New design for Corycia…
I got annoyed with the old design for my blog: it looked nice and clean, but was actually quite hard to read. I think this one is nicer. Please let me know if there is anything that can be done to make things easier to navigate.
Motorola phones are still rubbish
I should have known better.
All I wanted was a decent, small phone that could store my work diary and contacts from Outlook - the problem between me and most phones is that I have over a thousand contacts. No, I’m not that important, I just have to be able to contact individuals and companies on mailing lists, and it’s handy to have them in my own Outlook diary in case I need to call when I’m not at a computer. Until a couple of months ago I was using a T-Mobile Smartphone (with free Co-Pilot SatNav, which was kind of handy) - but the Windows Mobile 5 software started to complain about the volume of contacts, so I gave it away when I sold the SatNav bit. I tried resurrecting my old C500, but that seems permanently SIM-wedded to its old nefarious Orange masters despite various hacks, so I gave up there.
On to my wife’s old Sony Ericsson K750i - broken sliding lens cover, so the camera doesn’t work any more, but the phone itself seemed ok. The downside is it only takes 400-odd contacts (why??? it has a 2 GB M2 card in it!), a ‘feature’ of the software. Obviously people who take pictures don’t have many friends…. on the upside, it does sync nicely with Bluetooth to OSX/iCal. So with this I have about half my contacts, and of course that means none of the ones I use every day…
So I looked around for another cheap, newish phone with Bluetooth, and settled on the Motorola SLVR L6. GBP40 from Ebay, and it arrived in great nick. A big plus on this phone is its selling point: it is very thin, and doesn’t poke into your leg from your trouser pocket when you sit down. However, I should have remembered my previous experience with Motorola handsets: older models had terrible GUIs and were awful to use, and the L6 is no exception. It’s hard to describe exactly what is so maddening about it, but it just is. For example, when entering text, spaces, capitals, T9 etc. are in different places to virtually all other phones; it’s as if you’ve got into a new car to find the brake and accelerator pedals have been swapped over. You can’t do things like press-and-hold a key to get a contact to call or text, and when you choose a recipient for a message you can’t easily see which number (landline or mobile) you are using. Maddening. Oh, and the Bluetooth sync doesn’t work properly either. Finally, the screen design is poor. I don’t know whether it’s the resolution or the choice of font, but you can only get about 2 appointments displaying per page - hardly useful.
Motorola, your phones are still rubbish. Though it hurts to say it, I’m going back to Smartphones….
I’m calling my teddy bear Jesus
During the English Civil War iconoclastic Puritans travelled Britain, and between bouts of doing away with Cavaliers, spent their leisure time destroying images, stained glass windows, altar rails and other church paraphernalia, and by this left the churches of England today very different from their more colourful Catholic neighbours over the channel. The difference is so great, and our great English churches so austere, that they have coloured our views on aesthetics, and what churches and domestic buildings look like today - anyone for Dulux white with a hint of pink?
But why did the Puritans wish to destroy the items so venerated by their Roman (or quasi-Roman) opponents? At one level, they wished to return to the supposed simplicity of the early Church, and therefore to eliminate the superstition and idolatry they held that churchgoers were apt to. By destroying images in the manner of Moses destroying those of Aaron, they sought to enforce this view by denying others a focus for their idolatry. But why bother? If such idols have no power, why pay them any attention? But, like Moses who ground up the golden calf and forced the Israelites to drink it, the Puritans were more superstitious than they cared to think of themselves. By wishing to destroy icons, they admitted that icons had power, not only over their enemies, but also over themselves. Paradoxically, an iconoclast is also an idolater.
What does this have to do with teddy bears? If you’ve been reading the news in the last two weeks, you will know that Gillian Gibbons was jailed in Sudan last week for ‘insulting Islam’, and has today been released under special presidential pardon: in actuality, Gibbons’ ‘crime’ was to allow her children to name a toy after the Prophet (PBUH), so it’s still a bit unclear to me how she is culpable for the actions of some under-tens. But in any case, why on earth does the average Muslim care what name a teddy bear has? It seems the average Muslim doesn’t, but there is a vocal minority that appears to think that Gibbons’ actions (whatever they may be) deserve death, a fairly extreme view. Ostensibly, one reason stems from the concept of ‘excessive veneration’, where the excess is calling a toy after the Prophet. However, it seems that Gibbons’ class chose ‘Mohammed’ as many boys the children knew had that name; I’m unconvinced that calling a teddy bear Mohammed is any worse than calling so many children by the same name. From my reading of the Qu’ran, one of the key features is the idea of not raising man up to the same level as God - isn’t this risked in when naming so many children after the Prophet, no matter how illustrious the man?By the way, I’m curious how the BBC comes up with the fact that Mohammed (and its variants) is the second-most popular name for UK babies now. It’s hard to make that out from the National Statistics data (I shall check properly at some point).
Without the excessive veneration issue, what remains is that you have an object named ‘Mohammed’. So, why should anyone care about that? There is the obvious idea that it just an insult, a sort of Golliwog: offensive, especially in our sensitive times, but hardly a death sentence? And anyway, Gibbons looks like a revival of the sort of Victorian gentlewoman adventurer that travelled to Eastern shores in times past, and therefore almost certainly (like myself) an Islamophile of sorts. It seems harsh to ask for the death of a bumbling close friend. All that is left then is that some people really seem to fear an inanimate object with a particular name, as if it could steal some of the power from the object of their veneration. Like the iconoclastic Puritans, this view is virtually animistic, and therefore by its nature opposite to the basic tenets of Islam. In some ways, it has parallels to the nutters who opposed ‘Jerry Springer, the Opera’. I can call these people nutters because they’re Christians, by the way…
But what do I know? Like Gillian Gibbons, I am just a bumbling Brit; I would appreciate some explaining to me what the fuss is all about.
Of course, it could be plain old conspiracy: the whole thing was set up by the school secretary, and then capitalised on by some pressure group. As Shami Chakrabarti has pointed out, there’s no such thing as a spontaneous demonstration.
So, in summary, I’m calling by teddy bear Jesus. I’m taking him to church on Sunday; I hope no-one minds.
(note: the author has strong views on religion. How much does your interpretation of the above opinions depend on whether you think I am atheist, Christian, Muslim, or even Buddhist?)