Norman Ralph

Questival is an annual festival that is put on by the AHS to celebrate the ideas of skepticism and rational thinking. Featuring speakers such as Julian Baggini and Michael Marshall and performers like Matt Parker and Jonny Berliner the weekend long event attracted young people from across the UK.

Having missed its predecessors in the Yorkshire Dales, it was with some excitement that I made my way to Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire to join forty other free thinkers. At this point I must add my sincerest thanks to David and Peter from the Bradford University Atheist and Humanist Society for sorting me out with a lift down from Leeds! I arrived a little after eleven in the evening on Friday to be greeted with some bean chili and a glass of Glenfiddich and rest of the Questivillains (the collective noun according to the organisers) partying like it was 1999. I had booked my spot at Questival quite late so I had turned up without a camping spot but quickly found an old friend from university who had some room in his tent and after I had dumped my stuff I quickly joined in the party.

The theme of the main shenanigans seemed to be worms (the sleepover classic of wriggling around in your sleeping bags pretending to be worms) and the quote of weekend was soon to follow:

Andrew is the egg, everyone sperm him!
- Mark Wonnacott

The drinking and conversing continued late into the night (and the next morning by all accounts) with topics ranging from whether Socrates was a figment of Plato’s imagination to whether Oli had comfortable thighs and ankles. I gave up to hit the sack just after midnight due to the fact I had been at work and travelling all day.

The mob was awoken early Saturday morning for a breakfast of sausages and bacon (and their vegetarian equivalents) that was incredibly welcome by those that had taken the partying too seriously the night before. The rest of us wanted to fuel up ready for a full day of events. We started off with a gentle stroll into Tewkesbury that involved a water crossing! The nearest bridge to cross the Avon was several miles away, so the Questival team had organised canoes to ferry the forty-odd people from one side to the other. Despite the inherent risks of putting many people in small, unstable canoes everyone made it without getting too wet and those of us that thought the crossing was hard work were in for a surprise when we were presented the most fiendishly difficult treasure hunt I have ever been faced with!

Splitting into a number of teams we set about trying to solve numerical, general knowledge, observational and physical challenges to try and unlock the secret to the philosopher’s tome (the prize turned out to be a signed copy of Professor Grayling’s The Good Book). Unfortunately, the team I was in struggled to solve the final puzzle, so settled for second prize – that of getting to the pub early! We were slowly joined by the other teams and managed to quaff our fair share of some good ale and cider before setting off back to the festival site for an afternoon of speakers and performers.

Due to a scheduling incident, the weekend’s first speaker, Julian Baggini, failed to show up but the BHA’s faith school coordinator, and former AHS President, Richy Thompson, and skeptic and 10:23 founder, Michael Marshall, stepped into the breach to talk about campaigning from both a national and grass roots level. This was followed by a presentation by the founders of the fantastic Pod Delusion about skeptical landscape and how social and internet media are used to provide balance to the “crackpots”. The talk also laid the foundation for a special live recording of a Pod Delusion podcast which featured some great segments on epigenetics, cyber security, the STEM project and a wonderful summary of the energy industry’s portrayal in the media by an insider codenamed “Steve”. The evening was rounded off by the self-styled standup mathematician Matt Parker who did a meta-gig (a gig about his other gigs) that covered everything from his uncanny ability to predict barcodes, how many times we would need to shuffle a deck of cards to see every possible combination and other fun maths stuff. He had the room in stitches and if anyone gets the opportunity to go and see him then you should jump at it! Many of the attendees then hit the bar at the campsite and spent the night drinking and dancing and wondering if Gordon Swayze was just a figment of their imagination.

Sunday was a little less frantic as we started off with a leisurely breakfast followed by the rescheduled Julian Baggini talking about logical fallacies with reference to news and media stories. The talk struck the right balance between philosophical technicality and layman application. Despite being at a number of events where he has spoken, I have never actually heard Julian talk live. He is an engaging speaker with a real knack of selling logical argument and critical thinking. The early afternoon was then taken up with a variety of activities ranging from archery to sailing to making graven images of gods. The final act of the weekend was a musical performance from the simply brilliant Jonny Berliner whose quirky science and maths based songs had people gasping fro breath whilst tapping their feet. I bought his single and EP on the spot and he is definitely a name to look out for!

My good friend Andrew got married earlier this month in Jamaica and, due to the costs involved in getting out there, I wasn’t able to go to his wedding in person. I felt quite bad about the fact I couldn’t share in their happy occasion so started to think about what I could do to make it up to him when I noticed that my work were offering box seats to go and see Taylor Swift perform live at Manchester’s MEN Arena. Andrew is a big Swift fan so I entered the competition (having had to Google the answer to the question) and lo and behold I won a pair of tickets.

I am not what anyone would call a Taylor Swift fan, prior to entering the competition I was only vaguely aware she existed, mainly through Andrew’s fanboy ranting, and had heard maybe one song. So it was with some trepidation that I boarded the train in Leeds heading for Manchester Victoria. Andrew made the trip a lot easier by bringing along a bottle of Wray and Nephew overproof rum which we mixed with some apple juice (not my choice, but was actually really good at hiding the killer after taste of overproof rum).

We rolled up the box at about half seven and settled into our free Spanish chicken and pasta meal and the free bar. There was a Scottish pop duo supporting Taylor that had some catchy melodies but were nothing I would write home about. The overwhelming sensation from the build up to the main event was how young a lot of the audience were. Andrew and I have a combined age in the mid fifties, so we were significantly older than most of the people there to watch the gig (ignoring their parents).

Taylor Swift was actually really good live. Not only is she quite beautiful, she can sing and dance and also plays guitar, piano and ukulele. Increasingly rare in the manufactured pop world, Taylor also writes some of her own material. Her songs are not brilliant, a little cliched in places and clearly aimed at the teen market she didn’t quite sell the sentiment of her songs to me. Where she excells, though, is in how she performs. Taylor is a master on stage. She had the audience eating from the palm of her hand and was literally conducting them to her tune. As a live act, Taylor ranks up along Muse and Marilyn Manson in her ability to manipulate and motivate an audience into going on the concert journey with her.

2010 started quietly for me on the blogging front, apart from my Twitter updates my first real blog post was about the 10:23 Homeopathy Overdose Project (which I was unfortunately unable to attend due to work commitments) and my strongly worded letter to David Cameron.

February was another quiet month on the blog front although I did spend a week in the Lakes and come hoem to find my house was flooded which left me without a PC for nearly a month.

March saw me foolishly making some long term plans about future living arrangements as well as celebrating Normanralph.com’s 3rd birthday. I also gave up my car to cut down on costs and get ready for city centre living.

A good friend of mine was deported in April and threatened with death on his return to his native Pakistan. Leeds Atheist Society ran Reason Week 2010 and I started following Major League Soccer.

In May I spent a lot of time preparing for my speaking engagement at CWF’s Enquiry conference in Birmingham. I also split up with my partner and moved in with Chris and George.

June was world cup month, so the less said about it the better, but I was hardly in a celebrating mood following the events of the previous month.

I spent most of July running around the country with work, really throwing myself in to my job.

Blackpool started their Premier League campaign during August and I started to really get ready for my trip of a lifetime. The month finished with a really great weekend with Sarann at Solfest.

Eurotrip 2010 took up September. In three weeks Chris, Kieran, George and I took in Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Munich, Salzburg, Venice, Verona, St Gallen, Montreux, Monte Carlo and Jard-Sur-Mer. I also turned 26.

October was a catching up month. I was working a lot to pay off Europe and to make sure that I got my best ever performance review to date.

I was off around the country again in November. Taking in an audience with Greg Epstein and a load of gigs.

December saw me celebrate the success story of Blackpool FC’s season in the Premier League so far as well as the contribution made by their manager. I also found time to go and see Tim Minchin thank god for Sam’s Mum’s Cateracts.

As you can see, it has been a mixed bag of a year. Some real highs in the form of Eurotrip and the number of gigs I’ve managed to catch, but also some real lows.

I think 2011 might be OK, there are some things that I am already really excited about seeing how they pan out as well as some concrete plans to go to Dublin, Malta and maybe even back to Verona over the summer. I also have some great work to do with some of the organisations I support i.e. the AHS and BHA as well as continuing to build up my own career and developing some projects of my own.

Here’s to you 2011.

I finally got to go and see Tim Minchin at the end of last week. Tim is a fantastic comedian who mixes satire and song in a unique clash of witty and intelligent humour.

I am always wary of comedy done in large venues, so it was with some trepidation that I accepted Chris’s invite to go and see Tim at the MEN Arena in Manchester. I have long been a fan of Tom’s brand of comedy and some of his songs in particular have significant personal meaning – mainly due to their atheist and skeptical nature – but also on a purely musical level.

One of my other big concerns was that with his mix of rock and comedy, how would he fit in new material that comedy fans demand (remember the Eddie Izzard incident a few years back) but also sate his fan’s desire to hear the classic songs of previous tours?

He didn’t disappoint. The gig was simply fantastic, the best I have been to all year without a shadow of a doubt. I took away aching sides and a new favourite song! I think his use of the 55 piece symphony orchestra was the icing on the cake, although I felt he over used it on a couple of songs and under used it on others, buy this is the first tour he has done with it so i think he will get better at using it going forwards.

When I wrote a blog post about Blackpool winning the English Championship play-off final with the title “Blackpool for the Champions League”, I was writing somewhat tongue in cheek, I could not have imagined that they would actually go out and perform the way they have done. The English Premier League season is nearly half way through and Blackpool lie in 12th place on 19 points. Blackpool are not going to qualify for a Champions League spot from here, but it is highly likely they will avoid relegation which is a major feat in itself as they were by some margin the bookie’s favourite to go down at the start of the season (average price around 2/7). I have to admit that I was cautious at the start of the season about the team’s prospects, especially after the summer transfer activity that Ian Holloway undertook. It seemed to take an age for him to make any signings at all and with him releasing a large number of players at the start of the off-season, I was worried that he would struggle to bring in any players. Ian Holloway said at the time that we was looking for the right sort of player with the right mentality to fit into his system, a system that many thought would contribute to the team’s downfall. Ian Holloway prefers an attacking style of play, as seen in the Championship play-off, and tends to employ an “we’ll score one more that you” approach. Eventually Holloway made some signings, which included picking up strikers DJ Campbell (Leicester) and Marlon Harewood (Aston Villa) along with Elliot Grandin (free), Chris Basham (Bolton Wanderers) and Luke Varney (on loan from Derby County).

Even with the additions to the ranks, most pundits thought Blackpool would struggle in their first Premier League season (and first in the top flight since the 1970s). Few would have predicted the start that Blackpool got off to beating Wigan by four goals to nil. The result actually led to Blackpool sitting in top spot in the league for a couple of hours until Chelsea won their opening game of the season by a bigger goal margin. This start could not last and a couple of games later Blackpool were dumped out the League Cup and then humbled by Chelsea at Stamford Bridge. However, wins against Newcastle, Liverpool, West Brom and Wolves have meant that Blackpool avoided the possibility of ending the season on the lowest ever points total and also ensured that pundits started changing their minds about them even getting relegated.

Before I get ahead of myself, I think it is important to mention that this is still going to a very tough season for Blackpool and if they do manage to avoid relegation this season, it is a real probability next year. Blackpool will always struggle to attract quality players, it is not the most attractive club in the world and it has no money so will never be able to match the wages that teams around them can offer to journeymen and promising lower league players. The stadium, Bloomfield Road, is also a massive problem due its size and the lack of expandability. With a capacity at the moment of around 12000, it is the smallest ground in the league and will never generate the kind of match day income that the club will need to survive. The Blackpool hierarchy need to sort this out and sort it out pretty fast if they have any real chance of ensuring their continued stay at English football’s top table.

Where Blackpool have a fighting chance at the moment is their manager, Ian Holloway. Seen as a bit of a joker and an average journeyman coach/manager by most, he has transformed Blackpool in his relatively short tenure as Blackpool boss. His attacking philosophy and ability to make players play at a level higher than their underlying ability may allow are the reason that Blackpool won promotion the Premier League and their performances in the league so far. Holloway has a habit of adding extra attackers during games he is already winning, and often plays with three or four attacking players in his formations. Both of these tactics were obvious in Blackpool’s now famous victory over Liverpool in October.

The other ace in Blackpool’s hand is their skipper and last season’s top goalscorer, Charlie Adam. Signed for a once club record of £500,000 from Rangers, Adam has quickly become the keystone in Blackpool’s team. His goals, set pieces and on field leadership are vital for the team and Blackpool look a far weaker team when he is missing. Whilst at Rangers, Adam was never considered a particularly good player. He had a strong left foot but was deemed surplus to requirements at Ibrox. Many fans, myself included, questioned his move to Blackpool but we have been ecstatic to have been proved wrong!

By the New Year we should know whether Blackpool are going to stay up this season. They have a testing series of fixtures over the festive period, playing Liverpool, Man City, Sunderland, Tottenham and a very tough game away at Stoke. If Blackpool can come out of that series of games with four or five points then they will be a win or two away from securing their position for the 2011-2012 season.

Come on the Tangerines!

I have been itching to really get to grips with unleashing the power of my Blackberry device since I upgraded earlier this year. It seems this itch has taken a back seat as I have been busy with other things. That is until now.

The last week or so I have been experimenting with what applications I add to really make a difference to how I would normally interact with my phone or with the world at large. The Blackberry app market is not as saturated as the iPhone apps market, nor is it as easy to navigate and find the apps that you may be interested in. However, the apps themselves are as powerful as those for the iPhone and come with the massive benefit of not having to own an iPhone to use!

I am sure that as time goes on I will find soem more apps to add, but for the time being I have gone for a relatively small selection that really make a big difference:

WordPress for Blackberry – a fantastic app that allows full access to my wordpress blogs without needing to enter via the browser. This means you can write and edit the draft offline then when you are happy with the end result publish it in seconds. The features are pretty powerful and the UI is not bad to look at. Needs a little more work on the higher end functionality like adding media etc, but for text based blogging it is far easier than using the email functionality in wordpress!
Facebook – no Blackberry is really compelte without a social networking app. i have not yet worked out how to get it to tell me about new event invites, but it does let me synch existing events with my BB calendar.
Viigo – this RSS and news aggregator is a fantastic bit of kit. Took less than 5 mins to set up all the feeds I subscribe to and it also includes suggestions of related sites and feeds. The best bit about it is the almost complete control you have over how it displays your information. This really helps to prevent info overload!
Google Maps – BB based version of the popular web based mapping software. Ties in nicely with the BB GPS system.
Windows Live Messenger – a BB version of the IM software.
Gmail – Again, the BB app verison of the webmail service from Google. I actually don’t use it so much as I have my gmail accounts set up within the email system, but a useful backup none the less.

There is a saying that goes “another day, another dollar” and it seems only fitting that I begin my review of 2008 with a quote regarding time and money. 2008 has been a mixed bag of a year, like most years it cam with its ups and downs. The news stories of the year reflect this, with Team GB performing heroics in Beijing and then the economic issues of the last quarter. I hope the rest of this post reflects this theme.

January
Exams were the order of the day at the opening of 2008. never a good start. Although this particular bunch of exams went pretty well and helped set up a relatively successful second semester on my new course. A-Soc kicked off its second full year with its first event of 2008, the low turnout not indicating the successes to follow. January aslo saw Chris finally lose his virginity at Wendy House.

February
Darwin Day 2008 was supposed to be the highlight of February, but it got somewhat overshadowed by Sarann’s secret affair! The planning of Rationalist Week seems to get earlier and earlier and we officially kicked off the organisation of A-Soc’s flagship event on the 13th February. Somehow, I also managed to fit in a well deserved few days away with Liz in the lake District – you cannot beat walking, relaxing and real ale by the fire to wash away exam and coursework stress! The Union’s political machinations also culminated with me being dubbed “Norman the No! Man” due to my inability to sit back and watch debates go undebated, regardless of my actual view points.

March
One of the coups of 2008 came when Si finally succumbed to peer pressure and started blogging! In another blow for democracy, my decision to stand for Faith and Culture rep for the Union was rebuked as I was effectively blocked from standing (or voting). My main memory of March, however, was the setting up of Secular Portal, which would ultimately turn into my current project, the AHS.

April
Rationalist Week 2008. Need I say much more about how awesome April was? Except for everything that went wrong it was a great success! The icing on the cake was being elected president of A-Soc at the AGM. We managed to recruit a decent sized committee and really was the icing on the cake as far as the success of A-Soc in the first half of 2008.

May
it seems I didn’t blog about very much in May. Probably down to the exams etc that I was taking, along with recovering from April!

June
I started work with O2 at the beginning of June and spent most of the month training for my new role. I did manage to squeeze in a few social activities too, brewing my own ale for the SoC graduation reception was a particular highlight. I also went to see Avril Lavigne perform in Manchester, which was also pretty awesome. I also moved out of the house I had lived in for three of my four years at university.

July
Work and parties seemed to be the order of the day this month in 2008.

I’m going to stop splitting up the months for the second half of 2008 as I didn’t actually spend much time bloggine. Really, I worked near enough all summer – managing a day off for V Festival – either at O2 or putting together Intro Week for A-Soc.

Part of me thinks I should write here what happened in the couple of months I wasn’t blogging, but I feel that it wouldn’t do it justice. It wasn’t until December that I began blogging again, inspired by the relaunch of the site and our end of year festivities.

Hopefully, I will continue this new found blogging activity into 2009.

My marks out of ten for 2008 as a year, a good 7.

If you haven’t had chance to check out Chris’s new podcasts then you really should!

They are seriosuly funny and so unproffessional that it just makes them even funnier!

Check them out!

I’ve never been to one of the mainstream festivals before – Leeds/Reading, V Fest, Glastonbury etc. This is for several reasons, firstly the cost – £150 for a festival is too expensive, secondly there is the fact that they are massively ovwercrowded – 30000 people is just too many, finally there is the stigma. I usually don’t see myself as a music snob, but it seems that the sort of music fans that attend the mainstream festivals are the sort of music fan that pisses people off.

Having said all that, Muse were playing V Fest this year and, for those of you that don’t know, my girlfriend Liz is obsessed with them. The moment she heard they were playing she booked two tickets for the day they were headlining at the Staffordshire version of the festival. This mean attending one of the festivals I never thought I would, especially since the escapades of last summer!

We got up early on the Sunday, leaving about 9am to drive the 130 miles from Leeds to Weston Park, near Cannock, Staffordshire. The drive was pretty uneventful and there were no jams getting into the venue. The queueing wasn’t too bad to get into the actual arena either – maybe 20 minutes. Once in the arena we headed over to the main stage area to try and camp out for the headliners so we would be near(ish) the front. We managed to get to the first few rows right in the middle for the first few acts – The Futureheads, Alannis Morrisette, Lostprophets and Maximo Park. Unfortuantely, as mentioned above the sort of music fans that attend these festivals are prats, so after about 5 hours of getting squashed, beaten, crushed, kicked and being generally uncomfortable (and the fact that I had managed to lose my mobile telephone for the first time in nearly 10 years) we abandoned our position and fled the main stage area. We rustled ourselves up ome food – which considering the fact we were at a festival was not too over priced. We managed to find a place that did a giant Yorkshire pudding filled with sausage, mash, onions and gravy for a fiver! We also managed to find somewhere to sit amongst all the mud.

After queueing for a while to use the “toilets” and having missed The Kooks’ set. We headed back for the headliners. We didn’t go so deep into the crowd, but found ourselves a nice little spot not too far back where we could enjoy the music and see the stage without fear for our lives. The first headline act were the Stereophonics. They were absolutely awesome live. Kelly Jones really knows how to work the crowd and their back catelogue is impressive. I know it’s a festival and bands play their singles but I really had hoped they would play a few of the album tracks! Muse were the second headline act and they know how to put ona show. I am not the world’s biggest Muse fan – most of it is just noise – but they are good live, if only for their light and special effects show! Six giant satellites mounted with lasers and spotlights aodrned or surrounded the stage!! All in all a fun day, except for the hour or so queue in the mud to get out of the car park – but even that wasn’t as bad as I had expected.

Pleasently surprised is probably the right phrase. I wouldn’t pay to go back again, but if the chance arose to attend for the day again for free then I would probably think about and it would depend on who was playing.

Keep an eye out for more detailed reviews of the sets people played.

You may or may not be aware that Mozilla have recently launched their latest offering from the Firefox web browser series. Version 3 contains, according to the official website, over 15,000 improvements on its predecesser. Now I haven’t really got under the hood of it yet, but I have noticed a few of them – namely the interface is quite different. It doesn’t strike you straight away, but when you go to click where you are used to clicking and either a) nothing happens or b) the wrong thing happens can get quite annoying. After a little while when you get used to the new interface then things start looking up. Chris, on his flashy new website, mentions in his review about the fact that Firefox 3 doesn’t leech all your memory and other system resources. Now although I never experienced this with Firefox 2.x, I have noticed that the overall memory footprint is reduced as well as seemingly making fewer demands on processor and hard disk space too. It is still a little early to make proper judgements on it and no doubt I will in the future.

On the whole though, here is to another decent product that is available as open source (which will keep Kieran happy if nothing else)!