An essay from Polly Toynbee, writing in the Guardian.

A couple of excerpts:

Blair has appeased and prevaricated. Now, as the death cult strikes again, he must oust religion from public life.

and

It is time now to get serious about religion - all religion - and draw a firm line between the real world and the world of dreams. Tony Blair has taken entirely the wrong path. He has appeased, prevaricated and pretended, maybe because he is a man of faith himself, with a Catholic wife who consorts with crystals. But never was it more important to separate the state from all faiths and relegate all religion to the private - but well-regulated - sphere.

I went to another great gig last night, Joseph Arthur at 93 Feet East.

If you don’t know Joe’s work, and you like singer songwriters, I’d seriously recommend checking him out.

I first came across him when I was working at Real World - Joe was then signed to Real World records and seemed to be permanently hanging out around the studio, working on new material. I even had dinner with him once in the studio, but of course was far too shy to introduce myself and tell him how much I liked his music.

Anyway, he did a great solo set - mostly guitar and vocals, making excellent use of live sampling and a harmoniser of some sort to create a really big (and at times eery) sound. He also, in a strangely Rolf Harris moment, painted a picture on stage.

I wouldn’t consider myself a Trekky, but as a card carrying member of the geek’s union, and a sci-fi fan to boot, I ought to mention the sad demise of James Doohan, otherwise known as Scotty.

I’ve just realised that the cron task hasn’t been running on my Drupal server, which means the site hasn’t been getting indexed, and the search facility wasn’t working properly.

It turns out that the notify module I installed had broken the cron.php script in some way. I’ve turned notify off for now, so cron.php is running properly and you can actually search the site.

For any QPR fans out there who use a mac, I’ve updated my iCal QPR diary with the fixtures for next season.

You can subscribe to the calendar at: webcal://ical.mac.com/samdeane/qpr.ics

Hopefully the dates, start times and obviously the opposition should be correct. Cup games aren’t in there yet.

Let me know if you spot any errors…