An email to my father

( Discussing the much-publicised rapture/apocalypse predicted by Harold Camping which may or may not have begun back in May this year )

In fairness, the volcano in Iceland almost happened on time... Besides that, it's some serious straw-clutching.

Did you see the website before the rapture was due to occur? Google wecanknow. It was... Interesting. I was talking with a friend about it last week - I don't understand how or why you'd start a doomsday cult without a "God sometimes needs a little help/he's testing our faith"-style suicide pact, because without one, there's a 99.99999999etc percent chance you're going to end up with a lot of very pissed off ex-followers. A little digging around the site's supporting materials revealed that they put a lot of weight behind the scripture that suggests apocalypses can take a while to get going, so there was obviously a get out clause built in (whether consciously or not). 

My main point, though, in response to my friend's suggestion that Camping was "exploiting people the way all religion does", was that the lack of a suicide pact/kool aid guzzle suggests that Camping is indeed just like all the big religions, in that any exploitation/broken eggs is an accidental side-effect of his evangelising his own deeply-held beliefs. He wasn't looking to take advantage of people, but rather to save them.

End of Days cults are a standing fixture in human history, but I think it says an awful lot about how deeply and irredeemably fucked the world often appears to be, that so many people would buy into this one. The media on both sides of the pond overstated how many Americans were crazy enough to go along with it, but it was definitely more than a few tens of crazies, and I'm inclined to feel the media's bigger crime was (and is) painting a picture of a world gone bad which the average Joe has no regency over. The Fox News (and Glenn Beck) inventions of such macabre mannequins of vitriolic ignorance as Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, formed against a backdrop of The New World Order, The War on Terror, and a frightening and confusing vision of a Middle East in violent turmoil (democracy=good, cheering Arabs=bad, average Joe=arghhelp!!) has inevitably bred an even angrier, more disconnected and frightened kind of Deep South Bible Belt Confederate-Flag-waving lunatic. And those who aren't driven to stockpile arms and point a loaded and cocked shotgun at their bolted front doors day and night will instead hide in the churches, praying their God will spare them the myriad shameful end scenarios the TV told them about.

It's a sorry state of affairs when people can feel so hopeless that they actually welcome the end of the world. I shudder to think what Bill Hicks would've made of it all. 

Response to The Guardian's infuriating Celebrity Squares interviews

( Original article where The Guardian's Stuart O'Connor interviewed John Lloyd for their Technology section's regular 'Celebrity Squares' feature here: http://bit.ly/iPMXpQ )

Note - I read the Guardian regularly via my phone and online. I subscribe to their Technology news because I'm a bit of a geek. The down side of this is that I regularly found myself reading Celebrity Squares, which poses a series of questions (the same ones every time) to celebrities of varied reknown. These questions, particularly question 10, seem designed to inspire arguments in the comments section online, and countless posters frequently take the bait, spawning a boring and unnecessary argument over who makes the best computers/phones/whatever. I was supposed to be working, it was the weekend, and I stopped to read this particular article and its inane comments, and lost my temper a bit, and wrote the following smug pisstake...

Guardian reader bishely is bored at work and sick of the age-old flamewar these stupid 'technology' questions seem - with depressing inevitability - to provoke.

1) What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life?
The wheel. Without it, I can't imagine how different my life would be. I'm not a big fan of riding horses, and certainly wouldn't want to have to use one for my daily commute. God knows how Tesco would do their home delivery, either.

2) When was the last time you used it, and what for?
Just this morning - I took a bus into the office.

3) What additional features would you add if you could?
Nothing - it just works.

4) Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time?
While I still hold out hopes for the hoverboard or (better yet) a Star Trek transporter, I think wheels will be with us for some time to come.

5) What always frustrates you about technology in general?
People bitching and whining about which flavour of the EXACT SAME TECHNOLOGY is better. We're living in a world where we can connect to a global network, and use it to buy things, explore new ideas and communicate with other people everywhere, and slip the device that does all of this (and more) into our back pockets without ruining our jeans or crippling ourselves - and still people can't just appreciate the incredible advances our species has made in the last forty years without reverting to prehistoric tribalism over petty little details of personal taste. It's like arguing whether red or blue wheels are best.

6) Is there any particular piece of technology that you have owned and hated?
No. Next question.

7) If you had one tip about getting the best out of new technology, what would it be?
Spend more time learning to use it, and less time worrying how others see you for using x instead of y, or evangelising to others about x's superiority.

8) Do you consider yourself to be a luddite or a nerd?
No.

9) What's the most expensive piece of technology you've ever owned
My house.

10) Mac or PC, and why?
FFS. See question five.

11) Do you still buy physical media such as CDs and DVDs, or do you download? What was your last purchase?
No. And the guardian iphone app, which I'm beginning to regret, as I spend half of my time on it copying links into the browser just to post snarky responses to the stupid articles, and the ever-more-stupid bickering they seem to incite, then later hating myself for joining in with the bickering.

12) Robot butlers – a good idea or not?
For them to be any good, they'd probably have to be sentient, and once they're sentient we really ought to be either paying them or serving them. Programming them to enjoy helping us is probably just applying a rose-tinted veneer over slavery. So no. Robot Prime Ministers, perhaps.

13) What piece of technology would you most like to own?
A hoverboard, or a transporter. Or maybe a guardian iphone app that allows me to post comments with the caveat that I and every other commentor could see how much of our lives we'd each spent reading, getting emotional and then crafting ill-advised responses to the article and other comments. I reckon this has just taken me ten minutes closer to death, so I sincerely hope it hasn't been for nothing.

• bishely wrote this stupid comment, when he should've been getting urgent work done, because it's a Saturday and he can't be bothered. He also better spends his time messing around with music software on his computer (a hackintosh build that runs OSX, Win7 and Linux, if you must know). He would tell you where you can get hold of his music, but he hates 'celebrities' using this stupid 'celebrity squares' series of articles to flog their stuff, and is hoping to lead by example with the above.