The Off Topic Topic

[Admiral Yi]

One thing about nukes is that you need a LOT of them to make a planet useless through radiation. Earth has suffered 2,000 nuclear detonations, and even if radiation from those is measurable it has no global impact on health or the environment. And radiation levels drop off fairly quickly if you look at a decades-long interstellar conflict.

What about the dude in Chernobyl who said if the planet will be uninhabitable if we don't stop this?

[Razgovory]

Dropping an asteroid on earth is close to possible today, though it would take a long time.  We've already landed a probe on an asteroid, you couple hypothetically land an engine on an asteroid.  With a bunch of fancy math you could alter the course and have it hit the Earth.  Downside is that it would probably take years.  A more advanced civilization could probably do it faster.

[The Brain]

One thing about nukes is that you need a LOT of them to make a planet useless through radiation. Earth has suffered 2,000 nuclear detonations, and even if radiation from those is measurable it has no global impact on health or the environment. And radiation levels drop off fairly quickly if you look at a decades-long interstellar conflict.

What about the dude in Chernobyl who said if the planet will be uninhabitable if we don't stop this?

Let me quote myself from the book thread:

Fuck. Recently I read The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine, by Serhii Plokhy. I found it enjoyable and it seemed like a good introduction to the subject. So when I started on his Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy I expected a solid account of Chernobyl. But no. On page two of the preface I came across weirdness:

"Originally it [the reactor core] had contained more than 250 pounds of enriched uranium ..." Technically this is true, but it gives the impression that the core contained only hundreds of pounds of enriched uranium. Quick research suggests that he likely has read the amount of enriched uranium in one fuel assembly as being the amount in the entire core. OK, so a bit weird that he doesn't know much about nuclear reactors and thinks the core was tiny, and weird that it made it through to print. Still, mistakes happen, I read on...

"...- enough to pollute and devastate most of Europe." Really? Some hundreds of pounds of enriched uranium? I struggle on, but fatigue is building...

...and then he launches into a crescendo of weird. "And if the other three reactors of the Chernobyl power plant had been damaged by the explosion of the first, then hardly any living and breathing organisms would have remained on the planet." This is of course complete fantasy. Too bad that he's a fantasist, now I cannot trust anything he writes. So I stopped reading the book. I fucking hate it when this happens.

And get this: the guy is a Harvard professor. What a fucking joke. They're hiring anyone these days.

Sheilbh said he thinks the TV show was based on that book and that the guy was a consultant on the show. So basically it's BS.

NB obviously the fact that it's BS doesn't automatically mean that some guy in Soviet Russia didn't actually make the claim at the time. The author of the book stating the stuff as truth though makes me generally doubt him.

[Sheilbh]

Lovely piece by the Reverend Richard Coles on retiring as a vicar:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-rev-richard-coles-on-retirement-and-what-comes-next-vxhf92fxz

[Valmy]

Lovely piece by the Reverend Richard Coles on retiring as a vicar:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-rev-richard-coles-on-retirement-and-what-comes-next-vxhf92fxz

Paywalled. What is the gist and why is the Church of England divided?

[Grey Fox]

The forces holding the moon together are not that great, relatively speaking. The moon raining down on earth would render it quite inhabitable for a while.

[Razgovory]

Lovely piece by the Reverend Richard Coles on retiring as a vicar:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-rev-richard-coles-on-retirement-and-what-comes-next-vxhf92fxz

That won't make the world uninhabitable.

[crazy canuck]

Underground dudes will need to spend a lot just heating hair

They could forego the luxurious curls...

Would life be worth living at that point?

[Sheilbh]

Paywalled. What is the gist and why is the Church of England divided?

Annoying - it's just a lovely piece. No real gist or point but this maybe gives a bit of a sense:

The Rev Richard Coles on retirement and what comes next
The pop star turned priest will leave his parish for good after Easter. What does the future hold for him — and for the divided Church of England?

Rev Richard Coles
TOM BARNES FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE
Rev Richard Coles
Sunday April 17 2022, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

One day in 1985, when I was 23 and the unlikeliest pop star since the Singing Nun, my manager put a piece of paper in front of me and told me to sign. I did, without looking, like any self-respecting artiste. Fortunately it was not a wildly inequitable contract but a pension scheme.

Thirty-seven years later I signed another document, a deed to the bishop declaring that I was irrevocably surrendering the living of the parish of Finedon in Northamptonshire, where I have been the incumbent since 2011. Two signatures separated by nearly 40 years, the promise of the former paying out to enable the latter.

After Easter I will no longer be vicar. I will leave the vicarage and the parish and go south, to a pretty little English village between the downs and the sea, with a farmers' market and an ancient church, an old bakehouse, a village green and a pub, where the locals gather over a pint of locally brewed ale to reminisce about their Baftas.


St Mary the Virgin church in Finedon, where Coles has been vicar since 2011St Mary the Virgin church in Finedon, where Coles has been vicar since 2011
St Mary the Virgin church in Finedon, where Coles has been vicar since 2011
ALAMY

This was not my original plan. I had hoped to end up with my husband, David, living in a tiny place on a wild peninsula in the west of Scotland, but he died in 2019 and when widowerhood arrived I looked forward and saw nothing. Then lockdown happened. "Will you be OK?" my friends asked, anxious for my wellbeing in the double isolation of bereavement and quarantine. "I don't know," I said, and sat in the garden unable to read, or listen to music, or follow a box set in that loveliest of springs, watching the roses David had planted bud and bloom, a daily bouquet from my absent beloved.

Church was closed, by order, even to its priest — a rule I broke without any hesitation, sneaking in to pray in solitude, for I refused to be the only vicar of my church not to offer worship to God since 1349, when my predecessor John de Colby died in the line of duty, ministering to his flock when the Black Death arrived and killed half the clergy of England.

Unable to come together in church we went out to the community, forming the Parish Support Team so every household had a named person with a number they could call if they needed anything, prescriptions picking up, shopping, and for our most vulnerable neighbours ensuring basic support. The C of E, for all its flaws and failings, can still act as an agent of goodwill, lightly organising the generosity and creativity of the communities we serve, members and non-members alike.

I was a late adopter of online worship, reluctant at first to switch to a technology many would not be able to access, but as weeks turned to months, my curate persuaded me and Zoom evensong began. It is perhaps a counterintuitive fact, but Christianity has always been an early adopter of communications technology, from the codex — pages bound in book form — to printing, to broadcast, to online. My parishioners turned out to be surprisingly adept too, and not only them but others who join us from London and Scotland and Germany and Nigeria, nation speaking peace unto nation. We are now back in church with choral evensong restored, but Zoom evensong continues.

As lockdown's weeks turned to months I realised I was going to have to come up with more than just a new way of gathering a congregation. I began to think I needed a new way of life. "Don't get stuck, Richard," said Irene, David's mother. "Get out there, meet people, do what you need to do. It's what David would have wanted." Actually I think he might have quite liked me in eternal freeze frame, but he is not here any more. I am and there is life to be lived, and I realised I needed to do that somewhere new.

But where? With whom? Doing what?


Coles with his late husband, David, who died of alcoholic liver disease in 2019
Coles with his late husband, David, who died of alcoholic liver disease in 2019

The former manager came again to the rescue, with a proposal that I move to the village where she lives to a house at the end of her lane that had just come up for sale.

And so on Low Sunday, the first after the high and holy celebration of Easter, I retire. In May I start a new life in what looks like Tilling from the Mapp and Lucia novels. I'll be living in a charming 18th- century cottage with a bow window that looms over the street affording a privileged view of my neighbours' comings and goings, as the scent of lavender floats across the village green. Who lives in a house like this? A retired gay vicar, only unusually well provided for by present day standards.

That is all splendid, and lucky me, but the move is not without anxiety. Not so much about where I'm going — there is a bus every ten minutes with free wi-fi that stops outside Waitrose — but about what I leave behind.

I am not just leaving a job but a community, and a community in which as vicar I have played a particular part. A while ago I was in church when a burly young man called in and we fell into conversation about his hopes and his girlfriend and the state of the world. I asked him if he was local and he said, "Father Richard, it's me!" and I realised I had known him as a little boy in our primary school. I might have married his parents, buried his grandparents, watched him in a tinsel crown solemnly offer the Christ Child the gift of a lightsaber in the Nativity.

I leave behind a network of relationships formed in the extraordinarily privileged work of a parish priest. Example: Eric, the guitarist in the Cupping Melons, our parish band, in which I occasionally guest on keyboards, met Lizzie, but it went wrong, so he resolved to make it go right and, missing a critically important Manchester United home game, flew to Sydney, where she had gone to forget about him, to persuade her to change her mind, successfully, so they were married in church, restricted due to lockdown, but we had the knees-up when restrictions were lifted, the Cupping Melons reformed, with Toddy from the cricket club, whose daughter I baptised, and Baishy, whose nan I buried, accompanied by a brass band playing Bring Me Sunshine, and Tim, now cricket coach at Eton, whose father I buried, who had been my grandfather's dental technician, whose partner in the practice lived at Thingdon Cottage, built by Squire Dolben, opposite Dr Spencer, whom I buried, who was my father's GP, and whose son, my old schoolmate, is my GP.

And on divisions/CofE more generally:

I am a half-time vicar because, like a growing number of parishes, Finedon cannot afford a full-time stipend. I know of one vicar with 14 parishes in her care instead of the one we were originally intended for, and I will not miss having to come up with ways to spread myself ever more thinly, or find ways of paying bigger bills from smaller incomes. Too much of our time is spent raising funds to pay running costs — dizzyingly high in a grade I listed medieval building. Most want their churches to endure, as heritage if not for their original purpose. But if we want them we need to pay for them.

As more parishes tip into unviability, the trouble for me is that the least viable are the ones I like most. The Church of England I love is a church of liberal sympathies, of broad inclusion, beautiful worship, wise preaching, dog-friendly with Fairtrade biscuits, and when it comes to orthodoxy would rather its members were not Goneril or Regan, proclaiming their zealous devotion, but Cordelia, confessing her love. The churches that are viable — by that I mean growing in numbers and income — tend to be conservative, punchy, fundamentalist in matters of scripture, rigorous in matters of doctrine, and about as likely to offer choral evensong as I am to do the 400m hurdles.

Some of my friends, and many faithful Christians, are at home in churches like these, but if the future Church of England looks exclusively like that, I cannot see myself in it. This is not only because I find the worship not to my taste and the culture less congenial. I think I could live with all that if I had to — I have just been doing the clapping bit in Shine Jesus Shine with the kids for our school Easter service — but really because they are places where gay people are not welcome, and that rules me out. Not only me. In the past few months I have had a growing number of inquiries from same-sex couples dismayed to discover their relationships do not qualify for a blessing, or asking for reassurance that their kids in church schools will not be made to feel awkward for having two dads or two mums. The former I am not permitted to do [the Church of England does not recognise same-sex marriages]; the latter I am unable to, I am sorry to say. Things change, we are told; play the long game, and I have. But now I see change shifting more to exclusion than inclusion.


With Jimmy Somerville in the Communards on Top of the Pops, July 1988
REDFERNS

Such churches protest that all are welcome, asserted on their websites and noticeboards, but that welcome would be on their terms, shaped by a conservative reading of Scripture, and require me and others not only to renounce the intimate life we were made for but also to accept second-class citizenship in the household of God. I mind this not only because who wouldn't, but because I simply do not, and cannot, believe that relationships that are open to grace and holiness and healing can possibly be contrary to the will of God. Same-sex relationships are all those things and more, just like everyone else's, a fact so obvious it cannot be denied, and therefore the sin lies in accepting anything less than equal inclusion. I appreciate reconciling my view with the Church's traditional teaching on sexuality is problematic, to say the least, but nowhere does Jesus indicate that loving and serving the Gospel is neatly done. What I will miss least, once I have retired, is having to pretend that it is legitimate to delay or deny justice in this. That and photocopying.

I will still be a priest, I will always be a priest, and I will minister where I am able. Next month I am going to my first conference of prison chaplains and I hope I can make myself useful as a volunteer with inmates in the criminal justice system. I will also be helping out in a parish near me. But I will not be the vicar. Will I still habitually wish people good morning, or strike up conversations on the bus, or hear the phrase "More tea, vicar?" again? And will anyone burst unexpectedly into song or into flames, or turn water into wine, or see and hear when they were blind and deaf, or will I catch from the corner of my eye a bush that burns without being consumed?

It is Easter. Jesus's followers go to the graveyard thinking everything is over but what they find there sends them running out into a world transformed. For everything that has been — thanks. For everything that will be — yes.

[Valmy]

Ah yes the whole gay thing. That is splitting and destroying churches all over the United States. Or more accurately taking a country with 10,000 different denominations and making it a country of 20,000 denominations.

[Sheilbh]

Amazing work by Japan - first event on Jacinda Arden's visit features two kiwi fruit mascots dancing to mournful music
https://twitter.com/henrycooke/status/1516940545327009793?s=20&t=-Q-UnNmeM2LbAXY6JP92Jg

[Jacob]

Not so much dancing as gently rocking from side to side, like grade 1 kids at a recital.

[Valmy]

Amazing work by Japan - first event on Jacinda Arden's visit features two kiwi fruit mascots dancing to mournful music
https://twitter.com/henrycooke/status/1516940545327009793?s=20&t=-Q-UnNmeM2LbAXY6JP92Jg

Looks like a normal day in Japan to me 

I mean not that I have ever been there, only sort of what one might imagine it's like.

[Sheilbh]

Although that is the mood of that song. It'd be a bit weird (er? ) if they were raving.

[Jacob]

Although that is the mood of that song. It'd be a bit weird (er? ) if they were raving.

I was thinking something more like traditional Japanese dancing, or maybe ballet.

Raving would be a bit incongruent, yeah