Daily Archives: May 18, 2009

I hate spiders

Posted by David Hurst on May 18, 2009 None comments

I don’t care if people think I’m a bit of a girly wuss, I really hate spiders. They reduce me to a state of nervous hypertension and panic. I’m perfectly happy to look at the things in their own environment. I like watching them build their webs, and I’m intrigued when we see them at the zoo or pet store. But remove the 6mm sheet of glass dividing me and red knee behemoth and I’ll be out of there faster than a drunk at a party with no booze.

You might put this irrational fear down to the way they move (which I hate), or the way they look (which I also hate), but in reality I haven’t always been this way. As a boy, I was quite happy to hold a tarantula when occasion allowed. Frankly, I loved picking the things up. I used to have an ice cream tub (sans ice cream) into which I would place a few twigs and leaves, then bungee it to my bike and ride around looking for insects to turn it into some sort of mini eco-system. Grasshoppers were a favourite, and I got very good at catching them. Beetles, caterpillars, millipedes, centipedes, ear wigs, worms – they all went in the tub. And so did spiders.

I loved insects. I even had some stick insects which I used to feed on the privet hedge that bordered our garden. These were kept in empty sweet jars – big ones that I begged from the local sweet shop. The top was covered with a piece of mum’s old tights and held in place with an elastic band. It was always fun to get them out when we had company and watch the expressions of sheer horror on the faces of our guests.

Anyway, such was my affinity with the world of creepy crawlies, that my tub was soon a bustling hive of insectoid activity, that usually ended with the untimely death of some of the residents, usually at the hands, or should I say legs, of the arachnid community.

I particularly like the garden spiders. We had plenty of these in our garden, often with huge and very colourful bodies. Lovely looking things, I thought at the time. Then one day, one of them bit me. Now there are people that would have you believe that we have no biting spiders in the UK, but I know different. The common garden spider is certainly not averse to a mouthful of homo sapiens. This was no quick nibble either. The little git sunk its fangs into my finger and clung on for grim death no matter how vigorously I shook my hand. The pain was incredible. Much worse than a sting from a wasp and more frightening, because I just didn’t expect it. I am mildly allergic to bee stings, and I have had the dubious privilege of being stung by a hornet, and this ranked up there on the pain scale.

Therein lies the source of my phobia. When I see one of those things scurrying across the floor towards me, I just panic. I think it will run straight up my leg and sink its filthy fangs straight in. But why am I exposing my pathetic un-manlyness to the world?

Well tonight, as I was working in my garage – my space that must not be invaded by spiderfolk – my wife pointed out a huge one that was camped out in a hole in the door frame. That was it. I could no longer happily fettle my pedal cycle, because that was there. It could at any point jump out of its hole and across the floor to me when I wasn’t looking, and judging by the size of it, it probably would have eaten me whole. In a moment of resourcefulness that I think even Ray Mears might have been proud of, I sprayed the eight legged freak with WD40. I watched with pleasure as it slithered out of its hole onto the floor outside, and under my car. It of course headed straight for the back tyre, so it could hide in the dark.

Unfortunately for Mr Spider, he was unaware of my pressing need to move the car. Three inches forward and back again. Alas he is now rather more two dimensional than he once was. And of course by “alas” I mean: “serves the bastard right.

I’ve probably offended someone from the Spiders Protection League with my cowardly action, but I really don’t care, and I won’t be happy until every one of the little blood suckers in my garage is despatched with similar finality.

Religion is a lot like a web browser

Posted by David Hurst on May 18, 2009 None comments

Being a web developer by trade, I am accutely aware of the issues presented in building a cross-browser compatible website. This is because our clients demand that their website always looks the same no matter which web browser is being used. What they are blissfully unaware of is that, despite there being set standards for writing website code (as laid out by the W3C et al), web browsers are not forced to render said website code in a particular fashion, and this allows for a considerable amount of creative licence on the part of the browser programming team – and more often than not the programming team in question is the Internet Explorer programming team.

Firefox has its bugs, as do Safari and Opera, but you can pretty much guarantee that the vast majority of your cross-browser development pain will be caused by Internet Explorer – or as I like to think of it: The Church of England Browser.

You see, religion works in much the same way: you have one set of code (the bible) and yet each of the browsers (religious denominations) chooses to interpret that code slightly differently. And yet, just like a website, I think it is entirely probable that the person that wrote the code would have had in mind a specific way in which it should be interpreted and therefore might not be too happy about the way some browsers just do whatever they damn well please.

This is turning into quite the analogy, so let’s leave the web behind a minute and focus on the theological for a moment.

The bible clearly condemns war. Well, actually, the Old Testament is full of war, but that’s different to the Christian faith and principles of the New Testament. Perhaps we do need the web analogy still. Think of the Old Testament as Web 1.0 and the New Testament as Web 2.0. Web 1.0 is not invalid and many of it’s principles remain true, but other elements have been superseded by Web 2.0. The same is true of the bible.

Jesus and his apostles, of New Testament fame, quoted liberally from the Old Testament, thus proving its relevance to those of a Christian persuasion. And whilst it is true that God actively helped the Israelite nation in warfare, one must remember that in doing so he was merely using His people as His tool to execute His judgment. In fact, the Old Testament itself talks about beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning shears and ceasing warfare. The United Nations was particularly taken with this notion, and had the words of Isaiah 2:4 stuck on their building as some sort of motto, which they completely ignored by failing to turn any of their weapons into farming equipment. I digress…

How is it, that this straightforward piece of “code” can then be rendered by some religious “browsers” as: kill everybody? How can you have Catholics of one nationality going to kill Catholics of another nationality, with both claiming that God is on their side? Hmmmmmmmm. I detect a browser error. He cannot be on both sides, and therefore I suspect He is actually on neither side.

Jesus shunned politics, yet he had a clear and uncontested royal lineage that could be traced back to King David. He rightfully could have claimed his kingship, and indeed this is exactly what the Jews expected him to do. In fact, they tried to enthrone him as king, and he ran away. (John 6:15). Why? Because he chose instead to devote his life to talking about the future kingdom of God (Luke 4:43) – he even told us to pray for it in the Lord’s prayer – rather than focusing on the meaningless politics of the day which could never have brought any lasting benefits to humanity as a whole. He underlined this with a simple statement: “I am no part of this world.”

So then, how is it that the clergy of the Church of England are so involved with politics? Religion has shaped the governance of this country (and many others around the world) for eons, and it still refuses to let go. You see this particularly in the US of A, where politicians preach their manifestos from the church pulpits, creating an interlaced mush of religio-politics that must surely confuse the hell out of the parishioners – they usually look pretty confused to me anyway.

I think we are witnessing another browser error.

Here’s the thing: as sure as you know that Internet Explorer is a pile of festering turd completely incapable of following any standards whatsoever, you also know that there is a Firefox out there. Yes, it may be a little buggy in places, but it is rendering that code out the way it was intended to be viewed, and that’s all that matters.

Likewise, if you wade through all the religions, there simply must be one out there that is correctly distilling the truth. The problem is that you can’t just whip along to mozilla.org and download a copy, but I’m pretty sure that using purely the two principles discussed above, a diligent searcher will be rewarded with the Firefox of truth.