I was going to do you something oh so technical about peak oil and global warming, but then Zombizi came to your rescue by sending me this list of The World's Most Ridiculous Sports Team Names. The author, one Christina A, is American, and with some exceptions she sticks to the Transatlantic sports scene. Our Scottish readers may be disconcerted to note that she has omitted Fife and Forfar, but we shall forgive her. They're not funny in isolation, and being American there's no way she would remember the game that finished Fife 4 Forfar 5, or the difficulties it created for the poor man reading out the scores on Grandstand.

No, she is quite right to eschew the delights of lower league Scottish football and focus on what she knows. This mostly means teams from the kind of small town schools and colleges that think they can name their own teams just fine without hiring in some fancy dan sports consultants from the big city. They can't, obviously. There are conventions to the naming of teams, which some get and some just don't. Not getting them at all is bad, but nearly getting them is far worse.

Several teams for instance have the word Fighting inappropriately added to their name. I was especially taken with The Columbia College Fighting Koalas, although apparently that's not as oxymoronic as you might think, according to commenter Sydney Joe. He says, and a cursory check in Wikipedia backs him up, that koalas are more dangerous than we've been led to believe. Koalas have a temper, he says. I've seen the remains (in real life) of a German shepherd dog dismantled, literally shredded, by an angry male koala.

I'm not sure how much that helps with the impact of the name though. And no commenters mounted any such defence of the Scottsdale Community College Fighting Artichokes. The UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs, on the other hand, seem to have passed up the opportunity to call themselves the Fighting Banana Slugs. Banana slugs look like this, and in my view any lack of menace is due entirely to scale.

Across the Pacific things become more abstract. If you lean to the abstract, and I think you do, the next time you're in Bangkok you might go and watch top soccer team The Thailand Tobacco Monopoly. As Christina says, Being named after a tobacco company would be pretty hilarious in itself. But being named after the concept of the tobacco business being dominated by one corporate entity without any competition, this is truly a masterstroke. Unfortunately, thirty seconds on Google reveals that the Thailand Tobacco Monopoly are in fact a company who have acquired their own football team, but we can all pretend we didn't know that.

I've waited until now to lower the tone, because tone lowering should always be carefully timed, but at last the moment is here. So let's all celebrate the Butte Pirates. And from our lowered vantage point we can also see Peruvian footballers Deportivo Wanka, who were apparently bemused by their reception on their English tour, the more contrived Rhode Island School of Design Nads (whose team cheer is Go Nads!), and my personal favourite, the Chattanooga Purple Pounders.

From the NFL, there's always the Cleveland Browns. Nothing obviously comical beyond the tiresomely scatological, but it's nice to learn that the US equivalent of dropping the kids off at the pool is taking the Browns to the Superbowl.

And I've always had a soft spot for Young Boys Bern, if only because it must be so awkward to say you're scouting for them, but I never knew before that they played at the Wankdorf Stadium. All together now, we are the Wankdorf boys, the Wankdorf boys, the Wankdorf boys ...

My lovely readers. May you all be Wankdorf till you die.

The Bristol Blogger highlights a new initiative called Chooseday. The idea is that Tuesday should be the day on which you choose not to drive your car.

It's all very polite on their website, and they've been very careful to eliminate any association with radicals. Chooseday will not set out to disrupt the workings of the city, they say on their Values page, in a clear attempt to distance themselves from more interventionist environmental groups. Their top names are a mixture of Labour Party and business people.

But they clearly want things to be mildly different. Imagine the streets going quiet, people emerging from their houses, to a new kind of city, they say. I did experience that once, actually. The anti-IKEA people were having a demo, and the police had blocked traffic from the whole area. I was going to Tesco's to get my groceries, and walked there and back in an eerie calm. It was wonderful. While I was shopping, Tesco's locked their doors so the dangerous radicals couldn't get in, which meant the eerie calm extended to the actual shopping as well. Thanks, protesting people. If you're stuck for a campaign, I'm very concerned about the level of pollution on all the roads from my house to the pub.

No such methods for Chooseday, though. They just want you to stay out of your car for the day.

But what's this? The Bristol Blogger says they're funded by Agora. Agora have Values too, although they seem to have them slightly muddled with Events. They have one event coming up (oh dear, it happened a fortnight ago, do try and keep these things up to date), deliberately engaging with Christian spirituality and big picture visions concerning climate change and the environment. Hang on, what was that again?

Yes, it turns out that Agora is a Christian charity, headed by the Reverend Chris Sunderland. For instance, their site has a story called The Prodigal Civilisation - a story based around the Prodigal Son, but about a civilisation that 'squandered its inheritance' - about oil addiction, climate change and the environment.

I'm not against all this, actually. Whatever we might make of the people who think the voices in their head are real, and however much I enjoy calling them that, we are talking about most of the people on the planet. Eventually we can hope to change that, but in the medium term it does make sense to work with the ones whose voices are telling them to save that planet, if we want there to be an ongoing human society for us to bicker over.

To quote Sunderland's comment on the Bristol Blogger's website, Eighteen months ago Agora’s trustees decided we should commit the majority of our work to climate change, it being about the most serious issue that the human species has ever faced. When you think of the churches who seem to think humanity's most urgent challenge is the Holy War Against Sodomy, that's (comparatively) nice to read. He also says that Agora does do some work with churches, but Chooseday is a completely non-aligned initiative, that is, it owes nothing to, nor is trying to promote any major city institution, political party or faith community. And I'd be the last person to characterise Christians as the kind of people who think calling something Choose Day is really funny.

But they should say who they are.  Are they funded mainly or entirely by religious organisations? It reminds me of going on a demo and finding the Socialist Workers have done the placards, and they're all in a suspiciously familiar font. Whenever organisations with widely divergent goals come together in a common front, one of the guiding principles is transparency, and there are good reasons for that.

And I'm not sure about the Corporate messages of support, either. Partly I'm unsure about any organisation that thinks calling messages of support corporate is going to make us warm to them, but mainly I'm unsure because I've visited all thirteen websites and I've not been able to find any reference to Chooseday on any of them, except for Bristol Diocese themselves. To be fair, two were down for maintenance, and you'd hardly expect the RAC Foundation to be helping too enthusiastically, but you might have thought they'd warrant a mention with Sustrans, or Streets Alive, for instance. Apparently not.

So whilst I'm not saying this is a bad campaign, I would like to ask three questions. Does Chooseday receive any money from non-Christian sources? Does secular involvement in the campaign extend any further than getting quotes to go on the website? And if not, did the people quoted know they were backing a Christian campaign when they backed it?

I don't want to seem negative about a positive initiative, and they don't seem to be using it as a mechanism for religious propaganda, but I do think we should given answers to these questions. If it is a Christian initiative, then well done and all that, but stop hiding your light under that bushel.

Guardian blogger Anna Pickard has asked for advice with her organic vegetable box, so I wrote this for her and put it in the comments. She describes herself as a kitchen klutz, but I expect she's just flattering the smartarses so they will give her some tips. What she hasn't realised is that by asking the kind of people who treat cooking like a Japanese tea ceremony she's opening up a can of finely seasoned worms she doesn't want to saute. Or something. Here, then, is dinner for one from the real world.

Get up in the morning. Put the oven on at 200 degrees C. Put some brown lentils in a casserole dish. Boil a kettle, and tip the water that doesn't go in the cafetiere all over the lentils. Just guess the amount. Throw in some random stuff from the spice rack. I like to shuffle the spices, line them up, count from the left, and throw some in every time I come to a prime number. Contrary to what cooks tell you, it really doesn't matter, as all spices are the same.

This always works. Yes it does. Eat it while watching Heston Blumenthal feeding fish batter through a soda siphon or some such nonsense.

If she has a partner, she should cook twice as much. It's not rocket science. And I never thought of course she has a partner, the nice ones always do. You won't find that kind of coarse defeatism here. All my defeatism is fine grain. Incidentally, vegetables which don't come out of a special box with mud in it work just as well, plus they clean them for you.

I hope she finds it useful. I actually love watching Heston Blumenthal, in the same spirit as I might enjoy watching beardy posh blokes cross the Antarctic on tin trays pulled by ferrets. You know there's no point, but the absence of a point just isn't the point.

And congratulations to the Boston Red Sox, who are now World Series champions despite Jesus. Channel 5 added Phil Jupitus to the commentary team, and he said that Stephen Fry and Alan Davies were both fans. My joy is complete.

Well, we won again, and we're still second. I just don't know how to handle it.

I walked to the stadium. It's nearly an hour's walk, but I felt like stretching my legs. On the way over I saw two men hunched over an A to Z, and deduced they must be Stoke fans. I showed them the way, and we compared seasons.

This has happened to me a few times on the way to games, and I always enjoy it when it does. That whole thing about rival English football fans fighting all the time is a bit passe these days. Oh, there's taunting during the games. The fans are segregated, and some like to gibber and flaunt at each other, but there's always a line of police between them. Which is why they do it, obviously. Outside the stadium, where taunting has the potential to lead to some kind of fisticuffs, you rarely see any.

Most of the away fans come by bus, so they never actually come face to face with City fans, but there's always a few who come by train or live locally. In all the games I've been to, this led to trouble precisely once. I missed the initial incident, but I did see a Middlesbrough fan flat on the ground with a heaving mound of policemen on him. My first instinct was that the fan had fallen over and one of the policemen had shouted 'all pile on!', but apparently he'd provoked their intervention by being a bit naughty. What kind of naughty I'm not sure, but I think it was somewhere between a ruck and a maul.

In the stadium yesterday, fairly much all the taunting and flaunting was saved for the Stoke manager, Tony Pulis. He was City's manager for six months back in 1999, and recently won a poll for the least popular manager in the history of the club. When I mentioned this to the Stoke fans, they said he'd been voted their least popular manager ever as well.

Pulis took a different angle. He told the BBC that he was brought up a Rovers player and it was always going to be difficult transferring allegiance when I became City manager, thus implying that we disliked him for reasons of local rivalry.

This was not the case. No-one I spoke to even mentioned his past with Rovers. He was remembered as a manager with a taste for defensive, boring football that sent everyone to sleep. Yesterday he turned up with a very tall team with a natural talent for the blatant foul but no obvious ball skills, and it reminded everyone of the bad old days.

Our team aren't the tallest, bless them, and they realised there was no point playing the long ball. Almost by default they were forced back on the passing game, and very elegant it was too, like watching a pack of hyenas run rings round some giraffes. Elliott scored a wonder goal, and I remembered not to Dare to Hope.

I was asked why Daring to Hope was such a problem. It all goes back to the Roman era, and a philosopher and man of letters called Seneca. His work was based on the observation of other upper class Romans around him, who despite living in the lap of luxury, with massive wealth and slaves to indulge their every whim, didn't seem as happy as they might have been. His said this was because their good fortune encouraged them to set their expectations beyond anything real life could ever deliver, and that if they could learn to expect less they'd be happier.

I'm sure you've immediately spotted the main problem with the argument, which is that in real life results are not independent of your expectations. If you're not confident about getting the job, you're less likely to get it. If you feel threatened walking home at night, you're more likely to be attacked.

The success or otherwise of your sports team, however, is almost entirely independent of your expectations, which is why fans have such a deep sense of pessimism. Some fans haven't even read all Seneca's writings, but on some level we are all aware of the absurdity of our position, filling an entire layer of our happiness trifle with essentially trivial events we have no influence over when we could be filling it with custard, so we compensate for our inability to control the team by exercising a rigid control over our attitude to the team. By refusing to indulge hubris, we feel that we negate the possibility of nemesis. We don't, of course, events roll on exactly as they would otherwise have done, but in our minds we've participated in the collective drama.

From the sublime Seneca and Bristol City, to Christians in baseball. You may remember I said a few weeks ago that my heart was with the Red Sox, but the cold, dead hand of statistics was pointing with bony finger straight at the Yankees. Well, the Yankees went out in the first round of the playoffs, and the Red Sox are 3-0 in the World Series. It's the best out of seven, so one more win does it. Strike up another victory for Not Daring to Hope. Unless - but no. Just no, OK?

Not that irrationality in baseball always works. Look at the Colorado Rockies, for instance. They think they're batting for Jesus. Their owner, half the staff and some of their star players are Bible bashers of the most trying kind. To quote their general manager, Dan O'Dowd, You look at some of the games we're winning. Those aren't just a coincidence. God has definitely had a hand in this.

So it gives me great pleasure to report that it's Colorado that the Red Sox are 3-0 up against. Battling bravely against Matt Holliday, a strong bull pen and God Almighty, they've scored 25 runs to 7 conceded, and could wrap it up tonight. The last Colorado batter ground out after a shattered bat, which Jesus perhaps intended to symbolise the breaking of his body upon the cross. Or some nonsense. Just make it up as you go along, it's what they do.

Teleological nonsense aside, though, I do enjoy the baseball. To compare it to rounders, as some English people do, is to miss the complexity and intensity of it. Did you play rounders at school? What was your Earned Run Average? When batting, what was your On Base Percentage? Well bugger off then.

But I would like to complain about a couple of things. Firstly, the nationalism. It's all very well having the national anthem at Cup Finals, but you really don't need it every game. At World Series games they actually have two national anthems - The Star Spangled Banner, which at least has a bit of history in it (although it's always worth mentioning that the American War of Independence was actually a military victory for the French), and then at halftime, which for some reason comes three quarters of the way through, the nauseating piece of shit which is God Save America. If they sang God Save Colorado it would at least be funny.

And the commentators don't seem to be able to get through an inning without reading out some dreary email from Sergeant Redneck, on the USS Warcrime in the Persian Gulf somewhere. Give it a rest, guys. We know about Abu Ghraib even if you don't.

Even worse than the Gott Mitt Uns nationalism is the chewing. Gum, nuts, sesame seeds, the mastication never stops. And bubble blowing, and spitting. If they really must, then at least the cameras could stop zooming in on it.

But I shouldn't nitpick. After all, the Red Sox are about to win the World Series (there, I've said it), City are second and Leeds won again to move into the playoff places in League One - a remarkable performance by them under the circumstances, which completes my trilogy of cautious joy. Go me!

It's a slow day again today, I'm afraid, because I'm off to the football in a minute. I just wanted to mention that 235 of you dropped by yesterday. Tell fifteen of your friends, and then I'm into the Band B of blogging. Sort of like council tax, but free.

Like the junk mail, I promise you greater length soon.

When I'm not hiding in here I'm an adult education tutor. I don't write about it much though, for two good reasons. Firstly I'm not allowed to humiliate my students in public for some reason, even if they're what's known in the trade as challenging. Secondly, so much of what I do is paperwork that writing about it would be really tedious for you to read, and more importantly for me to write. And I do so abhor tedium, as you know.

Fifteen years ago there were few forms, but since then they've multiplied. Schemes of work, session plans, record of achievement sheets, evaluation forms, individual learning plans, enrolment forms, course information sheets, course summary sheets, I'm sure by now you're taking the point about tedium. Never mind you, though, what about muggins here filling them all in?

I used to think I understood bureaucratic proliferation. I used to think it was because each new local government management team celebrated their appointment by creating a new form, and over the decades they accreted like guano on a Patagonian cliff top. Now, though, I've decided something more sinister is happening.

Incidentally, did you know the Latin word sinister meant left handed? The word for right handed is dexter, which gives us dextrous. Bigotry really is as old as the hills. Actually by geological standards most British hills are quite young, but that's another story.

I'm imagining something sinister in the sense of unnerving, though. My explanation for the rise and rise of the tickbox is that the British state has been suborned by a secret conspiracy of obsessive compulsives. Twenty years ago sufferers started to organise therapy and self-help groups, and looking at society at large it must have struck them as incredibly sloppy, with a shocking failure to constantly count things. If there's one thing you can rely on obsessives for it's focus, so infiltrating themselves into the machinery of government must have been child's play.

And it can't be hard to persuade civil servants they need more data. After all, if data isn't important what's the point of their jobs? When did any ministerial flunky ever get the sack for suggesting a new round of consultation? Where I live, in the project-rich inner city, it's got so you're as busy dodging clipboard huggers as you are joyriders.

Now I know what you're thinking - if there's anything in this conspiracy theory, why is this the first time I've ever heard it suggested? Honestly, how can you be so naive? Just think about this. We know that obsessive compulsives started to get organised back in the Eighties. We also know they're really good at attention to detail and share a strongly defined world view. How likely is it that they have never ever tried to take over the reins of government? And wouldn't we have heard about it if they'd failed?

The very lack of evidence for such a conspiracy, when viewed in this light, is the strongest indicator that it must have succeeded. If we had any reason to believe it, it would actually be much less plausible.

Of course, it's not just Britain. Even to think it might be would be to live in a fool's paradise. The paper trail stretches across the world, and now its tendrils curve through cyberspace as well. I've decided to break cover to warn you of the threat, but now I'm going to have to go to ground. Expect only occasional posts from now on, typed in the back of a dirty van (they couldn't bear to look in it) and piggybacked on the carrier wave of a stolen wifi connection. Tell your friends, but not the tidy ones. And bin those forms. You know it makes sense.

You didn't get anything again yesterday, because I was out of the house all day. I know some of you are wired in so deep you can add content straight from your neural net with a wave of your virtual fingers, but I only get to access the Internet if I sit in this chair, just here. Like I am today. Dressed, so you can stop that right now.

I had a perfectly nice day without you. Lunch with a friend, then running round town doing things. Those of you who know my hair will be relieved to hear that I've finally got it cut. And to top it off, a City home game. At which I did a Very Silly Thing.

It was all going so well, you see. We scrambled one in from a corner after four minutes, and fifteen minutes later Ivan Sproule scored a wonder goal. He dribbled the length of the field, round several of their defenders and shot delightfully into the bottom corner. Oh how we whooped and hollered.

And that was when it happened. Two-nil up at home, about to go second in the table again, that was when I did it. I Dared to Hope.

I just can't believe I made such a rookie mistake. Surely I should have learnt by now. The inevitable happened. City's defence crumbled, and they just lost their passing game. Southampton were playing in such a lurid yellow kit, you'd have thought their players would have been easy to see, but pass after City pass went straight to them. It was like watching ships rounding Cape Cornwall and making straight for the lighthouses. I suppose to be fair lighthouses don't move around all the time, but really that's the kind of detail they ought to have been prepared for.

Just after half-time Southampton got a goal back, when one of our defenders played a slide rule pass through our defence to one of their forwards. If he'd been playing for them we'd all have been raving about the quality of the pass. There really wasn't anywhere else on the pitch he could have put it so damagingly. For the rest of the game Southampton attacked, getting so many corners it felt like crossing practice.

Whenever we did get the ball, one of two things happened. Either they lost it with a bad pass and a mistimed tackle somewhere round the halfway line, or they hoofed it long for Byfield. Bless him, he's not the tallest, and he seems to have some weird body dysmorphia where he imagines he is. At least, that's the only explanation I can see for his habit of constantly letting the long ball fly six inches over his head.

Fortunately, some of their fans must have dared to hope as well, because somehow a combination of luck, good goalkeeping and terrible finishing stopped them scoring again, and we limped off 2-1 winners.  So now you're thinking come on, you've won, why are you still moaning? How little you understand.

Nonetheless, I shall sign off on a bright note. They do say the sign of a team with real prospects is that they can play poorly and still win, and by that yardstick we're witnessing the birth of champions. And we are second, after all. If this was April, we'd be promoted to the Premiership. I've opened up the league table on a separate tab, and I keep clicking on it just to stare at if for a while. Not with hope, mind you. Never again. I've learned my lesson.

You didn't get anything yesterday, I'm afraid. I had this half written, but then I went to the pub to watch football. Despite being a Spurs fan, Sean said he wanted them to lose so their manager would get the sack. Strangely, when they actually did it didn't seem to make him happy at all. I was all right, I had nachos, and beer. After all my moaning about not doing enough drinking. If I was any more capricious I would actually be a goat.

Lets' set the football aside, though, for it was the rugby World Cup I was writing about. For the benefit of my apathetic or American readers, World Cups happen every four years, and that's about as often as I personally pay any attention to rugby at all. This time it was over before I'd really got the hang of the game. Last World Cup I was beginning to understand why they kicked the ball up and down all the time instead of running with it. I knew the difference between a ruck and a maul, I knew how to tell who got the throw in at lineouts, I even understood why they didn't just constantly kick drop goals all the time and get like sixty points a game or something.

Between World Cups I lapsed back into rugby apathy, of course, just like everyone else, and this time it just seemed inscrutable somehow. The best games were the group games, where teams got extra league points for scoring tries. This gave them some incentive to run, which is the entertaining bit. But then came the knockout phase, and the order of the boot became the order of the day.

To be fair, other games have confusing rules as well. In Australian football they just stop every now and again for no apparent reason. The soccer offside rule is often portrayed as confusing, despite actually being simple and obvious, but the leg before wicket rule in cricket would probably count as a degree subject in some of the newer universities.

And I do have slightly more idea about rugby than zombizi. Being mildly interested in football and fairly apathetic about every other sport, he was rather baffled whilst shopping in a department store a few years ago, when his young son came bounding over joyfully and said Look, Daddy! A box of Lions balls! Disappointingly, it was just the rugby ones.

To be honest, I still think American football is the better game. American sports are like American films, there's plenty of blood but it's always properly choreographed. Football, so chaotic to the untrained eye, has a precise geography of violence. When 'in the pocket' you can head butt innocent quarterbacks in the groin with impunity, but take one step into the secondary and the slightest nudge will earn you the opprobrium of all concerned. I've always thought that kind of zoning should be used more in town planning, and it works on the pitch as well.

Incidentally, today is the anniversary of the Battle of Edge Hill. Growing up near the battlefield, I once reenacted the battle by myself. Being about twelve, and not owning any pikes or halberds, this mainly involved running down the hill very fast and shouting a lot. After a few yards it dawned on me that the hill was so steep there was no easy way to stop running even if I'd wanted to. I decided the best thing to do was to run it out, but just as I got to the bottom of the hill my foot caught on a rock. After a short flight I came down the wrong way up and broke my collar bone.

Not that I realised that at the time. With the casual insouciance of the young and foolish, I just got up and carried with my day. It was only that night I realised there was a problem, because I couldn't get my vest over my head. Casualty was a short trip and a long wait, and I came out with my arm in a sling, making me the last remaining Edge Hill survivor. It still gives me the shivers, mainly due to an adult appreciation of how near the collar bone is to several quite important vertebrae.

Incidentally, the battle was fought in 1642, which makes this year the 365th anniversary. In other words, it's as many years since the battle as there are days in the year. This will also be true of next year, which is a leap year. I might do you something about the English Civil War soon, as it's probably England's most interesting time. Before you go romanticising it, though, it's worth remembering that the Chinese saying about living in interesting times was meant as a curse.

Keep this under your hat, but I 'm a bit worried about my drinking. I hope you can be discreet about this - I don't mind telling you, but I wouldn't want everyone to know.

Yes, it's becoming a concern to me. I just never seem to get round to it. The government medical adviser said the safety limit is eleven pints of beer a week, and I'm not getting anywhere near that. Is this dangerous?

I do keep a bottle of gin in the kitchen in case Bacchus drops by like he used to, but it always seems to be as full as it was the week before. Does gin go off? Is a use it or lose it kind of deal? I've no idea, it's never been an issue before.

But I still have faith. Somehow, some day, I know the urge will return. For I am British, and the only dry thing about us is our wit. We've been a nation of drinkers since the first time a Celt downed a pint of mead in one, and got to use the Roman skull it was served in as his personal tankard. We understand where our inflated sense of national self-esteem really comes from, and we act accordingly.

Not that drinking is our only vice, of course. There's also the pork, so close to our national heart we have more words for it than the Eskimos do for snow. My favourite word for pork is scratchings. And whilst rum, sodomy and the lash are traditionally said to keep the Navy afloat, one can't help noticing that none of those things are entirely absent from the mainland. Bottoms up, we cry in unison, and how well the expression suits our love of ambiguity.

We're also one of the most religiously apathetic nations in the world, with 64% of respondents answering no to the question Are you religious? in a recent poll. Notice that the answer was no, not No! I would have said No!, but then I have a very Unbritish attachment to the world of ideas.

So, let's review. We like a drink, we like a ham sandwich, we don't go to church, and given half a chance we rut in hedgerows and bus shelters like the beasts of the field. When it comes to the usual permutations of orifices and equipment, we're childishly enthusiastic and open to offers. You really would think Jehovah would be more visibly disappointed. And more given to tantrums in our general direction.

To be fair, he did send us some floods. You'd hardly have been reminded of Sodom and Gomorrah, though. We also had a tornado in Birmingham a few days ago, but nobody was hurt. Is God losing his touch?

I just don't understand it. We have one of the mildest climates in the world. We never get earthquakes above bugger all on the Richter scale. None of our animals would ever be so rude as to try and eat us, and even our poisonous insects are sub-lethal. Malaria stops two thousand miles south of here, the Enlightenment saw off the Plague, we haven't been properly invaded for a thousand years, and across the land a rather complacent prosperity reigns supreme. Famines, locusts, frogs, all the classic divine punishments pass us by. Even boils are kept to a decent minimum. You're flirting with death if you graze randomly on the wild mushrooms, and there is the national football team, but that's about it for divine vengeance.

To see what a poor show God's put up, we only need to compare Britain with a more religious nation. Let's pick, oh I don't know, America. Did you see that coming?

America has summers that burn, and winters that would cry foul scorn at our feeble English bobble hats. The woods are crawling with black widows, the mountains are full of grizzlies and if you make it down to the plain it's only to wander blindly into the path of the next twister. There are deserts that could shrivel a scorpion, and even warm, wet Florida has crocodiles. They lost an entire city to floods, and then there's the earthquakes and hurricanes. It's no wonder the airport security won't let foreigners out until they've probed us to the point of haemorrhage. They're just preparing us for the horrors to come.

It's all so unfair. I feel the need to apologise to all my American readers on Jehovah's behalf. He's so terribly unkind to you, and yet you're so much nicer to him than we are.

You may have decriminalised homosexuality, but we've legalised gay marriages. You have a Bible belt, we have free abortion on demand. You have a Creation Museum, while 90% of British people believe life evolved through a process of natural selection. It's not like you haven't made the effort. Many of you go to church on a Sunday. What does he want, blood?

Meanwhile I lie in on a Sunday, and now I'm sat here typing away, unpunished. And I don't even have an excuse. I mean, it's not like I'm hungover or anything. He's just so arbitrary, the way he picks on you and not me. Honestly, what a cunt.

If there's one thing we can rely on the BBC for, it's their simple childish faith in bodice rippers. They've already done all the Regency bonkbusters going, so now they're falling back on England's second favourite historical shaggers, The Tudors.

The series name is their first factual error, because it's actually just about the early reign of Henry VIII. Maybe they're planning sequels. Maybe they're even planning a prequel about Henry VII, and they'll rename this series Series II: A new hope. Come to that, watching characters whose life trajectory you're already familiar with does remind you of Haley Joel Osment playing a young Darth Vader. Aah, they're so sweet, it's gonna go bad, then they die.

Henry himself is mainly remembered as a fat, gouty old man with six wives most people could maybe name three of, but not many people know the back story. When he first came to the throne he was a dashing young prince beloved of all, sort of like a more virile Prince William, except beloved of all. They've got Jonathan Rhys Meyers to play him, and you'd have to say he's got the looks.

In one scene they have him playing real tennis. You may or not be aware that the Wimbledon version is an impostor, but actually the original version was popular in European courts in this period. The name tennis comes from the French tenez, which means hold or watch out, and in the game meant I'm about to serve now. Nothing to do with Dennis, which is a corruption of Dionysus. Suddenly Dennis the Menace makes more sense. Although ideally they'd have drawn Gnasher with three heads.

Real tennis has been enjoying something of a renaissance, rather appropriately, and has been picked up by our very own Prince Edward. In his other job as a failed actor he once made a documentary about Henry VIII's love of the game, in which he said that after his father's sudden death Henry had 'quite literally been catapulted onto the throne'. Unfortunately, this is incorrect.

The show does several things very well. It's beautifully filmed, it gives due weight to the minor characters without feeling cluttered, and it slips the history in naturally, save for the odd clunking moment. Of which the worst by far was the scene where Anne Boleyn's father actually calls her Anne Boleyn. It was as unnecessary as it was crass, because he'd already been introduced as Thomas Boleyn, so if he'd just called his daughter Anne that would have been quite enough. Oh well, we all make mistakes. I once told a girlfriend I didn't mind that she was sharing a house with her ex. I'm sure you can fill in the blanks.

The most surprising pleasure is the way it relocates England as a part of Europe. In the populist version of pre-imperial English history everything is about us, with foreigners existing only to lay on some ships to sink. In fact, Europe was a shifting sea of alliances and antagonisms, with England a significant actor, and significantly acted upon.

Since the death of Charlemagne, the crucial antagonism in European history has always been between France and Germany. For most of its history, Germany was divided into a patchwork of princedoms (ooh, that's alliterative, I'll use that again) under the banner of the Holy Roman Empire. At various times France and Germany fought in Italy, Spain and the Low Countries. The Holy Roman Emperor at the time of the Tudors was also the king of Spain, which made the French feel a bit hemmed in, especially after Henry switched sides to Germany.

I'm not going to tell you any more. I don't have to, the BBC are going to do it for me.

Where they go very wrong, though, is in the portrayal of Thomas More. For some reason More is enshrined in English history as a noble martyr. In fact, he presided over the torture and murder of many Protestants, and his own beheading was rather kinder than the indignities he inflicted on them.

Not that most of the audience care about that kind of thing. Most of them are probably paying a lot more attention either to Meyers himself, or to the factory line of twenty-first-century perfect women climbing into his bed on one side, getting processed and then climbing out the other. My interest, though, is consistently held by two of the clothed actors. Sam Neill is engagingly venal and compromised as Cardinal Wolsey, and Maria Doyle Kennedy as Katherine of Aragon unites the personal and the political side of the story. To see the European political dimension, it helps to be aware that Aragon is in Spain.

So it's a cautious thumbs up from me for a noble effort, especially when you remember it's filling up scheduling space they might otherwise give to Help Anthea I'm Infested. It's not quite Rome, if only because none of the factory line could hold a candle to Polly Walker, but it does go some way to filling the gap until the next series.

I'm making some effort to give you a little something every day, and oh how it's paying off. 178 of you came yesterday, and it's been over 100 all month. Apart from my fifteen minutes of fame on Pharyngula, it's the most traffic I've had on this blog. And 704 page views, too. On average you each did four. How gratifyingly curious of you.

Oh I know some of you come and go just like that. Click in, who's this dork, click off again. Well, we don't want your kind. You can just bugger off. Oh, you have. Carry on. The rest of you, though, my loyal subjects readers, we love you.

I like to imagine you all out there, giving it the old Alt-Tab Refresh whenever you're sure the boss isn't looking. Or possibly sat at home in your dressing gown, wondering if you can be bothered getting dressed yet. When I say I'm picturing you in your dressing gown, I don't want you imagining anything lewd. I never said I thought you were attractive.

Still, hideous minging gargoyles that you may be, it's time to feed you. I've no special muse on today, so here's some of the usual filler.

I'm feeling rather vindicated by this one. Swearing is officially a good thing. In particular it cuts down on stress at work. Fuck yes.

They've got this one wrong though. It's the Left Brain v Right Brain Test. It works brilliantly as a visual trick, but they claim that people who see the model rotating clockwise, as I do, are emotional, impetuous types. In particular, it suggests we might be religiously inclined. How do you spell hmmph? Thanks to zombizi for the link, anyway. Even if he is turning into a Mekon.

To be is to consume in our commodified world, and I do like to bring you things you never knew you needed. Here for instance is a skull sauna. As TH Huxley said about Darwin's theory of natural selection, 'how extremely stupid not to have thought of that'. It's from Atelier van Lieshout, although before you run away with the idea that that's his actual name I should probably point out that atelier is the French for studio.

And what's even better than a skull sauna? A radio smaller than a human hair of course. Widthwise, you fool. It wouldn't be that impressive lengthwise, would it?

Right, you've been fed now, so you can stop mewing like that. Apart from anything else, the more I feed you the more I put on weight. Say hello in the comments, if you like. I want to know who you all are.

Naaa, na na naaa, naaa, na-na, na-na, na-naaa. Along the Thames, the cranes dip in memoriam. The wreaths pile up at the Grave of the Unknown Striker and the nation wonders why the Queen hasn't acknowledged our grief.  After all, this is so much bigger than the vain, self-indulgent sorrows of yesteryear. Wars come and go, and blue bloods get killed joyriding all the time, but this - this is the football. As the cortege bearing our hopes and dreams and Steve McClaren's contract crawls through the streets of London past Hyde Park and the broken water feature which must surely now be renamed the Moscow fountain, thousands pause to reflect that finally we know how a real tragedy feels.

And as always when you're prostrate in the wreckage of any car crash, the mind tends to dwell on past errors. One goal at home to Macedonia would have been enough. The last time they beat anybody they were managed by Alexander the Great. And there was Jamie Carragher's header against bloody Israel. Three inches lower, and it would have gone under the bar rather than bouncing back off it. If only Britain hadn't collaborated with the Zionists in the 1930s, we might have been spared all this suffering now. Couldn't they have thought about the bigger picture?

It's all very well for you. You were just going to watch it. I was going to write about it. I can't believe the way they've let me down.

But, and it's a medium-sized but, there still remains a little hope. If England beat Croatia at Wembley and Russia don't win their last two games against Israel and Andorra, or if Macedonia beat Croatia and we also beat them by three clear goals, we still go to the ball.

Yet surely these are delusions, mere distractions from the dismal facts. One might as well hope to destroy a Death Star by firing one up its exhaust port. George Lucas can indulge such flights of fancy if he chooses, but in the real world England have lost the Force, and so have I. I can't even be bothered to manufacture some kind of double entendre about firing things up exhaust ports.

And Scotland fucked up as well. Whatever.

My analysis is here.

A while back psiloiordinary tagged me with the Evolution Meme. I have to cite five posts which contributed to the development of my blog. I said I'd hold off for a bit, because I'd just done the Better Blog in 31 days thing, and I was sick of talking about myself. That particular sickness never lasts for long, though, and I'm feeling ready to sit up, take tea and self-aggrandise once more.

The first thing that strikes me is that calling it the Evolution meme is pretty weak. If I'd set up a series of blogs, allowed each one to reproduce when it amassed a certain number of hits and let the big posts eat the little ones that would be one thing, but strictly speaking The Secular Backlashed hasn't evolved, it's developed. Still, there is an everyday sense of the word, and it does come from the Latin evolvere, to unroll or unfold. Like Derek Jacobi did with the scrolls in I, Claudius.

Yes I did get on my mother's nerves. How did you guess? And now I'm going to remind you of some of the ways I've got on your nerves in the past.

This was my first post. Aaahh. Actually, my first word was Ooh. And this is the kind of thing I did a lot of in the early days. It's called An infinity of searing pain, and looking back I'm not a bit surprised.

I was soon adding other topics, though. Here I am finding a suitable punishment for Freddie Flintoff, after he'd been bad at the Cricket World Cup.

This is me with my new slogan for new times, All you fucks can just bugger off. And here's the science bit. There's no Jennifer Aniston, I'm afraid. That's because it's the science bit.

So that's how I unfolded this blog. I started on topic, then I branched out. If I was you I'd go straight to the last page, which of course ends with the first post, and work your way backwards. Or forwards. Hey, whatever I write, it's always the Last Post.

And I didn't even mention Fuck Jesus in the arse. Which is for the best.

To round off, a little amuse bouche. It's another movie countdown list, but this one actually counts down the numbers in reverse, from movie clips. A bit like Drowning by Numbers, but the other way round. And today is the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, so if there's any still left tomorrow I'll want to know why.

No more introspection for a bit, I promise. I'm supposed to tag someone to do the next post in the theme, so the first person to bagsy the honour in the comments can consider themselves tagged.

Our computers are about to move into the terabyte era, courtesy of Hitachi. For those of you who don't get units, here's a simple guide. Those of you who do may not find this post especially informative. That's the down side of mixed ability blogging, I'm afraid. The up side is you get to learn all about English soccer teams you might never otherwise have heard of.

A kilobyte is a thousand bytes of data. Actually it's 1024, for reasons we don't need to go into here. Mind you, we don't need not to either. It's 1024 because 1024 is 2 to the power of 10, and with computers counting is done in binary. It's actually quite handy that 2 to the power of 10 is roughly equal to 10 to the power of 3, because it makes mental arithmetic easier if you need to handle high powers of 2. Well you might do. Suppose you were playing infinite backgammon, you might be doubling all night.

A million (1,048,576) bytes is a megabyte, and a billion (1,073,741,824) is a gigabyte. A terabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, or 1024 gigabytes. It's roughly 10 to the power of 12, but exactly 2 to the power of 40. Which is nice.

Incidentally, gigabyte is an anagram of a bit eggy, which is just how the carpet round my desk smells. Maybe I should be eating at the table.

Kilo, mega, giga and tera are standard units. One might speak of kilograms, megahertz, gigatons, terawatts, and so on. They're SI (Systeme International) units, like the ones I talked about in this rant about how the metric system is better than some old bollocks about gills and furlongs. Outside the hermetic and hermitic world of data storage, a thousand is just a thousand.

There are standard units of miniaturisation as well. A milligram is a thousandth of a gram, a micrometre is a millionth of a metre. A billionth of a metre is a nanometre. Any use of nano should always be referring to measurements in the range of a billionth of a metric unit, usually a metre.

In the BBC article linked to above, the new hard disk is described as a nanotechnology breakthrough. They do this on the grounds that the company has successfully managed to shrink the read-write head of a hard drive to two thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Well done for lasting all the way through - as a special treat, here's the world's weirdest moths.

Thanks to Vowles the Green for alerting me to Blog Action Day. On October 15th we're all supposed to write a post about green issues. This is about the importance of separating environmentalism from the sub-Taoist bilge which sometimes gets attached to it.

The Green Party is experiencing something of a renaissance at the moment in the UK. Some of you may remember the last time this happened. It was in the early 1990s. At one point they might even have become the third party in British politics. Their leader at the time (they call them facilitators or some such) was David Icke. Can you see where this is going?

Yes, it was just after this that he announced to the world that he was the Son of God, and that was the end of the little Green surge. Since then he's gone on to greater things, alleging that the Protocols of Zion are historically accurate, and that the world is run by alien lizards disguised as bankers and Presidents. And as the British royal family. They m