Three words that always make me smile

Lidl are having one of their bike weeks - decent stuff dirt cheap, so if you need another pair of cleaty shoes or some shorts or base layers, pop in for a bargain.  And get lots of praline choc and eurosausage at the same time (I can't be the only one).

Me?  I spent all of twenty quid and have a shiny new bicycle. 

Well, half of one: a shiny new unicycle.  He needs assembly and a name.  The danger of reading Iain M Bank's Culture novels when you get a new bike is now becoming apparent: Rather than being called Eric or Boris or Lagavulin or Buckaroo, he's probably going to end up with a name like I Told You That Would Hurt.

Stop asking "can you actually ride a unicyle?" in the back there.  How hard can it be?  I've read the interwebs and everything.

Nooooo!

Neuromancer the movie.  What could possibly go wrong?  Three words:  Hayden Fucking Christiansen.

Zeitgeist: Custodians of the Garden

First those solar power roof tiles, now the idea that the best way to work around the disconnect between polluter and effect is to make the act of polluting a sin, my zeitgeist-fu is strong right now.  The Vatican have announced a new list of deadly sins, which are mostly modern glosses on the old naughtiness, and environmental pollution is right in there.  The more I think of it, the more I think it's sheer bloody genius.

It gets good visceral wrath-of-God afterlife fear into people who otherwise might not give a flying damn.  People are funny like that.  And those same people are going to believe that Katrina was God spanking their filthy sinful asses if they've been stenching up the place.  They're *is* a connection, but it's too disconnected and statistical for most people.

Government plans and UN initiatives last for years or decades.  The problem we're facing is epic in scale, brain-hurtingly vast, and messed up with double-signals like the UK Government's green-lighting of a new coal power station (ffs!).  The Catholic Church knows persistence.  It doesn't have water down policy to fight elections or buy support.  And it doesn't have to make the tough choices, just dispense rules and sympathy.  New coal?  "No, it is a sin.  Find another way, my child."

Because the environmental issue is, at heart, a human moral issue - and that's what these guys do.