Alton Towers has cancelled the Islamic fun day next month. Halal food, a strict dress code and sex segregation on the park's rides evidently didn't appeal to enough people. 
And sitting opposite is someone who has been giggling at his PDA for the last 50 minutes. I stop using public transport for a week or so, and everyone's turned in to lunatics in the meantime. Perhaps it's just because it's the weekend.
I'm on the train, and at the table over from me, four women are sharing a bottle of champagne. And some bottled water.
Imagine if it were true 
Last October, before I was writing here everyday, I attended a debate at Conway Hall. It was titled "The House believes the Christian God to be a myth". I entered the hall with some expectation, having reserved a ticket to the event before hand.
We had good speakers on both sides - two prominent members of the NSS, and two Reverends from the Holy Trinity Brompton church in West London.
I left disappointed. The debate was a knock-about. The side of the believers more so than the side of the non-believers - instead of touching in any serious way on the isues of philosophy or Christian theology, they called up members of the audience to testify to their conversion. And so they came, with their tales of woe - crime, divorce, prison, sexual abuse - and then the Light of the World, Jesus Christ, saved them from their sins.
But if that were bad, how about the statements of the non-believers. I hate to say it, especially as an acquaintance was speaking, but they weren't much better. A brief speech that took little account of the evidence, the arguments or the debates which take place in both the pew and the academy.
There is a serious issue here. If we are going to reject religion - as we should - we need to do it seriously. Even if we are to make fun of religion, we must do that seriously too. As Kierkegaard argued, if one is to have faith, one is engaging in an individual subjective passion - the highest of all possible subjective passions. As the Stanford Encyclopedia puts it, "This self is the life-work which God judges for eternity."
And so we turn to our many publishers and book sellers. If one wants to engage in these issues, if one believes them to be important, as I do, then what does one find in book shops? Well, in short, nothing.
One will find a handful of Bibles and Korans, and then one will find a whole load of conspiratorial books - The Da Vinci Code without the styling of a novel. If one looks at works on the historicity of Jesus, one finds much the same. Whether it is books that seek to unlock the mysteries that the Church has locked away for centuries, or to reveal supposedly hidden evidence.
These books are thoroughly charmless and academically stultifying. They cheapen the whole exercise regardless of their conclusions, because their methods are so idiotic. Our so-called debate in London brought up more points worthy of considertion - even though that consideration never actually arrived - than these Jesus as Conspiracy Theory books.
And it is with that background which I have been reading Who Was Jesus?, a mercifully short text (have a look in a theological library sometime and you should see what I am referring to) by Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham, who has authored a number of studies of the New Testament.
It is an excellent cure for the rash of reinterpretive popular biographies and histories of Jesus. It takes the works of three authors and takes a critical look at them. Firstly, the British journalist, A. N. Wilson, whose book on Jesus was a best-seller both in Britain and the United States. Secondly, the various writings of the Australia author Barbara Thiering who uses a method based on the interpretation of codes to read new and radically different meanings in to the New Testament. Thirdly, the American bishop John Spong, who offers a sceptical, feminist approach to Jesus.
Bishop Wright demonstrates the numerous errors and failures of these writers in their approach to the historical Jesus, noting their internal self-contradictions and their hidden assumptions.
And it points us back to the key issue. We should not, as non-believers, be arguing these points for the sake of arguing. The evidence of the Gospels is clear as to who Jesus is claimed to be.
Just as those who are opposed to the government's policies should not waste their time with conspiracy theories about secret puppet-masters and unseen agents controlling the government, those of us who do not accept the claims of religion should not waste our time with these religious conspiracies. In a hundred years time, whose names are going to shine bright as critics of religion - Tom Paine, Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins or Dan Brown, Barbara Thiering and whoever else steps up to the Jesus conspiracy game.
There are people taking sceptical looks at the historicity of Jesus, and there should be. In fact, it is possible to argue that the whole enterprise of modern Biblical scholarship is in reaction to Tom Paine - a somewhat reductionist view, I may add, but not without support.
And so we end where we begin - if we do not take the enterprise of scepticism seriously and scholarly, the very issue will be taken over as fodder for light entertainment or, worse, supposedly scholarly light entertainment - the sort of pseudo-intellectual crap that keeps Radio 4 commentators in business. And that benefits nobody.
Apple: A New Users Guide
If Apple decide not to make it, we can always just photoshop it and post it on digg.com. They'll make it eventually. Having the actual product is only a fraction better than having a badly Photoshopped picture of the product.
Memo to journalists: iPod mugging is always a hot story, even though mobile phones get stolen more often.
Memo to journalists #2: stories about iPods being built in third-world sweatshops is an equally hot story, despite almost all consumer goods sold in the Western world having their place of origin in the same sweatshops.
Memo to journalists #3: Just because children can put porn on their video iPod does not mean that (a) it is the end of the world as we know it, (b) that Apple is somehow promulgating porn to innocent children or (c) those kids are so innocent after all (kinky video podcasts rarely turn up if you Google for "care bears").
Memo to journalists #4: If there's a security problem which affects Apple's products, it's always a bigger story than the security problems
We are allies with Intel. We have always been allies with Intel. We will always be allies with Intel. Any stories you hear about IBM or Motorola or PowerPC are all lies and misreporting and will be fixed by the Ministry of Truth as soon as possible.
If you meet Steve Jobs, you must cuddle him, slap him around the mouth and steal the designs for the next iThing.
The Flower Power iMac - a cycle: denial, anger, depression and solemn acceptance.
The MacBook Pro - a cycle: excitement, anxiety, depression, anger, denial.
Holy shit! My battery shouldn't be doing that!
Steve Jobs: They all deny that they love the white headphones, but wait until the next £35 white headphone package comes out and they'll be there, I guarantee it.
Motorola and Apple prove that two positives can produce not only a negative but a crazy-ass Ed Zander talking in tongues about the iPod nano. Nobody wants to listen to 1,000 songs. They want to listen to 100, and not a single song more.
"If you love OS X so much why do you get so excited about Boot Camp and Parallels Desktop?" is to the Mac/Windows debate as "Why do you hate America and/or eat babies?" is to general political discourse in the United States.
One more thing.
There will never be a video iPod. May we present: the video iPod. There has always been a video iPod.
And finally: this has been brought to you via the London Apple Store's free wi-fi. Can anyone say "Winston Smith"? Right from the belly of the beast.
