John Walker's Electronic House

Ideas for the previously touted Christians Who Think are bubbling away in the background. It seems that Christian pressure groups are becoming a more frequent media feature in response to anything that they decide not to approve of. “Mothers Who Hate Fun and Happiness” or whatever they’re called in the States and the many similar, and the cowards at Mediawatch in the UK, are regular voices on the radio, given an immediate airing as soon as they want to squeal. There’s a need for a response to this from Christians who don’t agree with them, and I’m excited by the interest that’s being shown in this project.

One person to whom I was never sure how to respond was Stephen Green, the one man band calling himself Christian Voice. While an idiot, he’s not an idiot, and played the game very cleverly during the Jerry Springer: The Opera debacle. The ‘organisation’ had some brief media coverage last year when it managed to get someone fired from St. Andrews’ Student Union over a play it didn’t like, but beyond that hadn’t received a great deal of attention. More critically, he didn’t have the leverage to get it. But with JS:TO, a great deal of fuss was drummed up by the late Mary Whitehouse’s tribute group, Mediawatch. If you trawl through the news coverage, you’ll notice that Christian Voice don’t appear until the ball is very much rolling. When he steps in, with his far more outrageous trumpetting, and far more media-entertaining screeching noises about Jesus, Mediwatch were forgotten, and Christian Voice suddenly seen as the face of the protest. A clever move.+

For the sake of an analogy I compare Stephen Green to a serial killer. This is because I’ve been watching a lot of The Shield season 3, and not because I am in any way implying that Stephen Green is a serial killer. However, I do imply that he is a spiteful shithead. A serial killer often commits his crimes because of the rush, and the rush is often increased hugely by media coverage. It’s what often leads killers to be caught, especially in TV shows. The desire to see the same coverage, to see the same attention, a second time will drive them to re-commit. But to keep the media’s attention you have do bigger, better, badder than the last time. It was obvious that Green was going to want to keep getting the incredible attention he had previous received, and so he was going to have to innovate to ensure his next ‘kill’ would get the same coverage.

Trouble was, he should have waited. He organised a pathetic protest outside of a cathedral that was hosting a charity concert featuring singers from JS:TO, and made a great deal of noise about how taking these blasphemers into the church was an attrocity, and that people should not attend the charity fundraiser. Now, with someone like Green there’s little to benefit from pointing out that surely the point of church is to invite the sinners in, and certainly no more point in telling him that the singers from the musical who attended were church going Christians themselves. Because Green isn’t just an over-zealous Christian loon – he’s a hatefully homophobic British supremacist, whose website is barely distinguishable from the BNP’s. Another past stunt was his ‘spoofing’ of the Gay Police Association’s website, that he was forced to take down due to its horrific content. His website contains a list of hymns that ‘they’ approve of, of which about half are foul, racist anthems that glorify the British Empire and tell of how it was God’s will for such a thing to exist. He proudly boasts that ‘they’ don’t miss out the verse from the British national anthem (“Verse 2 is so politically incorrect that it is omitted from all government websites! But that does not stop us singing it.”) that goes:

O Lord our God, arise,
Scatter our enemies
And make them fall
Confound their politics
Frustrate their knavish tricks
On thee our hopes we fix
God save us all.

Oh yes British people, be proud.

But like all good TV show villains, he went that one step too far. Protesting outside a cathedral trying to prevent people from attending a performance of Christian music to raise money for charity wasn’t enough. He then decided to target those who would be receiving money from this fundraiser. Maggie’s Centre, a small cancer charity, was blackmailed by Green to not take the money. He told them that if they accepted the £3000 his ‘organisation’ would protest outside of their charity’s doors, and hence publically denounce them – something a small charity could ill-afford to risk. They turned the money down.

Radio 4’s Today Programme covered the story yesterday, and once again made the mistake of crediting Green’s Christian Voice with being something that deserved to be taken seriously. But this was too much. Those Christians who heard reports saying “Jerry Springer: The Opera contains over 9 trillion uses of the word ‘fuck’ and will blind your children”, and trusted it, were quick to jump on the bandwagon. But this time… no.

Brilliantly the Today Programme decided to have a look into Green and try to find out quite how organised his organisation really is. And the results are awesome. Not only has Green been revealed as a cruel liar and blackmailer, but at the same time his ludicrous stupidity has given cause for a reasoned Christian voice to be broadcast in the report, with excellent and intelligent contributions from the bishops involved. I’m sure the BBC won’t mind my stealing it from their site, as it will disappear from their servers very soon. So, it’s uploaded here for your listening pleasure. Key moment: “er… photocopy it”.

Happy Birthday Kim

Things that hate me:

Hard drives
Gravity
My bag that tries to trip me up
Moths
Writeable CDs
Sellotape
Revolving doors
Goblins

For Stu,

Perhaps the curse has been lifted.

Anyone who has ever had the misfortune to be near me during a time of computer crisis (these times are indicated by the computer’s being switched to “on”) will know that I am particularly plagued by the most peculiar and perplexing problems. And I still maintain that it’s not through any fault of my own.

I find it particularly unfair, for instance, when I’m installing a new graphics card and the plastic of my monitor starts melting, or upgrading my soundcard drivers and a volcano erupts on my motherboard getting lava in the memory card slots, and the response from the individual to whom I turn for help is to say, “That would only happen to you, John.” And then laugh.

People on tech support lines, after realising that I’m reasonably aux fait with the insides of the machine (and hence am not using my PC as a hostess trolley for dinner parties, or desperately confused about why my floppy discs keep breaking the DVD drive) then take on a strange tone of sad confusion when I explain the error.

“I’m sorry sir, but it’s not possible for the screen to turn red and start bleeding from the front.”

Today was spent building a new PC from harvested parts, giving me something more up-to-date for this modern games reviewing lark (3200+ Athlon 64, 1GB RAM, GF FX 5900, DVDR/W, geek readers). Well, it was spent by my lovely housemate Jonty building it, while I drew on the case with permanent black marker pen. My PC now has a large, smoking explosion on the side. By my work, not Jonty’s.

However, the entire time he was at the machine (containing only the memory of the previous, and nothing else the same), he was alternating between chuckling at the impossible things that were going wrong, and swearing at the impossible things that were going wrong. Heroically, he saw it through, and I’ve spent the rest of the day (apart from jaunts in town with the ever lovely Hannah and Jo) emptying small hard drives onto large, and installing PCI card drivers. What a treat.

But. But but but. It all seems to be working fine. Maybe it was enough. Maybe it was writing “THIS CASE IS CURSED” in large block letters on the top of the case that humiliated it into trying harder. Maybe it was just my turn for happiness.

Of course, such positive thoughts mean I fear the inevitable explosive loss of life and damage deposit. But I write “but” too often in the face of fear, and claim it anyway. The curse is lifted! My machine is new and good! Tonight. But there was something a bit weird with Winamp earlier. And this green smoke probably isn’t meant to make me feel this dizzy.

I’m sorry to report that leisure centre male changing rooms are still the same as ever.

I don’t frequent such places with any regularity, since about a decade ago when one of my more potent complexes developed enough power to prevent my swimming in public. Without swimming there is rarely a need to use the male changing room, and it’s a good thing too.

Today, however, I played badminton with Chrissy. This is something we used to do regularly, and have just begun doing again, but previously the weather was appropriate for arriving at the centre in the clothes we’d play in. Today it was minus eight thousand degrees celsius and so wearing shorts for the walk down would have resulted in the loss of both legs. It meant WEARING DIFFERENT CLOTHES THAN THOSE WORN FOR PLAYING IN. Yes, it meant: Using The Changing Room.

So it is now my belief that the old grey man and the late 30’s man who stand naked in the middle of the communal changing area, scrubbing at their (own) dangly bits with a large off-pink towel, are employed by the leisure centre. They are ever present. They were there when I was a small boy going swimming, when I was a teenager going to those slide-improved swimming pools, and on any infrequent occasion I should have happened to stumble into one since. And indeed they were there today.

What possesses these people, when there are walls of empty changing cubicles lining the walls of the room, to make their genital drying a public performance? Are they inexplicably proud of their parts, wanting to ensure that all passing can be wowed by their decreasingly damp loinage? Are they terrible claustrophobes, unable to cope with the confined space of the cubical? Or are they, as I suspect, dads?

I believe it is something that occurs upon the birth of your first child. Something snaps inside. Some part of the male brain that had previously served to prevent public nudity entirely shuts down, turning a previously normal man into a serial naturist.

Perhaps it’s a pride thing. “Look! This thing works! It flipping works! All survey my fully functioning phallus.” Or perhaps, and I think this is my most likely solution, they are there to ensure that men are sure they have walked into the correct changing room. The thought of accidentily going into the girls’ room while it’s not busy, entering a cubical and getting changed into your swimming gear, and then walking out to be met with shrieks and lawsuits, is too terrible to contemplate. Were the naked old man and the naked man in his late 30s not there, the ambiguity of location would be too much, sending any rational male into a crazed search for the back-up solution – the inappropriately placed urinals. (For those who are less familiar with men’s changing rooms at pools (I think they’re called ‘girls’), for some bizarre and enormously disturbing reason, the urinals are always just placed against one back wall of the changing room, barely divided from the rest of the area, meaning that anyone peeing there is doing so for the eyes of the rest of the room. Is there no way these places could be made worse?).

I do not know if women’s changing rooms have an old lady and a mum in her late 30s with large off-pink towels. I shall wait to be informed.

Of course, the generational element is easily explained. People are hired as soon as they become dads, and then work for a leisure centre until they die. But it’s not so simple as just standing there endlessly scratching your scrotum with a beach towel – there are techniques, methods, unique skills. So each new arrival is paired up with an older, more experienced expert, who shows him the ropes (snigger).

It is solved. But it remains so very wrong.

Dear the BBC,

I wish to complain in the strongest possible tone about the next blasphemous, abhorent and evil programme you intend to televise at some point in the future. I am furious that you consider whatever it may be to be suitable for our televisions, and demand that you remove it from your schedules immediately.

I would also like to call for the resignation of whomever should be in charge of the channel at the time of the planned broadcast, as clearly he or she has no concept of morality and is unsuitable to have a position of responsibility at our Queen’s televisual station.

The damage that will be done by whatever it might be will be incalculable, especially to the innocent and fragile minds of babies, children and the mental. It makes me enter a corybantic rage to think that the BBC believes this depraved, despicable and horrific filth is appropriate for our eyeballs and brains, especially when we live in a country in which so many poor, stupid or foreign people have easy access to your broadcasts.

Obviously I shall be destroying my TV License when the replacement copy arrives, and I shall be encouraging others to do the same, as soon as such a time should occur when you show this programme, whenever that might be.

You disgust me, and you reduce the name of our Good Lord Jesus Christ, Lord and Mighty Saviour of MANkind to a swear word! It is quite clear that your corporation is infested with gays and blacks, and I weep for your souls on the day the Mighty God of the Universe crushes you slowly to death under His Holy Heels, popping your eyeballs from your sockets as your fragile, limp carcasses collapse pathetically, before you are cast into the eternal torment of a firey Hell.

With the love of Our Lord Jesus,
General Brigadier Second Lieutenant Gerald Harralfmanster, OBE.

Oh deary me, looks like I’m in a pickle. Although I do need to grow a pointy moustache.

Following the ludicrous furore over Jerry Springer The Musical, led by right-wing Christian organisations who don’t even have the balls to expressly state that they are Christians, I have reached the point where I can no longer sit still while these hateful, cruel and foul-faced bigots represent the faith that means so much to me. They are a wretched minority, screaming their bullshit so loud that no one else can be heard.

So I’m going to do something about it. Plans made, manifesto written, cogs beginning to whirr.

Watch out for Christians Who Think.