoba for 57 years, ending his career in 2005 as distinguished professor emeritus. He headed the math department for about 20 years, authored 140 research papers — about double the average professor’s career output — and was a leading light in a branch of pure mathematics called combinatorics, which deals with the abstract relationships of objects to each other. One application is the math that underlies the popular Sudoku puzzles.

His and others’ theories bore practical applications in such areas as scheduling, cryptography and software testing, often decades after they were promulgated. Helen, his wife of 62 years, had another name for her husband’s work: “dreamy mathematics” (though she had no qualms pronouncing that she “really” hated math).

Prof. Mendelsohn worked in other fields of mathematics, including computing and numerical analysis, graph and design theory, and many branches of algebra. But it was combinatorics for which he was best known.

“It is probably safe to say that there is not a combinatorialist or universal algebraist in the world who has not heard of Nathan Mendelsohn, and that probably very few of them have not quoted at least one of his papers or worked in an area of research which he has helped develop,” stated the Royal Society of Canada in awarding the Henry Marshall Tory Medal to Prof. Mendelsohn in 1979.

Mathematics, he declared in a 1985 National Film Board short, “is my vocation, my avocation, my hobby, my playground. I do other things for relaxation — I enjoy them — but my greatest pleasure is working with mathematical concepts.”

He first encountered that pleasure in Grade 3 when he became aware of two things: the power of immediate recall, and that he knew more math than his teacher did without really trying.

His father, Sam, an ironworker, came to Toronto with his four children in 1918 to join relatives after they had been burned out of their tenement in Brooklyn. The clan settled on Euclid Avenue, and its descendants note the connection to the ancient Greek mathematician.

Young Nathan amused himself by taking apart clocks (usually putting them back together). He was awarded a four-year scholarship to the University of Toronto, where he completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees and, in 1941, his doctorate.

While still an undergraduate, he belonged to the team that won the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, said to be the toughest math test in the world. Meantime, he was advised to take up magic as a way to calm tremors in his hands, and he studied the hucksters and pitchmen at the Canadian National Exhibition. His sleight of hand landed him second prize at an International Brotherhood of Magicians contest, just behind a young amateur named Johnny Carson.

But there was a war on, and Prof. Mendelsohn’s talents were needed in defence research. He was enjoined from talking about the work — he volunteered bits and pieces much later — but his family believes it involved code-breaking and artillery simulations, continuing the age-old use of mathematics for military applications. (A similar stint in the early 1960s at the Rand Corp. was even more hush-hush.)

At war’s end, he headed to Kingston, Ont., to teach at Queen’s University, where he stayed for three years.

Asked about the short interval, his son, Eric, a professor of math at the U of T, explained: “He understood that, as a Jew, he would never get a permanent position. Queen’s already had a Jewish professor in the department.”

So he settled in Winnipeg, where the University of Manitoba welcomed any and all to build its fledgling math department, and where Prof. Mendelsohn became deeply involved in the city’s vibrant Jewish community. Raised in a modern Orthodox family, he was drawn more to Judaism’s teachings on morality than its ritual. Evidence for the existence of God, he reasoned, was “circumstantial” — not quite enough for a scientist.

But with a salary of about $3,000 a year, he was forced to work during the summers, driving to Quebec City with his family for teaching jobs.

He first came to international notice after co-authoring a paper in 1961 on Latin squares — grids in which no two numbers may appear in the same row or column (essentially a numeric Sudoku puzzle). Tough enough on a standard 9×9 grid — but Prof. Mendelsohn raised eyebrows by successfully constructing five pairs of 12×12 grids. Visualized in three dimensions, with each grid placed over its pair, the numbers repeated neither in rows and columns nor up and down. And it was all done without a computer.

“That was absolutely extraordinary,” said Michael Doob, whom Prof. Mendelsohn hired to teach math at the University of Manitoba. “He was known for idiosyncrasies, but he taught without any notes at all. And I don’t think he had a mean bone in his body. He was a real mensch.”

Prof. Mendelsohn forged friendships with some of the leading names in the rarefied world of higher math, including the eccentric Hungarian number theorist Paul Erdos, who made a habit of showing up on fellow mathematicians’ doorsteps unannounced and with no money.

Prof. Mendelsohn also built his own cabinets. “He’d make four or five pieces of furniture and then stop,” his son recalled. “He was like that with math, too. He was more interested in finding a new problem and solving it than worrying about one classical problem.”

Two modern theories bear Prof. Mendelsohn’s name. Both of them, said his son, are “just a genius’s slight twist on an old idea to get mathematics to give up one of her profound secrets.”

Prof. Mendelsohn guided graduate students until a year ago, and he never stopped doodling on the proverbial napkin. The page proofs for his last paper arrived the morning he died.

Nathan Saul Mendelsohn was born in New York on April 14, 1917. He died in Toronto on July 4, 2006, of hepatitis C contracted through tainted blood. He was 89. He leaves two siblings, two sons, five grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. His wife died in January of 2005.

From a mailing list I’m on comes the following:

President George W. Bush was scheduled to visit an Episcopal church outside Washington as part of his campaign to restore his poll standings.

Bush’s campaign manager made a visit to the Rector of the church, and said to him, “We’ve been getting a lot of bad publicity because of the President’s position on stem cell research, the Iraq war, Katrina and the like.

We’d gladly make a contribution to the church of $100,000 if, during your sermon, you’d say the President is a saint.”

The Rector thought it over for a few moments and finally said, “The church is in desperate need of funds, so I’ll do it.”

Bush showed up for the sermon and the Rector began:

“I’d like to speak to you this morning about our President. George Bush is a liar, a cheat, and a low-intelligence weasel. He took the tragedy of September 11 and used it to frighten and manipulate the American people. He lied about weapons of mass destruction and invaded Iraq for oil and money, causing the deaths of tens of thousands and making the United States the most hated country on earth.

“He appointed cronies to positions of power and influence, leading to widespread death and destruction during Hurricane Katrina. He awarded contracts and tax cuts to his rich friends so that we now have more poverty in this country, and a greater gap between rich and poor, than we’ve had since the Great Depression.

“He instituted illegal wiretaps when getting a warrant from a court would have been a mere administrative detail; he had his henchmen lie to Congress about it, then claimed he is above the law.

“He has headed the most corrupt, bribe-inducing political party since Teapot Dome. The national surplus has turned into a staggering national debt of $7.6 trillion, gas prices are up 85% and vital research into global warming and stem cells is stopped cold because he’s afraid to lose votes from some religious kooks.

“He is the worst example of a Christian I’ve ever known. But compared to Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, George Bush is a saint.”

…is here, from Nightcharm. A very perceptive and charming appreciation of Mae West, several decades after her death.

…to . Many happy returns of the day!!!

I’ve hooked up a router in the kitchen, wired to the router in the study, and connected the iMac and my Dell laptop to it. Unfortunately, while you can see files on the main computer from those computers, you cannot access them (so, for instance, HWMBO tried to play an mp3 file which he could see from the laptop. It gave him an error message. So it seems that adding the router has screwed up the networking and file sharing. Fuzzbuzz!

We’re going to Cardiff tomorrow for a short break, so I won’t be able to try to fix it until Sunday or Monday at the earliest.

Will post when we get back.

Homepages are a bit easier to change than email addresses. I’ve bought the domain “christianphansen.com” and have switched my website there, with redirects from the old site that will be good for a few months, and then expire when I cancel my Demon account.

Here is my new website address.

There isn’t much new on it at the moment, but I am slowly refreshing some of the immigration and dual citizenship information and trying to brush up the nap of it, so to speak.

I left the seminary because I didn’t see myself as celibate. This gentleman, from Africa, seems to have had no such qualms.

…is here, but for Gawd’s sake DON’T try this at home, kiddies. You will have instant high blood pressure and probably a stroke. I would rather eat my own head.

…is here, and again you must look at “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought…” Why buy a pill when you can use the Sweat DVD and have the real thing!

…is here, but watch out for the white vans cruising your town’s streets; you may end up doing KP in Baghdad.

…is here, but don’t let your boss see you looking at it.

…is here (see the “People Who Bought This Item Also Bought…” section). And remember, those sheep don’t like hairy guys.

…is here. And if you say it’s lame, I will probably agree with you.

…because I was wondering whether Prince Philip is a Freemason. Didn’t find out anything about that (a Masonic friend thinks he is, but there is no firm pronouncement), but did get the following result at the bottom of the first page. I’ve airbrushed out the address in case anyone fancies a shopping trip.

Get ‘im while he lasts (he’s 85, you know).

I was directing very important truck traffic through a water hazard somewhere or other, at night. Suddenly my mobile phone beeped, and I looked at it and continued. A few minutes later I woke up and heard a beep.

My mobile phone was telling me it needed recharging. So I went downstairs to connect it up to the mains.

Interesting that the first beep didn’t wake me up, just directed me in my dream to look at my mobile phone, which was not at all like the Motorola Razr V3 I use. Darned beta-blocker.

…an awesome commercial.

…and I’m not talking about cars (Do they still make Triumphs??)

Yesterday I went for my yearly retinal exam at St. Thomas’s Hospital. I got the all-clear for another year, and the doctor remarked how stable my eyes had been for the past 10 years or so. Hopefully this will continue.

Also yesterday I finally cracked the problem of connecting my laptop up to the wireless network. It seems that uninstalling the card, reinstalling it, and making sure that I allowed Windoze to control access to the network works. So I won’t have to run a wire out to the kitchen, attach a router to the end of it, and wire up the iMac and the laptop both. I can do with the wire we’ve now got there. Hurrah!

Now to get the other laptop connected up.

…along with the person who points the mouse at the screen to make it move and the one who makes a xerox copy of a diskette and sends it in to customer service.

So how does the machine read the signature on your credit cards? Find out here.

here, on a dark and stormy night.

I love this….I think it needs to be on every TV station at least once an hour.

Courtesy of Ron’s Log comes this obituary. I suspect the booze, myself.

BOLD those shows you’ve seen three or more episodes of in your lifetime.

I won’t tag anyone, but you’ll find that your answers will be greatly affected by your age. I added two myself.

7th Heaven
Adam-12
Aeon Flux
ALF
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
Alias
American Idol/Pop Idol/Canadian Idol/Australian Idol/etc.
America’s Next Top Model
Angel
Are You Being Served?
Arrested Development
Automan
Babylon 5
Babylon 5: Crusade
Battlestar Galactica (the old one)
Battlestar Galactica (the new one)
Baywatch
Beavis & Butthead
Beverly Hills 90210
Black Adder
Bonanza
Bosom Buddies
Boy Meets World
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Bug Juice
Car 54 Where Are You?
Chappelle’s Show
Charlie’s Angels
Charmed
Cheers
Columbo
Commander in Chief
Coupling – UK
Cowboy Bebop
Crossing Jordan
CSI
CSI: Miami
CSI: NY
Curb Your Enthusiasm
Danny Phantom
Dark Angel
Dark Skies
Davinci’s Inquest
Dawson’s Creek
Dead Like Me
Deadliest Catch
Deadwood
Degrassi High
Degrassi: The Next Generation
Designing Women
Desperate Housewives
Dharma & Greg
Different Strokes
Doctor Who
Dragnet
Drake & Josh
Due South
Earth2
Emergency!
Entourage
ER
Everwood
Everybody Loves Raymond
Facts of Life
Family Guy
Family Ties
Farscape
Father Ted
Fawlty Towers
Felicity
Firefly
Frasier
Friends
Futurama
Get Smart
Ghost Hunters
Gilligan’s Island
Gilmore Girls
Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.
Green Acres
Grey’s Anatomy
Grounded For Life
Growing Pains
Gunsmoke
Hannah Montana
Happy Days
Hercules the Legendary Journeys
Highlander
Hill Street Blues
Hogan’s Heroes
Home Improvement
Homicide: Life on the Street
House
I Dream of Jeannie
I Love Lucy
I Spy
In Living Color
Inuyasha
Invader Zim
Invasion
Iron Chef (Japan)
Iron Chef (US)
It Takes a Thief
Hell’s Kitchen
JAG
Jackass
Jamie Oliver’s Twist
Joey
Keen Eddie
Kitchen Confidential
Knight Rider
Kolchak: The Night Stalker (original)
Kolchak: The Night Stalker (reincarnation)
Laverne and Shirley
Law and Order
Law and Order: Special Victims Unit
Life On Mars
Little House on the Prairie
Lizzie McGuire
Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman
Lost
Lost in Space
Love, American Style
M*A*S*H
MacGyver
Malcolm in the Middle
Married… With Children
Melrose Place
Miami Vice
Mission: Impossible
Mod Squad
Monk
Mork & Mindy
Murphy Brown
My Three Sons
My Two Dads
My So-Called Life
NCIS
Ned Bigby’s Declassified School Survival Guide
Nip/Tuck
Numb3rs
One Tree Hill
Oz
Perry Mason
Pokemon
Power Rangers
Prey
Prison Break
Profiler
Project Runway
Quantum Leap
Queer As Folk (US)
Queer as Folk (British)
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy
ReGenesis
Relic Hunter
Remington Steele
Rescue Me
Road Rules
Rome
Roseanne
Roswell
Saved by the Bell
Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?
Scrubs
Seinfeld
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
Sex and the City
Six Feet Under
Slings and Arrows
Smallville
So Weird
Soap
South Park
Space: Above & Beyond
Spaced
Spongebob Squarepants
Square Pegs
Star Trek
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Star Trek: Voyager
Star Trek: Enterprise
Stargate Atlantis
Stargate SG-1
Starsky & Hutch
Strange Luck
Stingray
Strictly Come Dancing/Dancing with the Stars etc
Strange World
Superman
Supernatural
Surface
Survivor
Taxi
Teen Titans
That 70’s Show
That’s So Raven
The 4400
The Addams Family
The Andy Griffith Show
The A-Team
The Avengers
The Beverly Hillbillies
The Brady Bunch
The Champions
The Cosby Show
The Daily Show
The Dead Zone
The Dick Van Dyke Show
The Flintstones
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
The Golden Girls
The Honeymooners
The Invisible Man (2000s)
The Jeffersons
The Jetsons
The L Word
The Love Boat
The Magnificent Seven
The Man from Atlantis
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
The Monkees
The Munsters
The Mythbusters
The O.C.
The Office (UK)
The Office (US)
The Outer Limits (original) I saw all of them, and have ’em all on DVD and tape.
The Outer Limits (new)
The Phoenix
The Pretender
The Professionals
The Real World
The Rockford Files
The Saint
The Shield
The Simpsons
The Six Million Dollar Man
The Sopranos
The Suite Life of Zack and Cody
The Sweeney
The Twilight Zone (original)
The Twilight Zone (reincarnation)
The Waltons
The West Wing
The Wonder Years
The X-Files
Third Watch
Thirty-something
Three’s Company
Threshold
TJ Hooker
Top Gear
Touching Evil
Twin Peaks
Veronica Mars
Whose Line is it Anyway? (US)
Whose Line is it Anyway? (UK)
Will and Grace
Wings
Wire in the Blood
Witchblade
WKRP in Cincinnati
Wonderfalls
Xena: Warrior Princess
You Can’t Do That On Television
Young Hercules

HWMBO tells me that Italy won.

I’m very pleased. Now TV, radio, and newspapers will return to normal.

What game are they playing anyway? I’ve disallowed comments to ensure that I never find out!

…and it has nothing to do with flu. I wonder if they’ll get an ornithologist to study it…

Only people interested in the arcane way that the Church of England is financed will be interested in this post. However, yesterday, at Southwark Diocesan Synod, I moved a motion to as the Archbishops’ Council to assess the status and accountability of the Church Commissioners. There was more, but an amendment cut off the end. The motion read: “THIS SYNOD requests an urgent review by the Archbishops’ Council of the status and accountability of the Church Commissioners[, together with their commitment to an ethical investment policy, with a view toward bringing the financial resources that are currently under the control of the Church Commissioners fully under the stewardship of the Archbishop’s Council and accountable to the Church and to God through the General Synod].” The italicised part was amended out of the final resolution.

The Church Commissioners are the successor body of Queen Anne’s Bounty, founded in 1704 to assist the clergy in parishes in poor areas of the country. The Ecclesiastical Commissioners were set up in the 19th Century to take over other funding for the Church through the transfer of lands belonging to dioceses and bishops. These bodies were amalgamated in 1947 to form the Church Commissioners.

In the early part of the 20th Century, several social housing estates were formed in South London due to the work of Octavia Hill, a reformer and housing campaigner. They were named after her, and one of these estates is in our Deanery of Southwark and Newington. The Church Commissioners owned these estates, and let them to people who would have trouble renting conventional housing.

Recently, the Church Commissioners decided they were “overexposed to the UK residential property market” (according to their 2005 Annual Report) and sold the properties to a consortium which is going to sell the flats to yuppies as they fall vacant. Meanwhile a social housing association (which is a front organisation for the new owners of the estate) will administer the flats. These houses will be removed from the social housing stock in South London.

The Church Commissioners were lobbied, picketed, and met with in order to get the estates to be sold to a real social housing landlord, who would preserve them as social housing stock. They not only refused, but were considered to be quite rude and underhanded in the way they sold them. The sale was announced on the Friday before a meeting of General Synod (the national legislature of the Church of England), where questions were to be put to the First Church Estates Commissioner, Andreas Whittam-Smith. It was a fait accompli by the time the meeting convened. General Synod was not best pleased.

As a result of this, our Deanery wished to pass a motion to censure the Church Commissioners. After discussion, we decided that, better than censure, we would ask for a review of the status and accountability of the Church Commissioners. We feel that they are not accountable in the normal course of events (as no consequences follow if they do not take heed of General Synod’s directions on investment and disinvestment) and something needs to be done.

We believe the Church Commissioners are worried about this motion, as Mr. Whittam-Smith actually asked to come to Synod and speak to us about accountability. He came (a true Tory grandee of the old style, white coiffed hair and all) but rambled on for much longer than his allotted time. Then, I moved this motion (using my maiden speech in Synod to do so), and after the amendment was debated and passed, the shortened motion was also passed. I was complimented on the speech by several people in a position to judge the quality of such things.

This will be one to watch. I understand that the motion may be debated in General Synod as early as February 2007, which is a meteoric speed for a motion coming from a Deanery. Normally these take three or four years to work their way up to General Synod. If passed, the review will take place and probably report sometime in 2008. I hope that true accountability of the

If anyone needs more proof that the US is chock full of religious nutcases, read this. May be time-limited, so get your squicks soon, folks!

Occasionally HWMBO insists we have fish for dinner. My doctor would like me to eat more broiled, steamed, or baked fish (not fried, of course). However, I really don’t like fish. I can choke down the fish in “fish ‘n’ chips” but that’s fried, thus bad for you. So last night I took two salmon fillets (boneless and skinless) out of the freezer. I bought asparagus, and cooked rice as well. Put salt, pepper, and dill on the fish, and baked it at gas mark 6 for about 15 minutes.

Now HWMBO eats his unadulterated with any sauce. However, I can’t really choke it down unless I load it with ketchup. He scorns, but if I didn’t have ketchup on it I’d be lost, staring at the naked salmon saying “How can I get rid of this without HWMBO knowing?”

So this is the result, photographed this very evening. Note that the fish is almost (but not quite) hidden from view. I was stingy with the ketchup this time.