Finally I actually managed to write a blog post that wasn’t week notes. That may well be my biggest achievement of the week.

Health

Still hobbling around in a cast and on crutches. Getting a bit better at it, but my upper body strength is still almost non-existent so I’m not going very far.

I went back to the hospital on Friday. On my previous visit it took about three hours. This time I did pretty much the same things and it took about half an hour. The doctor says everything seems to be going ok. They don’t want to see me for another four weeks. At that point they hope to remove the cast and replace it with a plastic boot.

Speaking and Training

Not much going on here. Still slowly building up to the courses I’ll be running at the end of February – which it now looks like I’ll be running with a plastic boot on, so there will probably be a fair bit of sitting down involved.

A couple of enquiries came in for training sessions later in the year. Looks like it could be a good year for my training business.

General Business Stuff

I host most of my domains on servers rented from 1 and 1. They’re not the best option by some distance, but they’re really cheap. At the end of last year I noticed that they had servers available running Centos 6. I rented a new server and have been slowly moving my domains over. This is a long and rather dull process. But I expect to be finished by next weekend.

Gigs

Anther gig that I couldn’t get to this week. This time it was Ed Sheeran at the Brixton Academy. Put the ticket on Gumtree and within hours I had a huge number of replies. Guess I set the price too low.

TV Highlights

Sherlock, of course. For the record, here’s my theory.

Moriarty had a Sherlock mask that he used when he kidnapped the children (which is why the young girl screamed when she saw Sherlock). Sherlock jumped into the back of the lorry that we saw, but at the same time threw off Moriarty’s body with the mask on. The cyclist that bumped into Watson also gave him a quick squirt of the H.O.U.N.D. gas so he saw what he feared most. Molly arranged to have the body collected and misindentified as Sherlock.

Of course, this is just a synthesis of many theories that have been going round on the web this week. And Stephen Moffat says there’s a clue that no-one has spotted.

Finished series two of Lost on DVD and made a start on series three. And we’ve started to watch Mad Men against from the start. Hope to watched it all before series five starts in April.

Hmm… doesn’t sound like I’ve achieved that much this week. But that’s probably an accurate reflection of how I feel.

Today was the day that parliament had a rather long list of private members bills to debate. Originally there were sixty-four on the list. As this informative post from Kerry McCarthy tells us, they’d normally expect to get through about three of them. The MPs sponsoring the rest of the bills were pretty much wasting their time.

Number eight on the original list was Nadine Dorries bill to teach girls between 13 and 16 how to say no to sex. The Guardian’s headline was MPs to debate sexual abstinence lessons bill, which was slightly disingenuous as the chance of the debate reaching that far down the list was tiny.

But this morning, when the order of business for today in parliament was published Dorries bill was missing from the list. Everyone assumed that Dorries was responsible for this removal. As a spokeswoman for the Commons information office told the Guardian “No one would be able to remove a private members’ bill without the permission of a member”. The assumption seemed to be that Dorries had realised the futility of being so far down the list and had removed the bill. She wouldn’t have been the only one – the published list only contains forty-nine of the expected sixty-four bills.

At lunchtime, things got even more interesting. A new Twitter account called @NadineDorriesMP appeared with this tweet (in reply to a joke by John Prescott):

@johnprescott My bill has not ‘jumped off at Edge Hill’ if you care to read the order paper, it’s number eight on the list!!

Something about this timeline didn’t seem right to me. That tweet was posted at 12:47, which is almost two hours since I first saw the order of business without her bill. I assume the order of business was published some time earlier. The first hint I had that the bill had been withdrawn was this blog post by Kerry McCarthy which was published just after 10am.

On the basis that the real Nadine Dorries would have known by 12:47 that her bill was not on the order paper, I called the new Twitter account as a fake. But it seems I was wrong. People like Iain Dale confirmed that it really was her (and, yes, this is one of the few things I’d trust Iain Dale on).

All of which leaves us with a bit of a mystery. Either Dorries withdrew her bill or she didn’t. If she did then the first tweet on her new Twitter account is a complete lie. If she didn’t then we need to ask who did withdraw her bill – given that it’s only her who is supposed to be able to do that.

And even if someone else managed to withdraw her bill without her knowledge, something still doesn’t ring true. If she was expecting to debate her bill (no matter how tiny the chance) then surely she would have been hanging around in parliament all morning and I can’t believe that she didn’t see the order paper and notice her bill was missing. Or that one of her friends saw that it was missing and asked her what happened.

All in all I find it incredible that she could have got to 12:47 without knowing that her bill was not on the list. So how do you explain that tweet?

This is, I think, the third time that Dorries has joined Twitter. And with her first tweet she has already started people thinking that this time is going to be no different to the previous occasions. She will be ineptly trying to use it to promote her strange view of the world. And she will quickly make herself a laughing stock once more.

Update: At 16:37 this afternoon, @NadineDorriesMP tweeted the following:

Just to make it absolutely clear and leave no doubt whatsoever, my Bill was NOT withdrawn

Curiouser and curiouser. So, now we are left with two questions. 1/ Why wasn’t Dorries’ bill on the order paper? And 2/ At what point did she realise it wasn’t on the order paper?

Update 2: Welshracer may have got to the heart of the matter here. He points out what it says on the official parliamentary web page for Dorries’ bill.

The Bill was not printed and so was not moved for debate on 20 January 2012.

What do we make of this? One interpretation would be that Dorries didn’t withdraw the bill for debate, but that someone in her office forgot to get the bill printed so that it could be included in the debate.

But even in those circumstances you’d think that she’d get a phone call from the people who were planning the day’s business telling her what had (or hadn’t) happened. I still can’t believe that she didn’t know the bill wasn’t on the order paper when she sent her first tweet at quarter to one.

Update 3: Couple more pieces of information came in overnight.

Firstly, it seems that the new @NadineDorriesMP Twitter account was set up two weeks ago. It seems she resisted using it until goaded into it by John Prescott yesterday.

Secondly, the Independent managed to speak to Dorries about this confusion. She says:

The Bill is still live, but there was more chance of being struck by a meteor than getting it debated, so we told the Commons office not to bother printing a hard copy. What I didn’t realise was that if you don’t order it to be printed, it automatically comes off the agenda.

Of course I wouldn’t withdraw it … a lot of people had paid train fares to come and protest. It would have been churlish.

So we finally have the truth (or, at least, Dorries’ version of it). She knew it wouldn’t be debated so she decided not to have the bill printed. She didn’t know that would automatically remove it from the order paper. She didn’t withdraw the bill out of respect for the people who were coming to protest against it.

It’s also not clear to me in what sense the bill is still live. This was the final opportunity to debate private members bills before the end of this parliamentary session. Any unfinished business from this parliamentary session doesn’t get passed on to the next one, so anything that wasn’t approved is, as far as I can see, effectively dead.

You couldn’t make this up!

When I said I was going to experiment with week notes on this blog, I didn’t intend that the blog would only consist of week notes. But as we’ll see below, other things have been taking my attention this week and I haven’t felt much like blogging. Hopefully normal service will resume very soon.

Health

This is the big one. A few hours after posting my last week notes I slipped down a small flight of stairs in my house and fell badly. Something went ping in my ankle and it hurt like hell. I shuffled onto my bed where I lay for twenty minutes or so before deciding it wasn’t getting any better and I should probably take myself to A&E.

Four or five hours later I left A&E with a diagnosis of a spiral fracture in my fibula, a temporary cast, crutches and an appointment to go to the fracture clinic on Friday.

I spent the week hobbling about the house on crutches and went back to the hospital on Friday. They replaced the temporary cast with a more permanent one in sexy black fibreglass which I’ll be sporting for the next five weeks or so. They also took another x-ray and confirmed that although there’s definitely a fracture, everything is still in the right place so there’s no need for surgery, pins of any of that nonsense.

Going back to see them again next Friday.

Speaking and Training

The downside of having your leg in a cast is the doctors don’t like you flying – the pressure in the cabin can lead to blood clots. So I’ve had to postpone the trip to Romania. It hasn’t been rescheduled yet, but I hope to get there later in the year.

Counting the weeks, it looks like the cast will be coming off just before my other currently scheduled classes – the public courses for FlossUK and O’Reilly at the end of February. If I don’t heal on schedule then I expect I’ll be giving the classes sitting down.

Incidentally, those lovely people at O’Reilly have arranged to give away one free ticket to each of the two courses. Full details on how to enter are in an advert in the new issue of Linux Format. There are also runners-up prizes of copies of the new camel book.

Writing

Having spent the week sitting around at home, you’d think I would have had time to do plenty of writing. But, to be honest, I just haven’t been in the mood. The most I can report here is that I’ve got an agreement write four more articles for Linux Format over the next few months. I hope to finish the first of these (which isn’t about Perl!) today.

Reading

I have at least managed some reading. I’ve picked up Bruce Tate’s Seven Languages in Seven Weeks which I started reading in August but never quite got to the end of. And I’ve started reading Build Your Own Wicked WordPress Themes because I can see myself getting deeper and deeper into WordPress this year.

Gigs

I had a ticket to see Ani DiFranco at the Union Chapel on Tuesday. But my limited mobility mean that I couldn’t get there. I sold my ticket to the very lovely (and talented) Kal Lavelle. Luckily there are lots of videos of the gig on YouTube so I’ve been able to at least see some of the show.

Film

I had a ticket to see The Iron Lady last Sunday afternoon, but I was in A&E at the time. Later in the week I finally got to see In Bruges, which I’ve been planning to watch for ages. Oh, and one morning when I was sitting on the sofa feeling a bit sorry for myself I watched Sixteen Candles. Can’t beat a bit of Molly Ringwald to cheer youself up.

TV

Sherlock was another ninety minutes of delight, of course. And I was pleased to see that The Good Wife returned to More 4. VirginMedia have half of the fourth series of Big Bang Theory on their video on demand service, so I’ve worked through that and am waiting for them to add the rest. We’re working our way through a DVD boxset of Lost – we’re currently close to the end of series two.

But the big surprise has been American Horror Story. We’ve watched all of the first series. Sure, it’s a clichéd in places, but part of the fun is spotting all the references to horror films. We love it.

A new experiment on the blog this year. I’m planning to write a weekly report on what I’ve been doing. No idea how useful or interesting it will be or how long I’ll feel like keeping it going. So here’s what I did this week.

Speaking and Training

Didn’t give any talks this week, but there are a couple of things in the pipeline. I’m running four days of public Perl training courses in London at the end of next month and I’m starting to get into the marketing for that. O’Reilly have offered two free places on these courses as prizes for a competition that has been advertised in Linux Format.

As part of my marketing campaign I’ve been working on a new web site about my training business. Currently I’m working on the content. The look will come later.

Probably the most exciting thing to happen in this area is that I’ve been invited to give a talk about Perl in Transylvania. I’ve been doing some work with some Romanian Perl programmers and they’ve asked me to go over and talk to their new Perl Mongers group in Cluj. I’m going over for a couple of days at the start of February.

Programming

Over the last few months, Linux Format have been publishing a series of articles I’ve written about Modern Perl. The third and final article in the series will be published next month. The articles are about writing a web application to track a reading list. This was to replace a bodged together system or Perl programs that I’ve been using to track my reading for the last few years. This week I finally put the replacement system live at books.dave.org.uk. If you’re interested, the code is on GitHub. At some point I should probably write an article about it on my Perl blog.

General Business Stuff

About a month ago I realised that I was tired of dealing with Nat West for my business banking. It seemed that they made everything far more complex than it needed to be. I asked for advice on Twitter and most people seemed to recommend using HSBC instead. So I applied for an account with them through their web site.

Well, it wasn’t anywhere near as easy as it could have been, but last Saturday I finally opened my new business account. With a new bank account and a new accountant a few months ago it really feels like the business has started a new era.

People ask why I carried on with the HSBC application when it was all so painful. That’s because I still think they’re more efficient than Nat West were. It crystallised for me when I was thinking about the computer systems that they use. In recent months I’ve spent far too much time in Nat West branches watching the screen as an assistant tries to sort out a problem. Their internal systems are all running on what seems to be CICS-based software from the 1980s. When I was watching the chap opening my account in HSBC last weekend it looked like they were running an old version of Windows from the 1990s.

So HSBC’s software seems to be about a decade more up to date than Nat West’s. But still twenty years behind the rest of the world. Surely banking doesn’t need to be so tortuous?

House Stuff

I spent a lot of last week finishing a decluttering exercise that I started after Christmas. I’ve shredded a huge mountain of old paperwork and for the first time ever I have every piece of paper in my study filed in the right place.

Our back garden backs onto a railway embankment and there are a lot of trees there. So we get a lot of leaves covering the back garden. Yesterday I went out and swept up several months worth of fallen leaves. One of the tree has nasty small leaves which get through the grills over drains and block them. So I lifted a lot of drain covers and pulled out a lot of muddy leaves. It wasn’t fun.

TV Highlights

I’ve been watching a lot of TV. The new series of Sherlock was an obvious highlight. But I’m also enjoying the Sky version of Treasure Island and the BBC’s Public Enemies. One thing I didn’t enjoy was Eternal Law. Despite being written by the same people as Life on Mars, the premise of lawyer angels proved to be just as silly as it sounds.

Health

The scales just told me that I’m almost three pounds lighter than I was a week ago.

And here’s the second post in my review of 2011. This is a list of my favourite posts from the year. In 2010 I said it was harder to choose posts from that year as I had blogged less than in previous years. Well, I actually blogged even less in 2011 so it was even harder this year.

As usual I’ve tried to pick one post from each month, but because of the scarcity of posts I’ve had to bend the rules at times. Usually I don’t include posts that have already been mentioned in the list of most popular posts, but that has proved impossible this year so there is a small amount of repetition.

• Boothill Foot-Tappers. The Boothill Foot-Tappers were one of my favourite band from twenty-five years ago. I thought I’d never see them play again, so it was great that they got together for a one-off reunion gig.
• Leaving LoveFilm. I cancelled my LoveFilm subscription early in the year. This post explained why.
• Genealogy Primer. A friend on Facebook asked for help starting his family tree. I wrote a quick braindump in reply. Later I thought that other people might find it useful so I turned it into a blog post.
• Daily Mail on Google and Adele. One of the most ridiculous articles ever from the Daily Mail, debunked easily with the aid of Google.
• Watching the Press – Notes. In May I gave a talk at Opentech about the nonsense published by the British tabloid press and how a group of us try to bring this to the public’s attention by blogging about it. This post contains the notes from that talk.
• Free Web Advice: TalkTalk. TalkTalk really annoyed me by phoning me despite my phone number being registered with the TPS. They then annoyed me even more by making it next to impossible to discuss the matter with them. This post enumerated the many ways that their web site made this hard. I’m slightly ashamed to admit that I finally just gave up.
• Reading the News. A post about how I read the news these days and why a Kindle subscription to a newspaper doesn’t really fit into my life.
• Hating Gnome 3. My favourite Linux distribution switched its default interface to Gnome 3. This made me very sad.
• The Birth of a Meme. Some people writing in the Daily Mail claimed that the BBC had banned the use of the terms BC and AD and had forced broadcasters into using BCE and CE instead. This was completely untrue but that didn’t stop it repeated all over the media. Even now I suspect that a large proportion of the public think that it’s true.
• Dorries on Humanism. Nadine Dorries was nominated for the New Humanist’s annual Bad Faith Award. She responded with a trademark closely-argued explanation of why Humanism is an extreme belief that no-one should admit to holding. Her reasoning obviously impressed New Humanist’s readers as she went on to win by a huge majority.
• Winterval. More nonsense from the Daily Mail. But this time they’re admitting that it’s nonsense. When they started to publish a “Corrections and Clarifications” column I don’t think that anyone would have predicted that it would be used to undermine their core beliefs so quickly.
• The War on Christmas Cards. Another Mail article to close with. They claimed that there was an atheist plot to keep religious Christmas cards out of the shops. They also complained about the increased numbers of “obscene” cards – whilst, in another article, praising the work of Donald Gill from a hundred years ago.

It was only while writing this review that I noticed that four of these twelve articles are about the Daily Mail. Looks like the blog might, finally, be developing a theme.

Last year was my lightest year for blogging. In fact every year has seen fewer post since I joined Twitter. Tweets are, of course, far less effort than blog posts. But nevertheless I shall, once again, endeavour to blog more often in 2012.

Thanks for reading in 2011.

As I’ve done for the last few years I’m going to spend a couple of days looking back at the year on this blog. Firstly, here’s a list of the ten most popular posts on the blog this year.

1. Winterval. No surprise here. Because I monitor the Mail’s Corrections and Clarifications column, I was one of the first people to see that they had finally admitted that Winterval wasn’t the atheist/muslim plot they’d always claimed it was.
2. Leaving LoveFilm. This has been a bit of a slow-burner. It’s only so high because it was published early in the year. I explained why LoveFilm’s rental model no longer fitted in with the way I want to watch films. Still waiting for them to offer streaming-only subscriptions.
3. Hitchen’s Last Laugh. A look at the nonsense that took place on Twitter a couple of weeks ago following the sad death of Christopher Hitchens.
4. MPs and Facts. Not much politics on the list this year. This is a reaction to Nadine Dorries’ appearance on Any Questions where she (unsurprisingly) talked nonsense about drugs.
5. Chuggers. I’d been meaning to write something like this for at least a couple of years. Surely everyone hates being stopped by chuggers, don’t they? This was probably the longest comment thread of the year.
6. Daily Mail on Google and Adele. I’m rather pleased with this one. The mail published some nonsense about how Google is deliberately encouraging piracy to bring down the British music industry. It didn’t take very much research to disprove their claims.
7. Independent URLs. I’d forgotten this one. Back in April someone discovered a tiny flaw in the way the Independent’s web site automatically cleaned up URLs. Much hilarity ensued. This post explained what was really going on.
8. Alternative Vote. An attempt to explode some of the myths used by the No campaign to stop people voting for the alternative vote. It apparently didn’t work.
9. Message to ADT. Surprised to find this on the list to be honest. The ADT web site annoyed me so I wrote a post about it. Ten days later I got a reply from someone at ADT saying that my suggestions had been implemented. Which was nice.
10. MPs on Twitter. A review of the number of MPs on Twitter and how it had changed over time. I even drew a nice graph. I need to revisit this project.

So that’s what you’ve been reading on the blog this year. At some point in the next couple of days, I’ll post a list of my favourite posts.

One of my pet hates is all that “review of the year” stuff that appears before the year is over. But I’m not planning to go to any gigs in the next three days, so I feel justified in reviewing the gigs I’ve seen this year before the end of the year.

According to Songkick I’ve seen exactly fifty gigs this year. That’s over twice as many as I saw in 2010.

There are two artists that I saw four times – Stealing Sheep and Martin Carthy, but as Carthy was a guest star on two of those appearances, I guess that Stealing Sheep are the band I saw most. Not bad for an act I first saw in August. There were two acts that I saw three times – Antonio Lulić and Ed Sheeran. I also saw Amanda Palmer twice – and as they were on a Friday and the following Monday, I expect she was the artist I saw with the shortest gap between performances.

I’ve seen gigs in rooms above pubs and one gig at Wembley Arena. Judging by my attendance at venues, my favourites are the Union Chapel and the Barbican Centre.

So what did I like? Actually let’s start with what I didn’t like. I walked out of two gigs halfway through the main act. I went to see Other Lives purely because Hannah Peel was supporting. She was great, as always, but they were terrible. Later in the year I decided to go to see Emmy the Great purely because lots of people I like say how she is. Unfortunately I chose her Christmas party gig with Tim Wheeler and it was horrible. I left after half an hour. In both cases I took a chance on liking an act and in both cases I was wrong. I suspect I’ll be doing a lot less of that next year.

There were a lot of nostalgic gigs on the list this year. Eddi Reader at the Union Chapel was great. Ian McCulloch a week later at the same venue was less great. I think I would have been better off seeing Echo and the Bunnymen instead. Later in the year I saw two great nostalgic gigs at the Bush Hall – Roddy Frame and Michelle Shocked.

I also saw some stuff from even earlier than that. Van der Graaf Generator were really good, but I didn’t really enjoy Yes that much. I even saw Hawkwind for the first time since 1982.

I’ve trying to work out what my favourite gigs were. But there such a wide range of stuff that it’s hard to compare them. Here, in purely chronological order, are ten highlights of my live music year.

• Antonio Lulić, Jesper Ejrup, Trevor John, and Tess and Dibs at the Bedford. Didn’t see enough stuff at my local pub this year, but this was a brilliant night. All of the acts were top quality but the mad Danes in Jesper Ejrup’s band were particularly brilliant.
• The Boothill Foot-tappers at the 100 Club. This was pure nostalgia. I’ve written before about what this band meant to me. It was great to have the chance to see them again.
• Billy Bragg at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Hadn’t seen Bragg play for far too long. This gig proved he still has it.
• Rain Dogs Revisited at the Barbican. Various artists playing songs from Tom Wait’s album “Rain Dogs”. I love these nights at the Barbican. There’s always someone fabulous playing that I’ve never heard of. On this occasion, that was St Vincent. As soon as I got home I bought both of her albums.
• Pulp at Brixton Academy. I never saw Pulp in the 90s and I was seriously considering going to the Wired festival to see them in the summer. Glad I didn’t though as this gig in Brixton was very nearly perfect.
• Amanda Palmer at Heaven. An Amanda Palmer gig is always a treat, and this was no exception. Certainly one of the maddest nights I’ve had this year. Saw her again (at the British Library of all places) three days later for a rather more subdued (but equally brilliant) night.
• Kal Lavelle, Ryan Keen, and Antonio Lulić at the Bedford. Proof (I hope) that I don’t just enjoy seeing old farts play. Kal, Antonio and Ryan are part of an informal group of incredible singer-songwriters who are constantly playing around London (and further afield). At the time of this gig all three of them had recently supported Ed Sheeran at various gigs.
• Roy Harper at the Royal Festival Hall. Someone else I should have seen years ago but never got round to. Plenty of interesting guest stars – including Jimmy Page.
• Zappa Plays Zappa at the Barbican. Sadly, I’ll never get to see Frank Zappa play, but this is about as close as you can get. Dweezil Zappa plays note-perfect renditions of his father’s music. And at some points they had film of Frank playing which the live band jammed along to.
• Stealing Sheep at the Old Blue Last. Must include Stealing Sheep on the list. This was probably the best I saw them play.

All in all it’s been a good year for live music. I’ve ticked off a few more old favourites that I hadn’t previously got round to seeing and I’ve seen a lot of new and interesting bands. I’m already booking tickets for next year and hopefully it’ll be just as interesting as this year was.

What did you see that you really enjoyed this year? Did I miss any absolutely essential shows? What’s going to be great next year?

The Mail might have finally been forced to admit that Winterval wasn’t the the pagan plot they’ve always claimed it was, but that doesn’t mean they’ll stop publishing spurious “War on Christmas” stories whenever the fancy takes them. Today they turned their attention to Christmas cards and really didn’t like what they saw.

The headline was “Stores ‘ashamed’ to sell religious cards… but obscene ones litter the High Street“. The Mail have apparently had staff out on the high streets counting the number of religious Christmas cards on sale in various shops. They calculate that just half a percent of the cards for sale had a religious theme. They then took this information to “Christian leaders” for comment. This included well-known Christian nutter Stephen Green whose comments were every bit as intelligent and nuanced as we have come to expect.

I can’t believe this is being led by consumer demand.

I believe there is anti-Christian prejudice in the buying departments involved.

There’s too much of this multicultural indoctrination and too much of an idea that if they put out Christian cards they will alienate or discriminate against or offend other faiths.

There’s a kind of militant atheism and nasty secularism at work in this country which is completely opposed to Christianity.

He’s totally wrong, of course. This is completely lead by consumer demand. Shop owners aren’t stupid. If there was a demand for religious Christmas cards then they would meet it. If there aren’t many religious cards for sale it means that no-one is asking for them. Christianity is in decline in this country. That’s a simple fact that Christians (and the Daily Mail) are just going to have to accept.

But a lot of that article seemed a little familiar. And a little digging revealed Stores airbrush Christ out of Christmas cards from December 2010. Same writer, same survey, almost identical quotes from Stephen Green and other “Christian leaders”. I hope Andrew Levy wasn’t paid the full rate for both articles. Oh, and there’s another article on the same subject from 2006.

Something that was new to this year’s version of the article was the comparison to other Christmas cards that were on sale. Not only are religious cards in short supply, but the Mail was very distressed to find the shelves apparently packed with obscene cards with messages like “Merry Fucking Christmas”. With it’s useful sensitivity the Mail wanted to make sure that its readers knew exactly how disgusting these cards were so it listed plenty of examples – making liberal use of asterixes in certain words, but leaving us in no doubt what the real words were.

However, the Mail railing against these obscene cards seemed more that usually ridiculous when another article appeared on their web site later in the day. This new article was a celebration of the “bawdy” Christmas cards designed by Donald Gill at the start of the twentieth century. Surely the difference between “bawdy” and “obscene” is just the passage of time. I wonder if it’s worth searching the British Newspaper Archive for Mail stories from a hundred years ago complaining about Gill’s work?

[Executive summary: Betteridge's Law (probably) applies]

The Twitter furore over the #GodIsNotGreat hash tag has pretty much died down now, but there’s one branch of the debate that is still getting comments and retweets. Here’s an example from johnwilander.

#GodIsNotGreat pulled from trends because christians protest. But #ReasonsToBeatYourGirlfriend was allowed. Stay classy, @Twitter.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, the hashtag vanished from the list of global trending topics on Friday morning. And this conspiracy theory leapt up almost immediately. As far as I can see, none of the people repeating this claim have any evidence to back it up – which is more than somewhat ironic given Hitchens’ evidence-driven view of the world.

The argument seems to go like this: At one point the hashtag was trending. Then Christians got upset and starting making death threats aimed at the people who started the trend. Soon after that, the hashtag was no longer trending. Therefore Twitter must have given in to Christian bullying and censored the hashtag.

Whilst it all sounds frighteningly possible, I hope I don’t have to spell out the flaws in the logic. If you can’t work it out for yourself then I recommend the Wikipedia article on Correlation does not imply Causation.

I could be wrong here. There might be some irrefutable piece of evidence proving conclusively that Twitter deliberately censored the hashtag. If there is, then I haven’t seen it and I’d be grateful to anyone who could bring it to my attention.

There is, however, some evidence that Twitter didn’t censor the hashtag. On Friday morning, as the debate still raging, a Facebook friend in Canada pointed out that it was still trending there. In the middle of the afternoon someone pointed out that it was still trending in San Francisco. So if Twitter were censoring it, they weren’t doing a very good job. There’s even someone who apparently works for Twitter saying that they didn’t do it.

Of course, none of this is conclusive evidence that Twitter didn’t censor the hashtag. But balancing some evidence for non-censorship against absolutely no evidence at all for the censorship I know which side I come out on.

All of which leaves us searching for an explanation for the sudden disappearance. And, to be honest, I don’t think we really need to look too hard. Things stop being trending topics all the time. Things have to drop out of the list so that new things can come in. Otherwise the list would constantly be full of nonsense about Justin Bieber and Twilight. The Twitter trending topics algorithm can’t possibly just measure the popularity of topics. That would be incredibly dull. Instead, what it does is to look for changes in popularity. A steady buzz of the same few million people talking about a particular topic doesn’t get noticed, but a sudden increase in the number of people discussing the same topic does. The Buffer blog has a good explanation of this and the official Twitter blog says much the same thing.

I’m sure that this won’t convince the conspiracy theorists. “Ah,” they’ll say, “That’s all very convenient. But that just gives Twitter an easy way to cover up their censorship..” Which is true, I suppose, but hardly a basis for a rational discussion.

And that’s the most disappointing thing to come out of this affair. The people making this accusations are fans of Christopher Hitchens. You would hope they’d be from the more rational end of the spectrum. You’d hope that they would be above making accusations like this without evidence. I guess no-one is immune from irrationality.

But I’m going to go out on a limb here. And lay my cards on the table. And other clichés that Hitchens would despise.

Twitter (probably) didn’t censor the #GodIsNotGreat hashtag.

Update: The author of the tweet I quoted above seems to agree with me.

This morning I woke up to the terrible (although not completely unexpected) news that Christopher Hitchens had died. The rational community has, of course, lost one of its most erudite and interesting members. But it seems that Christopher had one last trick up his sleeve.

As with most breaking news these days, I found out about his death from Twitter. I checked my Twitter feed as I got up at about 6am. A few people that I follow were already awake and discussing it. As a mark of respect, many of those tweets were tagged with the name of Hitchens’ best known book “God Is Not Great“. And then more and more people started to do that. And before too long, the hashtag #GodIsNotGreat was listed as one of Twitter’s worldwide trending topics. At which point it started to go a bit weird.

All around the world religious people who knew nothing at all about Christopher Hitchens, his books or his death were looking at Twitter and seeing the tag #GodIsNotGreat. And that annoyed many of them immensely. So they started tweeting on the subject. Their tweets seemed to largely fall into three categories.

1/ What is this? And why is it trending?

2/ Attempts to inject their own beliefs into the stream – “God isn’t just great – he’s the GREATEST!!” (from someone called foolishdenise – you couldn’t make this up)

3/ Threats to kill whoever had started the hashtag (all very Christian) [UPDATE: Replaced a tweet with a rather NSFW background with another expressing the same sentiment]

Of course, all of these new tweets all included the hashtag. So that just helped ensure that the hashtag became even more popular. Hitchens fans replied, pointing out why the hashtag was trending (and inviting them to read the book) and the hashtag was tweeted and retweeted and commented on and argued over more than pretty much any other hashtag I’ve followed all year. For most of the morning the Tweetdeck column I set up to follow the tag was moving too fast for me to follow it.

At some point in the morning, the hashtag disappeared from the list of trending topics. Some people claimed that Twitter had removed it deliberately in response to the Christian death threats. But it seems slightly ironic for Hitchens fans to claim something like that without any firm evidence. I suspect that it’s more likely that once a hashtag reaches a plateau of activity then Twitter’s algorithm ignores it – otherwise the top trend would always be Justin Bieber (as two people pointed out to me). Apparently it’s still trending in Canada. But I’m not sure what that proves about anything.

One tweet in particular from luketadams summed things up for me.

Hitchens dies. His book #GodisNotGreat trends. Religious people threaten violence. The point of his book is proven. Hitchens for the win.

It’s tempting to imagine Hitchens looking down on the storm that his death has caused and laughing. But that would go against everything that he believed in.

So don’t do that. Instead, reread his articles, buy his books, watch videos of him demolishing his opponents in debate. And remember the great mind that we have lost.