Paint Stripper

You’ll all be pleased to know that my family have returned from Cambridgeshire. It was a long week without them, in which I managed to take up the downstairs carpets and expose the floorboards. Thus our home is currently a little basic., though functional. My intention is to polish up the floorboards and just put down rugs instead of fitted carpets. This would have been much easier had it not been for some buffoon in the past painting stupid bloody pictures all over the floor in gloss paint. I have been using paint stripper to remove these. This causes blinding headaches. I still have a cat, a spider, and an exit sign to remove.

The dragon and the boy actually returned on Friday which gave us the weekend to play. The Bristol balloon fiesta was in full swing, so we spent Saturday there. The balloon fiesta can be great, or it can be crap. It all depends upon the weather. Most years there is too much wind, rain, cloud, or something and the balloons don’t fly. In fact I have only seen them fly once. However, there were in fact perfect conditions this year and we saw 100 balloons go off. It was also less crowded than last year, which was good.

On Sunday we drove back to Bristol to go to the Water Sky restaurant, a fine Chinese establishment providing a wide selection of dim sum dishes. A good time was had by all I think. We also sat down next to a table which was shortly afterwards occupied by our next door neighbours. Who’d have thought. We could have car shared.

Next week I am taking some time off and we’re going to do some stuff together. Look out for pictures and commentary in coming entries.

Richard Dawkins seems to have started a Twitter storm by suggesting that the world’s Muslims have won fewer Nobel prizes than Trinity College Cambridge. I admit that this wasn’t a particularly diplomatic thing to say, though I suspect Dawkins was being deliberately provocative, but I cannot see why anyone is arguing about it. This is either a statement of fact, or it’s bullshit. If it’s bullshit you can tell him he’s talking rubbish. If it’s a fact, tough titty, it’s history whether you like it or not. Incidentally, I’m going with the history option there. Dawkins is not the sort of person who says these things if he can’t back them up.

Staying on the same theme (almost) there is a piece in the Independent today which appears to suggest that the smarter people are, the less likely they are to be religious. This is going to cause a few waves. You only have to look at the comments under the article to see how offended people seem to be. I have to admit that it’s a little difficult to define intelligence, and this study is somewhat vague on what it actually is. That’s not to say that it doesn’t attempt to define it somewhere, but it’s likely just IQ, which is probably an over simplification. Even so, it’s quite a claim to make isn’t it.