May the Spirit of Christmas be with you

Christmas can be moderately jolly, but it's best not to take it too seriously...

Jon Knudsen, the pastor of the Løkken Free Church in the Jutland town of Vendsyssel, loves Christmas, but he hates elves.

This weekend, Knudsen’s hatred for the creature he says “comes from the devil” manifested itself in the form of a mock execution by hanging of a Christmas elf outside his church...

One offended resident took action Monday afternoon while no one was watching, however, and pulled down the elf. He left a message with the pastor that the elf was being “kept safe until after the New Year”.

Knudsen reported the theft to the police, and the culprit confessed. The police, however, refused to press charges, stating that their “caseload was too heavy to make investigating theft of a stuffed toy elf a priority”.

I think I'll just offer you this heart-warming tale without further comment. Via

Public service announcement

I've just had an e-mail forwarded to me by a person who (IMHO) is pretty intelligent and well-meaning. It purported to alert people to an alleged scam involving unscrupulous cashiers adding unauthorised cash-back requests to card sales and pocketing the cash from customers who hadn't checked their receipts. The style of the message made me suspicious, so I spent a minute (literally a minute) googling it before discovering that the "warning" was a hoax.

These sort of hoax chain messages have a generic, easily-recognisable style - THE USE OF CAPITALS (generally in the message and the subject line), multiple exclamation marks and an urgent plea to 'pass this on to your friends / family / loved ones'. It always surprises me that even quite bright people do forward them - I'm guessing that the appeal to the welfare of your loved ones, combined with a lack of time for fact checking  is what triggers otherwise rational people to hit the "send" button and propagate the hoax.

I know nothing about the sort of people who start these rumours and don't know whether there's any motivation beyond the rather odd satisfaction of having created an inaccurate meme and watching it replicate. But I'd like to make a small plea to anybody reading this who receives a warning e-mail with lots of caps and exclamation marks, warning about some scam or danger to which you can alert your friends and family by forwarding the warning to everyone in your address book. If it looks like a hoax, it probably is, so please don't spread it. If you still think it might conceivably be true, it's probably serious enough to be worth a couple of minutes of your own time, spent either googling, or going straight to a site like Hoax-Slayer, before clogging up the in-boxes of your friends, family and colleagues.

Together, one e-mail at a time, we could create a world with a just little more head space for thinking about what's real and important, rather than fretting about unreal threats, or cursing the rising tide of disinformation.

Wikileaks revelation: WMD found in Iraq

Well, that's what you'd think from this headline in Examiner.com:

Wikileaks: WMD program existed in Iraq prior to US invasion

The article, though, over-promises and completely fails to deliver. No Ernst Stavro Blofeld-style facilities for producing super-weapons that could hold the world to ransom. Just 'containers of liquid sulfur mustard which have been used since World War I' a 'house with a chemical lab' and '155mm rounds filled with an unknown liquid ... several of which are leaking a black tar-like substance ... the rounds tested positive for mustard [gas]'.

It's horrible stuff, as Wilfred Owen and the survivors of the Halabja massacre have testified, but these aren't the sort of weapons that would have been dangerous to the West, or even to Israel (which identified a far more credible potential WMD threat back in the early 1980s and eliminated it by destroying Iraq's Osirak Nuclear Reactor).

The Examiner.com article isn't interesting for drawing attention to any actual buried treasure in the Wikileaks material, but it is moderately interesting to see a new and creative type of spin being put on this stuff. Like Alex Salmond's 'diplomatic tittle tattle' remark and the calls from Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin to have the leaker killed and Assange 'hunted down', the article says rather more about the messanger than it does about the material that's been released.

It's probably just an unhappy coincidence that the author, Jim Kouri, is styled a "Public Safety Examiner", a rather sinister job title that puts me in mind of  the Committee of Public Safety, responsible for centralising denunciations, trials, and executions during the Reign of Terror. I'm guessing, though, that his core competencies are more to do with scaring the public witless about a relatively small terrorist threat, given that the Huckabees and Palins of the world can be relied upon to do the denunciations, along with calls for trials and executions.

Frozen veg

First, he good news. We finally have some tiny florets of fractal broccoli - and I've got the pictures to prove it. The bad news - like the rest of the country, we've been getting severe frosts. I don't know how hardy Romanesco broccoli is, but I think we're about to find out.

Keep calm and carry on

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. This cartoon contains more sense than your average tabloid.

In the year 2025

That zealous convert to the joy of debt, Mystic Nick, has been peering into his crystal ball and knows what we'll all be thinking in the 2020s:

I believe in this policy. I really think we will look back in 10 or 15 years' time and think, actually that was quite a brave and bold and socially progressive thing to do.

Since we're in the prediction business, here's my version of what we'll be thinking a decade or so hence:

Remind me - who were the Liberal Democrats?

One-liner of of the week

The Cognitive Dissonance Society, formerly known as the Lib Dems...

I wish I'd said that.

You will, Oscar, you will...