Yes, today is the 359th anniversary of the day they chopped Charles I's head off. To celebrate, here's something I wrote two years ago today.

It was an easy mistake to make. It could have happened to anyone.

I was sat in my living room, and there was a storm outside. I looked down, and the middle of the carpet was rippling like a village pond in a breeze.

What would you think? Would you deduce that the wind was mysteriously passing through the apparently solid wall and going under your carpet? Or would you leap to the obvious conclusion? What if you'd had an adventurous time in the Eighties? What would you think then?

You may remember the Eighties as the age of yuppies and Duran Duran. You're wrong. Actually, it was the great age of acid. Oh, there were a few people doing acid in the Sixties, the decade it's always associated with, but it was only in the Eighties that it reached its widest demographic. I remember one occasion back then when one of the local wide boys shouted Superman at me for no apparent reason as he passed me in the street. I just assumed he was insulting me in a rather inscrutable way and walked on, and only fifty yards down the road did it dawn on me. He'd been trying to sell me Superman acid tabs. The world had changed. Soon after, acid house happened, ironically fuelled not by acid but by Ecstasy.

I remember my first trip every time I see a Salvador Dali painting, as the Metamorphosis of Narcissus was blu-tacked to the wall. You always remember your first time. Except those of you who are acid virgins. Poor saps - I've always thought of you as disabled. Mind you, I think of people as disabled if they can't do mail merge. Not being able to mend a puncture without crying, though, that's not a disability in any way. That's not how it works.

Anyway. If you've led a life like mine, the most obvious explanation for a mysteriously rippling carpet is that it's a trace echo of the states you used to put your brain in for the purposes of fun and instruction when you were a much younger man. In other words, your carpet appears to be rippling in the Noughties because of all the acid you took in the Eighties.

It was a simple and elegant way to account for the available data, and the carpet-acid paradigm survived for years. In the end, though, every paradigm has its tipping point, which in this case arrived very suddenly when a visitor asked if I knew my carpet was rippling. It's amazing how quickly a paradigm can come crashing down. So not the acid after all then, just a hairline crack in the sealant under the double glazing or something, and nothing else.

Can I give you some free advice? If this happens to you, it's vitally important that you don't then try and explain. They'll just give you The Look. You learn to recognise The Look, and to understand that the Looker has now put you in a mental box you're never coming out of. If you must tell someone, tell the Internet. You're my lovely readers, I know you'll understand.

Of course, in the context the phrase if this happens to you may seem poorly judged. But I'm not the only person that sometimes finds levels of reality hard to navigate. See, this is how I know Jesus doesn't really speak to them. I've been there, and returned to tell the tale.

There is a bright side. From 1983 to 1990 I probably took an average of one tab a week. I must have taken hundreds and hundreds of the things. And I'd always thought the carpet thing was the price I'd paid. Now it turns out I didn't pay any price at all. Result!

Courtesy of Graham Linehan, mute testimony to the horrors of life.

Once you pick yourself up from the floor, it becomes possible to admire the author's noble intent. Compared to the destroyers of Alexandria, she's actually a step up.

On a lighter note, as they say on the news, Parasites Turn Ants into Berries. Not always, you understand, or aardvarks would be fatter. But definitely sometimes.

There's a nematode worm called a cephalotes, which likes to be eaten by ants. Once in the ant's digestive system, it somehow manages to turn its abdomen red and render it temptingly swollen, so it looks like a particularly lush berry. The ant, not the parasite. If you're already inside the digestive system of an ant, disguising yourself any further would be redundant. Having a big swollen berry at the back also makes the ant heavy on its feet, and an easy target for berry-eating birds.

So, a bird eats the ants, the cephalotes get back in the bird's tummy, which they like, and the circle of life is renewed. As it says in the piece, now we know what Elton John was talking about. My belly's been temptingly swollen for years, and I'm a bit heavy on my feet, so maybe I've got a parasite. I guess I'd better keep an eye out for condors.

We all thought something similar was happening at Bristol City, where our striker Enoch Showunmi was about to be snapped up by Leeds United, my other club. I wasn't quite sure how to feel about this, but now the move's been cancelled anyway, so I've decided to be not quite sure how I would have felt about it instead.

On balance, I think I was prepared to write it up to natural forces. Players come, they go, we buy some more, that's the centre circle of life, yada yada yada. His abdomen wasn't obviously berrylike, but he holds the ball up well, which I guess is the football equivalent. Leeds thought so too, but he's decided to stay in Bristol. They couldn't agree personal terms, which means City offered him more money. I wish rival employers would come and bicker over me.

On the Guardian website, there’s a - well, let's say a series of posts, called Blogging the Qur’an. They call it a debate, but I’m not quite sure why.

The two participants in the debate, Ziauddin Sardar and Madeleine Bunting, are both metaphysicals ( I know it isn't a noun in the dictionary, I've personalised it as a term of abuse), and both have written articles arguing their religious point of view on the website before.

They are spiritual liberals. To refresh your memory, the typical line goes like this.

• We hear voices in our heads. They are real.
• All the other people who hear voices in their heads are right as well, and all the people who say we're deluding ourselves are just meanies.
• We have holy books. Common people who think books mean what they say they mean like to point out all the psychotically cruel things, but we rise above it, because we know they're just metaphors for abstract concepts only we can understand, and shouldn't be confused with ordinary books which do mean what they say.
• Yes this does make sense. The only reason you think things mean what they say is because you don't have our subtlety of thought.

So far, so typical. What's annoyed me though is that the Comments function, normally such a mainstay in the section they have after all chosen to call Comment is free, has been disabled. How this carefully mediated religious love-in deserves to be called a debate when it’s actually less like a debate than anything else they publish is a mystery. I emailed them to ask, but received no response.

To be fair, you can comment by email, and they do publish a selection of them. I had one published (Your say, second email), and Mr Sardar did respond to it (Answers to more questions, fourth paragraph down). In fact, that's why I'm writing this. His response annoyed me so much, it’s inspired me to start a separate blog, just for him. I've called it Blogging the Qur'an - the free debate. Anyone can comment, whatever they believe.

There are rules. I decided to use the Guardian’s own talk policy. It seems perfectly adequate to cover the discussion they decided not to allow.

There will be one extra rule. In order to allow the debate to take place, any remark which breaks the rules of civilised debate will still be allowed, if it is a direct quotation from one of the world’s holy books. Otherwise, it’s hard to see how the debate could ever take place.

There's only one post at the moment. Expect more to follow very soon.

Just a quick one, courtesy of Sean. It's a short story called Scroogled, by Cory Doctorow.

We all know governments would like to invade our privacy rather more thoroughly than they do now, but they're hampered by their own cackhandedness. Suppose they got Google to do it?

Also, thanks for this to Graham Linehan.

Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler, laid into Facebook in the Guardian the other day (With friends like these). I despise Facebook is his first sentence, and he doesn't get any keener on it as he goes on.

He starts and ends with the usual Luddite garbage, about how it's going to stop people interacting in person, and we'd all be better off reading. Why would I want to waste my time on Facebook when I still haven’t read Keats’ ‘Endymion’? he asks, a little pompously if you ask me. Now I once drank an entire pot of coffee to inspire me to do some work and then spent the next five hours trying to simulate the Game of Life on Microsoft Excel, so I may not be a hugely reliable source on timewasting, but even an achiever like Graham Linehan can find it in him to retort that not reading Keats’ ‘Endymion’ is a task I look forward to achieving every day, and he's not that wrong really.

Keats aside, his argument misses the point. I hardly use Facebook myself, but I do spend a lot of time on the Internet, and it hasn't reduced the amount of time I spend on social interaction, it's reduced the time devoted to mindless gawking at the telly. Partly.

And he entirely fails to get the Internet buddy thing. Again, it doesn't replace your face to face friendships, it complements them. It's interesting to relate to people without being able to rely on body language, and with no idea whether or not they actually look like that. Although I can assure you that xoorx really does look like this.

In the middle of the article, though, it gets quite interesting. He lists the people who own Facebook, and it turns out it's the libertarian fringe of the Republican Party, in cahoots with the CIA. Who'd have thunk it? It put me right off.

And it is being used for research (Researchers plunder social networks). If academics can use it to track their students, the CIA can use it to track us. Well they might. Listen, I've got a long history of radical protest, I have. I've signed petitions and everything.

On reflection, what a weird approach to activism that is. Protest campaigning step one - tell your opponents who you are, and where you live.

Incidentally, I had a very nice email from Jane Slavin, author of The Facebook Diaries. She said how much she liked my writing, which is especially nice from someone who's actually been published, rather than just clicking on a button labelled Publish. She's moved to a place called S----------, and is living in a place she describes as a secular nunnery. To try and find an interesting link for her, I googled for S---------- secular nunnery, and second in the list of links was - this blog. How amazing is that? It's not as if I've ever written about S----------, or  nunneries for that matter.

Apparently a friend of hers living in Sydney told her about me. This means I have two readers in Sydney. Comments are open, you lovely sheilas you, come up and take a bow.

It's just occurred to me that sheila might be a derogatory term. Oh well, too late now, it's all stream of consciousness today I'm afraid. Yes I know it's still grammatically correct. My subconscious is made out of sentences, all right? It's an Enlightenment subcounscious, more Bentham than Jung.

And while we're all waiting for me to have an original thought, here's one I've nicked from my mate Dave's blog, Pieces and Parts. How would Tom Waits and Nick Cave get on on American Idol?

I also want the gossip. One of my lovely readers had a date. She told us she was getting ready, but it's a day later and she hasn't said how it went. This is either a very good or a very bad sign. Which is it? I must know.

I'm away this weekend, visiting zombizi in Frome. I may blog live from the most culturally significant town between Trowbridge and Shepton Mallet, but otherwise I'll tell you all about it next week.

The whole title concept seems a bit tabloid somehow, almost - Blairite. It's so undignified, trying to come up with a soundbite to lure you in, so I can wrap you in the sticky tendrils of my baroque sentence structure and slowly digest you. See, even that was overworked.

I only really hit my stride in the second paragraph. Before that I just type stuff in, plan to edit it later, and then finally settle for what I started with. Quite often I fall back on song titles, and for some reason Ian Dury features large.

So we've had Sex and Drugs and Rock'n'roll, and many times I've offered you some Reasons to be Cheerful. I don't think you really want me to Hit You With my Rhythm Stick, and I'm damn sure none of you are about to Wake Up and Make Love With Me, but fortunately today's post is about some Clever Bastards. Because There Ain't Half Been Some Clever Bastards, if you recall.

Edinburgh University have a new computer. It's for running simulations - of proteins, climate change, whatever needs simulating. I think they should make it simulate a better computer, then build that one. Then they could use the new computer to simulate an even better computer, and - I think you get the idea.

At the University of Minnesota, they're making hearts. From stem cells. Rat hearts from rat stem cells, which is why they haven't been besieged by nutters. Carrying on with the mad scientist vivisector Cronenberg wannabe theme, they've genetically engineered a supercarrot, complete with extra calcium, and they want to splice humans and animals.

I don't see the problem myself. If you're needing a new heart, or if you've got one of the diseases that research on human/animal genetic mashups could cure, you probably don't either. There is a problem with animal research, but it isn't the one we ever get to read about. The problem is all the futile animal experiments to make 'me too' drugs, so that drugs companies can market drugs functionally identical to other drugs that already exist.

Over at xkcd they don't have the Frankenstein urge, but they do have an interesting stupidity filter for their IRC. You may may remember my post about StupidFilter a few months ago. Xkcd don't have their level of resources, so they've just introduced a simple rule to their conversations. When you add comments, you aren't allowed any sentence which is identical to any sentence previously added in any discussion, without regard to punctuation or capitalisation. If you should use one it's deleted, and you're suspended.

The length of suspension quadruples each time. The first time, it's two seconds, then eight seconds, then thirty two, and so on. On your tenth repetition, you're suspended for 6 days, on your twentieth for just over seventeen thousand years. Kind of like Just a Minute, but logarithmic.

This might seem draconian, but they've built in a mitigating factor, or more accurately a mitigating divisor. Every six hours without an infraction, the time for your next suspension is halved. In practice, this means you're allowed two repetitions a day. They say they're still tweaking the parameters, and they seem the sort that would. Geeks like that will always make sure the parameters are properly tweaked first, and then and only then are they likely to notice the fire alarm.

They're sweet and charming geeks, though, like all of us, and it's a good idea. The point is to eliminate all the futile and pointless things that get said. No more lol, dudes, no more Amen to that, brother, no more Hi everybody even. Only original statements can be made.

Right, that's your lot, I've got to go to town. I need three things beginning with S, but I can only remember two of them. This seems to be a drawback with the acronymic approach to shopping lists. I know I need socks, and shoyu soy sauce, which Tesco's don't deliver (how strange that I should be willing to eat dead pigs and laud the virtues of Frankenstein science, yet my views on soy sauce remain unchanged), but there's one more item beginning with S that I've forgotten. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Gary Johnson has complained about people leaving games early, and I can only echo his words. Yes, he's the Bristol City manager, and you can stop pretending you didn't know. Bristol sports updates? From Bourneville to Frankfurt to Indiana, you're all gagging for them.

Most home games, people start to leave the ground with about ten minutes left. By the ninety minute mark this has become a torrent of people all rushing to beat the rush and fighting through each other to do it. The irony of this seems to escape them. Injury time is played out with hordes of people along the edge of the touchline, and corners and throwins have to be taken at their convenience. Where we sit, any action near the corner flag is hidden from view.

Me and Dave, meanwhile, wait until the crowd has mostly cleared, then stroll out with ease. We do this with fingers stuck in our ears so we don't hear the announcer (I want to say compère, but that doesn't seem quite right) read out the full time scores from the Premiership, because that way we can watch Match of the Day without knowing them in advance. I've battled all my life to get my friends to accept that not wanting to know scores is an entirely reasonable attitude rather than just another weird Asberger's behaviourism they can taunt me with in the pub, so it's nice that in one place at least people instinctively understand and sympathise.

We're rarely more than ten minutes behind the premature evacuators. City aren't a big club. It's not like we're at Old Trafford, with seventy thousand fans all trying to get back to Harrogate and Slough. Most fans walk home. There is some traffic, but that's mainly the away fans who are heading in the opposite direction. And you have to wonder, if fans are so casual about the game they're prepared to miss any potential last-minute drama, why are they prepared to pay £28 a ticket? I just don't understand it.

It particularly annoyed Johnson at the Middlesbrough game, because City were a goal down and really needed a lift from the crowd to try and grab an equaliser. Footballers are performers, and can't be expected to work without an audience. Imagine if half the audience started filing out just as Hamlet was starting his death speech. Oh, I die, Horatio ... oi, come back, I'm still here, not all the rest is silence you know. Oh Horatio, surely you could have waited, or at least got me one in ...

Incidentally, apologies to anyone who wanted to watch the Hamlet highlights without knowing the final score. Surely you could see which way it was going, though.

Bill Gates, interviewed here by the BBC, says the keyboard and mouse are on their way out over the next five years, to be replaced by more intuitive and natural technologies. Smart surfaces will be everywhere, including the kitchen table. He also said that mobile phones were becoming more software-centric (his love of innovation clearly extends to language). Interestingly, when talking about his competitors he had more to say about Nokia and Sony than he did about Apple or Google.

They showed one of their new smart surfaces, and to be fair it does look quite cool. It's roughly what you'd expect - press with your finger to click, drag objects around, and so on. To resize an object, put two fingers on it and pull them apart or together. A three year old could do it, and I'm sure they will.

I remember buying Molly an Etch-a-sketch for her third birthday (she's ten now). She did a picture, and then asked how do you print? I had to explain the deficiencies of the primitive technology I'd given her, and she looked at me with pity in her eyes.

Microsoft are just as focused on the Eternal Now as any small child, and according to Gates they always obsolete their own products. He seems to just mean that they replace them with newer versions, but can I take this opportunity to beg you all to stand fast against any future attempts to treat obsolete as a verb?

But my favourite moment in the interview was his analysis of open source software, in which he says Microsoft have a great relationship with that entire community. Yes Bill, of course you do.

As if to counterpoint Gates' efforts to reorient his battered Death Star towards fresh victims, Jimmy Wales is launching Wikia Search. I checked it out, ironically by Googling for it, and they say they know their results are a bit poor at the moment, because they've not got any user data to work with yet, but can we keep using it so the user data builds up. So please do.

They identify four principles of Internet searching.

1. Transparency - opennness in the way algorithms operate.
2. Community - everyone should be able to contribute.
3. Quality - the accuracy and relevance of search results should be constantly improving.
4. Privacy - it shouldn't store or transmit any identifying data.

Boos to the Guardian, though, courtesy of Glenn, who sent me this link about rights grabs. Apparently if you enter one of their picture competitions, it's in the small print that they get rights to use submitted images even after the end of the competition. Talk about cheeky beggars.

Janet Street-Porter deliberately set out to annoy me at the weekend. Yes, me personally. Just because I have delusions of grandeur it doesn't mean I'm not actually grand. To be honest she annoys me a little bit every Sunday, but it's normally just the mild irritation you get when someone hogs an entire page of your newspaper to shout very loudly about bugger all. This week she decided the social menace most desperately in need of her attention was the blogger.

Apparently blogs are the musings of the socially inept, written by the kind of people you sidle away from at parties. The mind recoils from the thought of attending any party where there was the remotest chance of meeting Janet, but if the worst did come to the worst the other guests would at least be entertained by the sight of two people sidling away from each other at speed. Our combined relative velocities would probably fall short of a sprint, but could easily amount to a lope.

She also says most bloggers have never experienced any culture other than the one within their suburban front room. The dominant culture outside my front room could only be described as suburban if you stretched the term to include downtown Mogadishu. I once sat down and counted the countries of the world I'd had students from, and stopped when I got to sixty. Not that this kind of cultural diversity pissing contest proves anything, and much of the world's great literature was written by people with rather more limited horizons by our standards, but I can't help wondering if the view from the Porter residence is as stimulating.

It's not all blogs she hates, to be fair. It turns out it's only 99% of them. And to be honest, I only find 1% of blogs interesting myself. But to think that condemns blog culture is to misunderstand it. Quite apart from commercial or spamming blogs, most blogs are only of interest to the friends of the author. These blogs serve a similar function to student politics, inasmuch as they provide a forum for adolescents to work their way through some of life's more egregious errors before they embark on anything that might actually matter.

But there are also some high quality specialist blogs out there. I've gone on often enough about the Science Blogs, but I might for instance add Stephen Fry's blog (go on, Janet, sidle away from him at a party), or the excellent art blog who killed bambi?, or so many more. Grown ups blog too, Janet. And 1% of blogs is tens of thousands of them. I'm only interested in a fraction of the Independent, but there's plenty in that fraction to fill my Sunday.

She finishes on a high note, which unfortunately manages to fatally undermine her case. The Facebook Diaries, written by TV actress Jane Slavin under the pseudonym Lucia Keenan, is about her brief affair with composer Michael Nyman, who wrote the music for the Piano and various Peter Greenaway films. Slavin met him through Facebook, had what she refers to as the Facebook Fuck, and then decided we all really needed to know about his ear hair and erection difficulties. It sounds sordid and neglectable, and that's the aspect of it that Porter focuses on.

But it's also a rollicking read, and crucially for our theme it's well written. You start off with some sympathy for Nyman, but this drips away with every selfish thing he says or does, until by the end you're begging her to humiliate him a little more. Of course we're only hearing one side of the story, but if half of it is as true as it rings you begin to understand the need for such a public revenge.

In the end, she invents a false Facebook identity and strikes up a fresh relationship with him under this pseudonym. He emails her suggestively and arranges a rendezvous in a cafe, which she attends. Deliciously, he assumes she's there by coincidence and makes up a lie about a meeting, only to have her hand him printouts of the emails he'd sent. It's nicely summarised by Richard Brooks in the Times.

And if it wasn't for blogs we'd never have heard any of it. It's hard to imagine a newspaper taking the chance on it, especially in diarised form. If Janet Street-Porter had succeeded in making her blog off, as she so originally puts it, we'd all have been the poorer for it.

They think they've come up with a universal flu jab. Hopefully, the million or so people who die of flu every year won't have to now. Unless the usual suspects start their nonsense, like they did with the MMR jab.

Let's have a quick peek into the future. Flu jabs for all, no quarter for obscurantists, and plentiful supplies of the vaccine across the world, without any of that corporate nonsense about patents. You know it makes sense. All we have to do is make it happen.

Less momentously but for some of us just as cheeringly, youth hostels are to be given alchohol licences. Kevin Rushby in the Guardian gets weirdly upset about this, apparently in the belief that walkers are uninterested in drinking. Some people really are a bit slow on the uptake, aren't they? Will alcohol ruin the hostel experience? he asks. No Kevin, it won't. You might, but it won't. Oh well, you may give us the hump, but at least you won't be giving us the flu.

Do you remember the Eighties? Crap beer, dispensed with stony faced reluctance in smoke-filled museums of grime, between the hours of three-thirty and a quarter to four. Compare this with our modern wonderland, and tell me life isn't getting better.

I've got another new plan. I've given up on the idea of buying the flat, and remortgaging my house. Instead, I'm going to be a lodger with my brother and his wife, and rent the house out.

They live in Totterdown half the year and Crete the other half (which is nice), and they need someone to look after the place in the summer. Because they still need access to it, they can't rent the whole place out, so they keep a lodger, and I'll be replacing him at the end of March. I'm going to let the house through the council, who will put in one of their families off the housing list.

Unlike all my previous plans, this one might actually work. It doesn't depend on that mysterious entity they insist on calling the property market even though it hasn't got any stalls, and I don't need to persuade anyone to buy my house or lend me money. If bad things happen it's easily reversible.

Well in my mind, you do care. In my mind, you've all left the computer and dashed to the foot of your stairs to bring your loved ones the news. Cherished partner, family and/or friends, you cry, come quickly. Jon has another plan. Excited voices echo so loudly I can hardly hear the Mozart. Exsultate Jubilate, since you ask, and it seems fitting. The s is correct in the Latin, by the way, so don't think you can get picky with me.

The whole sorry saga worries me though. I've thought about it a lot, and on balance I don't think I'm really suited to a life of freedom. Oh don't get me wrong, I haven't turned into some weird fascist. Quite apart from the appalling architecture, the inadequacy here is entirely personal. It isn't freedom that's failed me, it's me that's failed freedom.

What I really need is somebody to tell me what to do. Here is your room, here is your computer, here is the telly, this is the button for the football. Tomorrow morning you will go to this place and do this thing, towards the general good. When your appointed task is completed there will be dinner, where people will be happy to listen to you showing off. Don't just sit there like that, that's why you're so unhealthy. Eat this, I think you'll find it's surprisingly nice.

That's what I need. A monastery, but without the religion. Now all I need to do is silence the voice in my head that's telling me I shouldn't be saying this out loud.

A minor seasonal miracle has occurred. After a fairly challenging set of matches, City are still third. More, we're equal on points with West Brom and Watford, and only behind them on goal difference. I looked carefully at my toast this morning, and for a moment I was almost sure I could see Gary Johnson's face in it.

Of course, there are no miracles, there is no Curse of Daring to Hope, none of that animist stuff ever applied. We just can't stand the idea that so many of our hopes and dreams hang on the way a small round object ricochets off young men's legs in the vicinity of a wooden frame with a net hanging off it, so we invent a narrative in which we feature as active participants rather than passive observers.

The truth of this elementary proposition was made apparent yesterday afternoon, while we were beating Coventry 2-1. At no point was I even tempted to Dare to Hope, but they still managed to give away a soft goal twenty minutes from the end anyway, and then five minutes from the end they gifted the ball to a Coventry player alone in the box. By the grace of a merciful Jah he could only manage to hit the post and it bounced out to a City player who cleared it, but the course of the game was so similar to the Southampton one where I had Dared to Hope, it amounted to a control experiment. Based on a statistical group of two, I can now confirm my own correctness to my own satisfaction, which let's face it is all any of us really need.

There were times when City played some shockingly elegant football. Normally if the ball comes to them from behind and they're facing the wrong way they get all jittery, and either play it sideways or dribble off somewhere futile. Yesterday they used a manoeuvre called control-and-turn, which is a self-explanatory concept, but hard to put into practice.

We're starting to think seriously about the possibility of promotion now, and it's giving us the right heebiejeebies. I'd love a season in the Premiership, but having Arsenal and Man Utd coming would be like being a team of fauns, suddenly promoted into a division of meat processors.

Before the game there was a minute's silence for Motherwell player Phil O'Donnell, who died after a heart attack on the pitch last Saturday. It was so impeccably observed you could hear a dog barking in the middle distance. It's an amazing thing to stand absolutely quiet and still with fifteen thousand people. Shame someone had to die for it though.