Category Archives: Uncategorized

Whilst I was researching my “Empires” piece, I glanced at an article which mentioned a study that had shown that, on average, English families with surnames derived from the French language have more wealth than those with surnames of Anglo-Saxon origin.

The Independent, 28th May __19 Anti-democrat’s tweet condemned There was widespread outrage on social media yesterday following a tweet by a formerly unknown costume-denialist, Wat Simkin, claiming that, at the morning royal parade, the Emperor “hadn’t got anything on.”

An article in the BBC magazine Radio Times, by David Butler, is an interview with Sir David Attenborough. Butler raises the question about why series like Blue Planet II divert viewers from the wonders of nature by the oft-repeated message about impending ecological disaster and, particularly, climate change.

A slight landmark for The Hump yesterday – for the first time we hit over 20,000 hits for the previous month. That’s a cool quarter of a million a year.

Well, I’m told that the author-copies of the new book are winging their way across the Atlantic from the publisher to me, which means that it should be published within the next few weeks. Thanks for being so patient.

Another year has passed at the Camel’s Eyrie (and, I suppose, elsewhere!), and it’s been a good one. We’re now big in China and Turkey as well as Sweden.

A frivolous post, since it’s so hot and summery here. Over at Joshua Swamidass’s Peaceful Science blog, he has the same software as does BioLogos, enabling him to give pithy descriptive epithets to regular posters. For me, he has chosen “Indigenous Theologian”.

There’s something of a clash of the titans going on over at BioLogos, where Dennis Venema is defending his claim in the book Adam and the Genome that science makes belief in a single original human couple untenable. In the blue corner is Richard Buggs, of Kew Gardens and Queen Mary College, London and, ruining the boxing metaphor somewhat, Steve Schaffner (“Glipsnort”) is doing expert computer simulations on the side within his sphere of undoubted expertise.

When I recently posted a YouTube clip of the band Devo, it was based on a vague recollection of a hypnotically quirky song attached to a supposedly subversive philosophy not of revolution, but of devolution. Checking out the back-story, though, I discover that the whole idea was rather ironically purloined from a controversial anti-evolutionist pamphlet-writer of the 1920s, B H Shadduck. The Devo track was, in fact, named for Shadduck’s 1924 pamphlet Jocko-Homo Heavenbound.