Google Groups appears to be an abomination. I belong to several, insofar as I appear in the membership lists and can post messages, but when I try to read messages I'm told that my details have changed in some unspecified way and I must change them back, and nothing I do makes any difference.

I have just started a Google Group, called 'WUR!' I wanted to call it 'WUR' but that was rejected as too short.

I created it mainly as an experiment because I was having difficulty getting into someone else's group, even though I'd been invited to join. However now it exists - does the metaphysical resonance of that word make you tingle, as it does me? - it might as well be used, and I see its future primarily as a refuge for the denizens of cix:wur in case cix fades away.

The group is closed. The simplest way to apply for admission is to go to the entry page.

Greenpeace appears to be both less innocent and more Luddite than we are often led to suppose. In their early days I was sympathetic, especially when their boat was blown up in Australia by agents of the French secret service, but in recent years I've been repelled by their strident self-righteousness.

My doubts were strengthened by this article by a former Greenpeace leader who left because he found other leaders both ignorant of science and indifferent to it.

The recent teachers' strike struck me as absurd.

I was a teacher all my working life and never considered I was paid too little.

I'm interested in ideas, especially Mathematical ideas and I like reading, so to some extent I was being paid for pursuing my hobbies. As teaching involves conveying ideas to the young, people who don't find ideas interesting are likely to find the job tedious, and their sense of tedium is likely to be communicated to their pupils. Such people would be better not teaching at all. I think the union activists and trouble makes are usually misfits of that sort. I encountered a number of them when I was teaching. They seemed to combine a cantankerous ill humour with a blinkered economic innumeracy, expecting that any money they thought they needed could be made to appear just by appealing to wordy political slogans.

I have several times dined at the Casa Romana, an agreeable Italian restaurant in Leicester, but only today have I discovered from the Leicester Mercury that one of the staff believes herself to be possessed by the Devil.

Just think what she might have put in the Bolognese sauce !!!

Israeli police had to break up a fist fight that erupted between Greek and Armenian Orthodox clergymen at one of Christianity's holiest sites.

The scuffles broke out at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem on Orthodox Palm Sunday.

there is more on the BBC site.

One is supposed to react to such stories with a mixture of sadness and shock, but I think it's funny :-)

I'm intrigued by the privileges enjoyed by Head Boys and Head girls in some of our ancient educational establishments.

These include rights to keep pigs, goats, and in some cases even mistresses; it was not clear whether all forms of livestock were intended for the same purpose.

When I read of such engaging customs, I pity those who are subjected to the unimaginative regimes of modern comprehensive schools.

Details are provided in a recently published article in the Telegraph.

The peerless Gerard has just told me about RSS feed from blogs, inspired by which information I have added feed from his blog to my reader page. I'm posting this message to give him something to read. I hope he'll soon return the compliment by posting something in his blog.

Yesterday I used one of those DIY business card kits to print some cards giving my email address and the URLs for this blog and for my website. If I carry a few about with me it may help me avoid the operation of writing them down, doubly hazardous because my email address is the only one of the three I can be relied on to remember.

How often I shall use the cards remains to be seen. There was a previous edition that predated this blog and gave only web site and email address, and I've used only one of those, giving it to my friendly butcher who spends quite a lot of is pare time seeking strange facts on the web.

A recent gastronomic adventure was eating vegetables Bolognese, consuming Bolognese sauce with assorted vegetables instead of Pasta.

It's strange how we get wedded to conventional associations of food. It took me many years to get round to eating conveniently-shaped-pasta Bolognese instead of ridiculous spaghetti, a commodity that seems designed to discomfort those of us who have beards, but it only recently occurred to me to eliminate pasta altogether., in favour of vegetables with less carbohydrate. A mixture of carrots, parsnips and calabrese went very well with some of my home made Bolognese sauce - I vary the standard recipes by adding red wine and pureed chicken livers.

Second thoughts

This blog is turning out to be surprisingly self referential. I'm writing this entry because one hardly has a blog until there is more than one entry.

I started my first entry with a date, and now see that the software adds a date. I'm not completely sure that that makes my date superfluous, because the date automatically added reflects the American time at which the entry was posted, but the English time when I started to write it. I shall watch those dates carefully.

Now I shall try to add a link:

my web site

I was very brave when I entered that, keying in the URL from memory; usually I cut and paste. I wonder if I've got it right.

17th April 2008: My first entry in any blog

I have never blogged before, partly because I've always had plenty to do without acquiring a new hobby, and partly because I like stories to be told in chronological order, and blogs tell the story backwards. However I do sometimes want to make topical announcements, often of recent changes to my web site, and if I store old announcements, reverse time order seems to be the only way, so I shall try it out.

I think I've now written enough to investigate the editing and other features of this site, so let this be the end of the first blog.