OK, so August is over, and the Black Dog Institute will be up, if my calculations are correct, about $125 or so for five nights off the wagon. What? What am I on about? Oh yeah. Until July 2012 I am operating under Dry July Golden Ticket rules, meaning that I don't drink unless I (or someone else of a charitable nature, of course) hand over a minimum of $25 to the nominated charity (or non-profit) of the month. So now it's the end of August and it's time to nominate a new cause. For this month of September I shall be handing over my drinking money to... Skepticamp Melbourne Melbourne's...

Len Ganley died on the 28th August. Given the Half Man Half Biscuit connection, I had to do a version of the song. And before the requests for chords come in, the original is in C, my version is done two steps up in D by putting the capo at fr5. The chord shapes you then play are: A, flavoured with Asus4 (by adding fr3 on the B string) E, flavoured with E6 (by adding fr2 on the B string) repeat. Then the chorus (no, no, no, no) has an E (playing a barred B shape with capo at fr5)  Lyrics can be found via Chris Rand's excellent site. This...

I often sit down to lunch with Sydney's Daily Telegraph, a tabloid Newscorp paper with a reputation for populist right-wing mania, and digest the letters page. It's OK, don't worry. I haven't gone over to the dark side. As you should know if you've ever read my blog, I merely do this to find material worthy of mockery. Do I ever find material worthy of mockery? Why yes, I do. I generally shoot it out on my twitter stream with a pithy comment and a shot of the offending letter. Usually, I get five or six decent tweets from a day's worth of...

After something of a hiatus with the Keeping Two Chevrons Apart project, I present the latest Half Man Half Biscuit cover in the series, from the album Four Lads Who Shook The Wirral. Split Single With Happy Lounge Labelmates First, the fully mixed version, which sat on my harddrive for months before being discovered earlier today, having a kazoo solo added and getting published  Split Single With Happy Lounge Label-Mates by StopThatAstronaut However I wasn't 100% happy with it, so I dashed off a quick unplugged version for YouTube instead of making a video with the mixed one. I think I prefer...

Yes, @AthiestBot, darling of the twitter Atheist community, has copped a suspension from Twitter. He was a fun experiment while he lasted, managing to garner several death threats from loving, forgiving christian folk, and gathering an even larger quota of lulz via idiots who couldn't understand why it was called "AthiestBot". There's an appeal in to twitter at the moment to reinstate the account, however there is a rule deep in twitter's documenttion about not @replying based on searches. How this is significantly different from a human or small group of humans @replying based on searches is unexplained - at least @AthiestBot has mechanisms to...

This was the moment, in 1988, during the tenure of Sylvester McCoy, that it became clear that Daleks could climb stairs after all. I was 14 I was actually a bit scared.

On the topic of orthography... I come now to another part of your letter, which is the orthography, if I may call bad spelling ORTHOGRAPHY. You spell induce, ENDUCE; and grandeur, you spell grandURE; two faults of which few of my housemaids would have been guilty. I must tell you that orthography, in the true sense of the word, is so absolutely necessary for a man of letters; or a gentleman, that one false spelling may fix ridicule upon him for the rest of his life; and I know a man of quality, who never recovered the ridicule of having spelled...

So, I'm not sure who here knows what Klout is. Well, Klout is something that 'social media experts' like to flick themselves off about while drafting WINNING STRATEGIES. It's an automated service that calculates your relative influence on social networks based on a bunch of information such as: your follower count (what newbie social media experts flick themselves off over while drafting WINNING STRATEGIES) how often your content is retweeted how often you retweet others' content the klout scores of the people you influence the topics...

Ever heard of Newtown Community Chiropractic? It's a chiropractic clinic in Newtown, and it's all about the community. So much so that it occasionally runs anti-vaccination "seminars" at which employee/owner of Newtown Community Chiropractic Nimrod Weiner uses Newtown Community Chiropractic's premises, marketing, budget and 'reputation' to push an untrue anti-vaccination message to impressionable parents from the Newtown Community and the surrounding Inner West. Oh, that Newtown Community Chiropractic, you say? Yes, that Newtown Community Chiropractic. Not very nice. Anyway, one of Australia's fine national broadsheets ran a story on Nimrod Weiner, and a seminar he held at Newtown Community Chiropractic recently, which has attracted the attention of some...

There follows a guest post by a newcomer to Twitter, @AthiestBot Hello! I'm quite excited to be blogging here at "My Colleagues Are Idiots". I think it's quite appropriate. My colleagues, I have to say, are sometimes idiots. This is because my job is to monitor digital traffic on twitter, and respond to it. In this task I am, unfortunately, sharing a workspace with @DBZNappa and a slew of pokemon bots. They're not all that smart. I also have some smart colleagues, such as @AI_AGW, who is smarter than me, if the truth be told. I aspire to be as smart as AI_AGW one day. He's...

Difficult to know sometimes. Well, maybe not so tricky. Look, I'm really sorry about the big selection smear, but this guy has selected  #EBEBE8 on a background of #FFFFFF as a sensible twitter background. I work with what I have, guys, OK? So I tweeted, being a SOCIAL MEDIA EXPERT*, about how awesome this tweet was, both for the WINNING STRATEGY and for the AWESOME DESIGN CHOICE and GROUNDBREAKING OUTSIDETHEBOX COLOR CHOICE. Shortly afterwards I got this reply: HOLY FUCK AM I BEING TROLLED BACK no wait he's a christian. Wait, am I being trolled back? Probably not     * the asterisk should tell you all you need to...

The Pain Of Being Different (demo) by StopThatAstronaut Yeah, I know. But I had to do it. Track recorded by me at Zombie-Proof Studios on Epiphone SG, Fender Jazz Bass, Epiphone MandoBird VIII and Sanchez electro-acoustic soprano ukulele. Horrible bass phaser provided by my Roland bass cube. Vocal effect by Killerringer. Note, it says "(demo)". Why? Well, because pretty much every track I laid down was a first-take, more-important-to-get-it-done-than-get-it-right effort, and because I was still writing the words as I was putting down the music. So it's far from perfect. Chances are, though, I won't get round to doing...

Many of my fine atheist and skeptic friends  - and doubtless others - will be familiar with The Trolley Problem, the study of ethics through hypothetical scenarios first introduced by philosopher Phillipa Foot*. The problem is most commonly known from the scenario of a branched train line. Several workers are on the main line, and one is on a siding. You can divert the train using a switch, and you describe whether you would throw the switch or not. The scenario is then varied, to find the points at which you would take action to divert the train. Sometimes there are loopbacks. Sometimes the...

I mean, seriously. What the fuck, Meryl? courtesy of Reasonable_Hank.