That's Albert, not Abbie or Dustin. Abbie killed himself in 1989 and Dustin's still alive, which after Meet the Fockers is definitely the wrong way round. One F and two N's in Albert Hofmann, apparently.

Mrs Tilton mourns his passing, which brought it to my attention. Turns out the old guy made it to 102. So now you know the secret of long life - be Swiss, and invent a psychedelic drug.

I've written a little about my acid experiences before, or more accurately their imagined aftereffects. To cut a long story short, I thought I was experiencing mild flashbacks, but it turned out the world was just a little weirder than I'd realised. Well, if it wasn't for Dr Hofmann none of that would have happened, the highs or - well, actually there weren't any lows. So just the highs, then. Thanks Bert.

zombizi celebrates his legacy with this picture. For today's competition, please explain why. This competition is open to everybody called zombizi, and the prize is another post by me about football.

Just to fill the ball-shaped hole in the meanwhile, Ronaldo's been caught with some transvestite prostitutes. That's the Brazilian Ronaldo, not the Portuguese one. Apparently he knew they were prostitutes, but didn't know they were transvestites. I'm not quite sure why he thinks that sounds better.

It's a tense business, being a football fan, and sometimes the last bit is the worst.

There are times when the other team is all over you and you're hanging on for the final whistle, knowing that one goal could snatch it all away. I swear, at times the clock goes backwards. I've sweated it out for City often enough, and it's no different for fans of other teams.

So congratulations to lowly Chester, who eked out a 0-0 draw against Stockport tonight, and secured their survival in League 2. Rarely can a team have failed to score at home against Stockport and made their fans so very happy. The Shropshire Union Canal will be awash with Carlsberg tonight. Commiserations though to Mansfield, who now get relegated to the provinces instead. League 2 teams are only just full time professionals, so going down threatens jobs as well as reputations.

The evening's other game was quite a tense affair too, but Man United scraped through against an unlucky Barcelona to earn a place in the Champions League final in Moscow on May 21.

Both teams in the final will be English, as Liverpool and Chelsea settle the other semi-final tomorrow. Bearing in mind that Liverpool knocked out Arsenal, this means that no English team has been knocked out this year by non-English opposition. This is unprecedented.

Not that there's any cause for nationalistic fervour. It's all about the money, you see. English teams are rich rich rich because of TV rights for the Premiership, so they can afford to buy the best players. Contrary to popular opinion, it isn't actually the warm beer that tempts them over the Channel, but the cold hard cash.

Should be a good final though, whichever team wins tomorrow. I'm just glad I don't work for a Russian airline. Imagine trying to fly two such antagonistic groups into the same city separately. And then there's the fans to worry about as well.

No news is rarely good news in blogging, and you may have guessed from my extended silence that the Stoke game didn't go entirely as hoped.

We lost 2-1, and as a result they're sitting pretty in the automatic promotion spot which we just don't seem to have the bottle for (here's the Championship table). If we'd won 2-1, we'd be sat there instead of them. But we didn't, because we were crap.

It's an fine example of the mind-body problem. Because minds ascribe meaning to the precise location of footballs, thousands of tons of human flesh encased in millions of tons of metal will most likely be hurling themselves along the motorway to Stoke next season, rather than Bristol. 32 small panels of plastic are stitched together to form a sphere and booted round a field, their location, vector and velocity act upon the cognitive pathways in our brains, and months later the coaches roll. 150 years after the birth of Max Planck, it's still not obvious where the momentum comes from.

Not that we should be jumping to any dualist conclusions, partly because Descartes' solution to the mind-body problem is a total crock but mainly because the promotion race isn't quite over yet. If we win both our last two games and Stoke lose both of theirs, or lose one and draw one, we can still beat them. Alternatively, there's still the playoffs.

As long as we can amass two whole points from our last two games, anyway, or failing that as long as the other teams carry on being as shit as we are. Otherwise, we could still finish the season as low as eighth. Which we'd have been thrilled at if we'd known at the beginning of the season, but which hardly seems adequate now.

Saturday is Sheffield United away, then we've got Preston at home for the last game of the season. We could go into this game still hoping for automatic promotion, but we could also go into it one defeat away from falling out of the playoffs.

Oh yes, and a happy St George's Day to you all. Did you know he was Turkish? And his mother was Palestinian. Now you know, you surely ought to go outside, find a drunken, flag waving patriot and burst their xenophobic bubble for them. You know it makes sense.

This is another one I wrote ages ago, but never got around to actually publishing.

I've been telling you for ages that religion isn't inevitable, you know. You have to remember that it's a sociological phenomenon like any other. Such phenomena are characteristic of the societies where they occur (talk about tautological arguments -  I can't believe I ever wrote something that banal), but once the society changes, they can come to seem - well, perhaps rather quaint.

Religion has been a dominant theme in most times and places throughout human history, it's true, but that's also true of other ideas whose time has been and gone. The idea of the divine right of kings, for instance, much invoked by Charles I, was upheld by royalty across the world and across the ages. The worldly and heavenly powers attributed to the monarch/deity tag team varied from one benighted tyranny to the next, but the principle itself remained solid for millennia. Similarly, human sacrifice has been a constant in human history outside the monotheistic era (in which it was banned for blasphemy, not for cruelty).

And now there's some evidence which suggests religion might be about to go the same way. Let's start with Britain. According to the Times, Over half of Britons claim no religion (full UN report here). We are now no longer a faith community, no longer even a patchwork of different faith communities, but a faithless community.

This data fits with the Guardian survey of December 2006, but not with the census data from 2001. In that survey, 72% of respondents identified as Christian. Although the generation who were raised in a solidly Christian country during and after World War 1 have been dying off in the last six years, I suspect that the main cause of this change is something else.

I think that when people said they were Christian, what they meant was C of E. In other words, they'd been baptised in a Church of England church, maybe they'd got married in one, maybe they'd buried people in one.

Since then, religion has become a political issue. Obviously Islam has been in the news almost constantly since 9/11, but also militant atheism has been in the media a lot, and people have become more polarised on the issue. As a result, people who don't believe in God no longer get their kids baptised, they no longer get married in church, and they no longer say C of E on official forms.

And when Richard Dawkins turns up on the telly and says religion is a pile of cack, the majority of people in Britain think you know, I think he's right. And when some wanky old bishop or Madeleine Bunting or somebody starts going on about how extreme he is, most people think who the fuck are you? At least science is a proper subject. Your specialist subject is like Santaology. Not a small cabal of militant rationalists. Not just the educated, not just the articulate. The majority.

This simple fact provides the context for Rowan Williams' recent remarks about sharia law. The Church has realised that the only way they can hang onto special status is by extending that status to other religious groups. Even with Catholics, Muslims, Jews, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists and Jedis on board they're still in the minority, but at least that ad hoc theistic caucus gives them control over the Labour Party, which is what matters for lawmaking.

Globally, religion remains mystifyingly popular, but even there we can see encouraging trends. Here's an article in the Atlantic. And if that's too much to take in, here's the same thing in a nice picture.

It can rapidly be seen that there's an inverse correlation between material comfort and religiosity. Standards of living are rising across the planet, so the implication is that secularism should infect everywhere. Other inversely correlating factors are material security (eg health care, pensions, unemployment benefit), political freedom, education and geographical mobility.

So as you can see, it all comes down to the coming global crunch. If we can get through global warming, adjust our economies to sustainable practice and make a world where everyone gets a slice of the pie, we can wave goodbye to bishops, imams, pastors, shamans and the whole sorry gang. If we can't, and if the vision of a decent standard of living for all turns out to be a mirage, then they'll be back, and looking for vengeance. I don't want to get all Churchillian on your ass, but what do you want - broad sunlit uplands or the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted religion?

Cheer up, it might be our finest hour.

I wrote this about a month ago, but when I hit the Publish button I forgot to take the tick off Draft. As a result it's been sat there tantalisingly out of reach for you all, if you can really be tantalised by something you don't know isn't there.

First off, the Great Tantra Challenge. Nothing to do with Sting, this was the showdown between magic and rationality. In the blue corner, barking mad tantric magician Surinder Sharma. In the red, Sanal Edamaruku, President of Rationalist International and my personal hero for the day [in fact, my personal hero for March 20th - Ed].

The challenge was for Sharma to kill Edamaruku with tantric black magic. In India as in Glastonbury and Totnes, self-proclaimed magicians earn a good living from the fears and desires of the credulous, and Edamaruku wanted to show one up on TV across India.

It's a fascinating tale, well worth the reading, but Edamaruku suffered no ill effects (obviously), and the world is now fractionally less gullible than it was. Well done.

Ben Goldacre of Bad Science has been at it as well. He linked to this video explaining the physics behind homeopathy. When I say explaining, what I mean is saying things like "Well, you know that Energy is equal to mass times the speed of light. But as a friend explained to me, the whole mass of the universe could actually be fitted into a space the size of a bowling ball, so that equation actually reduces to Energy is equal to the speed of light."

I paraphrase. I have to, because the video has been taken down. Presumably it was just too embarrassing. So, Goldacre and Edamaraku. Who said there were no more heroes any more?

And now the fuckers are gonna get explained. It's the worst thing we could possibly do to them, and the best thing we could possibly do for everyone else.

But what's that, in the distance? It's the sound of whining. Once you've taken away religion, magic, quack science, what's left? What is there that makes life worth living?

Well, dog robots, obviously. Thanks to Zooillogix, for staying on top of this stuff so I don't have to.

[And because you're only getting this now, it gives me the chance to add in Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss in conversation].

You'll want to be sitting down for this one.

Bristol City aren't top any more. We're not even second. We're third.

After a dismal defeat in Southampton and a home draw against Wolves (Wolverhampton Wanderers, not a pack of wild dogs), we've been overtaken by West Brom and (again) Stoke.

As previously explained, only the top two teams get automatic promotion, so falling to third is cataclysmic. If we don't beat Stoke next week, the playoffs are a near certainty.

I went into a deep sulk for about three hours, then Sean cheered me up. Have you seen this week's Venue? he asked. You're in it.

And so I was. In the list of Bristol's best blogs. They've listed twenty, in no particular order, and I'm one of them.

I'm touched. The last time I made a shortlist for anything it was 1985, and the shortlist in question was an injunction. It was only a snippet (in Venue, the injunction was quite detailed), but it's all grist to the mill.

Jon Eccles talks about religion (which he's against) and Bristol City FC (which he's all for), it says. Both assertions are true, but what happens when they conflict?

I found out the other day. Our goalkeeper, the peerless Adriano Basso, is a born again Christian, and rumour has it he's been taking Bradley Orr to services with him. They're two of our best players.

Dave told me about this at work, and what were the first words out of my mouth? Well if that's what it takes, I said. I can't believe I was willing to write off two human beings to the ignominy of medieval superstition, just so we can get promoted. Never mind throwing the Christians to the lions, I was fully prepared to countenance throwing two of our lions to the Christians. The shame of it. How can I go back on the Richard Dawkins website now?

But as if to refute the very notion of karma, the universe has forgiven my grubby little lapse and granted me a new superpower. I just put the lights on in the living room, and one of them didn't come on. I reached into it to change the bulb, grabbed the old one and twisted it to remove it. Instead of popping out, it lit up.

The power of electricity, at my fingertips! Just one touch, and dormant light bulbs spring back to life. I might use it to give our front line a bit of a jolt. Pour encourager les autres, that's what I say.

Last weekend, I was discussing server farms with my good friend Glenn. In particular, we were wondering about their energy consumption. He sent me a link about Google server farms in the week.

Apparently Google have about 450,000 servers, globally scattered but locally clustered. According to the article, that number of servers would have an energy consumption roughly equal to about 200 megawatts.

A watt, of course, is one joule per second. Even the biologists in my readership know that. The point is that it's a way of averaging energy consumption over time. My lightbub says 100W on it (you can't use the energy saving ones with the dimmer switch in my lounge, unfortunately), which by my calculations means Google are costing the planet about two million full strength lightbulbs.

Is this right? Because it seems like bugger all, amounting to 1/2500 lightbulbs per human, and I'm sure Google must be more evil than that. You'd think it would take that much power just to monitor all the dissidents for the Chinese government. If anyone can fill in my uninformed prejudice with something more considered, this is the place to do it.

Also, who else runs an equivalent level of server farms? Flickr? Yahoo? Actually, that's the same thing. Which reminds me, Sean says you should all stop using Flickr, which he describes as the MacDonalds of photogalleries, and start using Gallery instead.

Also also, is it the case that server farms can basically be anywhere? Because if so, surely they could be where it's windy, wavy or sunny. With the obvious benefits thereof.

You tell me.

It's the headline all fans dream of. City chairman promises to spend, it says.

For a Championship team, being promoted is worth about £40m. That's for extra TV rights, a share of the gate at the big stadiums, increased sales of merchandising and so on. Steve Lansdown says £30m of that would go on players.

I'd like to offer my services right away. I've been standing aloof for so long now, quite literally cheering from the sidelines, and it's time for me to throw my hat in the ring. I wouldn't need the whole £30m, that would be unfair on the other players and contrary to my egalitarian values. A third would be fine.

But what would I bring to the team? I found out the other week on Match of the Day. One of the old Arsenal back four, who seem to have metamorphosised into the BBC front four, was talking about what it would take to stand up to Man Utd. You'd need a good, solid defender to sit on Ronaldo from start to finish, and take him out of the game, he said.

And there you have it. My USP. I could guarantee to sit on Ronaldo for as long as required, and frankly we aren't just talking about taking him out of the game. I just hope the little urchin's got tough ribs, or I'll take him out of the whole season.

But we need some points, or none of this will happen. Starting with three at Southampton tomorrow, ideally.

Exhaustive calculations have revealed that the earliest date Bristol City could possibly be crowned Champions of the Championship, an official and euphonious title to add to their unofficial one of Queen of all our Hearts, is Saturday April 19. On that day we travel to Stoke for one of this year's most crucial games.

I can hear the crass taunts from my less mature readers now. We're going to Stoke? You're going to Stoke with them, are you?

Yes I am. Yes I am going to Stoke. Four of us have tickets for the game, and we're all going up in Dave's car. So ha! to you, jejune readers, and may you wallow in the juice of your own contrition for all time, or at least until the end of the season.

It's my first away game, and I'm quite childishly excited about the whole thing, especially now I've realised I could witness our grand instalment as lords of all we survey. Admittedly the odds against it are in the order of 450 to 1, but still. We could also guarantee a top two place, which means automatic promotion. The odds against that are only about 80 to 1, which is a comparative certainty.

So mark it in your diaries, and bookmark the page you need. You'll have to go BBC Sports Championship live scores for the crucial facts, at about 19:20 GMT. It's particularly important for all my American readers, as your news channels will be busy covering the buildup to some dreary election, and won't have time for the real news.

I'll be no use, because there's a 1 in 80 chance I'll be dead drunk. Expect an avalanche of slightly late match reports, gossip and unsubstantiated speculation over the next few weeks though.